By Sara Finegan

Before I talk about how to locate and create materials to facilitate inclusion in general education, it’s important to understand why we are doing it and what inclusion should look like.

Placing a child with learning disabilities or cognitive impairment into a general education class has two purposes: First, it promotes socialization and the skills necessary for any person to participate with his or her community in the daily activities of learning and working. Second, it allows that child to access grade-level standards with his or her general ed peers.

In any special day class, kids should also be accessing grade-level standards.  The difference is that in a general ed class, your students with IEPs will be working in a different kind of environment.   In many but not all cases the instruction and assignments are more in-depth and high-level.  (If you run a demanding special day classroom like mine, however, the work may actually be at the same level or even slightly higher.   In such a case, the difference will be in class size and pace, not work level.)

Until recently, most school districts had special education services and classrooms at a variety of levels.  In my district we had,  just a few years ago:  ILS (independent living skills) classrooms for kids with profound disabilities; PACE (adaptive curriculum) classrooms for kids with mild mental retardation and moderate-functioning autism; ED classrooms for students with mental illness and behavior issues; and yet another classroom for kids with mild-moderate learning disabilities.  We also had a Resource program for kids with IEPs who could still participate in the general education classroom; they were pulled out in small groups for guided instruction in targeted areas, but most of their time was spent with the general ed teacher.

Unless a parent demanded it, kids who had cognitive impairments or who were more than one or two grade levels below their peers were not part of the general education classroom, on the theory that they needed a smaller, more structured environment in which to learn.  As long as the instruction provided in those separate classrooms was rigorous, there weren’t many drawbacks to sheltering kids from the larger classrooms and there were many pluses.

Nowadays, in many districts, kids at all cognitive and learning levels are increasingly being placed in general education classrooms, with varying levels of support. Thus, in a general education classroom, you may have 26 gen ed students, some of whom are below grade level and some of whom are far above, and 10 students with IEPs, with any of a wide range of disabilities: ADHD and focus difficulties; mental retardation; autism; receptive/expressive language impairments; visual and working memory deficits; visual processing impairments; auditory processing difficulties.  Most of these kids will not be able to read at grade level and have problems with writing and math as well.

Without structure and support, many of these students will struggle with sensory input.   For them, the noise level and activity associated with large-group settings will be profoundly difficult to handle.

Frustration with the materials and the work may lead some kids to shut down or act out and disrupt the classroom. Kids who don’t process what you are saying very quickly may miss entire chunks of instruction and directions and thus have no idea what to do when independent work time rolls around.

Our job as special educators is to provide the structure, support, and differentiated learning activities that will reduce those struggles in the general ed classroom.  It’s a complex process and one that requires a lot of thought and ongoing monitoring in order to be successful.  If we don’t plan purposefully, or if we don’t supervise the support provided by our aides when we aren’t able to be present, there’s a danger that our students will be relegated to the corner of the classroom with work that is too easy or without meaning.

Here’s what inclusion is:

It is the provision of differentiated instruction and learning activities that accommodate a child’s special learning needs within the general education classroom. The learning and the work are purposeful, meaningful, and serve to teach the child new information and skills.

Here’s what inclusion is not:

It is not separate activities for students with special needs; sponge work and other busywork that serve only to keep a child occupied instead of accessing the curriculum directly; minimal standards and expectations with high praise for accomplishing the mundane. In short, it is not babysitting.

There is babysitting in the general education classroom, and then there’s inclusion.

• Babysitting is having a child play with blocks while everyone else working on place value and numbers to a billion.
• Babysitting is having a child spend an hour coloring pictures of the a tipi while everyone else is learning about the Native American houses.
• Babysitting is writing vocabulary words on a piece of paper and having the child go over them with highlighter every day while the other students are writing paragraphs about the water cycle.
• Babysitting is having a student draw a picture of a snowman while the teacher does a mini-lesson about weather.
• Babysitting is placing a child at a listening center to listen to nursery rhyme songs while the rest of the class is learning about the genre of fairytales.

True inclusion would look like this:

• During math, while others are working on the standard and word forms of numbers to a billion, other kids are working on numbers to a hundred or a thousand. Still others may be using manipulatives to represent numbers in the tens and hundreds. When they’re done, perhaps they are playing a math vocabulary game where they have to read a number word and match it to a digit.
• After reading an easy book or chart about Native American housing, some kids are using sorting cards to match the names of the houses to the pictures. Others might be making a booklet about the different kinds of houses using pictures they’ve drawn or cut-outs the teacher provides. Still others might be pasting small pictures of the types of houses on a map showing the different regions of North America. (For example, a hogan goes in the desert Southwest, whereas a chickee goes in the Southeast.)
• While some kids are drawing the water cycle on poster board, some kids are using a word bank and labeling the different segments of the cycle on a worksheet. Others might be listening to an aide or peer read a story about a rain drop.
• After listening to a mini-lesson about types of weather, some kids are either playing a Memory game with sorting cards (matching photos of weather to the names) or are writing sentences about each of the new vocabulary words. (Ex: A blizzard is a big snow storm. A hurricane has lots of wind and rain.)
• During a unit on the fairy tale genre, some kids are listening to Hans Christian Andersen stories on tape, and others are reading books. Some kids are writing reports on fairy tales, and others are identifying the different elements of a fairy tale in stories they’ve read, using a chart prepared by the teacher. Still others might be looking at a laminated illustration from a well-known fairy tale with an aide, who is asking them to point to various items in the picture.

Inclusion is not about keeping the kids busy and quiet. It’s about giving them opportunities to use the vocabulary and practice new skills related to whatever you are teaching.

It’s not about enabling them to continue to operate with limited skill sets; it’s about guiding them forward, onward, and upward within the context of their current levels.

It’s not about having higher-level students help them; it’s about letting them experience the curriculum with higher level students.

It’s a new responsibility for many general ed teachers, and a terrifying thing for us special ed teachers, whose natural instinct is often to keep our students sheltered from the large-group learning environment, where they may get lost or overwhelmed.

The key is careful and purposeful planning, with constant monitoring and ongoing assessment to determine next steps. Much of this is done by special educators, in addition to the work we are already doing.

accessing grade-level · accommodations · classroom aides · cognitive impairments · differentiated instruction · differentiated learning · frustration · general education · learning disabilities · Paraeducators · resource · rigorous instruction · Sara Finegan · socialization · sorting cards · special day class · special education · student monitoring · supports