13.1 Appendix b: deciding for yourself about the research  (Page 7/20)

But they also found limitations on how much the teachers could collaborate at any of the schools. A major problem was the teachers’ dependency on informal communication with general education teachers. Instead of regularly announced meetings to discuss inclusion initiatives, teachers had to “catch” each other in the hallway or during lunch hours, for example, in order to have conversations about students and ways of including them in class or school activities. At these moments the teachers tended already to be busy. A partial result was that the general education teachers ended up with limited knowledge both about the special education program at their school, and about why particular students might be placed successfully in their particular classrooms. All of the students with disabilities had IEPs, but the general teachers had little or no knowledge of their contents—or even of their existence. Not surprisingly, under these conditions there were few major collaborative activities, such as the co-teaching of a course by a special education teacher and a general teacher or jointly operated activities or programs.

Yet for each school there were also individual teachers and activities that boosted collaboration in the school, and that could in principle be tried elsewhere as well. The private high school, for example, had an especially effective, vital program for involving parents: there were regular advisory group meetings to assess the current needs of the special education program and to develop and sustain support for it among the parents. Another especially effective collaboration involved peer tutoring—using high school students to tutor the students with disabilities on a regular basis, often with course credit given as “payment” to the tutors. Peer tutoring proved a good way to communicate the nature and extent of the special education program to the student population as a whole. A third effective form of collaboration involved using a teacher as a “community coordinator”, someone who developed linkages to agencies and potential employers in the community. The linkages proved especially helpful in students’ transitions to work and life after high school.

All in all, there were limitations on inclusion in the secondary schools, but also grounds for optimism because of the collaborative successes and the dedication of the teachers. Although Stowitschek and his colleagues focused on only three schools, their findings suggested three key points: (1) that the motivation for inclusion and collaboration definitely exists among secondary teachers, (2) that it is possible to work around the organizational constraints of high schools, and (3) that changes in those constraints in the future should further increase levels of inclusion and collaboration.

Questions