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.

I’ve spent my free time during the last month preparing learning activities for students along a wide spectrum of disabilities in third, fourth and fifth grade science and social studies.

I had a lot of free time, as I had not one, but two student teachers, who basically took over my classroom.  The job of a master teacher like me is to monitor and support, and since my tendency is to want to jump in a lot, I keep myself from doing so by working on related tasks.  More about the tasks I chose later.

Two things have rocked my world as a teacher this spring:

1. My school has lost one special education position, and despite my rather extensive years at the district, I’m junior in seniority at my school, so I get to go.
2. My school administrator has opted to take our school three giant steps in the direction of full inclusion by eliminating our Special Day Classes, so all of our kiddos are now going to be mainstreamed next year.

I’ve had several months to adjust to the fact that I am going to be at another school next year and to organize and sort my “stuff” preparatory to packing.  I’ve also had several months to listen to my general ed colleagues, hear the worry in their voices as they wonder how to accommodate kids with profound learning disabilities in their classrooms with less special education support, and to decide what to do about that.

What I’ve done is to create unit-by-unit resource bins and binders for our third, fourth and fifth grade science and social studies classes that contain activities and learning materials from the very lowest, pre-K level up to the third-grade level.    Gen ed and special ed staff can easily pull what they need to support everyone from the barely-verbal fifth grader with a four-year-old intellect to the fourth grader with autism and hyperactivity who becomes overwhelmed by words and activity around him.

The first thing I did was to look at the grade-level standards and pull strands that I thought kids at every level could access.  I delved into my own resource bank and our school’s book room and pulled books at every level that related in some way to each of the standards.   I located materials on the internet that pertain to the standards and downloaded them.  And what I couldn’t find, I wrote myself.

At the end of the my final day at the school, I had created boxes of books, sorting cards, stories, readers theater scripts, and art projects for each of the science and social studies units.    Each box has a binder containing a variety of materials and lesson ideas, plus coloring pages and other things for kids to do with support or on their own.

My hope is that the easily-accessible materials will allow kids to stay in the gen ed classroom with modified assignments and materials instead of becoming so frustrated that they need to leave.  My other hope is that my gen ed colleagues will have less stress as they begin this new phase of inclusion and that they will see, as they implement the lessons and pull activities and books to use, how they can continue the planning and gathering work in future years.

In the next few posts on The Demanding Classroom, I will talk about the work involved in preparing for inclusion and the tasks that gen ed and special ed staff face as we support all of our kids to learn grade level, standards-based curriculum.

         My colleague, Laurie Vierra, is a Special Education Intern this year with a special day class of third and fourth graders, having taken advantage of our district’s offer to pay for general education teachers to move into and obtain a Masters in Special Ed.  

         A background in the general education standards, pacing, and instructional methods are great assets in the special ed classroom.  Laurie knows what her students need to be able to do in order to function at grade level, and she’s interested in lifting them up to that level.  She has no sense of comfort with student dependence or any belief that a learning deficit is a static thing that can never be repaired. 

         She certainly isn’t under the impression that a learning disability prevents anyone from doing grade-level work.

         This was, at first, a little bit disconcerting to the students in her class and some of their parents, who are used to the program of the teacher she is replacing: 

• Gone are the days when the teacher and the teacher aide (para-educator) will go into student backpacks to retrieve homework:  she will not accept assignments turned in by anyone other than the student.   
• Nowhere in her classroom does the aide sit with students and follow a written script for instruction and support. 
• Students don’t get candy for behaving or finishing their work.   
• Students in Laurie’s class have homework every day, including weekends.  And parents can’t do it for their kids.
• Kids have to get their own pencils and paper; the aide is no longer running across the room to bring the students supplies.
• The work the kids do at home and in class is meaningful; there’s no such thing as “sponge work,” and every lesson and assignment is directed toward a reachable educational goal.  

         I’m interested to see what will happen as the year progresses, and Laurie alters her students’ IEP goals to better reflect state standards.   Almost all of the kids in her class had identical goals during the past couple of years, regardless of what their needs and strengths were.  

         I have a feeling that Laurie is already redesigning and reworking the expectations for each child; I know for a fact that she’s got a clear idea of what each child needs to learn in order to reach higher objectives.  If I know Laurie, she will be custom-creating goals that will actually move her students toward grade-level work.

         That class is moving, kicking and screaming perhaps at first, but more and more confidently into demanding, high-quality work.  I’m delighted, because it means that when the kids come my room for fifth and sixth grade, I won’t spend a year working to develop independent learners.

It was not always this way… 

         A few years ago, I opened my classroom to five new fourth graders, three of whom were GATE (gifted and talented) certified and all of whom, the teacher told me, were proficient in math, reading, and writing. 

         They’d scored high on the state’s standardized tests the previous spring and were just wonderful kids.  She advised that they should all be mainstreamed for math, and that four of them could attend a general education social studies or science class. 

She was right that they were wonderful kids.  I adore them.  But they were not wonderful students, not yet.

• During the first week, one of them spent six hours in the classroom crying because she wanted the lower-grades special day class (SDC) aide to come and sit with her. 
• During the first week, all of them failed the beginning of the year math inventory which reflected what they had learned the previous year.  Only one of them demonstrated anything close to mastery of some of the math modules for the previous year.
• During the first month, I discovered that they had no idea how to talk or think about what they were reading:  their idea of reading comprehension was to parrot back what the text said. 
• When I administered an On-Demand writing assessment that asked them to describe their favorite experience the previous summer, none of them wrote more than three sentences. 
• Three of them lasted less than two weeks in a general education math class because they weren’t able to follow the lessons.   
• None of them were able to participate in science or social studies, because they couldn’t get accustomed to the concept of active, engaged learning.  They sat passively through instruction, and waited during independent work time for someone to tell them what to do instead of reading the directions.
• I discovered on their first benchmark test that they were used to having all assessments read to them, even though four of them read at the third grade level or higher.  When they did in-class assignments, they expected me or our aide to sit with them and tell them what to do next.

The children were shorthchanged…

         Their previous teacher did them a grave disservice.  She sent me five very intelligent kids who hadn’t a clue how to learn.  It wasn’t their fault; they’d never been taught how to think or had thinking skills modeled for them. 

         My former colleague never worked in general education, never entered a general education classroom, and felt safe only in her cocooned Special Day Classroom, where she could nurture her students and coddle them.

         Laurie’s work is already showing results, and it’s just the beginning of November.  She’s participating in a fourth-grade team with two other general education teachers:  she took on social studies, and has a reverse-mainstreaming thing going on in her classroom; she teaches a rigorous math class to her students and some of the lower-scoring kids in general ed (and three of my students, fifth and sixth graders who are still needing support with basic math skills in a very small group situation). 

         When you walk into her classroom, it’s student work you see, not artwork done by her or her aide. 

         Laurie and I can finish each others’ sentences when we discuss rigor and independent learning.  This shorthand is based on a mutual understanding of what special education is:  a service designed to bridge the gap between ability and capacity, not an educational system to protect kids with special needs.

         When we smother kids with support and don’t teach them how to think for themselves, even the brightest of them will atrophy as learners.

           Some students are so far behind that they cannot keep up with a general education class.  Some students process in a way that requires more time, more space, more opportunities for practice, and a slower pace in order to master new concepts. 

           Some students need a small group – less noise, less activity, less chaos – in order to learn.   Some need instruction provided in ways that aren’t commonly found in a general education room – more visuals, more guided work, more modeling, more incremental. 

          All students with learning disabilities need at least one, if not most of these things in order to learn how to learn.  Notice that I didn’t say they  need them in order to learn everything.  Only to learn how to learn. 

 Full inclusion after rigorous preparation

         I favor inclusion of students with special needs in the general education classroom – after they have been given the appropriate, rigorous instruction and practice in the basics that will allow them to function on a par with everyone else.  I do not favor inclusion where the child enters too far behind to ever catch up and spends the rest of his or her school career vainly trying to do what the other students do.   

Our goal as special educators is to help our students bridge the gap between where they are and where they need to be in order to be able to follow along in a general ed classroom, at a general ed pace and in that kind of environment.

         In order to push our kids up to that level, we may have to enfold them in a Special Day Class or separate classroom environment for some or all subjects for a period of time.  In the best of all possible worlds, this would take place in the elementary school level, and by middle school, the vast majority of  kids with IEPs  who had spent time in a Special Day Class would be out in the general school population for most classes. 

How quickly depends on the child and on us

         How quickly we can bring kids up to the appropriate skill levels depends on each child’s areas of need and strength, and the level of rigor we infuse into our classrooms.  A demanding classroom will firmly and lovingly raise students who use their brains like a muscle in a gym, stretching, pressing, and moving from strength to strength.

I’ve had students arrive from other schools or lower grade Special Day Classes who lack the ability to do independent work, who have become so dependent on the assistance of aides and teachers that they are unable to problem-solve and try out new skills.

I’ve seen special education classrooms which rely on endless series of packets and worksheets, done quietly at student desks, where no questioning takes place and compliance with behavioral rules takes precedence over learning. 

And I’ve worked with many colleagues who become so frustrated with their students’ challenges that they lose sight of what we’re working toward and begin to teach so far below grade level that nobody will ever catch up. 

         None of this is going to move our kids from our classrooms into the general education population with any success.  All of this will perpetuate the deficits our kids arrive with. 

Keep in mind what we want for our students

         If we want kids with in our special education classrooms to move from deficit to ability to competence, we must be relentless in our rigor of instruction, and stand firm in our expectations of learning. 

          We must keep our eye on the ultimate goal, which is that we will shoo our students from our learning nest into the big wide world and watch them fly, fly into their lives as learners.

             Rigor is not the equivalent of harshness.  A demanding classroom is a nurturing environment where students are not expected to learn and function on their own, but where scaffolds and supports are in place and are gradually removed or reduced as mastery takes place. 

          A demanding classroom is one whose staff is attentive to the small signs of growth and need, and adjusts instruction accordingly. 

          A demanding classroom is one where students themselves, at all ages,  work with staff to set reasonable, achievable goal and celebrate success. 

          A demanding classroom is one where the teacher’s motto is “yes, you can, let’s work to find out how…” and where failure is seen as an opportunity to try again. 

          A demanding classroom is one where a student who doesn’t get it just hasn’t been taught it the right way yet – and where the staff is committed to finding the right way for that child. 

           A demanding classroom is one where laughter, curiosity, and determination are reflected in the faces and work of the children, and where academic behavior is as important as social behavior.

When we demand of our students…

           When we demand excellence of our students and fail to show them how to achieve it, we are not providing rigorous instruction.

           When we demand competency from our students and don’t support them in their learning, we are not providing rigorous instruction.

          When we require compliance from our students without understanding and ownership, we are not providing rigorous instruction.

           And when we reduce expectations to accommodate learning deficits, we are certainly not exhibiting any rigor at all in our own work.

 If we want our students to be able to do general education work in a general education classroom, we have to teach general education skills, not special education habits.

          We must demand of our own instruction and planning the same thing our colleagues in the general education classroom demand of themselves and their students.  To do less is to abdicate from the position as teacher.