Inclusive Schooling

October 2014

One of the educational perspectives that binds our faculty is our common commitment to creating an inclusive educational environment. This commitment to inclusivity is based on our ability to see human differences as valuable and that recognition that one of our jobs is to create a learning and social environment that celebrates and builds upon the varied abilities, perspectives, and experiences of our community.

Often, when referring to inclusive schooling, people refer only to special education services.  At 276, we broaden that definition to include English language learners, diverse learning styles, social emotional development, cultural diversity, family structure, race and ethnicity, gender, sexuality, home language…. Each of us has multiple identities that have diverse influences on our lives. By recognizing this diversity, celebrating it, and helping children navigate it, we enrich the learning experiences of our children and work towards a more equitable and just community and society.

Articulating what best inclusive practices look like is one of the goals I have for the year. I would like to share some of the ways, obvious and not so obvious, that we have in place to create a more inclusive environment.

Class names. In past years, we have referred to classes by the teachers’ names. This year, we are making a serious effort to refer to classes by their numbers.  We are doing this for a number of reasons. First, the classes belong to children, not the teacher/s who lead that class. Additionally, some classes have multiple adults working with our students. These teachers are general education or content specialists, special education teachers, ELL teachers, speech and language teachers, occupational therapists and paraprofessionals.  In many schools, these different teachers are identified as working with certain groups of students.  Often, this results in teachers who are equal partners being perceived as having very different roles. Students report that one teacher is the classroom teacher and the others are assistants or only works with certain students.  In our school, we have our teachers work with all students in the class not just a certain cohort. This helps disrupt the impression that that teacher works with those students.  Our teachers view all students as their students.

Curriculum We also continue to work to ensure that our curriculum is inclusive, accessible and appropriately challenging for all our students.  We do this by planning lessons and learning experiences that have multiple entry points and different ways of expressing learning. We are also taking into consider different types of diversity from learning styles and preferences to gender to culture.

Gender: School is typically is seen as more user friendly for girls. There is a lot of sitting still, reading and writing, and talking – tasks that girls are more likely to do well at than boys. Our teachers build interactive lessons, opportunities for collaborative learning, hands on projects, and inquiry – strategies that have been shown as beneficial to boys – into their units.  We are also making sure that our students have adequate time for recess.  Our younger students have time for exercise every day in addition to lunch recess and many of our middle grade students head to the park for outdoor play at least weekly.  Our middle school students have a lunch recess option in the gym most days.

We also work to be respectful of children who have non-gender conforming behaviors.  Our faculty strives to consider ways that our actions and words reflect gender-typical expectations and work to create an environment that is respectful of all children.

Multi-cultural. We are also examining our curriculum to make sure that our students with diverse cultural backgrounds can see themselves in the topics being studied at school. In 7^th grade social studies, our students learn about the role of enslaved and free black Americans in the Revolutionary war in addition to the more traditional founding fathers narrative. When our kindergarteners study families, we celebrate the different ways that families are formed.  And teachers are working on shifting our third grade social studies curriculum on world cultures away from a heroes and holidays, tourism-type curriculum, to one that studies the lived experiences of children in different parts of the world as well as the environmental challenges faced in different parts of the world.  Access to clean water and clean energy are challenges that many communities face around the world, and our third graders are studying wind and solar energy as possible solutions.

Teaching strategies Just as our teachers recognize that the curriculum needs to address diverse cultures and life experiences, they are also attuned to the learning profiles our students bring to school. To that end, they plan for diverse groupings and help students become self-aware of their own learning styles.

Diverse groupings during small group instruction. Throughout the day, our students work in a variety of groups.  Sometimes our students engage in whole class lessons. Other times, they receive individualized support from teachers.  Teachers also plan for students to work in heterogeneous grouping.  In this situation, students are not grouped by skill level. Instead, teachers group students by interest. In fourth grade for example, during the biography unit, students work in topic based groups. The group studying Sojourner Truth have multiple biographies that are written at a range of readability levels from less complex David Adler picture books, to middle grade chapter biographies, to Truth’s autobiography. They discuss how the story of Truth’s life is told, examine the anecdotes of her life that authors deem relevant, and consider how that information helps to frame the story being told.  Teachers also draw upon the strategy of homogenous, small group instruction. In this model, students with similar skill levels and goals, work with the teacher in a small group on a focused lesson. Flexible use of these grouping strategies allows the teacher to meet the different needs of our student across the school day.

Push in services v. pull out services. We want all our students to be part of the whole class community and to engage with the same curriculum as their classmates. Some of our students receive additional support in speech, OT, or learning English as an additional language. While occasionally, these services are better provided in very small group or individual settings, we strive to include support staff in classrooms as much as possible to encourage all children to be fully included in the classroom community.

Self-awareness of learning styles and building self-advocacy skills.

Executive function. One important skill learned in grades k-8 is how to organize our thoughts, our materials, and our bodies.  We teach these skills through a strong PE program, handwriting and keyboarding lessons, and time organization.  As adults, most of us know the value of planning ahead to achieve our goals. We do this through writing lists, keeping a calendar (or multiple calendars), and taking notes.  At school, we explicitly begin to teach these organizational skills through teaching students how to write down homework in their planners and plan out time for assignments on calendars.

Sensory smart. Many of us find that our senses get overwhelmed when we are in certain situations. I am not good at really loud or crowded events.  (I plug my ears often in movies so that I can feel more comfortable.)  Like us, our children also have different levels of tolerance for sensory input.  We work to have a sensory smart school environment.  This means that we recognize the continuum of sensory input experienced by students and work to have resources and tools in place to help children be successful.  Students are encouraged to try out different writing tools, movement breaks through yoga, and a variety of seating options in our classrooms -- from rocking chairs and cushions to desks that are separated from groups to allow for concentration.  We also make sure that our students have opportunities for active out door play and we provide lunch clubs for those kids who don’t handle loud, energetic environments such as recess. These children prefer to have quiet down time, so they can go to the library, play chess, engage in writing work, or other club options.

Empathy  In order to be truly inclusive, we need to be empathetic to the different experiences our students bring to our community.  Our students also need to develop empathy for their classmates.  We take the responsibility of the social curriculum seriously.  In addition to class meetings in lower grades and grade level community building experiences such as the 6^th grade trip to Frost Valley, we have a structured curriculum in place. 

In grades K-5 teachers use the materials in the Second Step program. This is a nationally recognized social skills curriculum that helps students learn about their own feelings, apply that understanding to the feelings of others, and learn to communicate and problem solve effectively. In grades 6-8, our students have a weekly advisory class where they engage in communication and social skills lessons in addition to learning about their learning styles.

This year, teachers are also engaging in study of Restorative Justice approaches to supporting positive behavior. Through this approach to discipline, students are asked to reflect on their actions, the impact their actions have on themselves and others, and to identify strategies for doing the right thing. We want our students leaving our school knowing how to make wise choices for themselves and for others.

There are lots of strategies we use to create an inclusive school environment. From our language and actions, to books and resources we have in our classrooms for teachers and students to use, we want to make sure that all our students feel fully valued as human beings. It is a big goal, and a complicated one. But it is a goal that all our staff feels very passionately about accomplishing.