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Inclusion inside of High School Classrooms

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Inclusion inside of High School Classrooms

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Inclusion is based on the idea that all students with disabilities have a right to be educated in a general education setting with appropriate support and services to enable them to succeed. Inclusion inside of your classroom can be accomplished in a variety of ways and should be molded towards all of your students.

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How does developing an effective behavior management plans relates to Inclusivity in the classroom?

What is one way you can involve variety in your teaching to highschoolers?

You are teaching a High School English Class and one of your students is having struggles reading the book you assigned because they have Dyslexia and ADHD. What is one way you can help?

As a high school teacher how can you establish a safe classroom for all your students to be able to share opinions with their peers and you as a teacher?

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Delivering instruction in various ways will make it possible for your students to appeal to different learning styles. Keep your students engaged by switching up your day to day teaching! (show new videos, digital lessons, re-imagine existing lessons, involve your students in games like Kahoot and Quizlet)

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Get to know your students and let them get to know you! This allows students a safe space to share important personal information you will need to know as their teacher, like how well they are understanding your class or what accommodations might be needed to support their individual needs.

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The Inclusion Classroom: An Inclusive Education Movement

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How to Create an Inclusive Classroom: 12 Tips for Teachers

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What does inclusion actually mean, in the context of schools and education? What does inclusion look like in the classroom? And most importantly, how can teachers create an inclusive classroom that benefits all students, no matter what their individual needs?

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If you have a child with an Individualized Education Program (IEP), you have probably been to many IEP meetings attended by a lot of people talking about your child and his or her education. Sometimes they use terms or acronyms you may not know or understand. This can be really frustrating. It can also limit your ability to understand, participate, and advocate for your child. Consider these two words, which can be especially confusing: mainstreaming and inclusion. It is critical to understand that these words do not mean the same thing, and are often used incorrectly in the context of special education.

"Mainstreaming" and "Inclusion" are often used interchangeably, but have very different meanings. "Mainstreaming" means taking a student from a special education environment into a general education location. Mainstreaming is usually talked about when a student spends most or all of the school day in a special education setting. The goal of mainstreaming is to spend more time with general education peers and being engaged in general education activities. Mainstreaming really describes the physical location of the student.

Inclusion is more complex and means actually "including" the student, which is more than just being in the same room with general education peers. The key to inclusion is making adjustments and changing things around so they are accessible to the student. This could be modifying the curriculum to the student's level, giving the student extra breaks, having the student sit at the front of the classroom so they can see or hear better, or providing a one-on-one aide. For a student who has a high IQ but also has anxiety and difficulty in social situations, mainstreaming could mean putting the student in a general education science class. Inclusion would be adjusting how the student is expected to demonstrate knowledge, such as completing a written report instead of giving an oral presentation. If the class is doing a group project, inclusion could involve thoughtfully choosing the group members and pairing students who are willing to cooperate with a child that may not have the same social skills.

When a student is mainstreamed, inclusion is often overlooked but must always be considered. It is not enough to put a student in the corner, ignore them, and then claim that mainstreaming has occurred. The student would not get much benefit from just being in the general education classroom. Steps need to be taken so the student can participate, learn, and interact with other students. The goal is to keep special education students in the general education environment as much as possible by providing necessary supports for the individual student, rather than segregation into isolated special education settings.

Mainstreaming and Least Restrictive Environment

Special education law requires each student to be educated in the Least Restrictive Environment (LRE) in which they can be successful. In other words, students must be in the general education environment as much as possible. Mainstreaming in general education includes academic and elective classes, lunch, recess, passing time, assemblies, and any other activity students participate in during school hours.

Each student should be in the general education at all times, unless there is an individual and specific reason that suggests otherwise. Districts must consider all supplemental aids and services that could be used to support a student in general education. It is only when a student cannot be successful in general education, even with supplementary aids and services, that a student should be removed from general education.

The placement stated on an IEP is critical and must be in the LRE possible for the student. Placement describes where the student's IEP will be implemented. This might include the general education classroom, a resource room, a special classroom, or a percentage of time in multiple settings. Whether a student can be mainstreamed, and how much, is made on a case-by-case basis, taking into account each child's individual educational needs, unique circumstances, and their IEP. The placement should be individually designed for the specific student in question, including the classroom location, type of instruction, and various aids and services necessary for success. Placement decisions are made by a group of people, including the parents, who are knowledgeable about the student and placement options. The placement decision is usually made by the IEP team.

The placement team must always first consider placement in a general education classroom. If removal for specially designed instruction, supports, or other services is required, it must be done in a mindful way. Pull-outs during electives or other carefully selected times can help limit the impact of the removal on the student.

LRE is not limited to the classroom. It applies to all school settings, including the lunchroom, playground, and transportation. Transportation includes to and from school, travel in and around school buildings, and specialized equipment that may be needed. It can also apply to nonacademic and extracurricular activities and services, as well as transition placements. The IEP team must consider how the individual student can be included in all of these settings, and in the least restrictive way possible. All supports and services should be detailed in the IEP.

Can the District Force Your Child Into a Separate Classroom?

The LRE obligation does not override a district's requirement to educate every child. Districts are required to provide each student a Free Appropriate Public Education (FAPE). Whether a student is in a special education or general education classroom, or a combination, the student should also be learning and progressing. If a student is unable to receive educational benefit from being in a general education classroom, even with appropriate supplemental aids and services, districts must consider a more restrictive placement.

The educational benefits available in a regular classroom should be compared to those available to the student in a special education classroom. While academic progress is important, a child should not be placed in a special classroom based only on academics. The IEP team must consider both academic and non-academic benefits. Non-academic benefits include, among other things, interactions with general education peers and learning how to work with others, along with other social and communication skills.

A child cannot be removed from a general education classroom because it is easier for the district. While it may require additional resources and cost more, a district cannot refuse to mainstream or keep a student in a special education classroom due to a lack of supports. If supplemental aids and services are on a student's IEP, the district must provide them. If the IEP team decides to remove a student from the general education classroom for any amount of time, the IEP team should document specific reasons for that removal. The IEP team should discuss and document the various supplemental aids and services that were considered and why they did not work for the student, if tried.

Districts are allowed to consider negative effects that mainstreaming a child may have on other students in the classroom. If a student's behavior is so disruptive that it interferes with teaching and learning, the student could be removed. A student who is refusing to work, screaming, throwing things, or hitting people, will likely be removed from the classroom at least temporarily. At the same time, almost all children have some behaviors at school. Students without disabilities also hit, bite, yell, swear, or refuse to work sometimes. Not every action of a special education student should be attributed to a disability, and a district should not automatically conclude that the child needs to be removed from the classroom.

Mainstreaming is not appropriate for every student, but must be considered. If mainstreaming would not result in any educational benefit for a student, the district is obligated to look at other options. A student's need for additional support in a more restrictive setting may outweigh the benefit of inclusion in the general education classroom.

Working Toward Mainstreaming and Inclusion

Because districts are required to provide a range of alternative options, inclusion is not an all or nothing prospect. Mainstreaming and inclusion can be done on a trial basis. If the IEP team is unsure how a student will do with mainstreaming, they can try one class or maybe recess to begin. Start with a class the student is already successful at or a preferred topic or activity. For a student really interested in and motivated by science, start by mainstreaming in a general education science class with appropriate supports. Determine how the class environment or coursework can be adjusted for the inclusion of the student. Any decision to change a student's placement should be based on individual needs, which includes looking at a wide range of potential supports to help the student be successful.

Every child and every situation is different. The most important thing is to figure out what your child needs and the supports required to meet those needs. It is ideal when parents are completely involved in this process and ask questions to understand what is happening at school and how to advocate for their child.

Mainstreaming should always incorporate inclusion. When mainstreaming is to be done, inclusion must be implemented. Parents can keep districts accountable by insisting that any plan to mainstream include strategies to make the general education environment accessible to their child.

Diane Wiscarson and Kelsey Coulter are attorneys with Wiscarson Law, the only firm in Oregon with a primary emphasis on special education law for families. Since its founding in 2001, Wiscarson Law has shepherded thousands of Oregon and Washington families through the region's public schools and education service districts on behalf of their special needs children.
This article was first featured in the Spring 2018 print and online edition of Spectrum Life Magazine.
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The words mainstreaming and inclusion are often used interchangeably but have very different meanings. Special education law experts, Diane Wiscarson and Kelsey Coulter from Wiscarson Law talk about the definitions, the differences and what it means in the context of special education for students on the autism spectrum and with other disabilities.

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Differentiating Instruction: It’s Not as Hard as You Think

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Create opportunities to listen and support all of your students. 

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Create opportunities to listen and support all of your students. 

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This will help your students become more engaged with the learning material. As a teacher you are able to do this in many ways. Such as just communicating with your students every day, or by creating assignments that can help the student express themselves in their own way. Issues may also arise in the classroom and being able to communicate with students and let them express their opinions is very important inside of the classroom.

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Can help prepare for disruptive behaviors and help understand their behaviors.
Talk it out instead of being aggressive and defiant
Should be shared with parents and students.
A good plan is when there is positive reinforcement and understanding of expectations.
Creating a behavior management plan helps minimize separation in the classroom.

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7 Things Inclusive High School Teachers Should Do

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7 Things Inclusive High School Teachers Should Do

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1. Make Learning Relevant
2. Make Learning Cooperative
3. Address Social Justice Issues In Your Classroom
4. Become a Reflective Practitioner
5. Advocate for Untracking and Inclusion
6. Encourage Self-Advocacy
7. Identify Post-High School and Community Resources

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We've shared many blog posts over the past six years about the benefits of inclusive education. Students with disabilities who learn alongside their peers in inclusive classrooms*:

Have more interactions with and receive more support from peers than students in self-contained classrooms

Benefit from greater access to the core curriculum

Achieve comparable or superior academic outcomes when compared with students in self-contained settings

Have an easier time adjusting to employment and community life

Inclusive education is critical in a child's early formative years, but it's no less important in high school, when students are learning important social and academic skills in preparation for college, employment, and community living. Today's post-excerpted and adapted from Quick-Guides to Inclusion, Second Edition, edited by Giangreco & Doyle-outlines several key things inclusive high school educators should do to meet the needs of every learner, encourage peer interactions, and get students ready for life beyond the classroom.

Make Learning Relevant

When high school classrooms include students of varying interests, talents, experiences, abilities, and motivations, following a traditional, lecture-based approach to teaching just won't work. (That's especially true if your high school uses block schedules with 80-minute classes!)

You might try designing units of study around an underlying essential question that requires students to tap into their talents and experience. For example:

"What is worth fighting for?" is an essential question that might organize a semester's work in American History, from the Revolutionary War through Reconstruction.

"If we can, should we?" might be the central question for a biology unit on genetics and heredity.

"Who owns the land?" could frame a unit of study about the westward expansion of America during the early 1800s.

Posing these questions on the first day of class would engage every student in a lively discussion based mostly on personal opinion and experience. From there, you can go deeper, introducing and elaborating on the content of the unit to help students make connections between the lessons and their own lives. The knowledge and skills you would focus on would be the ones students need to answer the essential question.

Other academic content areas might lend themselves to the use of problem-based learning instead. You might engage students in studying and solving real-life problems such as, "Develop a school policy about fair and reasonable accommodations for the participation of students with disabilities in interscholastic sports," "Fill out an IRS 1040 form," or "Design a business plan for a student-run school store." In cases like these, the skills you would teach would be the ones students need in order to solve the problem, moving beyond basic acquisition of knowledge to practical application and synthesis.

Make Learning Cooperative

Students tend to learn the most from teachers who encourage them to work together on homework, labs, or projects, to provide feedback on one another's efforts and work on solving problems together. Classrooms like these are a hotbed of activity and conversation, and you can feel the excitement when students are encouraged to bounce ideas off one another. When all students learn together, each student learns more.

Instead of tracking and ability grouping in your inclusive high school classroom, use cooperative group activities to ensure that your instruction responds to the diverse learning needs of all your students. In well-designed cooperative group activities, each student has a specific role and several tasks to accomplish for the group. For example, in a science class, your students might work together to design a solar collecting panel that would power a boom box. In a social studies class, groups of students may adopt a country and develop a strategy for improving its citizens' literacy or health. Each group would need researchers, speechwriters, chart makers, speakers, and liaisons to other countries. Effective grouping meets individual student needs, because the activities you plan will value and build on differences in what students know and how they approach problems.

Peer supports, another form of cooperative learning, can also be used in high school classes to ensure that students with disabilities participate in meaningful ways in the curriculum. For example, a classmate may take notes for a student who has difficulty writing, or help redirect a student with attention difficulties.

Address Social Justice Issues in Your Classroom

Preparation for college and the world of work are important goals of a high school education-but it's also essential to prepare students to be responsible and contributing citizens who fight injustice whenever they see it. To facilitate your students' commitment to this cause, you can address social justice issues through the curriculum and through your personal actions. Rather than stopping the flow of a course to have "disability awareness week," look for natural opportunities to discuss these issues. For example:

While reading Of Mice and Men, the class might discuss the need for everyone to have friends and advocates.

In a child development course, you might teach facts about a range of disabilities and explore the shifting societal attitudes toward children born with disabilities.

In a sociology or building trades class, students might explore the merits of requiring universal accessibility in the design and building of public facilities.

In physical education, students might discuss issues concerning the participation of students with disabilities in competitive sports.

To extend the commitment to social justice beyond the curriculum, establish norms for how students and teachers treat one another. Banning the use of hate speech and teaching students to mediate disagreements are part of the "hidden" yet essential curriculum in inclusive schools. Some of the most successful inclusive schools are those in which students themselves become advocates for issues such as hunger relief, peace, and antiracist education. Teachers in inclusive high schools show students that striving for social justice is in their best interest, because there comes a time in everyone's life when we need others to stand up alongside us and for us.

Become a Reflective Practitioner

Teachers who engage in ongoing reflection about their practices often find it easier to avoid burnout, maintain their enthusiasm, work through tough problems, and keep learning more about what works well. Reflection means more than just the end-of-the-day thinking that you do on the drive home from school-it also means making changes to your teaching that improve student learning. Because many minds are better than one, you might consider starting or becoming a member of a small group of teachers who meet regularly in "reflective practice groups."

Finding time together can be difficult, but many high schools are restructuring their schedules to give teachers a common planning period during the school day to do this important work. In these groups, you can:

ask colleagues to help you brainstorm ideas for inclusive teaching while you're planning a unit

plan to work in pairs to observe one another's classrooms, asking, "Is each and every student an active participant in both academic and social life here?"

reflect on critical incidents that arise during your day-to-day teaching

learn how to ask yourself and others deep and relevant questions ("What are the assumptions behind your thinking about John's refusal to do the work?")

explore your beliefs about teaching and assumptions about motivation, independence, and learning differences

examine student work as an indicator of how effectively instruction and supports were designed and implemented

discuss key overarching questions such as, "How can we narrow the gap between the achievement of students with and without disabilities?"

Advocate for Untracking and Inclusion

As a busy teacher balancing many responsibilities, you may not think you have the time-or the need-to become involved in larger debates about inclusive education. But you may wonder how schools might benefit if more teachers were willing to include students with disabilities, or if administrators provided more professional development about teaching students with disabilities. You see the benefits of having an inclusive class, but you may wonder why, in many schools and classrooms, there are still separate special education classes, "low" and "high" level tracks, and alternative high schools.

All around the country, more and more teachers are becoming involved in efforts to "untrack" schools and include all students. Consider taking steps to sharpen your advocacy skills. Speak out publicly about the benefits of inclusion and untracking, and challenge outdated philosophies. Write letters to state representatives, compose opinion pieces for newspapers and blogs, and advocate for quality professional development and teacher collaboration. Start or join a professional learning team and brainstorm ways to improve inclusion, both in your school and in other schools.

For example: teachers from one high school were all members of professional learning teams that worked together for a year to investigate and understand a variety of current educational issues and dilemmas. One team focused on the inclusion of students with significant disabilities. They read seminal and current research, used reflective practice protocols to solve problems related to instruction, and eventually made recommendations for changes in the school's course registration policies that improved access to rigorous academic courses by students with disabilities.

(See this blog post for suggestions on how to become a more skilled advocate for students.)

Encourage Self-Advocacy

Helping students develop the skills they need to advocate for themselves is an important job for any inclusive high school teacher. Transition planning meetings provide a great opportunity to encourage self-advocacy and self-determination-be sure to involve students in a range of activities before, during, and after these meetings.

Before meetings, you can help students prepare their responses to questions that are likely to be asked. Some students may become involved in identifying and sending out invitations to potential team members.

During meetings, ask your student to be the first person to respond to questions that are posed, encourage the student to share previously prepared notes, and invite them to assume responsibility for carrying out specific responsibilities on the IEP and transition plan. You can also foster self-advocacy by creating a comfortable and relaxed atmosphere and encouraging the student to invite friends to meetings.

After the meeting, have check-ins with your student. Talk about ways they can take on increasing levels of responsibility during meetings, including co-facilitation.

Outside of transition planning meetings, you can promote self-advocacy and self-determination by providing your students with plenty of opportunities to make choices about possible courses of study, extracurricular activities, and recreational activities. Encourage your students to express their needs in appropriate ways, and provide modeling when necessary. Many students will also benefit from instruction in specific self-advocacy skills, such as self-assessment, goal setting, problem solving, communicating, and resolving conflicts. (Always keep in mind that self-advocacy means different things to different people and should be considered within the context of a student's age, culture, and support needs.)

Identify Post-High School and Community Resources

High school students and their families will benefit from resources and supports that help them achieve their transition goals and become increasingly independent and connected to their community. Help them locate training, supports, and relevant information related to goals such as:

finding and maintaining employment

exploring postsecondary education options, financial aid, and admissions requirements

getting a driver's license

managing finances

living independently

participating in community recreational activities

You might do this by contacting the student's guidance counselor to obtain relevant information, making a list of websites with reliable guidance, and encouraging family members to attend resource fairs at your high school or local parent information center.

If you're a high school teacher, what's the most important thing you do in the classroom to teach and include every student? Add your thoughts in the comments below-and for more practical inclusion guidance, check out the book that inspired today's blog post!

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7 Things Inclusive High School Teachers Should Do - Brookes Blog

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We've shared many blog posts over the past six years about the benefits of inclusive education.

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5 Inclusive Classroom Strategies to build safe community

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5 Inclusive Classroom Strategies to build safe community

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5 Inclusive Classroom Strategies To Build A Safe Community | EVERFI

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So how can we ensure inclusivity is at the forefront of our daily instruction? Use these inclusive classroom strategies to help get you started.