The power of inclusive education | Ilene Schwartz | TEDxEastsidePrep

The classroom is a complex environment. If not explicitly managed, it can quickly turn into a collection of smaller groups that happen to be in the same room rather than an inclusive whole. See how this, sometimes overlooked, aspect can make a profound difference.

Dr. Ilene Schwartz is a professor in the area of special education at the University of Washington and the director of the Haring Center for Research and Training in Education at UW. She earned her PhD in child and developmental psychology from the University of Kansas and is a board certified behavior analyst (BCBA). Dr. Schwartz joined the UW faculty in 1991 and has an active research and professional training agenda with primary interests in the area of autism, inclusion, and the sustainability of educational interventions. She has had consistent research funding from the U.S. Department of Education since 1990 and serves on a number of editorial review boards including the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis and the Journal of Early Intervention.

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx

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)