My journey to becoming an advocate for inclusive education began with teaching in a “special day class,” a segregated special education classroom. I taught a class that was designed specifically for students on the autism spectrum, so at first, I was skeptical about including my students with their nondisabled peers—but once I started, I didn’t want to stop. While I eventually came to know that inclusive education provided better post-school outcomes for students with any disability category, it can be difficult to advocate for inclusion when you’re the only staff member who knows this or wants to do something about it.
If you are a special education teacher who is in this challenging position, here are some tips that may help you to begin including your students in general education. It’s one thing to talk about how inclusion is beneficial, but in order to demonstrate evidence of growth for students in both special and general education, you need to actually practice it.
Focus on Student Strengths
Whenever you are considering moving a student from a segregated environment to a more inclusive setting, the student’s strengths should be the first thing on your radar.
For example, I once worked with a fourth-grade student, Greg, who had excellent multiplication skills. Many students this age do not yet have a mastery of multiplication, and so, as I started to think about what part of the day he should be included in a typical classroom, math was a natural choice.
On one of the first days that Greg and I went to math class in the general education fourth-grade classroom, the teacher called a few students to the board to answer multiplication equations. Greg (who had little functional communication and mostly spoke in scripts), went up the board and stated the equation, “7 x 7 equals 49!” There was an audible gasp as the students clapped for Greg, as if they’d just seen him perform a magic trick.
Greg’s inclusion in this classroom and for this activity was fantastic, but it also showed how little the students thought of his skills. I realized that my students needed to be more visible within the school community.