What is the difference between mainstreaming and inclusion?

Mainstreaming is allowing the student with a disability to be educated along with non-disabled peers in a general education classroom. For example: I teach 7th grade special education and most of my students come to me for math or language arts. They receive science and social studies instruction, with modifications, through a general education teacher. This also includes subjects that most people call exploratories such as p.e., art,etc…

Inclusion allows the student with disabilities to receive instruction in the general education with special education services coming to them. For example: a student with difficulties in reading would have the special education teacher come to them to receive their instruction in the same room with their non-disabled peers. Some school districts call this collaboration, in which the general education teacher and special education teacher collaborate to provide instruction to all the students.

In some districts you will find a mixture of both. Obviously, some children will need resource services due to their special needs, whereas other students with disabilities would do well in an inclusive classroom. Deciding one which model the child feel the most successful in depends upon the needs of the child. Today, many school districts have adopted an “either or” mentality of providing services. IDEA did away with that and dictates that schools must provide a continuum of services. Unfortunately it just has happened.

I have probably provided you with much more information than you were wanting. Please feel free to email me if you are still unsure of the definitions of these two terms.

Laurie

Mainstreaming means including a student with disabilities in a general education class as long as he/she can perform similar work to his/her non-disabled peers. This might be Art, Music, PE in the old days.

Inclusion means that students with disabilities are educated based on their own unique learning needs in classes of students with and without disabilities.

Mainstreaming is still all too common in schools. Some classroom teachers *call it* inclusion, but still expect the student with disabilities to be in their classroom *only* if they can keep up with the same workload.

Do you all, as teachers, etc., find that the inclusion class is “watered down” for the rest of the general ed students who are there?

It means that teachers may not slap the same old tired worksheets on the copy machine.

With good planning and instructional differentiation, I can challenge several learner levels on the same topic. Inclusion also requires extra planning time spent to accommodate learning needs.

Lesson plans also do not work well from year-to-year in the differentiated classroom because lessons are geared to learner needs—and no two groups have the same needs.

It doesn’t have to be.
It’s a bit of an art, though.

Thanks for the input.

I teach 11th grade academic English in both a self-contained and inclusion setting. We, in VA have the state tests called the SOLs. All of our students have to take and pass them in order to receive a standard diploma. All of our classes, in both environments, have to have the same expectations. The only difference in my SC class and inclusion class is that it is a smaller class and I can give more attention to remediation in the SC class than in the inclusion class. I, in fact, expect more out of my kids in the SC class because I am a harder teacher than the reg ed teacher. We have a really good group of sped teachers that teach SC English and I have a good percentage of kids passing the SOL tests. You have to have high expectations for all students in order for them to succeed. You have to realize that in this time of whole language, most of the sped kids are such because these are the students that had to have more instruction and didn’t; they are suffering from dysteachia. At the beginning of the year, I give my SC class their last writing assignment, a 3-5 page reasearch paper on a topic of their choice. These are kids with both reading and writing ‘disability’. I keep a portfolio of the preceding year’s students so that my students now can see that they can do it. They all do. You must remediate, not accommodate. I don’t know any of my kids accommodations in my SC classes because I can’t, for example, ‘read to’ if I want to remediate. My parents and school are fully aware of what I am doing. I also am able to exit kids from sped. Sorry, but I did get off subject, but it is all related.

Explain the difference between accomodate and remediate. I’m not sure I understand what you do in the classroom as opposed to the regular ed teacher.

The difference between remediation and accommodation is as follows: to remediate, say, a reading disability, is to give the child who has it special instruction in reading, via a reading instruction tailored to his needs. (The same goes for remediating problems in spelling, handwriting, math, visual memory, hand-eye coordination, gross motor coordination, etc.) Accommodations consist of giving that child alternative ways to learn the curriculum that the others are learning via reading or writing. For example, he could listen to his textbooks on taped textbooks, watch videos and films, etc.

While he’s receiving accommodations, he should be receiving intensive, daily remediation. Otherwise, he’ll enter adulthood without the academic skills needed for success in today’s world.

Yours truly,
Kathy G.

dee wrote:
>
> Explain the difference between accomodate and remediate. I’m
> not sure I understand what you do in the classroom as opposed
> to the regular ed teacher.

Have you checked out Layered Curriculum by Dr. Kathie Nunley. I think you can find info at help4teachers.com. It has some great ideas for differentiating instruction for all students. After spending several years accommodating the students to fit the instruction, it seems like it would be such a delight to fit the instruction to the students and their preferred learning styles. Now if I could talk some of the regular ed teachers in my school into giving it a go. Susan Long wrote:
>
> It means that teachers may not slap the same old tired
> worksheets on the copy machine.
>
> With good planning and instructional differentiation, I can
> challenge several learner levels on the same topic.
> Inclusion also requires extra planning time spent to
> accommodate learning needs.
>
> Lesson plans also do not work well from year-to-year in the
> differentiated classroom because lessons are geared to
> learner needs—and no two groups have the same needs.