Hello I am Jack Arend, Associate Director at AWSP. We are excited to bring you this special edition of AWSP News. We’ve got a great theme for you today, and that’s inclusion. Specifically, we’re going to focus on our two-year journey through our Inclusionary Practices Project. In 2019, AWSP and a handful of other organizations– received a contract from OSPI to increase school leaders' knowledge, skills, and ability to create and lead inclusive schools for each and every student.
This cadre created incredible content, tool boxes, webinars, podcasts and more for school leaders and school teams to learn from and implement in their buildings. We will cover more of the resources throughout this special edition of the AWSP News.
Our role in the Inclusionary Practices Project focuses on leading for inclusion. As you all know, an important piece of leadership is making sure we have a common understanding. So what do we mean when we say inclusion? One definition comes from a principal from one of our Inclusionary workshops. They said, “Inclusion means moving beyond deficits to establishing communities of identity where all are welcomed and valued.”
As great as that definition is, we can tell you firsthand the principals in our workshops initially did not have common language on what inclusion looked, felt, and acted like within a school context. Fortunately, OSPI adopted the Cadre’s definition of inclusion. You can find that definition and much more on our Inclusionary Practices resources page at awsp dot org slash IPP.
One tool we love for helping define inclusion is this graphic that many of you have already seen. Take a look at it here on the screen. This really highlights the difference between inclusion, exclusion, integration, and segregation. Do you know the difference between these? Where are you at in your school and classrooms?
Now that you know a little more about defining inclusion, we’d love to share this quote from one of our workshop participants, “Breathing the same air and being in the same space does not make the activity inclusive. Purposefully creating a community that highlights each person's diverse contributions is inclusion.” What a beautiful definition. Isn’t it great to learn from each other?
One of the other things we learned along the way is that designing for inclusion doesn’t just help students with disabilities, it helps everyone. Check out this great accessibility infographic from Microsoft to see how everyone wins when we design for accessibility.
And speaking of everyone winning, we’ve got something for everyone when it comes to inclusion. You can find links to everything we’re talking about on our Inclusionary Practices page we already mentioned. Are you looking for resources? We have created an Evidence of Impact for Inclusionary Practices form and a 5-Step Planning for Inclusion tool to help school leaders thoughtfully engage in shifting a school’s culture, systems, and learning toward inclusion for each and every student.
Looking for resources for your teachers, your school or district team, or to share with your central office? Our friends in the Inclusionary Practices Cadre have you covered there too. Do you love podcasts? We have podcasts with inclusion experts and thought leaders from around the country. You can hear even more from them in our Inclusion 360 webinar. If you’d rather read than listen, we have some great articles in our Washington Principal magazine. When it comes to video, we have a couple of our fast five videos, some short features, and some amazing workshops in our Path learning management system. We were incredibly fortunate to create workshops with internationally-renowned inclusion experts like Shelley Moore, Dan Habib, and a Summer Conference session with Dr. Lauren Katzman. We even have an Inclusion 101 workshop to help you get started.
You’ve got a ton of opportunities with all the workshops and resources this project has provided. In fact, one of our workshop participants said, “... these opportunities are essential to help us see the forest for the trees, network, and get new research and ideas.” We’ve got another quote from Tracey about the Dan Habib series, who said, “These films/videos have impacted my daily work as a building leader and a steward of public education. I have not always believed in "inclusion" because I was afraid. Thankfully as this is my 6th year as a principal, I have been shown and coached at the possibilities of how to include ALL of my students. My staff will be viewing ALL of his videos in the coming months.”
The AWSP Inclusionary Practice team of Chris Espeland, Cris Sippel and myself have enjoyed working for, and with all of you this year. We are excited about the tools, resources and learning opportunities that have been created for school leaders across the state to support leading for inclusion. Let’s wrap up this special edition of AWSP News with another quote from Columbia River Gorge Elementary Principal, Tracey MacLachlan, Tracy said “I’ve been in education for 36 years. I have NEVER had something like this impact my life this much....I had no idea what I was going to become involved with, and I will never look back.”
If you haven’t joined us on our IPP journey yet, it’s time for you to look forward. We have all this great content from Shelly, Dan, and others available in our Learning Management System. Remember, your kids are counting on you. That’s it from us here at AWSP. On behalf of our IPP team and all of our staff, keep up the great work for kids. See you next time.