Teaching in an inclusive classroom: An essay to young teachers
LIKE it or not, inclusive education is here.
Inclusive education is the name for the educational movement to include all children, regardless of academic abilities or academic disabilities into regular classrooms.
Typically, inclusion refers to the integration of special education learners into regular classrooms. The inclusive education movement has been supported by most parents, especially parents of special education learners.
These parents make the point that their children have the right to be educated in a “regular” classroom.
Inclusive education is one of today’s educational “hot” topics, and there are a variety of positions on inclusive education.
Positively stated, one goal of inclusive education is to help learners and staff gain an understanding and an appreciation of all groups present in the local, national, and global communities.
Negatively stated, inclusive education, or main-streaming, means placing “special needs” learners into regular classroom situations. Inclusion has generated a number of practical questions for teachers, who are faced with new and confusingly difficult roles and responsibilities.
The whole “problem” of inclusion has been exacerbated by the fact that inclusion has not brought with it expanded support staff or funding.
This lack of support has increased teacher dissatisfaction and frustration. We agree.
Whether it can be supported philosophically or not, inclusion is a practical problem for teachers, it makes the job of teaching more difficult. The teachers we have spoken with about inclusion have talked openly about the difficulties of teaching in an inclusive classroom.
The reason we have used the term “problem” which is negative is because inclusive education has brought teachers a great deal of anxiety and extra work. However, there are some very positive aspects to the whole idea of integration. The purpose of this paper is to explore some of the reasons for involving special needs learners in the classroom and to suggest ways to make this involvement more beneficial for teachers and other students.
The first point we want you to know is that, even if you don’t like the idea of inclusive, you will be “facing it” as a teacher. Many people, including some teachers, believe that main-streaming means to bring special needs students into “regular” classrooms with “normal” children. But there are some problems with this perspective. The first is that there is no “regular” classroom with “normal” children. Children are never “normal.” All children are unique. Because they are unique, they all have individual strengths and individual weaknesses. In our experience, all children can perform well at some tasks.
But schools are a unique culture with a unique set of rules. Most of us take this culture for granted because we are accustomed to it.
In fact, those of you who are reading this paper are probably especially adept living in this culture. If you were not, it is unlikely you would have made the choice to become
a teacher.
Schools have their own criteria for success and for failure. Given the criteria used to evaluate success in schools, some students are very “successful;” some are not so “successful.” This does not mean, however, that those learners who are not successful in school will not eventually find a place in life where they will be successful.
We are sure that all of you have heard stories of famous intellects — people like Thomas Edison and Albert Einstein — who were busts in schools. The point we are making here is that schools have their own unique societies with their own unique rules.
When a child enters a school, that child becomes a learner and must follow the rules that go along with being a learner. In schools, all learners are “ignorant” (meaning that there are areas that they have ignored) and all learners have weaknesses (meaning that there are skills that they do not know and need to learn).
Some children take to being learners more easily than others. One young woman we know has been so adept at learning the curriculum “school learning” comes so easy to her that she needs individual challenges. The school has responded by isolating her, alone, in the hall where she spends her solitude working on advanced, university level material for almost all her subjects.
She spends the day virtually by herself. Have we made our point redundantly enough? Let us ask you a question. And, we would like you to think about it carefully. In the situation we describe above, the school has obviously decided that its task is to educate the student by encouraging her to work to her academic potential and has all but ignored her social life.
Often, newspapers write celebratory articles about young learners like these who are so successful at academic learning that they have graduated from university at 13 years of age. Our society seems to constantly honour these young people, calling attention to their genius. But, seriously, what do you think? How do you think the school should handle those people who are so obviously gifted in the ways of the school?
Is it good to encourage learners to attend university at the age of 11? What is the variety of options that schools have? What are the good points and the bad points of any decision that could be made? We believe that there are some basic truths to teaching.
One truth is that all learners need individualised attention to help them develop in particular areas. It should be no surprise that learners have special needs. We all have special needs, and we can all benefit from personal and individual contact and support.
Although teachers are expected to teach a class of 30 learners all at once, as a teacher you
need to remember that within this class you will be teaching 30 unique people. Although it is a difficult task, you should try to find ways to build success into each learner’s learning experiences.
Building an Inclusive Classrooms
Most teachers walk a fine line. On one hand, like people in any job they work like crazy to make their life in the classroom easier. On the other hand, they reach out to young people, helping as much as they can, knowing that the more they reach out the harder they work and the more difficult their job can become. Teaching can be the easiest for those who care the least.
The biggest “problem” with teaching is that there are people to teach. Content by itself is easy. Most teachers, unless they are teaching out of their subject areas, love their content. But it is learners who are the problems; and classrooms are filled with learners.
Learners are both the joy and the bane of teaching. Let us repeat an obvious, but important, bit of information. The impact of this bit of information is incredible. Each person you will teach is different from each other person you will teach. Not all kids are born with the same ability. Some are smarter than others. Some are more skilled. Some have a home environment that is richer. Some have particular and individual difficulties that make school harder.
Historically, schools have responded in three very general ways to the differences of learners. Long ago, when we went to primary and secondary school, a teacher took all comers. The classroom was filled with people who came. Whoever showed up in a particular grade, or sometimes grades, was in a teacher’s class.
These learners were equally as valuable, but not equally as skilled or able at schooling.
To the teacher, this meant that instruction should be different. There were learners in, for example, a Grade Six class who could not read at all and learners in that same class who could, and had, read very sophisticated literature — probably more sophisticated literature than the teacher could, or had read.
To cope with the sets of differing abilities that any teacher might find, the teacher would often organise the classroom into groups of some kind or another. As evenly as possible, a teacher would create groups of like ability in math, or reading, or writing, or spelling, or whatever topic area might be studied. Often, without even having heard of the concept, a teacher would organise quite complicated patterns of peer tutoring where a student with high ability in reading, for example, would work with a student whose reading ability was not as high.
We were in such classrooms. No formal training, as best as we can remember, was given; but, those students who were the tutors, those with the highest abilities — just seemed to know what to do. Go over the material, and if the tutor made an error correct it. As far as we can remember, it sort of worked. Probably we didn’t know any different. It was just what school was like.
One teacher we remember had an intricate personal classroom ordering system where, for each subject, a learner classified himself or herself into the classroom chair that corresponded to the learners’ achievement number in a particular subject.
Every chair in the room was numbered, from one to 30, with chair one being savoured by the “top” learner and chair 30 being scorned by the “bottom” learner.
On cue, when a certain subject began for the day, learners would move to take their places in the designated chairs sort of a perverse and hierarchical “Upset the fruit basket.”
It was a special day when the teacher announced chair changes — a source of pride for learners who moved up or a grudging submission when learners moved down.
Although this practice today seen abhorrent, we honestly remember that this teacher was a good teacher. At the time, we didn’t consider her actions as anything less than “the way the world operated.”
Of course, we were lucky enough to not be in seat 30, not ever; and, the view from close to the top was obviously a better memory than the view from the bottom.
More recently, schools at least in schools where there was more than one class of a particular grade have shunned such classroom organizing. Small flocks of “bluebirds” or “crows” or “buzzards” no longer nested in the same classroom. Instead, whole classes might be organised by ability.
Learners who were “bright” and “able” were put together into a classroom; learners who were “less bright” or “less able” were put into another classroom. Typically, this “lower” ability group was joined by a group of learners who were unremarkable for their skills or abilities.
Instead, they were known for their behaviour. They were the behaviour “problems.”
Schools became virtual ghettos, streamed by skill and ability. And, like any economic or social system where scarce goods and services are distributed, schools also distributed their resources.
In response to the streaming of learners, teachers were also streamed. Some worked with high ability groups; others-worked with low ability groups. This whole system of ghettoizing schools was known as homogeneous grouping.
As you might detect from the tone of our writing, we are not fans of homogeneous grouping.
It might seem to make schools easier to run and content easier to teach, but to us there were obvious problems. One problem was practical. Homogeneous grouping tended to convince teachers and administrators that the students they taught as part of a homogeneous group were, in fact, all the same.
In real fact, these students were not the same. They might be together because they all scored within a certain range on a standardised achievement test, but they were far from the same in terms of needs, behaviours, histories, and personalities.
To us, homogeneous grouping sort of dulled schools to the needs of even “homogeneous” learners.
Another problem was that the low ability groups became a wasteland for the stubble of school society.
Research suggests over and over again that low ability learners are usually treated as low deserving learners. They are given the least prepared teachers often teachers teaching outside their own subject area and are subjected to the lowest standards for achievement and behaviour.
Surprise, surprise; these learners react accordingly. They stay in school the lowest number of years they can; and when they are at school they often are not at school. They skip. School is not for them, and they quit to pursue other labour. No one seems too sad. If they would have come to school, we often hear people say, they would have done better.
Blaming the victim, we often suggest. —