‎"Nobody can train teachers. Teachers train themselves - they inherit certain traits" Dr. Krishna Kumar at Ten Talks- The Teacher Foundation, Bangalore

I’m not sure I completely agree with this. Certainly, there are people who have a knack for teaching. But that’s talent in the raw. If we relied only on teachers with the intangible qualities of passion, purpose and talent to teach millions of children, it would hardly be enough. After all, how many such people can there be?

                For example, there are people with an aptitude for Science and the thought process necessary to shine in the field. But the human race would hardly be where it is now if all scientific advancement were left to the few who were so inclined and inherently talented. Conventionally trained scientists have contributed as much to the field as the self-taught mavericks.

                The object of any training would be to bring the magic of this ‘exotic secret knowledge’ that only a few seem to possess to the many. We need many such teachers to teach and nurture the many children of India. The few with inherited traits could lead the charge. 

Processing Disorders Simulation Activities

I'm a special educator currently teaching near San Francisco, California. I will be moving back to India shortly and want to work in the field of special education in India. My areas of interest include Learning Disabilites, integration into mainstream, lifeskills and vocational training, school-to-adulthood transition and teacher training.

I have a lab consisting of several activities that simulate various invisible processing disorders in children with learning disabilities. Disorders addressed in this lab include auditory processing, visual processing, visual memory, fine motor issues, visual perception, memory and autism. Activities create conditions that mimic classroom situations, and participants can get an experience of what kids go through all day long in school. This activity is very relevant and useful because many kids with such disorders are undiagnosed and continue to struggle in the classroom without help. They get labelled lazy or stupid and start believing it. They fall behind academically and catching up becomes really difficult.

When teachers and administrators go through these activities, they can actually understand what a struggle it is for such students. This empathy might translate into administrative decisions such as providing special education support services for struggling students, rather than labeling and marginalizing them.

Students with invisible disabilities struggle because they themselves do not understand why they are underperforming even when they put in effort. Eventually they might stop trying.

I will be in India next June and July 2013, and would be happy to present in any venue/ school/ city. Please let me know (via this blog) if there is any interest. 

My article in Deccan Herald (Bangalore)

Education for all?

Aug 30, 2012 :

The key to successful inclusive education is teacher training. Teaching to a heterogeneous classroom is a skill that has to be taught in teacher training programmes, writes Padma Shastry.When the word ‘sarva’ was included in the name of the governmental organisation ‘Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan’, a certain high and ambitious ideal was defined for India’s future. How well is it being realised?

It is early days, for sure, but are we on our way to achieving it? Or are personal prejudices, inadequate training, and policies undermining that high ideal?

I believe there is opposition to the recent mandate on including students from the socioeconomically disadvantaged population in schools. I can certainly understand why.

Teachers are used to teaching homogeneous groups of students. Every school caters to a certain demographic, whether it is middle class, economically disadvantaged, or the privileged. All students in a class or school are roughly from the same background. It is easier to teach a group of students with similar backgrounds.

It is also somewhat true that schools not only group along economic lines, but also along cognitive lines. Most private schools are exclusive in nature. I use exclusive in the sense of exclusion — they keep out students who do not fit the mould, either socioeconomically or cognitively.

They interview parents and have students take entrance tests. They take into account the education level of parents. Such checks make the student population at a school even more homogenous.

Class dynamics

Introducing students from socioeconomically disadvantaged populations or with disabilities into such a class changes the dynamic drastically. Such students bring a whole different set of issues into the classroom.

Even if they fit in cognitively (who says students from poorer families or students with special needs cannot be intellectually high achieving?), they might have other needs that the teacher and the school cannot meet.

Is this experiment, then, doomed to failure? Will the RTE experiment raise the quality of education for the disadvantaged? Or will it bring down the quality of education for the high achieving? Is that the fear? What happens when we introduce students with disabilities into the classroom?

I am a special education teacher; I teach students with disabilities. Should I not entertain any hope of seeing my students successfully integrated into mainstream schools? What if one of my students is a potential Stephen Hawking? Would our education system banish him to the hinterlands of segregated special education? Would we as a nation refuse to nurture such potential? Would my students remain as second class citizens?

I currently teach in the United States, and I do this type of inclusive teaching for a living. I teach in a government funded public school, where we have to educate every student who walks in the door. We have students from all backgrounds and several different types of disabilities in the classroom.

My own daughters attend such public schools and learn with students with disabilities. I only say this to illustrate that this is not a new experiment. It can be done, and it has been done. Of course, it goes without saying that the Indian model of inclusive education will look nothing like the US model, or any other for that matter. India will have to develop a workable model that reflects the realities of our country, our troubles and strengths. But, refusing to deal with it can hardly be the answer.

Specific courses

The Rehabilitation Council of India has designed courses that cater to specific disabilities. However, we do not find a class full of students with one type of disability in a school. Such homogeneous grouping would only be found in a segregated setting. How would such courses help in inclusive education?

The key to successful inclusive education is teacher training. Teaching to a heterogeneous classroom is a skill that has to be taught in teacher training programmes. Learning, achievement and success have to be nurtured and cultivated regardless of the circumstances of the student.

Teaching is a career, a calling even; it is so much more than just a job. Would a teacher, faced with a difficult student, challenge himself or herself to find a solution, or would he or she ask that the student be removed from school for failing to fit in? The latter scenario occurs much more often. That is a crying shame.

That is a teacher accepting failure. That is a teacher saying he or she has nothing more to give. That is a teacher saying that he or she has reached the limit of his or her knowledge. This last, at least, can be remedied by improved teacher education.

The rest of it is a mindset that can only be changed through greater self-confidence, self-worth and self-respect. After all, could I respect myself if I gave up on a student and accepted defeat?

I have also heard from teachers who ask if it is worth it to spend extra time on one or two students at the expense of the rest of the class. It doesn’t have to be so. This is where the skills and strategies of teaching a mixed class help.

Besides, such cost-benefit, or rather, labour-benefit analysis is unbecoming of the teaching profession. How do you like it when your doctor performs a similar mercenary analysis to determine your medical care? Teachers and doctors work with human beings, not iphones.

The construction site next door could produce a student who might find a cure for cancer. My student with cerebral palsy might be the brilliant scientist who could find an alternate fuel source. Does India really want to pass up on such students?

Learning Disabilities

          Would we deny a blind person a white cane? What about a hearing aid to a hearing impaired child? Why then do we routinely deny help to a child struggling in school? It seems cruel to say so, but this happens with surprising regularity.

          Children with learning disabilities are not easily distinguishable from the regular school population. One cannot tell just by looking if a child has a learning disability or not. This is also true of a few other disabilities like mild autism, ADD (attention deficit disorder) or PDD (pervasive developmental disorder). Many mild disabilities are masked. This does not mean that they don’t exist, or that they are trivial. If anything, it is harder for the child to cope because society expects him or her to respond in a certain way, and the child can’t. The surprise, irritation and negative reaction from people at such times is difficult for the child to understand and cope with. Such repeated experiences break the child’s spirit and condition a child to think of himself or herself as a failure. In contrast, we are much more gentle and empathetic toward a child with a visible disability. We would never overtly verbally abuse or shame a child in a wheelchair on account of his disability, for example. This is not at all to suggest that any kind of disability is preferable to any other, or to minimize anybody's problems; absolutely not. This is merely to demonstrate that kids with invisible disabilities suffer in their own unique way.

          Learning disabilities manifest as dyslexia, dyscalcia, dysgraphia, attention deficit, memory problems, auditory processing problems, visual processing problems, etc. None of these can be identified without careful assessment of the student.

          I was recently in the office of the commissioner of disabilities. I needed some data, and while talking to some officials there, I discovered that they didn’t accept that learning disabilities was a disability. Laziness, stupidity, even poverty, was offered as an explanation for poor academic performance. While it is true that there are unmotivated (lazy?) children who skip school, what is called stupidity by people could be a learning disability. And poverty! Sure, students from socioeconomically depressed families have a harder time in school, but it is for reasons that have nothing to do with brain chemistry. They have less than ideal conditions at home to cope with, little food, large families, crying siblings, no place or time to study, chores to do, less educated parents, the list goes on… Is it any surprise they can’t focus on schoolwork? None of this has anything to do with learning disabilities.

          Learning disabilities is indeed a disability. It affects rich and poor alike, and if such kids appear apathetic (lazy?), it could be because of having experienced repeated failure. It is high time for it to be formally declared as a disability, so that the government can act to provide struggling students with special education support in schools. Not all struggling students have a disability; but maybe some do; and those that do certainly need support.

          After all, who would dare call Einstein, da Vinci, Napoleon, Churchill, Edison, George Bernard Shaw or Alexander Graham Bell stupid?

          

Accommodations and Modifications

          Why do teachers get all hung up about trivial stuff? Does it really matter how fast a child writes, especially in this digital age of typing? The purpose of writing is communication. Is writing speed or legibility a barrier to effective communication? Should lack of motor control be a barrier to Science education? Can’t a child in a wheelchair get a Science education? Will our education system stop the development of our own future Stephen Hawking?

When we assess like this, what exactly are we assessing? When a child fails a Math test, are we assessing his Math skills or his skill in reading and understanding directions? When a child fails an English test, did we just test his learning or was it a writing speed test? When we test a child’s comprehension, do we test his understanding of the subject, or do we test his reading speed? Timed tests- what information do they really give teachers and parents about a child’s learning?

Are tests really constructed to measure learning or the child’s weakest link? This is where accommodations and modifications come in. Accommodations are not a free ride to a child with limitations. We are not handing the child an easy pass. Accommodations are meant to level the playing field. After giving a child accommodations and modifications, the difficulty level then becomes the same for all in the class. That is the purpose of accommodations. As the name implies, accommodations help the child get past his or her weakest link. Only then can the child gain access to the actual intended learning.

School administrators and teachers are moderately generous, even if only in spirit, when accommodating a child with a visible disability. Children with invisible disabilities get a really raw deal under the present educational system. Things need to change, or many potential thinkers, writers, mathematicians, scientists, philosophers will fall through the cracks… What a loss that would be!

Is RCI facilitating Inclusive Education?

The operative word in Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan is ‘Sarva’. This organization was created specifically to provide education to ALL. Students with special needs deserve the same access to education that typical students normally get. Why, then, is the Rehabilitation Council of India behind the curve?

          RCI has designed teacher training courses for teaching students with different disabilities. There is the Autism course, the Intellectual disabilities course, the course for teaching deaf children, blind children, and so on. This is excellent for teaching concentrated populations of students with similar disabilities in a segregated school setting. But how would any of these courses help in an inclusive mainstream school? Surely there are not going to be 30 students with autism, or 30 deaf students, etc. in a regular school. Realistically, it would be a mix of students with students with various different disabilities. How would a teacher trained in a narrow specialty be able to teach students with several different needs? Besides, doesn’t specialization come at the end of generalized study?

          I recently heard about a cognitively typical child with muscular dystrophy who couldn’t attend a mainstream math class because the classroom was on an upper floor, and he couldn’t access it in his wheelchair. Where is the justice in that? Is this the shiksha that is envisioned?

          Teaching courses have to be designed to the cognitive level of the student, not type of disability. Would Steven Hawking be in a class for orthopedically impaired children, or would he be in a class for gifted children? Teachers have to be trained to teach students with any disability who are  cognitively at the same level. Then classroom instruction can be designed for a certain level of academic need and difficulty level. So there could be a course for teachers to teach students with a mild to moderate level of cognitive impairment. Another training course would prepare teachers to teach students with severe to profound disabilities. This way, students with mild to moderate needs could be mainstreamed with cognitively similar children, with special education support. Students with severe to profound difficulties would, of course, need to be educated in segregated settings academically, while still providing social integration and life skills instruction with their typical peers. Teachers trained thus would be able to work with students with any kind of disability, instead of being narrowly trained and broadly ineffective.

          While public sentiment is tending towards inclusive education, the powers that be need to facilitate such a process with the right and effective methodology to make it a reality. 

Continuum of Services

When education is federally mandated for all, then every student has to be accommodated within the school system. No longer can school education mean merely academics. Schools have to create a continuum of services, ranging from most restrictive to least restrictive, from self-contained to full inclusion. The most restrictive self-contained classrooms would still try to have their students interact with their typically developing peers in some non-academic settings.

Education is federally mandated and a universal right. Every taxpayer is eligible to free and appropriate public education. 

This arrangement of classes is born from the word- appropriate. It means every student has to be appropriately placed and educated. 

To enable appropriate placement, a continuum of services needs to be offered. Practical considerations create the need for coming up with some plan to accommodate all students- not just academic students. Every student has to be fit in somewhere....

The continuum goes from fully self-contained classrooms with minimal interaction with typically developing peers at least during lunch (or, typically developing students could volunteer in such classrooms as community service) to fully integrated programs, where support is offered by the special education department inside the regular classroom. Ancillary services such as speech and Language, OT, Braille, etc, etc are offered in self-contained classes in what is called a pull-out setting for a part of the day. When students are in the mainstream classes with paraeducator support, that is called push-in support. Most of my students have a combination of both. We specify in their IEPs how much of the day they will be pulled out and how much they will be pushed-in. The same is true of life skills classes. Students who are very good at Math or science, etc, are integrated for that; yet go to life skills classes for social pragmatics, etc... The continuum goes on to include services for students in prison/reformatory and for chronically sick students in hospital. Teachers and paraeducators go to hospitals after the regular school day to tutor sick kids. The continuum also includes homeschooling. In short, the law states that EVERY student needs to be accommodated. 

Continuum of Services

School site services:

- Self-contained (usually life skills classes)

- Push-in Inclusion (academic classes with paraeducator support in their areas of strength)

- Pull-out ancillary services (Speech and Language, OT, sign language, braille, social group/pragmatics, etc)

No hard line separates these categories. Students are interchangeably placed for part of each day in each kind of class. As students mature and progress, their percentage of participation in inclusion increases...

Off-site services:

- Home-schooling

- Reform school

- On-site education for kids in hospital

Interaction with typically developing peers is encouraged during lunch time, physical education classes, or typically developing students work in the life skills classes. The life skills class in our school makes, packs and sells popcorn to the whole school on ‘popcorn Fridays’, they make and sell Christmas presents (they use these funds for field trips and for cooking supplies). They set up and man stalls to sell these things. They work with real money, make change, etc... They also run office errands, deliver office mail to teachers (this is their Geography activity, reading a school map to find different classrooms) and serve lunch in the lunch line. They clean the cafeteria after lunch, etc. They are integrated into the school community and a common presence all around the school.

An academic program would imply some inclusion (also increasing levels of inclusion over time) in a formal academic classroom setting. Life skills students also study academics- basic Math and literacy- but they study these in a self-contained class. It is a modified curriculum and taught at a much slower pace. But this level of academics wouldn't qualify as inclusion in an academic class, since it is taught in a separate setting.

Another yardstick to differentiate between life skills academics and 'academic' academics is to see who is teaching the course. Life skills academics are taught by special education teachers to a homogenous group of students with special needs; academic academics are taught by general education teachers who have the right subject credentials.

It's only academic inclusion if a student is in a general education class taught by a mainstream teacher, and the class is a heterogeneous mix of typically developing students and students with special needs. It would be a scenario where students with special needs are exposed to the same curriculum as all, and are expected to meet the same standards of performance- with the help of accommodations, modifications, scaffolding, and support, of course.

I would love to see Indian schools offer life skills classes, academic inclusion and the ancillary services necessary for academic success on all school sites. It would be wonderful to see students with special needs become a part of the education community. It benefits all students, not just students with special needs. Typically developing students who routinely interact, or simply just meet students with special needs around campus, take such inclusion for granted, and grow up with a better understanding of such students’ capabilities. While there is no accounting for prejudice, there might be fewer pilots who make people with special needs disembark from flights in the future…  

School Choice

This is a controversial topic in the US. Teachers’ unions fight this every time the politicians bring it up. The reasoning is that school choice creates the pressure necessary for schools to raise their performance. ‘Their’ performance means students’ performance, of course. After all, a school’s performance is not separate from a student’s performance.

This would be right if school performance was the result of only the efforts of teachers and students during the 6 hours that they are in school. We know this is not true. School performance also has a lot to do with what the kids gain at home. The socio-economic and educational levels of the parents determine the success of the child much more than the school environment. This is clearly demonstrated in the US, where schools in socio-economically disadvantaged neighborhoods consistently perform poorly.

In India too, there is now talk of allocating spots for socio-economically disadvantaged students in all schools. Quite predictably, the teaching establishment is reacting in a similar way in India too.

I am a special education teacher who strongly believes in an inclusive teaching environment. I want my students with disabilities to have access to the curriculum and resources that typically developing students take for granted. This thinking would also apply to economically disadvantaged students. They too should have access to the curriculum and resources that is typically available to all. It is to the advantage of such students to have exposure to a learning environment where the bar is set high, where students are expected to challenge themselves, where excellence is the norm rather than a novelty, and where well-stocked libraries and laboratories open up a world of wonder for them. I am forever crusading for my students to learn in such an environment.

However, I can also see the flip side. The advantage to our target students is easy to see. But, what about the schools? Can they continue to be excellent when the student demographic changes? Teaching homogeneous classes is far easier than teaching mixed groups of kids.

Teaching students who come from stable families, with educated parents, and a rich cultural tradition that values learning is very different from teaching students who have no academic support at home, who might be expected to work at jobs or chores after school, who have neither a place nor time to do homework, who don’t sleep well at night due to multiple, crying siblings, the list goes on. Put these two groups together, and it could very well be a teacher’s nightmare.

Teaching a heterogeneous classroom is a skill that has to be taught in teacher training programs before any legislation is enacted. Expecting untrained teachers to work miracles without equipping them to do so is bad policy. Putting the cart before the horse can hardly be wise.

Training to teach in inclusive classrooms

           All classrooms have students with special needs in them, whether we know who they are or not. Just because they have not been identified as having special needs doesn’t mean they are not there. They could be the students with behavior problems, social problems or chronic failing grades. These kids may or may not look different from the other kids. They certainly cannot be identified as needing special education services just by looking at them. Does the classroom teacher know how to teach such students? How does the teacher work with such students?

          Society and public policy these days are leaning toward inclusive classrooms. It means that there will be more and more students with mild to moderate needs in all regular mainstream classes. This is the trend, and a great one toward creating a fully integrated society.

          The classroom teacher needs basic knowledge of special education issues. Maybe not depth of knowledge, but certainly a breadth of knowledge. Teachers are one of the earliest identifiers of learning difficulties, after parents. They see the child everyday for hours at a time. It is unfair to put a teacher in a classroom without the requisite training to handle the range of students there.

          The Rehabilitation Council of India has a course called ‘Foundations’ aimed at the regular education teacher. This is wonderful indeed. This course would acquaint teachers with the basic knowledge of different kinds of disabilities, recognizing special needs, and strategies to deal with these in the classroom. Including students with special needs in the general classroom makes the classroom heterogeneous. Teaching such a mix of students simultaneously in one classroom is a skill that needs to be taught and developed in new teachers. This course alone is hardly enough preparation, but it is a great start.

          However, this is a course that teachers have to enroll in of their own accord. Why wouldn’t this course be part of the regular B. Ed program? This is important information that every teacher needs to have. The Rehabilitation Council of India can advocate for the population that it is supposed to serve by lobbying for and getting this course embedded into the regular B. Ed curriculum. After all, inclusion is the wave of the future, and every teacher has to be equipped to handle it.