Special Education: Contemporary Perspectives for School Professionals

by Marilyn Friend

inclusive practices,

is a belief system or ph...

their responsibility to educate all students so that they rea...

inclusion is not about where students sit as much as it is about how adults and classmates welcome all students to access learning and recognize that the diversity of learners in today’s schools di...

These parents wanted their children included with other students in school, and thus the concept of inclusion was introduced to the field of education.

regular education initiative (REI),

urging general education and special education teachers to work together to edu...

what is considered inclusion varies widely depending on the clarity of st...

Some professionals argue that the only way a school can truly demonstrate an inclusive belief system is to place nearly every student in general education full time

public education has two curricula.

expli...

it is the curriculum that guides the instruction of typical learners, and advocates argue that it cannot truly be accessed by students with disabilities unless t...

impl...

includes social interactions and skills that are best learned with typical peers. Advocates stress that students with disabilities likewise must ...

Use person-first l...

Avoid the term hand...

Avoid the language ...

Talk to the p...

Don’t make assum...

It is better to err by presuming competence than lac...

People with disabilities are i...

These professionals suggest that many students need a smaller class size, a higher degree of structure, specialized instructional methods, and, for some, a curriculum that emphasizes life skills, that is, interventions that can be delivered most readily in a special education classroom for part or most of the school day.

four school districts in which students with disabilities demonstrated unusually high academic outcomes.

What the districts shared included a strong commitment to inclusive education, a highly collaborative school culture, and professional development for teachers and others on topics such as effective instructional practices.

analyzed reading and math achievement of students with various disabilities, ages six though nine, in relation to the number o...

a strong positive rela...

The more hours students spent in general education, the more positive the...

many students feel stigmatized when they spend part or all of the day in spec...

some high school students with significant disabilities have been found to have positive experiences when they receive at least some of their education with their peers, particularly in terms of their so...

the responsibility of discovering effective means for all students to learn together is taken very seriously, and deviations from this approach are made with reluctance and only after careful deliberation.

it is premised on the goal of reducing or eliminating the separate service as soon as possible.

Collaboration

refers to the way in which professionals interact with each other and with parents or family members as they work together to educate students with disabilities.

Collabor...

is the means for achieving ot...

co-teac...

a special form of coll...

Unless principals and other school leaders actively foster a collaborative culture, set expectations for all staff members, and themselves become students of collaboration, a sense of community is unlikely to develop.

The goal of an inclusive education is for the approximately 80% of students with disabilities who do not have significant intellectual disabilities to achieve academically at a level similar to their peers and for the others to learn essential skills aligned with the general curriculum.

Special educators monitor and report their students’ progress as often as other students receive progress reports or report cards, usually at least four times during the school year

Common Core State Standards (CCSS)

learn from sophisticated problem-solving tasks, challenging reading assignments that require careful analysis, and writing ...

evidence-based pr...

they must make decisions about what to teach their students and determine how effective that teaching/learning process has be...

also must teach, using programs, interventions, strategies, and activities that have been demonstrated th...

Universal design for learning (UDL),

sometimes also referred to as universal design for instruction (UDI),

UDL says that teachers should design instruction from the beginning to meet a wide range of learner diversity rather than try to retrofit, or make adjustments, a...

UDL is not a replacement for the specialized instruction of special education, but when UDL ...

disabilities, as well as others who need alternative educational approaches, benefit.