minds and souls. They not only teach academic content but also observe, hear, honor, and facilitate their students’ emotional, social, and behavioral needs in a nonjudgmental yet constructivist learning environment that allows the students to shape their own experiences. Positive behavioral supports (PBS) build on students’ strengths to improve behaviors and develop positive relationships both in the classroom and community. Remember, inclusion means students are learning together in supportive environments while supporting themselves.
Bibliotherapy
A powerful tool for raising awareness about disabilities is bibliotherapy. Educators use bibliotherapy (using literature as an instructional tool) to successfully build both the academic and social skills of students with social and emotional difficulties, and there is compelling evidence it also facilitates one’s own development (Lutovac & Kaasila, 2019; Regan & Page, 2008). Through fiction and nonfiction genres, educators can send the message that students with disabilities have needs similar to their peers. At the same time, reading books such as those in table 1.1 increases students’ awareness of diversity and differences and minimizes stereotypes. Such books also address peers’ insensitive actions.
The list in table 1.1 offers several books to explore differences according to grade level and disability. Select literature that portrays students with disabilities in a positive way with pluralistic themes, rather than literature that focuses solely on the disability or portrays people using a deficit paradigm.
It is often more effective for students with disabilities and their peers to read about fictional characters and then translate those messages to everyday classroom scenarios than to digest information the teacher presents in a lecture about disabilities. Students identify with the protagonists and absorb the subliminal messages through stories that often have common themes and are not exclusively about disabilities.
University of Haifa (Israel) researchers and coauthors Zipora Shechtman and Rony Tutian (2016) cite evidence of educators using bibliotherapy as an intervention with in-service teachers to train them to reduce students’ aggression. Students constructively draw healthy, parallel emotional conclusions with fictional characters’ experiences and candid narratives. Knowing that they are not alone helps students with disabilities work through some of the issues they face in a nonthreatening, less confrontational manner.
Table 1.1: Bibliotherapy to Increase Disability Awareness
Visit go.SolutionTree.com/specialneeds for a free reproducible version of this table.
Behavioral Approaches
Students with emotional and behavioral differences often require extra attention from educators and administrators. Developmental, learning, physical, and emotional differences can impact students’ attention and progress. For example, students with a traumatic brain injury may exhibit frustrations with memory issues during instruction and assessments. Sometimes professionals prescribe medications to modify unwanted behaviors for learners with ADHD, but even so, students also need self-control strategies. Therefore, educators should use a multimodal behavioral approach that includes more than one intervention.
Some students’ behavior impacts the learning of other students and challenges school personnel. If that is the case, then educators must proactively design and implement appropriate behavioral plans to monitor positive strides and decrease negative, unwarranted, and often disruptive behavior. Teachers can use behavioral student contracts and metacognitive forms to help students exhibit more self-control and emotionally regulate themselves better. It is sometimes difficult for the student, teacher, or a family member to realize that self-control, paying attention, or following classroom routines is an evolutionary process, but if the teacher monitors and charts improvements, then behavioral and social skills become more tangible and manageable. Educators, students, and families should collaborate to reinforce expectations.
Figures 1.2, 1.3, and 1.4 (page 29) offer elementary and secondary self-regulation examples, which teachers can transform into informal contracts to increase teacher-student conversations and reflections, and share spot-on data with families.
Figure 1.2 is a tool elementary students can use to tally the number of times they display on-task behaviors and routines to accurately complete assignments. Its purpose is to increase learner awareness of when and how frequently they display the behavior to then self-regulate. Students have the option of adding tallies or comments.
Source: Adapted from Karten, 2017b.
Figure 1.2: My self-regulation chart.
Visit go.SolutionTree.com/specialneeds for a free blank reproducible version of this figure.
Figure 1.3 is a tool to help upper elementary and middle school students reflect on how their behavior impacts their weekly performance and interactions. It tackles the next steps needed for improvement beyond compliance and provides “what if” scenarios.
Figure 1.3: Daily or weekly reflection on class and school expectations. continued
Visit go.SolutionTree.com/specialneeds for a free blank reproducible version of this figure.
Figure 1.4: My resolutions for making me a better me.
Visit go.SolutionTree.com/specialneeds for a free blank reproducible version of this figure.
Figure 1.4 is a tool to help middle and high school students follow through with their behavioral goals and intentions.
Sometimes educators should break down the components of social behaviors into sub-skills and offer increased verbal reinforcement, modeling, discussion, and practice across settings to ensure student understandings, generalizations, and applications to other situations and environments. Simulations and modeling appropriate interactions through hypothetical scenarios reinforce appropriate behavior. Students also need practice seeing things through other people’s perspectives and viewpoints, especially when they differ from their own. Students need not agree with the viewpoints, but they must learn to tolerate and even accept them. Understanding other perspectives is a crucial life skill.
Knowing the perspectives and honoring the voices of students with and without disabilities within inclusion classrooms reveals more about how teachers manage the academic and behavioral supports (Shogren et al., 2015). It’s a fact that within an inclusion classroom, some students will need more help than others. How that is perceived by students with and without disabilities is important to know, since a positive school climate and culture influence student outcomes (Thapa,
