Mind Shift

   As our department chair it has been my goal to ensure that our special education teachers and staff have a student centered approach when developing IEPs and discussing services, as it should be. Under our past school administration this was not our focus, and instead we were very aware of teacher schedules which may have impacted student placement. For example, this year alone I have worked with 2 children from the self contained setting, who were mainstreamed with me for reading. Both of these students were well above their general education peers academically and in my opinion, should have been mainstreamed much sooner. This threw up huge red flags for me and drove me to assess our self contained classroom's data on student achievement. I found that there were, in fact, several students who had the potential to be mainstreamed. When we met as a grade level to discuss this, I realized that the school climate prior to our new administration was still impacting our self contained teachers. They were afraid to recommend their children be mainstreamed due to lack of support from administration and acceptance of their children. To me this just further illustrates how administrators set the tone for the school and directly impact student's education. Even after said administration is gone, some teachers continue to make decisions based on the fears that were faced  prior. It has been a challenge to break through these fear-based decisions and ask teachers to trust the new climate and do what is best for children, every time.

I wonder.....have others experienced a similar situation of trying to re-teach or re-train teachers thought processes when there has been an administrative shift? I know that trust is of the utmost importance, but has anyone experienced specific techniques which can help expedite the process?

One strategy I'm trying is to vertically observe one another. For example, our self contained K-1 teacher will go into a classroom where there is general education support for our K or 1st grade children so she can see what a day in general education looks like and get a better handle on if any of her kiddos could benefit from that environment. I've also asked them to assess data from each grade level to see how their children compare. They were surprised to see that some of their students perform well in comparison to their general education peers. Granted, their performance is measured through the support of a self contained setting, but if their performance is at that level, then we should definitely discuss looking at different services.

Any other ideas out there would be much appreciated as we try to ensure that our goal is to be advocates for our students, and develop IEP's which reflect the least restrictive environment for each student's success.