December 30, 2024
Students learn best in spaces that are safe and appealing and where they feel they belong and are accepted just as they are. Staff, too, prefer to work in these types of schools, where they’ve established caring bonds with students and coworkers and they’re given ample time and training to serve their students.
This Spotlight helps educators and school leaders support inclusivity in classrooms, foster relationship building within virtual or real-world classrooms, and take a careful look at their schools’ climates in order to identify strengths and areas for needed growth.
Increasing the Reach of Inclusive Early Education for Children With Disabilities
Inclusive education can be a win–win prospect for both children with disabilities and those without them: Both groups learn to understand and appreciate differences and critical social–emotional lessons such as patience and empathy. But fewer than half of preschoolers whose education is protected by the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act received services in inclusive early education programs during the 2022/23 school year, as WestEd Senior Research Associate Dr. Sarah Johns notes in her blog post, “Expanding Access to Inclusive Early Education for Children With Disabilities.”
Dr. Johns’s post presents the findings of WestEd’s evaluation of the California Department of Education’s Inclusive Early Education Expansion Program (IEEEP), which issued grants between 2020 and 2024 to 65 California school districts and county offices of education to encourage inclusive early education programs for children with disabilities.
The evaluation found that inclusive programs offer impressive benefits to children and families, especially when robust partnerships exist between general and special education teams and between educational institutions and local community groups. Participants in WestEd’s evaluative surveys and focus groups and visits to inclusive early education programs also lauded training programs and adaptive equipment that helped early education staff work more confidently and effectively with their populations. However, the evaluation also found that a lack of cohesive data and reporting made special education programs difficult to monitor and that sustaining gains made in inclusivity will require funding from federal, state, and local sources.
Read more about inclusive early education
Increase Positivity and Joy With Relationship-Building Classroom Activities
“Build relationships” is a frequent piece of advice given to educators who sometimes struggle with class management, but that’s a task easier said than done in a busy classroom with many competing obligations. Cultivating Caring Relationships at School: 15 Activities That Promote Staff and Student Connection can help. This is a toolkit of classroom activities for elementary and secondary students that can help build bonds between staff and students.
Coauthored by the California Center for School Climate’s Youth Advisory Team, the toolkit is freely available as a PDF, and activities are designed to be low-cost and require minimal preparation. Some activities are classics: Activity 11, a Getting to Know You Survey, contains detailed instructions on administering the survey and lists of suggested questions. Instructions on how to use survey information later with spreadsheet generation tools are also helpful.
Other activities in the toolkit may be new to teachers, such as Newsfeed, which advises teachers to set up a digital bulletin board with a different prompt for each class session. Students in either virtual or physical classrooms can answer each time, perhaps as a bell-ringer activity, and over the course of the year they create a journal of experiences.
Learn more about relationship-building activities for the classroom
Evaluate Your School’s Culture and Climate
What is your school like for the students who go there and the staff who work there? Do they get a happy feeling or a sinking feeling when they walk through the doors? Is your school a positive place overall? That’s an evaluation that may be tough for an educator to make. But Promoting Safe and Supportive Learning Environments: A School Climate Domain Assessment Tool can be of assistance.
Published by the California Center for School Climate at WestEd, the tool is designed to evaluate the experience of attending or working at a school. It separates school climate into three core domains: Belonging and Connectedness, Safety and Wellness, and Environment, with measurable indicators for important qualities. For instance, mental health is a subdomain under Safety and Wellness, and the tool asks whether the school has collected and reviewed data to support the mental health and wellness of students and staff and whether the school’s entire staff is given professional development on mental health.
Research (and common sense) tells us that schools with a positive climate can lead to better outcomes for students and staff; this tool can provide a snapshot of your school’s current climate health to identify areas of strength and places that need more support.
Learn more about this self-evaluation tool
Positive change can take time to blossom, particularly in schools, which sometimes lean more toward upholding traditions than embracing new ideas. But research shows that inclusive, welcoming, friendly school spaces can make a difference both for the students who attend and for the staff who work there. Increasing positive relationships between students and staff, making efforts to improve your school’s climate, and finding new ways to welcome and care for students of all ability levels can spark transformative change for a community that can be seen; heard; and, most of all, felt.
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