Sexuality in the Special Education Classroom

CN: “sex ed” 

There is no room for sexuality in the special education classroom. It’s a difficult and controversial topic in general education that gets largely ignored in special education. Students with disabilities are either viewed as non-sexual (eternal children) or hyper-sexual (sexual deviants). Those who fall into the first category don’t get sex ed at all. The second group do get sex ed, but it’s “sex ed for special education.” Sex Ed for Special Education covers: public and private - what you can do where, circles of friendship - appropriate behaviors around people you know more/less well (aka not everyone is your best friend), and hygiene.

If you’re wondering where the actual “sex ed” is in that curriculum, that’s pretty much my point. Hygiene is as close as they come to “why my body is changing” and I’ve seen some pretty fascinating misconceptions about how the adult body works from my adult students as a result. But I only knew about it because I was supporting them in the residence in the evening when they were confused and overwhelmed and unable to express it. Most teachers don’t get that opportunity to interact with their students in that setting and most residential staff don’t have the time or training to provide the feedback to the educational staff. (And that’s assuming either side is willing to listen or do anything about it.)

Somebody did ask, at a recent conference I attended on teaching sexuality to students with significant needs, about teaching about sexuality, safe sex, or dating. The presenter dismissed this as a non-issue for this population, stating “if a student expressed an interest in any of these areas we would address it on a 1:1 basis, but it hasn’t come up.” Of course it hasn’t come up. Most of our students don’t know how to ask. It certainly isn’t default vocabulary in anyone’s communication device. Typical students have extreme difficulty talking about it and finding someone who they trust enough to talk to. We are expecting students for whom basic communication can still be a challenge, and who may only have a few people in their lives with whom fluent communication is even possible, to initiate these conversations?

But that won’t change. Because that’s not the point of Sex Ed for Special Education. The goal, like the goal of most special education curriculum, is to get those uncomfortable box 2 students back into box 1 where they make their typical educators feel more comfortable. Without changing that paradigm, sexuality will never be allowed to exist in the special education classroom.

The Mask in My Teacher Toolkit

I try very hard to create a classroom that is welcoming of students natural ways of moving, of interacting with the world, and of expressing themselves. In the adult autistic community, we talk a lot about masking, and the effects of it on self-esteem. And then I watch my neurotypical colleagues, completely unaware of what they’re doing, expect those masking behaviors. And I watch myself use them all the time as well. And in makes me wonder, am I doing a disservice to my students by not teaching those skills?

Masking is a skill. The more skills you have, the more opportunities are available to you. But what if our students grew up knowing, not just that masking exists, but that it is a choice? The social skills curriculums currently out there teach “this is what you have to do” but how different would the educational experience of the next generation of autistic children be if we taught it as “this is what the NT population does/expects.” What if our behavior expectations where “here is how to do it/fake it” and “here are reasons/times when you might want to.” 

I know full well that my ability to pass, and thus have control over disclosure, has given me opportunities I might not otherwise have gotten. (There’s a reason this blog is anonymous.) My students may never pass for NT due to other disabilities, but don’t I owe it to them to give them the skills to try if they want to? When I have struggled with social interactions, I’ve gotten instruction (I, personally, found Michelle Garcia Winner’s Social Thinking at Work and Ian Ford’s Field Guide to Earthings particularly useful.) Why shouldn’t they benefit from the same opportunities? As a special educator, isn’t that my job? To make the general education curriculum accessible to my students?

(Neuro)Divergent: The Classroom

It’s funny, I used to be called “the mean teacher” because I would insist on students doing everything they could independently, no matter how long it took, and not letting others “save” them. Because I insisted on teaching grade-level content to all my students, no matter their academic skill access level.

Now, I’ve changed schools. To the school that was closest aligned to my values that I could find in the state. And all of the sudden, I’ve developed a reputation as that teacher that is too permissive. You know the one, the one that lets her kids get away with everything and doesn’t actually teach? Yeah, that’s how I’m being perceived.

So what happened?

I could point to any number of things. I do have a really hard class this year. Certainly harder than I’ve had in a while. Groups don’t look very group-ish most of the time. And certainly, I’ve had more lessons fail than I had gotten used to. That’s only a problem when I’m okay with it and don’t learn from it. (And it’s the cause of my discomfort, not the school community perception.)

No, this reputation came about because I have found the hard edge of their tolerance for neurodiverisity. I knew it had to be there: schools are staffed by neurotypicals and even the respectful ones are limited by their perceptions of the world if they’re not listening to the voices of the neurodivergent community. And I noticed that from day one when I started at this school. It was far more respectful and understanding of the neurodivergent community than any place I had been before. But it was still an “us” and a “them” and the voices of the neurodivergent community were conspicuously missing from the conversation. (I left feedback saying as much on my evaluation. I doubt it made a difference.)

That’s what the perceived “permissiveness” is: I’m being too neurodiversity friendly. And, as often happens, it’s being perceived through neurotypical eyes as letting them get away with too much: because it makes them uncomfortable, because if they were me they would not let him do it. And so the “he needs to learn he can’t do that out in a job setting” argument gets invoked.

I literally got told that I’m really good at keeping kids calm and preventing them from getting upset so they can learn. And that that is a bad thing. Because they need to learn to handle being more uncomfortable. (Them being comfortable is making the staff around them uncomfortable.) We need to sacrifice their learning so they can accept more “appropriate boundaries.”

And to some degree, of course, they’re right. Because outside my neurodivergent-friendly classroom, the cold neurotypical world won’t accept them for who they are. And they will be forced to accept arbitrary social rules in the name of “appropriate boundaries” in order to be successful. And we all want them to be successful.

So, where do we go from here?

• We use a more typical token or points system on are goal-directed-learning project. (Honestly, that was probably the next step in understanding how to reach our goal anyway. We needed to make it more concrete.)*

• We set up clearer physical boundaries in the classroom. (I’ve already bought painters tape. Wish I could remember the name of the teacher I met on Twitter who gave me the idea a couple years ago! Thank you, Awesome Autism Teacher Who’s Name I Forget!)

• I have some social skills curriculum to write. And some social stories. They need to come from me because they need to come from a neurodivergent perspective. (Unless someone else out there has already written one? I don’t need to reinvent the wheel!)

I’ve got my work cut out for me changing the perception of myself at my students at my new school. But I think it’s worth it. Because this school really does have the right idea and the right values. It’s why I chose to work there. 

Even when we have neurodiversity acceptance in our society I don’t think we’ll ever have neurodivergent-friendly classrooms the way we have neurotypical-friendly classrooms now. And that is what I was trying to create. And honestly, if I believe in inclusion, which I say I do, that shouldn’t be what I want. Our goal should be a neurodiveristy-friendly room. One that works for all of us, neurotypical and neurodivergent. They are right, I went too far to one side. It’s time to re-build the classroom that works for all of us, because that’s the classroom that is really going to prepare students for “the working world” after graduation.

*I know the research on reinforcers. I’ve read Punished by Rewards. I’ve read Mindset. But I work in a PBIS school that wants to increase its use of PBIS. That means using rewards. I have some ideas about how to make this work following the TTOG principles. I’d been trying it before everything fell apart in the last month or two and having some really awesome successes, even in the DTT context, that I hope to get to write up at some point.

The Gift of Flexibility

The rules that make up our social structure can seem arbitrary when participation is not intuitive: Go here now but not later. Touch this but not that. Put this here but not there. When you look for an underlying logic in order to understand them, as many autistic children and adults do, it appears they change on a whim. “Go with the flow” requires recognizing and understanding, or at least being able to follow, the “flow” of society, which is based on social norms - the very skill that eludes so many people on the spectrum. It’s really no wonder so many cling to routine, structure, and sameness and get upset when it is violated. From that perspective, it’s actually surprising more folks on the spectrum don’t spend more time in “fight or flight” mode. It is a constant battle to figure out how to live in a world that often doesn't make very much sense.

Engaging with the norms and expectations of the school and classroom environment is particularly challenging for several of my students. In particular, they do not recognize the logic behind sitting and completing an academic task, moving to another area, and repeating the demand. Both sitting and moving are non-intuitive demands. Both have, historically, had intensive intervention aimed at compliance with these demands. 

They often demonstrate their lack of understanding by removing themselves from the demand to engage in preferred activities which are both highly interesting to the student and engage the teacher in an interaction, thereby drawing both of them away from the interaction they do not understand the logic behind. What concerned me was students who were getting bigger and older (I teach middle school) and more aggressive. And we were the cause. (Of the aggression, teenage boys are going to grow like weeds whether we want them to or not.)

I met with the team and we got programs put in place to get everyone’s hands off the students unless there was a real immediate safety risk (e.g. about to be hit by a car!)

We got lots of alternative seating in place. More than enough for every student in the room. Ball chairs. Bouncy chairs. Rocking chairs. We stopped telling students to sit and started asking them where they wanted to sit.

We got some pretty ridiculous answers at first. On the table? On the heater? On the floor?

We said okay. We did our academic work there.

Sometimes students didn’t want to sit. They stood or leaned.

We said okay. We did our academic work there too.

It wasn’t perfect. Kids were still on the move a lot. Transitions were not flawless. But what changed almost immediately? The day we made this change, the aggression that was starting to become a problem disappeared overnight. We’re getting just as much work done as we did when we were following the compliance-based program with one difference: everyone, kids and staff, are happier. We’ve been at this for a couple of weeks now and an unexpected thing has happened: the kids are starting to sit. They are sitting in chairs and without being asked. The logic is simple really:

Stop fighting the kids and they’ll stop fighting you. It’s the gift of flexibility.

Building Learning Habits

One of the earliest ways we build positive learning habits is by pairing learning with the activities the student would prefer to be doing. For some students, that’s a first/then activity board, for others, that’s using high interest manipulatives. For students with significant anxiety or trauma around learning, that means pairing instructional demands with preferred activities (non-contingent reinforcement). In my current classroom, I have students using all three strategies. 

Using edibles for reinforcement, even non-continently, isn’t my preferred instructional strategy. But it’s a stepping stone to building learning habits. I have a student who, when school started less than a month ago, would tantrum every time we said it was time to do anything he perceived as “work.” He spent much of the day trying to get snacks out of his snack bag. We began pairing snacks from his snack bag with actively participating in academic work. Multiple times this week, I observed him to come independently to the table when told it was time for an academic task and sit with his snack bag expectantly waiting for the task. He is beginning to develop a new mental model and expectation of what school means. He is developing learning habits.

The next step has traditionally been hard for many of my students. These are students who are able to join learning activities, but do not persist in task completion. If the task becomes challenging (or boring) these students will mentally (or physically) “check out.” They do not (yet) have the learning habit of “seeing it through” probably because nobody has ever explained to them what the goal is that they are trying to accomplish. Unfortunately though perhaps unsurprisingly, most interventions (that should be a red flag right there!) for students who struggle with this learning behavior is compliance-based. The answer to “why should I have to do/finish this should never be “because I said so.” Targeted instruction in my classroom is focusing on teaching students about their goals and how to measure their own progress (short and long term). Creating progress monitoring habits will help students to persist in task completion without relying on compliance or building staff dependency.

More than content, teachers strive to instill a love of learning in students, especially those who do not see themselves as learners or who have not had positive experiences with school in the past. We do that by building relationships with our students and creating a culture of trust and risk-taking. We do that by teaching and fostering positive learning habits. Learning is about much more than ABC and 123.

What Is Behavior?

The operational definition for an educational context that I’ve always heard for “behavior” is: something you can observe the student doing.

When I googled the definition I got “The way in which one acts or conducts oneself, especially toward others” or “The way in which an animal or person acts in response to a particular situation or stimulus.”

Almost anything a student does is observable. It is the social context, as put forth in the first definition, that determines whether it is a behavior (conducting oneself in relation toward others.) 

To put that in a behavior tracking context: We can observe anyone breathing, but for most students there is no reason to track that as a behavior. For a student who is severely respiratory compromised, for whom continued ability to maintain consciousness (and therefore maintain any relationship with others) is a concern, it is a very appropriate behavior to track.

The problem comes, I think, not when we try to define the behavior (defining observable behavior is a skill, but is one that can be mastered with practice.) Where we struggle is in defining the social context. When the norm is typically developing age-peers, almost everything a student with high support needs does will be considered a behavior, because the things they do successfully and independently often look very different from their peers: indistinguishability does not allow for the beauty of neurodiversity. However, when the norm is peers with high support needs, we are often setting ourselves on a slippery slope of low expectations: “this is the best they can hope for so we just have to accept it.”

The justification I so often see for tracking indistinguishability behaviors (stimming, eye contact, etc) is that that kind of behavior will not be accepted “in the real world.” There are certainly neurodiverse individuals out there spending a lot of energy practicing indistinguishability behaviors in order to be successful “in the real world” right now. What would it take so they, and our students, didn’t have to?

In the classroom, we have near-complete control over the social context. And the social context that students learn in school is the one they will bring with them into the adult community and workplace. If we build a classroom community that values neurodiversity over indistinguishability, that is the social context that students will learn. It has worked for successful businesses like Google and Apple. It will work in our classrooms too. And it just might change the world for the better.

The Limits That Make Us Soar

A former student of mine just transitioned into a new classroom. Her new teacher has set limits for her that make me uncomfortable from a philosophical and pedagogical perspective. Some of these are limits that I literally spent years working with staff to get them to understand why they were completely unacceptable in my classroom. It’s taking all of my willpower not to say something to her. But the thing of it is, that student is happy. She is happier than she was toward the end of her time in my classroom. She is happy and she is engaged in learning in a way that she and I had struggled with over that last year or so.

With a little perspective, it’s clear to see what has happened. In my quest to create a student-centered classroom, I lost too much of the structure and boundaries that make the classroom effective. If I’m honest with myself, I knew that. My data on student progress and student behavior over the second half of last year showed it pretty clearly.

It shouldn’t surprise me. I’ve known, as I’ve gone through this process, that I’ve consistently struggled to implement one of the most key pieces of a student-centered classroom: feedback. My students need to know what is expected of them, and how they are doing in meeting their goals and expectations. I need a way to show them. For progress on student goals, I’m thinking about creating visual goal monitoring pages in their program data books. Using picture supports, students can track by independence level or accuracy level increases (we take data on both) and can choose what they want to make public: progress, achievements, or nothing. I’ll try and post one to twitter when I get them made, hopefully next week, and will try to edit this post. (Blogger doesn’t seem to like image posting anymore.)

In order to provide more effective behavior feedback, I need to first re-examine for myself where the behavior limits should be in my room. The feedback I got from my students last year was that I didn’t give them enough limits, and that they found learning difficult in that environment.

What matters?

Student choice:

Students should be able to choose: where they work (learning station - may sometimes have to be restricted choice, depending on activity), who they are working with, which activity they are doing (from list of activities for that academic block)

Student safety (individual target behaviors)

Student task completion/participation

I can see how this could easily be represented to students using an interval data visual:

Activity Chosen

Location

Staff Member

5 minute interval safety tokens +++++

5 minute interval participation tokens +++++

(Again, I’ll try to post an image-based one to twitter when I have it, Blogger doesn’t play nice.)

The similarity between the behavior feedback visual I’m proposing and a traditional token chart is not escaping me. In fact, during the difficult time we had last spring due to the weakening structure associated with the school closing, one of the things I did for one of my students was pull out a token board he hadn’t used in over a year. He needed the visual to know how much work he was expected to do in order to help him stay regulated. Many of the tools in the ABA toolkit are very useful tools. Tools, by themselves, are not positive or negative, it is how they are used. Behavior tools must always be used to support student choice, self-advocacy, and body autonomy not to create compliance or restrict a student’s natural expression/movement in the name of “normalizing” behavior. The line of teaching “socially appropriate” behavior is a very thin one and must be walked with extreme caution and much input from the Autistic Adult community. We do not always fully comprehend the power of the tools we use. We need to listen to those who have had those tools used on them, just as we look at the results and reviews of any other new curriculum and program that we wish to adopt into practice (or material we chose to use with our home and family.) But to quote Levar Burton “You don’t have to take my word for it…” (ask another Actually Autistic person!)

Structured Feedback: #ObserveMe

As an educator, I value feedback, especially from other professionals who share my core teaching beliefs. I joined the faculty of my current school because of the mission based around student-centered teaching focusing on self-advocacy and meaningful independence for every student regardless of perceived intellectual ability. Because of negative experiences I’ve had with observers in my room at other schools, having visitors in my room makes me anxious. I feel judged. I automatically see the behaviors, the missing symbol supports, the student(s) not fully engaged in an academic activity at that exact moment: all the things I would have been criticized for at other placements. And I want to say, “I know all that! We’re working on it! Here’s what I *actually* want feedback on…” And that’s when I heard about #ObserveMe.

#ObserveMe was started by Robert Kaplinsky last year. (I think this is the original post here.) I first saw it on twitter. (Of course, it’s where I find everything new and cool in education!) The idea is simple: post a note on your classroom door inviting your colleagues in to observe and telling them what areas you would like feedback on. It feels to me like exactly the answer I’ve been looking for. The visuals I put on my door already tell someone entering a lot about what I value as a teacher: that’s intentional. My hope is that adding this sign will help to structure those interactions so I can finally get the feedback I am looking for to grow my practice.

The text of my #ObserveMe sign is below:

We are all learners in Room 1. Please come in and observe me. I would like constructive feedback on the following goals:

Student voice:

Are students making authentic choices?

Are we honoring all student communication (not just symbolic language)?

Instructional Process:

Are teacher demands clearly rooted in meaningful instructional context?

How could we change the instructional demand to increase learner independence?

Feedback:

Are we giving clear feedback to students that gives them a clear picture of the progress they are making toward their goal?

How can we make student goals and the path to achieve them more concrete and visual for our learners to understand?

Please #ObserveMe and help our learning community grow!

Asking for Help

Asking for help is one of the first functional communication skills we teach, especially to students who exhibit challenging behavior due to frustration (at not being able to accomplish something independently) which is a lot of our students. It's also one of the skills we're least successful at teaching. I don't mean the kids don't learn it. They learn the sign/word/picture. What most of them don't learn is when and how to use it. They either never ask and we end up saying "ask for help if you need it" when we see them struggle, or they're constantly asking and we find ourselves in a never-ending cycle of "try it yourself first ..." It's clearly not a skill we're teaching very effectively.

It's something I've been aware of for a while now, and I've been trying to make an effort to model it in the classroom. But there's a qualitative difference between "Do you know where the stapler went?" and "Please help me tie my shoes." And, for obvious reasons, the more urgent situations in the classroom are not appropriate times for modeling.

As I see it there are 2 key skills that need to be taught along with requesting help. 

1. Making an effort to do it on your own first. This means we need to make sure we are paying attention to partial successes (and failed efforts) as important and successful steps toward the larger goal.
2. Multiple solutions to the problem. I believe that problem solving is, quite possibly, the most important skill that we can teach students, and this is a key part of it. Students need to have an understading that there is more than one approach to chose from and the mental flexibility to try a different approach if the first one is unsuccessful.

We do talk in my classroom a lot about how "help" doesn't mean I'm going to do it for you. But isn't that exactly what adults usually mean when we ask for help? Sometimes, certainly. If I ask for help because I can't get the glue open, I don't expect you to put your hand over mine and that we're going to push it open together. No, I expect to hand the glue to you, and you will open it for me. Because the expectation is that I have already tried and found my skills lacking, so now I'm asking you to give it a go. But sometimes that's exactly what I mean. When I helped my coworker email an attachment for the first time I sat down next to her and verbally walked her through each step. If I'd taken the mouse from her and done it myself, it wouldn't have helped either of us. I'm not sure, though, how one knows (except by social experience/nonverbal context) what kind of help is appropriate/expected in a given situation. And so I'm asking for your help. What is the distinction? And, more importantly, how can we teach it to our kids?

Do You Have a Minute?

(Image courtesy of ASAN www.autisticadvocacy.org)

I've wished, pretty much since I learned about them, that the rest of the world would implement Color Communication Badges, especially for events like conferences where so much emphasis of the benefit is placed on the face-to-face connections: in other words, the socializing - that thing I can't do. My dear friend, Nightengale, made a wonderful argument in her most recent post about why we need to introduce the badges into schools. Because what we expect people to want isn't necessarily the same as what they do want, and the first step in advocacy is ask-vocacy: ask the person.


Then I spotted this on the Internet: https://twitter.com/weareteachers/status/771072597962272768

That got me thinking about the benefit of implementing Color Communication Badges in my classroom, not just for my students but for myself as well. There's pretty much nothing a student can do in my classroom that will bother me, or prevent learning from happening, but there are 4 little words that can throw off an entire lesson or even an entire day:

"Do you have a minute?"

The unwritten answer to this question, of course, is "yes." I work very hard to be flexible and accessible for collaboration. It's worked. It's worked a little too well, to the point where people think it's okay to interrupt me in the middle of lessons. But the fact remains that, a lot of the time, I don't have a minute. I'm with a student or group; I'm mentally (sometimes physically) organizing the next lesson; or I'm taking a much needed breather so I can be "on" again in a minute.

The problem is, once I've explained that, no, now is not a good time (because it would be rude to just ignore you) I've already lost that focus so I might as well recoup my losses and go down the rabbit hole on whatever you wanted "a minute" about. Maybe it will be useful. So I have acquired a reputation of being always accessible that is actually counterproductive to the way my brain works.

Therefore, when school starts again tomorrow, I'm going to be rolling out Color Communication Badges for everyone, students and teachers, in my classroom. The original descriptions (edited slightly for brevity) are:

Green: actively seeking communication. May have trouble initiating conversation, but want to be approached by people who are interested in talking

Yellow: only want to talk to people they recognize, not strangers/friends from the Internet.

Red: probably doesn't want to talk to anyone (or only a few people) unless it is an emergency.

(Source: http://autisticadvocacy.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/ColorCommunicationBadges.pdf)

I'm going to have to tweak the definitions for the classroom environment a little bit. (They stand fine as they are for leisure time.) My preliminary classroom definitions:

Green: available to talk on a new topic/with a new person. Ready to try something new.

Yellow: can talk, if it's on the topic at hand/current instructional topic, or getting information I'm waiting for. Probably don't want to try something new/work with a new person.

Red: not available, unless it is an emergency. 

I suspect my card will spend a fair amount of time on "yellow" during the school day. I'll check back in after a couple weeks, and let you know how it goes.

What Students Need

I've brought up the concern at conferences before: the special education students who are the best at earning points in programs like Class Dojo. We've taught them to do their work to get the things they want and they're very good at it. To the point where many of them won't do their work without the reward and meltdown if they don't get it. I've had a front row seat to that show this summer.  The incentive system clearly does its job. But, for me it always comes back to the same questions: "What are you teaching? What are they learning?"

Now I want to add another question: "What do they need?"

When we use a reward system we are clearly teaching students that they should not value the academic task. After all, we obviously don't. It's only one factor that goes into getting their token (complete task and behave usually) and it takes multiple tokens to get anything they care about. They are learning to comply with teacher-directed activities and to engage in pro-social behaviors. Adding the last question makes it clear what the reward system is really driving at: what students need. Students need to care about the work they are doing. They wouldn't engage in the reward activities (they wouldn't be rewards) if students didn't care about them. If we want to get rid of reward systems we need to make the work the thing students care about.

For some students, making the work the thing the student cares about is as simple as incorporating the students interest into the instructional activity. You're talking about auditoriums? Okay, let's find the letters in auditorium to spell it into google and get a picture. Write three sentences and we can print it out. Let's count how many doors there are between here and the school auditorium.... (This idea make sense to you? Want to run with it? I recommend Paula Kluth's book Just Give Him The Whale!)

It's a strategy that has worked remarkably well. Some content is harder to fit in (science, social studies) but we find other ways to make it fun and more often than not those activities become the things that students are talking about. (Think I'm crazy? Learn from the Pirate Master himself, Dave Burgess in his book Teach Like A Pirate)

For some students, it's not as easy to see what they need. Because interest and perseveration are not always the same thing. Because we don't always have enough context to tell what is self-calming speech, what is anxiety-speech and what is social speech (assuming we can understand the speech at all.) Because the same tools that a students enjoys can be exactly the wrong tools for learning for a student who has trouble context-switching.

The fact remains that teacher-directed instruction is still important. Teaching pro-social behavior (and reducing or eliminating dangerous behavior) is also important. There will always be cases where we can't see they pay-off for completing something (because it's too many steps down the line) and we need to give ourselves a little extra reward. I know I do it for myself. (How do you think this blog post got published?) Rewards aren't evil. But students need to know that learning is important, fun even, and not just because you can get the computer after you fill your token board for doing it.

Losing Control

Last week at #atchat, I was having a conversation with Ricky of www.atmac.org about the challenges of teachers who fear technology in the classroom, and who fear their students being more capable with the technology than they are. That got me thinking, and I said it at the time, the essence of that fear is teacher fear of losing control over the classroom dynamic.

It is common knowledge that every first year teacher struggles with classroom management. It's one of those rights of passage of first year teaching. There's a teaching urban legend that says "don't smile until October." Great emphasis is put on having an orderly, well controlled classroom.

In special education, this emphasis is paradoxically increased. Because our students struggle with the basic skills of self-regulation that come effortlessly (most of the time) to students in general education, most special education classrooms are filled with behavior charts and other paraphernalia of teacher-directed behavior support programs (incentive programs, reward/consequence programs, positive behavior supports..... the names and philosophies change - sometimes for the better sometimes for the worse, but all are predicated on the same concept: student must do what teacher says: top down.)

How many IEP goals have you seen that have goals for following (x step) directions? Or other goals of compliance. Participation in a structured activity goals? That's a compliance goal too. We spend a lot of time in special education teaching compliance.

And then, at some point, in "progressive" special education classrooms, somebody gets the idea of teaching self-regulation. It rarely goes well. The students are unprepared for there being no "right" answer. The teachers do not want to allow the behavior to become disregulated, so they control the choices, reinforcing the students' belief that there is a "right" answer and their own belief that their students are "too low" or "too routine oriented" to understand how to self-regulate. Because without the behavior plans and structure the class would get out of control.... right?

Wrong.

The problem is not that the students are "too low" (I don't believe such a thing exists) or "too routine oriented." The problem is trying to teach self-regulation in a context, and based on a foundation, that does not support it. The problem is that classroom culture of behavior charts.

I am not saying that we have to do away with extrinsic motivators (rewards) for all our students in every context. I'm not saying visual behavior supports aren't important - they are. But for most of the day, if students aren't motivated to learn the material, we need to find a way to make the material motivating. For example, I have a student who has been acting out during math: he struggles with numbers. We are learning about ratios as part of the 7th grade common core standards. He has been throwing every manipulative I try to use to teach this skill. But he loves time and clocks. So we started talking about the ratio of time to distance. He loves starting and stopping the stopwatch as we check the time to travel various distances. He still doesn't love telling the numbers, but he's more motivated to do so now that they are times.

More to the point, puts my timer to far better use than it was being put giving him check marks for staying in his seat and keeping his hands to himself to earn the swing when math was done. He still might ask for the swing after math, but it's not contingent any more. Sensory breaks are important, and now he's learning both math (which he wasn't before) and early self-regulation skills.

As my students build their skills in the areas of self-regulation, self-advocacy, and self-determination (all areas of the curriculum represented on every IEP in my classroom) I don't expect I will find anyone is "too low" to make progress and develop skills. And I'm not worried about losing control of my classroom to do it, because I won't be giving up any behavior control in order to for them to practice those skills. They are working on them every day in the classroom already. My students are the primary stakeholders in what goes on in my classroom: if they're not invested in learning, I don't waste my time teaching: the standards only tell us what to teach, not how.

Assessing Our Place

The controversy over state and national assessments, the common core, and the place of students with disabilities within that structure is a loud and large debate on which everyone has an opinion and everyone knows best.

I don't know best, but I do have an opinion, which I would like to share.

The MCAS-alt (Massachusetts's alternate assessment protocol for students who are unable to take the state test, even with accommodations) may not be a valid, or even meaningful, test of student progress toward meeting grade level standards. However, it is an important requirement of all students educational program because it requires teachers, for 40-90 lessons out of the school year, to provide at least some academic instruction to all students, regardless of perceived "ability."

These are the teachers, and some of them have been my colleagues, who are inordinately proud of themselves for keeping their students safe and happy. They feel that is proof that they are doing a good job. I can't help but wonder if they are familiar with the difference between the job description for babysitter and the job description for teacher - and which one they think they are doing?

These teachers truly believe, and have convinced many wonderful parents as well, that the MCAS-alt is a waste of both student and teacher's time because it takes away from focusing on the important (usually developmentally-based) skills that the student "should" be working on according to her/his IEP.

Yet, when the IEP is written with the grade level curriculum as the starting point (as opposed to the outdated and usually bogus notion of the student's "developmental level") as the starting point, the MCAS-alt portfolio flows naturally from the student goals, even for students who do not have a formal communication system and students who are working on "access skills" (not necessarily an interchangeable group.)

These teachers get offended at all the requirements to keep a portfolio from being marked incomplete. (10 different dates. Data on work samples must match data on graphs if the dates match. etc.) Yes, it's a pain, but if you actually teach the lessons throughout the year, it's really not hard. And that's the point. Fundamentally, this assessment isn't about whether the student learned the grade level material (because if they can access grade level material, why are you doing alternate assessment?) It's not even about showing student progress and mastery (because teachers chose both the skill - within limits - and the mastery criterion.) No, at its most basic level, the MCAS-alt is about forcing teachers' hands to ensure that all students get at least a little access to instruction in the academic curriculum. And as long as we have teachers who don't think their students "are ready for" academics we will need the MCAS-alt portfolio assessment, with all its hoops, to make sure they give their students at least a little bit. For the rest of us who are teaching curriculum and trying to move our students forward into more inclusive environments? Well, it's one more bureaucratic hoop to jump through, and in the world of special education, who will notice one more?