The Joyful Inclusion Pilot Story
I started my last blog with “Data are like stars. They appear as separate points until there’s a story to connect them.”
So what’s our story?
Joyful Inclusion began in 2016, when a principal told me that his special education service delivery system needed help. The challenge was — all his professional development days were already allocated to other priorities.
My solution?
I created a series of short videos, each targeting an approach, skill, or strategy essential to building effective collaboration and co-teaching. Teachers and instructional coaches watched those videos during PLCs and co-planning periods. That allowed me to use my coaching days to visit classrooms, to provide feedback and to facilitate problem solving sessions with those teachers.
We made lots of adjustments as we went along - adding planning templates and strategy organizers. We also started collecting data about changes in teachers’ strategies.
This method worked!
We launched the current version of Joyful Inclusion in fall 2019, excited about gathering data to evaluate our approach in Pilot A and Pilot B.
Pilot A was a middle school with 53 participating teachers, supported by 3 school-based coaches.
Pilot B was a district with 8 schools, 193 participating teachers and 3 district level coaches.
We used our walkthrough tool to conduct Inclusion Rounds in all schools in November and February, seeing gains in all four indicators of inclusion. Principals visited classrooms with us, reinforcing their abilities to recognize different levels of proficiency for each indicator.
We were especially excited to see the huge growth in the number of classrooms where teachers were implementing engagement methods that involved all students in learning, rather than one student responding at a time and the increase in graphic organizers and other scaffolding structures to support student mastery of concepts.
Perhaps the most exciting finding was the change in the co-teaching structures we observed from November (blue) to February (red).
More teachers experimented with (and gained proficiency in) the six co-teaching structures, including with their paraprofessionals. We couldn’t wait to see what our May Inclusion Rounds would reveal! But that was spring 2020. Covid-19 shut down schools, and there would be no walkthroughs.
Fast forward 18 months to this school year. Pilot B was operating under a no-PD policy, giving teachers space to cope with teacher shortages, mixed hybrid teaching, and personal well-being. We couldn’t blame them.
But our Pilot A school wanted a refresher. They were coping with many staffing changes. Teachers wanted help with collaborative teaching even though everyone was masked and social distancing. We created some new refresher modules and brainstormed strategy with the Principal and coaches.
> In Sept, we conducted our first Inclusion Rounds, disappointed but not surprised to see lower scores on all inclusion indicators. We also visited fewer co-taught classrooms because so many teachers were covering for colleagues who were sick or quarantined.
> In Feb, our scores were even lower -- closely related to the discouragement, overwhelmed moods, and low energy we witnessed in every encounter.
> But May was a delightful surprise. All scores had returned to the Feb 2020 level -- some even higher. And co-teaching pairs started experimenting with more effective co-teaching structures.
What is the story these data tell?
Teachers are amazingly resilient and committed to doing their best to support students.
Not surprisingly, the COVID pandemic had a negative impact on teachers’ effectiveness.
Our approach for fostering teacher growth in four inclusive indicators and 6 co-teaching structures seems to be working, even during adverse circumstances.
Most importantly, the growth in teacher proficiency is a tribute to Pilot A’s school leadership team and coaches who were determined to form a caring safety net for teachers to see them through.
Next year, during the 2022-23 school year, we will collect new data sets. As we expand to more schools and districts and add Inclusion Coaches to our team, we hope to discover even greater gains in teacher application of strategies. We’ll also begin to collect student achievement data, although research is clear that there is often a delay between teacher use of high leverage, effective practices and improvement in student achievement. Still, we’re curious.
