Understanding Alternate Assessment with Debbie Taub ~ 304

Tim Villegas
Hi, I’m Tim Villegas, recording from my living room in beautiful Marietta, Georgia. You are listening to the Think Inclusive Podcast, Episode 11, brought to you by Brooks Publishing Company. I’m your host, Tim Villegas.

Today, I will be speaking with Debbie Taub, an expert in the field of special education and alternate assessment. For those of you who don’t know, alternate assessment is the state test or portfolio that is administered or collected for students with the most significant cognitive disabilities—around one to two percent of all students in a typical school district.

I had the pleasure of visiting with her one evening in February of this year. Debbie and I discussed what exactly alternate assessment is and what it’s supposed to measure. In addition, we talked about how alternate assessment might be a gateway to more inclusive schools. At the end of the podcast, Debbie lists resources that may be helpful for any educator who wants to know more about modifying grade-level curriculum for students with significant disabilities.

All in all, we had a great conversation. So without further ado, let’s get to the Think Inclusive Podcast. Thanks for listening.

Joining me on the Think Inclusive Podcast today is Debbie Taub. She is the Director of Research at Keystone Alternate Assessment. Dr. Taub has designed, implemented, and evaluated alternate assessments for students with significant cognitive disabilities, developed standards-based curriculum and instruction, and conducted validity and alignment evaluations. This work is informed by her experience as a classroom teacher and school reform specialist.

She has contributed journal articles, book chapters, and numerous professional development trainings to the field of educating children with complex needs, and has presented internationally on working with students who have autism. She is an advisory member of the Council to Promote Self-Determination Education and Workforce Committee, an active member of the TASH Inclusive Education Committee, a member of the Council for Exceptional Children’s CCSS Advisory Group, and a representative for TASH on the National Center on Universal Design for Learning Task Force.

So, welcome to the podcast, Debbie. Thank you very much for taking time to speak with us.

Debbie Taub
Thank you so much for having me. As I said, I really love your work, so I’m excited to be here.

Tim Villegas
Thanks. Good, good. Well, guess what? I just completed—I am a teacher—and I just completed my alternate assessment for my kiddos. So that is a big relief off of my shoulders. And I know that for the educators that know what alternate assessment is and do administer it, in whatever way, in whatever state they’re in, it can be a challenge depending on where you are and what you do.

So for the people that don’t really know what alternate assessment is—I know that there’s a lot of people that know what assessment is. They have state testing and benchmark testing and everything like that. That seems to be familiar to everybody. How would you, as someone who works in the field, describe alternate assessment and what it is and what it’s supposed to do?

Debbie Taub
Wow, that’s a lot of things.

Tim Villegas
Let’s tackle one thing, I guess.

Debbie Taub
So often, when we talk about alternate assessments, we’re talking about your large-scale assessments—not the things that happen in your classroom, not the ones in-depth classroom instruction, not the ones you use to look at your IEP goals, not the ones you use as a formative assessment—but the ones that are used for Annual Yearly Progress under the USDA federal regulations, otherwise known as No Child Left Behind.

There are a couple of different ways that students can participate in AYP. One, they can take the SATs and everything that most kids are taking—a general assessment without accommodations. Two, they can take the general assessment with accommodations. Some states have a two percent modified assessment that the federal regs are trying to phase out, so I won’t really talk about that.

The other way is that they can take what’s known as an alternate assessment based on alternate achievement standards. And that’s for, as you said, students with the most significant cognitive disabilities. Right now, every state has a different assessment. Some people are using portfolios, some people are using performance tasks, some people are using a combination of observations and checklists. So there’s a lot of different ways that they have built their alternate assessments.

There are two consortia right now that are building alternate assessments based on the Common Core State Standards. They’re called Dynamic Learning Maps, or DLM, and the National Center and State Collaborative, or NCSC. So that’s kind of your basic introduction to alternate assessment.

I’m trying to think of the rest of that question—what are they supposed to do?

Tim Villegas
Well, yeah, I guess, you know, let’s back up and say, why should we test students with the most significant disabilities? That’s a question I hear a lot.

Debbie Taub
And I hear it a ton. So let me start with that. I think that there are problems right now with our accountability system, and there are things that we need to do differently as a country around education. That being said, I have become a firm believer in the importance of assessing all kids.

I used to teach at the college level. I was one of those professors who stood up in front of my students and said, “I can’t believe this No Child Left Behind thing. They’re going to make us test these kids. What are they thinking? They’re ridiculous.” I started really looking into it, and what changed my mind was that I was doing school reform work in a school that was really not doing well with students.

The principal said to me, “I have all these special education teachers at my school, but I know nothing about special education. So I kind of just let them do what they want to do. But I need to change that, because we’re not doing well at all. And that’s what AYP is showing us now—that we have to stop ignoring these kids. It’s showing me that I’m not doing well, and we need to fix that. Come help me do that.”

I went into this one classroom—it was a fifth-grade classroom—and their math task was to color triangles green. And that’s what they did for two weeks—just colored triangles green. This was a very good teacher in many ways, but that’s what she thought she needed to do for math for the students—focus on identifying triangles over and over again.

So I worked with her, and we talked about how to make a standards-based lesson that would actually—this state had a portfolio system—so how could you make a standards-based lesson that met the student’s needs but was connected to the grade-level standards?

Within three months—actually, not even that long—within six weeks, she came back to me and said, “I never would have believed that this kid can do multiplication. This kid is doing great things. He just needed different support, and I needed to think about the content differently.”

And that’s what had me start thinking, “Okay, maybe these assessments are not the evil thing I thought they were.” And I’m hearing those kinds of stories all over the country—of students who, once challenged and provided with the accommodations and support that they needed, started getting more and more academics.

And this is the part I really love about it—teachers are saying to me, “Well, if my kid can work on the same kinds of things, with modifications and with support and accommodations, why do I have them in a segregated classroom, basically, away from their peers?”

So alternate assessments, for me, became a really powerful way to help promote inclusive practices. And I love that aspect of it. I never thought I would say anything positive about an assessment system, but I love that aspect of the alternate assessment system—that it can help provide better education for some of the students. Higher expectations, a higher level of presumed competence, and then some teachers who never would have thought of inclusion for these particular students—even if they thought of inclusion for other students—they might not have thought of it for these kids. They started thinking, “Wow, well, yeah, if I had the support and accommodation, sure, we could do that.” So it became less about “Why can’t my student?” and more about “What can I do to get my kid there?”

Tim Villegas
Right, right. And you know, that way of thinking was actually what turned me around on the concept of alternate assessment. I don’t want to talk too much about the way that Georgia does it, because I might just rant the entire evening.

Debbie Taub
No problem.

Tim Villegas
Yeah, yeah. But you know, like I’ve told my colleagues who do like to rant to me, I say, “Look, it’s not that I have anything against alternate assessment. I like alternate assessment. It’s just the way that we do it.” And also, the systems that are set up to support it. It makes complete sense to me that giving access to the general curriculum to students with significant disabilities should be done in a general education classroom or in an inclusive setting. It does not make that much sense to me to do it in a segregated classroom or a self-contained classroom—which I am a teacher of.

So it’s, you know, one way that I’ve kind of worked around it, when I’ve been able to, is to do some hybrid type of co-teaching model, where I would bring in a fifth-grade classroom along with the teacher, and we would do a co-taught lesson based on standards for fifth grade—like physical change and chemical change or something like that. And we would do this science lesson using the principles of Universal Design, where we would have a meaningful activity for my students as well as the typical fifth-grade students. And then be able to use that for the alternate assessment.

And that, to me, is the best way I have found to get that done in a way that I think is meaningful, where I’m not just teaching in a vacuum. And that’s what I’ve been trying to tell my colleagues—that when we do this in our room, when it’s just us, it feels like we’re teaching in a vacuum.

Debbie Taub
And that was one of the things about the state I was working in with that particular teacher. One of the performance dimensions of their assessment system was: in different settings, was the student able to generalize their skills and do these things in different settings and peer interactions? Did they have interactions with peers who didn’t have disabilities? And those things counted towards the student’s score.

Now, that’s unfortunately not included in most assessment systems for AYP anymore. Some states may still include those dimensions in their state information, but it’s not reported to the federal government. This is a theme, I think, because just like you’re saying, those are some of the most important things. We know from research that students who take alternate assessments need help generalizing. They do better when they are with same-age peers and peers without disabilities.

So by taking out those dimensions, I think I understand why we did it in terms of reliability and validity. But I think for our population of students, it may not have been the best decision. Because we do what we’re tested on sometimes. And so for some teachers, it took out that requirement of saying, “Oh, you know, I could do this in a general science class. Let’s go do that.”

Tim Villegas
Right. Exactly. Yeah, I think it’s definitely hard when you have multi-age or multi-grade self-contained classrooms, and you’re trying to generalize in general education with that kind of varied age group. And like I said, I don’t know how other states do it, but I think that’s the mechanics of it—the pragmatics of it—is what most people have a problem with. It’s not necessarily the theory behind it.

So a couple of questions come to mind. One is: how much does how students do on alternate assessment affect AYP? Because I’ve heard a number of different things.

Debbie Taub
It depends on the school and it depends on the state. For instance, one of the schools I was working in had a lot of kids who were in alternate assessments. It made a big difference if their kids scored well in alternate assessments.

Schools that only have a couple of kids who take the alternate—which, if you’re in a neighborhood school, that’s what the natural proportions should be—usually are, because you just have a few kids. Then the alternate assessments in that school don’t do too much for the overall AYP scores. It may change because they also report out by subgroups, so it may affect the subgroups.

And for the state as a whole, we’ll see what happens with these new assessments. But certainly, there was a trend for a long time of students on the alternate assessment doing better than students on the general system. More students were scoring proficient and advanced than the students in the general assessment.

So it’s hard to say. And I think it’s an interesting question. I think the myth that students on the alternate pull down the scores is just that—it’s a myth. We don’t really have any evidence to show that on a large scale.

Tim Villegas
Right. But that’s a concern. That’s something that administrators definitely worry about—whether, like you said, if it is a myth, it’s something that at least gets talked about.

So what I would also like to know is: what kinds of alternate assessments are there currently? So I’ve mentioned before that Georgia—and I believe Alabama, right next door—uses portfolio assessment. How many other states that you’re aware of are doing portfolio and other kinds, if you know?

Debbie Taub
Well, here’s the problem with that question for me. One state calls it a portfolio, another state calls it a performance task or a checklist. So there’s not necessarily a straight answer to that.

I can tell you that many, many states are doing some form of portfolio—meaning that the teacher teaches a lesson, collects the work, and then scores that work. And that work is used to help inform what the alternate assessment scores are.

Some people have a portfolio where they videotape the students, and then an outside scorer—not the teacher—scores it. So there’s a lot of different ways that people have taken that term “portfolio” and made it their own. So it’s hard to say.

But in general, there’s:

• Portfolios, where you have teacher-created and teacher-collected work.
• Performance tasks, where it’s like an item or a task that the student has to do—different steps, different skills and concepts. All the students are given the same task. How they access the task may differ based on their communication system or their needs, but they’re all given the same task. Then teachers can take that information and usually include some evidence to support their score of how the student did on that task.
• Performance checklists, which just have a list of all the different things that students in the alternate may be doing or should be doing at that grade level or grade band. The teacher just checks it off and maybe turns in a piece of evidence or two or three for one or two of those checklist pieces.

There are very few item-based alternate assessments at the moment—where you have a multiple-choice question and the answer is A, B, or C. That may be part of somebody’s performance task, it may be part of somebody’s portfolio, but it’s not generally the sole measure of how a student is doing.

Sorry I can’t give a straight answer on that one, though.

Tim Villegas
No, that’s fine. That’s fine. Because as an educator, I only know what’s either around me or what I’ve experienced. So I know that other people were curious as to that.

Here’s another question—and more of a history-based question—about alternate assessment. How long have we had alternate assessment in the United States?

Debbie Taub
The passage of No Child Left Behind, which was—what—1997?

Tim Villegas
I think that sounds right to me.

Debbie Taub
So since then, that’s when we’ve had federally mandated alternate assessments. Now, Kentucky had an alternate assessment system before that. Because if you look at IDEA, one of the things it says is that all students need to be included in instruction and accountability systems. And so Kentucky said, “Well, all means all. We’re going to create a form of alternate assessments.”

So Kentucky was actually one of the first states to build an alternate assessment.

Debbie Taub
So they did it before it was required under No Child Left Behind. But we’ve had alternate assessments for quite a while. And one of the things that I think is really important about alternate assessments—and one of the reasons that it worries me when people talk about getting rid of them (not the federal government or states, but when people are grumpy and say they wish we could just get rid of all these things)—is that we have learned so much about this population of students in the past, what, 10–15 years, that we never knew before. Because it just wasn’t what we focused on.

For instance, when alternate assessments started, we used to talk about how the students who make up the 1% of the population who can achieve proficiency on the alternate assessments actually make up the 99% of the diversity within schools—meaning they are the most diverse group of kids you’ll ever get together.

If you look at the research, Kleinert and Kearns and Pauls did some research on learner characteristics of students who take alternate assessments. They’ve now done that research across 26 states, and the averages across those states have been pretty much the same in every state. About 80% of those students are using some form of symbolic communication—whether it be an AAC device, sign language, braille, or words. They’re using some form of symbolic communication.

Approximately 70–80% of the kids are needing some level of reading support—whether it be basic sight words or being able to read and answer questions. Some of the kids in the alternate assessment are actually able to answer pretty high-level questions, not just basic recall but more inferencing-specific questions, which is interesting.

So what we’re finding is all this information about these students—and also learning about how they best learn, what we can do to help them learn better, and how to present information to them in a way that’s meaningful and useful. But also, that helps push our expectations for this population of students.

A lot of teachers really struggle with the idea that they should only teach their kids functional skills. They say, “Why should I teach anything else? They just need to learn functional skills.” And I have two big answers to that.

One is: what’s more functional than reading now? What is more functional than reading a map and problem-solving and figuring out, “If I don’t know the answer, what do I do? Where do I go?” Those are all things I taught my students. I worked as a job coach for a while, and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been doing training on alternate assessments and very concerned teachers came to me and said, “I just don’t understand why I would ever teach my kids an idiom. That’s not what they need to work on in their life. They need to get a job. They need to do this and that. That’s not what they should be working on.”

And I said, “Well, I understand what you’re saying. But as a job coach, when my client’s boss said to them, ‘Hey, you need to shake a leg,’ I needed my clients to work faster—not stand there and shake a leg.” That’s why it’s important to teach idioms. That’s why this is vital.

Also, just for inclusive practices in the community—I want my students to grow up (and I taught elementary school, so I didn’t have transition-age students when I was teaching), but I wanted them to grow up and have friends and do things and go into the community and have a job and live in the community. So I wanted them to be able to have a conversation where they weren’t thrown by words that weren’t literal.

The other piece of the “I should only teach functional skills” argument is: that’s what we know. That’s what we know works. When our field first started teaching students with the most complex needs, we focused on functional skills. But there was no research to back up that that was a good idea. We just, as educators, looked at the outcomes for our students and said, “Gosh, teaching these developmental stages is not getting our students jobs. It’s not getting them to be as productive in the communities as we want them to be. It’s not getting them outcomes of friends and all of these other things. So there has to be a different way.”

And we started looking at teaching functional skills and this idea that we should look at what our student needs in the next natural setting to be successful. Those are the skills we should be working on now.

So I understand the concern, and I hear that concern. But I think we need to take a step back and look at what we really want for our students, how we want to help them achieve that. And also, I think once in a while, it’s good to let go of things. I’ve been in high school classrooms where they’re still working on identifying letters of the alphabet. Because the student doesn’t know the alphabet, and how will they ever learn to read if they don’t know letters of the alphabet?

Well, if I’m in high school and I don’t know the letters of the alphabet, maybe it’s time to give me some kind of different support to help me read and understand.

Tim Villegas
Right. Exactly. I think that it’s very difficult as an educator when you have been teaching a certain way for so long to hear anybody talk about doing it a different way. Especially if I had been in the teaching profession for 30 years, and that’s what we started to do when we first got into the field. That’s what you did. You worked on functional skills and life skills. I mean, that’s what you called it—life skills curriculum. And that’s actually what we still call it sometimes.

But how do you think—or what is the best way—to help people change their mindset? Because I think for a lot of educators, they just don’t have any concept of what you’re talking about. Like, “Okay, I’m supposed to be teaching them multiplication. How exactly am I supposed to do that?” What advice do you give teachers, or what resource, or what exactly do you tell teachers to help change their mindset?

Debbie Taub
Well, it’s a hard question. One of the other pieces of work that I do—and I really love it—is helping states and school districts build inclusive systems. One of the things that research and practice have shown us is that you can’t always change beliefs until you’ve changed behavior. Which means I can talk until I’m blue in the face about how important it is for kids to be included and how important it is for us to teach academics. But until teachers—or family members or administrators—see positive outcomes, they may not change their minds.

So sometimes you have to change the behavior before you can change the belief.

Often when I’m in those situations, it’s because I’ve been brought in to help people teach grade-level content—or grade-level aligned content. One of the things I say is, “Okay, we can have this philosophical discussion, but in the end, the law says you have to teach grade-level aligned content. That’s what we’re supposed to be doing. So let me help you do that.”

I will support you in whatever way I can. I’m happy to brainstorm with you, talk through problems, and connect you with other resources. There are lots of great trainings online and lots of great resources. I don’t want teachers to have to recreate the wheel every time they go to plan a lesson—especially not in this day and age. There are so many ways to share resources and information. Let’s do it.

If I have a teacher who’s working on teaching Romeo and Juliet or Huckleberry Finn, I can point them to three or four different places where they can get adapted texts online for free to help with those lessons.

Both of the consortia—NCSC and DLM—are building sample lessons and professional development resources for teachers on just that question: how do I teach aligned content to students with the most complex instructional needs? How do I do that?

Keystone also has a webpage filled with resources. We try to collect everything we come across—trainings, conferences, things we learn from other people—and put them up on our website. Free resources on how to build communication systems, how to teach math, how to do science—whatever we can put into people’s hands to make their lives a little easier. I’m absolutely happy to do that and want to do that.

So that’s usually my approach: let’s get down and dirty in terms of figuring out how to make this work. Because it shouldn’t be about “should the student or should the student not.” It should be about “how.” There are so many places, resources, technologies, and supports out there. It’s about how in this day and age.

Tim Villegas
Shifting a little bit—changing the focus to the general concept of inclusive education—what’s your feeling about where we are going as an educational system in the United States? Do you feel like the move toward inclusive education is inevitable? Or do we still need some key things to happen? For instance, do we need more specific legislation about LRE in IDEA? Or what exactly do we need to push this forward?

Debbie Taub
Wow, that’s a hard question.

Tim Villegas
Sorry, I didn’t provide you with that one beforehand.

Debbie Taub
I say that because I’m having that conversation a lot right now—with people at TASH, on the Inclusive Ed Committee, and with various people I’m working on papers with. What do we need to do to move inclusive practices forward?

Is it something that needs to be mandated from the federal level? I’m not sure that will ever happen, because in our country—and especially in certain states—we are very tied to the idea of local control and also to parental choice. So you can’t really mandate that all kids be included.

And then there are people who would struggle with how that looks. That’s hard. You’d have to put in a lot of support for the full system across the nation to make inclusive practices successful. Otherwise, what’s going to happen is we’ll mandate it, some people will implement it poorly, and then it will become the impetus for saying, “Well, of course it’s failing. It just doesn’t work at all.”

And we know that’s not true. We know that when it is done well, and with the appropriate support and in the appropriate way, all students—both with and without disabilities—do better.

Tim Villegas
Right. I think it’s a very nuanced conversation, and it’s a lot more nuanced than people give it credit for. I’ve often said that inclusion advocates are probably some of the most misunderstood people in the education reform movement. Because we kind of have this mantra of “all means all,” right?

And when people hear that, they automatically equate it to the civil rights movement. And while there are some differences between the civil rights movement and the inclusive education movement—or the disability rights movement—they are very similar and parallel, as far as I’m concerned.

But there are systems and supports that need to be in place for us to be successful at inclusive education. That’s something you touched on. When we decide and mandate and say, “Okay, we are getting rid of all self-contained classrooms in every school across the country,” some counties and school districts will absolutely thrive in that situation. But like you said, others will fail miserably. And it’s just because—well, there are a hundred reasons why.

So I think having that conversation and admitting that is a really good thing. Because people need to hear that that’s not what we’re trying to do—or at least, I think the people who are really serious about doing it right, that’s not what we want to do.

I had a conversation with this Englishman, Alan Share, who I’ve written about. He wrote a play called The Death of a Nightingale. And how they went about moving inclusive education forward in the UK was very much, “Let’s get rid of all special schools, all self-contained classrooms, and let’s do it now.”

And you had some parents who were very upset by that—and educators. So I want to make sure that as the United States moves forward—which I believe we should—we do it smartly and with the correct supports. That’s why I love the SWIFT Schools and all the coalitions for inclusive education around the country. They’re beating the drum and waking people up to the fact that this is a good thing.

But I also don’t want to go the way of setting ourselves up for failure. You know what I mean?

Debbie Taub
Well, yeah, absolutely. And I think that—I’ve been lucky to be part of some really great, exciting work in different states. One state I’m working with, one of the ways they’re helping their schools see the power of inclusive practices is by approaching it from the angle of, “We know you have to teach these new standards. We know you have to teach grade-level aligned content, which is something some of you may not have done before. So here are some supports we can give you.”

And one of those supports is connecting you with content specialists and with other schools. Through pathways like that, the schools and the teachers and administrators are starting to see how it’s not that bad. It’s not that scary. We might be able to do this.

And one thing that’s really become concerning to me in the past few years—I have a friend who called me up one day. Her daughter had been in an inclusive school or an inclusive class, which I thought was kind of weird, but she was in an inclusive class. Her daughter has some language concerns and ADHD, but nowhere near as significant as the kids you and I typically work with.

She called me one day in tears and said, “I was just pulled aside by the principal and the teacher, and they told me my daughter needs to go into a special ed segregated classroom next year because she’s just not doing well in this context.”

I was floored. I went to visit the school and see what was going on and talk to them. The fear-mongering they instilled in this poor parent—I was horrified. Because what they kept saying, in the nicest possible way, was, “If you put your child with this special education teacher, she’s going to be nice to her. If you put your kid with the general ed teacher, she won’t be.”

Tim Villegas
Right.

Debbie Taub
I think that kind of fear-mongering that some schools or teachers—maybe not intentionally—engage in, it’s so easy as a parent to want what’s best for your kid. And as a relatively new parent, I’m certainly learning whole new aspects of this in my life.

But when somebody says to you, “If you put your kid in the segregated classroom, they’re going to get all these wonderful therapies and services,” there’s no reason—and there was no expectation when writing the least restrictive environment laws and statutes—that that had to happen in the segregated classroom. That was supposed to be a continuum of services, not necessarily a continuum of placement.

And yet, some people really bought into—or truly believed in—this idea of continuum of placements. That if you’re in a segregated placement, that’s where you get the most services. And there’s no way they can envision putting those services into a general ed setting.

The outcome of that is telling parents, “Well, they’re going to get a better education if they’re over there.” But research shows they’re not going to get a better education if they’re over there. They’re going to get a different education. But if you want your child to have access to content—

Michael Waymire did some really interesting research on levels of—I’m blanking on the word—it’s not “level,” but how well students were given access to the content. And it’s done much better in the gen ed setting.

Tim Villegas
Well, yeah. Of course. That’s something I’ve talked to my colleagues about too. As a self-contained teacher, I understand the pace of my classroom. The pace is slow. I physically cannot run my classroom like a general ed classroom because I have things that need to happen—whether they’re physical needs that are being taken care of or whatever. I won’t go too much into detail.

But when you have one of my students in a general education room, things are flying. The content is flying. They’re exposed to so much that they would never be exposed to in my classroom—even if I did teach all the standards all day, every day. You know what I mean?

Debbie Taub
Oh yeah. You’ve got so many things going on in your classroom. And I think one of the other pieces of that is, we also have a lot of teachers who, for whatever reason, didn’t have to take content courses in order to get their degrees in special education.

I know I chose to take, as an elective, courses in teaching reading and teaching math. But it was not a requirement in the program I went through. How is that possible? And then I would be in charge of teaching my kids content?

Tim Villegas
Right. Isn’t that a problem with our teacher training? I mean, okay, there’s a problem with teacher training in general, right? But then there’s also a problem with teacher training in the field of special education.

I got my credentials in moderate/severe disabilities, so that’s what I’m most familiar with. But I know there are issues when you’re talking about mild disabilities or learning disabilities and how they teach the standards in those programs.

That’s probably a whole other show.

Debbie Taub
Education is such a complex being. I remember when I first started doing education research, I struggled with this idea of causal effects in education. Because I can say that all these teachers went to X professional development, and that caused them to change their teaching behaviors, and that caused their students’ scores to go up and their knowledge about Shakespeare to improve.

But it could also be 40 other things. It could be that they all happened to take the same theater class, and that informed their understanding of Shakespeare. It could be that there was a Shakespeare festival in their town that all their parents took them to.

So there are so many factors that go into a child’s education. It’s hard to say it’s just one key. And yet, we’ve had such clear correlational data that shows that kids with all disabilities—and kids without disabilities—do better in inclusive settings.

But it’s hard to make that quantitative, because you have to take in all these other variables.

Tim Villegas
Right. That isn’t only a special education problem. That is definitely not. That is, in a general way, an education problem. Because general ed kids are dealing with that too—with testing and with the different states.

I think in that way, we have something in common—those of us in the field of special education. We can go to our gen ed colleagues and talk about the same issues they’re dealing with.

Something I’ve really just learned in the last few years is that when you actually do create relationships with your general ed colleagues, you become a better teacher. It’s so easy to be a self-contained teacher, and no one expects anything from you. You’re just with “those kids,” and no one knows what you do. You might as well be doing whatever you want, and they would never know it.

But once you start opening yourself up to having those relationships and maybe creating those co-teaching partnerships, it just changes your perspective. I’m for inclusive education, but I’m also for including yourself in your school community as an educator. Because I think that is huge—not just sitting at the special ed table.

Debbie Taub
No, I think you’re absolutely right. It’s very, very big for teachers.

Debbie Taub
I was really lucky when I first started teaching. I had a little naivety. I wasn’t aware that not everybody did inclusion. Where I went to school and in all the places I worked—student teaching, volunteering, early childhood intervention programs—the objective was inclusion. So I just naively assumed that everybody did it.

I got my first job, went into the school, and started talking to all these teachers about when I was going to be in their classrooms and how I was going to work it. It wasn’t until halfway through the year—and I was really struggling with this one teacher, we were having a tough time working together—I said to her, “Explain to me why this is so hard, because I’m not understanding what you need.”

She looked at me and said, “You know, nobody’s ever done this inclusion thing before. I took these kids and let them be in my class because I assumed I’d never see them.” And that was, in fact, the case with the other teachers I worked with.

I said, “Wait a minute. You guys didn’t do this last year?” And they said, “Oh no, no, no. Everybody just took their kids and took them out. That’s what we did.”

And I thought, “Oh my God. Nobody’s ever done this before.” And yet, I was looking at how much I learned from those other teachers—strategies I never would have thought to use, concepts I never would have thought to teach, skills I never imagined. I got the most amazing lessons on how to teach.

I was so lucky. I got to work with one of the science teachers of the year in our state. I got all these great science lessons from her. I worked with a woman who was a 25-year veteran in teaching math, and she had fantastic strategies I never would have thought of.

So I look back at that and think, thank God I was so naive that I just assumed I’d be in these classrooms. Because that interaction with those teachers taught me so much more than I ever would have learned if I had just gone into a classroom and closed the front door.

Tim Villegas
Yeah, that’s a great point. In fact, that’s one of the things that has helped me in actually teaching content to my kids—not looking up lesson plans on the computer, but going to my fourth-grade counterpart and saying, “How would you teach this lesson? Because I have no idea.”

And they would say, “Oh, you do this or this,” or “This is how I would teach it to my kids.” And then it makes sense. I can adapt that for this student or that student.

I really wish I had the time to do that more. And I think that’s part of the issue too—that collaboration piece. We just don’t get enough time to do that. There are a lot of things I wish we had more of. That whole collaboration definitely resonates with me.

Debbie Taub
And I do think that for the states moving to the Common Core State Standards—if they’re going to do that and do it right—collaboration should be something they’re all looking into. Because that’s one of the big points of Common Core: you’re supposed to be teaching literacy across content areas.

That means you better have teachers talking to each other. Or else, how will you know that you’re covering all the standards? How will you know you’re addressing all those issues? How will you know that your students are getting a holistic education?

And that includes special education. We have so much to teach general ed teachers too.

Tim Villegas
Well, yeah. And I think that’s all part of it. It’s getting those conversations going and also having them see special ed teachers as real teachers. I think that’s been part of it.

We seclude ourselves—and I can only speak for myself, because I’ve done that before.

Well, I want to wrap up with one more question. This has been an awesome conversation. Thanks again for being with us.

Debbie Taub
Thank you again for having me. This has been fun.

Tim Villegas
So I want to know—for a teacher, educator, or even parent who is struggling to figure out where to go to learn more about how to give access to the curriculum to a student with significant needs—what would be the number one go-to place? Or two or three? Where would you send them?

Debbie Taub
Well, that’s hard for me, because I don’t want to sound like I’m promoting me or our company. But that’s what Keystone Assessment does—we help people build accessibility and alignment to the standards.

But if I had to point you to just one place… there isn’t just one. There are so many places you can begin.

You can begin with places like TASH and the Inclusive Schools Network and the parent organizations. You can go to places like the UDL Center. You can begin with the Inclusive Schools Coalition, which is another great place.

But if you’re looking specifically for content, that is definitely harder. Looking at the two consortia—DLM and NCSC—for content would be a place to start. Also, the National Alternate Assessment Center and MathPartners.org. They have some really good trainings on how to align content and what that might look like for students with significant cognitive disabilities.

So I guess if I had to pick one, I would probably start with MathPartners.org, because I just think they have some really powerful, good stuff out there. And they’ll also lead you to a lot of other resources.

Tim Villegas
Okay. I’ll try and put all of the links and the organizations that we talked about on the show notes page, so that when people listen to it, they can know where to find those things.

Once again, thank you, Debbie, for being here.

Debbie Taub
And you’re doing such fabulous work. I love getting your updates and seeing the stories that you’re sending and the research pieces. It’s been fabulous.

Tim Villegas
Well, it’s my pleasure.

That concludes this edition of the Think Inclusive Podcast. For more information about Debbie Taub, you can follow her on Twitter at @DBVTAUB or visit keystoneassessment.com for more resources on how to make any content accessible.

Remember, you can always find us on Twitter at @think_inclusive or on the web at thinkinclusive.us. Please visit our sponsor at brookspublishing.com and receive 25% off your order using the promo code TINBD25.

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

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