Chapter 4 Summary

Chapter 4 Summary :Creating Collaborative Relationships and Fostering Communication

Resources:

1) www.myeducationlab.com

2) http://www.teachhub.com/news/article/cat/14/item/250

This is a great article about co-teaching, its’ pros and cons, and more strategies to use to effectively co-teach.

3) http://www.teachervision.fen.com/education-and-parents/resource/3730.html

This is a great resource to use to help teachers develop good strategies to use to effectively plan and carry out a parent teacher conference. There are also form templates for teachers to use to help them.

Summary:

· An effective inclusion program is one in which there is good communication between the teachers and other members of the planning team.

· Wraparound process- process the team uses to guide them to make the best decisions for implementing inclusion.

· ESL teachers instruct students in English

· Bilingual teachers help students in their native language and in English

· Migrant Educators helps migrant families enroll their children in school and then they provide the child with supplementary individualized instruction in smaller groups.

· A key member to the comprehensive planning team is the case manager, service coordinator, or support facilitator who helps make sure that the group is staying on task and working toward a common goal.

· Roles that teams should perform in order to work collaboratively: initiating; information gathering and sharing; clarifying and elaborating; summarizing; consensus building; encouraging; harmonizing and compromising; reflecting; balancing.

· Successful teams use “person/student centered planning,” in which the important roles that the students and their families play in planning inclusion is are recognized.

· MAP planning is another strategy used by the team to develop goals for inclusion. “Map Action Planning” is what MAP stands for.

· Co-teaching- teachers work together in the inclusive classroom. Different instructional arrangements teachers may use to co-teach:

One teaching/one helping

Parallel teaching

Station teaching

Alternative teaching

Team teaching

· Collaborative consultation is used to help teachers effectively work together in the inclusive classroom. The consultant is usually the special ed, bilingual, or multicultural educator or a school psychologist, speech/language therapist, or physical therapist who works along with the general education teacher.

· Want to promote congruence in between the co teachers.

o 2 models to help co-teachers collaborate: 1) a priori model- in this model, supportive services educators teach new content that supports the content ot be learned in the general education classroom. The instructions lays foundation for what the child will learn soon in the classroom.

o The post hoc model- supportive instruction services reinforce skills already learned in the classroom.

· Advocate for your students and their families

· Teachers must be aware of the diverse backgrounds from which their students and families come from in order to effectively communicate with them.

· Essential to understand the belief systems of your students

· This chapter had very useful information on effective ways to communicate with families and set up and carry out conferences with families.

· Informative notices, newsletters, daily/weekly notes, 2 way notebooks, and daily/weekly progress reports and home-school contracts all help to keep families informed about what is going on in the classroom and how their child is progressing.

Chapter 5 Summary

Chapter 5 Summary: Creating an Environment that Fosters Acceptance and Friendship

Resources:

1) www.myeducationlab.com

2) http://specialed.about.com/od/teacherchecklists/a/classroom.htm

This is a great website that gives teachers useful information about how to create a welcoming classroom for all students to learn in.

3) http://education.byu.edu/diversity/activities.html This website gives great ideas for how to promote diversity in the classroom.

Summary:

· Many cartoons, comics, and tv shows show characters who have disabilities or differences in a negative light. Kids learn to have negative attitudes towards others with differences because of what they see in the media. As a teacher it is important to promote positive attitudes towards everyone regardless of their differences.

· “an important goal in your inclusive classroom is to teach all students to appreciate diversity and to value and learn from each other’s similarities and differences”(p176).

· Important to discover what the attitudes of your students are like when it comes to dealing with diversity by performing “attitude assessments, using individual differences probes, look at students drawings, and use observational techniques and sociometric techniques.”

· The teacher must be the role model for how to treat others and how to respect diversity.

· Disability simulations can be used to help students understand what it would be like if they had a certain disability.

· Make sure to incorporate a unit of study on disabilities and individuals in the past who have had them.

· Teach about assistive devices

· Teach students about different cultures and incorporate cultural diversity in the way you decorate your classroom.

· Use the “bridge system” to teach kids about different dialects.

· Teach students about stereotypes and how to appropriately respond to them. Also, teach students about discrimination.

Chapter 2 Summary (pp43-62)

Chapter 2 Summary: Understanding the Diverse Educational Strengths and Challenges of Students with Disabilities ( pp 43-62)

Resources:

1) http://www.myeducationlab.com/

2) http://iris.peabody.vanderbilt.edu/

3) http://www2.ed.gov/parents/needs/speced/iepguide/index.html

Summary:

· A Comprehensive planning team is composed of families and professionals who join together to come up with a plan to help students who are struggling in the general education classroom. Once students who are struggling are identified, the team comes up with a plan to help them. This plan is put in place before further special education classes and services are considered.

· Mediation is offered when there are disagreements that result between family members and educators about the plan of how to best help the child.

· An impartial hearing officer steps in when disagreements cannot be easily settled.

· Prerefferal System- this is a process used to assist teachers with helping to meet children’s needs before a referral for special ed. placement is made. If this process works for the child in the general education classroom, then it is continued. If it does not work, then the team will look further into special education accommodations.

· Response to Intervention (RTI) are also used before special education is considered. They are “ multitiered identification and instructional models used for assessing the extent to which the child responds to and needs more intensive and individualized instruction to succeed in the inclusion classroom.”

· Progress monitoring- monitors the effectiveness that your program has on the student’s progress.

· IEP’s ( Individualized Education Program) these are written individualized plans that identify the special education and related services that the student will receive to address their needs. Assistive Technology may or may not be implemented within these plans, but if it is then it must be written into the IEP. To determine whether or not it is to be used, an individualized technology assessment is performed.

· Transition services are natural points of transition that a student will go through and activities are implemented that coordinate with the different points of transition to help the student easily progress throughout these periods of transition.

· Summary of Performance (SOP) are made after the student graduates or surpasses the age for receiving special education services. They address the student’s achievement and also give suggestions to help the student succeed their post-secondary goals.

Chapter 1 Summary

Chapter 1 Summary: Understanding Inclusion

Resources:

1) http://www.kidstogether.org/inclusion.htm

This article addressed inclusion classrooms and said : The fundamental principle of inclusive education is the valuing of diversity within the human community.... When inclusive education is fully embraced, we abandon the idea that children have to become "normal" in order to contribute to the world.... We begin to look beyond typical ways of becoming valued members of the community, and in doing so, begin to realize the achievable goal of providing all children with an authentic sense of belonging. (Kunc 1992, pp. 38-39).

2) http://www.myeducationlab.com/

3) http://iris.peabody.vanderbilt.edu/

Summary:

· People with disabilities long ago did not have the same opportunities as those who do today. Most were institutionalized, whereas today they are given the chance to be in general education classrooms with students who do not have disabilities. They are put into what is called inclusive classrooms.

· Many efforts have been made to accommodate the needs of children with disabilities into inclusive classrooms. The least restrictive environment (LRE) has helped to make this possible. The LRE is an individual plan for how to best include students with disabilities into a general education classroom. “Students are placed within LRE based on their strengths, challenges, and motivation” (p.12). LRE allows the students to be moved from more restrictive to less restrictive classrooms as the need arises. This is in order to meet the needs of the students in the best way possible.

· Normalization- “provides students with opportunities, social interactions, and experiences that parallel those of society to adults and children with disabilities” (p.15).

· Advances in technology have been used to assist a person with disabilities.

· IDEA “mandates that free and appropriate education be provided to all students with disabilities, regardless of the nature and severity of their disability.” It has been changed overtime in effort to be more inclusive for those with disabilities.

· Pages 31-32 record the results of a study done on the impact that inclusion had on students with disabilities which seemed to show that the impact was mostly positive. These students seemed to thrive in the inclusive classroom.

· Studies show that students who are in inclusive classrooms and do not have disabilities also seemed to thrive academically. They also thrived socially as they tended to be more apt to make friends with and stand up for students with disabilities.

· Educators attitudes about inclusion vary. Some worry that they will ba overworked and that the pace of the classroom will be really slowed down making it hard for them to keep up with the standards they must teach in the school year. Others find that it is a positive setting to teach in.

· Families with children with disabilities tend to have very positive attitudes about the inclusive classroom.

· Families with children without disabilities tend to have mixed feelings about their children being in an inclusive classroom. Some worry about it slowing down the pace of the classroom. Others find in socially beneficial for their children to be in a classroom with other children who have disabilities because it allows for their children to learn to be more accepting of people with disabilities.