Are Inclusion programs all inclusive?

On Tuesday, January 29th the Urban Educators Cohort of MSU's College of Education brought in a panel of urban educators to talk about special education in the urban setting.
Panelists included:

Lori Abbott
Principal, Gier Park Elementary
Lansing School District

Virginia Acheson
Principal, Sheridan Road Elementary School
Lansing School District

Elizabeth Coverson
Teacher, Schulze Elementary School
Detroit Public Schools

Troy Mariage
Professor, College of Education
Michigan State University

Charles Tutt
Teacher, Holmes Gender Academy
Flint Community Schools

Jessica Henning
MSU sophomore

Katie Murphy
MSU freshman

Shalayla Williams
MSU freshman

Dr. Troy Mariage began the guided panel discussion by discussion what he calls the Deficit Problem within the current educational setting. Teachers and experts have become so good at identifying a student’s weaknesses and those areas where students struggle that they’ve completely lost the notion of highlighting students’ strengths. As special educators one of our biggest tasks is working with our students and their parents. Dr. Mariage went on to stress how much it means to the parents of a child who receives special education services to find their child’s strengths. Parents of children with severe cognitive impairments or children with physical impairments have spent a significant amount of time with doctors who tell them everything that’s “wrong” with their child. Most parents of children with special needs need someone to find something “right” with their child.

Elizabeth Coverson is a Kindergarten teacher at Schulze Elementary in Detroit, a school that has failed to meat AYP for 4 consecutive years. She admits that a school such as Schulze gets a lot of help from the government, however, she said “…it’s not the students who are failing, it’s not the teachers, it’s the system.”

Charles Tutt is a middle school/high school teacher of Civics, Government, and History. Charles teaches in the Flint area in a school that is known for its inclusion program. During his talk, Charles mentioned the push-out, push-in program that his school has for students of all academic backgrounds.

Lori Abbott, principle at Gier Elementary (here in Lansing) was a special educator for many years before she assumed her administrative role. As an individual who has put in the hours of being a teacher and is now in a leadership role for a group of teachers, she believes that the key to special education is training the teachers. General education teachers need to be trained on how to work with special education teachers and special education students. One of the training methods she has brought to Gier Elementary is differentiated instruction. She believes that it is her staff’s responsibility to “…meet the needs of all of the students in your room, no matter how many students you have, no matter the differences in their academic abilities”. She has also spent time training her staff in classroom management. When asked why, she responded, “What separates a general education teacher from a special education teacher? Classroom management.”

As I walk away from this panel event, I can’t help but question if inclusion programs are really all that inclusive? Both Elizabeth Coverson and Charles Tutt claim to work in buildings who provide full inclusion. Perhaps my personal view of inclusion is skewed, but I do not view Elizabeth Coverson’s Kindergarten class as a fully inclusive program because she mentioned that once hearing impaired students are fluent in ASL the student and his/her interpreter come into her classroom. Is this full inclusion, or inclusion with accommodations?
Charles Tutt mentioned the push-out, push-in program that his building offers, after discussing how well known his school is for their full inclusion program. Any student can go see a push-out, push-in teacher for assistance with the work they were assigned in the general education classroom.
Virginia Acheson, principle at Sheridan Road Elementary (also in Lansing) went on to say that students in her building (K-5) don’t know they are receiving special education services. She claims that they are not viewed differently for going to see another teacher for reading and that “special education just isn’t an issue for younger students”. Whether going to another classroom for an academic area is or isn’t an issue for the students in her building, I wonder about the students in Charles Tutt’s middle school and high school classrooms?

E-Notebook Submission

Discuss what you are thinking for your lesson plan. What did you consider in making that decision?

Considering the fact that I have not been to field placement since Thursday, Jan. 17th, I am not that far along in the planning phases of my future literacy lesson plan.
However, before I dive into planning this lesson I want to get with my CT and talk about the thematic units she'll be covering this semester. My plan is to do that when I return to the field on Monday, Feb 4th.

Although I am not prepared to discuss the prompt provided for this week my brain is still very much wrapped up on the "new form" of discussion that we read about in Almasi. As I was reading the article I couldn't help but think there was nothing wrong with the form of discussion that she deems "recitation". After all, this is the only form of discussion that I have ever seen in a classroom. Teachers are always facilitators and as a student, I've always wanted to tell the teacher exactly what he or she wants to hear...So what happens when the teacher becomes a moderator and only interjects in the discussion to direct students on the right path?
The benefits of a true discussion, one in which the students are learning from each other and making connections for new information to fit into their schema of prior knowledge, are clear. One of the most beneficial advantages that I see from a true discussion is the social acceptance that comes from one peer evaluating another peers response. There is less fear/anxiety of saying a wrong answer, because you're not telling it to the teacher, who "knows" all the answers. Instead, you're sharing a thought with a group of classmates, some of which you'll probably convince.
There are more benefits of this kind of discussion that Almasi goes on to mention, however, I want to stop and apply this kind of learning tool to my field placement. In a room full of 27 Kindergartners, I am a bit hesitant about jumping into an Almasi discussion. What about the student who has something to say about everything? Or the students who can't process a discussion with such limited structure? In my opinion, this type of discussion has a place in education, however, I do not believe that it is in my CT's classroom, nor most Kindergarten classrooms.
Kindergartners are socially accepting. They want to be friends with everyone and they think classmate is a synomym for friend. They write stories about each other everyday. Do they really need evalutation from their peers? Sure they do. Does it need to come from a class discussion? I don't believe so.

Portfolio: Expectations

Discuss what your expectations are for this course and how they are or aren’t being met.

Like any other student, I expect to learn material related to the topic of this course. Math is one of those subjects that I’m a little unsure of teaching just because I don’t know how to teach it. I understand it great, most of the time that is. However, I have several wrinkles in the teaching application of math that need to be ironed out.
Therefore, from this class I hope to gain some real applications that I can take and use. To be honest, I’m a little tired of reading about great methods of teaching and never having the opportunity to see them. This is something that I have struggled with in my classes at MSU, both within the college of education and outside. My style of learning is completely opposite of soaking in a reading; I need to see it and be able to reflect upon what I’ve seen and what I’ve read.
Based on the classes we’ve had thus far, I feel like that is happening and I’m excited to continue on. During the class session that we brainstormed all the different ways to come up with a solution to a problem it was amazing, to me, to listen to all these different ways of thinking about the same problem and coming up with the answer.
Math is a naturally differentiated topic to teach because we all have different experiences that forces our lines of inquiry when approaching a problem to differ. Perhaps that’s why math seems a little too complicated for me right now. Expanding my own thoughts and seeing something through a different point of view is often a task that I don’t embrace with open arms. I’m a very concrete person and also very feeling-oriented.
My fiancé and I differ in that he is very logically minded and rarely sees room for emotions to serve as logic, whereas I always am more concerned with the way people feel about something. That being said, it should be easy for me to ignore the logic-however I’m finding that I have great difficulty with making sense of other’s thought processes. Therefore, my hope is that this class will force me to examine different methods of teaching and applying math so that I can become a better teacher.
Lastly, I have high expectations of myself for this class. This is really the last education course that I will be taking before my internship and I really feel an urge to soak up as much as possible. I will come to class with readings complete and I will strive to learn as much possible from this course. I expect that my peers will do the same so that we can all learn together.

E-Notebook Submission

What do you know about differentiation and how it is utilized in teaching?

As a special education major, I know that differentiated lesson planning is what my future is all about. There is no such thing as a special education curriculum; rather it is up to the teacher and the IEP team to come up with accommodations for students with special needs to access the general education curriculum.
For me personally, special education is really just effective teaching. Students with special needs that have an IEP or a legal document that highlights the academic areas for which they need a little help accessing the materials need teachers who are willing to try different things, to be creative, and to really care that the student gets it. There is nothing special about special education. Every student is special in his or her own way(s). As a future educator, it is my job to make sure that every single student who walks through my door feels loved and accepted and special.
In order to accomplish this, I believe that it is important for me to understand how to bring differentiation into my classroom.
With the extreme proficiency levels stated in NCLB and the push of inclusion programs it is easy to see that future educators of students with special needs are going to be working side-by-side general education teachers. Students who come to me for special education services will likely spend some portion of their time in the general education classroom and I need to know how to work with that general education teacher and make accommodations to his/her lesson plans for the students who need multimodal lessons.
The extent at which differentiation is used in typical classrooms today is a figure that I am unaware of, however, via the experience I’ve been gaining through my field placements, I do not believe that it is highly utilized.
I believe that one of the problems with the public education system in the United States is a general problem of ownership. Too many general education teachers see students with special needs as the “special education teachers kids” and not their own. Special educations teachers are just as guilty. Until teachers begin to work together for the bettering of the student, at the individual level, this problem will not go away.

"Like in the Noodle head story!"

Although they are only 5 or 6 years old, Kindergartners are smart and they're brains are constantly building didactic connections to further develop their individual line of inquiry.

I got to spend some time today working with two below-average students on writing. After nearly 12 minutes of writing time, each of these student had barely finished their quick-sketch drawing that they are required to do, to get their brains ready, before their write in their daily journal. Another commonality among these two students is a severe lack of motivation. They are both very easily distracted--and there any many distractions in a class of 25 Kindergartners!
As I began working with the first student I wanted to find out what he was planning on writing about, and how what he was drawing was related to that. When I asked him what his story was going to be about, he said "I don't know." Then I asked him what he was drawing and he again replied, "I don't know." Clearly he was drawing something; the question is, was he to shy to share with me what he was thinking about writing about or was he choosing not to share with me for no apparent reason, or, does he really not have a thought going through his mind about what he wants to write and how the image he is drawing could relate to something that he could write about? I'm not an expect on learning disabilities so therefore it is unfair of me to suggest that there is a medical reason for his lack of sequential cognitive work. However, his work, based on other students in the class, is very below par and his daily actions suggest confusion and a lack of the mental and emotional capacity to function in a classroom with 24 peers. He is so distracted by what everyone else in the classroom is doing that he simply does not have time to do his own work. He cries when another friend uses what he believes to be his pencil, he had a meltdown today when he couldn't carry all of his belongings from the closet to his seat and completely shut down, he constantly has to tell my CT what other students are doing if he does not approve, and because of all these things and more he is falling behind.
Once I finally got him in a setting where he wasn't distracted by others and I clearly communicated to him that my expectation of him was that he finished his work we were able to come up with a story for him to write.
Then it was onto another student who could not discipline herself enough to focus. This student typically spends more time than necessary completing her quick sketches and many times her pictures are difficult to connect to her text. I believe that I realized why today...
This student cannot hold onto a thought long enough to write it down. She wants to verbalize 5-6 sentence stories but she won't stop talking after each one to write it down. Therefore, she wants to add elaborate detail to her pictures because the thought process behind what she is drawing makes complete sense to her, however, when she goes to write the story out she cannot recall her previous thought process. So, after she verbally communicated with me the 5 sentence story that she was going to write today I summarized it in one complete sentence back to her. She nodded in approval, so I told her that that was the one sentence she was going to write. I repeated it again to her but when she began writing she started in a different spot. The sentence that we agreed upon was "I seen Hannah Montana at the store." The first few attempts at writing began with "Hannah Montana" and "store". I used several different approaches for getting her to say the sentence before she wrote and also trying to say the sentence as she was writing. However, nothing seemed to be working. I decided to start using very basic signs with the words of her sentence as we were repeating it again. We verbally said the sentence aloud twice, with me using the signs. Then I asked her to write it. When she got stuck I used those signs without any speech and she was able to get the sentence down on paper.
What I realized with this student is that writing is challenging, speaking is not. She isn't looking for a challenge, so she does everything she can to avoid challenging tasks.

The best part of my day was when the students were sitting in their math circle on the rug and my CT asked them how she could count the number of noses in the room. She then said, "I'm only going to count the kid noses". After taking suggestions from the students and walking through the steps suggested, my CT asked anyone if they knew how many noses were in the room. Even though there were 21 students in class today and both of the ways they had previously counted gave them 21, one student still said 22. When my CT asked him why he thought there were going to be 22 noses he said that she had forgot to count her own nose. Quickly one boy said, "like in the noodle head story!" Everyone burst into laughter because they had heard a story about a family of noodle heads that couldn't figure out how to count correctly. This is the kind of connection that these students make on a daily basis and too often they are ignored. In the classroom, my CT embraces the process of making connections to prior learning. But I wonder how many times at home these children are ignored when they make a simple connection to something they learned at school because their parents don't immediately understand it. If I wouldn't have been in my placement the day that my CT read this story, I wouldn't have got it.

Portfolio: Analysis of Student Work

The assignment:
Students were asked to evaluate their own names and identify the number of letters in their name. Using classroom resources, such as the white board which has all students’ names listed alphabetically and individual name tags at each desk, the students were to find at least 2 fellow classmates who have shorter names, longer names, and names with equal letter-if possible. Each peers name was to be recorded in the appropriate column.

Student #1:
I chose to analyze this students’ work because I feel like she is a very above-average student, especially in mathematics. I have been observing this student since September of 2007 and was instantly drawn to her keen intellect. She is an out-going student and always eager to help other students at her table finish their work.
I was not surprised to see that this student’s paper had a “Great” noted at the top from my CT and had more than the required number of names in the appropriate columns. In addition, every other students name was spelled correctly.
From my time in this classroom, and observing this student, I know that she probably knew most of her peers’ names without using the classroom resources around her. On a daily basis she writes about friends in her journal-and at this age level she refers to all of her peers as friends.

Student #2:
I chose to analyze this students’ work because she is a below-average student in multiple subject areas as well as her verbal skills. Once a week she attends speech therapy, a pull-out program during mathematics and/or science. This particular student lacks motivation to complete her in-class work. On numerous occasions I have sat with this student and tried to keep her on track during disruptful classroom settings. A majority of these times have resulted in her actually completing her work due to the fact that she was forced to stay on task.
I was most surprised to see that this student displayed some interesting writing samples on her worksheet. Instead of writing a peer’s full name, she only wrote a few letters. In another situation, she wrote a name backwards. However, there were also at least 3 names on her worksheet that she spelled correctly. Most surprising to me was that she put her own name in the longer name column. I have a difficult time understanding her line of inquiry and rationale for completing the task in this manner.

Student #3:
This student is, for lack of a better term, a “social butterfly”. She will try to talk her way out of anything; not in a convincing manner, but rather instead just wasting so much time talking. It is easy for me to assume, after observing this student, that the distractions of talking with other classmates while walking around the class and looking at everyone’s name charts was too much for her to handle. She did not finish the worksheet, nor did she get any answers correct-the first time.
I am unaware of the circumstances, but for some reason this student redid this worksheet on the back of her paper. After she re-did this assignment she put at least one correct name in each column.
When I return to my field placement I will ask my CT about the reasons for which she re-did this assignment.

"There's Monday and there's Tuesday..."

I felt good to get back into the groove of my field placement today. Except today was a little different. This is the first day that I've gone to my CT's classroom in the morning, more specifically to observe literacy.When I walked into the classroom this morning my CT and the students were singing...imagine that :) However, they were singing a days of the week song that has taught them all 7 days of the week. Listening to them and carefully observing my CT purposefully stop singing while the students continued showed me that they know this song. They're not just repeating what she is saying; instead they are singing it and they've probably been singing it since they started Kindergarten. Which forces me to ask the question, do they comprehend that they are repeating the days of the week or have they memorized this song that they know they are going to sing every morning? It would be interesting to me to see if they could recognize the days of the week in a random order, not in the same pattern that the song repeats.Back to the main focus of the day...Literacy.In my placement last year I observed a 1st grade teacher who taught straight from her basal reader. After talking about my observations with my TE class as a whole, I was informed by my instructor for TE 301 that this is not a good approach to teaching literacy. Holding the basal reader in your hand/lap and reading from it is a sign of unpreparation. I was working with a young CT at the time and I sided with my TE instructor on this issue, keeping in mind that my CT probably just didn't know any better. This semester, I am working with a CT who has been teaching for 13 years and who I would consider a master teacher. She knows what she is doing and she does it very well. She knows how to reach/teach Kindergartners at their level. So, I was very surprised this morning when I observed her teaching from her basal reader. There it was; this binder that is apparently bound to every teachers' palm. And she read from it; word for word on some pages and slight glances at other times. Do I think she's a "bad" teacher? NO. She's an experienced teacher and she is not unprepared to teach. Does the fact that she didn't memorize an entire story from the basal reader and she had to read from it mean she is not a good example for me? Certainly not. The difference between my CT this semester and my previous experience is that it is VERY obvious that my current CT has read the material from the basal reader before she sits down in her chair and calls all her students to the rug. She knows what she is doing and she knows exactly where the literacy lesson is going and how it's going to lead into tomorrows lesson. She's done her homework.The story that my CT read aloud was about a Noodle family. Not only were these family members made of different noodles, they were all "noodle-heads". After explaining this term to the students, she began reading. But before she did she informed the students that good readers listen to details and can retell a story even after it's over because they were listening so well. She proceeded to tell the students that once they had listened to this story, they were going to act it out so she could see what good listeners they were. Watching the students act this story out was the highlight of my day. I've never seen children so young get so detailed about a task. They wanted to repeat the words from the story exactly and they did the story justice with their acting abilities. There was fake crying, there was screaming, there was a hysterical mother and a father who didn't know how to count. They were great! And then I began to think about how much more this story is connected to each students schema because not only did they sit and listen to it, they also seen some of their closest friends acting it out. They laughed about it not once, but twice. They heard it while my CT was reading it and they proved that they remembered it by acting it out. Repetition is key in education. Repetition has it's place, but how do we stay away from days of the week songs that have to follow a specific tune and pattern? Where does the agent of change come in? How do we ensure that because a child can repeat something, that they infact know it?

E-Notebook Submission

What is your dialect? What do you say or do that can be attributed to your cultural environment? What can be attributed to the digital or medial environment?

I feel accurate saying that Standard English is my dialect (especially after reading the Codeswitching article by Wheeler and Swords). However, I must admit that my rural, small town upbringing has had some impact on me and my family. Coming to Michigan State has, in a sense, pulled me out of the so-called "redneck" culture and I feel that I do speak with a more proper language than I used to.
I don't want to blow things out of proportion, but my father has much more of the hillbilly-like dialect characteristics than anyone in my family. However, he has no post-secondary education and was born and raised in the same community that I was brought up in. At no time in my life have I ever felt the need to correct my fathers language, however, there have been times when he asked me to type something and I've had to proofread and re-proofread what he wrote down. *That's another highlight of my small town life, there's no high speed Internet service around; not that it would matter much, because my family doesn't even own a computer!

I would associate the type of culture shock that I experienced coming to MSU with my current dialect. However, my dispositions and personal morals also have had a major impact on the language that I choose to use. Being a mentor in the residence halls has exposed me to individuals, very different from myself, who value different things. I'll never forget when I heard someone say they were going to "get crunk". This was foreign language to me because I had never heard the term or used it before.
I was also first officially introduced to AAVE in the residence halls. For me, this was a totally new language and it was frustrating for me to always have to ask to have something repeated because I couldn't understand what someone was saying.
However, something clicked inside of me back when I read the Wheeler & Swords article on Codeswitching for the first time back in TE 301. Different dialects are called different because that's what they are; they're not wrong!

In terms of the digital environment that I see myself in, the gap between my family and I is much larger. I'll never forget the day that I told my mother that I made a web page. I seriously thought she thought I was a genius. Computers are foreign to her, and both of my parents are very intimidated by them. Granted my mother uses one for work, she really only turns it on and selects the program she's going to use and has no other interactions with it. My father, a self-employed farmer, could save himself so much time by paying rent online and keeping track of crop prices online, as well as many other things, but it will never happen. He doesn't see the need and he gets very frustrated with technology. He says he'll never run out of lead, whereas a computer can crash and you can loose everything.
For me personally, I view myself as somewhat technologically savvy. I feel like I know a lot more about technology after taking CEP 416, here at MSU.
I am also very supportive of bringing technology into my future classroom because I see the interactions that young children have with technology and I believe you should reach kids with things that interest them-even if it seems a little scary :)

Assessments...

Today was my first day back in the classroom after a nice and relaxing winter break. Break didn't slow our learning down though. My CT had me finishing math assessments today with some students that she hadn't caught up with. I was basically just giving students a sequence of numbers on paper, in front of them, and asking them to point to the number, say it aloud, and move on to the next. In the mean time, I was making a check mark above the number on the child's document if they got it right, writing the number that they said instead of the real number if they were guessing or confused, and drawing a dot if they gave me no answer at all. A majority of the students had really improved since the last time they were tested in September. The assessment itself had 3 sets of numbers (1-10, 10-20, 20+). In September, if a student got an entire section correct, I didn't have to re-test them. However, of the few students who got an entire section correct, it was the first section only. There were lots of dots on the rest of the page. Today, though, the students were zooming through the number sets. The most mistakes, in the class in general, were with the numbers 21, 31, and 33. Almost everytime I tested a student he/she replied "12, 13, 13-3" for these three numbers. This is very interesting to me after having watched these same students participate in the morning routine of counting the number of days of school they've had. I assume that this chart is fairly common in a lot of lower elementary classrooms because it was very familiar to me; using straws to make ones-tens-hundreds, all while counting the number of days of school they have had. Each morning, my CT adds a new strawand when there is a completed bundle of 10 straws they move the bundle from the ones to the tens and they count up to whatever number they are at. If they have 70 sticks, they count from 1 to 70. The students are saying these numbers aloud, but are they really seeing them enough to put the sound of the number with the shape of 2 numbers together (i.e., 21, 31, 33)? This is a concern to me because I am forced to question whether or not the students are able to recognize that a 3 and a 3 next to each other is the number 33, not 3-3. Which forces me to think about teaching the concept of twenty, thirty, etc... For most of these Kindergartners, the idea of counting double digit numbers is abstract. Most of them are 5 of 6 years old and they are using their fingers to count. Their age is usually the highest number they want to count to at any given time because they just haven't been introduced to other numbers--on average. Obviously some students have more prior knowledge when they walk through those classroom doors but what about those students who have never read books with Mom or Dad before they go to bed at night? Who've never counted on their fingers? Who've never played hide-and-seek and used numbers? It happens, and I believe that it happens more often than we really think. One thing about my CT's classroom that amazes me is the amoung of young mothers. I have seen several mothers come into the school since I've been coming and I'm amazed that they have children in school. They seem so young to me! I give them 100% credit for raising their child and taking responsibility, however it still blows my mind that these girls, some of them my age, are bringing their children to school when I'm finishing school. Something is to be said for the trend of younger parents and children with less and less prior knowledge when they walk through our classroom doors. Based on NO scientific evidence, my theory is that unplanned pregnancies are a financial burden and young mothers cannot afford to not work. They have to work, along with their significant other to support themselves and a child. When I was born, my mother took 3 years off work and raised me. I spent every day with her and I knew how to count, read, and tie my shoes before I started Kindergarten. She had the means to stay at home and take the extra time to teach me those things. However, when you're 20 years old with a small child and only a limited income, sometimes those things are luxuries that you cannot afford. Does that mean you're child should suffer? NO. As teachers, we need to be prepared to work with all children and all academic levels. It may be one of the most challenging tasks as a teacher, but it is also the most rewarding. Leading a child towards that "a-ha" moment is priceless.

E-Notebook Submission

Determine 2 personal goals you would like to pursue during our time together. What will you gain from this course? Provide an explanation of why you chose those goals.

Goal #1: To apply class material to field observations.

This was a very easy goal for me to come up with because it is important to me. I believe that we, as teacher candidates, are told too often to make observations without a real focus. I have pages upon pages of observations I've recorded from various placement settings that I've been in. The one thing in common with all of these observations is that they stop at the end of the page. Rarely, if ever, have I taken an observation from my CT's classroom and analyzed it to the point of pulling out pieces from MSU class materials and pursuing my own line of inquiry based on what I've learned in class and seen in the field. I've also never taken the time to question my observations, as most of them are facts. I am challenging myself to make more observations that are opinions or interpretations, not matter of fact statements that require no thought process at all.
For me, this is an important goal to set for myself because I am a very concrete thinker. When I see a problem, I want to search the pages of the textbook for an answer. This is how I have been brought up. However, the thought of abstract thinking is appealing to me and I want to move past the need for finding the "right" answer on paper to building my own inquiry and gathering more understanding of the different practices that my CT's use.
Going the extra mile to reach for that reflective answer instead of a reguritated observation is what I am striving for.

Goal #2: