welcome to five more minutes useful videos in about five minutes that support the teaching and learning of all students i'm your host shelly moore and today's episode is called reducing the barriers planning for all [Music] okay everyone today we're talking about something very important today we're talking about shifting a paradigm now one thing that i'm not sure everybody realizes that in our efforts to move towards more inclusion and equity in our schools is that one of the biggest barriers the actual infrastructure of the existing educational model you see me like many of us who work in education we were taught how to support students through a special education lens that is a model where a plan is made for most students and then special support is offered to those students who don't have success in that original plan this special support then seeks to figure out what's wrong with the student in question and then offer support in a way by offering adaptations and modifications so that they can fit into the first plan what if nobody fits into the plan because of how we were all taught to support students as our classrooms have become more diverse there's been this overwhelming feeling that inclusion is so much work because more and more students need this type of retrofit support in order to be successful okay now listen i have never met a teacher that can follow more than one plan so a big question emerging here is how do we make one plan for all learners from the start so that we can be effective and efficient and then not have to retrofit for all of the learners that don't fit in order to do this we need to shift how we think about and respond to students who are struggling you see special education evolved out of a medical model so for example like if you break your leg you go to the doctor and then they fix you and if they can't fix you they send you to a specialist we get medical attention when something is wrong this is special education it's designed to react to students when something is wrong and as a result our educational system has become so heavily reliant on processes that emphasize failure expensive evaluations and intervention systems that focus on the deficits in students well something that we can learn from the disability community is that just because a person is struggling doesn't mean they're broken people don't need to be fixed so then how do we respond to students in a way that meets their needs without creating programs and following processes for only targets what's wrong well i will tell you this we need to move away from the medical model that's for sure so what can we do instead well one alternative is to shift towards a social model in a social model if someone isn't having success it's not because they have a disability or because something's wrong with them as an individual but instead it's because there's something around them in the context that's limiting their success now listen i spend a lot of time traveling mostly throughout north america but about two years ago i had the opportunity to speak at a conference in hong kong now i was so excited about this i've never been to hong kong so my wife and i we packed our bags and we were ready to go on our great hong kong adventure well i was so excited that i didn't really anticipate that i would have different meets in hong kong than i do in north america typically i would feel pretty independent in my travels i would rent a car i would drive no problem i would be able to navigate conversations and menus and directions and be able to find the conference hall that i'm presenting in easy peasy but in hong kong i realized i needed much more support to be able to do these very similar things like i wasn't able to rent a car i didn't have the right driver's license i wasn't able to have many conversations read menus or follow directions because there was a language barrier i also had no idea where i was speaking because i couldn't read any of the conference signs i needed a lot of support in hong kong thank goodness the organization who brought me there anticipated this and made three hong kong ea's available to me if i needed them i had a driver and a translator i had a host but i couldn't help think to myself like that's so many resources for one person what's important to know about this example is that whether i'm in north america or whether i'm in hong kong i'm still the same person my success and independence in hong kong had very little to do with me as an individual and had more to do with the barriers that existed around me now i want you to imagine all the students that you work with every teacher they interact with every classroom and school they go to i want you to think about all these different contexts as possible different countries students are the same regardless of where they go what changes is the context around them and every context is going to have more or less barriers that can either support or limit success so how do we support kids this way well first of all we have to anticipate these barriers which means we can't wait for students to not be successful we can't wait for them to fail second we have to stop putting all of our resources into trying to fix individuals if we move away from this kind of student diagnosis and intervention as the first strategy it allows us to assess the environment and the context first to find out what's getting in the way because the big idea here is this my friends the more we support a context to reduce barriers the less individual resources a person will need to be successful the social model of support is a foundational understanding to planning for all students and directly connects to universal design for learning response to instruction and collaborative models of support it would be very difficult to try and implement any of these frameworks if we were only looking at students through a medical and deficit-based perspective students are not broken they may need support but today's challenge is asking instead look around the student to see how can we fix the context so that barriers are reduced instead of looking at what we can do to fix the students in their deficit area thank you for tuning in to this episode of five more minutes make sure you take a look at the five more minutes podcast where we dig deeper into some of these big ideas give us a like don't forget to subscribe you don't want to miss any of these episodes i'll see you next time you