Lecture 4 Chapter 4 Inclusion

Let's wrap up chapter four by talking about

our final topic in this chapter inclusion.

So

most of what we've discussed so far

um has to do with how we qualify students for special education.

Um What's included on that? IEP Right. What is the least restrictive environment?

What does that mean?

Where can kids actually be placed? We talked about that?

Well, let's talk a little bit,

a little bit about inclusion and this really leads

us into your discussion topic for this chapter,

which is all about inclusion and what you think about inclusion.

So first let's understand what inclusion is.

So your book talks about the things that are really important

when we think about including our students with

special needs in your regular education classroom.

What does that really mean?

Who,

what is inclusion all about mean?

Really? What is it all about? Well, let's talk about it.

First of all, it has four key characteristics,

home school placement principle of natural proportions, restructuring,

teaching and learning,

then age and grade appropriate placements.

What does that mean?

Well,

the first characteristics, home school placement, that means

that the student gets to attend school in the same school building

that they would attend if they were not a student with special needs and were instead

just a regular eyed kid.

That means if I live, um,

near my elementary school down the street and

my brothers and sisters attend that elementary school,

I Susie, who might have again, that special learning need.

I get to attend school the same place that my brother and sister get to attend school.

I'm not going to be bussed across town to

a different building because I have special education needs.

This is kind of important, it's important for um the student to be included.

Remember,

one of our big overriding principles is to help kids

be included in their community and be active community members.

So that starts with a home school placement.

After that the law talks about or the idea in principle, talk about

the principle of natural proportions.

So what does that mean?

That means

that if

you have a class of 31st graders

and the natural proportion of students who have any type of identified special need

is

30%

then 30% of the students in your classroom

should be special education students.

So we're just looking at taking

the normal percentage,

an easier number to think about that would mean that the number would be nine.

But more typically, it's about 10 to 15% of the population

are identified as students who have special needs.

So in a classroom of 30 you'd have 3 to 5 kids that may have special education needs.

That's natural proportions. Right.

It doesn't,

it, it means that no one individual teacher should have a whole lot more than that.

Nor should you have a whole lot less.

That is what it looks like in the natural population that being said,

different years yield different results. That's just an overall average

restructuring, teaching and learning.

So it's great that you have this wonderful classroom all

geared to deliver standards based education to typically developing kids.

It's wonderful.

So

we have kids who have special needs, we know they have special needs,

they have those individualized education programs.

How are we gonna help them

get the most out of what you are offering in your classroom?

Well,

we do a few things,

some of which we're gonna talk about in the next unit when we talk about how we adapt,

what happens in everyday classrooms to account

for our kids that have special needs.

But for now,

let's say we're just gonna restructure your classroom and what we're gonna do

when we do that is we're probably gonna ask you to cote,

they're gonna teach with somebody else. Woohoo. That could be a lot of fun.

So in a lot of school districts,

inclusive classrooms may include the addition of

a special education teacher that you team with

more realistically sometimes what that looks like is you will have

your friendly speech language pathologist who will come in and help you

um uh some of the time

in order to help um decipher some of what it is that you're teaching

and help reinforce that instruction that you're giving

for the students that have special needs.

So it kind of restructures the way we look

at how you deliver lessons to include the support

of others who may be able to assist us

in serving those students with special education needs.

And the last principle is really age and grade appropriate placement.

So what that means is kids need to be with same age peers in the same grade

used to be historically,

that a lot of times inclusion was accomplished by say, for instance,

taking a student with Down Syndrome who may be 10

years old and including them in a first grade classroom.

Because functionally

that might be where they're reading and the level of math that they can do

well,

true inclusion means that that su that fifth grade student with Down Syndrome

needs to be in that fifth grade classroom with their same age peers.

And we need to adapt what is delivered to that student or how

it's delivered to make sure that that student is in short educational curriculum,

standards based education.

So there's two major issues

that are are at the heart of

why people debate about this.

So

it is a big debate. It's still a debate to this day.

Let me share with you on this topic a

little bit about my history with the inclusion movement

with my own personal child.

So

let's keep in mind that my own personal child is now a grown up adult human being

at the time that he was diagnosed with special needs.

Long before most of you were even thought about by your parents,

maybe even before your parents were even old enough to date or think about dating.

He was born in 1986. So as of this year, he's 37

I was really against separate education.

I was very much pro inclusion.

And it was always my goal to have him included

just following those principles that we just talked about.

I wanted him in the same school district and the same place that I lived

really,

it's a lot more convenient to send your school, your kid to school down the street

than it is across town.

I wanted to make sure that he was served um in a standards

based curriculum and that he had the supports that he needed to have.

I wanted all of those things.

But at the time that was bucking the trends.

So at the time, there was something called mainstreaming.

And what mainstreaming meant was that sometimes he

was gonna be in class with everybody else

when that worked out for all parties involved.

So,

mainstreaming is different from inclusive education because mainstreaming did

not require him to get a standards based um education

or to be there with his same age peers mainstreaming much like my previous

example can mean a 10 year old child with

Down Syndrome who should be in the fifth grade,

sitting in a first grade classroom that's mainstreaming.

They're getting what that first grade classroom has to offer,

but they're not being educated with their same age peers,

right? So that is what mainstreaming looks like.

So

inclusion really um is,

is many people feel trying to exclude the continuous um continuum of placements.

So remember I talked about

we've got our four or five federal settings, right? That's the continuum

of educational placements.

So people who are anti mainstreaming think that that's the case.

In fact, it's not, but

that is what the debate is about

and then increasing the amount of time

students spend in the general education classroom

um should be the goal of all education, right?

That's true in your general curriculum.

You don't want to in your general classroom single out a student to send

to the principal's office all of the

time because they're losing instructional time,

right?

So the same is true for kids who have special education needs.

We don't want to single them out and send them

down the hall to Mrs Jones unless we have to,

if Mrs Jones is gonna provide that support.

So

we want kids in that classroom as much as possible to

benefit from your wisdom and instruction as their general education teacher.

So we want to increase that amount of time.

Well, that puts a, a significant burden on you, the general education teacher,

it really does. That's why you're taking this class.

We want you to know and be aware of the fact that

that is some of what you're going to have to face.

Hopefully,

with all of the supports in place that are

necessary because we've revisited the way we educate students.

Remember, you might be co teaching with a special educator.

So those are some of the big issues behind the whole inclusion movement. It

is not completely implemented everywhere. Not even by a long shot,

it's still a movement and it's still a debate and you're

gonna continue that debate in your discussion of this topic.

So students with disabilities benefit a great deal from inclusion.

You'll find that out when you watch the video down below from Doctor Vella,

who's gonna tell you a little bit more about special education inclusion

and some of the history behind it.

But students with disabilities gain lots of things and I'm here to tell you that.

I also think general education students do as well.

And I will again, I guess I didn't really finish my story.

My son was included in general education

up through his elementary years.

So he finished out elementary school, being included with same age peers

in his home school district.

So that worked really well for him up to that point at that point in time,

his behaviors and developmental challenges became much more significant.

So his placement changed to a level three program

later as

his autism and behavioral challenges um were more

disruptive to a general education classroom setting.

He ended up being in a level four program.

It's kind of the end of that story.

Um all of them benefited him

at those various different stages in his life.

So we know by research that students

with disabilities can and do benefit academically.

So we need models, right?

All kids need models and they follow models, kids with special needs,

also follow those models.

So you want to make sure you're modeling up,

not down,

right? That was always my argument.

I want my son to follow the better model, not the worst model

in the old days when he was growing up,

it was very frequently in the situation where students who were

on the autism spectrum were replaced

with emotionally behaviorally disturbed kids.

That was a completely inappropriate placement for him.

And I fought those placements, tooth and nail

and 1

95% of the time

because that wasn't the right place for him to be.

But

the fact of the matter is that still occurs in many school districts.

But I I am also here to tell you that

um it wasn't just Zach,

my son who benefited from being in with typically developing peers,

those typically developing peers

gained something as well,

they gained understanding and empathy that they never

would have had that people of my generation did

not have because we didn't interact with individuals who

had special needs and who had disabling conditions.

So both sides benefit from these kinds of situations.

You can see and you probably many of you have been in classroom situations and school

situations where you have been educated with same

age peers who may have had disabilities.

So you have gained some understanding of what that

population or at least the people that you know,

um what that, what those people had to offer you

and what you had to offer them.

So the world is changing and I think the world in many ways is becoming much,

much more inclusive.

I'm here to tell you that schools are generally

a little bit behind what the world does.

But that being said,

most of you are gonna go to work

after you graduate from college

and you will be in schools that have

inclusive opportunities for students who have disabilities.

So it bears thinking about it and discussing it

and that's what you're gonna do after this. Well, after you watch doctor

rella,

talk to you about inclusion

and

what happens

that wraps up chapter four for all of us.

Lecture 4 Chapter 4 Inclusion

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