Educators of Students with Complex Access Needs: Reengage a Team After Summer Break

(bright music) - Maintaining a team's momentum and enthusiasm for their work around inclusive education is tough, particularly when there's a two month summer break. And when everybody's, particularly at the beginning of the school year, when everybody's energies are devoted to learning new students, maybe learning new curricula, maybe even shifting into a different grade level or a role on the team. So one of the important functions of an inclusive education coach, whether that someone within the school building, at the district level, or even someone from one of the regional service centers is to support that teen's re-engagement in the fall. So here's a couple of suggestions for how they might do that. One is to maybe try to get people together for a social activity over the summer. I know everybody's busy, you know, they go on family trips, but trying to find just that, you know, time for folks to meet for coffee, even if it's a Zoom meeting can help the team still feel connected to one another after the end of the school year and before the beginning of the next school year. I think another important thing to do would be to ask for a little bit of time on the agenda of any required summer, before the first day of school professional development days, to not only to kind of share with the rest of the faculty about what this team is doing to promote inclusive education, but perhaps to even do some pre-planning with the general ed teachers and special ed teachers and other folks who are going to be supporting students once the school year begins. And I think another suggestion would be for the inclusion coach to speak with the school principal and schedule meetings of not only the co-teachers who might be working together in a particular classroom or grade level, but to put on the school calendar, those monthly or bi-monthly meetings of the inclusion implementation team. We know how quickly people's calendars fill up at the beginning of the school year. So getting those into the master schedule, even before the first day of school, will really make everyone's lives easier.