LINDA: Well, first I want to really thank you for making the time to join
this group again. Your presentation was extremely well received at the state
institute,
and there’s been quite a lot of talk since you came and spoke with us
there about how
folks are looking at applying the learning from your presentation. So we’re
really thrilled
that you’re able to join us again.
And the readings that you gave were particularly clear and certainly insightful
with plenty more to think about. I want to start with a quote from one of your
readings—
the one that dealt with the professional learning communities where you said
about
educators who are building a professional learning community that they “must
recognize
that they must work together to achieve their collaborative purpose of learning
for all.
Therefore, they create structures to promote a collaborative culture.”
And I would say that many of our leadership sites were probably building
professional learning communities well before they knew to call it because collaboration
is at the heart of all their work. But our leadership sites have an additional
focus of
collaboration between general education and special education to unify the education
system and to ensure that students with disabilities in particular are learning
just like
everyone else.
So in looking at, I know in those articles that issue of collaboration across
general
education-special education was not address specifically, but if you’ll
share your
thoughts on any specific barriers and/or successful strategies for collaboration
that
you’ve found across general education and special education teachers
and
administrators.
RICK: Okay, well I think that the biggest barrier to becoming a
learning community—and it applies to general ed as well as special ed—is
that teachers
have traditionally worked in isolation. And, for most teachers, they have the
mindset that
I am responsible for my kids. So if I’m a fourth grade teacher and I’ve
got 28 kids, then
those are the kids I’m responsible for. If I’m a U.S. History teacher,
I’m responsible for
the kids assigned to me, but I have no responsibility—or interest really—in
what
happens to the other kids who are taking U.S. History. Because we’ve
created this sort
of “structural cells” in which we work, and that’s how our
schools have been organized,
that’s how we envisioned our job. And I bet almost every teacher on the
line has heard,
at one point or another, a colleague say, “All I want is for them to
give me the kids, give
me the books, give me my room, and leave me alone. I want to focus on my kids
and
that’s it. I don’t want anybody bothering me and I don’t
want to have to worry about
anything else outside of my room.”
And I think that’s particularly true for special ed teachers who will
find, I think, that
many regular ed teachers have an assumption that, if this student is special
ed, he’s not
my responsibility, he’s not my kid. He’s the responsibility of
the special ed department.
And so the biggest single obstacle is to get people to stop thinking in terms
of
“my kids” and to start thinking in terms of “our kids.” And
that obstacle is there for all the
teachers who teach third grade or all the teachers who teach U.S. History and
the
teachers who are teaching in the general ed and special ed setting—that
a student has
to be the responsibility of both that special ed teacher and the regular ed teacher.
So I
think that’s the one big obstacle.