Centering Students with Disabilities to Create Powerful Change
Centering students with disabilities in schools results in powerful changes, including breaking down silos, a recognition that all staff are responsible for all students, and equitable school policies and practices that school staff can implement.
Sitting in a room and letting kids tell you, ‘I’m not embarrassed to read anymore,’ will send shivers up your spine and matters more than that graph number going up.
Glynis Shulters, Improvement Lead, Green Dot Public Schools
Intentionally Incorporating Student Voices
Centering students with disabilities (SWDs) can result in powerful changes to charter school or charter management organizations (CMOs) culture, structures, and practices that dramatically improve student outcomes.
Generally, “centering” SWDs means incorporating SWD needs and voices into core planning and administrative activities at multiple levels. SWDs’ needs then become part of regular, ongoing conversations among staff and CMO leaders, ideally resulting in a mindset where each educator views each SWD as “their” student and part of “their” classroom, regardless of whether they are responsible for the student as a teacher or other staff member.
In centering SWDs, decisionmakers solicit and consider student voices, and improvement teams routinely view policies and practices from the perspective of how they affect SWDs.
Key Considerations
CMOs that center SWDs can do so in a variety of ways. In this brief, we highlight three practices that CMOs in the Networked Improvement Community (NIC) used to catalyze positive change:
Intentionally incorporating student voices: By soliciting and carefully considering SWD opinions and feedback, improvement teams can quickly identify the real stumbling blocks to improving learning under current systems and practices.
Creating inclusive structures: Orienting school policies, operations, schedules, and other practices around SWD needs first can address barriers to success without affecting (or even helping) general education students.
Embedding SWD topics in planning and administrative activities: Disrupting the siloed approach to teaching SWDs (where special education and general education staff plan and work largely separately) requires regular, ongoing discussion of issues affecting SWDs among staff members at multiple levels of the school and central office.
Explore More Findings
Topic 1
Systems Change to Support Students with DisabilitiesExplore Topic 1
Topic 3
Champions for Change: Two Essential Roles for an Effective Improvement TeamExplore Topic 3
Topic 4
Continuous Quality Commitment: Iterative Learning Cycles to Meet System ChallengesExplore Topic 4
Topic 5
Get Ready, Stay Ready: Will and Capacity Checks Along the Improvement JourneyExplore Topic 5Stay Informed about Research Updates
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