Across North America, regular classroom teachers are facing a new challenge: teaching children with disabilities. With varying degrees of support from special educators and administrators, teachers are striving to meet the needs of students with physical, mental, and emotional disabilities—students who, in the past, were taught in settings other than the regular classroom.
Teachers are seeking—and finding—ways to make inclusion work, experts say. Until recently, educators were caught up in debating the pros and cons of inclusion, says Richard Villa, an education consultant from Colchester, Vt., and co-editor of the ASCD book Creating an Inclusive School. Now teachers are asking, "How do I do it?"
The answers are not simple. "What we're asking teachers to do is so dramatically different," Villa says. "We're asking them to feel uncomfortable and incompetent for a while." Teachers are far more likely to accept inclusion, he notes, if they get strong administrative support.
Administrators can support teachers in their inclusion efforts, Villa says, by providing them with training, listening to their concerns, helping them solve problems, adjusting schedules so they can collaborate, and giving them feedback. Administrators can also make sure teachers get the resources—technological, material, and human—that they need to make inclusion work.
The resources issue is a major bone of contention between inclusion supporters and skeptics. What kinds of resources for inclusion should teachers reasonably expect?
Besides support from the principal, teachers need one-on-one aides, consulting support from disability specialists, and coteaching arrangements, says Beth Bader of the American Federation of Teachers. With such support, a teacher might be able to handle two or three children with disabilities, she speculates. Planning for inclusion should start a year before children's placements are changed, and teachers should be asked to volunteer to move to inclusion, she adds.
Although teachers' unions are protesting the level of support teachers are receiving, which they consider inadequate, some experts believe educators may overestimate the amount of support needed to make inclusion work well.
When administrators implement inclusion, they sometimes provide a very high level of support "to keep the regular staff appeased," says Douglas Biklen of Syracuse University, author of Schooling Without Labels. For students with severe disabilities, "the support services are very substantial—sometimes unnecessarily so," he says.
Biklen cites the example of a student with autism who was placed in a regular classroom. Three adults worked with this student: the regular classroom teacher, a teaching assistant, and a full-time special education teacher (who also served two other students with less severe disabilities). Biklen finds this degree of support excessive. The consulting teacher could have been present for just part of the day, to help adapt the curriculum, he says. The modified curriculum could have been taught by the regular classroom teacher or by the assistant.
One-on-one aides may also be excessive, according to some experts. Although teachers often lobby for instructional aides to work with disabled students, aides can actually be a barrier to inclusion, Villa believes. Aides who act as a "hovercraft" can hinder disabled children from interacting with their classmates. Aides should be "general classroom assistants" who work with nondisabled children as well, Villa advises. They shouldn't just "velcro" themselves to children with disabilities.
Although concerns about support for inclusion are legitimate, some teachers may have more support at their disposal than they realize, experts say. Teachers' colleagues and students may be untapped resources.
Conferring with colleagues may be more useful than training that provides general information about disabilities, says Virginia Roach of the National Association of State Boards of Education (NASBE). Teachers with experience say that "Special Ed 101" courses are not very helpful, she reports. Instead, teachers say they need "opportunities to work with other professionals to brainstorm and problem solve around specific kids." Sometimes the solution may require training in general education techniques such as team teaching or cooperative learning, she notes.
Students are "the most underused resource" for supporting inclusion, Villa says. Nondisabled children are very creative in devising lesson modifications, physical accommodations, and behavior interventions for their classmates with disabilities, he says. One 1st grade teacher, for example, asked her students how to modify a lesson for Molly, a classmate who was deaf and blind. Within 10 minutes, the class had generated more than 60 ideas, Villa says.
Garnering Support
Despite these potential resources, some teachers with disabled students simply don't get the support they need to make inclusion work well. How can these teachers cope?
According to Villa, they should create a support team that includes the child, the child's parents, colleagues who have experience with inclusion, and other interested parties. Teachers need to "reach out to people with expertise and experience," he emphasizes. Teachers who lack support should begin by "opening up lines of communication with the parents," Roach says, because parents act as "a conduit" between general and special education. Then teachers should "sit down and problem solve with fellow teachers," brainstorming ways to address specific issues, she suggests.
"Teachers are truly in the middle," says Bader, because they have "no rights in the law or regulations." Teachers need to enlist their unions to pressure school districts to provide adequate support, she asserts.
According to Philip Ellis of the New York State United Teachers union, teachers who are provided insufficient resources should lobby district administrators for "supports and services as stipulated in federal regulations." Teachers' requests should be specific, he advises. For example, they could ask for opportunities to observe classrooms where inclusion is thriving; for a reduction in class size of 10-15 percent; for staff development training during the summer; or for paraprofessional assistance.
"Teachers have to be the ones to say, This is what we need,' and they ought to be able to get it"—whether they need information, training, or an aide, says Theresa Rebhorn of the Parent Educational Advocacy Training Center in Fairfax, Va. Teachers should unite with parents and be demanding, she says.
According to Jo Webber of Southwest Texas State University, a teacher who feels unsupported should tell the principal, "My heart's in the right place—I'm willing to accept this child in my classroom—but I need to plan with an administrator and a special education representative." During such planning, a fundamental question that must be answered clearly is "What do we want this child to learn?" From that answer should flow decisions as to necessary resources, support options, outside agency involvement, and the need for an oversight committee, Webber says.
While holding high expectations for their students, teachers should not hold unrealistic expectations for themselves, Roach cautions. Often, teachers feel tremendous pressure to "fix" their students with disabilities—to bring them to grade level. That's not what's expected, she emphasizes. "Parents expect appropriate programming, but they don't expect the teacher to ameliorate the disability."
Even after the resources issue has been addressed, educators "still haven't dealt with the fundamental issue," Biklen believes. "The real challenge is to get all educators to have an open mind about the education potential of children with disabilities," he maintains. It's universally accepted that nondisabled children need a good education, but disabled children may be seen differently. It's "terribly important" that society come to see a child with autism, cerebral palsy, or Down's syndrome, for example, as "somebody who desperately needs a quality education," he says.
