(bright music) - The top three concerns that I hear from teams who were thinking about transitioning a student with complex access needs from a special education classroom to a general education classroom are number one, will this student require an inordinant amount of attention from me when I have 25 or 30 other students in the classroom? The second concern that I often hear is how is the student going to learn my curriculum? I assume that one of the reasons the student was in the self-contained classroom was because that student couldn't keep up with students without disabilities. And then
a third concern, which is kind of related, is how am I gonna assess the student's learning? I'm increasingly being called upon to account for how much my students are learning, whether or not they're meeting the expectations on our state standards. And I'm really worried that I'm not gonna be able to really document well what the student has learned. And I'm kind of afraid this student's gonna kind of bring down my class average.
So addressing each of these concerns is much more than a one-off conversation. You know, there's no quick answer that's going to satisfy the general education teacher. But what I can give you is a few ways of responding to those concerns that can kind of kick off that longer conversation. So that first concern was, well, I have to spend a greater proportion of my time with this student than with my other students.
And by large, the answer to that question is no. The first thing I would say is when it comes to inclusive education, it truly does take a village. It's not authentic inclusion to just place a student with complex access needs in a general education classroom and expect the general education teacher to do it all, to meet all that student's needs. One of the benefits of a student with complex access needs being in general education is that he or she often brings along with her a host of other educators and educational providers.
Another way in which the amount of attention that the general education teacher will need to give to the student with complex access needs comes from the possibilities of utilizing peers as not only social in communication partners for the student with complex access needs, but also students who can be academic partners. So if teachers think strategically how to group students together so that the student with complex access needs is working with other students, then, again, the classroom teacher is not being called upon to provide an inordinate amount of extra attention or support to the student with complex access needs.
A second concern that I often hear from general ed teachers is how in the world is this student who is participating in our state's alternate assessment ever gonna be able to learn the curriculum that I teach? So let me provide some words of assurance to that general education teacher. If a student with complex access needs is, in fact, participating in your state's alternate assessment, then the majority of learning objectives in the curriculum areas for that student are called alternate assessment standards. And that means that the learning objectives and the hope for outcomes for that student within the curriculum are reduced when compared to students without disabilities.
They're reduced in depth, in breadth, and in complexity. So let me give you an example. Imagine you're a fourth grade gen ed teacher and you're teaching early Texas history. You may expect your students without disabilities to master all the learning objectives within the Texas social studies curriculum related to early Texas history.
Your student with complex access needs may, actually, you may expect that student to understand kind of one big idea about the establishment of Texas as a state, a couple of vocabulary words, and a couple of really important people. So your expectations can be appropriately lessened for that student. And connected with that idea is your responsibilities for assessing that student's learning. So just as you would plan for the student's learning to be reduced in depth, breadth and complexity, likewise, when you, and the rest of the students team, design a way to assess what the student knows, you would not give that student the same assessment as you do your students without disabilities.
That student would have many fewer questions. They would be really targeted to what your personalized learning objectives are for that student. And that student is scored on a different scale than your students without disabilities. So as general education teachers are approaching the possibility of having students with complex access needs in their classrooms, these are the kinds of questions that they're going to raise.
And if the teachers don't raise those questions, I would actually encourage them to think about those issues. Because the more that some of those questions that are in the back of their head are brought right up onto the table and addressed in an honest and straightforward way, the more comfortable the teacher would be at the beginning of this new journey.
