By Sara Finegan

In my tenure as a special educator, I’ve taught kids in a Special Day Class setting as well as those who would be classified as Resource and kept in the general education environment.    I’ve taught almost every subject area in separate classroom and general ed classroom, in grades 4 through 12.   I’ve taught kids with mild to moderate learning deficits, and even a few with more moderate to severe disabilities.

The more I work with these wonderful kids, the more I am made aware that it is not the content of the lessons, but the manner in which we teach them that makes the difference in learning.    Direct, explicit instruction, customized to the child’s individual learning style and need, is the key to the door that accesses, for the child, the material.    Even the best teachers using the best practices for instruction, may need to tweak how they do things to accommodate our learners’ deficits.

Let me give some examples:

Avery was born premature and since early childhood has exhibited difficulties with memory, particularly sequential memory.  He is now getting ready for middle school.  He does not know the months of the year in order, or the seasons in which the months belong.  He just learned his phone number.  He has difficulty memorizing multiplication tables.  He has significant deficits in the area of auditory processing, and may have receptive language deficits.  He certainly displays difficulties with expressive language – he has difficulty at times retrieving even the names of long-time friends.  He is friendly, funny, athletic, and popular in his class.

Justin is an upper primary student who has an anxiety disorder.  He has trouble falling asleep at night, is fearful of the dark and strange places, and desperate that nobody know when he doesn’t understand something in class.  He is shy, but friendly, and has a good sense of humor.  He masks his terrible fear of exposure with a feigned carelessness.  He refuses help at home from his parents and peers, which makes homework and remedial learning difficult.    Justin, like Avery, does not process what he hears, and tries to model his academic behavior after what he sees his peers doing, without understanding the concepts  being taught.   A popular kid, Justin’s learning is impeded by his internal anxiety and his processing deficits.

Shayna has ADHD and needs to be constantly moving in order to function at all in class.  She’s tried a variety of medications, all of which has side effects that made it impossible for her to continue.  With preferential seating and lots of visual cues, she can manage in class for the most part, but has frequent episodes of panic when, after emerging from a short episode of inattention, she realizes that she missed something important and doesn’t know what to do.    She is sloppy and careless in her work, but is motivated to learn.    Her writing skills are very limited; spelling is atrocious, punctuation non-existent, and she often skips words, writes run-on or incomplete sentences, and never, unless prompted, uses detail to support her ideas and flesh out the text.

Toby is a high-functioning autistic learner.  His expressive and receptive language deficits make understanding what the teacher is saying, including directions, difficult, so he does a lot of watching and copying what others are doing.  He thrives where there’s math calculations to do, but in terms of setting up problems, navigating through word problems, or showing mathematical reasoning, he is far below grade level.   Toby is a good mechanical reader, but his comprehension skills are limited to the surface, literal meaning of text.

All of these kids are in a general education class of 30 students, with a fabulous teacher who provides differentiated instruction better than anyone I’ve ever seen:  Every lesson includes kinesthetic, visual, auditory, and musical and/or artistic segments designed to address every type of learner.    She knows her stuff, and she knows how to make learning fun, energetic, and successful.   Everything is color-coded, rhythmic, and well-spaced so that kids aren’t overwhelmed by the material.

            And yet……….our four friends are falling seriously behind.    

Walk into the classroom, and take a seat in a corner.  You will see a dynamic teacher leading kids through a fun lesson.  There are pauses for movement, there are funny accents to keep your attention in the right place, open-ended questions, modeling, and cooperative learning activities.  Kids are active, engaged, and working together.

Look at our four friends.  They are smiling.  Eyes are glued on the teacher when she’s providing instruction.  They copy everything she does.  They are well-behaved. 

But when it comes time to work with partners or independently, they are helpless.  They look at what their partners are doing and try to follow along.  Ask them what they are doing, and they can’t really say.  If they’ve followed the modeled lesson and copied the info into the graphic organizer, using colored pencils, just like the teacher did, they don’t know what to DO with the information when left to their own devices.  They let their partners do most of the work and strive to look busy.

Avery needs 45 more minutes than anyone else to finish a task.  Justin doesn’t finish, but does enough to get by.  Toby copies exactly what his partner wrote.  Shayna walks over to the teacher eight times in 35 minutes to show her what she’s done so far and ask if it’s right.  It isn’t very good, but at least she’s trying.

Next scene:  math class.  The kids are working on multiple-step problem solving.  Avery and Justin are confused, and are using the wrong operation to solve equations.  Shayna loses track of what she’s doing and has to start over again three times.  Toby is sitting, staring at a word problem, unsure how to set up an equation.  He shuts down completely until the teacher approaches and writes an equation out for him, at which point he quickly solves it in his head.  He writes the answer without showing his work. 

You get the picture.  You’ve probably seen each of these kids somewhere in one of your classes.

            So what is missing?

            I think that what is missing is direct, explicit, step-by-step instruction. 

Instructional trends have been moving increasingly to the exploratory learning module, where kids are given open-ended questions and work together to explore and reason through answers using grade-level materials.    Understanding the concepts behind mathematical operations is given the same importance as being able to use the operations properly.  Experimenting with concepts and ideas and giving kids time to try on and try out different ways of writing, thinking about the content of the textbook constitute a good part of the day.    We want kids to be able to reason, not just answer by rote, right?  Absolutely. 

But there’s a problem with this.  If our kids can’t really understand the language, can’t process it or use it, if their processing deficits impede the reasoning needed to do the work at grade level, or if their reading and writing skills are below grade level so that they struggle just to make sense of the textbook, all of the exploratory learning in the world is not going to achieve anything at all.  In fact, it is going to confuse the kids and get them more tangled up with feelings of inadequacy and confusion, frustration and anxiety, than they need to be.

These kids need coping strategies, problem-solving strategies, and to be taught, shown, and given multiple opportunities to practice, the step-by-step process for doing the work.

• They need to have those steps provided to them clearly, in writing, on charts displayed in the room, and in their binders.  They need to be shown, over and over, each step, in isolation.  Practice just doing Step 1 ten times.  Then do Step 2 ten times.  Then practice Steps 1 and 2 five times.  And so on.
• They need to be told what you are looking to see them do.  “I want to see you reading the question, and underlining the key word.”   “I want to see you scanning the text, line by line, looking for the key word.”  “I want to see you lining up your problem one number right underneath the other.”  “I want to see you highlighting the operations words in the math problem.”

• Give them templates.  Give them checklists.  Give them small group supervision as they practice, without making them feel that they are being singled out because they’re dumb, or “special”.    Send them home with the step-by-step instructions and five practice opportunities as homework, with a reward when they bring it back. 

What does this require of us, the teachers?  It requires that we be willing to break tasks down into smaller bits, and to create clear, concise, and easy to remember explanations or instructions for each.  It requires that we be creative enough to find mnemonics, songs, goofy slogans, and pictures of the key elements of the lesson.  It requires that we  be flexible enough to create small group opportunities, DAILY,  to help guide our students with learning difficulties, in the general education classroom, not as a pull-out where they are singled out as “special”.  It requires that we be sometimes willing to go against the teaching modules that our newer textbooks and educational programs dictate , to include the older-fashioned direct instruction that these kids need.

accommodations · differentiated instruction · direct instruction · directions · explicit instruction · exploratory learning · Inclusion · learning · learning disabilities · learning styles · repitition · resource · rote learning · Sara Finegan · special education · teaching strategies

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