Seven Pathways to a New Teacher Professionalism

Yes, it has been a long, long time between posts here. A new job, and the switch back from university based life to the reality of working with real schools and real children - real life, caused re-set. A reevaluation of how to use my time, and of how and perhaps why to write.

But I am back with a new mission - to begin a discussion of the known possible.  A discussion of the project we are attempting in real public schools in Virginia.  Not wealthy schools.  Not easy schools. Real schools. Complicated schools.  Schools with vast and deep challenges, as well as schools with great resources...     
                                                                           - Ira Socol  - Charlottesville, Virginia 

How do we reimagine teacher professional learning.  Let's face it, it isn't going to happen in universities and other institutions of higher education and teacher training. Those are places, even the "best" of those in the United States, of social reproduction and status preservation, not places interested in change. So it will be something which progressive schools and school systems have to do on their own - on their own, but, preferably together. 

 Enabling Opportunities, Creating Access (Click Here to See Video)

The new kind of teaching professional we need to build is something quite different in concept from that being developed in schools of education. Those institutions develop people who deliver content and manage classrooms. We need educators who enable opportunity and create access, and that requires a different group of skillsets and a different belief system.  For the most part our teachers know this... that is, they know what they do not know. They know what they need. They told us that...

I work in the Albemarle County Public Schools in Central Virginia and we've been thinking about this a lot this year. After a 12 year process of building change we attempted another acceleration this year, another "inflection in the innovation S curve" through an internal grant program called "Design 2015."

Design 2015 asked all of our 26 schools to describe a fundamental change they wanted to make in student learning, and to describe a project which could begin to break away the barriers which stood in the way of those changes happening.

For some schools those barriers were quite literal, and we removed walls or created new doorways which opened up new opportunities.  In others lack of technologies was an issue and the solutions ranged from 1:1 laptop initiatives to "tool buckets" for classrooms filled with MacBooks and Galaxy Tabs, iPods and Cameo fabricators. In other places it was more flexible comfortable furniture, or library redesigns, or a re-envisioned cafeteria which doubles as a collaborative MakerSpace. Still others just sought extra time for teachers to plan or to spend a few summer weeks immersed in Spanish for their bilingual school.

We found ways to fund all of these in one way or another. Not because we're wealthy, but because we dug deep and reallocated to fund innovation. But before we could begin building, or buying, we needed to help teachers find ways to find paths to new ways of thinking.

We knew this because we saw the questions embedded in their grant requests. And as we, a team ranging across many levels of our small “central office” - 

let me pause here and give some credit, for because of brave leaders - those who are both risk-takers and risk-accepters - that great things are allowed to happen - Dr. Billy Haun, our Assistant Superintendent for Curriculum and Instruction; Debbie Collins, our Director of Instruction; Vince Scheivert, our Chief Information Officer; Becky Fisher, @beckyfisher73 our Director of EdTech and Professional Development; Chad Ratliff; our Assistant Director of Instruction; Rosalyn Schmidt, or School Architect; and our brilliant EdTech integrators and trainers Jamie Foreman and Nita Collier; along with myself, whatever it is that I do...

 - walked our schools, we listened. We walked our schools with "Attention-Deficit Disorder Vision" - seeing and hearing, even feeling, whatever we could. Observing children, grasping, however we were able, the User Experience and comparing that to the User Experience we hope for and that our educators hope for. For it is only by beginning with thinking about the User Experience we want that we can backward map to the User Interface - the school and pedagogical design we need.

Which pathways do you see here? A 9th Grade English Class in the MakerSpace in
the Monticello High School Library. Maker-Infused Curriculum? Project/Problem/Passion-Based Learning? Choice and Comfort? Instructional Tolerance? How about Universal Design?

We saw that no matter what our schools were asking “for,” what they really wanted their children to do fell into one or both of two broad categories: They wanted children to use contemporary technologies to interact broadly and consistently with the world in meaningful and deep ways, or/and. they wanted children to be makers most of the day, not just consumers. But in both cases the teachers were not entirely sure of how to jettison the constraints of delivering filtered, packaged content, and replace that with a trust-based, child-centric, open approach consistent with our Life Long Learning Competencies - competencies aimed at helping children become successful adults in every phase of their lives in their times. So those categories - Interactive Technologies and Maker-Infused Curriculum - became our first two professional learning pathways.

We found much more, of course, discovering five other essential questions:

Project/Problem/Passion-Based-Learning - Our teachers know that they waste their and their students’ energy fighting for attention when projects and passions bring attention naturally, they want the skills to bring knowledge through interest.

Choice and Comfort - Our teachers want to learn how to “let go” of rules which burn student cognitive energy on things unrelated to learning, and unrelated to workplace or social success in this century.

Connectivity - Our teachers have asked to learn the tools which connect students globally, synchronously and asynchronously, to create authentic audiences, break isolation, and support complex learning opportunities from kindergarten on up.

Universal Design for Learning - Our teachers have expressed real interest in looking “beyond differentiation” and even “beyond CAST,” toward a true Universal Design, with student preference replacing diagnosis and prescription everywhere it is possible.

Instructional Tolerance - Our teachers and administrators have begun a lively conversation about moving away from traditional school and classroom management toward the concept of “Instructional Tolerance.” What happens when “teacher preference” no longer drives classroom rules and atmosphere? What must students tolerate from adults? from other students?

Armed with these questions from our teachers, these professional learning needs, these “pathways” to a new kind of professionalism - we found teacher-leaders, “pedagogical entrepreneurs” in our emerging vocabulary, who could bring their vision of these educational futures to our entire faculty cohort. Not by labelling our previous work “a failure,” but by discussing the evolving marketplaces of education, brain research, and contemporary technological affordances. 

Tying these professional learning opportunities directly to school grants supporting new learning spaces and new technologies created both urgency and immediate learner test bed, crucial project-based learner tools. Offering learning opportunities at differing times, in differing formats, face-to-face and online, short and long sessions, in rooms often with multiple screens and multiple types of devices provided real demonstrations of the kinds of work we were showing. We never offered that ed school special, the lecture on differentiation.

 Transformational Maker Summer

We created "lab schools" too. Working with Maker Education's MakerCorps Initiative, and inventing some of our own stuff spun from ideas like Mozilla's Maker Summer we transformed Summer School in many places from the old remedial nightmare into something else - a radical pathways learning experience for children and teachers. Whether it was elementary summer school at impoverished sites, middle school connected maker summer school, or a ninth grade welcome week at a high school driven by maker activities and connectivity, our teachers watched as these new professional strategies transformed the often "hardest kids" into winners and their own careers into something with new meaning. These summer schools transformed principal expectations as well, bringing new paradigms to those August staff meetings.

Our Pathways are captured throughout our professional expectations
and performance assessments

As our school system has for years, we've reimagined what professional learning looks like in many ways. Recertification credits come many ways, including documenting active participation in social media professional learning. Just two weeks ago Chad Ratliff and I led a small group of our educators on a mission to New York, where - as we are increasingly learning to do - we avoided schools and eduction conferences and watched learning unfold at museums, at the World Maker Faire, on the High Line, in Central Park, on the subway system. What does learning look like? What do learning spaces look like? What questions do humans ask in learning spaces?

We're working on it, and we're looking for anyone willing to join with us, in collaboration, in sharing resources, in sharing the spirit. Honestly, as we asked the Virginia Educational Research Association a few weeks ago, we'll take the support of any university interested in supporting our mission as well...

We ended that call to "VERA" with this:

'"Fifty-one years ago at Rice University President John F. Kennedy said, “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win..."

'"Today we ask you to join those of us in Public Education to do the research [and teacher professional learning work] which our children need, not because it is easy, not because it is easily funded, not because there are existing textbooks and courses explaining how to do it, but because this is the hard work we must do, it is the grand challenge we are unwilling to postpone, the grand challenge we will step up to accept, and the task we will accomplish in order to build the society our children deserve."'

This the grand challenge. Teachers who understand themselves within a new professional paradigm. Teachers who see themselves as enablers of learning, as people who close the opportunity gaps, as educators who are both mentors and partners with their students on these learning journeys.

Wish us good luck, then jump in alongside us.

- Ira Socol

Affirmative Action in Education: Game Changers

A few years ago at a Disability Studies in Education Conference at Michigan State University we got into a fascinating discussion over dinner: Should schools/colleges of education use "Affirmative Action" ("Reverse Discrimination") to ensure that at every level - Bachelors/Undergraduate teacher training, Masters, PhD - there was far better representation of students with disabilities?

The argument for? Since most students do not actually do well in school, since most students with disabilities do not do well in school, we need more teachers, administrators, and teacher educators who understand - on a fundamental level - that education must change.

There was little argument against, this was not a group which would think that an effort like this would really be doing anything more than reversing all the existing discrimination against those who have struggled in school, but people were concerned that few, if any, schools/colleges of education - at least in North America - would do anything but terrible things to those incoming "disabled" students.

But despite all the obstacles, I have begun to detect something - a small but significant cohort of young, mostly male, teachers who are changing practice in schools in important ways. They typically had bad experiences as students themselves, often right through university. They struggled with attention issues, reading issues, math issues, writing issues. They were typically born from the late 1970s through the late 1980s and benefited as the first students with disabilities to have real human rights protections under the Americans with Disabilities Act and Sections 504 and 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 (as amended). And they went through the bulk of their education before the No Child Left Behind legislation began to destroy opportunity in American public education.

Today they range from, say, 35 down to their early twenties, and I have been watching them.

Middle School Jazz Camp, Albemarle County, Virginia

Watching them as they change - in dramatic ways - classrooms, schools, and the culture of education. Now, I'm not saying - obviously - that these are the only teachers doing these things. Often, these "boys" are adapting what they saw from the best of their teachers who "came of age" long before NCLB or even the "Reagan-Bush-1 Conservatism," but they are forming a powerful new cohort often in opposition to the "mainstream" teaching staff trained for an era of testing and classroom management.

I see these guys in elementary schools, in middle schools, in high schools, in every content area - a new band of teachers who demonstrate...

1. Instructional Tolerance and a belief that childhood and adolescence are good things.
These guys don't "sweat the small stuff." They know, from years of struggling in school, that no one in any classroom was always paying attention, or was always on task, or was always behaving. So stuff like taking breaks by staring at the window, or looking at Facebook, or walking around, or just spacing out, are fine. So is the use of different tools by different students. So are different time frames for different students. So are flexible deadlines and flexible assignments. Learning matters, the rest really does not.
2. A very different kind of classroom observation skill, perhaps the result of watching from back corners, these teachers are unusually good at spotting who is getting uncomfortable, and who is struggling.
This group of teachers understands how to watch for students becoming uncomfortable. They know it well because - that was them. Uncomfortable students stop learning, surely can't process at higher levels, so solving that is essential. These teachers also seem "much better than average" at recognizing when things aren't working for a student, and are most willing to try different paths.
3. A multi-level practice of teaching with large group, small group, and individual interactions occurring almost simultaneously.
Multitasking is basic to these men. They tend, most of them, toward the ADHD spectrum, and they see all the things in a room, thus they are able to observe and intervene, watch interactions at many different levels, and understand the borderline between the chaos of a great learning space and the chaos of dysfunction. As "Borderliners" themselves, this boundary line is far clearer than it is to those who sat near the front and attended to the teachers' directions.
4. A focus on student comfort and psychological safety is perhaps the most important thing in how this cohort teaches.
Once you've been uncomfortable, this become crucial. So these teachers have the classrooms where kids are "safe," where they go when they need to escape. You'll find kids there even when they don't have class. You'll find kids sitting on the floor, on windowsills, gathered together or being alone. Wearing hats, wearing hoods, playing games, doing nothing. There is an understanding - a native, pure understanding - that no one can do higher level learning - being intellectually uncomfortable - without being physically and psychologically comfortable. The concept is from Maslow, but these guys know it from their own experience.

Choices, opportunities, passions which engage instead of force conformity
are the hallmark of these teachers' spaces.

5. An understanding of the need for the passion which connects students to school is basic to these guys.
Why would a student come to school each day? Don't say, "we made it a law." Why would each student come to school each day? If football, or the play, or music, or the chance to talk about poetry with a certain teacher, or the social scene at lunch or recess is the top emotional reason which gets a child out of bed in the morning and two your door, you cannot let that ever become secondary to anything else, because if that disappears, the reason to attend - or at least in our compulsory system, engage - vanishes. These new teachers know that. You will see them bringing games, music production, new sports, new clubs, and new conversations to the schools as they seek to meet kids at their passions.

I have worked with many great teachers, from all kinds of backgrounds, and I have worked with many great new teachers, from many backgrounds - and yet, what I see in schools suggests that there is incredible value in recruiting - at every level of education - a group of people with diverse school experiences.

As long as schools are primarily taught and run by, and future teachers are prepared by, those for whom school has been "easy," or who have succeeded in school-as-we-know-it, schools will be, primarily, for that one-third of the population. To allow all to succeed, our faculties - all of our faculties - must begin to feel a lot more like our students.

- Ira Socol

What Teacher Education needs to be?

More "laboratory" work, more doubt, more diverse, more complex, and more flexible.

Chad Ratliff, a twitter colleague from Virginia, routinely challenges my thinking (a direct refutation of Larry Sanger's claims about web 2.0). Chad believes in Charter Schools (a rare thing in the Old Dominion), and Chad believes in alternative teacher certification, and I think Chad believes that at least some market forces can improve education. As an ex-teacher from a very high-needs impoverished community, and as a guy who studies education closely, I don't take his stances lightly.

First, let me say that I am not against Charter Schools. I believe charters and university lab schools are critical to educational invention in the public sector. My kid attended a great charter school. What I oppose are for profit chain-charters which steal money from children and do nothing to re-invent anything except, too often, racial and disability segregation.

Nor am I against alternative teacher certification. I am desperate to find effective ways to take experienced adults and convert them into great teachers, and equally desperate to develop strategies which turn committed adults from high-needs communities into lifelong teachers and community role models. What I'm against is Teach for America - a program that gives poor kids untrained, non-experienced teachers, while giving rich kids a resume boost.

Yes, I am pretty much against market solutions for public service. In my view market-based strategies have, for example, made American health care the most expensive in the world while also making it clearly less effective than the systems of other nations. And market-based strategies in the US military have given us Halliburton profits and Blackwater murders. I hope for better for our kids.

But let's go back to Teach for America. What's the problem? Well, it starts with a bit of cognitive dissonance. Teach for America claims that going to school to learn something is not just completely unimportant, it might be a negative. This is the heart of their argument (and the arguments of TFA fans like Joel Klein, Michelle Rhee, and The New York Times), that there is not just no difference between teachers who have attended education schools and those who have not, but that those who have not might even be better. This seems a story I wouldn't want presented to any child who I hoped to keep in school. "My teacher says school is worthless," is what I'd say if I had a TFA teacher.

But the bigger problem, even skipping my opinion of TFA as a classic colonial project designed to oppress, is that I see no reason why if rich kids get only "trained, certified" teachers, poor kids deserve something less. That's not, in my opinion, a gap-closing path.

If there is a teacher shortage in certain places, then maybe we do need a small "market solution." Would those districts attract top teachers if the pay was $150,000 or $200,000 a year? If the schools were properly equipped and maintained? If the necessary supports for student achievement were in place? I think the TFA Foundation should be raising cash to try that set of solutions out.

But yes, we all know that Teacher Education across America is not what it should be, and Chad wants to know where and how to start. And its a great question. And in trying to answer, I start outside the field.

Back when I was an NYPD cop, we used to describe certain rookies as suffering from "Starsky and Hutch Syndrome" (I believe the term now might be "Jack Bauer Syndrome"). "Starsky and Hutch Syndrome" cops inevitably came from the distant exurbs of New York, Suffolk County, Rockland County, Putnam County, and beyond. They had led these white bread kind of lives, and all they knew about the City of New York and its diverse population were the "horror" stories told by older cop relatives who had moved their families as far east or north as permissable to escape the "nightmare" of the city, which in their minds looked a lot like the film, Escape from New York. These cops arrived as crusaders who would "clean up" the city. They were totally earnest and sincere, determined to recreate the mythic New York City of their parents' childhoods'. They were also unbelievably dangerous. They could not understand street dynamics, our community standards. They could not comprehend that different people might behave differently on a hot summer Saturday night. They got into endless fights, they made stupid, worthless arrests, they damaged police community relationships, and they hurt members of the public and other cops through turning small problems into huge crises.

Here's an example of typical "Starsky and Hutch" behavior - from a much more recent time - thankfully captured on video:

The moral is, beware saviors, beware crusaders, and go for training.

The reason I start here is that for 6 months, that is, 26 weeks, the NYPD worked diligently in Police Academy courses to eliminate this syndrome. Through sociology and psychology courses, through Constitutional Law courses, through simulations and role play, through awareness training. New York cops learned all sorts of things during those 26 weeks, but the hardest thing to get across, almost every instructor said, was the notion that nothing in the past lives of these suburban 'pre-cops' or their educations (which were often quite impressive), was of any real value in terms of helping those in New York's struggling neighborhoods.

And so, after 26 weeks of 45 hours per wek training, New York's rookie cops are typically supervised heavily on the street for another six months - that's all considered part of their training. And still, more than a few Starsky and Hutches slipped through.

We compare that to the guy on the left, who now runs Teach for America in the San Francisco Bay area. He went through TFA's five week training program, and then taught for two years. I'm just saying...

So, issue one is that it takes a lot of training, and a lot of actual time, to make people effective public servants when dealing with people unlike themselves.

You know I tend to make fun of, and even to bash, my school, Michigan State University, but honestly we do do somethings quite well, and here's one: Our future teachers have typically spent time with as many high-needs diverse students before they begin their internship year than TFA corps members will in their entire "career." And we use that. From the first 100-level ed course on our students work in high needs classrooms. They do this in almost every course. And they come back and we - the instructors - get to work with their reactions. We do that for most of four years, and that makes a difference, because this is very difficult stuff to learn. We don't want missionaries, we don't want crusaders, we don't want saviors - we want teachers who, before they begin "student teaching" are starting to understand that their experience is not their students' experience, and that they are not superior humans for having had better luck in the birth lottery.

Now, Michigan State is no Ivy League institution. It is a Land Grant University (the very first Land Grant University) in a desperately struggling state. Yet our students are the elite, they have made it to one of our top universities in a place where attending any post-secondary school is a minority position. Their knowledge of the struggles of underclass children or children who struggle in school is typically highly limited. And if we, in the College of Education, did not push them out into the City of Lansing's schools or poor rural districts, well, the only times they'd actually get into Lansing itself is going to World Market in the Frandor Shopping Center for beer (sorry Spartans, MAC's Bar doesn't count, it is technically in Lansing Township). In other words, if they were not education majors, they would likely know little of this - even on a campus far more diverse in economic origin than those East Coast elite campuses.

We do something else pretty well at MSU, which is deal with issue two, creating and understanding doubt, which is essential to developing teachers who can differentiate instruction. We do not teach students "one way" to do anything. Our faculty could hardly agree on a group of five or six ways. I say to those in my team-taught course, that even in that single course they will hear three views, often at odds. If you take any sequence of MSU College of Ed courses you will hear lots of ideas, lots of possibilities, lots of suggestions - and as you go out into the a real classroom, and meet any collection of students - you will need every one of them.

Obviously, this also takes time. You cannot dump 50 strategies on a bunch of pre-service teachers in a semester. You can only offer that variety if you give everyone the time to process and compare, to test in actual teaching moments, then process and compare again.

We also have a highly diverse group of instructors at MSU, which is issue three, getting fully comfortable with diverse perspectives on the notion of education itself. I don't mean diverse in skin color, though we do have lots of people from lots of continents. I mean diverse by economic origin, by family origin, by systems of primary and secondary education. The "Brit" group comes with a set of views, as does our "East Asian" group, our "South Asian," and "African" groups have a "Brit plus" view set. Then we have our Americans. There are instructors wth every "disability," and instructors with every kind of language issue, and instructors with every type of political stance. This really does make a difference as new teachers learn to navigate communities which do not share their values or histories.

Issue four is all about complexity. In any class of students, but especially among "high needs" students, there will be real issues you must deal with. In Linda Darling-Hammond's study of TFA this is the place where the untrained teachers really fell apart, they had no exposure to any of this, and it showed. What, I recently asked a man on Twitter who seemed to be suggesting that anyone with good content knowledge would be a good teacher, does (his example) film maker and history buff Ken Burns know about dyslexia, dysgraphia, dyscalculia, ELL, AAC, CAPD, ADHD, EI, Autism, Aspergers - to name a few issues likely to confront every teacher. These are complex issues with no set formulas for answer. These take time too. You must move past the labels, past your "declarative knowledge," to true "operational knowledge," or you will not only not help these students, you will injure them.

My fifth issue though is about flexibility. Because I am a fan of alternative certification. When someone like @spedteacher chooses, after a lifetime of diverse experiences with people, to become a teacher, that is a fabulous thing. And so I want to be able to entice great people, in their 30s, 40s, 50s into education, and I want to leverage the human skills they already have. I want them to be able to study to be teachers while being paid. I want them to have shorter, year round courses, that fit their lifestyle needs. I want them to be merging their past experiences with the curriculum, and I want them in classrooms in a secondary role almost immediately. I especially want these people if they come from the kinds of communities which suffer teacher shortages, because I want to develop a community-based faculty which is lifespan dedicated to that community and its children.

In my battle over teacher training I surprise myself. I have a ton of problems with how we train teachers, just as I have a ton of problems with how we train doctors. So, I might think I'd be on the TFA "No Training" side. But I'm not. I consider these both to be critical, life and death professions. Who kills more in a year? I'd guess bad teachers over bad doctors, really. A disastrous education too often leads to a disastrous - and short - life.

So my solution to bad teachers and bad doctors is not to minimize training, it's to reconstruct it. To make it really work the way it should. That's my start - let the conversation begin...

- Ira Socol

I get bloggerviewed

at OpenEducation.net

Still time to get
The Drool Room
for Christmas:

How Inclusion Works

This past weekend Lisa Parisi put up a remarkable post...
The Successful Inclusion Program,
which you should go and read on her site.

But I wanted to lead you through some of what this teacher is describing, as she has found a path to student success in a Universally Designed Classroom.

Let's begin with teacher training, Lisa and her co-teacher have been lucky enough to be trained in working with every student, not just "regular" students or "special students:" "Although I teach regular education," she says, "I do have my Masters' in Special Ed and have always believed in differentiating instruction to help all students succeed."

This is so vital - the false distinction most teacher preparation programs make between "Teacher Education" and "Special Education" is incredibly destructive to student success. It encourages the worst mass-teaching practices of "regular ed," and the isolation of "special education." You can not say that you believe in either universal design or in the idea that "every student is gifted, every student has special needs" and operate of college of education which proclaims that these programs are separate.

We can see the impact of these flawed teacher training programs in what Lisa says next about co-teaching. "I truly believe that a perfect classroom is one in which two teachers work toward a common goal. So I have had many co-teaching situations. Two have been quite successful, most have been very unsuccessful." "Some co-teachers (both regular and special ed)," she continues, "believe that "you have your students and I have mine." I have worked with a teacher like this. She would come to the room and say, "Ok, my students come with me." I would then watch as the children, with mortified looks in their eyes, would slink out of the room."

Yes, these teachers are at fault for being inhumane. But surely the fault lies with the university that trained them, and the state which licensed them. If a teacher thinks like that it is evidence of systemic failure. A failure to believe in educational equity. So Lisa states, "Rule #1: Do not separate the children. They should not stand out for being classified. Remember: inclusion means to be included, not separated."

But the fact is, we can only include everyone if we accept the idea that we are all different and embrace the technologies which allow all of us to be different.

Lisa puts it this way: "There's also that belief that we should be so private as to not speak about the needs of the children. Don't embarrass Johnny by telling him to put on his glasses, hearing aids, etc." This is essential because we do not try to hide the fact that, for example, we use a ladder because we are not good enough at leaping to make it to the roof unassisted, and we do not try to hide the fact that we take a car to get to the next town because we can't run fast enough to get there on time via foot. And if we treat any particular student assistive need differently than we treat our own assistive needs, we are separating, humiliating, and diminishing. "In our classroom," Lisa says, "fidget toys are in a box for all the children, glasses are mentioned frequently, students are encouraged to move to the front of the room, grab a spell checker, use the computer or alphasmart, pull out the E.Z.C. Readers, etc. The difference? These tools are demonstrated to and available for everyone. So when a lesson begins, up jumps the classified student along with the gifted student. They both gather tools they need to be successful. So... Rule #2: Don't hide special needs. Point out that we all need assistance at times. Make it available to everyone." This, of course, is the heart of both Universal Design and Toolbelt Theory.

And the most important tool we can train our students to choose is the combination of learning style and learning environment which works best for them. This is wildly counter to school tradition which assumes that the teacher always makes these decisions. And Lisa points out that it is also counter to how most "special educators" operate in co-teaching situations: "[T]here's the idea that a special educator is only there to work with the special ed children. This leaves a lot of other children behind and makes the classified children really stand out. We believe that we both are there to teach all of the students. We group children for various subjects and rotate who teaches the groups. When class tests are given, volunteers leave the room with one of us to go to a more quiet setting or to have tests read to them. Amazingly, the children, all of them, really do choose what they need. Some leave the room for the novelty but most choose the setting in which they work best."

Student choice, what a remarkable idea. Lisa's "Rule #3: Mix the teachers up and allow students to choose their style of learning."

Which goes directly to her next point. "This year," she says, "we also eliminated reading pull-outs. Students remained in class during reading and ended up receiving much more reading service time than they would have in the pull-out program. And keeping students in the classroom as much as possible is helpful for having them not miss content. Next year, we are going to do the same for math pull-outs. Note: This was not an easy goal to achieve. Reading and resource room teachers may feel it threatens their jobs. If necessary, try to make your pull-outs push-ins instead." I remember my sister - a long time teacher - saying how she never used ability grouping for reading. There were four or five books to read, kids picked the book they were interested in. That, of course, gives a student an actual reason to read. And it encourages students to reach beyond their limitations. And if encourages peer tutoring. And with technology, it is easy. Even if "Student A" can not possibly decode "Book C" we can offer it to him or her via iPod or CD, or via text reader with a dictionary built in.

This is great for reading instruction, it is even better for eliminating the humiliations we visit on children. Lisa's "Rule #4: Keep students in the classroom as much as possible. Eliminate as many pull-outs as you can."

Lisa goes on to mention Project-Based Learning and truly Differentiating Instruction, two hallmarks of education which actually educates rather than divides and trains compliance. There's a lot to discover on her blog. It is worth your time.

But what is most important here is this. When "we" attack "education as we know it" we are attacking it because we know that something better exists. Everyone with minimally "open eyes" knows that what really works is flexible, universally designed education which responds to student needs, and encourages student independence and self-determination. When we see the success of a classroom like Lisa's what are we to say about teachers, administrators, school systems, universities, and legislatures which refuse to embrace - which often actively resist - these methods?

True inclusion is a decision we can make. Not choosing true inclusion is another decision.

- Ira Socol

"So I had my ranking, which was pretty good, cause I could climb really well and was OK at baseball and good at hockey; plus, I had slot cars and a dad who played sports. But once the teacher made the reading groups there was a different kind of ranking. Once the teacher made reading groups, I was officially a “dumb kid.” This started as a small thing, but school gets more and more important as you get older. And the more important school gets, the more important the school’s ranking system gets. Eventually, the very first thing people know about you is that you’re a “dumb kid.”' - The Drool Room - page 29

The Drool Room by Ira David Socol, a novel in stories that has - as at least one focus - life within "Special Education in America" - is now available from the River Foyle Press through lulu.com

US $16.00 on Amazon

New! Digital version available through lulu.com

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