Introduction

 

The memory of my first day as a Special Education teacher is vivid, and it always rises quickly to the surface when I think back over my time at High Tech High.  Prior to entering Special Education, I taught 6th grade Humanities.  As a classroom teacher, I experienced a visceral intensity every morning in anticipation of the arrival of 28 bodies in my little classroom.  On the morning of my first day as “Inclusion Specialist,” I wandered the halls, greeting new sixth graders and exchanging excited hugs and hellos with returning students.  Soon, it was 9am, and all of the students rushed to fill their classrooms.  I was suddenly alone, standing in the studio space in the 6th grade wing, lingering near my former classroom.  I turned, wide-eyed, and walked to my office and shut the door.  I’ll never forget the bizarre, haunting quiet of the room.  I looked around, dazed, and experienced an unexpected feeling of loneliness.  I quickly “came-to” and spent the rest of the day in classrooms.  Though I rarely again experienced being completely alone in a quiet room, I did often feel isolated in my new role.  I rarely saw another Inclusion Specialist, and I often felt lonely in my attempts to hone and advance my practice.

 

During my second year in Special Education, an Inclusion Specialist at the school across the street invited me and another colleague to eat lunch together.  We began to gather informally twice a month over our assorted tupperware and plastic forks, and we just talked.  We swapped challenges and we swapped ideas.  I began looking forward to these lunches with an intensity that surprised me.  There was incredible catharsis in the realization that our challenges are universal, and in the hope that accompanies a great new idea.  These lunches had an enormous impact on my practice.  We role-played challenging conversations with classroom teachers.  We shared Google-docs and paper-docs.  We swapped books and stories.  We left our time together feeling lighter and more hopeful.

 

In the fall of 2012 I moved into a leadership role in Special Education at High Tech High, and over the course of the year had countless conversations with the 25 Inclusion Specialists across our schools about their hopes and dreams for our programs.  The theme that surfaced most frequently in these conversations was a desire for more collaboration.  Many Inclusion Specialists expressed a desire for professional learning, and for more opportunities to share about successes and challenges.  

 

As I looked ahead to my new role, more than anything I wanted every Inclusion Specialist to experience the catharsis and hope and energy that my lunch group shared years ago.  I hoped to learn how to effectively “scale-up” what my lunch group achieved together.  I wanted to figure out how to emulate our casual but effective cycles of collaboration and action, this time across 12 schools with 25 people.  Yet, as with all movements that begin organically, figuring out how to implement on a broader scale is a complex endeavor.  I identified several goals that helped to focus my energy and passion as I embarked upon this project: 

 

First, I wanted to explore and develop specific structures for collaboration.  We planned to first meet as a whole-group (with all Inclusion Specialists) and eventually in smaller groups in each region.  I wanted to learn how to structure both of these experiences by asking and answering questions like:

       ●      What meeting structures will work best for our group?

       ●      How can we share best practices and support each other as a community?

       ●      How can we collaborate to solve dilemmas?

 

Second, I hoped to create a community of leaders.  I wanted to learn about how to build leadership capacity in our community so that every Inclusion Specialist confidently acted as an agent of change at their school site.

 

I hoped to lead a professional learning community where every individual felt deeply passionate, excited and energized by our work.  I envisioned a community that had the capacity to affect change across the organization by exploring and implementing new and innovative Inclusive practices in collaboration with classroom teachers and school directors.

 

My research question became: “How do I create a rich adult learning community of Inclusion Specialists and build leadership across 12 High Tech High schools?”