Acton Public Schools

Acton, MA

I have been asked to talk about how life has changed for the classroom teacher in the last 4-7 years, with specific emphasis on the effect of Inclusion in the life of the classroom. I will get there, but first I think it’s important to understand that, in the overall landscape of the classroom and therefore of the teacher’s life, the sands keep shifting and the earth keeps shaking. "Inclusion" is but one change in the topography of the last decade, which has seen enormous shifts in emphasis, in approach, in the content and in the sheer volume of what we teach. There is Cooperative Learning, Assertive Discipline, Project-Based Learning, Bloom’s Taxonomy with its hierarchy of thinking skills, Critical Thinking, Multiple Intelligences, Portfolios, Alternative or Authentic Assessments, Cross-Curricular Integration, The Frameworks, High Stakes Testing, to name a few. And with each shift, the pedagogical buck eventually stops at the teacher’s desk, demanding study, demanding application, experimentation, imagination, demanding time.

A classroom space looks different now too. There is more machinery in classrooms and in schools, more wires, more extension cords, as we try to retrofit our outdated buildings to incorporate hardware, software, and multi-media presentations into our teaching lives (but still no telephones). Learning centers and clusters of desks are more prevalent than the traditional rows. There are no more class pets, because of the number of children in our schools with asthma and allergies.

The classroom is not as silent now. Children are working together in small groups, in pairs. The teacher is no longer "the sage on the stage," but rather "the guide on the side;" the teacher facilitates, the teacher mediates, the teacher studies, the teacher experiments, the teacher applies, the teacher spends time.

We have also added to the traditional teaching plate other much-needed courses in conflict resolution, drug and alcohol resistance education, technology instruction, foreign language instruction, health education, sexual harassment prevention. In education, we have always been very good at addition; we tend to have great difficulty with subtraction. And into these crowded days, we also ask classroom teachers to find much needed time for children to read quietly, to write, to reflect, to discuss, to investigate, to explore, to construct knowledge, to process, to revisit and revise, to reconstruct and to make meaning. For the classroom teacher, this takes study, and this takes time.

Into this charged landscape come the children---all of them. We have always had in our classrooms students with diagnosed and undiagnosed disabilities in the mild to moderate range, with an occasional and usually memorable child whose needs were more severe or demanding. We now have names for some of these children, thanks to books recently published: The Hurried Child, The Shy Child, The Out-of-Sync Child, The Explosive Child. These children have been in classrooms all along, but they now consititute sub-groupings among the "regular" education population. Still others lead difficult, or even secret, lives outside of school, the consequences of which are often played out in classrooms every day. Each deserves attention; each deserves study; each deserves time.

The inclusion model has legitimized and brought into our classrooms an even broader, deeper, more intense and, in some cases, altogether different level of disability.

Tourette Syndrome

ADHD

PDD

Asberger’s Syndrome

Mod./Severe Mood Disorder

Muscular Dystrophy

Hearing Impairment

Autism

Clinical Depression

Mod./Severe Language Impairment

Bipolar Disorder

Sensory Integration Disorder

****

Visual Impairment

Head Injury resulting in brain damage

Significant cognitive delays

Down Syndrome

Oppositional Defiant Disorder

Severe Immune Deficiency

Mod./Severe Respiratory Issues

Seizure Disorders

This is a list, by no means complete, of some of the disabilities which we now find in many of our inclusive classrooms. The first group contains the names of disabilities of students who have been in my classroom over the last few years. Other classrooms in my building currently have, or formerly had students with the disabilities listed in the second group. There are five elementary schools in my district, so this list does not represent the full spectrum of the inclusion students in the community. This year, I have four inclusion students in my fourth grade class of twenty-six students. One of these students spends most of his day in a CASE collaborative classroom. He joins us for library, lunch, and specials. His teacher has come into our classroom to show us how he uses his communication board, and to answer any pertinent questions related to his disability. Of the remaining twenty-one students, several have been identified as students with mild to moderate disabilities which require IEP’s, and a couple of others are in the process of being identified.

It is now the responsibility of the classroom teacher to educate each of these children, to incorporate that child into the daily fabric of the classroom, to make both planned and spontaneous judgments about that child’s ability to cope with the academic, social, physical and emotional aspects of life in a public school classroom. This responsibility can challenge us at our most basic level, to connect with another human being whose particular package we may be meeting for the first time. No book or expert can predict with absolute certainty the outcome of a particular student’s integration into a classroom. We function in real time, with real kids, and it can be real different from teaching as we knew it just a few years ago. Many of these diagnoses are new to us, so we read and we learn and we listen and we watch and we continue to teach.

…But the classroom teacher does not accomplish this alone, and here is another major change in the landscape of the classroom. The nature and degree of disability often require the services of a number of in-house and outside specialists. At any given time, the classroom teacher may receive visits, phone calls, emails from consultants, therapists, and specialists to assess, evaluate, prescribe, modify, observe and help. The classroom teacher might meet or communicate weekly, monthly, sometimes daily to make decisions about how to modify existing curriculum to suit a particular child’s needs.

There are a lot more adults in our schools. Seven to ten years ago, the school in which I teach had a staff of about thirty-five people, including support staff. That number is now between 85 and 90, with the number of students remaining about the same. On the first day of school this year, a student in my class asked, "Why are there so many grown-ups in this classroom?"

We wear identification badges in our school system, so that children can be reassured that the many adults who now walk the halls of our schools are indeed supposed to be there.

Many of our classrooms have full-time assistants who are assigned to one or more inclusion students. Although directly supervised by the Special Education staff, inclusion assistants also need feedback from the classroom teacher to meet as many of the classroom curriculum expectations as possible. The teacher might also need to consider how to organize the day so as to reap maximum benefit from the additional staff assigned to that classroom. For example, sometimes it becomes possible to do more small group work with another pair of hands in the classroom, if that pair of hands happens to be available. Scheduling now needs to take into consideration the presence or absence of specific children in the classroom. All of this requires study, it requires coordination, and it requires time: time to jot down observations or questions, time to consult with the experts and specialists, time to check with the nurse (I sometimes have forms to fill out which monitor the effectiveness of a child’s medication), time to meet with the parents, time to respond to daily and weekly emails, time to attend meetings, time to coordinate schedules, time to think, time to plan. The number of decisions a teacher now has to make on a daily, hourly, minute-to-minute basis has increased not arithmetically, but geometrically.

Other aspects of the changes in the life of the classroom teacher also merit

discussion, such as the time and energy required to document and keep records (we are all very "up tight" about this these days), the need to work with the families of inclusion students as they cope with new settings and new demands, the need to respond to the twenty children in "regular education," children who may be curious about the inclusion of those whose profiles might be quite different from their own and quite new to them, the need to respond to the parents of children in regular education, who bring with them their own ideas and opinions and personal histories and concerns.

If we were taking a field trip, I would wear a fanny pack (much larger than seven years ago) which would contain, no doubt, a cell phone, and I would carry medications which I might dispense at various times during the day. (I have had to start wearing a watch in the last few years for this purpose.) I would have called beforehand to inquire about handicap access, and to let them know that we would be bringing additional chaperones. I would be more vigilant than I was seven years ago. I would have a lot more to think about.

Part of the dilemma for the classroom teacher, I feel, is how to live with state mandates which, when translated into day-to-day classroom operation, seem to contradict each other: on the one hand are the curriculum frameworks, content-driven and constructed to cover broadly and deeply (which is in itself not possible). On the other is our obligation to explore and to find ways to bring into our classrooms a population of students we may not have worked with before, which requires flexibility and change. The curriculum frameworks are static; inherent in the framework of inclusion is its state of flux. In the inclusion model, we build the ship as we sail it, and although we have a destination, we don’t know the length of the trip, and we aren’t quite sure about the exact itinerary.

It falls to the teacher to somehow find a way to have these double mandates co-exist side by side, to raise the bar on standards and expectations while welcoming into their class a population which often, by its very nature, requires a different set of standards and expectations. If inclusion is to succeed in public education, some efforts need to be made to appreciate the complexity and the diversity of the needs of the students in our classrooms, and to provide the financial and legislative supports to make it work. It will take study, and it will take time.

Deborah Hess

McCarthy-Towne School

Acton, MA