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April 17, 2022
To serve all students well, it is indeed critical to always be asking, “What’s next?”
The Parents. This is the story of parents who challenged us, who asked the hard questions, who pushed us to be better, who celebrated successes with us, and who demanded what we all want for our children. Parents have partnered with us through every step—sometimes in strong collaboration, sometimes through difficult conversations. They have all been important because inclusive and excellent schools can never happen without deep respect and understanding of the unique and vital role that parents play in the educational process.
SO MUCH SAMENESS. SOOOOOOOOOOOO MUCH SAMENESS.
Students educated in special (segregated) classrooms, grouped with other children with similar learning challenges, did not move on to general education classrooms. Almost all students in these classrooms maintained a parallel educational track through their public school career.
In an age where educators are, rightfully, thinking deeply about how to interrupt patterns of inequity and eliminate bullying behaviors in schools, we needed to take a long hard look at ourselves and our actions. If we want students to value diversity, deepen understanding of differences, and develop qualities such as empathy and compassion, how can we continue to draw lines between who belongs and who doesn’t?
We knew we would continue to have individualized schedules and supports—not a one-size-fits-all approach to inclusion. When your starting point is that everyone is in, everything changes.
“When you know your Why, your What becomes more impactful because you are walking toward, or in, your purpose.”
Leaders need to know their Why deeply (TEDX, 2009). And we need to help each individual at each layer of the system to know their Why too. We need to recognize that your Why and my Why may not be the same. And we need to learn to tell the story of our Why and provide opportunities for others to tell their stories too.
And we need to learn to tell the story of our Why and provide opportunities for others to tell their stories too.
When do we provide opportunities for others to tell their stories? Inclusion goes so far beyond just being invited to birthday parties. I've never had the opportunity to share my Why.
General thought: Board community engagement is about providing opportunities for others to tell their stories, so that the Board knows (or finds) its Why.
When students are separated from grade-level peers because of their learning difference, educators may subconsciously adjust their expectations for the level of work students will produce. The learning difference or disability becomes the defining feature of those students in segregated settings, and the expected learning is almost always reduced in depth, breadth, or complexity.
the heart of the instructional framework is students interacting with one another and engaging in rigorous academic discourse, with entry points that make those tasks accessible and meaningful to each student.
Additionally, John Hattie’s (2008) research highlights that students’ belief in themselves as learners is one of the most important factors in educational success. This self-efficacy has a significant impact on achievement (Yusuf, 2011). When students are taken out of general education classes and removed to an alternate setting, what self-talk occurs for those students? The message many students internalize is that they are not capable of learning the content or not capable of learning with peers who they may perceive as more capable.
Interesting to think about this in a Quest context, too
In many districts students who have complex communication needs are often segregated into schools or classrooms where curriculum is “functional” and peers are unable to model language. With no peers engaging in language, should we be surprised when students in these settings do not grow in their communication skills?
If we gather evidence that some students are not engaged, are not increasing their understanding, or are not challenged, it is absolutely our responsibility to address it—whether that student has an intellectual challenge or a different home language or whether that student qualifies for Talented and Gifted services.
As teachers consider the range of learners in their classrooms, they must think deeply about what the essential learning target is and where it fits in an overall learning trajectory. This consideration allows the teacher to create different pathways toward the same essential learning target, for students who need significant support to engage with the topic as well as for students who may already understand the topic at one level but need to extend or deepen their learning.
A country’s systems and institutions teach by example what the country, state, or community values: either inclusion or segregation or exclusion. (Villa & Thousand, 2016, p. 9)
Grouping children by perceived ability, even to the extreme where some students are forever removed from interaction with other students in a school setting, clearly sends a strong message to all children about who belongs and who doesn’t. In their most formative time children experience an “othering” that has been wholly constructed by the adults around them.
"Wholly constructed by the adults around them." OUCH. But true.
Perhaps just as impactful on our society, students without disabilities who are in those typical classrooms experience a lack of learning diversity. They come to believe that this is “normal” and that students who are not there are “others.” This leads to a lack of understanding that disability is in fact a normal and predictable part of the human experience (Snow, 2013). The unknown becomes scary, and so the segregation of human experience continues.
See? This is exactly why we need inclusion. Folks of our generation were raised in a segregated world, and when situations are tough, many fall back on the beliefs of that time. When our students are grown, they will understand that disability is natural and everyone belongs.
THIS IS THE WHY
Families know their children best and are able to understand their broad range of strengths and challenges.
autism is an important part of Kara, but it is not all of her. Placing her in a class for students with ASD misses so much. What if we placed her in a class with only fans of Taylor Swift? Or if we placed her just with funny students? Why does autism have to be the defining feature?
“What the best and wisest parent wants for his child, that must we want for all the children of the community. Anything less is unlovely, and left unchecked, destroys our democracy”
In our district inclusive education is not just about special education. It is also about students who are emerging bilinguals, it is about students with diverse racial or ethnic backgrounds, it is about students who are excelling academically, and it is about students from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds. Inclusive education means that everyone belongs, diversity is a strength, and demographics should never be predictors of outcomes. There may be some specific structures or areas of expertise that support growth among these different student groups, but we continue to find that our
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All means ALL.
If we espouse axioms like “All children can learn,” are we adding an asterisk and really saying, “… except those children”?
ALL MEANS ALL.
our commitment to equity means recognizing that though every student belongs in their class, the ways they access their learning or represent their thinking may be different.
In the old model, if a student needed a different style or pedagogy, no one would have thought to ask the general education teacher to change their methods. Instead, the student was pulled out to receive this “special” education in another setting. We now understand that there is, and always will be, a range of ways in which all students learn in every classroom. If classroom teachers plan lessons through a lens of Universal Design for Learning (UDL), allowing multiple ways for students to access and represent their learning, we can inclusively support the learning of all students in the
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Early in our journey toward more inclusive learning communities, we learned that the binary construct of segregation versus inclusion is not authentic or useful. Rather, there is a rich spectrum. There are steps that we can take to be more inclusive wherever we are, while keeping our eye on the target of what inclusive practices in their most developed form will look like.
The purpose of special education is to provide services that help students learn the skills to access grade-level curriculum.
I like this statement because it encompasses the shift from remediation to accommodation that should occur over the course of K to 12.
Having teachers with high levels of professionalism who value continuing to learn is foundational to implementing this sort of deep and comprehensive reform.
Very few of us experienced positive inclusive schools as children, so it makes it difficult to envision a truly inclusive learning community.
We knew that we needed three rich and compelling areas of focus that could be broad enough to move us forward across grade levels, schools, and years yet specific enough that all members of our district could relate to them. The three areas that we chose are the following: Creating Inclusive Cultures Improving Instructional Practices Increasing Student Voice
Creating inclusive cultures includes the ways students and adults interact with one another in an inclusive way.
Improving instructional practices is a critical area of focus because it recognizes the work that we have to do as educators to get better at understanding and engaging every learner.
Increasing student voice means ensuring that every student has an effective way to communicate, students drive their own IEPs, and students are authentically included in the big-picture work of school reform.
children are complex and whole. Their strengths and challenges are multifaceted and often do not align with our labels.
This can become a never-ending process of sorting and grouping children. And it may never achieve the intended outcome of fully matching students with professional expertise. Meanwhile, this process of sorting and separating impacts the children in so many negative ways by limiting the range of peers and by establishing a child’s learning challenges as the biggest factor in their schooling environment.
This applies to hicap too
Often, when there are many different experts working with the student, we can forget to think holistically about the student’s experience.
Parents are potentially better positioned to think holistically
if it is our stance that all students can learn, we hold the same stance that all adults can develop expertise to support diverse learning in the classroom.
Principle #2: Mindset
Embodying a growth mindset became absolutely foundational to us as an organization, to each of us as individuals in this work, and to the beliefs and expectations of our students.
We had seen examples of individual schools that were experiencing great results with inclusive practices. But we did not know of districts our size that had implemented inclusion successfully. We did not have a formula to make this happen. We knew that we needed to innovate, to learn, to adjust. We were very sure that we would make mistakes along the way.
A few years later, that changed as five of the incoming sixth-grade students had more complex academic, behavioral, and communication needs than the staff had experienced before. We thought we had done a thorough transition process, but when the school year started, we learned right away that the teachers and paraeducators were not as prepared as we thought to meet the needs of those particular students. The team recognized that they had a lot to learn in a short period of time and that they needed to build expertise. The team reassigned the duties of the paraeducators to support the needs of
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Principle #3: Communication, Communication, Communication
Coherence is not a top-down message that is simply adopted by members of the organization. That sort of directive communication will not result in true coherence. Rather, as each member of the organization works with the ideas of the framework, through a lens of common values, each member constructs meaning.
As we bring new ideas to people, we have to allow the time and structures for people to make sense of those ideas, so that each person can build their own sense of connection and commitment.
Individual experiences continue to influence the context in which people receive and process information. For example, we sometimes lead teacher workshops about planning for students who use augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) devices to engage academically and socially in their classroom. A teacher who has never had a student who communicates with a device may not deeply attend to this content. The following year, that teacher may be working closely with a student who uses AAC. The next time this topic comes up in a teacher workshop, it is now deeply relevant to that teacher, and
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People need to feel heard in times of stress and change. Eliminating segregated classrooms and serving all students in their neighborhood school is a significant shift in school culture. In the process, we are asking people to take on different roles and learn new skills. There may be educators who feel a real sense of loss even as they embrace new roles and responsibilities. We need to listen openly to people’s experiences and concerns. We need to consciously determine that we will not react defensively when they raise questions.
These listening sessions provided an important emotional opportunity for educators to let the very real challenges of change be known. Equally important, we learned so much from these listening sessions that informed what types of professional development were needed, when we may need to provide more support, and how to adjust on-the-ground implementation of the principles of inclusive education.
we create opportunities for learning specialists, general education teachers, paraeducators, students, and parents to share their why—their successes, their passion, and their conviction that everyone belongs in this imperfect, messy, and absolutely critical world of school.
everyone belongs in this imperfect, messy, and absolutely critical world of school.
LOVE.
