Site Supervisor Conference and Consensus

During a programming meeting for the upcoming school year, my principal and I took time to discuss my draft action research plan. It was a natural transition in our conversation because we had been reviewing the projected special education caseload for our campus. As we reviewed the reasoning and foundation for my study we began discussing which special education students we felt would benefit most from the two proposed inclusion classes. With a better idea of which students to group into the two proposed classes our conversation turned to what needed to take place for those students to be included. One key insight that I took from this was that we would need to schedule a number of ARD meetings before the beginning of school in order to maintain individual IEP compliance and begin providing inclusion services. As our conversation progressed, we also discussed personal, resources, and allotted planning time. Of these three topics, maintaining and allotting adequate planning time for the general education and inclusion teachers was of particular interest to my principal. Her main concern was making sure that both teachers go beyond their normal planning to ensure that both have enough time together to adequately prepare inclusion instruction. We talked about a couple ideas for guaranteeing plenty of planning time that I had noted on my class discussion board this week. Specifically, by aligning the inclusion teacher’s planning period with the appropriate grade level planning periods, we could assure that when the general education teacher is planning that the inclusion teacher is not teaching. This would also require some tweaking of the master schedule and individual grade level schedules. The second idea that we discussed would involve offering those teachers involved in my study two half day planning sessions per nine weeks period. By building teacher planning time into their day we could also assure that all key stakeholders are provided extra support to plan for student success accordingly. My principal agreed that both ideas were worth looking into more in order to make certain that both teachers planned accordingly. With these suggestions on the table, my principal agreed that my draft action research plan was in line with what we had discussed during the last school year when we reviewed my internship plan and that she was prepared to support its implementation during the upcoming school year.