Toolkit
Promoting Shared Ownership
These strategies highlight research and best practices, along with short-, medium-, and long-term solutions, as essential for supporting collaboration and shared ownership amongst educators serving students with disabilities.
Strategy A
Create a learning environment where all students feel valued, respected, and supported.
School Story
Principal Alvarez: Lack of Shared Ownership
Learn from Principal Alvarez as she ensures students with disabilities receive services as outlined in their IEPs by supporting teachers in building collective efficacy amongst staff.
Strategy A
Create a learning environment where all students feel valued, respected, and supported.
Deepen My Knowledge: Reflect on how current collaborative practices among educators influence school policies to foster students with disabilities’ sense of belonging and staff members’ shared ownership.
Possible Actions
- Collect and analyze data on school climate from both staff and students through, for instance surveys and/or focus groups, to identify ways to foster belonging and guide leadership learning priorities.
- Assess how your current schedule is set up to support or hinder collaboration between special and general educators and a sense of belonging for students with disabilities.
- Engage in regular, structured opportunities for collaborative learning with other school leaders focused on fostering belonging and creating supportive, student-centered school environments.
- Engage educators, families, and students in conversations about what belonging looks like, and use their feedback to inform school policies, classroom practices, and communication strategies.
Support My Staff: Support staff in using strategies that promote student belonging, increase engagement, and strengthen collaboration between general and special educators to reinforce shared ownership for students with disabilities.
Possible Actions
- Organize targeted training that explores how belonging influences student engagement, behavior, and achievement, and that equips educators with practical skills to build strong relationships and support meaningful peer connections for students.
- Provide dedicated time and structures for teachers to reflect on how bias—conscious or unconscious—may affect their expectations and their roles supporting students with disabilities.
- Use reflective protocols and school data to help staff identify places where students may feel excluded or disconnected.
- Conduct walkthroughs using a belonging-focused rubric to observe how classroom environments and interactions promote or hinder students’ sense of connection.
- Debrief with teachers after walkthroughs to reflect on how classroom practices support or limit belonging and to identify next steps for improvement.
Influence Systems: Build a culture of collaboration that reinforces shared responsibility for educating students with disabilities.
Possible Actions
- Protect dedicated time in the school schedule for meaningful collaboration between special and general education staff.
- Model practices that build strong student connections, such as greeting students by name, attending student events, supporting access to extra-curricular activities, and ensuring each child with a disability has a trusted adult, while encouraging staff to reflect on their own relationship-building efforts and celebrate progress.
- Embed belonging-focused goals for all students, including those with disabilities, into school improvement plans, staff meetings, and coaching cycles, and use walkthroughs and observations to reinforce practices that strengthen relationships and elevate student voice.
- Continue to use data to assess impact of strategies to promote belonging and revise approaches as needed.
- Explore and apply collaborative leadership models (e.g., distributed leadership) to strengthen shared decision-making and integrate these approaches into school structures, team routines, and instructional planning processes.
Strategy B
Maintain high expectations and promote educators’ collective efficacy.
Deepen My Knowledge: Increase understanding of how collective efficacy promotes high expectations and deeper collaboration for students with disabilities, and evaluate the leader’s role in shaping this shared belief system.
Possible Actions
- Participate in professional learning focused on IDEA requirements, and inclusive leadership practices.
- Collaborate with special education staff to analyze the successes and challenges of students with disabilities, identifying which supports had the greatest impact.
- Engage in structured self-reflection with colleagues or experts (such as the special education director) to examine beliefs about the capabilities of students with disabilities, using tools such as belief inventories or guided journaling prompts to explore assumptions and biases.
- Participate in book studies, peer mentoring, or leadership coaching to deepen understanding of how collective efficacy is built and sustained.
Support My Staff: Support staff in building collective efficacy and maintaining high expectations to ensure students with disabilities are valued, well-supported, and included within a culture of shared ownership.
Possible Actions
- Use faculty meetings, professional learning communities (PLCs), and school-wide communication to consistently reinforce the belief that all students can learn with the appropriate supports.
- Model this belief through consistent decision-making, resource allocation, and instructional priorities, and provide time for staff to reflect on and examine their own beliefs.
- Provide ongoing professional learning that builds understanding of staff beliefs about students with disabilities and how those beliefs influence practice.
- Allocate protected time for general and special educators to co-plan accessible lessons, analyze student data, and align supports, using protocols that promote shared ownership of student outcomes.
- Regularly highlight examples of student progress, educator collaboration, and success stories in staff meetings, newsletters, and school communications.
Influence Systems: Build systems that promote collective efficacy by assessing and reinforcing shared beliefs, high expectations, and joint responsibility for the outcomes of students with disabilities.
Possible Actions
- Communicate a shared vision that sets high expectations for all students, including those with disabilities, and reinforces collective responsibility for supporting their success.
- Develop and use a consistent observation tool that includes indicators of high expectations, effective practices, and belonging for students with disabilities.
- Establish a routine for teams to collaboratively review student work (including work of SWDs) to assess rigor, alignment to standards, and evidence of high expectations, and to celebrate successes.
- Use surveys or reflection tools to assess teacher beliefs about the potential of students with disabilities, and monitor shifts over time.
- Form a team to analyze outcomes for students with disabilities and review teacher feedback to identify trends and recommend systemic improvements.
Related IDEA Considerations
Collaboration between general and special education teachers is vital to ensure students receive a free and appropriate public education (FAPE) in the least restrictive environment (LRE). IDEA has specific language about ensuring each student with a disability has access to the general education curriculum alongside their non-disabled peers to the maximum extent appropriate. 34 C.F.R. Sec. 300.114–300.116. Most importantly, IDEA states a child with a disability can only be removed from general education classrooms if “the nature or severity of the disability is such that education in regular classes with the use of supplementary aids and services cannot be achieved satisfactorily”. 34 C.F.R. Sec. 300.114 (a)(2)(i)
Shared responsibility for outcomes for students with disabilities is a core element of IDEA, as shown by the required participation of general education teachers in IEP development. 34 C.F.R. Sec. 300.321 (a)(4). The general educator’s responsibilities, as a member of the IEP Team, include clarifying how the disability impacts the child in the general curriculum or other settings, identifying needs for special education and related services, identifying needed supplementary aids and services that will be provided in the general education classroom, and determining appropriate behavioral interventions and supplementary aids and services, and program modifications for the child. (See C.F.R. Sec. 300.320; 300.324 (a) (3)).
Courts have consistently reinforced the importance of access to general education settings for students with disabilities. Roncker v. Walter (1983) found placement decisions must focus on whether the benefits of a less restrictive setting outweigh the benefits of a more segregated setting. Roncker v. Walter, 700 F.2d 1058 (6th Cir. 1983). The decision emphasized that schools may not automatically place students in segregated settings without first attempting to provide appropriate supports in general education. This principle was reinforced in Hartmann v. Loudoun County Board of Education (1997), where the Fourth Circuit held that general education—with shared ownership and support—must be the starting point. A more restrictive placement is only justified when documented evidence shows the student cannot succeed in a less restrictive setting. See Hartmann v. Loudoun County Board of Education, 118 F.3d 996 (4th Cir. 1997).
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