Five years ago, Steven Gould, then principal of the 400-student James Russell Lowell Elementary School in Watertown, Massachusetts, set out to mainstream every one of his special education students. The idea was to foster an environment in which all childrenâ€"regardless of their strengths or weaknessesâ€"study at their own pace and take responsibility for their work and behavior. Now, Patti Sclafani-Hinkley, a special ed teacher in this Boston suburb, can gesture around a colorful classroom packed with teaching materials but devoid of children and say, "I don’t call this the resource room anymore. I call it my office."
While Sclafani-Hinkley's classroom is now studentless, Mary Ford’s is bustling with 26 children, five of whom have IEPs. Right now, she’s talking about the letters they will be writing to their parents as part of the afternoon’s language arts lesson. As if on cue, special ed teacher Peggy McDonald enters the classroom, positions herself at a table, and starts helping the kids put their thoughts on paper. "When you are finished, show your work to me or Mrs. McDonald," Ford says.
Neither teacher spends all her time helping only special ed students. While Ford is checking work at one end of the room, McDonald is at the other, looking over a pupil’s shoulder. "I like how focused you are!" she exclaims. "You’re crankin’!"Gould, who is now an administrator in the Watertown district office, believes that putting students with disabilities in regular classrooms is a civil rights issue. "‘Separate but equal’ is not equal," he says. Initially, teachers resisted the idea of mainstreaming youngsters with an enormous range of needs, abilities, and behavioral issues, says Lowell’s acting principal, Marilyn Hollisian. But once it became clear that teachers had the authority to mold many of the special ed practices to their styles, "they felt much better about it," she adds.
To help teachers tailor tests and instruction for each child, provide extra help as needed, and handle behavior problems, administrators hired an inclusion specialist and a behavioral specialist, who joined the existing special ed teachers, speech pathologist, occupational therapist, and physical therapist."Before, it was just you and your four walls, and you did the best you could," says Kathy Fucci, a
25-year teaching veteran. Now teachers have "the feeling that you are not alone," she says.
The work has paid off for Kyle Martin, a 5th grader with severe attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, bipolar disorder, a nonverbal learning disorder, and sensory difficulties. When Kyle started kindergarten, his mother, Michelle Martin, heard parents and even staff members complain about "that loud kid with the issues." Now Martin says she tells parents, "My child’s IEP is benefiting your child" because the extra help Kyle receives spills over to the rest of the class. They also have learned that "not everyone is alike, and some people have disabilities."
"And you work with them," Martin adds. "You don’t put them in a separate room."â€"Michelle Galley
March 2004Teacher Magazine
While 6th grade teacher Sharon Hall calls out questions from the multiplication tables, Roberta Fugett walks through the room, stopping at some students' desks. Many of the children in this class at Clark Middle School, in Winchester, Kentucky, have no clue that Fugett is a full-fledged certified special education teacher because she helps any student who has trouble. That way, she says, there's less of a stigma.
As the class works on multiples of 11 and 12, Fugett is peppered with questions from both sets of students. Collaborative teaching, a resourceful approach to mainstreaming, is a keystone of the school's plan to raise the achievement levels of special ed students and provide access to the general curriculum.
Such seamlessness was not always the norm in this small rural community that is being transformed into a bedroom suburb of Lexington. About five years ago, principal Don Burkhead says, many special ed students in the 750-student school were still in self-contained classrooms for part of the day. "Our test scores showed a tremendous achievement gap between regular students and students in special education," he explains. "We just thought, the more we could include them in regular classes, the better."
This year, 59 of Clark's 92 students with disabilities are full participants in the general curriculum. Of the remaining special ed students, 50 percent are included at least half the time, and the rest at least a quarter of the time. The effort has involved retraining both special ed and regular educators while incorporating the use of technology and overcoming doubts about students' ability to adjust. "You can't just drop these students in the classroom," says Burkhead. "You have to do what you can to create a level playing field so they can get as much as they can from the regular curriculum."
That's Fugett's job. It's one thing to let special ed students sit in on regular classes; it's another altogether to make the content and materials accessible to them, she says. While in the classroom, she modifies assignments for "her" students, whispers guidance, and crafts alternative tests. "I always try and make the tests look exactly like the regular tests, so students can't look at someone's paper and know they are in special education," Fugett explains. "Sometimes, even I forget which students are in special education."
The regular teachers share planning time each week with the collaborative teacher, an essential part of making the system work. They also work together to align the students' IEPs with state content standards. Now, according to 7th grade science teacher Anna Bruce Kostelnik, it's often hard to tell the regular and special educators apart. In her classroom, she and colleague Dan Horn work interchangeably. Such pairings put an onus on the collaborative teachers to be jacks-of-all- trades. "We are not glorified aides," Horn says. "We have to master... all of the subjects our students learn."This afternoon, Kostelnik circulates in the room and helps individual students. When a teacher's aide enters with a child who has Down syndrome, Kostelnik rushes over, leans in, and whispers to the aide to have the student trace words from a workbook during class. Kostelnik also encourages collaboration between students. She tells one 7th grader to alert the student next to him when his turn comes to read an answer out loud.
"Everybody," Kostelnik explains, "takes responsibility for everyone in here."
â€"Lisa Goldsteinâ€"PAT McDONOGH
© 2003 Editorial Projects in Education Vol. 15; number 05; page 48 March 2004The assignment looks simple for an 11th grader: Learn to use a weekly planner to write down homework assignments. But this special education class, dubbed "Strategies for Success," may give its four students, at Cabrillo High School in Long Beach, California, as well as their peers in other classes, the boost they need to perform well on state testsâ€"and earn high school diplomas.
What Teachers Think
Located on a former naval base in a blighted neighborhood, Cabrillo High is a medley of contemporary buildings scattered across a pristine 63-acre campus. It has served this neighborhood on the west side of Long Beach for only a few years, and at first, families were reluctant to have their children attend. Now Cabrillo High attracts not only new local students but also a handful from other schools drawn to the special ed services. Enrollment this academic year swelled to more than 3,200 students, a population that is predominantly Hispanic and African American.
The Strategies for Success classes were set up after district administrators looked at the state test scores of their students with disabilities and noticed that between 50 percent and 70 percent were failing even though they'd received extra instruction outside of class from special ed teachers. The problem, administrators discerned, was that the supplemental instruction did not match the curriculum taught in the general education classes, largely because of a lack of communication. Now, district officials say, special ed teachers are trained to reinforce their students' coursework.
In Rick Lamprecht's Strategies for Success classroom, assignments from his four students' regular classes hang on bulletin boards. The juniors dutifully follow the teacher's instructions to copy abbreviations for common terms, such as "algebra" and "paragraph," into sample planners. Lamprecht stops to explain the crucial distinction between commas and dashes when using numbers. Doing problems "29, 42" is not the same as completing problems"29-42," he notes.
"It's the end of a class, and your teacher says, 'Do the questions on page 203.' How do you write that?" Lamprecht asks. "If a teacher doesn't say, you have to assume it's the whole page."
The focus on classroom fundamentals helps students with disabilities learn more in their general education classes. Andrew Gilman, who has autism, is among them. One morning, he sits in a crowded geometry classroom and sketches out a crossword puzzle to learn some of the basic vocabulary and definitions. As he carefully traces the lines on grid paper, his teacher, Charma Adams, admits he's had a hard time keeping up with his classmates. She doubts he'll be able to pass the state math exam, but she thinks he's grasped at least some of the foundations of the subject.
Andrew's mother, Ginny Gilman, believes her son is learning more at Cabrillo than when he was in fully inclusive classes in elementary and middle schools. "The teachers are willing to modify assignments and assist the kids," she says. "I'm very impressed with the attitude of the school and its willingness to adapt."
â€"Joetta L. Sack
PHOTOS: Rick Lamprecht's Strategies for Success class stresses the basics.
â€"DAVIS BARBER
© 2003 Editorial Projects in Education Vol. 15; number 05; page 49
Donna Martinez