Comments:

Last year, one of my schools, an Elementary School, decided to look a little more closely at what they needed to do to make the inclusive process work better and one area that they targeted was collaboration [working with a team of people to provide the best program and services that we could provide for the students].

We also had a really strong feeling that we should include specialists, [art, music, physical education, and media teachers] on our team. These teachers certainly deal with that child on a regulas basis also, but don't always get the support that a regular classroom teacher would get. As part of that process, we contacted two ladies that were doing some research in that area: a person from a University in the USA and Chris Salisbury from another city. They came out and spent two days with the staff there and put together a training model that we could utilize after they had gone. One of the special education teachers and myself worked with the team then and developed our own form of collaborative teaming, finding the time to perform that, making sure that everyone was included, and if they weren't that they got the information they needed, to make the best program for the student. We trained one particular team, a first grade team, and this year we are expanding that to include a second team and we are slowly but surely adding teams on as they go.

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