Many hold tightly to the original principles of inclusion, principles that help a child to learn alongside his or her peers. I believe we have to update our inclusion practices now to meet the ever changing landscape of education--just to be with your peers is not necessarily the best place to learn.
Instead of old-time inclusion principles alone, I believe we have to update our practice to include attributes of personalization and just-right education for every child. For example, the noise factor alone in classrooms can prohibit a child from learning. If you're working in a small classroom with many students who are eagerly exchanging ideas about the learning focus, it's not going to be super quiet. Some children need a good degree of quiet to focus and learn--a noisy, busy environment will be distracting to students like that.
Further, to figure out a complex student and how he/she learns also demands a quiet, focused space. A teacher who truly wants to support a child who is struggling needs that kind of focused space to examine a child's attitude, strategy, and progress in order to move that child forward.
Last year a colleague worked one-to-one with a student for a significant amount of time. That student made a lot of positive progress--that quiet one-to-one time mattered a lot. I know the students would not have made the same progress in the busy, populated classroom setting for that concentrated learning work.
I'm not suggesting that we return to a time when children who had learning challenges were always learning outside of the classroom. Instead I'm suggesting that we take a closer look at all of our learners and make thoughtful decisions about the learning space attributes such as comfort level, noise factors, lighting and more. We also have to take a close look at pedagogy, how we help students, learning experiences, and content. We are at a point given the technology available to personally design learning paths that help individual children of all learning profiles to grow with strength, positivity, and confidence.
How are you updating your inclusion and specialist services? What are you doing to improve the learning? I'm thinking about this.
