Our school is lucky to be very well-resourced with assistants. All classrooms in the ES from pre-kindergarten to grade 3 have a full time assistant and grades 4 and 5 each share and assistant. This year, we have begun a more structured program for providing professional development to assistants. The better they understand what is happening in the classroom and the more skills they have, the better they can support the teachers with whom they work and thus provide better differentiation for the students in their classes. There have been sessions on the Reggio Philosophy, technology, conflict management, child-protection, and most recently, I led 2 sessions on working with students with special rights.
We began the first session by setting the stage and my vision for understanding and working with students with special rights. First, we have begun to adopt the language from Reggio schools that these are students with special rights, not special needs. This subtle change of language begins to move us in our mindset from a deficit model towards one that focuses on strengths. This is an important shift in moving from acceptance to embracing these students.
The assistants were quite keen to learn more about specific disabilities and how best to support students with these challenges. As such, we began by doing an activity inspired by a session at the Next Frontiers Inclusion Round Tables in both Genoa and Bangkok. They were given strips of paper with descriptions, definitions, strategies, and strengths common to several disabilities present in our school. They were than asked to sort these into the different named disabilities. In the process, we discovered that there is significant overlap. An important insight from this activity was that knowing the label attached to a student only helps so much. There are certain strategies and strengths that might define the student based on this label, but there is so much more that we need to know about the individual student to best meet their needs.
We finished the first session considering one case study based on a student currently at our school. Through our conversation, we began to make a list of strategies that we might use when working with students similar to the one in our case study. Before leaving, the assistants were asked to share questions they had or information they wanted so we could address it in the next session. Most of their questions were about how to help specific students in their classes. I used this information to write up similar case studies for our second session.
In the second session, we spent most of the time considering and discussing the case studies I prepared and adding to our list of possible strategies to try. After the sessions, I shared the descriptions, challenges and strengths of common disabilities, as well as our generated list of strategies based on our case studies, with all the assistants to have as a resource.
Finally, we closed the second session by highlighting that a student with a special right is not defined by that label. It means that they have special rights to help them address it and supports and strategies might be require to help them to be successful. It is not a limiting label. It only means there is work they need to do now and perhaps differently. In both the case studies and throughout our time together I kept coming back to the idea of learned helplessness. One, often unintentional, consequence of a significant amount of support in the classroom can be learned helplessness. It takes great skill and intention to keep this from happening. That means that we need to help students understand what they need to do and then leave them alone to do it. Set the goal and walk away. Do not sit with them or drag them through the work. We need to break it down into pieces they can finish independently. Otherwise the message is sent that they can’t do it by themselves and they learn to not even try until someone helps them.
As we work towards building more inclusive schools, it is important that we include all stakeholders in the development of the vision and skills required to successfully include a wider range of difference in our schools. Providing professional learning opportunities to all members of the community is one way to support this mission.