IP 1: All Clips Overview for Classroom Climate
[Annie Bauer - Professor of Early Childhood and Special Education]
One thing that's really important to remember is that when you're looking at inclusive classrooms, they're classrooms in which every child with or without disabilities is completely engaged, active, and learning. Because of that it's sometimes difficult to pick out the child who has disabilities because, of course, all the children are active learners and engaged in activities of, at least, moderate difficulty for them.
So when we look at the sixth grade classroom, for example, we know that there are children in there identified as having learning disabilities, attentional problems, kids on accommodation plans, children who may be taking medications to help mitigate some attentional problems. But, they're very difficult to pick out because everybody is actively engaged in learning. The very activities that the teacher uses are designed so that everyone can be successful.
[Steve Kroeger - Learning Disabilities and Behavior Disorders Specialist]
And to add to that, just noticing from the moment the children walked into the classroom, I noticed kind of seamless sort of style that she had. A whole classroom of kids came in, hung up there books, went to their desk, sat down, all within three or four minutes. Quieted down without any prompts for an announcement that she then engaged them in describing some of their own personal narratives about what they were talking about. What happened to them throughout the weekend and stuff? And that flowed. I couldn't hardly tell that we had started Social Studies because suddenly we were talking about the pyramids, and how it had come just so smoothly out of interest in their own personal lives and things like that. So her climate in the classroom structure was so evident that classroom expectations had been made clear over a pattern. There's a real clear routine that they went through without any prompts being needed.