Leading for All: How to Create Truly Inclusive and Excellent Schools

by Jennifer Spencer-Iiams

Principle #4: Start and Get Better

in the two years of working with this grant, they had not reduced the number of students in segregated classrooms or increased students’ time in general education classrooms. They said they were committed to inclusion but they felt like they needed to learn more and get more people on board before they were ready to actually make changes for students. Unfortunately, there is always more to learn. If we were to adopt this stance—waiting until we have it all figured out and have everyone on board—we would never make substantive change.

It is simply not possible to completely plan your way through this work. There is so much innovation that happens when great educators work together in the midst of complex and uncertain challenges. So much of the learning that happens is specific to the unique context. We had to learn the work by doing the work.

Principle #5: The Magic Is in the Team

As leaders, there were difficult meetings where all eyes turned to us to ask, “How are you going to make this situation better?” People seemed to be looking for the program, curriculum, or model that provided consistent answers to all questions—a silver bullet or magic wand to fix the situation. What we learned again and again is that there is magic—and the magic is in the team!

First, make sure the right people are in the room. Not just people who are filling the legally prescribed roles (as in the IEP process) but people who are passionate about students and committed to working through messy situations to find creative solutions.

we can’t wait until we have hired an entirely new staff to engage in transformative change. So we need to work to build teacher efficacy—teachers’ belief in the mission of inclusive schools and in their own ability to learn and adapt their systems and structures to meet the needs of all students.

When team members know that they are empowered to work through the problem—and they all have a mindset that it can be solved—and that they are the right people to be at the table to solve the problem, amazing things happen. And if the problem persists, the answer is almost always to bring the team back together to look at new data, consider things in a different way, think about what they may have missed, and recommit to their students.

The teacher’s actions dignified Kortney’s learning experience in a way that could not have been done in a self-contained classroom or by a paraeducator alone in the back of the general education science class.

“Of course, all students should be in our schools. When they get out of school, there aren’t separate places for them. It’s not like there’s a special ed Target.”

Quote from a student! So important.

Over time we recognized that this model of clustering students with significant disabilities in the same general education classroom was not the most inclusive practice. It was efficient and it was more inclusive than the segregated self-contained classroom, but it perpetuated structural barriers that prevented the students from truly engaging in their classroom community.

For a student with ASD, these natural peer interactions are critical for developing strong social communication skills. Peer support and modeling are more effective than a paraeducator providing one-to-one support to the student (Carter et al., 2016).

The special education establishment has essentially told general education teachers, “Don’t worry about this kid. We’ll take care of him. You can focus on the rest of your class.” So it is no surprise that general education teachers are feeling disequilibrium when we now say, “Actually, every student belongs in your class. We are going to build your expertise and bring specialized support to your classroom.”

Learning specialists who previously taught a self-contained class serving a narrow profile of students are now working with a broader caseload. They used to plan their day around creating a small, nurturing classroom community with an intensive focus on specialized skills. Now they spend most of their time providing push-in supports for students and consulting with general education teachers and related service providers.

Our challenge as leaders was to create structures that allowed these experienced teachers to share their knowledge and strategies, building capacity in the other learning specialists and the general education teachers who would now be taking greater ownership of the learning of all students.

My disability, among many other things, is integrated into who I am. There is no way to separate me from my disability.

The key is that we want our language to recognize and respect that individuality. Grouping students can be helpful for organizing systems and aligning resources. But language that groups students can also limit the way we talk about (and think about) their individualized needs.

the term inclusion kids carries with it an assumption that some students belong in the classroom and other students are only there because of some districtwide inclusion program: “We are ‘doing inclusion’ now, so I have ‘inclusion kids’ in my classroom.” If we are truly committed to creating inclusive learning communities, then all kids are “inclusion kids.”

A word like segregated can be inflammatory. It can make people feel uncomfortable. So we are also thoughtful about how we use it. When we talk about the historical systems and structures in schools, we want to draw connections between segregation in special education and other forms of segregation that society has deemed no longer acceptable.

The challenge of transformational leadership is to draw attention to the fundamental inequities of the segregated system without alienating the people who have worked in the system and believed that they had the best interests of their students at heart.

True of all forms of transformation

Unified Sports brings together students with and without intellectual disabilities to compete on the same team.

Love this idea

As with other ambitious goals, we set the target at 100%. Our goal says, “All students participate in cocurricular activities inclusively, broadening opportunities for students with disabilities and promoting a culture of diversity and respect in all of our schools and throughout the community.”

Potential monitoring goal - OE-14?

As we think about data collection for this goal, we try to minimize the additional paperwork responsibilities for case managers. Our solution for this was to embed a question in our IEP software that requires case managers to note whether a student is participating in cocurricular activities and, if so, what kind of activity.

Some students and families believe that they are not eligible to participate because they learn differently, move differently, or communicate differently than most other students. They are often surprised to learn that they can participate and that we can make appropriate accommodations to provide entry points for access.

We always asked ourselves how our strategies, systems, and practices were helping us become more inclusive as a whole, particularly how they were helping individual students experience a more truly inclusive education. And we continued to tell stories of small successes along the way to reinforce our sense of The Why.

When we talk about improving instructional practices, we are talking about two areas of instruction. Both are critical to student success in inclusive classrooms. Specialized instruction led by the special educator to help students reach their IEP goals Daily instruction led by the general education teacher for all students in the class And in inclusive classrooms the lines between these two areas begin to blur.

In all of these cases, the built environment is designed to be accessible to all people. Architects and designers are thinking about accessible design from the beginning, rather than designing a traditional building, door, or sink and then adding a way for a small group of people to access it differently. In the same way, teachers and school leaders should think about designing instruction to maximize accessibility from the start. This concept is called Universal Design for Learning, or UDL. While some students will definitely need specially designed instruction as part of their IEP, the starting point for planning should be how we make the classroom learning experience as accessible as possible to all students.

If we are clear about what we want students to know and be able to do, the classroom teacher and learning specialist can collaborate to identify multiple access points for many students, and the specific access points that may still be necessary for an individual student. Having clarity on what we want students to know and be able to do allows us to plan lessons through a Universal Design lens.

For example in an English language arts class, the teacher assigns a three-page essay analyzing the motivations of three peripheral characters in Romeo and Juliet and gives the students the choice of writing about Friar Laurence, Tybalt, Mercutio, Prince Escalus, Juliet’s father, and Juliet’s nurse. If the learning targets are not clear, it may be difficult for the teacher and the learning specialist to know what to expect from a student with a disability that affects writing. Should we expect the same three-page essay as from other students? Should we shorten the assignment and have him write only one page? Should he write about only one character? Should we have him give an oral presentation? If the teacher has articulated a clear learning target for the assignment, it becomes much easier to differentiate the task—for

If the student has more significant learning challenges, the learning target can help the team decide how to modify the content in a way that allows the student to continue to engage with their grade-level peers. Continuing with the Romeo and Juliet example from above, there is a range of possible modifications depending on the student’s level of comprehension and expressive communication. The teacher may ask the student to write a sentence about each of the six characters and describe their relationship to Romeo or Juliet. Or the teacher may provide descriptors of each character and ask the student to match them to the character named. Or if comprehending the story of Romeo and Juliet is too difficult, the teacher may ask the student to identify the motivations of characters in a simpler format—perhaps a graphic novel or a simplified pictorial text. Clarity and precision in the original learning target allow the classroom teacher and learning specialist to distill the essential concepts and skills for a broad range of learners.

Students learn best when they are interested in a topic, have some control over how they encounter new knowledge and what to do with it, ask genuine questions, wrestle with real-world problems, talk to their peers about their formative ideas, contribute ideas to a group, and receive specific timely feedback.

Sounds like IM

The teacher still has a critical role to play in helping students construct meaning. But it is more about facilitating the opportunities for students to engage with content and practice skills, rather than explicitly delivering content.

There is a need for explicit instruction, too

Student talk is a powerful entry point to deeper conceptual learning. For students with limited expressive communication skills, this can be particularly challenging. The role of the SLP becomes critical to collaborate with classroom teachers—providing entry points for all students to express their ideas to their classmates.

Are our SLPs equipped to understand and address this need?

As an engagement strategy, visual scaffolds promote access in an inclusive classroom. They lighten the cognitive load, allowing students to focus on the specific high-cognitive task (analysis) without being burdened or derailed by the lower-cognitive process (factual recall).

Super important for a kid like Christina!

a common task in a mathematics lesson about subtraction may be something like 846 − 379 = ____. There is one clear answer to this question and a relatively limited number of pathways to get there. There is not a lot of room for meaningful student discourse.

Another way the teacher could create a problem like this would be to ask students to use all of the digits between 1 and 9 to create a correct mathematical sentence (Kaplinsky, 2019). This is a much more rigorous task, but it can be scaffolded or supported in various ways.

Because this problem requires more complex reasoning than simply applying an algorithm, the teacher can encourage students to talk with one another. Intentional student grouping and clear talk protocols can be very effective here.

This kind of activity increases rigor for all students, promotes meaningful mathematical discourse, allows for a range of access points, and values analysis and depth of thinking over speedy recall or rote adherence to algorithms. By designing instruction like this, teachers can create a classroom culture that promotes inclusion and improves learning outcomes for all students.

For powerful engagement strategies (e.g., talk protocols and selecting and sequencing) to be truly effective inclusive practices, they need to be in support of rich, complex, and culturally relevant curriculum.

Another of the targets in our special education focus areas is “In their general education classroom learning community, each child has access to grade-level content, high-cognitive tasks, opportunities for meaning-making, and explicit instruction.” This statement brings together two traditions of teaching and learning: constructivism and direct instruction.

In special education we recognize that some students may experience barriers that interfere with their ability to engage in this constructivist pathway to knowledge.

AHA! Yes! Recognition of times when explicit instruction is needed!

What is important is that we are open to adjusting our methodologies to what each individual student needs and that our use of these methodologies is in service of the student accessing general education as inclusively as possible.

YES! Both are needed! Center the child's needs.

Assessment provides the opportunity for meaningful collaboration between special educators and their general education colleagues. Special educators have access to specific assessment tools and have expertise in access strategies. General educators spend large amounts of time with students in an inclusive setting and have the opportunity to gather data frequently over multiple days. This shared role in gathering data can spill over into collaboratively analyzing the data and planning for future instruction.

there are certain components of school and classroom culture that can have a profound impact on a student’s ability to engage in rich learning opportunities. In our district this has been a significant emphasis of our professional learning over the past few years.

School leaders need to identify core principles and beliefs about student learning behaviors that allow teachers to design clear student expectations. Leaders should consult with staff to identify tight/loose expectations. The core principles are tight, and we can expect that all teachers will hold these expectations for their students. Other principles may be held more loosely, allowing teachers to establish expectations that align with their personal style and the culture of their classroom. The key is to be clear about not just which principles are tight or loose but also what the underlying beliefs about students and community are that guide the selection of these core principles.

When a student is demonstrating a behavior that is unexpected, disruptive, or unsafe, our first response is often to tell them not to do that behavior. While it is important to identify and stop inappropriate behaviors, it is more important for students to know what to do instead.

These routines have become part of the fabric of the classroom rather than a special activity that is reserved for a specific student. The Get Ready-Do-Done process is another example of the All-Some-Few model. The teacher said that there are a few students in her room who absolutely need this kind of scaffolding to engage in complex tasks. But there are a significant number of students who also benefit from the increased clarity of expectations and the process.

The teacher said that there are a few students in her room who absolutely need this kind of scaffolding to engage in complex tasks. But there are a significant number of students who also benefit from the increased clarity of expectations and the process.

Much like structured literacy

The students were going around the class and “giving a rose”—a compliment or recognition of another student’s work. BJ was a member of that class, but his participation in the learning and the creation of the student paper looked significantly different because of learning and communication differences. However, his peers provided authentic recognition for his contributions to the team. One student said, “I want to thank BJ for helping me pick the photos for the front page.” The teacher noted to us later that the peer would hold up two photos and BJ would select the one he thought most appropriate by pointing to it. This authentic work and the public recognition elevated BJ’s status in the class and reinforced the belief that everyone has something valuable to contribute.

Rich learning experiences activate the prefrontal cortex, allowing students to draw connections between ideas and build neural pathways for long-term retrieval. When students experience social-emotional dysregulation, the brain reverts to a fight/flight/freeze reflex. This disengages the prefrontal cortex and inhibits meaningful learning opportunities (Hammond, 2014).