Inclusive Classroom Project - Essay Example

Inclusive room Project: Recommendation Part Recommendation Part From the data that was collected from the school through interviewing two teachers, with its analysis, several issues were arrived at that required improvement for the inclusive program to operate well in this school. Consideration should be made that the school just began this program this year, therefore, there is a lot of room for improvement. They still need to adjust on various areas to enable them make the inclusive classroom active. The inclusive classroom that they just started is basically meant for children from various perspectives. Here, both general and special need students are included. As explained by Demelman and Hyde (2010), students are usually different and being different should be taken as a goal as well as a fact for most of us. This notwithstanding, the main goal of education, Demelman says, is to enable all students to benefit by helping them become important members of the society (Demelman & Hyde, 2010, p. 17). Similarly, education has its main purpose which is to ensure equal access to skills, information and experience by every student to prepare them to contribute to the workplace of their community. For this purpose to come true, and having in mine that students are not equal, where there are those who have learning disabilities, there was a great need for the introduction of an inclusion program in this school. The inclusion program is necessary since its major purpose is to allow students with disability to be included in the normal classrooms in the entire period, and have an extra time with their special education teacher in the resource center to give them special care and attention that such students require to improve on their areas of weaknesses. Trinity Elementary School has made the first bold step which is to start up this program in the school. However, the program is just kicking off, and there is a requirement for improvement in various areas to enable the program to run smoothly and become active in accomplishing its goals and main reasons for establishment. From the analysis, findings and the issues that were untraveled from the data collected from the teachers, there are various areas that the really need improvement to put the inclusive classroom program on its course. Some of these areas for improvement include improvement from teachers, improvement from parents, improvement from the District and collaboration between the teachers, students and parents. The first area that require improvement is that of the teachers. From the findings, the school only has four special education teachers. This number is considerably very small taking into account the kind of close supervision and attention children with disability require when they are being attended to (Peebles & Mendaglio, 2014, p. 246). When they are in the resource center where they meet their special education teachers, they are taught on those concepts that they did not understand when they were in the general classroom. Here, more time should be devoted to a particular student to help them at personal level, with their writing, mathematics and reading skills. As a result, when the teachers who take them through this session are few, it would be hard to attend adequately to all these students. The result will be that, some students will go unattended or not adequately attended. They will, therefore, not be able to learn adequately to equalize with their counterparts who do not have any learning disabilities. The government provides the school with the EC teachers, and the student to teacher ratio in this school is 16:1 as determined by the District. However, this situation should only hold when all the students in the school are those without disabilities. The students with disabilities require more teachers who are skilled and trained in special education. The ratio of the students to teachers should, therefore, be reduced to at least 5:1, here one teacher should be in charge of at most five students with disability. This is to mean that, students with disability require more teachers or one teacher should be teaching a few students, not like it is with the general classroom teachers with many students. This can be good enough since attending to all of them can be easy. Since the school does not have enough money to hire more teachers, it is recommended that they should look for other ways of obtaining more teachers and co-teachers to help them with the work. First option that the school can apply is that of inviting volunteer teachers who can come and offer their services to the school for a short period. This could be cheaper and work effectively for the school since there are those who are ready to volunteer and help with the special education services. Secondly, since the school has a good relationship with the staff at the UNCG, they can request them for co-teachers who are both in-service and pre-service to help them with some of the special class duties. These teachers sometimes only need facilitation, otherwise, they are a cheaper way of obtaining more teachers for the school. Second area that require improvement is that of parents and students together. As one will find out, some students and parents do not really know or understand what this inclusive classroom is all about. This makes it hard for the school to implement this program as some of the stakeholders are not aware the parts they need to play to make it a success. It would, therefore, be recommended that the school should organize an open day where all the parents and the students will be publicly informed about the inclusive classroom (Sue, 2008, p. 2). The school can organize for this day by inviting the parents on a specific day where they will teach them about this inclusive classroom, its importance and why it is necessary. They will then be requested to support the program after they fully understand how it operates and where their support will be required. The school will be able to identify some few teachers who will take the parents through this program. The special education teachers are better choices in this case (Cheminais, 2013, p. 11). The assistant principal should be a facilitator and ensure the teachers to take part in this program are all well informed about their various parts that they will be required to perform. It was established during analysis that most parents give the school a hard time in as far as helping their children is concerned. To begin with, some parents do not want their students to be tested out of the fear that their children might fail the tests and they might be considered foolish. They do not know that through testing the children, it is possible for them to know the progress of the children and decide whether they will be subjected to different strategies of teaching or move to the next grades. It is, therefore, recommended that parents should give the school easy time when handling their children. Since the curriculum is developed for the school to apply, the parents should support the application of the curriculum by allowing the teachers to do all that is required, including testing the children. Some parents also take time, when contacted by the school, to respond. The special education teacher may call or send emails to the parents so that they might help in improving their children’s progress, however, some parents take a lot of time to respond, and a times, they completely fail to do so. This makes the teachers to go, physically to their homes looking for them. This is not right and should change. To change this, it is recommended that the meetings that the school usually has with the parents should be made more frequent and such issues should be stressed. Thirdly, it would also be in order that the parents be urged to provide certain equipment or facilities that the children might require to study at home. The parents should be urged to provide at least a computer and internet access for their children to use at home, with their assistance, to help them improve on their skills when at home (Causton-Theoharis & Kasa, 2010, p. 2). There are those parents who have the skills to teach or guide their children on how to read and write, such activities should be encouraged and the parents should be urged to frequently submit the progress of their children and discuss the same with the teachers. Fourthly, to help improve this inclusion program, there a need for collaboration among all the stakeholders (Porter & AuCoin, 2012). This should begin with the collaboration among the teachers. One will find that there are teachers and co-teachers taking particular subjects in a classroom. When there is no proper collaboration between these teachers, they will not be able to run the class as expected. As explained by Ms. Christian during the interview, there is a good collaboration between her and her co-teacher, therefore work is very easy. The same thing should happen with the other teachers so that taking care of the needs of these students cannot be hard. Teachers need to collaborate with their co-teachers in such a way that, they need to auger well in the areas they take the class through. The teachers should collaborate through job specialization in such a way to ensure that those who teach mathematics, major in that and teach it well while those who take reading skills, take just that. Similarly, there should be a collaboration between the teachers who teach general classroom students and the special education students. Here, those teachers teaching the general classroom should be clear on the extent they teach the class and what the special education students will have to teach. For example, the general classroom teacher who teaches mathematics will have to teach only that subject as if they were teaching a general class. However, when the special needs teacher teaches the class, their work will be to reinforce of those areas that require extra effort for the students to understand. This way, there will be good working relations that will help them iron out few misunderstandings that could have occurred to offer misleading or confusing information to the students. Parents should also work in collaboration with the school to help monitor the progresses of their children and provide feedback on the same. Parents should do their part of ensuring that they monitor the progress of their children frequently. In case of any problem, parents are expected to report to the school immediately and discuss it with the teachers. At least, this way, the parents and teachers will agree on the areas of weakness of the students and agree to join efforts to help them. Given the main stakeholders in this fight should be the students, since they form the core of this program, they should also be involved actively in the program (Vanderbilt Kennedy Center, 2009, p. 1). It is recommended that the students should be asked to support the inclusion program to help them improve learning and academic performance for all of them, both with and without disability. With proper involvement of the children in the program, they will have the opportunity to discover and accept individual differences that will help them overcome the misconception about disabilities. References Causton-Theoharis, J., & Kasa, C. (2010). Achieving inclusion: What every parent should know when advocating for their chld. Peal Center, 2. Cheminais, R. (2013). How to create the inclusive classroom: Removing barriers to learning. London: David Fulton Publishers. Demelman, D., & Hyde. (2010). Improving education: The promise of inclusive schooling. National Institute for Urban School Improvement, 17. Peebles, J., & Mendaglio, S. (2014). Preparing teahers for inclusive classroom: Introducing the individual direct experience approah. Learning Landscpe, 7(2), 245-254. Porter, G., & AuCoin, A. (2012). Strengtheing inclusion, Strengthening schools: Report of the review of inclusive ducaion programs and practices in New Brunswick school. New Brunswick: Ministry of Early Childhood Development. Sue, L. (2008). Preparing parents forr inclusive classroom. William and Mary School Education, 1-3. Retrieved from http://education.wm.edu/centers/ttac/resources/articles/inclusion/prepareparent/index.php Vanderbilt Kennedy Center. (2009). Inclusion in the classroom. Center for Excellence and Developmental Disabilities, 1-2. Read More