Content / Bahavior Strategies

Ideas for content area instruction

Dr. Christopher Kliewer, who taught for four years in an inclusive elementary school, offers the following broad outline for an inclusive classroom:

• inclusive education is nothing more than good teaching for all students.
• students take responsibility for their education; they help create the structure of the classroom, including helping to establish rules and academic program.
• teachers have high expectations that all students will meet the rules and academic challenges.
• families are involved.
• curriculum is focused on humanity, on one another's worth. The students tell their own stories or other's stories and learn about things that matter in their lives.
• Teachers throw out the worksheets and basal reader system; they create curriculum that involves students.

Ideas for behavior strategies

Kliewer says it's time to reconceptualize the classroom and not automatically think bad behavior is the student's problem and something that needs to be controlled. Here are some ways to begin:

• Classrooms need one main rule - respect one another. After this, if students and teachers create interesting curriculum with material that matters in the students' lives, then students will be interested, involved, and focused on what they've designe d.
• Teachers need excellent observational skills to determine what caused a behavior problem.
• Structure the environment so students are actively engaged and motivated. That will be good teaching for all students. This will involve collaboration and networking. It also means the teacher is not always in control, but is one of a team of proble m solvers including students, parents, and other teachers.
• Other common strategies for content area instruction and solving behavior problems include peer tutoring, cooperative learning, and reciprocal teaching. These are all instructional techniques that have been around for a long time and provide ways for a class to work together toward a common goal, but don't mean that everyone is doing the same thing.

Problem-Solving Approach for Behavior Strategies

A functional assessment of problem behaviors can help general education teachers deal with behavior assessment and curriculum modifications. This is a proactive, deliberative approach that involves a team consisting of the student, parents, profession als, and teachers who ask questions about the physical environment, social interactions, instructional environment, and non-school factors.

For example, questions concerning the physical environment may include:

• are there too many people in the room?
• what about the physical arrangement of the class?
• what about the lighting of the room?

Instruction environment questions the team could ask:

• is the work too hard? too easy?
• is the pace too fast? too slow?
• is the teacher too loud?

Social and non-school factor questions:

• has the student had enough sleep?
• enough to eat?
• is the student involved in delinquent behavior?

Based on the assessment answers, the team plans a strategy to modify the environment so the child's problem behavior does not occur. Dr. Susan Etschedit points out that this is just good teaching. "If I change the material I'm using because I rea lize it's redundant for one student, all the other students who were a little bit bored also benefit and find the work more interesting."

In considering answers and strategy plans, be sure to get input from the students. Etschedit says there's also a whole list of questions to ask the student. "Students are willing to share their honest reactions if they see the whole team of peopl e is trying to help solve the problem with them."

"A broad consensus is emerging among educators that narrowly framed categorical programs have produced too few benefits." -- Wang, Reynolds, & Walberg. (1994). Educational Leadership.

This is one way to look at the variety of supports for adaptations: