Toolkit
Promoting Shared Ownership and Collaboration
These strategies highlight research and best practices, along with short, medium, and long-term solutions, as essential for enhancing shared ownership and accountability for the progress of students with disabilities.
Strategy A
Establish and protect planning and collaboration time between special educators and their general education peers.
Strategy C
Cultivate, model, and maintain an inclusive learning environment with shared ownership and accountability.
School Story
Principal Martinez: Role Confusion and Disconnection
Learn from Principal Martinez as she bridges gaps between general education teachers and special educators promoting shared ownership and collaboration to ensure that students with disabilities learn and thrive.
Strategy A
Establish and protect planning and collaboration time between special educators and their general education peers.
Review and assess current collaboration opportunities between special and general educators.
Possible Actions
- Stay up-to-date on emerging research about the various strategies for general and special educators to collaborate effectively.
- Identify all current collaboration opportunities by reviewing master schedules and professional learning plans.
- Survey teachers to assess their perceptions of current collaboration opportunities and use this information to strengthen collaboration time.
- Review IEPs at each grade level to determine if additional collaborative structures and opportunities are necessary.
- Match educators thoughtfully considering educators' personalities, teaching styles, and areas of expertise and solicit ongoing feedback on the effectiveness of their partnerships.
Engage intentionally with the district office to advocate for protected time in the workday for regular, dedicated collaboration between general and special educators.
Possible Actions
- Create appropriate expectations and professional learning opportunities related to collaboration.
- Review and adjust master schedules to build explicit collaboration time each week for special and general educators to plan lessons together.
- Consider building in time for paraprofessionals and related service providers to participate in collaborative planning.
- Provide structured agendas and guidance to ensure that collaboration time is used effectively.
- Include special educators in existing or new professional learning communities.
Resources
Master Schedule: A Climate and Culture Initiative
10 Months of Essential Questions to Guide Your Master Scheduling Process
HLP 1: Collaborate With Professionals to Increase Student Success
Finding Time for Collaboration and Using It Well
An Unconventional Way One District Is Adding Teacher Planning Time
Implement policies and practices that create a collaborative school culture.
Possible Actions
- Collect anecdotal evidence from teachers to advocate for more collaborative planning time (if decisions about planning occur at the district level).
- Meet with district office staff to share this evidence and advocate to formally establish sustained planning and collaborative time for special and general educators.
- Work with special educators to create solutions to reduce workload to allow for more time to collaborate.
- Involve staff in the design and ongoing evaluation of collaborative structure development and refinement.
- Monitor student and teacher data to understand the effectiveness of efforts.
Strategy B
Build trusting, positive relationships by being visible and available to staff.
Create structured and unstructured opportunities to meet with general and special educators regarding their comfort and confidence in supporting the needs of students with disabilities..
Possible Actions
- Create opportunities for teachers to provide input and feedback by developing formal processes, such as pulse check surveys, and informal processes, such as office hours.
- Review and adapt feedback processes based on staff input.
- Create a schedule for regular individual and group meetings to review feedback, prioritize needs, and provide tailored support.
- Promote a growth mindset by encouraging a positive attitude toward challenges, emphasizing the value of perseverance, and celebrating progress.
Create opportunities for general and special educators, including paraprofessionals, and related service providers, to observe one another, with a specific focus on understanding how students with disabilities are served across learning contexts.
Possible Actions
- Build ongoing check-ins and observations with new and inexperienced teachers into the master schedule.
- Deepen educators’ understanding and identification of effective instructional practices (e.g., evidence-based practices, high-leverage practices) for supporting students with disabilities.
- Develop routines and expectations (e.g., “look fors”) that promote regular, nonevaluative peer observations of students with disabilities across the various settings in which they receive services.
- Leverage the school leadership team to help cover classrooms so that educators can participate in observations.
- Use video analysis as a mechanism for providing peer observation and feedback.
- Help staff engage in productive analysis and reflection on the instruction provided, including the impact on students with disabilities.
Establish a Special Education Task Force comprising administrators, general and special educators, and students with disabilities and their families (as appropriate) to regularly review IDEA implementation (e.g., compliance indicators) and identify areas needing improvement. .
Possible Actions
- Ground the task force in a common mission that includes streamlining special education programming and addressing systemic compliance challenges without overwhelming the special education team.
- Build collaborative work time into existing staff meeting schedules, with opportunities for the task force to review needs and plan for the distribution of responsibilities.
- Train all task force members in IDEA, effective accommodations and modifications, supplemental aids, and evidence-based and high-leverage practices for students with disabilities.
- Lead the task force through developing an action plan that is transparent, focused on improving IDEA implementation, and which communicates progress regularly.
Strategy C
Cultivate, model, and maintain an inclusive learning environment with shared ownership and accountability.
Establish a shared vision for inclusion that emphasizes the value of diverse learners and the importance of every student’s success.
Possible Actions
- During beginning-of-year check-ins, ask all teachers and related service providers what inclusion looks like to them.
- Hold a staff meeting to discuss themes across staff visions for inclusion and work together to create a schoolwide inclusion vision statement.
- Gather feedback from families of students with disabilities on the schoolwide inclusion vision statement.
- Ensure that the vision statement is grounded in the IDEA requirements related to the provision of services within the least restrictive environment.
- Model the vision in daily interactions and ensure that mentor educators are modeling the vision with new teachers.
Provide all educators with professional learning opportunities that create awareness, build knowledge, and strengthen implementation of effective inclusive instructional strategies.
Possible Actions
- Leverage the expertise of effective general and special educators to design and deliver professional learning and coaching sessions.
- Focus learning sessions, such as professional learning communities, on high-leverage practices and accommodations most prevalent in students' IEPs.
- Create an action plan focused on implementing practices and programs that promote student belonging.
Resources
5 Tips to Help Students With Disabilities Feel Like They Belong
Universal Design for Learning Guidelines
Quality Indicators of an Inclusive Environment Checklist
Ten Ways Schools Can Foster Belonging Among Students With and Without Disabilities
Stories From the Classroom: Inclusion Is More Than a Seat in the Room
Establish systems and processes that reinforce inclusive learning environments across recruitment, hiring, and continuous improvement efforts.
Possible Actions
- Ensure your hiring team is clear on the qualities of an effective special educator.
- Ask candidates questions during interviews to determine if they share the school’s mission and commitment to inclusive learning environments.
- Revise job descriptions for both general and special educators to align with the school’s inclusion philosophy and clearly articulate expectations for supporting students with disabilities.
- Help educators understand how to actively monitor and adapt teaching practices using data (including progress monitoring data) to better address the needs of students with disabilities.
Solutions in Action
Promoting Shared Ownership and Collaboration
Kyle Roher, Powell Middle School Principal, Powell, Wyoming
In this video, learn how a middle school principal intentionally designs schedules and utilizes professional learning communities to cultivate a collaborative culture, allowing to educators to offer targeted support for students with disabilities during the school day.
Related IDEA Considerations
The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) mandates that students receive their education in the least restrictive environment (20 U.S.C. § 1412 (a) (5)), meaning that they should spend as much time as possible in general education classes. Consequently, both general and special educators play crucial roles in supporting students with disabilities. For instance, IDEA requires at least one general education teacher be part of the multidisciplinary individualized education program (IEP) team (34 C.F.R. § 300.321) to provide insight and input into the development of a student’s IEP, including the determination of appropriate positive behavioral interventions and supports and supplementary aids and services (34 C.F.R. § 300.324 (a) (3)). Special education teachers must collaborate with general education teachers to support students with disabilities by adapting lesson plans and identifying accommodations to make the general education curriculum accessible. General educators are essential in implementing these accommodations in general education classrooms, as specified in the students’ IEP (34 C.F.R. § 300.321 (a)(4)).
To enhance collaboration between general and special educators and improve services provided in the general education classroom, IDEA regulations allow local districts to use up to 15% of their Part B funds for training special and general educators (20 U.S.C. § 1465 (b)), including supports for working collaboratively in a general education setting.