The Inclusive Education Checklist: A Self-Assessment of Best Practices

Quality inclusive education is a goal and a requirement for educators today. In The Inclusive Education Checklist, authors Richard Villa and Jacqueline Thousand, who have spent over four decades advocating for and supporting school communities to initiate, implement, and sustain inclusive education best practices, synthesize their experience and extensive research to provide educators with an insightful and practical tool for implementing, assessing and optimizing inclusive education. The book offers a checklist of 15 key inclusive education best practices that together comprise quality inclusive education. Each chapter details an individual best practice and provides a list of 8-32 best practice indicators that deconstruct the best practice. Readers are instructed to rate the degree to which the each indicator occurs in their school in a scoring box to the left of the indicator. Instructions are provided for how to calculate and interpret the total score, mean score, and range of scores. The Inclusive Education Checklist is an invaluable resource for helping schools, districts, administrators, policy makers, teachers, paraprofessionals and all those committed to inclusive education understand what inclusion is, where their school is on the journey to being truly inclusive, and what needs to be done to ensure continuous improvement.

Richard A. Villa is President of Bayridge Consortium, Inc. His primary field of expertise is the development of administrative and instructional support systems for educating all students within general education settings. Villa is recognized as an educational leader who motivates and works collaboratively with others to implement current and emerging exemplary educational practices. In the school districts where he has worked and consulted, his efforts have resulted in the inclusion of children with intensive cognitive, physical, and emotional challenges as full members of the general education community. Dr. Villa has been a classroom teacher, special education administrator, pupil personnel services director, and director of instructional services, and has authored seventeen books and more than 100 articles and chapters. Known for his enthusiastic, humorous style, Dr. Villa has presented at international, national, and state educational conferences and has provided technical assistance to departments of education in the United States, Canada, Vietnam, and Honduras and to university personnel, public school systems, and parent and advocacy organizations. Additional information about Dr. Villa can be found at his website, ravillabayridge.com.

Jacqueline S. Thousand is a professor in the College of Education, Health, and Human Services of California State University San Marcos, where she designed and coordinated the School of Education s special education professional preparation and master s programs. She previously directed Inclusion Facilitator and Early Childhood/Special Education graduate and postgraduate programs at the University of Vermont and coordinated federal grants concerned with inclusion of students with disabilities in local schools. Dr. Thousand is a nationally known teacher, author, systems change consultant, and disability rights and inclusive education advocate. She is the author of numerous books, research articles, and chapters on issues related to inclusive schooling, organizational change strategies, differentiated instruction and universal design, co-teaching and collaborative teaming, cooperative group learning, creative problem solving, and positive behavioral supports. Dr. Thousand is actively involved in international teacher education and inclusive education endeavors and serves on the editorial boards of several national and international journals.