Is Your School Failing at Inclusion?

Is your school failing at inclusion? If you think your school is failing at inclusion, it does not mean that, "inclusion doesn't work". It actually means that your school is failing to successfully create an inclusive educational environment. 

There are several components of inclusion that are absolutely critical to creating and providing meaningful, inclusive environments. It's important for educators and parents to know about these crucial aspects of inclusion in order to give students with disabilities opportunities to successfully learn and grow alongside their same-age peers. 

Here are the foundational elements that every successful inclusive school system has: 

How to Make Accessible and Inclusive Education Materials for Students With and Without Disabilities

You've heard me say this many times. Inclusion isn’t a program. It’s the process of including students of all ability levels in our education system to the fullest extent possible. There are dozens of articles and books that cite the research on inclusion, describe the process and practice of inclusion, provide tips for writing inclusive IEPs, and name strategies for facilitating inclusion in the classroom. 

I've written many times on the types of materials that are widely used in an inclusive classroom such as visual timers, highlighters, color-coded folders, and more. However, one area that I haven't said much about is the text-based educational materials that we use in our daily instruction. After a year of viewing online coursework and hundreds of presentation slides, it's time to talk about providing accessible and inclusive text-based education materials for students with and without disabilities. 

10 Powerful Strategies for Teaching Students With Different Ability Levels in Your Classroom

There is no doubt that we will see greater disaparity in ability levels amongst the students in our classrooms given the time lost learning in a consistent, structured, and equitable educational environment over the past year. 

In fact, a recent study conducted by researchers at the Annenberg Institute at Brown University projected that most students will return to school with, "approximately 63-68% of the learning gains in reading relative to a typical school year and with 37-50% of the learning gains in math."