Coaching on Inclusive Education Implementation Plans

(upbeat music) - When inclusive education, reform, or change effort is first beginning, it's definitely important for the team to develop the team, the school, the district, to develop an implementation plan. And with the qualification that that plan will always change and grow. It's never a plan that stays the same even through a whole school year, much less a three-year plan. So expect changes in that plan. I find that coaching people to develop a manageable implementation plan means to me that there might be around five broad areas, six broad areas of focus for the implementation plan. And those areas are linked to the broad best practices indicators that the Texas CAN project has developed. So broad goals might be something like we need to get better at providing accessible instructional materials to students. We need to build student relationship and support networks. We need to improve our standards based IEPs. We need to use more humanistic and positive behavior supports in our classroom. Those are big areas. And I think it's important to over arch a plan in big, lofty goal areas. The smaller steps, I think are the ones where you want to give people a sense of their own agency and not be overly prescriptive with them. So as a coach, let's say we're talking about accessible instructional materials. I might be thinking to myself, "Oh, here are the 10 things they need to do". But I would wanna give the team some options of three or four things that might get them on the path towards making accessible instructional materials to all students. But again, give them some discretion in choosing the ones that feel right to them. You can use with teams a more formal kind of ranking and voting process, if that feels like something that kind of goes along with the team's personality. And by that, I mean, first let's brainstorm as many ideas as we can possibly think of, of what we might do to make accessible instructional materials more available for all of our students. And then give everybody some little colored dots to rank which ones they see as the priorities, and make a sort of a group decision based on the most popular items, the ones that were ranked the highest priority. Or you can do it in a little bit more of an organic way. You know, you can have people do fist to five. How many will give a one to this idea in terms of its importance? How many people give a two? So there are both some procedural ways and some structured ways to get groups to come to agreement about what their next steps are. There are sort of mini action items steps within their plan. And I think teams need to have a lot of control over what those are.