This is part 2 of 5.
Part 1 – Inclusion is a contiuum – can be found here.
There are myths about how children learn which make inclusion appear hard for teachers to do.
Some believe because children learn in very different ways, inclusive mainstream classrooms must mean lots of different children doing different things.
This belief was at its peak when VAK learning styles were in vogue, and while these have been for the most part driven out of education the underpinning beliefs remain with us. This is probably because the existence of a diversity of learning styles is a view held by much of society, and the claim humans learn in very different ways is often repeated as fact even though there isn’t strong evidence it is true.
Such beliefs make it logical to believe some children don’t learn much in school because teachers do not match instruction to the different ways in which individual children learn.
It has even led some to argue schools are not capable of being inclusive because they are incompatible with the pluralistic ways in which children learn.
This view was famously explained by the late Ken Robinson’s “Changing Education Paradigms” video, which went further and argued the uniformity of schools destroys the innate creativity of children.
Those believing this think teaching classes of children the same thing in the same way is inherently exclusive.
To them being inclusive means different children doing different things.
Some may be working on coloured paper.
Some may be wearing headphones or using computers or tablets.
Some may be using fiddle toys while others sit on beanbags on the floor.
In classrooms like this the teacher will not be instructing the whole class – instead they use different methods with different pupils. Occasionally overstimulated children who need a break leave the room quietly to stand outside while the re-regulate before rejoining the class.
The room has a cheerful productive hum about it.
If you’ve been teaching for as long as I have this might all sound uncomfortably familiar.
It’s what teacher training twenty or so years ago held up as ideal, and while this vision isn’t as often explicitly articulated it still has influence, particularly when inclusion is discussed.
SEND support built around conceptions of “additional/different” can imply inclusion must mean different things for different children and don’t sufficiently emphasise, even when individualised strategies have value, they can’t be effective in contexts of disorder and confusion.
A further driver is how the assessment of individual needs of children is often done through processes detached from their context as members of classes. Teachers aren’t private tutors, and don’t typically teach children one-on-one, which makes teaching strategies designed to work in this context of limited use to a typical mainstream teacher.
What might be a very helpful suggestion for an adult working with just one child can be terrible advice for a teacher teaching a class of twenty-nine.
When they try the result can be chaos.
Often it means confusion, unreasonable workloads and an inability to establish and set up the predictable and consistent routines and systems that allow lots of different people to be in one room working together.
This is not unique to teaching – any context in which there are lots of humans in one place – from battlefield armies to building sites to football grounds have common expectations, rules and modes of behaviour allowing individuals to work together towards a common aim, and this usually means doing the same things in the same way.
It would be odd if classrooms in schools were the only exception to this, so to be included children need agreed expectations of how to rub along together.
A reasonable response might be it isn’t the vision itself that’s wrong, but that those who attempt to enact it aren’t doing it right – that teachers need to be better trained and resourced in facilitating different children doing different things, and if they were then more children would be included and it would be possible to create cultures in which lots of difference and adaptation become part of the culture.
I would love this to be true, and the argument deserves to be taken seriously because any good idea can be ruined by poor resourcing and implementation. We must not be afraid of idealism because with pragmatism and good logistics this is the only thing that changes the world for the better.
Would we, for example, have an NHS if there hadn’t been people with outrageous and audacious vision? People who dared to dream of better worlds?
In this case, however, it doesn’t fly.
There isn’t enough good evidence children do learn in very different ways – I’ll say more about this in a later post – and we don’t have good examples of where such approaches have been successful so there is nowhere to go to for the essential logistical stuff.
I am open to evidence that might change my mind, but in the meantime good intentions can’t excuse poor outcomes – visions of an ideal world can’t be a reason to do things we know won’t work in the world the children in our classrooms are taught in.
What then works better?
To understand we could look at the needs of children identified as having SEND, found on documents like pupil passports and Education Health Care Plans.
It’s striking how typical strategies that are features of strong teaching for all children are emphasised; behaviour management techniques such as “have consistent, predictable routines”, and “responds well to praise”, and teaching strategies such as “break tasks down into smaller steps”, and “regularly check for understanding.”
Such strategies aren’t suggesting some children need radically different teaching to other children, but the problem is by identifying these as individual strategies for individual children there’s an implication these are things a teacher must do just for them rather than aspects of teaching practice that should be in place for everyone.
This is a lesson I have learned through my own daughter who has Williams Syndrome and an associated learning disability. Some of her differences are genetically driven and there’s fascinating research around it all.
To begin with this led me to believe she might need radically different pedagogies to other children.
I went to the best research I could get hold of and found while she was likely to be more distractable, have and experience more difficulty with visual-spatial task than most children without Williams Syndrome the way she learned was largely the same.
What worked for other children would usually work for her.
And so it has proved to be.
She is successfully learning to read through a synthetic phonics programme and numeracy through counting, spotting patterns and using manipulatives.
She goes a bit slower than some others and needs more expert, careful instruction in more frequent, shorter bursts, but there are no radical differences in method because there aren’t radical differences to how she learns.
She doesn’t need teaching to be different – she needs what works to be done expertly.
It is possible I’m overreaching, and I’m open to the possibility there may be some circumstances and conditions in which to be inclusive teaching must be extensively adapted but it is implausible most of the approximately 40% of children identified as having a SEND need at some point while at school have been assigned this label because they learn differently to others.
Even where children have been identified with explicit and specific learning difficulties there is still little evidence this requires wholesale changes to instruction.
For example, for most children with dyslexia methods of reading instruction aren’t different to children who do not have dyslexia, and when instruction is adapted this is to make the common principles more precise and targeted.
Where adaptations are most obvious it is often not clear these are of benefit.
For example it is common for children experiencing difficulties in learning to be prescribed different coloured paper or lenses, despite there being no conclusive evidence such practice outperforms the placebo effect. Worryingly, this is true of many separate specific strategies and interventions claiming to help vulnerable children, and evidence they do help is often limited to anecdotes on company websites and promotional leaflets.
This isn’t me nitpicking over minutia – it is important information for teachers because if there is no evidence something does what it claims to, then it means they shouldn’t expect any learning benefit from applying it, which has important implications for their planning. Conversely if someone insists something does work then a teacher should expect to see benefits, which again means they need to adjust take full advantage of them.
As much as we may wish otherwise there are few magic bullets. The basic tenants of good teaching remain the same for just about everyone.
Where teaching is good it usually shares common principles. Even where it may appear to be quite different – for example someone teaching a person with a profound learning disability how to use cutlery, differences are usually superficial with the deeper structures – breaking things down into small steps and modelling – the same.
All this often means teachers often don’t need to target supposedly personalised strategies at only children specifically identified as needing such strategies – it’s easier, more logical and more beneficial for more children for the teacher to make sure these things are features of their regular teaching not add-ons for a select, special few.
Teachers seeking to make classrooms more inclusive should first focus on things that need to be in place for all children before attempting to make extensive individual level adaptation and differentiation. Those that do may find they are meeting the needs of many more children as a result.
When this is done well, I don’t think inclusive classrooms look very different to good classrooms in general.
They are calm, quiet, orderly and clear.
Teachers explain things clearly in small steps and then tell children explicitly what to do. They pause to check kids have understood. They respond and adapt if they don’t. They have high expectations and maintain high standards, being predictable and consistent with routines, rules, rewards and sanctions so that more children are included in the group.
They speak to children with respect and ensure children treat them and their classmates with respect too.
Inclusive classrooms are places in which the teacher knows children in the room as individuals and targets the right question to the right pupil.
An inclusive classroom is first a good classroom.
While this may not be sufficient, it is necessary.
No amount of bespoke, additional pedagogy can compensate for poor teaching and teachers must be careful attempt to meet individual need through individual adaptation don’t compromise the necessary base conditions so that nobody succeeds – it’s much harder to break things down into logical clear steps for everyone if a teacher is trying to do this for lots of different children in different ways because they think this is what is required of them.
So why do teachers feel they must do this, even when it’s against their better judgement?
Perhaps sometimes it happens because teachers lack confidence in their ability to create and maintain a calm and disruption free environment, or when leaders insist on seeing different things for lots of different children because they think this is what inclusion means. An example of this happening might be a SENDCo visiting lessons, observing only children identified as having SEND and then asking for more individual differentiation as a solution to a disorderly environment in which few children are able to learn, when the correct solution is at class and not individual level.
Stopping here would be misleading. Perhaps even disingenuous and dangerous.
More children are finding it harder to be included in mainstream classrooms and when discussing inclusive classrooms, we need to acknowledge and address the rise in the number of families seeking SEND identification and more individual support for their children.
Those doing so are acting ethically and logically – as things stand there is no mechanism for parents to improve the overall quality of their child’s teaching, so if they are struggling seeking more bespoke support is their only option.
That said it seems unlikely we are seeing more struggling children because the nature of children in general has changed very quickly over the last few years.
More likely is in a context of rising poverty, increased time spent by children online, recruitment and retention issues, the collapse in children’s mental health services and declining real terms funding it is now harder for schools to create calm and positive classrooms for all, resulting in more kids struggling and being identified as having a SEND need.
This might mean better diagnosis or even overdiagnosis, but it is just as likely it means there are children with greater need who may have coped or even thrived before but are now not able to because we are experiencing the result of multi-system degradation.
These are difficult problems because many are not within the control of individual teachers.
While it is possible for teachers to be more inclusive when they focus on it, their efforts will be more impactful when school leadership supports them by creating conducive conditions to try – as hard as it is – to mitigate the effects of wider systemic failures.
All children benefit from consistency and predictability and if the learning and behavioural norms at a school aren’t clearly communicated and understood then associated confusion and disorder makes it hard for teachers to include children in their lessons.
Again, I think of my own daughter here.
When I think of her going to secondary school in a few years’ time I worry most about potential lack of clarity around things like how to behave at social times and on the corridor between lessons – if this is left to her to work out she’s likely to make poorer choices and become dysregulated, which would make it very hard for her to focus on her learning and so harder for her teachers to include her.
This – again -is an example of how attending to getting the basics right for all children benefits those most likely to be marginalised most.
Answers will not be found in throwing more life belts to our drowning sailors – instead we need to fix the ship.
All this said it would be wrong to say if we make schools better in general there will be nobody left requiring personalised support, and there’s always a danger the sorts of thing I’ve said so far might be deliberately misunderstood by those who think we spend too much money to say we can spend less.
Categorically this is not what I think.
It is always possible to be more inclusive – the point of the continuum I talked about earlier – and a calm, quiet, orderly, predictable, clear classroom can still be exclusive if a teacher allows children who find stuff harder than others to flounder.
This is rarer and more disturbing– rooms in which children sit doing nothing because they don’t understand while others around them work productively is disturbing to think about.
My next post is about how teachers might best support those who find learning harder.
Ben Newmark 