Acceptance to me means taking someone as they are and respecting them for this, this sounds easy and you may presume that all teachers do this, but sadly this is not the case and quite selfishly this can often be because accepting a student for who they are also means acknowledging the extra work that they as the teacher may need to put in to insure an inclusive classroom. It is far easier to belittle a student’s needs or assume that they don’t really need extra support. However the new SEND Code of Practice (2014) sets to change this view by ensuring all teachers are responsible for all of the students in their class even say when the student is partaking in an intervention out of the classroom.
‘’The class or subject teacher should remain responsible for working with the child on a daily basis. Where the interventions involve group or one-to-one teaching away from the main class or subject teacher, they should still retain responsibility for the pupil. They should work closely with any teaching assistants or specialist staff involved, to plan and assess the impact of support and interventions and how they can be linked to classroom teaching.’’
SEND Code of Practice 0-25, 2014
The only way to have this full responsibility is to learn to accept the student, learn to accept their needs and build a relationship with the student and those who have a significant part to play in their lives. A further key aspect of acceptance is building one’s own knowledge base in the area of Special Educational Needs in order to remove barriers in understanding.
Building relationships with students on the SEN register
Here are some ideas that may help you to build a positive relationship with a student on the SEN register. These ideas will also be useful for building relationships with all students in your class and particularly those with behaviour that you find challenging.
- Know the students profile – these are all on the shared drive and should be printed out and be with your lesson plan/ SOW. The information on here will give you some knowledge of the student allowing you to build a relationship with them faster than if you didn’t have it. For example if a student hates praise this sort of information will be present to help you avoid putting your foot in it. The profile also details ways to support the student and this is important for insuring the student feels included and therefore happy in your lesson.
- Build in lots of positive interactions such as greeting students at the door, having positive conversations and giving positive feedback every lesson.
- Refrain from ever shouting at a student – there is never any need to do this, all you will do is set a poor example of behaviour that your students may later follow.
- Get to know each of your students, ask them about their day, what they enjoy etc.
- Be flexible with your approach – no one method will work with all students. Be prepared to try different strategies, but most importantly never give up.
Building relationships is so important to the inclusive classroom, the majority of research focused on positive classrooms has found that students will only respect a teacher who first respects them and students work harder in classes where they like the teacher (Canter and Canter, 1992 and Cefai and Cooper, 2010).
Building relationships with parents
The new code of practice makes it clear that schools should have regular contact with the parents or carers of students who are on the SEN register. Many students have proactive parents who will contact the inclusion team or yourself, but other students will have less active parents who you will need to contact in order to keep them updated on progress. Unfortunately in the past this has not always been the case at the school where I work. I spoke with a parent recently who is house bound and waited weeks to hear from a teacher, but never did. This does not only give a poor impression of the school, but could also have a major impact on the student’s education.
It takes a lot of time to build positive relationships with parents, but only one small incident like the one above to ruin them. Ecosystemic theory tells us that students are directly affected by their parent’s opinion of the school (Molnar and Lindquist, 1989) so again I cannot stress the importance of these relationships.
Why build parent teacher relationships?
Build relationships with professionals
Schools will always have their own internal professionals who you can call upon for advice and normally your first port of call should be the SENCO. However in addition to this there are a number of external providers who are able to offer advice and support. The list below is a good indicator but is not exhaustive of the people we are able to involve if it is deemed necessary:
- PCAMHS
- Play therapists
- Occupational therapists
- Educational psychologists
- Language and Communication advisory teachers
- Autism advisory teachers
- Hearing impairment specialists
- Visual impairment specialists
Build own knowledge base
Building your own understanding of inclusion and special educational needs is key to developing an accepting classroom. There are four easy ways to do this:
- Attend the staff training sessions that are put on by your schools inclusion team.
- Ask your inclusion team for specific training for yourself or your department, if they cant offer it they should know someone who can.
- Always attend student focused meetings – these are designed to support you with teaching certain students.
- Read – there are so many good books out there offering great advice. I hope to do a blog on books I have found useful soon.
Whole school policy
I just wanted to finish on a final thought about acceptance. Most of the research on inclusion states that truly inclusive teaching is only possible when the message is coming from the top down and even then it has proven hard to implement across the whole school. However it would take only a small amount of effort from each and every staff member to put a school at the forefront of inclusive Education. So when you plan your next lesson think about what you can do to be more inclusive.
References
Canter, L. and Canter, M. (1992) Assertive Discipline: Positive Behaviour Management for Today’s Classroom. Santa Monica, CA: Canter and Associates Inc.
Cefai, C., and Cooper, P. (2010) Students without Voices: The unheard accounts of Secondary School Students with Social, Emotional and Behavioural Difficulties. European Journal of Special Needs Education. Vol. 25 (2), pp. 183-198.
Department for Education. (2014) SEND code of practice 0-25. London: HMSO.
Ellis, S. and Tod, J. (2009) Behaviour for Learning Proactive Approaches to Behaviour Management. Abingdon: Routledge.
Molnar, A. and Lindquist, B. (1989) Changing Problem Behaviour in Schools. London: Jossey-Bass.
Inclusion made easy 