Surviving Inclusion

Inclusion of English learners and students with special needs is a relatively new phenomenon in education. It requires knowledge and experience with specific teaching strategies, resources, and assistive technologies. This book is designed to equip general education teachers with the necessary knowledge to handle inclusion successfully.

Underlying Surviving Inclusion is a foundation built on the frustrations felt by many general education teachers, who lacked the strategies and techniques to work successfully with special needs learners in the past. The focus, however, is on the positive. Lehmann, herself a general education teacher, offers informational background necessary for understanding special needs students, as well as detailed strategies for use in the classroom.

For easy reference, teaching strategies are described separate from the text as highlighted Teacher Notes. Surviving Inclusion is not meant as a substitute for the training that should be provided by each school/district to teachers in inclusive classrooms. Rather, it should be seen as a survival guide to use until proper training takes place and as a continual resource for teaching strategies. One thing that will become clear is that these strategies are "just good teaching" and all students in the classroom will benefit from their use.

Dr. Kay Johnson Lehmann is an independent educational consultant specializing in online education and the integration of technology into the K-12 curriulum. She won the Milken National Educator Award and the Washington Award for Excellence in Education for her abilities to reach every student in the classroom. Her innovative methods utilized hands-on constructivist teaching with technology integration to bring social studies, reading and other subjects alive for her middle school students. Garrison Middle School, Walla Walla, WA, with a free-reduced lunch rate of 50% and a large second-language learner population, provided plenty of opportunities to utilize the methods shared in this book.

Summers spent working with teachers in the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's Teacher Leadership Project along with a Master's degree in Education with a specialty in Online Teaching and Learning led to working full-time in teacher professional development. Her online courses and face-to-face workshops feature the same constructivist, technology-enhanced methods that were so successful in the classroom.

Kay has previously authored two articles and is a contributor to the Microsoft Virtual Classroom Teacher Network.