The Human Side of Changing Education: How to Lead Change With Clarity, Conviction, and Courage

[00:01] Announcer:

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, helping you build capacity for instructional leadership. Here's your host, Director of the Principal Center, Dr. Justin Bader. Welcome, everyone, to Principal Center Radio.

[00:13] SPEAKER_00:

I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to be joined on the program today by Dr. Julie Koston, who is a Thank you. She's conducted presentations focusing on engaging ways to educate all students within the context of general education that have inspired and uplifted educators and families throughout the United States and helped them learn the most cutting edge inclusive practices. Julie is the author of a dozen books and more than 30 articles. And we're here today to talk about her new book, The Way to Inclusion, How Leaders Create Schools Where Every Student Belongs.

[01:01] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[01:03] SPEAKER_00:

Julie, welcome to Principal Center Radio.

[01:05] SPEAKER_01:

Thank you so much, Justin. I'm excited to be here.

[01:07] SPEAKER_00:

Well, let's talk about why inclusion matters, because I think we can remember a time, either in personal memory or we've at least heard of a time, when students with disabilities went to completely different schools from everybody else. There were just not opportunities for inclusion in the majority of schools. And it was seen as an insurmountable hurdle to educate students with disabilities in the same schools as everybody else. Why is inclusion so important? And why have we as a society moved away from that model where we separate students into separate schools based on ability?

[01:42] SPEAKER_01:

Justin, I love that you started with long ago, we used to segregate kids with disabilities and I love that idea and I wish it was so far behind us and it's still today. So today we still have separate classrooms and separate spaces for kids with disabilities. And why is it so important? It's a basic right for kids to have access to general education, peers and classrooms and curriculum. And it's actually been researched and studied for a long time to show that it ends up to be much, much better for everybody when we start to embrace this concept of inclusive education.

[02:17] SPEAKER_00:

Well, Julia, I think we all learned in our educator training about the infamous separate but equal case, you know, Plessy versus Ferguson, that said it's okay to separate students in that case based on race, as long as their schools are equal. And of course, we knew from the outset that that was not actually the case, that the schools were in no way equal. When it comes to educating students with disabilities, obviously, there is more of a rationale for separating students into different environments based on their needs. What happens both for students with disabilities and their peers when we do that? What is it that makes that not the right call?

[02:55] SPEAKER_01:

So I'm glad you went all the way back to Plessy versus Ferguson or 1954 Brown versus Board of Education when we decided that separate but equal are not okay for human beings in any way, shape, or form. And so what that means is, I think... Disability is the last bastion of that civil right, meaning we've thought it's okay to separate people for all sorts of reasons. And now any reasonable human would say, no, of course not by race, of course not by gender, of course not by.

[03:25]

And yet disability, we tend to still have a rationale that makes sense to some people. about sort of why to separate or segregate. And you use the word need, which is a really good word. It's a common understanding that some people need different things. And it's true. Lots and lots of people need lots of different things to be successful in schools.

[03:45]

But it's not something that we can divide based on a disability group. label and or a grouping of categories of a human being. So how I like to think about is that disability is just diversity. It's just human diversity. And our job as public educators, if the people listening are involved in the public or private sector of education, Our job is to educate every human being who comes into that school system. And our job is to figure out how to educate them together.

[04:14]

So we went all the way from Plessy versus Ferguson to Brown versus Board of Education. And I'm going to go all the way to where we are now. which is least restrictive environment. In the law, it states that students with and without disabilities should be educated together. And so that's kind of where the legal part of it is. And people come to inclusion for lots of different reasons.

[04:35]

Some come because of the law and they say, okay, what's the standard? What's the minimum? What are we expected to do here? And how do we do that? Which is great. And then some come because they realize, oh, research shows that students with and without disabilities do academically better in inclusive settings.

[04:50]

And then some people come to this work to say, I think it's just like a civil right. I think it's a social justice reason. And some people say, oh, it's because my kid has autism and I really can't see them being anywhere else besides their neighborhood school. And so what we realize is people come to this work for lots of different reasons. No matter the reason you come to the work, what we often see it to be is a skill set and a mindset and a heart set. And so we've got to make sure that we can help educators and administrators understand the mindset, heart set, and skill set to make inclusive education be effective in a school system.

[05:26] SPEAKER_00:

I wonder if you want to think maybe about a scenario where we have maybe a considerable extent of inclusivity, but still classrooms that are self-contained or programs that are entirely off-site. One of the things that I see pretty frequently in rural areas is that I think largely for issues of scale and staffing, regional service centers or regional schools will serve students with particular disabilities in a more self-contained environment, and those students will not go to their local schools. So thinking about that scenario where there are specialized programs established for reasons, you know, it's not necessarily for no reason. How could we begin to think about and move toward a more inclusive setup for those students who are currently not learning alongside their general education peers?

[06:13] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, so the rural example is a good one. And there are many different examples of BOCES or CESAs or places that have a collaborative, collective way to think about special education services. What I want to say is that that shouldn't supersede a kid's right to be in a general education setting in their homeschool environment. in their neighborhood where they are born. But what that means is, you know, you kind of said, well, what do we do with this? And what we do with it is systematically think about educating all teachers to support all students inclusively.

[06:45]

So if you think about the very bottom of, I guess, the definition of special education is access to general education content, curriculum, and peers. So that's the goal, the end goal. Then it doesn't make sense to do it somewhere else. But of course, it means that educators need to have a wide toolkit around how to support the range of learners in any one setting. And it's very doable if that's how we see our role as educators to educate all kids who come to our classroom.

[07:14] SPEAKER_00:

Well, let's talk, if we could, Julie, about some of the barriers that are in place to moving toward that vision. Because I think as educational administrators, we tend to be pretty practical people. And this all sounds pretty good, but for the details and the specifics of how to make that work. Because what we don't want to do is we don't want to take a system that is working to some extent and exchange it for a system that we're not really equipped to succeed with. We like the idea. But we want to make sure that we're not going to get ourselves in over our heads and make things worse for students in the name of doing something better.

[07:47]

So what are some of the challenges that schools typically face when they're moving in the direction that you're talking about? And what are some of the guideposts to navigating those changes successfully?

[07:57] SPEAKER_01:

I would say there are lots of barriers. So I'm going to name a few and we can talk about each of them. There's mindset barrier. And that's sort of the school has always looked this certain way and we've got to make a big change. So there's a momentum of the same issue that we have, meaning I went to school and kids with disabilities were in this room and that's what I'm used to. So we've got the momentum of the same and some of our structures, like you mentioned CESAs and BOCES and things like that, really, really are the machine that carry out exclusion over and over and over again.

[08:23]

So the other kinds of things that people say or that people worry about would be the skill set of our educators, making sure they know how to support students with a wide range of learning needs and students with a wide range of behavioral needs. We also know that behavior itself can be one of the most significant reasons students are separated or segregated. And so that's something else is really helping get educators to a new space and place around how to support kids with challenging behaviors. I think it does sound complex when you talk about it in these big ways, especially saying, you know, principles are pretty practical and we want to make sure not to exchange a bad system for a good one. And I want to say that the systems that we have right now are really not serving our students with disabilities in quite the way that we would want. And the reason I know that is when we've worked with school systems to become much more inclusive, what we see is phenomenal in the data.

[09:18]

around how well they achieve, they meaning kids with disabilities, they meaning kids without disabilities, how well they achieve academically, socially, behaviorally, et cetera, once we do a little bit of training for our teachers. The kind of training though that's really needed, there are like these, in the book we talk about six powerful classroom practices. And I'll just sort of break it down with three right now. Educators need to learn how to differentiate content curriculum really well They need to learn how to support students with challenging behavior. That's just part of the daily routine. And they also need to learn how to collaborate effectively.

[09:55]

So we have all these special ed teachers working in silos. And when we put all the resources in the general ed setting, now we also need to learn how to collaborate and co-teach effectively. But the good news is with those three main classroom practices being bolstered or improved, we see quick changes to school dynamics and to school systems to become better and better for all.

[10:19] SPEAKER_00:

Let's talk about what you see in terms of some of the improvements, both for students with disabilities and for students without disabilities, because it's easy to say, I like the optics better of full inclusion. But to say that the results are actually better is something else entirely. Talk to us a little bit about the results for both. What is it that changes when we educate all students in a fully inclusive setting?

[10:41] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, so I was a researcher and studied this for 25 plus years. And what we found is that across the board, every disability label, every disability category, when kids are included and included well with teachers that have training in how to differentiate, support students with challenging behaviors, and how to collaborate and co-teach. We see huge jumps in math performance, in reading performance, across every single area. And we see improvements for their non-disabled peers too. So you said, well, what is it about that? Well, that's the question.

[11:15]

There's a lot of different things. I think one is expectations change. So we start to have higher expectations for all kids. Another is support is available to any kid at any time. When we start to think about kids as kids and not Yeah. Those support needs, they don't have to be carried out in a separate space or place.

[11:48]

We can bring supports right to students in these like super seamless ways that is just kind of the next evolution of education. We're all really stuck in some outdated practices around special education. And there are all kinds of new innovative ways to educate all kids together that if school systems were on board with, then they can learn these ways of educating kids. And it's pretty phenomenal what happens for everybody.

[12:12] SPEAKER_00:

I mean, it's inconvenient that the results are as they are because it would be easier to just dismiss this whole idea and say, well, that sounds nice, but it's not workable and it wouldn't be better for the kids. Well, if it is better for the kids, then we kind of have to figure it out, don't we?

[12:25] SPEAKER_01:

That's right. Well, it's interesting because for you, the research is the interesting part. I could give some people piles and piles of the research. And they don't really care, but they look at the law and say, oh my gosh, this is what we're legally supposed to be doing. Everybody has a different why. And that's fascinating too, because as administrators, we have to differentiate our why for our whole staff.

[12:45]

So when we're leading this work and creating these experiences for all students, we have to help adults make changes. And most principals are pretty used to understanding change theory and things like this. But this is a little bit of a different level because it is unlearning some things. and relearning new things that really can take us quite a ways in the field of education.

[13:08] SPEAKER_00:

And one of the big things that it seems to me that has to be thought of differently or that we have to kind of unlearn is the idea that there are general education teachers and special education teachers, and hopefully they interact as little as possible and they're completely separate people. I think there are some states now that require all newly certified teachers to get certified as special education teachers. Is that correct?

[13:26] SPEAKER_01:

I don't think there are states that are doing that fully yet, but there are lots and lots of dual certification programs. So when I taught at Syracuse University, it was a dual cert program, meaning all of our teachers got general and special ed certification because in reality, really good teaching practice is really good teaching practice. And having a wide tool, a tool belt full of strategies and ideas can help all of our learners at once as opposed to having to silo or separate. And when we say that, I like to bring it all the way to the human level and think, How might it feel if it was your child or how might it feel if it was you that wasn't allowed in a general education setting? And so even though we're talking about like big numbers and research and things like that, it's like each and every one of those kids wants to belong, wants to have friends, wants to go to the school their siblings go to. And it's really not only kids.

[14:15]

logistically possible. It's a kind of a legal imperative. And then it's also quite feasible. And we find when our school systems, when people become more inclusive in their teaching practices, they're even happier because they're collaborating with other adults because they have a lot more ideas and people are bringing a lot to the table on their teams to support everyone in the classroom.

[14:37] SPEAKER_00:

I know in the book, you have seven milestones tied to an action plan for helping schools move in that direction. Maybe they're not going to get to the final one immediately. It is a process. You want to talk about any of those milestones?

[14:48] SPEAKER_01:

So yeah, we've been through this process with so many school systems that we've kind of seen people make mistakes. We've seen people do things to jump ahead in their system and we've seen people use really, really strong high leverage practices. And so we've kind of organized them into these milestones and I'll just kind of read the milestones. The first one being, do we understand why inclusive education is the way? The second one is, have we seen our system through an equity lens? So what we do is we look at all the students with different identities that are not being quote unquote successful and looking at what groups are overrepresented, underrepresented, who does and does not have access to general education.

[15:28]

And we literally draw their maps and they're called service delivery maps. And the third one is, do we have a really clear public vision for inclusive education? Meaning, does everybody understand where we're headed and why? And by everyone, we mean everyone in the community and everyone, all of the educators, et cetera. Then we start to realign existing service delivery models. So what we start to do is think, okay, if we've got all these kids with learning disabilities that are pulled out for more than two hours a day over here, how do we realign these adult supports and kids' schedules so that they have access to general education all day long?

[16:03]

So that's milestone four. Then we get into the big ideas around how do we reimagine schedules and collaboration? So we have to help educators co-plan, co-teach in lots of cool ways. And then milestone six is are we using those powerful, inclusive classroom practices? And so we have to make sure our educators are ready with that. And then milestone seven is a nice one.

[16:24]

It's just how do we provide ongoing support for this work? Because what happens is we'll get a very gung-ho principal in, ready to go, and we will make and support them to make their schools really, really inclusive, or their entire school or their entire district. But then they move, or then something changes. And so we've got to be able to maintain that momentum around inclusivity.

[16:44] SPEAKER_00:

I wonder if we could talk a little bit about staffing and class size and things like that, because one of the phrases that probably most educators have heard is the idea that when a student is identified for special education services, especially if there is a discussion about moving them to a self-contained class or program, the phrase, a smaller class would be better for your child, I think often passes through our lips. And if we think about keeping students students in a general education setting, often our minds go to, well, this student needs a one-on-one aid. And of course, those are very expensive. There's some talk about whether having a one-on-one aid is actually the least restrictive environment. How do we think about staffing and aids and those issues that become really the brass tacks of how do we make this work, but also maybe in some cases are our go-tos that should not be our go-tos?

[17:37] SPEAKER_01:

Beautiful. So you probably know all the research about class size, and we know that students, all students do better in smaller classes. And so when you think about inclusion, you're like, oh, so you mean that we would put all these kids together? How does that work? Well, let's remember that all students do better in small group settings. And so in any general education classroom, when you have all your resources there, it means you can do station teaching.

[18:01]

in small groups. It means you can do parallel teaching. It means you can do one teach, one make multisensory. So one person is reading Romeo and Juliet out loud, and the other one is acting it out with puppets. So you're always thinking about access points, adding them for the learner. So what we say is it's true.

[18:21]

Lots of humans need small group instruction. In fact, most do. And what this affords us is the ability to use small group instruction all day long in lots of ways. Now, what we're not talking about is ability grouping. So we're not saying we're going to pull the kids who struggle and put them here. We're going to pull...

[18:36]

the kids who excel and put them here. But we are going to say we differentiate in that inclusive classroom so that all students have access points through all of their assignments and the things that are happening in their classroom. And then you mentioned paraprofessionals, which is a total passion of mine. Paraprofessionals are really often used as a band-aid. You kind of said there are some that we might go to too quickly. And we've studied really deeply the deleterious effects of paraprofessional on kids, meaning sometimes they get in the way of social relationships, meaning sometimes kids are velcroed to an adult and people see the adult as the person they're going to talk to as opposed to the kid.

[19:14]

All sorts of challenges exist. Now, the good news is... when they're really well trained to support inclusively, all of those effects go away. And we start to see another adult that's able to help any student at any time that needs any support.

[19:30]

And so we have to get a little more flexible with our thinking about paraprofessionals, how they're utilized and how they're trained. But with really not a lot of training, paraprofessionals can play this pivotal role in helping to create access points for kids, in helping to create social interactions as opposed to impede them. There's just a million ways that they can be utilized well, but they're also not the answer. So they're not the answer to inclusive education. It's that co-teaching aspect. It's making sure that general and special ed teachers are co-planning instruction is the real answer.

[20:04]

Now, there are certainly some kids that are going to need more support than is available that way. So that's where those paraprofessionals come in. A lot of people say a paraprofessional is the most restrictive environment, and I just want to clear that up. A paraprofessional isn't an environment. A paraprofessional is a resource, a support, a supplemental aid, support, or service, and they're considered portable under the law. So in the law, there's something called the Ronker portability test.

[20:30]

It's an old case, Walter versus Ronker. And it says that if a service is portable, it should be brought to the student, not the student to the service. So when you think about, well, what's a non-portable service in special education, it's really hard to find one because most services are portable. And the goal being we need to bring those services to kids right where they are and not kids to the service. And so paraprofessionals are just a portable service and they're not an environment. Now, people use the word restrictive and they get confused because they're saying, well, it can be a problem.

[21:04]

It can be an actual issue to have a paraprofessional support when you look at the research. And the answer to that is absolutely. So we have to train our paraprofessionals to be very effective in their inclusive strategies.

[21:15] SPEAKER_00:

I wonder if we could talk about paraprofessionals, particularly when it comes to behavior, because often that is our go-to band-aid, as you said, especially if we have challenging behaviors that we're not really sure what to do with. We want other students to be safe. How can we think about safety and behavior? Because this is certainly a big topic lately. And there was, again, once a time when our first impulse was to exclude, to expel, things like that. Of course, special education law has considerable protections around those kinds of moves.

[21:47]

How can we think about safety? You know, I'm hearing a lot of nightmare stories lately about just very, very unsafe classrooms. Students are not getting what they need. You know, students who are struggling with behavior are not getting what they need and nobody else is either. And we've even had very dramatic and tragic cases like the teacher who was shot by a first grade student. So how can we think more inclusively about behavior and take seriously some of the concerns that are out there right now?

[22:13] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, the behavioral concerns are real. And I really respect how you're talking about them because we know that educators are coming home at night and feeling really worried about their jobs. They're worried about how to do the work of educating. And They're very worried about challenging behavior for good reason. So today I'm not talking about this topic, but I have another book through ASCD with Kate McLeod. And the title of this book is From Behaving to Belonging, The Inclusive Art of Supporting Students Who Challenge Us.

[22:43]

And it's all about the ways in which we have to develop relationships with our students and that there's really no shortcut to supporting kids with challenging behavior. except helping them feel seen, safe, soothed, and secure, the four S's. And those strategies, they take a bit of time and they're very sometimes complex and sometimes not. But essentially, when we help kids feel seen, safe, soothed, and secure, we can support pretty much any student inclusively and safely. So we always say safety is, of course, the number one concern for other students and for staff. And it means that there are some times when we have to do some extra problem solving.

[23:24]

And when I say the problem solving, What I mean is that we create a student success plan and we create it with the student. So too often we're sitting around roundtables, just adults trying to figure out what's the right consequence, what's the right reward, how are we going to set up this program? But in reality, there's no quick way to it except to involve the student themselves and create a success plan that will get everybody feeling more successful with the schooling experience of that student. I have a lot to say about behavior, but that's just a quick read to see kind of what we're talking about. We call it humanistic behavioral supports, and it's very much different than anything that involves remove, remediate, or punishment or reward.

[24:07] SPEAKER_00:

So Julia, I think it's worth asking, what actually is your definition of inclusion and where can people find that definition if they want to refer to it and maybe get in touch with you if they want to learn more about your work?

[24:18] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, so if it's okay, what I'll do is I'll read my definition of inclusive education. And this is written with my colleague, Dr. Christy Pretti-Frontek and I. All our work is at inclusive schooling. So if you go to inclusiveschooling.com backslash PR for this radio broadcast, you can get the definition and you can get information about all the things that we're offering and doing.

[24:38]

But I'll just read it. And as I read it, I'm going to ask listeners just to relax your body. and just take in these words and ask yourself which of these words really resonate with you, okay? So here I go. Inclusive education means we no longer accept that separate classrooms, separate schools, and separate lives are in the best interest of any student. Separating people by ability disadvantages everyone.

[25:03]

Belonging is a human need. Our educational system, practices, and spaces need to be reimagined. Inclusive education means every student is valued because of their strength, gifts, and even challenges, as disability is simply diversity. Everyone benefits from meaningful participation and opportunities to learn grade-level content with diverse peers. We must trust that all students come to us as incredible, whole people who do not need to be fixed.

[25:33] SPEAKER_00:

Wow. And you said people could find that on your website?

[25:36] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. So if you just head to inclusiveschooling.com and then I have a backslash PR and you can get exactly the definition and you can learn about the book that's coming out in ASCD.

[25:46] SPEAKER_00:

Dr. Julie Koston, thank you so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio. It's been a pleasure.

[25:50] SPEAKER_01:

Thank you, Justin.

[25:51] Announcer:

Thanks for listening to Principal Center Radio. For more great episodes, subscribe on our website at principalcenter.com slash radio.