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    Originally Posted by Tigerle
    Maybe I’ll compare the various laws, and implementation therof, on inclusion in education with special regards to both gifted kids and kids with disabilities or something, to straddle disciplines. I hear that Canada does great on inclusive models!

    OK, had to bite, but figured this was so off topic - even after just plowing through three pages of billing incentives for doctors laugh - that a new thread might be in order.

    Tigerle - I'd love to hear your impressions of the inclusion model in Canada, looking at it from outside the country, and with your obvious awareness of what's happening in many other places.

    We spend so much time screaming about it here that it's undoubtedly instructive every now and then to stop and think about what we might actually be doing right. On the good side, a lot of groups of parents have fought extensively and successfully over the years to get their kids fully included in the regular classroom.

    On the challenge side, I have found that we have a major split across spec ed in Canada. The groups who have led the fight for inclusion represent families whose goal is to provide their child with an education experience as close as possible to being exactly the same as everyone else, and who will learn best this way (i.e. kids with physical and intellectual exceptionalities). It is assumed that all spec ed advocates share this goal. However, we also have two groups who want the opposite: a different curriculum and teaching to meet the needs of kids who learn differently (i.e. LD and gifted) - and who won't learn nearly as well if given the same content, teaching, pace, etc as everyone else.

    After enormous advocacy efforts over decades to achieve inclusion, the voices who lead in setting spec ed policy cannot believe that anyone would choose "exclusion", still seen as synonymous with "dump the kid in a corner to rot". The idea that I might want my dyslexic child in a room full of similar learners where the teacher can spend 100% of her time addressing those atypical learning needs - from reading remediation to appropriate content and output expectations - is simply baffling. Anathema. Whereas I see it as simple logistics: do I want my child in a class where she is uniquely "incapable", and the teacher can spend at best 1/25th of her time teaching what my DD's needs?

    So what does doing great inclusion look like? What do you see in Canada that you think is working? Are there countries/ regions that are successfully implementing it, for real and not just in theory?

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    The problem of course where it comes to GT education isn't in convincing parents of GT students that inclusion is needed, healthy, and helps those students grow, it's convincing the rest of the school system that it is as such instead of being elitist and other parents feeling that their child is being excluded from something and left behind while GT students move yet farther ahead.

    So what does a successful exclusion program look like? It's part of a larger tiered system in GT education. Strong exclusion isn't needed for everyone who is GT, however, it's strongly needed for others.

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    Sorry for taking so long to reply - I have felt intimidated, LOL! I said I wanted to conduct this research, at some mythical point in time, not that I already have...

    But I do have some informed opinions.

    In order to understand where I’m coming from, let me copy some of the PM wrote to Aquinas (we actually did notice we we getting off topic, as some of the best conversations do...):

    I live in a country with a tradition of hard core tracking, with schools for college prep (and a few gifted programs scattered among those), for clerical track, for manual track, plus schools for the children with speech issues, learning diabilities, the deaf, the blind, the mentally disabled, the physically disabled...you name it, there’s a school for it - and, of course for every school, there is an adapted curriculum, which assumes, for instance, that physically disabled children need the learning disabled curriculum, or at most can just about cope with manual track. Densely populated country, so there usually will be a specialised school within an hours travel time, and if not, there’s boarding schools. Internationally quite unique, I believe.

    Of course, there is an equal and opposite reaction, with a strong political push for doing away with any and all curricular differentiation for anyone, mainstreaming all children with disabilities immediately in the closest school available no matter what their needs, and including mentally disabled children in college prep classes simply so that „these schools carry their share“, without conceding that some conflicts of interest may not be solved by telling the teacher to „just differentiate“

    Definitely interesting times. With one kid 2e (HG+ and suspected ADHD, plus anxieties, rigidities, the usual), one kid similar but probably somewhat less extreme in both directions and one kid with severe physical disabilities, learning disabilities AND probably gifted (jury still out), I will have my hands full in the next few years. After that, I could probably write a PhD about just my family’s experience!

    So, what is Canada doing right?

    For one thing, the discussion has been going on for decades, and the idea that on principle, all public schools should be accessible for everyone, both physically and otherwise, isn’t radical but mainstream. I can also see, from international surveys like PISA, that Canadian schools tend to manage a large spread of ability, SES and cultural and linguistic backgrounds in their schools and still do very well on achievement for all, but without the incredible pressure that, for instance, South Korean schools put on kids. So, Canadian schools appear equipped to manage a huge amount of diversity, and manage it well. I understand that, for instance, a learning disability is considered and issue to be resolved, in the normal course of things, with support teachers and curriculum adaptation, not segregation, and a physical disability is not considered an issue at all, or of anything, in the realm of medicine and maybe civil engineering (where should we put the elevator?), not pedagogy.
    I am in a position where that would already be HUGE progress.

    I imagine (this is where on the ground research would have to start) that a system like that has a head start also on how to include the biggest outliers (the highly gifted, the multiply disabled etc) - that a system that is doing so well accomodating so many different learners, it would be easier to find an individualised solution for situations in which a parent or a teacher might feel a child is not served well even then, the way you describe.

    I wish I’d feel more confident about in class differentiation for widely differing intellectual ability levels - I can’t get my mind around the problem that a teacher can teach (ie actually instruct, as opposed to manage individual work time) in the zone of proximal development only for exactly one level at a time, and that the more levels there are in the classroom, the less time there is for each and the outlier levels fall by the wayside.

    I read texts stating that inclusion is when you engage *everyone* in the classroom in the same topic and simply feel “not possible”. But maybe I’ve just never seen it done.

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    So, tl;dr:

    The inclusion model I’d like to see is one that is committed to both:

    to educate all kids together, ie in the same building(s), by staff that is responsible for all, in physical proximity wherever that is possible without compromising the education for anyone

    And to educate everyone in their proximal zone of development, with the understanding that this will result in outcomes that will radically differ across the student body.

    I would hope that once you had a system committed to both, one would be able to navigate all the compromises, indivual solutions, mistakes and new attempts cheerfully and eventually successfully.

    Getting off my soapbox now!


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    I would agree with tigerle on general principles. How that looks in reality is quite a bit more complex, of course. Perhaps it is worthwhile to think about a few of the concepts and models that feed into inclusion, such as:

    1. Universal Design for Learning (UDL). Embedding scaffolding and accommodations into instruction for all students. On the disability end of the curve, these allow students to receive content instruction, and demonstrate learning, at the highest level concepts and skills of which they are capable, with supports for deficit or asynchronous areas that are not essential to the content learning objectives.

    An example of this would be a student enrolled in a high school biology class whose conceptual skills were appropriate to that level, but whose reading or writing skills were not. Such a student might be allowed to use text-to-speech and speech-to-text to access text and produce written responses. Or use alternate assignments to demonstrate mastery of the standards, such as an audio-visual or performance product, rather than written work.

    The variant of this known as differentiated instruction is usually focused on curricular adaptations, typically within a narrow range. The absence of greater adaptation upwards reflects the origins of UDL and DI in special education, for the purpose of giving students with disabilities and English language learners access to grade-level work.

    2. Age-matched socialization and social skill development. This is a high value in the literature on inclusion. As it happens, I don't personally find it be as high of a value, and would argue that a higher goal would be social skill development that encompasses relationships with diversity in age as well as ability. When we remove the age-locked element, it opens up additional models for inclusion, such as age-decoupled instructional groupings based on current instructional needs. This brings strategies such as SSA and double- (or more) promotion into the umbrella of inclusion, as inclusive in age, but matched in academic needs. With respect to some of the social concerns, one solution that integrates both social developmental needs and intellectual/academic needs might be multi-age/multi-grade clusters, with students sorted by instructional needs in each content area, regardless of nominal grade placement.

    My own educational history includes being the precipitating case for promoting change in the private secondary school I attended. Years after I left the school, I returned for prepractice observation, and was pleased to see that they had maintained and extended into policy many of the practices that initially had been proposed by my parents as exceptions for my sake, such as placing students in individual courses based on their specific instructional needs, both above and below nominal grade placement. It had become a common enough occurrence that it was no longer noteworthy to most students or faculty.

    3. The 1%. By which I mean the top and bottom 1%. Well, it's probably more like the top and bottom 1-3%. The US and Canadian systems actually have a decent amount of success or potential success with +/- 2 SD (which is the middle 92% or so). Another couple percent on each end can potentially have their needs met with hybrid solutions/partial inclusion (some inclusion, some special programming). For the last few percent, it becomes more challenging.

    I am a huge proponent of inclusive education for the disability end of the exceptional population, as the ability to navigate the general population on a social and practical level is a much more important long-term skill for them than achieving age-appropriate academics is. But even there, the intensive instruction necessary to master life skills and functional academics, and the limited incremental benefit from being included in academic (out of their instructional zones) settings with NT age-peers, suggest to me that a better use of their K-12+ education years (to age 22, in the US) would limit time in inclusive educational settings to those with the most potential for community transfer, such as in non-core classes with greater social interaction (e.g., chorus, athletics, community service).

    For the right-hand tail, I believe a similar phenomenon occurs. At some point, the incremental benefit of leaving learners with extremely advanced academic ability in more-or-less age-matched groups for the purpose of developing social and adaptive skills within their age cohort ought to be balanced with the effective use of instructional time to meet their academic needs. Inclusive (age-matched) education for those students also might be better applied judiciously, and principally to settings in which academics are not the focus, and which have more intrinsic social opportunities, such as the examples named above. An additional factor is that there is a marked subset of intellectually-advanced learners whose social-emotional development is also advanced, for whom age-locked placement does not advance any of their skill development (other than tolerance for those with less skill, which, while a highly worthwhile goal, and likely one with significant life-long value to these learners in particular, also is a pretty modest sole objective for 10-13 years of compulsory education).

    I could say more, but I think I'll leave it at that for the moment!


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    Obviously jumping in late here to the discussion (I'm not even sure what the previous thread referenced was...) but wanted to comment about our experience and why inclusion can't always work.

    2e DD is now 13, 7th grade, and inclusion in a mainstream classroom was a disaster for her. As a kindergartener, 1st grader and 2nd grader where the focus was on the mechanics of learning to read and write THE ADULTS couldn't wrap their heads around a kid as smart as her being UNABLE to do standard tasks. She was repeatedly called lazy and manipulative, accused of trying to get out of doing her work and punished on a daily basis for not completing tasks she was physically unable to complete. No matter how much discussion occurred or how much we tightened up the IEP certain teachers, paras and other staff couldn't - or wouldn't - get it. In addition to all the LD and processing issues she now also had off the charts anxiety.

    "Exclusion" at a special Ed school focusing intently on remediation, training her in AT and other workarounds and allowing her to recoup some of her self esteem worked well. During this time she was able to get some support for the high level needs as well - ie radical exceleration in her area of greatest strength. After doing an 8th grade English class as a 3 grader the school did not feel comfortable having her sit in high school classes so her exceleration occurred 1-1. In others words exclusion within her exclusion. But it worked for her. For a while anyway.

    Then she was moved partially back to "inclusion" for our school district's one day a week TAG program. For her this was inclusion but for the rest of the students it was "exclusion". Pulled out of their regular classrooms one day a week and bussed to meet with other gifted kids from other schools in the district. Many of these kids had received small amounts of gifted pull out in previous years so by meeting with other gifted kids their pull outs sort of became inclusive. So the lines of inclusion and exclusion were blurred.

    This year when it became clear "exclusion" at a special Ed school was no longer appropriate and we could not locate another appropriate school the district insisted DD try the local middle school. She had made so much progress on her areas of deficit and did so well with the "inclusive" TAG program they were sure they could put together a program for her in the mainstream setting. They didn't mention LRE but instead focused on how much better it would be for her socially to be included. The one day she spent shadowing was an absolute nightmare. Academically although placed with the TAG kids she still found the class content below her level. She would have just been one of many though and would have resigned herself, probably, to school being "boring" or at least unchallenging. Environmentally though it was a nightmare. She COULD NOT be included because her sensory issues would make it impossible. 1000+ bodies moving around the school was overwhelming. 20+ bodies in a classroom created too much ambient noise and visual distraction for her to focus. It would have made using her AT very difficult. All in all one day in that "inclusive" environment showed she would have spent her time just trying to survive her school day with no room left for trying to learn anything. All of her sensory issues, as well as her anxiety which had been well contained, were triggered just by a one day shadow visit.

    What seems to work for her - probably because she falls in the 1%-3% of both the top and bottom that aeh mentions above - is 1-1. Crazy right? She recently started (at district expense) at a chain of schools (previously discussed on these boards) that offers 1-1 classes totally individualized for the student. Talk about exclusion! But it seems to work best for her.

    I guess my point is that inclusion can only work if the teachers are properly trained and given the necessary supports to make it possible. If a kid with special needs is just sent into a mainstream environment then as platypus says above the best they can expect is 1/25 of the teacher's attention. And that may be from a person not properly equipped to meet their needs even if they received 100% of their attention.

    I'm not sure if any of this makes any sense or adds to the discussion. I have come to realize that my outside the box kid is probably outside the box even as far as outside the box kids go. And that's my problem with pushing inclusion models. Each kid is an individual - this the I in IEP. But inclusion may not make it possible to really address that. By definition even if a teacher tries to differentiate and use UDL as aeh discusses it just becomes impractical at a certain point. A brand new teacher was crying to me recently that she had 25 kids in her classroom 2 with significant special needs and no para. She could either work to meet their needs or work to meet the needs of the other 23 kids in the room. There is just no way to properly do both. She's ready to quit teaching after one year. And she is a mainstream teacher with a sped certification. I just don't know how one person can meet these needs - especially without appropriate specialized training.

    Just my 2 cents...

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    Originally Posted by Pemberley
    By definition even if a teacher tries to differentiate and use UDL as aeh discusses it just becomes impractical at a certain point. A brand new teacher was crying to me recently that she had 25 kids in her classroom 2 with significant special needs and no para. She could either work to meet their needs or work to meet the needs of the other 23 kids in the room. There is just no way to properly do both. She's ready to quit teaching after one year. And she is a mainstream teacher with a sped certification. I just don't know how one person can meet these needs - especially without appropriate specialized training.

    Just my 2 cents...


    THIS.

    The hypocrisy in pretending that differentiation by ONE teacher can somehow occur simultaneously as opposed to sequentially has got to GO. As long as politicians and educators get to act as if the physically impossible were possible, there cannot be progress.

    Yes, it costs money, I get it. I work in the public sector, I used to work in the treasury, i know what budgeting constraints are. Put your money where your mouth is or admit that for economy of scale, at some point you have to do instructional grouping.

    And if you want to save money, stop being hung up on age segregation, as aeh insists. I get that too, it’s another form of industrial scaling, making sure you can process children in yearly age segregated batches. With that, as Spaghetti pointed out, you need to get rid of urriculum age matching as well - if I were in the US, I’d be a big proponent of common core - as a curriculum to be worked through by 98% by 12th grade at the latest...and by some by 8th.

    Last edited by Tigerle; 04/29/18 11:59 PM.
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    Thanks all for such thoughtful input! For the types of reasons pemberley describes so well, we've gotten to the point here where we tend to reflexively use "inclusion" as a curse word. I really appreciate Tigerle's reminder of where we came from and what the alternative used to look like. There's no doubt that we used to use specialized classes as a dumping ground, and this was really bad for kids. To be honest, our district still has a small number of specialized LD classes, and they are still a bit of a dumping ground for kids with severe behavioral issues, but we are at least pretending to try and fix that. sigh. Change is v e r y slow.

    I think the core challenge is that inclusion is a value system, not an educational structure. For many kinds of spec ed need, it flies in the face of both research evidence and financial logistics, but those considerations are irrelevant when the value over-rides all. I do think it's an important value, and our policy makers embraced inclusion with the best of intentions. I do not think they gave much thought to it's practical implications, nor did they recognize that the voices calling for inclusion only represent a small, though highly-visible, portion of the population with spec ed needs.

    On the practical side, you cannot get anyone in our system to admit on paper that inclusion, done correctly, is far, far more expensive. It needs way more people, time, money and resources. This is just simple logistics. If 25 kids need to be taught a certain way, it's a whole lot easier to put them in one class and do it once, then have them in 25 separate classes and have to do the same thing 25 separate times. Unfortunately, our districts are finding that they can make major budget cuts to spec ed by removing specialized classes, and trumpet those cuts as an unassailable move to more inclusion - and who could be against that? Somehow, the savings never roll back into supporting those same kids in the regular classroom. In practice, inclusion means you get the exact same thing as everyone else, though we may throw in a laptop (without instruction, support or relevant software, because your regular classroom teacher has neither time nor knowledge to help you use it).

    On the 'who is inclusion good for', I think both Tigerle and pemberley describe some of the issues I hinted at. I think the dividing line is, is this child best served by maximizing their time with the regular curriculum, and a "typical" group of age peers? Those kids hugely benefit from inclusion, as long as the system is able to provide the accommodations they need to participate effectively in the class, and the teacher has the support she needs to reach both that child, and the other children in her class, and doesn't have to choose one or the other.

    The flip question, though, is, is this child best served by maximizing their time with a different curriculum/ teaching approach, and a group of peers whose learning needs are similar to their own?

    The deep adherence to inclusion as the fundamental and overriding value means our educational system is genuinely unable to compute the possibility that this second group of kids even exists. And unfortunately, numbers-wise, it's huge (you could loosely estimate 20% of the population LD, and 2% gifted). It's also what I often refer to as the "invisible" exceptionalities: things that aren't medical diagnoses, that don't involve noticeable physical or intellectual challenges, that may not be noticeable until the child enters school - or even much later. It's really easy to ignore the kids who are just not learning, as long as (until) they become behaviour problems. It's pretty notable that in our district, we identify 2-3 times more boys than girls in every 'non-medical' exceptionality, including gifted and LDs. Our LD identification rate is ridiculously low, and 2/3 even of that small number aren't identified before secondary. The ones who act up get noticed. Girls are more likely to shut down, and get ignored. With 20-30 other kids in the class, the reality is, no teacher has the time to bother with a kid who isn't bothering her. Mere failure to learn does not trigger intervention.

    OK, that's a big rant about the problems. I'll conclude this portion of our programming (for fellow ed research nerd Tigerle smile ) with this link to a report on inclusion in another province, which had our district's special education committee nodding along in pretty strong recognition: http://www.ed.gov.nl.ca/edu/task_force/report.PDF . Chapter 1 is about the inclusion model, and consultation feedback starts on p11. Here's a couple of representative quotes, which I think also really capture our own experience. The second one is painfully true, and gets to the core of that problem-who-shall-not-be-named in our education system:

    "No one spoke in support of the model, and the phrase “Inclusion is a wonderful concept but....” was used at every consultation as people attempted to differentiate a philosophy of embracing diversity from a model of delivering supports to students with identified exceptionalities. ... Numerous presenters spoke to an apprehension of appearing ‘anti-diversity’ when they speak against inclusion, but the present model is untenable for students and teachers alike."

    Input from a teacher: “Inclusive education is NOT working - not in our current system. The students who are included are actually excluded in their classrooms. They feel excluded because their peers complete their work faster. They feel excluded because they can't keep up. They feel excluded because they can't comprehend the curriculum because it is not at their level. They are more stigmatized than ever before.”





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    I would agree that lack of funding and implementation fidelity are huge factors in the success or failure of inclusion. The most successful settings I have seen have staffed all inclusion settings with a minimum of one content (general education) teacher, and one special education teacher, and had ongoing training and follow-up with general education teachers on universal design. Also, inclusive settings are not supposed to ever go over 50% students with special needs.

    I'll quibble with platypus a little in that inclusion does not mean that 25 different special needs students are now split across 25 different classrooms. They are typically clustered in inclusion settings like those described above. This ought to apply to both ends of the spectrum.

    I would also disagree that the majority of LD students cannot be instructed appropriately in some form of inclusion, -properly implemented-. Perhaps one of the confusions here is that inclusion is not all-or-nothing, and it differs by grade level. We have nearly 100% inclusion in a secondary setting with most of the exceptionalities (other than the lowest-functioning multiply-handicapped or profoundly intellectually impaired). But our inclusion settings are all staffed with two teachers, with class sizes of well under 20. And our learning standards no longer focus on basic skills, so developing fluency with accommodations and compensatory strategies (including AT) is a much more significant dimension to our specialized instruction than remediating decoding and basic calculations (though that does exist for a small minority of students). At earlier grade levels, the role of focused direct service is, of course, greater, but still can allow for at least partial inclusion for many LD students.

    I am fully aware that our setting is not representative of all public schools, so I'm not disputing the problems with inclusion as it currently is implemented in many buildings, but I did want to point out that the model itself is not as weak as the implementation, for most learners with exceptionalities.


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    Originally Posted by aeh
    The most successful settings I have seen have staffed all inclusion settings with a minimum of one content (general education) teacher, and one special education teacher, and had ongoing training and follow-up with general education teachers on universal design. Also, inclusive settings are not supposed to ever go over 50% students with special needs.

    I'll quibble with platypus a little in that inclusion does not mean that 25 different special needs students are now split across 25 different classrooms. They are typically clustered in inclusion settings like those described above. This ought to apply to both ends of the spectrum.
    What you are describing aeh would be shot down instantly in my city as not-inclusive. Pretty much any mention of clustering or grouping is a no-go because it isn't deemed inclusive. That in itself isn't the issue but when specialized programs are cut without adding ANY supports for children who are now all back in the regular classroom it becomes an issue. Much cost-cutting has taken place under the inclusion banner and teachers are expected to be able to differentiate and support all of these kids with a couple hours of special education training. Students are never grouped by ability and teachers are expected to differentiate to the wide variety in their class as well as provide any accommodations required. There is very, very little remediation and for accommodations it is generally up to students to figure out what works for them and teach themselves how to do it.

    Another wrinkle where I am is the French Immersion factor. I live in one of the more bilingual cities so only 38% of grades 1-8 kids are not in immersion. Guess where most spec ed kids (excluding gifted) are? This ends up with some pretty interesting classes to teach because the ratios are the same regardless and these are by definition not special education classes. Attempts to add any sort of resources to support these teachers don't pass budget discussions and even admitting that this is happening is a dirty secret. Teachers in the non-immersion streams often have the majority of their classes with IEPs (I have a nephew in a class where 17/20 kids have IEPs for example). For extra supports there are special education teachers but they generally support a whole school or for a larger school maybe half of a school. Most of these classes have 1 teacher to 20 or 25 students (depending on age) and that is pretty much it for supports.

    Some numbers focusing on grade 1-8 (these are from a local board that actually has the most specialized classes remaining, the other local board has far fewer specialized classes and is very proud that it is even more inclusive).

    English stream - 38%
    Full time gifted classes - 1% (this is rapidly being shut down under the inclusive banner. Unless something drastically changes it will be gone in a few years)
    Development Disabilities program - 0.7%
    Special Education classes 1.7% (note many of these are part time inclusive) Doing the math you can see that these are reserved for the most extreme cases - a mildly dyslexic kid is not going to be in there.

    All kids that are not in full time inclusive classes - 3.5% (includes both ends of the spectrum)

    233 special education teachers supporting 2515 classroom teachers who teach just under 40,0000 students. Again, do the math and think about how much time a "just LD" kid is getting with a spec ed teacher a year.

    All that to say, we have a lot of room for improvement to be an inclusive utopia (although I do appreciate Tigerle's perspective since it is easy to wallow in our problems and forget that it could be much worse).

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