One idea and several stories

Just who do you teach?

Special educators? My child has no difficulties whatsoever.

Yeah, he needs to set goals, his organization could be better….

He knows stuff but his grades don’t show it. But other than that, he has no issues, whatsoever.

On the other hand…

Oh, this is for ‘normal’ children? My child has special needs. He can’t do this, that and the other thing.

Tell me when you have time for one-on-one classes, please!

Before we got ourselves into this avatar of teaching, Parul and I were special educators in a mainstream, CBSE, inclusive school. The classrooms had students who were toppers, first generation learners, children with difficulties and some ‘just children’…regular children in the world’s eyes. We worked primarily with students with diagnosed difficulties – worked with them in pull out sessions to build skills (not content, mind you but skills) and then worked with them in classrooms, where their science and math and english teachers taught classes, helping them generalize these skills. Generalize means that they use these skills in all environments.

What are these skills, you ask? Stuff like identifying the main idea, chunking text into manageable bits, taking notes, making inferences, predicting the next part of a story, system or process – this is a non-exhaustive list. What is so ‘special needs’ about these skills? Could we, as supposedly neurotypical folks, manage in the world without these very specific abilities? And yet, the students we explicitly taught these skills to ended up performing better in many levels than that last category of kids – those ‘just kids’.

The next challenge was to explain how the students we worked with could do better in the first place. According to the world’s definition, they are ones to be pitied, charity being the reason they were in school in the first place!! Flawed as this assumption is, this is unfortunately commonplace in most families and cultures around the world.

We believe that inclusive classrooms work best for all students. For the student with a specific need and those who think they have no specific needs…in reality, all children have different needs, just not all at diagnosable levels. When I cut off the labels on my clothing because they make me itch, no one is labeling me ‘with sensory needs’, special needs. Would I want a classroom for my child that cares, observes, recalibrates and works towards his/her progress, starting from where they are? Do I want an environment that would cherish every child, help them manage their needs as independently as possible and nourish in them empathy, kindness and good citizenship? How can a completely consistent, classroom that brooks no differences even begin to do that for any child, much less grow good citizens in the future?

At The Teachers Collective, we work with all students. We are informed by our special education backgrounds but do not discriminate to not teach a person because they don’t have a diagnosed special need. Our students are just that, our students…not our special needs students and our ‘normal’ students. It is our norm to have a diverse classroom, kind of like the world we live in. As parents, should we ask for inclusive classrooms to teach both our neurotypical and neurodiverse kids and therefore have them learning lessons we could not even begin to aspire towards?

If your child is in our class, we will customize. We teach skills explicitly, in several innovative ways and with fun – it isn’t even learning, it is playing….which is actually the best kind of learning, the job of a child is play!

We are bringing some of these ideas to all parents in a webinar, collaborating with Prishni, an ed-tech platform that supports diverse needs of all participants. Do join us to help your child…just child, every child….do different and better for themselves.

We provide some more specific tools for parents of kids with dyslexia and ADHD on Feb. 4th and 11th, respectively. Again, this will also work for all parents…what works for a child with a diagnosed difficulty works for ALL kids.

Cost – Your time and our effort, no money involved
To register

1. Go to https://prishni.in/event/liveStreams/
2. Create your account or sign up if you have an account
3. Click on buy and you are done.

We look forward to meeting you!