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Principles and Tips

Principles and Tips for Promoting Family Involvement in the IEP Process
Principles and Tips for Identification and Placement
Principles and Tips for Culturally Appropriate Pedagogy
Principles and Tips for Professional Development

Principles and Tips for Promoting Family Involvement in the IEP Process

Make parents feel like team members.

• Allow time on the agenda for parents to report on their child's progress, strengths, and needs. In addition, allocate ample time to adequately address all of the parents' questions and concerns.
• Offer parents opportunities before and after IEP meetings to obtain clarification of educational reports, policies, and procedures.
• Provide information regarding long- and short-term goals, parental rights, policies and procedures, and access to general education curriculum.
• Communicate to staff that relationships with families are valued by emphasizing the importance of building trust and confidence with parents.

  Identify and confront all barriers to parents' participation.

• Ensure that school staff are accessible to families by offering comp-time to school staff for facilitating parent availability meetings.
• Make home-visits when possible to establish and maintain communication, and to exchange information.
• Increase the clarity of district policies aimed at empowering and involving parents and families from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds.
• Provide translators and translated materials to limited English proficient parents as necessary.
• Take a brief survey of barriers to parent participation, such as transportation, time, and language, and create policies and programs on the basis of these needs.
  

  Use the schools as a resource center.

• Provide information about agencies and community services that will aid in the well-being of the family and child.
• Communicate with families to ensure their awareness of the many ways to support the education of their children.
• Ensure that staff understand and respect diverse family networks and child-rearing traditions.

Principles and Tips for Identification and Placement

• Provide on-going training for staff that includes the criteria for referral and guidelines for interpretation of assessment results that are consistent with legal requirements.
• Involve families in the decision-making process with particular emphasis on the unique contribution that individuals from diverse backgrounds can bring to the process.
• Review student progress and instructional strategies on a regular basis to determine whether a student's educational program is appropriate to his or her needs and reflects a culturally responsive learning environment.
• Include professionals who understand factors that influence students' learning, effectively interpret data, and provide input that considers a student's past educational experiences and needs.
• Develop standards for determining a student's progress and readiness for exit from special education and ensure that the standards are delineated at the time services are initiated.

Principles and Tips for Culturally Appropriate Pedagogy

• Design and implement strong academic programs that foster success for all students in both general and special education. These programs should be based on research (reading professional journals, interviewing parents, speaking to cultural experts) that considers the students' unique cultural and, if relevant, immigration background.
• Empower students to take a personal-interest inventory to identify and celebrate their own strengths. Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences may help students categorize their strengths into logical-mathematical, musical, bodily-kinesthetic, verbal-linguistic, visual-spatial, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and ecological intelligences. Both general and special educators have successfully used this framework to drive the content and presentation of classroom lessons according to student strengths that both they and their students identify.
• Celebrate the cultural gifts of students and the dynamics of their contribution to the classroom by providing opportunities for them to share family traditions.
• Link students' unique prior knowledge and experiences to new knowledge.

  Classroom Culture

• Display an attitude of respect for cultural differences and the belief that all students can learn by infusing cultural elements into the classroom culture (i.e., books, classroom décor, field trips, celebrations, etc).
  
• Understand how culture can influence your evaluations of students.
• Teach Standard English without devaluing the home language. The language at home may be different from that at school; if possible, demonstrate acceptance by incorporating it into the instructional process.
• Use academics and social learning to facilitating an understanding of dual existence in U. S. society. It is important for individuals who are typically oppressed to see education, political rights, and self-actualization as agents of change.

  Text and Curricula

• Use curricula and texts that represent multiple perspectives.
• Challenge students and teachers to critically analyze texts and curricula, especially in social studies and history. Educators must address historical and cultural omissions, distortions, inaccuracies, and misrepresentations.
• Be aware of text that tries to direct student beliefs regarding culture. Be especially aware of text that marginalizes, devalues, or demeans the experiences of other cultures.

Principles and Tips for Professional Development

Although teachers generally feel that they are familiar with cultural differences and the ways these differences affect instruction, very few incorporate a wide range of culturally responsive practices into their daily classroom discourse (Rodriguez, 1996). General and special educators must work together to embrace all students to provide a successful and nurturing, learning environment. The increasingly diverse student population requires that educators receive continual cohesive training to learn strategies that are most effective for all students. Therefore, professional development activities should prepare educators to practice the following:

• Demonstrate the belief that all students are valued by showing equity in displays of student work, opportunities to participate in class, and public recognition of student strengths and gifts.
• Be aware of your orientation toward student ability. Instead of a deficit-orientation that focuses solely on ameliorating students' weaknesses, provide instruction that focuses on building on students' strengths.
• Use a variety of assessment strategies and implement assessment procedures that link assessment to instruction.
• Use culturally sensitive assessment practices.
• Appreciate the historical and contemporary contributions of persons from racial and ethnic minority groups.
• Use community resources for teaching and learning in the classroom.
• Implement collaborative staff problem-solving models for promoting student success that includes effective team assessment procedures for students from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds.
• Hire and train educators who are culturally competent in the face of increasing student diversity.
• Ensure that teacher preparation include an increased concentration on culture and its relationship to students' achievement and teaches the language and strategies associated with culturally appropriate pedagogy.
• Use multiculturalism as a central theme around which to plan curricula, instead of relegating it to special holidays (e.g., discussing of Native-Americans at Thanksgiving, African-Americans during Black History Month, etc.).
  

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