The Most Important Belief You Need to Design an Inclusive Special Education Program
I strongly believe that school principals are uniquely positioned to grow inclusive special education programs in their school and, as equity focused leaders, have a specific responsibility to shift the instructional, cultural, and systems practices in their school that will create the conditions for scaling inclusive practices across every classroom in their school.
While the work of implementing inclusive practices in classrooms will exist intimately with teachers, principals are the one who are best positioned to create the enabling conditions for inclusion of students with IEP to be scalable and successful.
Before we dive deeper into why taking proactive ownership over the special education program at your school is critical, I want to first ground us in an expansive vision for inclusive education. While some may think of inclusion as being just about which classroom the student is placed in, or whether or not the teacher of record has a general education or special education credential, I want to submit for your consideration a vision of inclusion that goes beyond placement.
I invite you to consider that inclusion is about more than placement. Imagine with me a vision for inclusion that is about reimagining general education classrooms as a learning space where the rightful presence of all kinds of learners is affirmed and celebrated as undeniably necessary and valuable. Pause here and reflect for a minute, what comes up for you when considering this expanded vision? Does this vision resonate with you or feel unrealistic or unattainable?
If those of us in the community who are more analytical and might not immediately resonate with the idea of reimagining the purpose and function of general education classrooms within the context of inclusion, consider that as a special education service delivery model, inclusion is more cost-effective than continuing to maintain a special education program that is disjointed from your general education program. Further, the professional development you will invest in to grow the capacity of your staff to operate within an inclusive special education program will grow the capacity of your team to respond to the needs of other persistently marginalized student groups, making this shift a school wide capacity building initiative that will have a long term positive return on the investment.
Given that students of color, students who are multilingual learners, and students from low socio-econimic status are over-represented in special education, centering your staff’s growth around being responsive to the needs of students with IEPs is effectively centering your staff’s capacity to meet the needs of all of our persistently underserved student subgroups. As such, from my vantage point, inclusion of students with IEPs at the school site level is the highest leverage equity initiative a principal can choose to lead. Again, take a minute and pause and reflect here. What feels true to you about what has been shared? What feels aspirational, but something you know you will need support with to bring into reality?
If upon reflection, this message resonates with you and you want to move forward but you don’t quite see how, I recommend again that you start with vision. The first question to ask yourself in service of adopting the belief that as a school principal you need to actively lead your special education program is:
What might it look like to design and implement a professional development plan that uniquely supports my general education and special education staff to successfully collaborate and teaches them to see the positive impact their collective effort can have on positive outcomes for students with IEPs?
Beginning with this question is a tangible way to make forward progress. If at any point while reading this edition of the Inclusive Ed Leader newsletter, you thought to yourself, “Yes, this makes sense to me, but I don’t know where to begin…,” inside the Aligned PD coaching experience, I can help you answer your question of how to get started and where to begin.
Through a combination of customized made for you PD resources and facilitated PD design sessions, I will guide you through how to create and facilitate a PD plan to meet the unique needs of our staff, in service of the unique needs of your students with IEPs at your school. If you know that a supportive coaching model is the kind of professional development experience you need as a leader to actualize your vision for inclusion in your school, message me or use the “Book an Appointment” link on my profile to schedule a discovery call so that we can brainstorm what working together could look like.
To dig a little deeper into this question around what might PD that uniquely supports your gen ed and sped teachers to collaborate and actualize their positive collective impact look like, two areas to consider are
PD that supports general education teachers with unit planning using the Understanding by Design framework to ensure that what students need to know and show is clear and can be easily communicated to special education teachers,staff, students, and families.
PD that supports special education teachers with consistently co-planning with general education teachers and bringing expertise around high leverage instructional and behavioral practices for students with IEPs, as well as a strong understanding of Universal Design for Learning principles and aligned strategies
Supporting each group with understanding and practicing these unique contributions they can bring into a collaborative relationship sets the foundation for new possibilities like developing a shared, group identity that when they work together they can achieve greater outcomes for students with IEPs than when they work in isolation.
