At Edmond Public Schools’ Frontier Elementary, 4th grader Kellen Hedler is “thriving.”
Kellen is an active participant in the class’s daily routines. He raises his hand to correctly answer a question as his teacher goes over a worksheet in the morning. He exercises on a snowboard machine and reads a prompt out loud during Action Based Learning time. During small group time, he works with a tactile aid called a “number line” to work through subtraction problems.
Kellen has Down Syndrome, but spends more than 80 percent of his day with his peers. He receives specialized instruction the rest of his day.
His mom, Kristy Hedler, said while he was physically included in the general education classroom at his previous school, Kellen wasn’t being meaningfully included. She said he didn’t have the supports he needed to succeed. Since changing schools two years ago, she’s seen a “night and day” difference.
“The reading has just exploded,” Kristy said. “We went from, at his previous school, working on letter I.D. and some basic letter sounds to him now reading at a second-grade level.”
That’s a credit, Kristy said, to Frontier’s teachers, staff and administration. Kellen is paired with an assistant who keeps him on-task in class. His special education team gives him targeted instruction and meets with his parents regularly. His teachers also modify their lessons to make them accessible — like having Kellen use a color code for labeling maps instead of requiring him to write in the names.
Kellen’s homeroom teacher, Adam Frederick, said having a fully inclusive classroom has changed the way he thinks about delivering lessons.
“I do have students who are still doing addition with finger counting, yet I’m trying to teach multiplication,” Frederick said. “So that gives me the opportunity to try to teach multiplication through addition for those students. And it gives our students who are on-level or above-level another strategy.”
Frederick has been teaching for eight years. He said when he got his bachelor’s degree, he does not remember having any designated courses on teaching special education students as a general education teacher.
“They have you differentiate lessons for assignments,” Frederick said. “And then, when you’re in it, you feel very underprepared. Because it’s a real situation, you’re dealing with real people. You don’t want to mess it up.”
More students with disabilities than ever before are spending at least 80 percent of their school day in general education classrooms. Federal data show that share of students has more than doubled in the last 35 years.
But how are teacher prep programs at universities changing to meet the needs of more inclusive classrooms?
The ten largest universities in the country have a patchwork of special education requirements for future teachers.
At Texas A&M, one designated course is required. But Suzanne Bettencourt, assistant director for educator preparation programs and certification, said the university has updated its curriculum to infuse inclusive practices into general education courses — such as emphasizing universal design for learning in reading and language arts instruction.
The University of Minnesota requires a fifth-year master’s degree to get a teaching license. It includes three special education courses with a semester-long practicum in an elementary classroom with students served under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, which provides federal guidelines for schools covering students with disabilities.
In Oklahoma, the state’s two largest universities have made changes to adapt their coursework.
Corey Peltier teaches special education at the University of Oklahoma. He said in the past, OU’s single required special education course for education majors was set up in a “disability of the week” survey format. Students would learn about different disabilities in a theoretical manner, but little of the coursework allowed students to apply their learning. But recently, that course saw an overhaul.
The new coursework focuses on federal education policy, equipping teachers to become active members of IEP teams — the group of school staff and parents who collaborate to format and update a student with disability’s Individualized Education Program — and multitiered systems of supports, which are models to catch students and intervene to prevent them from sliding academically or behaviorally.
Students are also taught how to plan instruction and build learning environments to best support a classroom with diverse learning styles. He said students write lesson plans to practice laying out modifications for students with disabilities. And, at the end of the semester, students write a final project paper on their philosophy toward inclusion.
“But you can imagine, that’s one course,” Peltier said. “There’s only so much depth you can get within one course.”
He said conversations have begun about modifying other courses to infuse special education practices. While the degree requirement for a single special education course will likely remain, he wants to ensure the concepts learned in that class will continue throughout students’ degrees.
“If we want to model practicing general and special education teachers [collaborating] in schools, we need to make sure we’re modeling that in higher ed as well,” Peltier said.
Oklahoma State University also requires one special education course for elementary and secondary education majors.
Candace Schell teaches special education at OSU. She said the department looked at first-year teacher surveys and saw significant struggles in new teachers knowing how to teach students with disabilities. The “disability of the week” format, she said, was “outdated.”
“We saw a necessity,” Schell said. “So that did require the revamp, and that did require us to really look at, ‘What do gen ed teachers need to know from day one when they get out in there?’”
Now, the course emphasizes universal design for learning in three areas: multiple means of engagement, representation, and action and expression.
For engagement, pre-service teachers are prepped to motivate learners and sustain their interest. For representation, they are taught how to offer information in multiple formats, like written, verbal and visual. For action and expression, they learn how to provide different avenues for students to display their understanding of concepts.
Schell said universal design means lessons are prepared for all learners — rather than separate treatment for neurotypical students or students with disabilities.
“We’re giving everyone an accommodation to learn — not just the kids that are federally mandated to have those accommodations,” Schell said. “Because there’s more than just kids in special education that need assistance in the general education setting.”
Schell says, while the course has improved, it’s still only one class. The college added a special education minor to its elementary program — one they’re beefing up over the next couple of years in hopes of offering a degree with more coursework and fieldwork in special education.
One like the Elementary Education Unified degree at the University of Kansas.
While KU still offers a Bachelor of Science in Elementary Education that requires two special education courses, it recently debuted its unified degree and graduated its first cohort in May. The unified degree requires eight more special education courses and more fieldwork, and it is geared toward students who want to serve in either general or special education classrooms.
Jennifer Kurth chairs the Department of Special Education at KU. She said the degree program was created to ensure its graduates were prepared to teach every student. It requires a paradigm shift, she said, to a philosophy that “all students are general education students.”
“And if you leave a unified program knowing how to teach all students, you know how to individualize instruction; you know how to collaborate with people across disciplines; you know how to understand students, IEPs and understand the general education curriculum,” Kurth said. “You’re just going to be a more confident and more capable teacher.”
Unified programs are flourishing in Kansas — not just at KU. Wichita State, Pittsburg State and Fort Hays State universities also offer them. The University of Northern Iowa debuted a unified degree in early childhood education last year.
Robust teacher prep programs aren’t a silver bullet. For children with disabilities to benefit from these new programs, college students have to choose to enroll in them over traditional education pathways. Kurth said it’s too early to say if the department would switch to a unified-only education program. But it’s a possibility.
“I could honestly see a time in the near future where we do only have a unified program, because I think it has been really well-received,” Kurth said. “We’re maybe just a little cautious in trying to do too many big changes at once.”
Special education course SPED 326 is the one that all education majors — elementary, secondary, music and elementary unified — share.
On the day StateImpact visited, the lecture was on advocating for students with disabilities, such as getting a seat at the table when planning IEPs or standing up for students against segregational practices. Assistant professor Lisa Didion co-teaches the course.
“When we think about students with disabilities, I want you to think about them as all of our students,” Didion told the class. “All of the students in the building belong to us, and we all have ownership in getting those students where they need to go to be successful.”
At the end of the class, Didion made a pitch for students to join the unified degree program. Benjamin Erickson is a junior majoring in elementary education, and he’s considering switching to the unified program. He said as someone with disabilities, it’s important to him to be part of a “better system.”
“Knowing that about kids who are coming into my classroom and learning how to support them is really important,” Erickson said. “But also, when you have an inclusive classroom and you make sure that everybody feels supported and everybody has what they need, everybody is able to succeed.”
NPR education reporter Jonaki Mehta contributed to this story.
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