Issue of inclusion

Hi.
You’ll find you get more responses here if you give some answers of your own as well as a list of questions.
Who are you? Are you a teacher, a school aide, a parent, an adult with LD, or a student?
Are you a student in a teacher education program?
Why are you asking these questions — what is your involvement with the issue?
Is this an assignment for a teacher ed class? (If it is, many people would prefer to encourage you to do your own work and research because that way you learn from it.)

You can find a lot of info about many different topics by clicking on the LD In Depth link on the top of this page.

My own answer to your questionnaire is that results vary too highly to generalize. There are good inclusion setups and bad ones. It depends both the student and the classroom and the subject being taught, and how far the student’s abilities are from what is usually needed to succeed in that class and subject. A good example of inclusion would be a blind student who has a scanner and can read Braille and can participate fully in all the class activities through university and law school; a bad example would be an MR student sitting at the back of the Grade 3 class playing with toy cars all day — I have seen both examples personally.

That’s a good answer, Victoria. Not all disabled students are able to handle full inclusion—they need a more restrictive environment to be able to succeed. Those who [i]can[/i] handle it, of course, should be given the opportunity to do so.

Kathy G.

kgreen, I’ll have to disagree with you. I agree with Vicktoria…my believe is…while not all LD students can handle a regular education classroom (depends on their level), but if all possible I believe that they SHOULD be in the regular education classroom.

total ‘restrictive environments’ don’t work. Ok… I can’t say that for every time…because there are different situations. Most of the time it doesn’t work. There are times during the classroom day where some students should be taken out of hte classroom for one-on-one instruction, but not the entire day.

LD students can do very well in the regular education classroom with the right kind of assistence and program.

Something that I have learned (through school and observation) is the best teacher are STUDENTS. A student is able to be more on the level of a LD student, and are able to help them make more connections.

Ok…I was going to wait until I figured out what this thread was about, but I just wanted to say something. I will wait now until I figure out what this information is for.

I don’t know, Tessa. Can a student with severe learning disabilities handle being full-time in a regular classroom with 30 or more other children and a teacher who must somehow manage to maintain some type of order while actually helping all the students to learn the curriculum? Not likely. It would be impossible for the student, and impossible for the teacher as well.

Reading these debates on the full inclusion issue can only remind me of something that Sally L. Smith said in her excellent book, [i]No Easy Answers: The Learning Disabled Child at Home and at School[/i]:

[b]_____________________________________________________________

The greatest controversies regarding the least restrictive environment center around a child like Gilbert. There are some classroom teachers who can help mildly to moderately learning disabled students find ways of functioning that minimize their disabilities and enable them to feel enough success each day to continue to believe that they can learn. However, students like Gilbert usually feel more inadequate and frustrated by remaining in classrooms with children who are not disabled. For Gilbert to be placed in a regular classroom where his needs cannot be met there is in fact a more restrictive environment than to be placed in a self-contained classroom where he is helped to learn and succeed. It was not the intent of Congress to plunge Gilbert into an environment where he feels more inadequate and more frustrated and is subject to teasing and social isolation because of his deficits. Since Gilbert is bright enough to see that others can easily do what he, with massive effort, cannot do, how can he feel better about himself as a person in a regular classroom? In that situation, Gilbert can feel so defeated that he may turn inward or he may act out and become the class clown, the negative influence, the vandal, the disrupter who keeps everyone from learning.

When a child is placed in a self-contained classroom, he does not have to be denied normal experiences. He can be introduced to exciting materials, challenged intellectually and creatively, taken on trips, and given opportunities to interact with the community. The self-contained classroom can allow the child to absorb the materials and the experiences by structuring them in ways so he [i]can[/i] learn. Normal experiences belong in the self-contained classroom.

Many students like Gilbert belong in a self-contained classroom of nine to eleven severely learning disabled students until they are ready to move into a resource room, and finally, with the proper support services, into a regular classroom. We would never think of throwing a preschooler who doesn’t know how to swim into a large pool, telling him to swim. Yet every day we are throwing children who do not know how to learn into regular classrooms and often we watch them begin to drown. Parents need to be vigilant in regard to what is best for their child. This means looking closely at the child’s needs and being able to face the disability courageously. There are some parents who lose sight of the needs of their own child and become involved in the stigma that they feel will taint them with their child’s special placement. All parents want to see their children “make it” and not be isolated as “different,” but the emotional complications that occur from a child failing day after day can become more severe than the disabilities themselves.

The severely learning disabled child is multihandicapped. As one teacher cogently said, “He’s a little bit blind in that his eyes don’t make sense out of what they see on the page; he’s a little deaf in that he can’t organize the information coming out of his ears. Frequently, he has touches of what could be called cerebral palsy in that his movement is disjointed and clumsy. Sometimes his speech is halting and he can’t find the words that he needs. Emotionally, he tends to overreact or to act inappropriately. And yet, he has many areas of competence. He’s the hardest to teach.”

Can Miss Porter, who has thirty-four sixth-graders in her class, among them one blind and one deaf child, give hyperactive, severely learning disabled Gilbert and two other moderately learning disabled students the help they need? She needs to help them learn to control themselves and teach them, step by step, the prerequisites in order for them to learn. Miss Porter might be able to serve Gilbert’s needs systematically if she had only fifteen students in her class, a trained aide, and many support services available; even then, it would be difficult…

…Inclusion has not reduced Miss Porter’s class of thirty-four. In fact, it has increased the class to forty and she is now responsible for three ADHD and learning disabled youngsters, two learning disabled, and one with a degenerative physical ailment. To compensate for this, she has been given a special education teacher who comes in a few hours a day, but she still feels unsuccessful and many of her students feel the same way.

Larger classes rarely serve students’ needs. All over the United States test scores are going down, discipline problems are soaring, children are not learning to read and write properly, yet not one school district is drastically reducing class sizes in order to give children and teachers a fighting chance to succeed. Why? Because citizens and their representatives decide that money must be allocated elsewhere. Yet we continue to wring our hands in despair at the poor quality of our schooling and too often blame the teachers.

Teachers are rarely given the support and training they need in order to work with youngsters with disabilities. (Chapter 12: “Parents, Teachers, and IDEA,” pp. 247-48, 250, [i]No Easy Answers: The Learning Disabled Child at Home and at School, Revised and Updated,[/i] by Sally L. Smith, @1995)

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Under such circumstances as described in her book—and they are all too prevalent, all over the nation—how can full inclusion begin to succeed? It can’t; not without a major restructuring of regular education in general, and I don’t see that happening in the near future (if ever). All it does is set up severely disabled students for failure, frustration, and ostracism, and they don’t get the specialized help they sorely need in order to become successful. I’m a firm believer in maintaining a full continuum of services, from full inclusion for the children whose disabilities are mild enough to permit them to handle it, to special schools or even hospitals for the children at the opposite end of the spectrum. Dumping all students into the regular classroom, whether they can handle it or not, and telling them to learn when they can’t, is—to my mind—cruel and detrimental to the children themselves.

Yours truly,
Kathy G.

Greeting! To be honest with you this is my very first year teaching in an inclusion setting. I am the Special Education teacher and I work alongside the regular education teacher. There are a total of four of us in the classroom which includes the two paraprofessionals. I have worked In-Class Support / Resource Room for four years.

Inclusion is based on these teaching models:

Parallel Teaching
Working in separate groups in the classroom

Typically, how a lot of support teachers begin
If this is the only thing you do, this is not co-teaching
Only use parallel teaching now and then
Supportive Teaching

1 teacher presents content, 2nd teacher provides enrichment
strategies enhance learning for the entire class
Complimentary Teaching

teaching students certain learning strategies within the context of a content lesson
Team Teaching

both teachers share the whole class instruction
divide lessons
simultaneous instruction

It all depends on the class and the amount of inclusion students you have. I feel that if you have a great working relationship with your co-teacher that you will have lots of fun working together.

If anyone can pass along ideas that they use differently in their classrooms on inclusion it would be certainly be appreciated.

Thanks,

Jerry G.
www.angelfire.com/nj4/pulaski8

There are **lots** of really good ideas about inclusion on this site, though some of them take time and work and planning. Check out “watering up the curriculum” in the “for teachers” section.