The Inclusive School

1. The Inclusive School www.schoolofeducators.com

2. The Move to Inclusion • Over the last 20 years • Practice of educating students with special needs in the regular classroom • Demise of special classrooms/schools • Collaboration/Co-Teaching • Safe and productive learning environment for all • Move from “allowing” students with special needs “in” to welcoming • Building a communities where everyone feels a sense of belonging

3. What is Inclusion? • Welcoming • Educating • Collaboration • Designing

4. Why? • Education is more than an academic process. The brain and the emotions need to be developed and we need to use the strengths of all children to build academic success • Schools provide the advantage of community • Children learn from modeling of age-appropriate peers • Opportunities to learn more about acceptance and respecting differences

5. How? • Be flexible • Be collaborative • Be prepared to problem solve • Be a planner • Be aware of the language used when describing students • Be aware of how you spend your time • Be prepared to play a key role in beginning and maintaining an inclusive focus

6. Schools In each school there are students, teachers, staff, administrators, parents and often members of the community who interact daily. These interactions become part of the culture. Some schools let their culture develop on their own and others take the initiative to promote a culture they value.

7. Belonging • “belonging” is a tern coined by A.H. Maslow. It appears with “love” on his hierarchy of needs. The premise is that human beings are motivated to satisfy needs. These hierarchical needs must be at least partially satisfied before a person will try to satisfy higher needs.

8. Create Belonging • Make the concept explicit • Include children in problem solving • Teach inclusion and celebrate diversity • Establish a relationship with each child

9. Learning as a Journey As a whole class children need to understand that we all have strengths and areas to work on. We hope that children will honour their own strengths and needs and the differences of those around them. We need children to realize that learning is a process, not a race. The concept of learning is a process and and the concept of a journey links to the outside world. We are all on lifelong journeys, each going at our own pace.

10. Stainback and Stainback, authors of Support Networks for Inclusive Schooling “In inclusive schools , the focus is not exclusively on how to help students…fit into the existing, standard curriculum in the school. Rather the curriculum in the regular education class is adapted, when necessary, to meet the needs of any student for whom the standard curriculum is inappropriate or could be better served through adaptation. Possibly the most common curricular modification in inclusive schools involves arranging for students to pursue different objectives within the same lesson.”

11. When a teacher makes adaptations, the curriculum maintains the exact same learning outcomes for the student, but may the goals/expectations, presentation, materials, assistance or environment may vary, be different.

12. When a teacher makes modifications, there are differentlearning outcomes for the student, as identified in his or hers Individual Education Plan. The materials used may be similar or different from those of the other learners in the classroom

13. Adaptation vs. Modification • Use of adaptation over modification when possible enhances the student's acceptance and inclusion in the classroom • Adaptation reduces teacher time needed for planning and delivering multiple curricula • Once clearly understood and practiced it almost comes naturally *Avoid assuming the child requires a separate curriculum since the overuse of a separate curriculum increases the exclusion of the child and workload of the teacher.

14. Ask Four Questions • Which curriculum learning outcomes can the child meet without any changes? • What adaptations can be made, and where for the child to meet these learning outcomes? • Which learning outcomes will need to be modified? (can this be done with the same classroom materials?) • Are there any times when the child will be working on different learning outcomes with different, but age appropriate, materials?

15. Creating a Resource Model • Combine resources • Collaboration • Team model • Co-Teaching/co-plan/programming • A model and support for classroom teachers

16. “The whole reason for education is to help create whole people for the future. We build in students what we want in a future society. The principles around inclusion are what we are all searching for in our lives. I think if we give a taste of this to children, they will seek it out for the rest of their lives” -Kim Ondrik, teacher

17. “You can’t be a team member without being a part of the conversation. You’d just become a technician without reflection, and teaching just has to be more than that” -Steve Rosell, teacher

18. Your attention and participation has been appreciated. THANK YOU !