Saturday Post-Conference Workshop

The Keys to Making Inclusion Work

Saturday, December 1, 2012
9 a.m. – 5 p.m.

Overview

The Keys to Making Inclusion Work is a fast-paced, skills-building post-conference workshop that provides practical tools and resources to support inclusive practices throughout a child’s education. This workshop includes four major components addressed by leading experts in inclusive education:

1) Effective processes to facilitate the inclusion of students with moderate and severe disabilities
2) Strategies, forms and digital tools inclusion facilitators can use within inclusive environments
3) Successful examples of inclusion and what they mean for students with disabilities
4) Differentiation of instructional practices for different learners

Presentations

Making Inclusion Meaningful One Student at a Time: A Nine-Step Best Practice Process
Richard Villa, Jacqueline Thousand
Learn about and see illustrated a nine-step process for facilitating meaningful inclusion of students with moderate and severe disabilities. Learn and experience best practices from assembling a team and data gathering, participation options and level of contribution, to recruiting adult and peer supports, providing professional development, and IEP goal monitoring in general education classrooms.

The Inclusion Teacher’s Digital Toolkit
Jennifer Kurth, Megan Gross
“I really want to include my students, but I just don’t have the time.” With organizational tools and support, inclusion teacher’s can successfully juggle their responsibilities and develop meaningful inclusive opportunities for their students. This session will describe and provide samples of strategies, forms, and digital tools for the inclusion facilitator to use throughout the school year to implement effective inclusive practices.

Is It Really Inclusion?: Reexamining What Makes Inclusive Education Truly Inclusive
Alson Cole, Lou-Ann Land, Debbie Taub
This presentation uses research around teaching academics in inclusive settings to outline what inclusive education actually is and looks like. Given a recent push to return to segregated classrooms and schools, and given that schools may think they are practicing inclusion when in fact they are not, this presentation seeks to examine the roles students with disabilities have within a general education setting as well the opportunities they have to interact with their non-disabled peers and use materials similar to those used by their non-disabled peers. The presentation will focus on how inclusion can be done well and provides participants with tools to monitor inclusive practices.

Differentiating Core Content to Meet Diverse Student Needs
Aparna Jain, Adie Buchinsky
Students who have a variety of needs are working together in the general education classroom, where they work on projects and activities in the content areas that bring together their varied skills. This model, however, is not sufficient to enable all students to maximize their individual skills. Having students with IEPs in a general education classroom but always working on isolated skills is not true inclusion and does not foster interpersonal relationships between students with varied needs. As inclusion is implemented in more schools, it is important to examine ways to maximize students’ learning of the curricular content while simultaneously working systematically on students’ IEP goals. This conference will focus on providing a variety of practical strategies and tools to modify curriculum to meet students’ needs within the general education classroom, to ensure that all students can access the curriculum, including students with mild to severe disabilities.