Inclusion

Inclusion is a very important topic in today’s society. Many special education students are now included in normal classroom settings rather than being members of self-contained classrooms. I think that it is very important that teachers of inclusive classrooms receive the adequate training that they will need to be able to adequately teach the children with special needs while not neglecting their other students. I also think it is important that these teachers take behavior management classes in hopes of being able to lessen the frequency of certain outbursts.

Young children can be accepting of people who are different than themselves. Maybe if more children were exposed to children with disabilities at a young age there would be less discrimination against persons with disabilities later on. From my experience I have found that including special needs students in a mainstream classroom can not only benefit the special needs child, but also the other students in the class.

James was one of my classmates from middle school all through high school. James has Down syndrome but I never remember a time where he wasn’t accepted as a friend or as just a normal kid. I think that including James in some of our classes and all of our school activities it made every single student grow to be a more accepting, understandable person. I think that James being included in our school and community gave him a lot of confidence and a limit was not set on his potential. Senior year, James was my class’ homecoming king and at graduation when James got his diploma there was a standing ovation.

We have come a long way in a very short period of time. After much thought, I think that inclusion is a positive option for certain students with disabilities, but it may not be right for all students with disabilities.

Head Start or Not?

I recently read an Ed Week article, "Head Start Study Finds Brief Learning Gains," by Mary Ann Zehr. This article acknowledges Head Start's positive effects on children's learning. I had the privileged of volunteering at Head Start for a year and I, too, saw the positive effects that the Program made on its students, however, I also noticed some of its short comings.

The goal of Head Start is to prepare children for school. Overall, Head Start is a very effective program. However, foreign students are often confused. Head Start is very diverse, there are Indian students, Hispanic students and Chinese students just to name a few. Because many parents do not speak English at home, the children understand very little of the language when they begin attending the program.

There is no requirement that teachers in the program must be bilingual or know any amount of a language besides English. Therefore, some children have no way of understanding his/her teacher, while the teacher cannot understand the children either. Also, interaction with other children is a very important part of kindergarten. In kindergarten, children learn how to play together and build friendships. But this is impossible when children cannot communicate. This communication gap is a problem that prevents many children from learning. It is indeed easier to learn a language when young, but children should not be completely lost in school until they learn English.

Many challenges stand in the way of solving this problem. The first is that the program does not have sufficient funds to train teachers in other languages. Also, many teachers may not want to spend time learning another language. However, the program cannot support an additional teacher to teach English as a second language either. An additional teacher to a program location would cost $ 20,000 that the program does not have. Also, because there are children from various cultures, the teacher would need to know many different languages.

I think that Head Start needs to make small changes to help foreign students. There are many things that the program can do that would not require much money. Even little things would help more than nothing. In the classes there are pictures everywhere, of homes, schools, and colors. If each of these images had a label under it, saying what it is in English and then in the other necessary languages, it may help children make connections between their language and English. Also, if Head Start did this, without trying, the teachers of the program would begin to learn a little of each language, shrinking the communication gap between teacher and students. It is also hard for teachers who cannot help their students.

From my experiences volunteering at Head Start, I have seen that all of the teachers care about the children in their classrooms, they want the children to succeed, that's why they are teachers. As an educator seeing a child’s face light up when they learn/master something is the single most rewarding thing. For this reason I believe that if every teacher had a list of greetings and expressions in other languages they would be motivated to learn. Head Start is a very good program, and with a little work will become a fantastic program. I believe that the communication problem in the program needs to be fixed. Every child deserves the same experience, no matter what language they speak. Little things can really help children in the program. Everything that happens when a child is young influences his/her future.