Imagine a world
in which children of all abilities learn, play, and grow together,
a world in which ability does not stand in a way of making friends
or dictate where you get to go to school
or who you get to study with.
That's what I do every day.
I try to think about how we make this become a reality,
how we try to understand and appreciate
the power and the promise of inclusive education.
So, what is inclusion?
Inclusion's not a strategy, an instructional strategy.
Inclusion isn't a placement option.
Inclusion is about belonging.
It's about belonging to a community,
a group of friends, a school, or a community.
But it's also important to remember
that inclusion is not just about being there.
We've all probably had the experience
where you walk into a room full of people
and you don't belong, you're not a member.
That doesn't feel very good.
So how do we fix that
to make sure that the children that we are working with
don't experience this idea of not belonging?
Well, we do that through instruction.
We do that through teaching.
What we want to learn and what we've learned
is that teaching works,
instruction is important.
But it is also important to realize that instruction doesn't just happen.
Instruction is intentional.
Instruction is planned.
Instruction helps all of us be more successful.
Whether you're a child learning how to negotiate their environment
or a little boy with disabilities who's learning how to use language
or a child in elementary school trying to tackle two-digit addition
or trying to learn how to ride a bike
or you're a 50 plus something non-digital native
who's trying to figure out how to use her new iPad,
instruction works.
And we all benefit from good instruction.
Now, we sometimes as adults forget how important good instruction is
because we don't venture very far out of our comfort zone
and try and learn new things.
So, one of the things I do every year
is encourage my graduate students to try to learn a new thing.
And they all look at me with a perplexed look and say,
"We're in graduate school.
We're learning new things every day."
And I say, "Yeah, but by the time you get into graduate school,
you know how to do school.
So, try to learn something else.
Try to learn something in a domain that you aren't very good at."
And I follow my own advice.
So, once every so often, I try to learn a skill
or achieve something in an area that I am not very good at -
and that's how I ended up doing a triathlon for my 50th birthday -
and understand -
(Applause)
Thank you.
(Laughs)
And understand the importance of instruction.
Now, when we think about instruction, it's important that we think about
what instruction does to both the learner and the teacher.
One of the things that instruction does for the learner is
it helps them be more confident and more competent, okay?
When we have good instruction,
the learner, the children, become better at what you're teaching them how to do.
The teacher becomes more confident as well.
Because there's nothing more reinforcing
than a teacher then seeing their students achieve.
And really, there's nothing -
there's no way to make a child feel better about him or herself
than to help them be successful in their learning.
If you want to teach someone,
if you want to increase someone's self-esteem,
teach them how to read.
That's how you do it.
Now, the thing about instruction, though, is
that it's important to think about what you're teaching.
Often when people come to see
the inclusive preschools that we run at the University of Washington,
they'll say to me, "Isn't that great?
I can't tell who has a disability and who doesn't have a disability."
That always makes me happy.
But isn't it great the way children just naturally interact together?
And you know, we have about 50 years of data that tell us
that if you have children with and without disabilities
and you don't do anything special,
what you'll have is
you'll have children with and without disabilities
in a room together not interacting.
So, if we want them to interact together, we need to teach it.
If we want children to be helpful towards each other,
to interact and be friendly towards each other,
we need to teach it.
If we want children to care about other people in their classroom,
we need to teach it.
And that teaching is intentional.
The other thing about that teaching is that it's data-based.
What I mean by that is that good instruction yields good outcomes.
In fact, we like to think about it
as saying that student failure is instructional failure.
When a child doesn't learn what we want him or her to learn,
it's because we haven't taught it to them in the right way.
It's not because we're necessarily bad teachers.
It's because maybe we haven't figured out the right way to teach it yet.
Maybe we don't have control of all the elements
that we need to be able to have control of.
But when a student isn't making progress in an area,
what that teaches us is
that we need to change our instructional strategy.
Well, instruction is important.
It's only important
if you're teaching values, skills, activities, and outcomes
when we are very interested
in thinking about what children learn from being in inclusive environments.
Now, when we started studying inclusion,
I was working with some colleagues,
and we studied about 35 children for five years.
And these were children ranging from preschool to high school.
And they had severe disabilities,
and we observed them many, many times over the course of five years.
And we talked to their teachers and their parents and their peers
and to them, if they were able to talk with us,
because we were interested in finding out what the benefit was of inclusion.
We all knew there was benefit.
We saw the benefits.
We heard the stories.
And in fact, one of the stories we heard every year was
what I like to call the birthday party story.
So, imagine that you have a third-grader with severe disabilities
who's always been in a segregated classroom.
And this year, because their school has decided to embrace inclusion,
the child is in a general education classroom
with support.
And about three months into the school year,
Bryan, our third-grader, comes home,
and in his backpack is a birthday party invitation.
And his parents say this is the first time
he's ever been invited to a birthday party.
That's a big outcome, okay?
But it's not the outcome of inclusion.
The number of party invitations you get, it's not the outcome.
But it's an indicator of an outcome.
And what are the outcomes we're looking for?
The outcomes we're looking for are membership, relationship, and skills.
And membership is how we interact,
how a child interacts with the group, with the school, with the classroom,
with the community,
what kind of accommodation are made
to help that child participate in a meaningful way.
Relationships are how the child interacts on a one-to-one basis
with other children, students in their classroom,
and we think about the range of relationships
that student demonstrates.
So we think about the relationships where sometimes you're a peer
with someone in your classroom.
Sometimes you're helping someone in your classroom.
Sometimes you're receiving help from someone in your classroom.
And sometimes you have conflicts with someone in your classroom,
and you have to learn how to settle those conflicts in an appropriate way.
Now, you notice one of the kinds of relationships we don't label
is friendship.
Because friendship is a complex range of relationships
where you sometimes are helping and sometimes receiving help,
sometimes hanging out,
and sometimes having conflicts and settling those conflicts.
And of course, another outcome of inclusive education are skills.
We don't want to ever not give enough credit
to how important it is to learn skills,
but skills by themselves don't help us accomplish great things.
We all know people who are very good at math
or very good at writing or very good at science
who can't use those skills,
because they can't work with other people,
because they don't have good relationships,
because they aren't interested in
or don't have the skills to be a member of a group.
So these things together are what we call inclusive education.
So we've talked about what inclusion is.
We've talked about how to promote inclusion.
But now the question is, Why do we care,
why do we care about inclusion?
And I like to sum it up this way.
Inclusion is the celebration of diversity put into action.
If we care about diversity,
then we have to do something to make this diversity come true.
Just like we have 50 years of data
about children with and without disabilities
playing together,
that if you put them in a room and you don't do anything special,
you'll children with disabilities and without disabilities in a room
not playing together.
But we know that if we use our smart instructional practices
to facilitate interaction,
everyone benefits.
And that's the power and the promise of inclusion:
making sure everyone is supported, everyone is challenged,
and everyone benefits
in this great inclusive world that we have.
Thank you.
(Applause)