The Inclusion Toolkit

Sarah Herbert

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781849207607, 9781849207591
• eBook ISBN: 9781446292495
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Inclusive Education

With downloadable electronic resources

Are you looking for ways to make your classroom more inclusive to children with learning difficulties?

The practical strategies suggested in this book are supported by current research into effective teaching and learning, and the author shows you how inclusion friendly teaching could look in your classroom. The book is aimed at the teacher who wishes to respond to the diversity of learning needs of children that are placed within their mainstream classroom, without teaching each child differently. The advice given for teaching all learners aged 7 to 14 will help you ensure that you are providing well for all your learners that only a very few will need substantially different support.

Rather than focussing on the differences between learners, the common strategies that will enhance the learning of all, based on the common concerns of class teachers working with pupils who have Special Educational Needs, are identified.

Structured around the three areas of memory, motivation, and communication which are key to addressing inclusion friendly teaching, the book covers:

- the memory friendly classroom

- the motivation friendly classroom

- the communication-friendly classroom

Ideal for all classroom teachers working with children aged 7 to 14, and with plenty of supporting material available to download from the SAGE website, which works in tandem with each chapter of the book, this toolkit will make inclusive teaching a reality.

1

Foundations for Inclusion

This book is aimed at the teacher of 7–14 year olds who is planning to meet the diverse learning needs of children that are placed within his or her mainstream classroom. It would also be useful to the special educational needs coordinator who wishes to support and advise his or her colleagues about developing inclusive teaching approaches. Teachers are likely to be in different places in terms of their knowledge, skills and beliefs. What we need to ensure is that we offer the right support to enable teachers to develop their knowledge, skills and beliefs about inclusion. Although it may seem counter-intuitive, it is easier to change the way someone thinks about inclusion by helping them do it than by trying to persuade them to believe in it and waiting for their practice to change. Essentially, once you are supported with the ‘how’ of inclusion you are likely, through having a go and experiencing some success, to find that you do believe in inclusion!

Case Study

Mrs Brown is an experienced teacher of 7–11 year olds. This academic year she is concerned because of the range of needs she has to meet in her class. In addition to a large ‘low achievers’ group, two children are identified as dyslexic, one is diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and one further child with moderate learning difficulties. The advice she has received from specialists involved in each learner has made her feel overwhelmed and that she cannot begin to meet all their needs. However, with the support of the special educational needs coordinator and the teaching assistant she works with she is able to identify the needs that these learners have in common and develop an action plan of strategies that will address the needs of all her more challenging learners. As the new approaches embed she finds that she enjoys the challenge of developing new teaching strategies, and that all the learners in her class are benefiting from them.

Inclusion and inclusive teaching have been defined in many different ways. The term integration preceded the term inclusion and seemed to imply that the learner whose needs were ‘different’ from the majority would be placed in a mainstream classroom and adaptations (to the environment and/or curriculum and/or teaching methods) would need to be made so that they could participate. Inclusion is sometimes seen as part of the human rights agenda, and additionally as a means of achieving human rights (through what might be seen as the social engineering function of schooling). Inclusion can mean different things in different contexts and refer to many different groups of learners, for instance: ethnic minorities, boys, girls, learners with special educational needs or disabilities, those with behavioural or emotional or social difficulties, those from lower socio-economic groups and so on. In the context of this book we are addressing the issues around teaching learners with diverse learning needs in mainstream classrooms, specifically those who might be experiencing difficulties learning from the teaching strategies usually employed. The premise is that although the usual teaching strategies may enable many of the learners to make progress, more attention to the particular strategies that are described in this book will lead to better progress for nearly all learners, including those who might usually find learning difficult.

In many books on inclusive teaching you will find chapters outlining approaches and techniques suitable for children with different sorts of needs, chapters headed for instance ‘supporting the child with dyslexia/dyspraxia/moderate learning difficulties/cerebral palsy’ and so on. This approach suggests that a myriad of different teaching approaches are necessary according to the identified conditions of learners within that class, and also that there are particular ways of teaching learners with special educational needs. The Special Educational Needs Code of Practice (2001) regards this as what is ‘different from and additional to’ what other learners need. The approach of this book is to reduce the need for provision that is ‘different from and additional to’.

Research has failed to find any substantive difference in teaching practices between special educational needs teachers and mainstream teachers (Cook and Schirmer, 2003; Lewis and Norwich, 2005; Florian, 2007). No specialist pedagogy for pupils with special educational needs has been identified, just what might be characterised as teaching strategies that vary in intensity along a continuum from high to low (Florian, 2008). It seems good teaching is good teaching for all, if a strategy works with those who experience difficulty in learning, and it works with those who do not, then all can benefit from these strategies identified as best practice.

This book will help you to enhance the effectiveness of education for all learners, by ensuring that you can provide so well for all learners that only those with the greatest needs will require a substantially different approach to learning. There is now a great deal of knowledge about good practice in teaching. In summary the research refers to approaches such as:

• Flexible grouping, not fixed ability grouping or setting
• Collaborative approaches, including discussion and debate
• Metacognitive approaches, which includes self-assessment, pupil-focused target setting and review, sharing learning objectives and attending to existing knowledge
• Positive adult to learner and learner to learner relationships
• Continuous dynamic assessment (assessment for learning)
• High teacher expectations for all, including positive attitudes towards inclusion
• Specifically trained teaching assistants working in close partnership with teachers who continue to take responsibility for teaching and learning
• Direct experiences for learners based on their lives and realistic problems, engagement with the local community and the wider world
• Engaging higher order thinking through questioning and problem solving.

There is also a body of research to call upon regarding the nature of learning difficulty and barriers to learning. I have summarised these difficulties as existing within the framework used in this book: difficulties with memory, motivation and/or communication. Difficulties in any of these three areas may be experienced by any learner in unique combinations.

Case Study

Rosie (age 11) has a diagnosis of moderate dyslexia. She has difficulties related to her ability to acquire literacy skills; specifically she has a reading age two years below her chronological age and has difficulty learning spellings. As she reads less than her peers her vocabulary is also less well developed. She is also a somewhat reluctant learner, especially when required to record her learning in writing. Her difficulties relate to all three aspects – memory (difficulty learning spellings), communication (writing difficulties and poor vocabulary) and motivation (specifically around written work). She would benefit from being taught memory strategies such as mnemonics and expanding rehearsal for spellings, and communication strategies such as specific vocabulary teaching. Using ‘think pair share’ in class time would offer her an opportunity to demonstrate her learning without writing. Motivation could be improved through increasing the use of collaborative learning approaches since this will allow her to work to her strengths.

Case Study

Jacob (age 8) has a diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. He has great difficulty remembering what has been taught. His difficulties with attention control mean that he does not easily encode new learning as memory. His ongoing behaviour problems have also resulted in difficult relationships with adults in school and he is increasingly reluctant to engage in classroom activities. His difficulties relate to memory and motivation. He would benefit from memory strategies that emphasise routine and avoid long activities. Increasing novelty and variety in his classroom activities and planning in regular brain breaks would also help. Motivation could be improved by a structured approach to praise and reward. Since Jacob also has the support of a teaching assistant for part of the week, careful consideration should be given to how this support might improve his motivation and independence skills, rather than result in learned helplessness.

In this book we see how inclusion friendly teaching could look in your classroom, by drawing together the two areas of research on good practice in teaching and barriers to learning. We must therefore consider what learners with SEN (and those without) have in common, and therefore, what approaches the teacher can use in teaching to maximise learning for all. Rather than focusing on the differences between learners I shall identify what common strategies will enhance the learning of all, based on the common concerns of teachers working with pupils who have SEN. Our starting point will be the good teaching and learning strategies that work for the diverse population of learners in any inclusive classroom. It is not ‘different’ or ‘additional’; it is good quality for all.

The approach I shall take here is one of expanding the range of strategies used in your general teaching so that individual needs are met without separate provision. I will not be addressing differentiation in terms of curriculum, but instead focusing on pedagogy, that is, on developing inclusive teaching strategies.

This in no way implies that all learners will benefit from being taught in exactly the same way. Inclusive education is that which accepts the differences between learners. There will be, in some mainstream classrooms, individual learners whose learning differences make it necessary to provide a highly personalised teaching approach. These personalised approaches will remain on the continua, albeit at the extreme high intensity end. In this instance the most appropriate approach might be a matter of providing better opportunities to deliver these highly personalised approaches in small group and one-to-one situations, and rarely in specialist provisions such as special schools and units. However we need to be aware that sometimes learners are placed in special provisions not because of their needs, but because the mainstream has not made the provision that it could have done. This book, however, aims to make your teaching accessible to nearly all the learners in your class, nearly all of the time, thus minimising the need for specialised approaches for individuals and reducing the workload of the teacher. It could be characterised as differentiation by support, rather than differentiation by activity.

Much of our education system is organised around the notion that intelligence is fixed, measurable and normally distributed – that is, intelligence does not change, it can be measured and in some way relates to educational or life success. A certain percentage of the population is present at each ‘level’, with most of us clustered around an average, and very few at either extreme. This view is now widely discredited. There is some discussion about what exactly intelligence is and some disquiet amongst many psychologists (and teachers) about how such an intangible could be expressed neatly and numerically as an IQ score. Intelligence is now more often seen as the totality of what a person has learned. Learning here does not just mean traditional subject-based learning, but the broadest range of human learning, including such skills as interpersonal, intrapersonal, creative and so on. We also know that the brain is much more plastic than previously thought, and that even in adulthood your brain makes new connections (learns) in response to teaching (Goswami, 2004). While learners are still individuals, and it is undeniable that some find learning more difficult and are more challenging to teach than others, intelligence is fluid, changes over time, and responds to teaching. This is good news for teachers: we really can and do make a difference!

What teachers believe about learning is important here too. We know that where teachers have a genuine and articulated belief that all learners can make progress, that achievement is not fixed but can be changed, where progress is a real expectation, learners do indeed make better progress. The best teachers are open to experience and willing to make errors and learn from them, and to seek feedback from learners. It is the intention of the author that working with the materials in this book will support teachers in this process. Those teachers who study their own practice and respond to what they find out are those who are most effective in raising learners’ attainment.

Teachers and researchers commonly identify the following issues as having a key impact on a learner’s access to learning, and on the teacher’s confidence in meeting their learning needs:

• Memory Working memory is now thought to be a highly significant factor in educational achievement, even more so than IQ, and those who struggle the most with learning are usually those who have the most limited working memory. Learners may be unable to learn by rote facts to support abstract concepts such as spellings or times tables, or may appear to know something and later forget it. Memory systems include functions related to attention control. Teachers may notice that learners may not attend to the important bits or attend to only small parts of learning experiences, seem to daydream, have difficulty following instructions, and lose their place in multipart activities. Working memory can be overloaded, leading to a breakdown in the ability to concentrate and learn. This overload can be avoided through careful lesson design. Key aspects of memory are encoding, storage and retrieval. These can be improved through supporting attention, organising information and rehearsing its retrieval to achieve well worn brain pathways. Strategies such as brain breaks, mnemonics, teachi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• About the Author
• List of Figures
• List of Downloadable Resources
• 1 Foundations for Inclusion
• 2 The Memory Friendly Classroom
• 3 The Motivation Friendly Classroom
• 4 The Communication Friendly Classroom
• 5 Steps to Success
• Index