Dr. Julie Causton discusses the steps schools must take to become more inclusive ~ 301

Tim Villegas
I’m recording from my living room in beautiful Marietta, Georgia. You’re listening to the Think Inclusive Podcast, Episode Eight. I’m your host, Tim Villegas.

Today, I’m speaking with Dr. Julianne Causton, an associate professor in the Department of Teaching and Leadership at Syracuse University and creator of the website Inspire Inclusion, which has a 10-part video series about inclusion for parents of children with disabilities.

I had the pleasure of visiting with her one evening in November of last year. Julie and I discussed the necessary steps for schools to become more inclusive, which include professional development, reimagining school districts’ service delivery models, and using the law as leverage for systems change. This is one of the most interesting conversations on the podcast to date. So please, if you can, listen to the entire episode.

So without further ado, let’s get to the Think Inclusive Podcast. Thanks for listening.

Joining us today on the Think Inclusive Podcast is Dr. Julie Causton. She is an associate professor in the Department of Teaching and Leadership at Syracuse University. She’s also the creator of the website Inspire Inclusion, which includes a 10-part video series about inclusion for parents of children with disabilities. She has also been involved with research on inclusive practices, including the landmark project Schools of Promise. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us today.

Julie Causton
Oh, it’s my pleasure. Thank you, Tim.

Tim Villegas
Well, let’s go ahead and dig right in. The reason why I wanted to get you on the podcast was because of the work that you did with a research project called Schools of Promise. I know that was a while ago, but I was hoping that we could talk a little bit about this particular research and tell our audience about your involvement. And if you agree that this was a good example of how inclusive education can be possible for all students.

Julie Causton
Yeah, definitely. So Schools of Promise began a while ago, almost maybe eight years ago. My colleagues at Syracuse University and I were teaching about how to create inclusive schools with our undergraduates. We teach teachers how to teach general and special education in inclusive settings. We were placing our students in city schools nearby Syracuse University, and we were finding that we weren’t seeing very good models of inclusive education locally. The concern was we were teaching them something that they couldn’t see in practice.

So right away, we decided that one of the best things to do would be to begin to look at the schools where we were currently placing our students and see if we could work with those schools to become more inclusive. We went to the superintendent of Syracuse City Schools at the time and asked if anybody was interested in being involved in our project. We ended up getting a lot of schools that were interested. We worked with those schools that had 80% or more of the teachers really on board with becoming more inclusive. We had done some surveys and things to figure that out.

We ended up starting with two different schools in Syracuse. When we say school reform, what we mean is that we worked with the entire school staff. It was a pretty typical school team. It would have been a school that had pullout classrooms where kids would be pulled out to resource rooms. There were segregated classrooms in those schools, and there were also some classrooms that were more inclusive.

To be involved in the partnership, we said that they would need to be willing to get rid of their segregated classrooms and their resource room pullout programs. All children with all disability labels would be included in the general education content and curriculum. We began work with those schools and spent about three to five years with each school. We worked alongside them as they restructured their school and got rid of their segregated pullout programs. All the kids with disabilities were in the general education classrooms.

The work we did mostly focused on professional development and teaching teachers how to create inclusive classrooms, how to differentiate content, how to support challenging behaviors, and how to collaborate effectively with their colleagues. That was the work we had done. It was great work. The schools looked different in terms of no children being segregated any longer.

What surprised us with the research was the academic results. Much like you, Tim, at a gut level, you think inclusion might be the best idea for children on lots of different levels. I knew that to be true. But what we didn’t expect in our research was that there was such a great big academic gain for not only children with disabilities but their peers without disabilities. They did better in these classrooms.

That was the bigger surprise in our research study—across reading, across math, across social studies, across science, across state tests. Everything we found showed that kids actually did better academically when they were included. This research project took us from the social justice reasons for including kids to really academic performance reasons for including kids.

What’s interesting is that since the Schools of Promise schools, we’ve had schools recognized as schools of excellence and things like that, which is great. But what’s been really interesting is that we’ve been able to replicate those same results in multiple schools across the country. We’re not calling it Schools of Promise, but we’re doing a lot of school reform work like that. We’re finding the same academic achievement results.

Now, what’s interesting is that a lot of times when I’m talking to administrators about why to include students, I’m actually using the academic achievement gains as the number one reason to include kids with disabilities.

Tim Villegas
Do you find that that is more effective as convincing?

Julie Causton
Yes, definitely. Everybody right now is interested in the bottom line—their test scores, their cut scores, the Common Core, making sure that everybody has access to that. When we can actually show with real numbers and real children in real schools—and I don’t want to say these schools are perfect, they’re still not perfect—they’re decent schools with great teachers working hard. But the point is, I’m getting a lot of leverage around inclusion because we’ve got hard data that shows that children do better when they’re in inclusive classrooms than when they’re sent down the hall or when they’re segregated and separated, where they’re in for an hour and then out for another hour and then back in and then back out.

What we find is students miss so much during those transition times in and out of the classroom. It only makes sense that students who spend their days in the Common Core, learning along with their peers in really creative, interesting ways, are going to do better academically.

Tim Villegas
Did you have a strategy to deal with—I’m not just talking about the early Schools of Promise—but with the schools that you’ve been working with recently? What strategies were you using with the teachers to deal with challenging behavior? Because that is probably the number one reason that supervisors and teachers will give me about why a student cannot be included in general education.

Julie Causton
Yeah, you’re right. Challenging behavior is one of the reasons that students are segregated—probably the number one reason that students are not included in general education. What we do is spend a lot of time talking about why students behave the way they do. When you create a community where students feel like they belong as real members of a general education classroom and you provide differentiated instruction, students usually behave much better than in schools where they’re separated and segregated out.

So that’s a piece of it—creating that community feel and sense of belonging. Then the other thing is, we talk a lot about why students behave the way they do. One of the things I often ask teachers is, “What are the most challenging behaviors you see? What are the most dangerous, concerning, challenging behaviors you see in your schools?” They make this long list—swearing, kicking, hitting, biting, running, threatening staff, threatening others, screaming—all this kind of stuff.

I write this list on the board or on the computer, wherever I’m doing the presentation. Then I say to them, “Okay, look at this list. Has anybody in this room participated in any of these same behaviors yourself as an adult?” And sheepishly, hands go up. Because things like swearing and fighting and running and shutting down and crying and screaming are all on the list. So everyone raises their hand in the room.

I always make a joke: “Look around. Your colleagues—your esteemed colleagues—have the most dangerous, concerning, challenging behaviors we see in our schools.” Then I say to them, “Now, honestly, when you have these challenging behaviors that you’re admitting to me right now, what do you need?” And they say things like, “I need someone to listen to me. I need a hug. I need love. I need connection. I need empathy. I need space. I need food. I need water.” They often jokingly say, “I need a glass of wine,” stuff like that.

I tell them, “You know what you’ve just done? You’ve written the best behavior plan that’s out there.” What you’ve explained—and then the other funny thing is, I say to them, after I take all the things that they need when they have challenging behavior, I write them all down. Then I say something like, “How come nobody said they just needed a sticker chart?” I’ve done the same activity in hundreds of school districts around the country, and nobody said, “I just need a sticker chart.” Yet our number one response to behavior in school is a sticker chart.

That’s an interesting question. People have a lot of great answers to that. Obviously, one of the biggest answers is because you’re not addressing the actual student needs. You’re just sort of masking it and dealing with it in an external fashion as opposed to intrinsically responding to the student’s need.

Instead, they list all those things they need—time and space and care and love and comfort—and I say, “You’ve just written the very best behavior plan I’ve ever seen.” Because essentially, human behavior is no different for children. One of the things we have to really think about is what kids need in the moment and how we can give them what they need in terms of support and kindness and love and connection, compared to exclusion.

Our typical responses are the sticker chart and exclusion—meaning, “You’ve misbehaved, out you go.” We know that creates a cycle. One of the things to do is get them to understand that behavior is human behavior. It’s a human response, and it means something. If we don’t deal with that, we’re not going to get to kids who behave well.

That, in conjunction with tons and tons of strategies and ideas about how to make learning fun, engaging, and how to differentiate so students aren’t working at their frustration level all the time—in concert with really effective community building—creates the recipe for classrooms where students don’t have a lot of challenging behavior.

Tim Villegas
Right, right. I know where you’re coming from. When I hear you talk about behavior and unmet needs as kind of the core of where challenging behavior comes from, I get that. But how do you get professionals—educators—who don’t have that prior knowledge of how behavior works to understand? Because it’s a different way of thinking about behavior. It’s a different way of looking at it. So many educators would hear that and say, “Well, you’re coddling those children. You’re creating little monsters.”

Julie Causton
Right. It is interesting because it actually flies in the face of what we think to be true about behavior. What we think to be true is antecedent, behavior, consequence—apply a consequence because of the behavior, and we will reduce that negative behavior. It absolutely flies in the face of that way of looking at behavior.

You could look at it through the antecedent, but instead, you really just look at it as, “What might this student need?” Actually, the number one strategy that I suggest for teachers is to ask the student, “What do you need right now?” and to name the behavior. “When I’m looking at you right now, it looks like you might be really frustrated because you’re banging your head or because you’re yelling. I’m not sure—are you frustrated?” We start there. You just figure out what’s happening. “Are you angry?” You’re just trying to get a sense of it. Then you ask the students themselves what they need.

Your question, Tim, is how do I get teachers to see behavior in a different way? I have the very good fortune of getting to spend tons of time educating teachers, and a lot of it happens in my professional development with them.

Very often in professional development sessions—in fact, this week I did a big professional development class for a whole school district about behavior—I started out with a behavior chart that had the red, yellow, green. Have you ever seen one of those kinds of charts before?

Tim Villegas
Yes.

Julie Causton
Okay. These teachers walk into their PD session, and their names are big in the front of the room. They all start on green. So green—picture kind of a stoplight system. If our listeners don’t know what it is, it’s really a green light means you’re doing fine, yellow is a warning, and red means you’re in trouble.

As these teachers file into the professional development session, they see their name publicly up front. They see that they’re all on green. I explain to them that throughout this presentation, I’m going to need to monitor their behavior. Because to be honest, teachers are some of the worst audience members. I jokingly say that, but there’s some truth to it.

As I start, right away, as soon as people are talking—side conversations or whatever—I’ll go tell them to pull a card. That means move from green to yellow, and then again. What I tell them—depending on where I am—at the university, where I’m teaching, if they get to red, they have to write a five-page paper that includes all the readings for the semester. If I’m in a school district, I tell them that if they get to red, they’re going to need to have a meeting with me and their administrators to discuss their behavior.

So we do this. What’s super fascinating is I can get human beings to behave. And by behave, I mean sit tall and be quiet and not fool around, essentially. But after about 20 minutes of me doing this behavior system—and I’ll usually call many people out on their behavior, and there’s a lot of laughter and nervous laughter—after about 20 minutes, I say to them, “Okay, we’re going to stop with the behavior charts.”

I ask the group a question: “Did it work? Did that behavior system work?” And they’ll say, “Well, I mean, I was quiet.” “Okay, good. Were you able to learn better?” “No, I was totally distracted by who was getting their names called and who was getting in trouble,” or “I was so nervous I just kept my eyes down,” or those kinds of things.

What often happens is really fascinating to me—people start to call each other out. They’ll start to say things like, “She’s talking,” or whatever. I start to create this sort of community of competition. That’s one of the most powerful tools I use—to actually simulate what happens in K–12 schools across the country, which is behavior management through a public display of humiliation.

I am very serious when I talk to teachers afterward. It’s a very funny conversation because everybody admits how they felt. I say, “Well, did it work? I just want to know—did it work?” And they say, “Well, it works to create silence and compliance, but it does not work to create community. It does not work to create an environment for learning to occur.”

It’s a really big aha moment for most educators. We’re kind of going about this in the wrong way. A lot of the different things that I do in professional development, I would say, are very instrumental in getting people to rethink what’s typically done for kids with disabilities and kids without disabilities in public schools related to behavior.

Tim Villegas
Now, do you think that professional development is really the only thing that needs to happen for us to move forward with inclusive schools? Let me just add one more thing—because there are a lot of barriers. Not even at the top of the list is attitudes. One of the biggest things is money or funds, or how we restructure the delivery model of how we serve all of our kids. For instance, if we have a school district that wants to become more inclusive, how do they go about doing that when there isn’t any more money than what they have? Because of the economy, the housing market, property taxes, and all that stuff. How does a school district go about moving in that direction? And can a school district really do that if they don’t want to? Because it sounds like the schools that you’ve been working with have wanted this.

Julie Causton
Well, I’m sure you remember I said 80% or more voted yes to a very lovely presentation about inclusion. So I’m starting with schools that are saying, for the most part, “Yeah, we’re in.” That’s all they’re saying. Honestly, it’s the hardest work that I do. I’m often working with schools that are somewhat on board. Because we know in every school district and every school, there’s a very vocal minority. That group alone can really tank any major school reform efforts.

So it’s a ton of work with the administrators to both expect people to disagree with the concept of inclusion and to prepare for the fact that they’re going to disagree. They’ll want to slow it down, wait, or try it next year but not this year. There are all these different ways that people respond to change in general, especially change around inclusion.

Your question was, is PD the answer? Well, it’s a great start in our current school system, but PD doesn’t come first. The most successful school reform efforts don’t start with PD. We actually start with the school reform work, where we take all the existing educators on a map. We create these maps, and by map, I mean we show where all the teachers are and where all the students are—who’s being pulled for what, who’s being segregated, etc.

Usually, I bring it right to the teachers themselves and say, “Okay, this is your current special ed model.” It’s on one PowerPoint slide. “What problems do you see inherent in the model right now?” People come up with those, and we talk about what’s working in the model and stuff like that. Then I give them the challenge: “If inclusive education was our goal, what would need to happen in terms of moving children and teachers?”

Tim, you bring up the financial piece, which is really fascinating. We’ve proven—and by we, I mean many people have studied—that inclusive education is no more expensive than segregation. If we educate everybody in segregated settings and in resource room settings, we still have lots of special ed teachers, we still have lots of paraprofessionals. In many cases, segregated education is more expensive.

What we do in the school systems is draw the maps of their schools, their service delivery model. We talk about the pros and cons of what’s happening. Then we actually, in a pretty democratic system, have people redesign the model with their given teachers. It’s not like we add five more teachers or $10,000 more. There’s no more money, no more staff. But we say, “What if?” How would you rearrange things if all kids went back to their general education classrooms?

What that does is free up all these teachers who used to work in segregated classrooms and resource rooms down the hall and closets. People—teachers—are working in all sorts of funny little ways to support kids with disabilities. But when we say “all hands on deck,” everybody’s in general ed. Now you can pair general and special education teachers together, and people can teach inclusively, which is a very different way of doing it.

So professional development is step two. Step one is redesigning service delivery models.

Tim Villegas
I’m sorry—so I guess the larger question is, how do we influence inclusive education? That’s one piece of it. Those are existing schools. The other piece happens at the pre-service level, which is a lot of the work that I do—preparing students to be general and special educators who don’t think about services as a place, but instead that services are portable and should be brought to children.

Right now, every semester, we graduate about 60 teachers at Syracuse University who enter the workforce and really don’t see general and special education as different entities, but really see special education as a portable service brought to children in the context of gen ed. That’s the other piece that I think is really helpful to think about—the more we educate our pre-service teachers not in those traditional, old-fashioned ways of thinking, where you walk down the hall to receive your special ed service, or if you have a certain kind of disability, you’re educated in a substantially separate location. We just have generations of teachers who don’t think that way.

Tim Villegas
Actually, I’m glad that you said that, because my experience in my teacher training was much more in that vein of thinking, where general and special education—we were expected to collaborate. But when I entered into the public schools, the schools were so far different from that line of thinking that there was a big adjustment period for me. I got hired on as a self-contained teacher, and I had to take the things that I learned and try to apply them in a context that wasn’t friendly to it. You see what I mean?

I’m happy that I had that training. I went to Cal State University Fullerton and had some wonderful professors that got me rethinking how that service delivery should look.

The other thing I wanted to talk about—what you said about changing and restructuring service delivery—is I think I remember from reading the Schools of Promise research that about 15% of the students in the schools that you were serving had IEPs or identified disabilities. In that restructuring, do you have students go to their home schools? Is that a way of also restructuring the service delivery model?

For instance, at my school, we have about 20% of our students with identified needs, with IEPs. Our school is not their home school. So how exactly did that work? Is that something you address?

Julie Causton
It definitely is. What we do is—just like you’re describing—very often we begin to bus kids around based on the fact that they have disabilities, which alone is fairly illegal. But that’s a really common practice.

In any school district that we’re working with, absolutely, returning kids to their home school is the goal. The problem for me comes in the actual—these families have been told that their children have to go on a bus and go somewhere else because of their disability. What I like to do with those families is give them choice. Either return to your home school or stay, because we’ve already made this mess for you. If you’re more comfortable here, let’s just finish your schooling out here.

What we don’t do is continue that process. So the new kindergarteners coming in—they no longer get shipped. They instead stay in their home school.

That’s how we’ve done it. And 20%—the national average is about 14%, which is what you’d expect in any one school. So you’re a little higher in your district. But what you do is also think about who’s here that shouldn’t be and is being bused. Then you start to think about whether they want to return to their home school. If so, we’ll help them do that.

The other thing is, in any one classroom, if 20% of your kids have labels, then in any one classroom, you would never expect to have more than 20% of children with labeled disabilities. That’s the concept of natural proportions, which is really important in the redesign and restructuring.

So often—and you might have seen this before—people will say to me, “Julie, you’ve got to see our inclusive school. It’s amazing.” I’ll go and see it, and they’ll say, “See those kids over there? Those are inclusion.” If you have inclusion students, you don’t have inclusion.

The truth is, we often see classrooms that are really densely populated with children with disabilities—50%, 80%, or more—and they’ll call it an inclusion classroom. It’s really important to not only pay attention to home school rules—children should attend the schools they would attend if they did not have a disability—but also, when you’re doing this restructuring, look at your actual percentage of kids with disabilities and follow that throughout your entire school. No classroom should have more than 20% of kids with disabilities.

Tim Villegas
I mean, that sounds great. And I’m trying to ask questions because I know that—like I said—I’m tracking with you, and I agree with you. But I want to make sure that people who listen to this podcast or when I have conversations with people and they bring up questions, we can address the real challenges of getting there. Because what if a school doesn’t have that 80% buy-in? I guarantee you there are plenty of schools out there that don’t have that 80%.

So I wanted to talk about legislation and about the law. If what we have now under IDEA is sufficient—and we talk about, in special ed, least restrictive environment—do we need something different or more to clarify and push forward inclusive schools? Or is what we have sufficient as long as we fulfill it? Does that make sense?

Julie Causton
It makes perfect sense. I want to just back up really quick to what you said related to the fact that most schools wouldn’t be 80% interested in becoming inclusive. You’re 100% right. Most schools are not that interested in becoming inclusive. Those Schools of Promise were two examples where we had a vote. All the other schools that we’ve worked with—and I mean hundreds of other schools now—have not been like that. They’re just typical schools where people are not necessarily interested in becoming inclusive.

One of the things is to just ask yourself, from your position—whether you’re an educator, administrator, whatever—what do I have power and control over? And how can I create a more inclusive school?

In some schools, we’ve been invited in just because a group of educators said, “Hey, we want to do this, and we need your help.” So we’ll come and really work with them. Sometimes it’s the ground level—educators themselves saying, “Come help us do this.” Other times it’s administrators. And sometimes it’s because there’s litigation. Often I’m invited in because a district has lost a due process hearing, a federal court case, or a class action lawsuit. And the remedy is training for inclusion.

So there are lots of reasons that schools become inclusive. The law is one very important reason. It’s a great question.

The spirit of the law is very much on our side—the side of inclusion. The spirit of the law is: “To the maximum extent appropriate, children with disabilities, including kids in public or private schools, are educated with kids without disabilities.” And then the piece that’s really useful to us is that removal happens only when the nature or severity of the disability of a child is such that education in regular classes, with the use of supplemental aids, supports, and services, cannot be achieved satisfactorily.

So essentially, you can only remove kids when you’ve exhausted all the supplemental aids, supports, and services. The beauty is, I happen to have a document that I think is like 20 pages long—it’s every supplemental aid, support, and service out there. Whether it’s extended time, pacing of instruction, using multiple intelligences theory, every adaptation, modification, accommodation you can think of is on this list.

When you look at the law, it suggests that you can remove only when you’ve tried all those things first. One of the most important things I do is serve as an expert in due process hearings—always related to inclusion and LRE. On the stand, when I’m working against educators who are saying, “We can’t include this child,” I have that list of supplementary aids, supports, and services. I go through one after another in front of a judge and say, “Have you tried this? Have you tried that?” Inevitably, the district can’t prove their burden, which is that they’ve attempted all of these supports and services. Therefore, segregation is not really okay.

I’m not saying this to toot my own horn, but to show you where we are in terms of the spirit of the law. I’ve done nine cases since I’ve been here at Syracuse—federal court cases—and we’ve won. The beauty is, we’re at this place in time where, if you go to litigation, it is likely you’ll win based on the spirit of the law.

Your question was, what needs to change? Sure, I’d love the language to change to be less wishy-washy. “To the maximum extent appropriate”—you see how that language is very difficult to prove. But when you really lay your case out in a due process hearing and show that districts haven’t met their burden of proof, it’s not hard to prove that children should be included.

That’s been a lot of the work that I really enjoy doing.

Tim Villegas
That’s brilliant, by the way. I love the list of accommodations and modifications. I’ll have to pass that on.

Julie Causton
There’s a truncated version of it on Inspire Inclusion. I think it’s in the second video. That one comes with a shorter version—maybe seven pages in length. It’s really, really good.

Tim Villegas
Okay, we’ll look that up and put it in the show notes.

One thing I’ve heard over and over is about students not being able to be included in general ed because it’s not academically appropriate, or they are so far behind in either math or reading—or globally, across grade-level content. In fact, I don’t want to name anybody specifically, but when parents want to have their students have one-on-one aides in general education, districts typically balk at that. They don’t want to spend the money on that particular student to have the assistant to modify those activities or however they want to support that student. They feel that student is served appropriately, like IDEA says, in another environment.

What would you tell parents if they came to you and said, “The district says I have a third-grade student who is not reading at a third-grade level—he’s reading at a kindergarten level. He’s just working on number sense. But I want him to be included with his peers. The district is telling me it’s not academically appropriate for him to be in third grade because the curriculum needs to be modified so much that he has to be working on other stuff.” How would you address that?

Julie Causton
There’s nowhere in the law that says students need to be at grade level, or close to grade level, or no more than two grade levels below. There’s no language that says that. I think it’s really fascinating because it’s very often used as a rationale to exclude—“Your child can’t keep up,” or “Your child is below grade level.”

The whole point of special education is to provide portable services for children in the context of general education so they can access general education content—age-level appropriate content. The whole goal of special education is accommodations, modifications, and adaptations so they can be successful at their level.

It is absolutely appropriate and okay to make modifications. When I taught special education, I taught elementary, middle, and high school. I had 12th graders who were reading at a kindergarten level—just decoding or barely decoding—and I was still including them in high school English courses.

The question is, how would that happen? At some point, we decide that decoding might not be in the student’s near future. So we can no longer limit learning to what they can decode. Instead, we have to modify around the decoding problem and give them the information.

It’s as simple as students listening to the story and still being expected to respond to comprehension questions, participate in dialogue, create a PowerPoint presentation about the book. There are still a million things they can do to participate. But when we limit learning to decoding skills, we hold thousands of children back from learning what they’re capable of learning.

You simply have to modify around those things. There’s nowhere in the law that says kids have to be at a certain level in order to participate. Modifications and adaptations are the law. That’s part of what you have to do.

Tim Villegas
Yeah, it is interesting because I’ve never actually heard anyone say that—use IDEA as saying, “Yeah, we’re excluding a student,” and that that is backed up by the law itself. It’s mostly because, “Well, this is just what we do as a district. This is how we’ve decided to handle this.” So thank you for addressing that, because I think that’s important for parents and for educators to know. When you are advocating for a student and you get those questions, you can say with full certainty, “There is nothing in the law that says that this student cannot be included.”

What becomes difficult, I think, is how the district or the school—the local school—decides to do that. How they practically do that. Whether that is through the classroom teacher, the general classroom teacher, modifying those things, or whether it’s a paraprofessional model modifying those things. Or in my case, I usually work with the general ed teacher and my paraprofessional, and we work together to modify those things for my students who go into general ed.

So it really, I think, comes back to the collaboration piece—changing how people think about inclusion, how to deal with behavior, and so on and so forth. Because most of the time, it seems that administrators just can’t wrap their head around how that’s going to look. They want to protect their teachers. So when you come to them, or when parents or advocates come to the meetings and say, “We want this,” they just don’t know what that looks like, so they shut them down.

Is there any— I guess in your opinion, is there any research that you think is the silver bullet as far as moving inclusive education forward? It seems to me that the research that you’ve done with Schools of Promise and going forward really sets the bar. Because like you said, you go to administration, you go to the superintendents, and you say, “Look, this actually increases student learning across the board.” Then you’ve piqued their interest.

Is there something else? Or is there another kind of research that you’ve found to be effective?

Julie Causton
Sure. I mean, I have this really long list of research studies that I make my graduate students and undergrad students read, and I find them to be really, really useful. I have a list that I can—I don’t know how to get it to you—but I have a list of kind of the best of the best, in my opinion.

But I think nobody’s minds and hearts are changed because of research. If people are not interested in creating inclusive schools, I could give them a stack of 300 peer-reviewed research articles about why inclusion is better, and it’s not going to change that much. It’s just not.

I mean, I am a researcher, and I do that work, and I find it to be really important and useful in making part of my claim and to kind of move inclusion forward. But I think ultimately, it’s the work of hearts and minds.

So I run a Summer Leadership Institute at Syracuse with my colleague George Theoharis. We run this Leadership Institute for 200 or so superintendents and principals and special ed directors. They come from all over the country, and we spend five days with them. All our work is how to create and maintain inclusive schools.

The research part is just a tiny piece that we go over and talk about, and they can learn more about it if they’re interested. But I can tell you this: there’s never been a school administrator that said, “I just need like five more studies to show me that it really works.” Or, “Just give me one more article.”

I make this joke a lot. I have all these slides, and on the slides—in small print—it’s study after study after study that shows that inclusion is better for kids with disabilities socially, academically; better for kids without disabilities socially, academically; better for the school community; better for the school. It doesn’t matter—just tons and tons of studies.

Then I ask the question in the audience, “Has anyone ever seen The Biggest Loser?” People raise their hands—like the show on TV. I say, “Here’s the deal. I’ve seen every episode of The Biggest Loser. I think we’re so far into the season, and I’m not really an exercise physiologist or I don’t study exercise science, but I think there’s some research out there that suggests that the fewer calories you eat and the more calories you burn, the more likely you are to lose weight.”

I jokingly say, “Has anyone ever heard of that research before?” And of course, everyone laughs and their hands go up. I say, “Okay, well, in education, there’s nothing more clear when it comes to research. There are lots of strands of research in education, but one of the most clear lines of research is that when kids are in general education, they do better.” It’s just crystal clear in the research.

I know how to lose weight. I know how—because I’ve watched the show The Biggest Loser. I’ve read lots of articles. I’ve read lots of research, magazines, and things like that. I think the research is really clear there too. But the question is, when am I going to get on the treadmill?

I think in education, it’s the same. When are we going to get off the couch? We know this is better for kids. The research isn’t going to do that for us.

So what does do it for us? I think it’s a combination of inspiration, the law, and then lots and lots of practical, useful ideas so that people know what to do. I can say, “Yeah, include a kid with autism.” Okay, great. I can tell you to do that. I can tell you the law says you should do it. But when you’re the teacher and you’re looking at this kid who has interesting behavior, who isn’t verbal, and I’m reading—using the book Where the Red Fern Grows—and I have to figure out how Adam is going to be engaged in this class with this novel, unless I’ve given lots of ideas and strategies to a team of people, they don’t know what to do.

Not because they don’t have good intentions—it’s because they just don’t know what to do.

I worked with a team from one of the Schools of Promise schools recently, and it was great because that exact problem came up. Adam, a kid with autism—they were trying to figure out what to do with Adam during Where the Red Fern Grows. The first thought was, “He’s probably going to need a sensory break. What if he just did that?” And someone said, “Well, it doesn’t really fit with our commitment to inclusion.”

Right away, it was a problem to solve. His team is really full of ideas now, after working with our team for a long time. They said, “Okay, he’s going to need a fidget. Let’s give everybody a fidget. Let’s consider bags on every table. That’s how the students relate to the story. He’s going to need to stand. What if we put graffiti paper on the wall?” “Okay, not just for Adam, though—let’s put it up everywhere.”

In like three minutes, they solved this problem of what to do with Adam during Where the Red Fern Grows. I happened to watch this actual lesson, and it was beautiful. The paraprofessional charts the lesson. There’s graffiti paper on the wall, so anybody who wants to write or draw or outline while listening to the story—feel free. There are markers out there. She explained that.

Then, as they were reading, the teacher says—after they finished Chapter Four or something—“Okay, everybody, go grab your fidget bags. Pull out something. How does it relate to the story at the moment?”

I listened to two other kids—not Adam—but two other kids without disabilities who said, “Oh, we pulled out these little trees.” And they go, “This reminds me of the giant sequoia trees and the two dogs in the story—Old Dan and Little Ann—were under a big tree.”

I just realized that by changing the lesson a little bit for Adam, the lesson became so much better for everybody else.

Tim Villegas
That’s awesome. I love that. It’s universal design at work, right?

Tim Villegas
Well, we’re running up to about an hour here, and it’s been a pleasure to talk with you. I want to make sure that you had an opportunity to talk about your website or if you are on any other social media, or how—what’s the best way for people to contact you if they would like to work with you?

Julie Causton
Okay, well, yep. So my website is Inspire Inclusion, and that’s for parents of kids with disabilities who want their children included. That’s a great place to turn. I have a Facebook page called Inspire Inclusion—that’s a great place to go. I just put up lots of inspirational stuff there.

Actually, Tim, I find your work to be really useful because sometimes I share things that you’ve said and things you’ve written, so thank you for that.

I’ve written some books that I think are probably useful to this conversation:

• The Paraprofessional’s Handbook for Effective Support in Inclusive Classrooms is available through Amazon. That’s for paraprofessionals out there who might be interested in learning how to better support students.
• I just wrote a book called The Principal’s Handbook for Effective Support in Inclusive Education. This is a great book—parents often give it to their principal. It’s really useful in terms of how to create and maintain inclusive schools. A lot of your questions today, Tim, related to the structure of schooling and the ins and outs of how to make it work—those are all in there.
• I’ve just written The Occupational Therapist’s Guide and The Speech and Language Pathologist’s Guide to Inclusive Education. So it’s really about how we do all those related services inclusively.
• This year, I’m writing The General Ed Teacher’s and The Special Ed Teacher’s Guide to Inclusive Education. Those books will be really great reads for teams to read together. Every member of the team can have their own copy—it’s really about their own role. I’m really excited about that.

Another free thing that I have is an app called I Advocate. That’s for parents of kids with disabilities who might want to know what to say when their district tells them that their child can’t be included. What I’ve done is put all the reasons that districts are likely to say that a child can’t be included, and then how to respond, and then court cases that relate to that. I give parents a really nice tool. We created that at Syracuse University.

And then my email is julie@inspireinclusion.com. I take lots of requests for speaking engagements and also work on due process hearings through that particular email address.

Tim Villegas
Wonderful. Thank you so much for telling us about all those resources. I had no idea about the books that you had written, so that’s going to be on my list. Really great stuff. Thank you so much for joining us, and all the best in your future endeavors.

Julie Causton
Thank you so much, Tim. And keep in touch.

Tim Villegas
Absolutely.

That concludes this edition of the Think Inclusive Podcast. For more information about Dr. Julie Causton, you can follow her on Facebook at Inspire Inclusion or visit her website at www.inspireinclusion.com. You can find a link to download the checklist of sample supplemental supports, aids, and services on the show notes page of the Think Inclusive Podcast.

Remember, you can always find us on Twitter @think_inclusive or on the web at thinkinclusive.us.

Today’s show was produced by myself, talking into USB headphones using a newly refurbished MacBook Pro, GarageBand, and a Skype account. Bumper music by José Galvez with the song “Press.” You can find it on iTunes.

You can also subscribe to the Think Inclusive Podcast via the iTunes Music Store or Podomatic.com—the largest community of independent podcasters on the planet.

From Marietta, Georgia, please join us again on the Think Inclusive Podcast. Thanks for your time and attention.