By Sara Finegan

Having special needs in the classroom doesn’t mean that you lack the ability to learn; it means that you learn differently.   It’s not about how smart a child is; it’s about how he or she is smart.

For years, educators and parents believed that students with cognitive impairments and other moderate-severe disabilities were not well-served by inclusion in general education classes.  It was a natural extension of this philosophy to decide that these children also couldn’t follow the general education curriculum.    At first glance, this makes sense; it is only when one pauses to look more carefully that one sees the distortions.

It’s certainly true that a child with cognitive impairments, who can’t read independently cannot read the science textbook and keep a science notebook like his or her gen ed peers.   There’s no doubt that a child who has limited verbal capacity can’t write a five-paragraph essay about the Sioux Indians, or read and understand the Mayflower Compact.

But that doesn’t mean that the kids aren’t able to learn about and demonstrate their understanding of Native American daily life or the Pilgrims’ ordeal in the New World.   You don’t have to be able to read to access text.  You don’t have to be able to write to show what you know.

This year my class had the gift of accepting a fourth grader with autism and mild cognitive impairment into our five-six combo class.  Jack (name changed to protect the fabulous and amazing) had no  choice but to learn about Ancient Greece and Rome with us.  To be sure, he couldn’t use the text book the way the others could, and he didn’t have the ability to make connections between the Greek and Roman forms of government and the current U.S. political system.

• But he could, and did, read fables and do a report on them.  He could, and did, handle the tallying of votes as we explored democracy.
• He could, and did, learn all about the different Greek gods and goddesses and served as the go-to expert when we played Jeopardy!
• He could, and did,  learn 25 vocabulary words related to the units of study.
• He could, and did, create a power point presentation about Harry Potter (ok, not related to social studies or science, but still!)

There’s an ongoing debate, albeit a quiet one, about whether someone like Jack really would be better off learning about Ancient History when he might be, instead, learning independent living skills and the kind of reading and writing he will have to do as an adult.   I confess that I don’t know.  What I do know is that I have never been able to determine what a child’s capacity actually is, and thus have not been privy to knowing what he or she will be able to do as an adult.    Jack came to me unable to do anything independently and very averse to trying difficult things.  By the end of the year, he was actively engaged with other kids in the class, participating in all of our lessons, and doing things nobody had thought he could.

All it took, besides my amazing aide Tamara, was a little planning time.  OK, a lot of planning time.

And there’s the rub: preparing materials and activities for kids with moderate-severe disabilities to access the gen ed curriculum is extremely time-consuming.   As far as I know, there aren’t pre-built units available on the market to use; you must be creative and innovative.

This kind of instruction can be provided in both special ed and general ed classrooms.  If you are designing it for a general ed classroom then it also has to be structured around the gen ed teacher’s time-frame, teaching style and structure, and areas of emphasis.   I suppose you can develop a generic set of tasks and materials, but if we’re serious about teaching every child at his or her level, then we need to provide our kids with special needs with work that makes sense.

And once you’ve created a resource bank to use, you can’t stop there.  You must constantly be building upon it, adding to it, revising, and customizing it to fit the needs of each child.

The task may seem daunting.  For some, it may appear to be an impossible responsibility.   But I think that, if we understand the proper methodology to use, we can, slowly but surely, create for our students and our gen ed colleagues a workable system that allows all of us to engage in the job of teaching in new and exciting ways.

autism · general education · Inclusion · learning styles · lesson planning · modifications · multiple intelligences · Sara Finegan · science · social studies · special education · teaching strategies · unit planning