Inclusion is a Skill Best Explicitly Taught

While in the lower grades, a large concern of parents and guardians is “is my child making friends?” For special education students, this is more of a challenge, but even more of a necessity. Thoughout my time at my current employment, I have observed that the special education students within my school tend to have a harder time making friends and developing positive relationships. To start to tackle this issue, I used a two-pronged approach when attempting to empathize with the targeted audience: put myself in the students’ shoes and research online about the program itself.

From my special education students’ perspective, they come to school every day and watch the other kids talk and laugh with their friends, and have an internal longing for friends, but have trouble making them, and don’t know why the other kids don’t like talking to them for very long. They go to class for a short period of time, only to be called out to go to the resource room to receive instruction with a small handful of other kids, all of them requiring a large amount of attention from the teacher. These students still go to their specials classes (band, art, computers, etc.) like everyone else, but need instruction based on what they need, singling them out. At recess, they try to play with the other kids, but often times have them run away, only to spend the remainder of their free time by themselves. 

After putting myself in the shoes of some of the students I see around the building, my heart aches for them. A possible solution to this loneliness is peer to peer. “ Peer to Peer is a school-wide program designed to increase academic, independence, and social engagement opportunities for students with autism and other disabilities” (Grand Valley State University, 2022). This program allows for other students to gain empathy for students with disabilities, all the while developing authentic friendships. While this program is designed primarily for students on the autism spectrum, this could be benefical for all students that are within the special educaiton realm that struggle to gain peer appropriate relationships. Currently, I have no knowledge of my district’s peer to peer program, though there is one. However, there are some ways to incorporate peer to peer interactions within a classroom environment without needing admittance into the program itself. Some of the activities that I found are: design a daily 5 minute peer to peer check in, whole class weekly debriefs where students share successes, struggles, and solutions, students show autonomy by broadcasting their successes on a “fridge” in the classroom, and have students develop a year-long portfolio about their development in peer relations throughout their year (Owen-DeSchryver, 2021). These activities could be modified to meet the needs of a variety of classrooms, and could be beneficial to developing the peer relationships in classrooms. 

Overall, none of this information seemed new to me. The activities listed above seem to be strategies that can be used to develop a healthy classroom culture, no matter student demographics. What did surprise me is that my district did not openly share anything about having a peer to peer program on their website. It is something that is hidden away from vast public knowledge. This needs to be addressed. Having a peer to peer program should be something that a district prides itself on, because it shows that the school leaders value student mental health and the whole child, not just test scores and data points. 

References:

Grand Valley State University. (2022). Peer to Peer: General Resources. START
Project. https://www.gvsu.edu/autismcenter/peer-to-peer-general-resources
-239.htm#:~:text=Peer%20to%20Peer%20is%20a,with%20developmental
%20or%20intellectual%20disabilities. 

Owen-DeSchryver, J. (2021). Empower One, Empower ALL: Creating a Peer to Peer
Culture One Classroom at a Time. Grand Valley State University START
Project.https://www.gvsu.edu/autismcenter/start-connecting-empower-one-
empower-all-creating-a-394.htm