Brain-Friendly Strategies for the Inclusion Classroom

Judy Willis

• Publisher: ASCD
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781416617433
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Many teachers in regular classrooms feel unprepared to teach students with learning disabilities. Fortunately, brain research has confirmed that strategies benefiting learners with special challenges are suited for engaging and stimulating all learners. In this book, neurologist and classroom teacher Judy Willis explains that we can best help students by putting in place strategies, accommodations, and interventions that provide developmentally and academically appropriate challenges to suit the needs, gifts, and goals of each student. Brain-Friendly Strategies for the Inclusion Classroom will help teachers

* Understand how the brain learns and the technologies that reveal this process.
* Implement strategies that are compatible with students' individual learning styles and honor their multiple intelligences.
* Improve the focus of students with attention disorders and help them gain the confidence and skills they need to develop goal-oriented behaviors.
* Create an enriching learning environment by incorporating student-centered activities, discovery and hands-on learning experiences, cross-curricular learning, and multisensory lessons.
* Implement strategic review, study, and test preparation strategies that will allow students to retain information and connect it with future learning.
* Build safe, supportive classroom communities and raise class awareness and empathy for students with learning disabilities.

It's time for teachers to lower the barriers, not the bar. Using strategies that align with research on how people's brains function, teachers can engage all students as individuals and help them reach their maximum potential with joy and confidence.

---

Chapter 1

---

Success for All Students in Inclusion Classes

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

More Inclusion for More Students

Most educators do not enter teaching with the expectation that they will be working with consistently well-behaved, enthusiastic, successful learners who enjoy sitting quietly in rows listening to teachers lecture at them. Nor do most teachers anticipate that all their students will dutifully use their highest cognitive processes to memorize, prioritize, analyze, and reflect on everything they hear. There may be some days when such a prospect is appealing, but for the most part, teachers and students have at least one thing in common: their brains are inspired and stimulated by challenge. Robotically attentive "Stepford" children, always ready for rote memorization and one-size-fits-all instruction, would not need teachers. Videotaped lectures and textbooks could serve their needs.

What makes teachers true educators is their acknowledgment, appreciation, and respect of students' differences. Students' diverse intelligences, talents, skills, interests, and backgrounds enrich our schools and our lives as teachers. Many of today's classrooms are more diverse than ever, including as they do students with LD.

Most of us know that the L in LD stands for learning, but the D can stand for a variety of terms: disability, dysfunction, difficulty, diversity, dichotomy, or difference. The fact that these two letters can represent more than one term is of value. The terms may not be clinically or diagnostically interchangeable, but my goal is to offer approaches to enrich the classroom experiences of students in all of the LD categories, as well as those of their classmates. No two students are the same, and no individual student has the same response to learning in every situation. What we consider a disability for a student in one situation may be a difference that enriches that student's learning experience in another situation. The generally accepted definition of the term learning disability is a cognitive, neurological, or psychological disorder that impedes the ability to learn, especially one that interferes with a person's communicative capacities and potential to be taught effectively. Some states require that students labeled learning disabled have normal or above-normal intelligence and difficulties in learning specific skills. Other states extend the definition to include people of below-normal intelligence who have such conditions as perceptual handicaps, minimal brain dysfunction, dyslexia, developmental aphasia, and AD/HD, but they do not include learning problems due to mental retardation, emotional disturbance, cultural or environmental disadvantage, or physical handicaps (for example, impaired sight or hearing or orthopedic disabilities).

Neither learning nor teaching is a single process. Neuroimaging studies show individuals' varying abilities to identify such sensory stimuli as color, shape, sound, and location. These variations correlate with individual students' different recognition capacities, learning styles, and responses to instructional materials and teaching techniques. Because each student is unique, teachers—especially those in inclusion classes—must use diverse strategies suited to students' broad array of abilities, intelligences, and learning styles. When we offer a variety of individually appropriate strategies, we enable all students to be true participants in a community of learners.

As teachers strive to meet the needs of all students, they will realize that there is no clear, consistent dichotomy between "special" and "regular" students. The same students will not always be at the top or the bottom when they are evaluated according to their intellectual, social, physical, and creative abilities. With the move from a divided general education/special education model to a unified inclusion system, the most successful educators will be those who work together and share resources and expertise to meet all students' needs in any way possible (Stainback, Stainback, & Forest, 1989).

As educators, we won't know what gifts are hidden in our students until we unwrap their packages. Most successful teachers of inclusion classes have found that when they teach basic skills within the context of meaningful lessons, all students can achieve higher-level learning. Such lessons stimulate critical thinking and motivate students to make personal connections with the material.

Students who are part of a community of learners tend to rise to higher levels of learning and joy, especially when they work cooperatively on in-depth, project-based units of discovery. In these supportive classroom communities, students acknowledge and appreciate one another's skills and talents. Stereotypical academic success no longer becomes the only standard for who is "smart." Students who learn about their own and their classmates' multiple intelligences and unique abilities begin to shed previous negative attitudes or preconceived notions about LD students. In addition, an education environment that values participation in cooperative activities can reduce LD students' academic anxieties and build their confidence as they receive positive recognition for what they bring to the community of learners.

The Law

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) requires public schools in the United States to make available to all eligible children with disabilities a free education in the least restrictive environment appropriate to their individual needs. Under IDEA, public school systems must develop an appropriate individualized education program (IEP) for each of these students. The specific special education plan and related services outlined in each IEP should reflect the individual needs of the student. IDEA also mandates particular procedures that schools must follow in developing IEPs. Each student's IEP must be developed by a team of knowledgeable persons and be reviewed at least once annually. The team includes the student's teacher; the student's parents, subject to certain limited exceptions; the student, if determined appropriate; a state agency representative who is qualified to provide or supervise the provision of special education; and other individuals at the parents' or agency's discretion.

The decades since the initiation of IDEA in 1975 have seen the almost complete elimination of separate pullout classes for students with disabilities. Now students who were previously sent to "special" schools attend classes with their siblings and neighbors. Inclusion classes, when successfully planned and taught, become places where friendships are founded on the appreciation of similarities and differences.

The word inclusion carries positive connotations of belonging. Indeed, full inclusion of all students—even those with severe disabilities—in general education classrooms doesn't mean LD students work separately with their aide while the rest of the class does other work. Truly inclusive classrooms integrate and coordinate specialized school support programs within the general education program. This approach has replaced what was previously dubbed mainstreaming—nonacademic inclusion, in which LD students joined general classes for nonacademic work and were removed for academic special education.

Benefits of Inclusion

In the past, many students with severe disabilities were separated into special education classes and missed out on the benefits of having long-term social relationships with classmates who did not also have severe disabilities. As a result, when they left the supervised classrooms, they were not ready to join the larger, heterogeneous communities in which they would live and work for the rest of their lives. In contrast, a 10-year follow-up in one study found that LD students who had been taught in integrated classes demonstrated more independent functioning and social adjustment (Stainback et al., 1989).

Sometimes problems in separate special education classes arose because of insufficient teacher training. For example, teachers may have learned to identify and accommodate the needs of LD readers but lacked instruction in teaching higher-level reading. Also, because special education classes were not necessarily smaller than regular classes, many students with disabilities received no more individual attention in the segregated classes than they would have gotten in the integrated classes. In some such cases, teachers were obliged to teach the majority of the class to the level of the least common denominator—the most severely disabled students who needed the slowest pace and the least-challenging lessons (Affleck, Madge, Adams, & Lowenbraun, 1988).

Strategies derived from brain research enable LD students to learn according to their strengths and help them develop the characteristics found in successful students. In addition to promoting academic success, these strategies uncover such strengths as energy, curiosity, concentration, exceptional memory for details, empathy, openness, perceptiveness, and divergent thinking. Many students who struggle with LD become self-reliant at an early age, are good at expressing their feelings, are aware of their thinking and decisionmaking processes, and are tolerant of others' weaknesses (Goldberg, Higgins, & Herman, 2003).

Teachers who have used brain-compatible learning strategies to build on LD students' strengths report an additional long-term benefit over the course of 5 to 10 years. When I spoke with Judy Gamboa of the Learning Disabilities Association of Arizona, she noted that

Children who practice the strategies successfully to compensate for limitations associated with their LD have become college and graduate students who stand out among classmates who never had to struggle with LD. The students who have incorporated the adaptive strategies are standouts in their ability to express their feelings and exhibit tolerance and empathy for others. I have found that these former students who achieve success in later life have used the adaptive strategies they learned in school to enrich their lives once they leave the classroom. The discoveries they made about the correlation of practice with skill building and mastery stay with them and continue to empower them to work to achieve their goals. It is so satisfying to see these former LD students reach their goals and use the strategies we practiced to achieve competence. Joy of learning has taken the place of frustration and avoidance of challenge. There is nothing as rewarding as seeing my students years later with the confidence and perseverance to make their dreams become realities. (J. Gamboa, personal communication, Feb. 17, 2006)

Inclusive classes are also good for teachers. Whereas isolated special education teachers experience more burnout and attrition than regular teachers do, effective inclusion teachers tend to describe themselves as tolerant, flexible, and prepared to take responsibility for all their students (McGregor & Vogelsberg, 1998). These successful teachers' colleagues and administrators found them to be good collaborators who exuded warmth and sincerity in their interactions with students. Their most common concerns were insufficient time for collaboration and the challenges of managing students whose severe behavioral problems disrupted class. Evaluations have found that the most beneficial supports to successful inclusion teachers are strategic training, support from a team of professionals, and assistance personnel in their classrooms (Pryor, 2003).

The Road to Success

The principal goal for all students is to achieve their own highest level of success in supportive classrooms, taught by teachers who give them the tools to overcome obstacles and learn to their fullest potential. Although success means different things to different people, most people agree on certain common factors as important components of success, including positive family and peer relationships, self-approval, academic success, job satisfaction, physical and mental health, financial comfort, and a sense that one's life has meaning and value.

A study tracking LD students over the course of 20 years identified several specific attributes that seem to lead to such successful life outcomes. These attributes include a positive self-concept, a proactive approach to life, a tendency to set goals, perseverance, effective support systems, and effective emotional coping strategies. Although not every subject who achieved successful life outcomes had all of these attributes, the study found that their presence was more predictive of success than were such variables as school grades and IQ (Raskind, Goldberg, Higgins, & Herman, 1999).

Five Critical Conditions of Learning Success

A sequence of five critical conditions of brain processing helps promote some of these attributes of success. I have defined the conditions according to the brain structures and functions that neuroimaging research has demonstrated are the basis of processing raw sensory data into retained and accessible memory. Most of the strategies I describe in this book help promote these five conditions. The strategies aim to empower students' brains to recognize which sensory data are worthy of focus; promote the passage of these data through alerting and affective filters; pattern the data into the coding of brain cell communication; and prepare the data to be successfully stored, maintained, and retrieved. The entire process turns information into the memories that become accumulated knowledge. The following five steps describe how the sequence of these necessary conditions of learning unfolds.

1. The brain responds to sensory input that engages the attention of sensory processing filters.
2. After the senses register the information, it passes along to the neurons in the amygdala, where it can be moved to memory storage. At this point, the affective filter in the limbic system must be set to accept and not block incoming data. If high stress or negative emotions have overloaded the amygdala, the affective filter will block passage of the data into memory. On the other hand, pleasurable, positively reinforcing, and intrinsically motivating stimuli unlock the gates of the limbic system to facilitate active information processing. Such information has the best chance of entering long-term memory storage banks (Willis, 2006).
3. Sensory data that pass through the brain's filters are coded into patterns that can be connected to existing neuronal pathways.
4. Dendrites (neuron extensions that conduct electrical impulses to neighboring neurons) and the synaptic connections they form build neuronal pathways that cross-connect to multiple storage areas of the brain. These neuronal pathways are activated through relational, emotional, personally relevant, learner-participatory, and experiential stimuli. The repeated activation of these new circuits by the variety of access stimuli will strengthen the new pathways, limit their susceptibility to pruning (a process of eliminating inactive brain cells), and increase the efficiency of memory retrieval.
5. Repeated multisensory stimulation brings new memories from the brain's data storage areas to its executive function processing centers. When the brain's highest cognitive levels use the facts, processes, sequences, and routines that it has acquired as memory, all learning comes together. At this stage, synapses are firing in brain centers of critical reasoning, prioritizing, judging, and pattern analyzing. This is the brain's electrical dance of original, creative discovery—the "aha" moments.

Gray Matter

The brain's emotional core is a connection of neural centers in and near the temporal lobes that together are called the limbic system. Composed of the medial temporal lobe, thalamus, hippocampus, amygdala, and parts of the frontal lobes, the limbic system is the core of emotional response, stress reactions, and fear patterns. All information enters the brain as sensory data from what we hear, see, smell, touch, or taste. This information must pass through the reticular activating system (RAS) and the limbic system to be acknowledged, recognized, connected with relational memories, patterned, and ultimately stored in long-term memory.

The amygdala is often referred to as the center of the limbic system because it is so responsive to threat and fear. fMRI and PET scans demonstrate that when the amygdala is in a hypermetabolic state in response to stress, the brain regions that process information show much lower metabolic activity (i.e., less oxygen or glucose use). This lower metabolic activity suggests that the information is not getting through the hyperactive amygdala's blockade and reaching the secondary processing areas (Introini-Collison et al., 1990; Introini-Collison, Miyazaki, & McGaugh, 1991).

The RAS is another critical brain entry pathway that is affected by emotion. A major attention-activation switching system located at the brainstem, the RAS receives input from the nerves that converge into the spinal cord from sensory receptors in the arms, legs, trunk, head, and neck. The spinal cord sends these sensory messages up through the RAS to gain entry to the brain. The RAS sets the state of arousal of the rest of the brain and affects the ability of the higher brain sensory recognition centers to receive and respond to incoming data (Eich, 1995).

Teachers can best meet these critical conditions when they have access to professional development—inservice training or conferences, for example—that teaches them about the most valid brain-based teaching strategies. By using these techniques, teachers can successfully engage all students in appropriately challenging yet supported learning.

Gray Matter

Information travels along the nerve cell's axons and dendrites as electrical impulses. However, where these sprouting arms connect to the next neuron in the circuit, the information has to travel across a gap between the end of one nerve and the beginning of the next one. In these gaps, called synapses, there are no physical structures along which the electric impulses can travel. When crossing synapses, the information impulse must therefore be temporarily converted from an electrical one into a chemical one.

Neurotransmitters are the brain proteins that are released when the electrical impulse of transmitted data arrives on one side of the synapse. The released neurotransmitters then float across the synaptic gap, carrying the information with them to stimulate the next nerve ending in the neural circuit. Once the neurotransmitter is taken up by next nerve ending, it acts as an ignition to activate the electrical impulse once again so that the information can travel along to the next nerve cell.

Strategic Achievement of Inclusion Goals

Although experienced teachers have learned how to structure lessons without having to plan every detailed component in advance, the additional complexities of teaching inclusion classes make planning a valuable procedure. In particular, the process of figuring out which strategies will engage and accommodate students' challenges, developmental levels, interests, gifts, and physical needs will help teachers achieve authentic inclusion for all their students.

I present the following strategies as a menu of options to empower all students to become more successful. Instead of attempting to match specific strategies to each category of LD, I developed most to be of general benefit to the diversity of learning styles and abilities found in inclusion classes. T...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Why?
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Success for All Students in Inclusion Classes
• Chapter 2: Looking into Multiple Intelligence Brains
• Chapter 3: Teaching Students with Attention Disorders
• Chapter 4: Enriching the Inclusive Learning Environment
• Chapter 5: Review and Test Preparation Strategies for Diverse Learners
• Afterword: What the Future Holds
• Appendix: Sample Lesson Plans for Inclusion Class Activities
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• About the Author
• Related ASCD Resources
• Study Guide
• Copyright