Is inclusion the best way? Pull-out vs. Push-in Special Ed?

Push-in vs. Pull-out in Special Ed starts with highly effective instruction for all students with disabilities! 

OPINION: Push-in Special Education models INCLUSION using a collaborative co-teaching model are best when the teaching professionals are highly trained. Special education gives us a great opportunity to improve teaching skills and a place to test best teaching practices for all students. Sean Taylor M.Ed

Two Perspectives on Inclusion In The United States - ERIC PDF
inclusion, equity, deficit perspective on inclusion, social constructivist stance on inclusion. Introduction. As we began ... who wrote in 1950s,. “in general, it is best not to segregate any ... In much the same way it is assumed that a relatively small ...

Ingredients for Inclusion: Lessons from the Literature - ERICPDF
of inclusion; a process of learning reflecting best evidence ... very effective way that New Zealand schools can ... DevelopingInclusive_Education_Systems.pdf.

What is Inclusion? - Core PDF
inclusion should be geared towards everyone with a disability, while others believe it should be ... needs in a classroom without proper support and services. ... This includes being able to adapt materials and change methods in order to help a.

Ten Top Tips for Inclusion in Schools PDF
TIP: The best way to be sure of anything is through good communication. This means communicating with students about their needs and feelings, communicating ...

Dispelling the Myths of Inclusive Education - Tash.org PDF
Inclusive education is the practice of educating students with disabilities in ... Myth #2: Students with the most significant disabilities do better when they are ... that using the principles of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is the best way to ...

THREE KEY AREAS NEED TO BE ADDRESSED:

ONE | Proactive Teams, Goals, and Objectives Directed (IEP): Each student that is identified needing services should receive a truly Individualized (Personalised) Education Program (IEP) that is planned and developed by a team of stakeholders. These academic or social-emotional learning programs need to identify, monitor, and screen for a student's particular strengths, weaknesses, social-emotional needs, and academic needs. The IEP Goals and Objectives should reflect the formative and summative data that is collected using the initial screenings. The student receives these special education services based on the individualized needs of the student, the goal is to maintain academic progress with peers or help them close the learning gap. These individualized services need to target a student's academic goals and or social-emotional needs. The key factors to successfully implement an IEP is high quality researched based special education services and targeted progress monitoring! A Push-in Special Education model with two teachers collaborating and co-teaching working towards a common goal is more powerful in meeting the needs of their students! 

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: 

Pull-out or Push-in Special Ed are both good options, yet Push-in is BEST when done correctly! Both options can be very effective but they are both at the mercy of a broken special education system. The biggest problem in Special Education is that it is underfunded and understaffed with highly trained teachers. Many school districts treat special education services and the associated paperwork especially the IEP's as a bureaucratic nuisance. Worse yet are the schools that warehouse special ed students, each student gets a boilerplate IEP and boilerplate services! When two teachers have a common goal and shared interest, warehousing is not likely. Special education needs to be responsive, adaptable, fluid, follow a praxis process, and IEP's need to be living documents with REAL individual Goals and Objectives. What I sadly see today is a copy and past mentality, students with identical goals and objectives, the same service, and the same exact amount of time for every child! Today the norm in special education is a single overarching IEP goal and is usually one goal that is supposed to fit all students.

TWO | Best Teaching Practices (Research-Based Methods): Response to Intervention, Pull-out or Push-in Special Ed, Child Find, Specialized Instruction (Wilson Reading Program, Direct Instruction, Orton-Gillingham Approach), Progress Monitoring and Academic Testing, Multimodal IQs Assessments, student interviews, the list is gigantic. Research-Based Methods by law are used at all phases of special education, from initial placement or to determine the time, place, and duration of services provided. Every child is a gift, every child is gifted, every child is special, each child comes to school with unique abilities, strengths, weaknesses, and real needs that affect learning. All students deserve a real individual and personalized education especially our special needs students. There are so many pathways of learning, we as educators must provide these pathways and ensure that each student has the opportunity to learn in multiple ways. Special education services need to make stronger a student's strengths and bolster a student's weakness.  

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: 

We are on the verge of so many discoveries in brain research and learning theory, yet we are slow to evolve and adapt new best teaching practices. We are overly influenced by a top-down pedagogy model in the English speaking nations. We seek to over test, over-complicate curriculum, overvalue Big Data, under encouraging each other and our students. We truly develop more problems than we solve. 

THREE | Progress Monitoring (Guideding Student Success): 

Progress monitoring is the scientifically based practice of assessing students' academic performance on a regular basis for three key purposes (Research-Based Methods):

1. To determine whether students are profiting appropriately from the instructional program, including the curriculum
2. To build more effective programs for the children who do not benefit
3. To estimate rates of student improvement

Progress monitoring is a set of weekly or monthly assessment procedures for determining the extent to which students are benefiting from classroom instruction and for monitoring the effectiveness of a corrective or compensatory curriculum. Progress monitoring should be based on grade-level norms and be based on researched best practices. Progress monitoring is used to assess a student's academic progress or lack of progress and evaluate the effectiveness of interventions and instructional support. Progress monitoring tells the teacher what your child has learned and what still needs to be taught. The school interventionist and or special education teachers should be collecting weekly/monthly data and creating graphs that show the student's progress and growth.

Progress monitoring for IEPs or SSTs: Special education teacher or intervention teacher uses short formative or summative tests to evaluate a child's academic progress. The most effective progress monitoring is done every week or two with all data graphed and shared with all the stakeholders. 

        RtI Programs, Section 504, and Special Education Programs need to use valid progress monitoring tools that measure, track and identify a student's strengths and weaknesses. Schools that do not use a suite of comprehensive progress monitoring tools will leave the students and the teachers at a disadvantage. School systems today may use some form of computer-based monitoring programs like the NWEA MAP assessments and or classroom-based assessment tools like the DRA for progress monitoring. My first four years of teaching special needs students taught me the power of using comprehensive progress monitoring program 1:1 with students multiple times every quarter. Sitting with a student and assessing them vs. sitting them in front of a computer and having them take an assessment is gold vs. bronze in my opinion. 
     Helping teachers and students increase academic skills starts with valid, comprehensive, effective tools that identify strengths and weaknesses. Diagnosing academic strengths, weaknesses, and potential problems using RtI diagnostic screens and assessments is one of the first steps. The Brigance Comprehensive Inventory of Basic Skills and The Woodcock-Johnson® III Tests of Achievement are the two I was trained to use. Both are 1:1, giving the teacher great insight into a students academic attitude/aptitude, thinking and reasoning skills, confidence, perseverance, self-regulation, and overall communication skills. You miss most of that when you rely on computer-based monitoring.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: 
You can't improve student performance in reading, math, writing, science, and social studies and or social emotional intervention programs,  if you are not actively measuring progress or the lack thereof.