Daniel Colley 17660772 Inclusive Education

Assignment 2 Case Study

Daniel Colley 17660772
Inclusive Education: Theory, Policy and Practice

Part 1: Student Case Study

During practicum, this author taught at a low socio-economic school, teaching

English to a year eight learning difficulties class. Within the class were a variety
students with learning difficulties mostly centred around poor reading and
writing comprehension. Within the class, a number of students with more severe
difficulties or disabilities were pointed out by the supervising teacher, such as
two students with mild selective-mutism, as well as a particularly disengaged
student with suspected (but not diagnosed) Aspergers Syndrome (or Autism
Spectrum Disorder), whom shall be the focus of this case study. As he was not
formally diagnosed during the practicum, this case study must therefor first
describe his specific strengths and weaknesses/learning needs in order to
propose the effective inclusion of him and all students in the class. In doing so,
this case study will exemplar an authentic example of inclusive education
practice by modifying the second lesson conducted with the class against a
posteriori reflections, students specific needs and evidence-based practice
within Universal Design for Learnings (UDL) primary principles of multiple
means of representation, engagement and expression (Meyer, Rose & Gordon,
2016).

Before meeting the case study student, the supervising teacher provided the
following observations about him; that (1) he, like the rest of the class, had
difficulties with comprehension of both texts and activity instruction which
frequently caused disengagement and demotivation (Vaughn et al, 2015); that
(2) he exhibited obsessive or intensely focused behaviours such as being unable
to transition effectively between different topics within a days lesson and; that
(3) he had trouble collaborating with other students, the supervisor commenting
that he often sat alone in class. Within the first few lessons, these observations
were further evidenced by this authors own observations but also that the

1
Daniel Colley 17660772 Inclusive Education

students particular issue with collaboration seemed to stem from not prefacing
his statements to others, opening conversations without defining the pronouns
he was discussing (such as it or they) and confusing his peers, which appeared to
have negatively affected his social confidence and expressiveness (Fuentes,
2013). Further, during lessons, the students strength in close analysis of logic
and inference understanding was highlighted by his student work, narrowing his
comprehension difficulties to broad understanding and drawing connections
between texts (Carretti et al, 2014). Likewise, once he clarified the topic he was
discussing, he was particularly skilled at debates and discussing his personal
interest in animal hunting habits. As such, the areas of focus for student needs
(both of this student and the class) are broad reading and writing
comprehension, introducing topics in peer-to-peer interactions, social
confidence, and transitioning effectively between activities.

A common and particularly prevalent learning need of the whole class

(including the case study student) was written comprehension and engagement,
and thus it was made the primary concern of the modified lesson on metaphor
below. In discussing the skills necessary for effective written comprehension,
Carretti et al (2014) identified the three skills of (1) meta-cognition, (2) the
ability to integrate information and (3) verbal working memory (p. 196, 2014),
however failed to display any significant effects of verbal working memory
training on written comprehension, rendering working memory an unsuitable
skill for development within an evidence-based approach (ARACY, 2013). Using
the two former skills as a means of improving written comprehension, the
following strategies are integrated into the lesson plan respectively: Reflection
and Feedback (Baas et al, 2011); and a Gradual Release of Responsibility Model
of developing meaning (Bishop & Isbester, 2016).
Whilst feedback and reflection are a relatively small part of the lesson
(contained within the broad analysis and exit card tasks), their effects on meta-
cognition have sound implications for the integrity of the lesson as a long term
UDL curriculum (Vaughn et al, 2015). Meta-cognitive skills, in terms of written
comprehension, focuses on the goals students set and the strategies they use in
engaging with/designing texts (Carretti et al, 2014). For instance, the exit card

2
Daniel Colley 17660772 Inclusive Education

task asks students to reflect closely on why they chose their designed metaphor
and its respective visual (representation) as well as explicitly identify its
meaning. In addition to this, during the broad analysis task, students are
required to submit a short statement on the effect of the poems structure and
title on its overall meaning for teacher feedback before posing their answers to
the class in open discussion. This task offers an opportunity for students to
express their ideas in written and oral forms but also presents an opportunity
for the teacher to assess student broad comprehension (Swaffield, 2011), and
also for the teacher to give feedback on the strengths of their answer and
suggestions for how to improve. This ensures that feedback is not passively
received (Baas et al, 2015, p. 440) but rather useful for students to engage with
and regulate their strategies of approaching comprehension (2015). Finally,
students can also self-assess or reflect on their own work by referring to the
explicit quality criteria integrated across the lesson, assessing how they should
approach the question to meet the activity and its criteria (Swaffield, 2011), a
skill particularly significant to the case study student whom was identified as
struggling with comprehending activities and disengaging because of it.
However, such self-regulation is not achievable in this lesson alone (Baas et al,
2015) but rather through this reflection and feedback remaining as a consistent
part of lessons overtime, with Vaughn et al (2015) claiming that comprehension
interventions for secondary students indeed requires long-term practice.
Gradual release of responsibility models are simply described as the reduction
of scaffolds as students develop independence or fluency in a skill (Meyer, Rose
& Gordon, 2016) and, in terms of the lesson below, the primary scaffold for
information integration is collaborative learning (Morcom & MacCallum, 2012).
Specifically, students collaboratively develop their comprehension of metaphor
and the lessons text (Litany) by taking a focused, sentence-by-sentence, group
look at metaphorical meaning and gradually expand that meaning outwards
whilst transitioning into smaller and smaller groups until they individually
developing a whole text comprehension (Morcom & MacCallum, 2012; Bishop &
Isbester, 2016) (a particular area of need for the case study student). By
gradually removing the collaborative scaffold, students responsibility of
meaning making and analysis gradually develops independence, resulting in

3
Daniel Colley 17660772 Inclusive Education

increased confidence and improved comprehension outcomes sustainable to

collaborative and individual settings (Bishop & Isbester, 2016). Further, by
beginning with an easily achievable, prior-learning task (defining and providing
common examples of metaphor) and then moving into increasingly more
challenging tasks, students develop efficacy momentum (Abbasian & Malardi,
2013) and are thus more likely to remain engaged with the tasks, which is only
compounded by the motivation generated by the potential reward described
during the introduction of the lesson (Seixas, Gomes & Filho, 2016). Significantly,
this efficacy momentum begins at one of the case study students strengths, close
analysis, and thus indirectly further assists and subtly accommodates the
student, a particular goal of UDL (Meyer, Rose & Gordon, 2016). By improving
meta-cognitive skills through reflection and feedback, and improving
information integration through the gradual release of responsibility model of
meaning making along a collaborative setting, this lesson addresses the learning
needs of the class (written comprehension) and the particular needs the case
study student (disengagement from class activities), with a particular focus on
multiple means of engagement.

The secondary areas of need focused on within the lesson are peer-to-peer
communication and social confidence. The case study student was observed
throughout the early sessions of the practicum as struggling with introducing his
topic of conversation and whilst this caused little issue with student-teacher
communication, it appeared to result in self-isolation and lowed social
confidence in peer-to-peer communication. To address this rather specific need,
subtle communication prompts have been scattered throughout much of the
collaborative learning activities encompassing the first half of the lesson. These
take the specific form of either outlining how to enter into the class discussion
(for speakers of small group task) in a regulated way or training students to use
clear, complete sentences in their answers (opening mind-map task after they
write their answer). In doing so, students are offered a teacher-modelled
strategy and adaptive modelled strategy for opening conversations respectively
(Ledbetter-Cho et al, 2015). This benefits the student specifically as a clear
model for effective peer-to-peer communication (Ledbetter-Cho et al, 2015) but

4
Daniel Colley 17660772 Inclusive Education

also other students by furthering the explicit nature of the quality criteria,
allowing students to start their entry into discussions with confidence built from
clear frameworks (Fuentes, 2013). This confidence is also built through simple
practice (Fuentes, 2013) and the gradual release of responsibility model (Bishop
& Isbester, 2016) mentioned earlier in this case study. That is, by gradually
reducing the number of persons involved in conversations from whole class to
intimate pairs, the onus of carrying peer-to-peer communication is gradually
released to each student. Like comprehension training though, social skills
training is best learnt through long-term interventions across multiple lessons
(Fuentes, 2013) and in order to retain the dignity of the case study student by
having this intervention fit subtly into lessons through UDL, students require
multiple means of expressing themselves in a variety of social situations
(Fuentes, 2013), building a collaborative community of learners overtime
(Morcom & MacCallum, 2012). As such, multiple means and opportunities of
expression is the main goal of the interventions improving communication.

Finally, the last observed case study student area need was identified as a
form of highly focused behaviour, whereby he often had difficulty transitioning
between activities due to remaining concentrated on a prior activity long after its
completion. As this was only observed to last a lesson at a time however, one
cannot accurately call this obsessive behaviour in a clinical sense (Barton &
Hayman, 2013) and thus this author focused on building transition skills within
the lesson. Tullis, Cannella-Malone and Payne (2015), through a meta-analysis of
numerous transition interventions, argue that students who receive explicit
introductions and summative conclusions (where able) between lesson topics
more easily acknowledge the breakdown of the lesson and cognitively
differentiate topics (Tullis, Cannella-Malone & Payne, 2015), a benefit for both
the class and case study student. As such, these introductory and concluding
statements were inserted wherever the lessons focus changed, that being, the
admired persons mind-map transitions to a literary analysis of Litany and then
into a metaphor exit card. Notably, Tullis, Cannella-Malone and Payne (2015)
state that ensuring students focus on a single topic within a lesson avoids the
antecedent and thus the need for transitional skills (p. 96), but this ignores the

5
Daniel Colley 17660772 Inclusive Education

students area of need. Instead, the lesson is based around a central topic
(metaphor) but shifts its focus in clear, easily followed structures (introduction,
body, conclusion), allowing for a greater variety of representations of a topic
(such as mind-maps, poems and visuals) whilst scaffolding the development of
transitional skills rather than ignoring them.

In so, the exemplary lesson was purpose built towards addressing the case
study students areas of need subtlety within a standard classroom, whilst
benefiting all students through a UDL framework. In improving student written
comprehension, multiple means of engagement became the primary focus
through explicit quality criteria, meta-cognitive training and a gradual release of
responsibility in meaning making. In addressing the students need for peer-to-
peer communication skills and social confidence, expression became central in
modelling effective communication and providing collaborative opportunities in
varying contexts and degrees of difficulty. Finally, in refining students cognitive
transitional skills as a means of addressing the students highly focused
behaviour, representation was championed by clearly structuring activities and
the lesson as a whole around an introduction-body-conclusion structure and
centring lesson around a single topic but still allowing for shifting focuses on
different examples/representations of that topic.

6
Daniel Colley 17660772 Inclusive Education

References

Abbasian, G. & Malardi, P. (2013). The effect of negotiated syllabus on EFL

learners: Writing ability and self-efficacy. Theory and Practice in Language
Studies, 3(8), pp. 1399-1405.
Australian Research Alliance for Children & Youth (ARACY). (2013). Inclusive
education for students with disability: A review of the best evidence in
relation to theory and practice. Retrieved from
https://www.aracy.org.au/publications-
resources/command/download_file/id/246/filename/Inclusive_educatio
n_for_students_with_disability_-
_A_review_of_the_best_evidence_in_relation_to_theory_and_practice.pdf
Baas, D., et al. (2011). The relation between Assessment for Learning and
elementary students cognitive and metacognitive strategy use. British
Journal of Educational Psychology, 85(1), 33-46.
Barton, R. & Hayman, I. (2013). Obsessive-compulsive disorder in children and
adolescents. Paediatrics and Child Health, 23(1), pp. 18-23.
Bishop, K. & Isbester, K. (2016). Teaching reading: Junior secondary ASD
students and the Australian curriculum: English. Literacy Learning, 24(3),
53-62.
Carretti, B., Caldarola, N., Tencati, C. & Cornoldi, C. (2014). Improving reading
comprehension in reading and listening settings: The effect of two
training programmes focusing on metacognition and working memory.
British Journal of Educational Psychology, 84, pp, 194-210.
Fuentes, S. (2013). Small-group discourse: Establishing a communication-rich
classroom. The Clearing House, 86(3), pp. 93-98. doi:
10.1080/00098655.2013.767775
Ledbetter-Cho, K., et al. (2015). Effects of script training on the peer-to-peer
communication of children with autism spectrum disorder. Journal of
Applied Behaviour Analysis, 48(4), pp. 785-799.
Meyer, A., Rose, D. & Gordon, D. (2016). Universal design for learning: Theory and
Practice. Wakefield, United States: CAST Professional Publishing.

7
Daniel Colley 17660772 Inclusive Education

Morcom, V., & MacCallum, J. (2012). Getting personal about values: Scaffolding
student participation towards an inclusive classroom community.
International Journal of Inclusive Education, 16(12), 1323-1334.
Seixas, L., Gomes, A. & Filho, I. (2016). Effectiveness of gamification in the
engagement of students. Computers in Human Behaviour, 58, pp. 48-63.
Swaffield, S. (2011). Getting to the heart of authentic assessment for learning.
Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy & Practice, 18(4), 433-449. doi:
10.1080/0969594X.2011.582838
Tullis, C., Cannella-Malone, H. & Payne, D. (2015). Literature review of
interventions for between-task transitioning for individuals with
intellectual and developmental disabilities including autism spectrum
disorders. Review Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 2, pp.
91-102.
Vaughn, S., et al. (2015). Improving reading comprehension for high school
students with disabilities: Effects for comprehension and school
retention. Exceptional Children, 82(1), pp. 117-131.

8
 Daniel Colley 17660772 Inclusive Education

Part 2: Lesson Plan with Adjustments

The following colours are use to highlight UDL principles in the alterations made
to the original lesson plan: Representation, Engagement, and Expression

Time Teaching and learning actions Resources

5/10 Introduction White Board

Perform a quick introduction about people we admire and why we At least 2 white board

admire them using a personal example. Have students brainstorm markers

Student workbooks
individuals they admire or look up to along the following steps,
reminding students that everything put on the board is to be written in
workbooks:
1. 2 students are to have a marker for writing their answer on the
mind-maps. Hands up to receive marker
2. Shortly tell the class who you admire and why by saying I
admire [person] because they
3. Write the who onto the People we admire mind-map and
the why onto the Characteristics we admire mind-map
4. Give your marker to another student with their hand up
Take Roll
Inform students that if they progress through the work steadily and
peacefully, youll make a game with rewards using what you learnt from
the task.
15 Metaphor Write Metaphor definition

Have a short discussion with students about the ways we can express on board

ourselves in speech and writing to introduce students to the relevance

of symbolic language. Ask students to define metaphor and provide a
bunch of examples they know from everyday speech or to make up one.
Write the definition on the board and ask students to write this down
as well.
Provide your own example of a metaphor and what it means as model
for next activity.
20/30 Group Annotation of Sections Split up sections of Litany

9
 Daniel Colley 17660772 Inclusive Education

Have the following steps projected on the board and quickly talk by Billy Collins (roughly split

through them before having students conduct the activity: by stanza into 5 sections)

1. Move into groups of 5-6 (5 groups total)

Loose sheet of paper
2. Assign one member of the group to be the scribe (writer) and
one to be the speaker for later.
3. Your group will be provided with a section of the poem Litany
by Billy Collins
4. In groups, underline/annotate each of the metaphors in the
section
5. Discuss what each metaphor might be discussing/mean and
why, talking short notes around the page.
6. Pick one of the metaphors and write it down on a loose sheet of
paper as well as what it means (ie. metaphor meaning)
7. Beneath, decide on then write another metaphor they could
replace it with that has a similar meaning.
8. Have a spokesperson read out the groups analysed and
replacement metaphor to the class in a similar way to how it was
written
35/40 Full Poem Annotation Full Litany Poem by Billy

Hand out the full poem to each student and tell them that youll Collins

be playing a clip of the poems reading. Youtube clip for poem

reading
Instruct students that whilst listening to the clip, they are to
(https://www.youtube.com/
individually read along and underline any metaphors or similes
watch?v=56Iq3PbSWZY)
that stand out to them
45/65 Whole Text Activity (T-chart and Statement) T-Chart on board

Ask students if they noticed a metaphor in their reading that they

struggled to understand. Using that metaphor as a model, place it into a Workbooks
T-chart with the left saying, What is says (quotes), and the right
saying What I think it means. Students perform the following lesson
with steps on board:
1. Copy T-Chart into workbook

10
 Daniel Colley 17660772 Inclusive Education

2. Fill out T-Chart in pairs, taking metaphors from the full poem not
used in the group task
3. Fill out a 2-4 sentence statement on a loose sheet of paper
answering the following question in full sentences: If Litany is a
poem style that repeats the same phrase, what effect does this
and the poems metaphors have on overall meaning of the text?
Students then offer their answers for a class discussion and then hand
in their statement
70/ Making a Metaphor (Exit Card) Image sheets (images were

Shortly introduce activity altered to be more diverse

and have more choices with
Present student groups with a series of images on sheets of
previous images largely
paper
focused on emotion)
Have students individually select images that reflect/dont reflect
containing a collection of
the characteristics of the person they admire that they
images based on animals,
brainstormed at the beginning of class (still on board).
nature and structures
On the exit card you hand out, they are to write their own
metaphor comparing the person they admire to one of the Exit Cards
images they selected (provide modelled example). Below that
they are to write a one or two sentence explanation of why they
chose that metaphor and what it means. Remind students that
they are to hand you these exit cards at the end of the lesson, so
they need to be completed.
Alt Reward Activity Characteristics Lists

If the students have been well behaved and completed work during Tic-tacs (three flavours)

class (exit card particularly), conduct this task. Ask students to throw
out a load of good characteristics to form a quick list on the board then
bad characteristics for another. Once the lists are made, tell them that
youll call out a characteristic and if they have a metaphor for that
characteristic, put up their hand. Youll pick the hand you feel came first
or from someone new and they can speak their metaphor and be
rewarded with a lolly (tic-tac). Repeat the task, randomly selecting

11
 Daniel Colley 17660772 Inclusive Education

characteristics and rubbing them out after use until the list is exhausted
or 1min till bell.

12