Inclusion - Third Installment

A significant amount of effort is spent on advocating for students to be included and shifting how the institution works to make this possible. After we get the students in the room, then what do we do?

Inclusion is more than admittance. We must modify and change the instruction to make it both accessible and challenging. Sometimes we even need to reframe for ourselves what it is we are teaching. If the middle school learning goal is to analyze recurring themes in literature, then we might need to deliberately teach how to build knowledge as a student reads – not only what questions we might ask.

For instance, it might feel instinctual to invite students to identify the motivations of the characters, reactions of the characters, conflicts in the story, and themes the author touches on. And there are many instances where a teacher has to teach and reteach what these things are… theme, conflict, characters, etc. However, we can help many students by breaking down the thinking that is involved in analyzing and showing students how to organize this mental information. This might look like character maps that helps students make visual connections between characters and space or characters and other people and/or helping students predict all the possible unwritten things the character could be thinking. For many kids accessing their mental process, “I read________. I think ___________. I connect___________. I ask___________.” is incredibly challenging and teaching what happens at each step VERY DELIBERATEY is, at minimum, a first step.

Collaborative teaching allows for great teaching opportunities. My favorite collaborative teaching model this week is Alternative Teaching. Here one teacher teaches the lesson one way and then the other teaches the same lesson a different way. With aides in the room you could even modify this to  repeat the same lesson again or break the lesson down into smaller parts for a few students. The trick with all this is to keep the instruction hemmed in and brief. Maybe one teacher would start out with a 5-7 minute lesson, then the students would work for 20 minutes, followed by the alternative 5-7 minute lesson and ten minutes or more of work. I think it would be great to lead with the lesson the teachers deem “most accessible” for all their students.

We are still figuring out what to do once we get them into the room and sometimes we are struggling to keep them there once they are included. I will continue to ruminate on inclusion, graduate school, and learning. Until next time…

Inclusion - Second Installment

I used to think an inclusion setting was not ideal for my kid. He has this double whammy of deafness and Autism that make sensory integration a huge challenge, plus he had an early history of hiding underneath tables in a more “typical” deaf preschool setting. The thing about our guy is the signing itself can be overwhelming and layer on the inability to sit for longer that five or ten minutes, truthfully advocating for inclusion at times seemed like advocating for hell. But then I started to work in schools, more specifically to work in special education settings and I had the opportunity to meet reality.  

Plain and simple, both in schools and in society, separating “typicals” from “non-typicals” is counter-productive (whatever typical and non-typical mean anyway?). If we are all going to live well in our communities together, these interminglings must begin early. Often parents of differently-abled kids feel isolated, disconnected, and in their worst moments hopeless as they try to care for their children.  Schools can and do perpetuate this isolation with self-contained classrooms and a lack of student expectation. In my own employment and when I substituted in my urban school district, I witnessed the degree of isolation teachers of special education and their assistants can be within school communities. They are often working outside of state standards and their students have questionable access to grade level curriculum. Administrators and other teachers often fail to include these staff members and students when they focus on improving student learning and teacher instruction.

How can self-contained classrooms meet student’s individual needs?

Self-contained classrooms in theory can insulate students from large class sizes where their specific academic goals and instructional needs may be glossed over in the sea of other faces. These classrooms reduce the teacher-to-student ratio and often pair the teacher with at least one instructional aid. The self-contained classroom can provide more direct instruction with some extra room to deal with behaviors that are challenging to navigate in a general education setting.  Self-contained programs, deaf and hard-of-hearing programs, Autism programs, and programs designed to meet the needs of medically fragile students are usually created as an attempt to meet the specific and unique needs of the students being served.

What can be problematic about self-contained classrooms?

Students in self-contained classrooms receive fewer opportunities to interact with typically developing peers and grade level curriculum. Sometimes skilled grade level instruction is also a missed opportunity. Students in these classrooms vary in their ages and grade levels, at times to extremes. The range is often disproportional to a range found in a typical classroom setting. A teacher may be modifying a math lesson where every one of his/her students is working at a different grade/ability level, from prekindergarten to algebra.  Realistically, day-to-day instruction suffers, as instructional trainings for differentiating curriculum lag behind their need.  Teachers and instructional aids in self-contained classrooms are isolated from the school community, their peers, and school wide instructional improvement plans and goals. They are not visible enough and sometimes the insular setting allows teachers to believe they are doing more than they really are.  There is a lack of instructional oversight and expectation.

How can inclusion classrooms meet student’s individual needs?

In inclusion classrooms typical and non-typical peers have access to one another as peer models. Students of all varieties regulate their behavior in the presence of their peers. Students model different learning styles and strategies and have access to the make-up of their whole school/world community. Often different ways of moving around in the world or dealing with stress that call attention to some students in public are ignored or become normalized in an inclusion setting. Non-typical behaviors are less distracting and they are accepted as day-to-day occurrences. In a full inclusion model, instruction is modified so that all students have access to the curriculum, teaching strategies take into consideration the varied learners in the classroom and this attention to differentiation benefits all students.

What can be problematic about inclusion classrooms?

Full inclusion usually translates into more adults in a classroom. Figuring out this working relationship can be chaotic at times for students and teachers and perceived power imbalances tend to stress the more sensitive students. Whether co-teaching or supervising instructional staff, teachers in inclusion classrooms have to skillfully manage student and adult relationships simultaneously. Additionally, in the inclusion settings it may be harder to address specific education goals for individual students and track incremental student progress. Sometimes meaningful student work may suffer to include a wider range of learners. Usually, it is those students at either end of the spectrum that lose out. 

When my stepson entered middle school instructional intervention started falling away because the adults in his school communities stopped believing in what was possible for him.  They concerned themselves with accepting him “for who he is” and his limitations. An inclusion setting offers a thin shield from this type of thinking. Even when these protections are the standards and expectations teachers and communities have for more “typical” students.

Inclusion – First of Three Ruminations

Inclusion is a complex and yet simple vision. It is a process, a way of living, learning, and teaching, but sometimes is misunderstood as a goal or a place to get to, instead of paradigm shift or a way of being.

I work with and parent children that would be considered “low incident,” another way of saying complicated and not many kids with their particular challenges out there. They are outliers even in groups of students being served by Special Education. Because they are complicated and some of their parents happen to look like and sound like those who are almost about to sue, they receive a lot of attention and some “extra” services. And when educators talk about “full inclusion” they aren’t talking about these kids – they cannot even wrap their brains around what it might look like.

They have intense sensory needs, they struggle to access language, not to mention curriculum. They have been known to flap, scream, fail to sit in a chair for longer than five minutes, have little expressive communication that doesn’t touch on their own specific needs, and they get stuck in their own feedback loops. Often educational institutions respond to these students by providing one-to-one support and/or “self-contained” rooms for specialized instruction and intervention. We refocus the lens on behavior modifications and marginalize these students’ access to grade level materials and teaching. 

I think institutions should reconsider. Most of the time inclusion is appropriate for students, and separating some students out from larger student populations fails to provide all students with an accurate understanding and picture of their whole communities.  Plus, when you contain a population of students you “contain” their families, their teachers and their assistants. Inclusion is a hard process, I get that it is not a magical solution in the struggle to meet an individual student’s academic needs. It’s easy to say full inclusion and harder to put meaningful inclusion into practice. Inclusion not only means a seat at the table or in a desk, widening a door or putting in an elevator, but it also means modifying instruction and curriculum, recreating class room norms, and encouraging patience in ourselves and others. It often requires teachers to work closely with other teachers and assistants, which can be challenging in itself.

Next time I would like to touch on what I used to think would work best for my deaf stepson who has Autism and a host of other quirky disabilities, and what I think now after working in schools. It won’t be pretty.  

Questions are concepts

Small inroads were made this week on my instructional goals. I decided after looking at several things to try Math Fact Café as an assessment tool for a few weeks. The page itself is not hard to look at and there aren’t a whole bunch of adds. I am prompting the student to use manipulatives with each step. I think the student’s inability to ask internal questions like, “What do I do now?” or “What do I know?” inhibits their ability to move through a multi-step process or concept. So, I am trying to focus in on the language and the process behind the concept. For an addition problem the language model would look like  “I see 6, I think inside my brain 6, I count 1,2,3,4,5,6. I see +1. What do I do? + means add. I get one more. = 1,2,3,4,5,6,7. 6 add 1 equals 7.” This is supported by counting objects during the explanation and following it up with picture, stick figure, and thought bubble clarifications.

Communication is Everything

We started out the week on a Tuesday. My student’s desire to discuss the schedule’s order is reduced. I continue to draw the stick figures and thought bubbles three to four times a day, detailing the order of events. I have also consistently been using a similar method to modify science experiments and classroom discussion. This week I started to try and reteach these illustrated concepts later in the day and assess comprehension. So far behaviorally we are experiencing a bit of an upswing.

Last week the student had a breakthrough and after years of searching for motivation and a month and a half of daily hand-over-hand assistance, the student can use a mouse independently. I credit a visually stimulating game we found on Zac Browser, the hand-over-hand strategy, and the willingness of the student to hang in there. Leading with this new ability, I am hoping to find sites that might help me assess student learning a little more accurately.

This weeks goals are to find assessment sites and introduce them to the student, increase the students interactions with inclusion teachers by having them ask the student at least one “Yes” or “No” question a day (the student will respond with an itouch communication device), and experiment with other hand-over-hand strategies that are linking communication and thinking. These could be anything from helping the student to draw a stick figure self and thought bubbles, to connecting pictured concepts to mathematical concepts.  

End of the week

Looking back at the week I think that meticulously drawing stick figure and thought bubble pictures about the student’s schedule has helped reduce lengthy behavioral episodes, even though the days were not agitation free. Sitting down together three different times throughout the day and using the drawing and writing process to discuss “what will happen?” refocused the student.

I also have been using this method during inclusion classes to help the student make connections with the grade level curriculum, though my instruction is not direct in these scenarios. For example, during a science lab where a small student group was working to filter water, I would draw the various actions and stages with the corresponding questions around the steps they used. The student would help with the experiment and then use the drawings to more fully understand what was happening at each stage and as a model of internal dialogue. Overall, the student’s behavior was less agitated and engaged. Evaluating whether or not these are sufficient ways to deliver instruction has yet to be determined. And here I think I am facing the fundamental challenge of creating an environment that centers instruction and learning, as apposed to behavioral intervention. I would like to figure out a way to lead with the learning, to have the learning itself support positive behavior.

The goals remain; help the student understand their own communication and how others comprehend their communication, while bridging the gap between their knowledge and word base in one area to their expressive communication.  It’s the “concept” part of language that I’m working on to put it more succinctly.

This week I increased the amount of time I used to help the student process their schedule or the question “What will happen next?” At the end of the week, I started to include some hand over hand drawings of these cartoon explanations. 

Attempting Hope

It has been a day full of chaotic schedule and displeased children who happen to have Autism, both at work and at home. We had a late start due to a wee bit of snow and a lot of slush on the roads.

So out of the classroom and into my own head. I just finished writing some feedback for the teacher who is formulating my son's IEP. This gnawing irritation that our most vulnerable kids are often held back by what the adults in their lives believe is possible, keeps haunting me. One only has to look at the history of special education (or public education as a whole for that matter) to see how much the paradigms teachers and administrators live within shape the instruction and opportunities our kids happen upon.

Two conflicts in education that I think a lot about are...

Secondary Special Education and "life skills" curriculum - where is the research that says kids need to learn life skills in school over academics in order to transition successfully into their adulthoods. In other words, teach my son how to read a book instead of how to load a dishwasher. 

Oh and those pushy parents who have kids with Autism and yep I'm one of them sometimes, although my kid has a few more whammies to add to the list. Here I am talking about disparities in special education. Families and educators are shifting the ways people think about difference and access to grade level instruction and curriculum because certain kids are sometimes quite capable and "in there." However, in some districts it's these kids who are moved out into inclusion settings and the kids who are learning well below grade level or students who are medically fragile in one way or another still remain in self-contained classrooms with little exposure to grade level materials and peer interaction. The issue is hugely complex and briefly touched upon here, but it's glaringly present in public schools.    

Resources

In these last two posts I have been using some of the strategies outlined by Ellyn Lucas Arwood Ed.D, Carole Kaulitz M.Ed., and Mabel Brown M.A. in their books Visual Thinking Strategies for Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders - The Language of Pictures (2009) and Learning with a Visual Brain in an Auditory World (2007). I have had the good fortune of being observed by Carole Kaulitz and she provided me with feedback and ideas about my teaching.  She will observe me again this winter.

Visual Thinking Strategies for Individuals With Autism Spectrum Disorders
Learning With A Visual Brain In An Auditory World

Pacing

Today I stepped back a little. I prepared a stick figure image of the student and several thought bubbles over the figure before the student arrived. We came into the classroom and it was an unusual beginning because the student’s bus arrived more than thirty minutes late. We sat down across from each other to work.  

I drew simple pictures inside the thought bubbles – one of the science class (two kids sitting at a table and a flask), one of the student eating snack, one of the science class with a line across it with “not today” above the image, one question mark, and one with the student sitting near work boxes (labeled 1, 2, 3). Then I told/signed the story of how the student arrived at school and signed, “science, snack?” I pointed to the corresponding thought bubbles – signing/saying, “You were thinking about what will happen next – Science? Then snack?” I pointed to the “not today” science picture and told the story about the late bus and there would not be science today. I wrote out the sentence – Today is different – and we signed it together. I pointed to the workboxes image and signed “first work boxes,” followed by “then snack” as I touched the snack picture. I wrote out these sentences on the page and I directed the student to sign the sentence back to me. We put the picture up with the sentence strip – What will happen? – and started the day.

I did not put myself into the picture today or attempt to broach the concept that I was thinking something different from the student. I reiterated the student’s communication and made visual imitations of the signed communication. I then used these visual imitations to explain how the day was different.  This kind of intense one-to-one engagement over something this student really cares about is agitating. Also, trying to get the student to think differently about the way the day progresses is met with some resistance, but this particular student is quite motivated by the exchange and clearly is grappling to understand.

Later in the day I tried to incorporate these stick figure drawing strategies into a reading lesson. This particular student can, with more than 75% accuracy given a field of 3 to 5 picture choices, identify the characters in a story and one to two character traits. With less accuracy (but more than 60%), the student can also identify a main (or big) idea in a story. Here again I am trying to step back and teach/reteach the concept of characters, character traits, and main idea.  I had a separate paper for each concept. I placed the student, as stick figure, in the center of the paper and through pictures in thought bubbles tried to explain what each concept was. I labeled the pictures, and then used the visual images to talk about the concepts.  After looking at and explaining each thought bubble I would write a sentence (put the picture into written words) and the student would sign it back to me.

The student, with prompting, then read a short story and with assistance answered these questions on a communication device (iPod touch with Proloquo2go) The device is also new for the student and myself.

With all these strategies I want change one or two things, tweak them if you will, a day. The student has significant communication challenges and so evidence that these strategies are helping is harder to come by. I am trying to shift my way of approaching the student overall and create additional instructional tools. The student’s willingness to engage is my highest priority right now, although I think it’s important to nudge kids sometimes out of their comfort or stuck zones even if frustration is unavoidable. 

Proloquo2go 

Questions Met With Silence

 I am working with a student who repeatedly indicates an aspect of their schedule using a single utterance (in this case sign) to ask a question or seek out reassurance about the schedule. The communication is predictable, rarely strays off of four or five reiterated signs, and seems to carry a lot of underlying communication. The communication centers on the day’s schedule and sometimes the student requests a complex response by signing “first, second, third…” to indicate that he/she is waiting for a list.

MY OVERALL GOAL is to help the student understand that I understand the single sign as a question and that what I am thinking/understanding may be different than what she is trying to communicate. The student’s “lunch” + raised eyebrows, I understand to mean, “When is lunch?” The student’s “science, snack?” I understand as “What will happen next?”

I am fairly certain that sometimes the student is asking about the schedule and sometimes the student is trying to say something else, like “I am hungry” or “I don’t want to sit here right now, when is the next thing going to happen?” or “I don’t feel good, this is boring, I am frustrated, etc.” However, one of the only real back-and-forth exchanges the student has with folks has to do with understanding and reiterating the schedule. In these interactions I think the student feels some mastery over what is signed and what he/she can expect to see signed and spoken back and therefore he student is stuck inside this one concept.

Today the student was getting agitated during a science lesson and started signing “Lunch?” Because we were in a larger class setting I started by ignoring this repetitive question. Then we made eye contact a few times and I signed “not yet” and tried to change the subject. We moved to a one-to-one lesson. Here when the student would sign the repetitive question we would go get a sentence strip which had the longer “When is lunch?” written out on it. I signed, “You are asking me a question – (we read it together) When is lunch?” Then I handed the student a different sentence strip with the time lunch begins on it and had the student put both the question and the response in the sentence strip holder.

When the student asked me again, “Lunch?” I pointed to the sentence strips and signed, “You are asking me a question, you are thinking in your mind, When is lunch?” and then I signed the answer “11:35, time.”

When the student asked me again I drew one stick figure of me with a thought bubble over my head and one of the student. In my thought bubble I drew another stick figure of the student with a question mark above their head and the sentence - I think (name of student) is asking me “When is lunch?” Then in the student’s thought bubble I drew a lunch box and a question mark and the sentence “When is lunch?” Then I added, “I am hungry.”

As the student continued to make the request I added more possibilities to the student’s thought bubbles. My thought bubble remained the same. I signed/spoke the details in the picture as I added more questions the student may have been asking.

The student remained engaged in the interaction, but did not indicate if the different ideas in the thought bubbles seemed closer to what was being communicated through pointing or a smile. We moved away from the task as the student became less connected to the interaction.

Tomorrow I would like to try a more visual (stick figure/thought bubble) approach before bringing the student to the sentence strips.

My goals are to help the student understand that a question is being asked and model how a question is answered. I also want to help the student identify the question or communication more accurately. Additionally, I hope to help the student transfer the vocabulary they understand when reading and writing to the word bank they use when engaging in expressive language.