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Neurodiversity and cross cultural dissonance both have the students' best interest in mind. Neurodiversity is a positive way to discuss a child's learning disability. Teachers can encourage neurodiversity while also eliminating the effect of cross cultural dissonance by getting to know their students and their home lives, cultures, families, and much more! The more time and effort the teacher puts into his/her students, the more the child will feel comfortable and accepted in the classroom as well as included.

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Social Model of Disability: Individual is disabled by their physical environment or social barriers and the blame is not on the individual but rather their surroundings.

Medical Model of Disability: Individual is disabled by their body or brain and the blame is on the individual.

Which one should a school, school system, and classroom promote?

The school, school system, and classroom should all promote a social model of disability. This is true because it has a more positive outlook and therefore explains why the disability is a cause of the individuals environment rather than labeling and saying it is a cause of the individual and their body. As an educational system, we should not be putting any blame or labeling our students by their disability.

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Rose and Wilson both brought up very timely and pressing issues regarding special education in today's society. Wilson took the stance as a mother of a daughter who has a learning disability and Rose chose a bystander perspective from the outside looking in. Both Rose and Wilson agreed that a universal design for learning was essential for ALL students no matter their cognitive abilities. Wilson stated that with this universal design for learning, her daughter was able to flourish and strive to reach her highest potential in a classroom that was inclusive and supported her daughter's educational needs. I resonated with the fact that Wilson discussed how no matter their cognitive ability, ALL students benefit from accommodations and therefore it is not hindering one student or the other if students with disabilities are included in the general education classroom in addition to their modifications.

On the other hand, Rose was discussing the importance about staying away from an "average classroom." This means that we as educators need to create a classroom that is not for the average student. In today's educational system, there is little room for variation to reach ALL of our students. Therefore, we need to go back to the drawing board and determine ways in which we can stray away from implementing classrooms that are made for the average student to flourish and instead, create environments that encourage ALL students to reach their highest potential. Two ways in which we can teach more towards the edges and not the average include a re-evaluation of materials such as textbooks that we use in the classroom and understanding that students will be average in some areas and not in others. Therefore, curriculum instruction needs to support students of ALL cognitive abilities.

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Neurodiversity is the term that replaces the negatively connotated word, "disability"and creates a positive outlook on students with disabilities (Armstrong, 2015). It is important as educators that we help change the stigma that the word disability has and use neurodiversity instead to encourage and celebrate our students for being diverse! We need to see our students for who they are and NOT what or who society wants them to be (Armstrong, 2015).

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Cultural Dissonance: Racial, cultural, or linguistic differences that students have which can be misinterpreted by others (Smith et al., 2018). An example of cultural dissonance is a student not looking the teacher in the eyes to show respect. In some cultures, this is actually a sign of respect but in today's society, individuals might interpret it as being rude and therefore disrespectful (Smith et al., 2018).

Cross Cultural Dissonance & Special Education Correlation:
Cross cultural dissonance impacts special education because if a student has a diverse cultural background in learning, behavior, or communication, it can cause a teacher to misinterpret the meaning behind the behavior. Therefore, that teacher can incorrectly label the student as a student with a learning disability when actuality, it was just a misunderstanding and a cultural dissonance (Smith et al., 2018).

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We as teachers need to strive to reach equitable special education for our students. This means to have available resources for them to use to their educational benefit, qualified teachers that can assist students with their learning accommodations while also genuinely getting to know the students and being there for them, and more inclusivity in classrooms. It is important that we as teachers work more towards equitable special education especially when it comes to inclusivity and creating our classrooms that are welcoming to all students despite various learning disabilities (Armstrong, 2012). At the end of the day, children of all walks of life just want to be accepted, feel loved, appreciated, and cared for and that is no different with students in our classrooms.

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Equitable Special Education: All students receive the materials, support, and opportunities they need in order to be successful and have similar outcomes to students that are not receiving special education services (Smith et al., 2018).

Characteristics of Equitable Special Education:
1. Excellence Educators for All Initiative supports equitable special education since it strives to give all students no matter their race, cognitive ability, learning accommodations, or backgrounds a right to great educators (Smith et al., 2018). Therefore, one characteristic of equitable special education are great educators and highly qualified teachers for ALL students.
2. Another characteristic of equitable special education is the importance of integrating students with disabilities into classrooms with peers that do not have disabilities to immerse these students in with others and create new situations (Armstrong, 2012).

Inequitable Special Education: Special education where students with disabilities are not ensured through resources, materials, and highly qualified teachers that they will be college and career ready by the time they are adults as compared to students without disabilities (Smith el al., 2018).

Factors of Inequitable Special Education:
1. Increased dropout rate of students that have disabilities (Smith et al., 2018)
2. Discrimination and bias towards students with disabilities based on their demographics, race, socio-economic status (Armstrong, 2012)

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Special education is the variety of services that are provided to students with learning disabilities to help continue meeting their educational needs at school (Smith et al., 2018). The main purpose of special education is to give students with disabilities the same free public education that is provided to students without disabilities to continue reaching their highest potential and become college and career ready for adult life (Smith et al., 2018). The IDEA or Individuals with Disabilities Education Act was passed in 2004 which allowed students with thirteen disabilities to receive their free public education while also having their accommodations tailored to each individual student. It is important to note that the IDEA does not include students that are gifted and talented in the thirteen identified disabilities since these students are not guaranteed to receive special educational services (Smith et al., 2018)