Creating Inclusive Classrooms: Strategies, and Building Relationships

Summary:  

In this episode of "Practical Access," hosts Lisa Dieker and Rebecca Hines are joined by Dr. Maggie Mosher, an assistant research professor at the Achievement and Assessment Institute at the University of Kansas. Dr. Mosher specializes in using evidence-based practices and innovative technologies to improve academic, social, emotional, and behavioral instruction for students, particularly those with high-incidence disabilities. The discussion covers various topics, including building relationships with students and families, setting goals, progress monitoring, and leveraging technology in education.

Resources:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Maggie-Mosher

https://shorturl.at/klGOW

https://voissadvisor.org/

https://www.projectvoiss.org/  

Highlights: 
- Building Relationships: Dr. Mosher emphasizes the importance of building strong relationships with students and families as a foundation for effective teaching and learning. She highlights the significance of getting to know students individually, understanding their goals, and collaborating with families to support students' academic and personal growth.
-Personalized Instruction: The discussion underscores the importance of personalized instruction tailored to meet the unique needs of students, particularly those with high-incidence disabilities. Dr. Mosher advocates for individualized goal-setting and progress monitoring to ensure that instruction is meaningful and effective for every learner.
- Practical Strategies: Practical strategies for teachers include minimizing teacher talk time, using graphic organizers, and making connections between learning objectives and real-world applications. These strategies help engage students, enhance understanding, and foster a positive learning environment.
- Technology Integration: Dr. Mosher shares insights into the transformative role of technology in education, particularly tools like PDF readers and note-taking apps. These tools enable students to access information more effectively and manage tasks efficiently, thereby enhancing accessibility and productivity in the learning process.

Transcript

Lisa Dieker 0:07  

Welcome to practical access. I'm Lisa Dieker.  

Rebecca Hines 0:09  

And I'm Rebecca Hines. And Lisa, today, we have one of our co authors joining us and I know you're excited, why don't you introduce our guest?  

Lisa Dieker 0:18  

Yeah, so super excited to have a new colleague and friend here that we just finished an article with Maggie Mosher here at the University of Kansas. So, Maggie, we're gonna let you share your background and your role here at the University of Kansas. But we're excited to have you with us as a colleague and friend. 

Maggie Mosher 0:33  

Thank you for having me. Hi, my name is Dr. Maggie Mosher, and I'm the assistant research professor at the Achievement and Assessment Institute at the University of Kansas. I specialize in utilizing evidence based practices and innovative technologies to improve the academic, social, emotional and behavioral instruction of all students, but particularly students with high incidence disabilities. And right now my work focuses on using artificial intelligence and extended reality to individualize instruction and provide timely, feasible progress monitoring tools and interventions for educators.  

Lisa Dieker 1:04  

So wow, and again, if you haven't met Maggie, that intro there, no one could do justice to it. She's got a beautiful CV and a recent PhD graduate. So congratulations on all your accomplishments. But I'm gonna go backwards a little bit, and then we can move forwards. So one of the things that Maggie has, under her many accomplishments is was Teacher of the Year, and, and really celebrate that, and I'm curious as teacher of the year, it's kind of something we're trying to incorporate in the podcast. I'm a new teacher, what would your advice be to help me connect with the kids with disabilities and my class? 

Maggie Mosher 1:42  

I would say the first thing is to build relationships get to know as much as possible who the individual students, you can do all this research on a disability. I'm someone who was twice exceptional. And I will say that if you researched my disability, I wouldn't fit into that box. And so I don't think that doing a ton of research on a disability is very helpful, you learn a lot of that in classes at school, instead, building relationships, getting them to trust you getting them to understand that you care about them, and that you want to know more about them, and that you care about what their priorities are and what they want to do. And also getting to know families because it's going to be important that you are on the same page with the parents of the student, and that they understand that you guys are all working together to help them to meet their goals.  

Lisa Dieker 2:25  

So one quick follow up and then I'll let Becky have a turn. You said families and you said kids like what would your day one strategy or your week one strategy be, you know, as a parent or as a kid, like I don't want to be singled out. But what would you do to start like, what's the, you know, the thing that you intuitively do that I'm going to teacher and I would even know, intuitively to how to get a hold of a parent?  

Maggie Mosher  2:48   

Yeah. I think day one, the important thing is to see if you can get another teacher to co teach with you and do small groups. Because people don't tend to open up in whole classes, especially kids with disabilities, it's really hard to share who you are and what you want, what you think, when you're in front of everyone, the anxiety, the stress, it's just difficult. So if you could do one on one meetings, or small group meetings, where you really tend to bring some students together, so they get to know each other as well. And I'd ask the basic questions like, Okay, I'm starting new this year, what's your goal? Here's my goal. Here's what I think we can work together on what do you think, here's what I'm really good at. And here's where I struggle, because I think students need to know that T as a teacher, you know that you have your gifts, and you have your weaknesses. And they don't need to know all those weaknesses. But giving them one way in which you feel really human and that they might pick up on easily is helpful for them. And then they're gonna feel more comfortable saying, Well, I can't do this, or I really struggle with this. And I think that that's the best way to start by building relationships. And to really try when you're not in the classroom after you figured out who these students are, to understand a little bit more about their culture, their backgrounds, the place they come from, what might be a good way to interact with them and what might not be a good way to interact with them. I know. I'm from the Navajo reservation, and we don't do eye contact when we're trying to build respect with someone so we wouldn't share eye contact. The other thing is, we tend to like to be lower than the person who has more authority than us. So it's better for you to be sitting up on a chair and need to be on the carpet for me to feel comfortable as you being my authority figure. So getting to know those basic things is really helpful.  

Rebecca Hines 4:20  

Yeah, two things I heard there, Maggie that really resonate one that idea of conferencing with students and goal setting individually. I'm I've used and I always recommend teachers uses simple SWOT analysis, the little quad chart strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, model it for your students and then have them do their own and set a plan to touch base with every single student about what's on  their SWOT analysis. I think that was a great tip by you to set up the conferencing and you also mentioned the collaborative piece. I think a lot of times people think oh well I'm not assigned to co teacher but sometimes we can find a collaborating teacher, you know who's like, oh, let's both invest in goal setting. So I'll do something very big group. So you can work with small groups or individuals, and then we'll flip it. So sometimes I think our colleagues think this means something bigger than we mean, you know, it's like any means necessary, you don't have to have an official appointment as a co teacher to do this. So I thought, I thought both of those were great tips. But I'm going to ask you something, I'm going to elevate the conversation a little bit, because you mentioned also progress monitoring. So now we have rapport with these students, but we're trying to see what they're achieving in our classrooms. What would you say is a good first step for teachers who are to that point? And of course, the expectation is they're doing this anyway. But, you know, haven't really done a lot of progress monitoring. How do I how do I set that up? And how would that look in my classroom?  

Maggie Mosher  5:56  

Yeah, I would say a number of things. First thing is do get to know what your school and your districts assessments are, what they currently use for progress monitoring for reading, math, science, social studies, so that you're aware of how the other teachers are already using their data and what kind of data they're using. But then also, I love to, and I know a lot of teachers don't do this, but it's my favorite practice to do with kids is to start by taking a chart, and ask them what their goal is, and then talk to them about things that are getting in the way of their goal. And once I know them, based on their progress monitoring from dibbles, or star or whatever, the school district reading and math, their fluency, their comprehension, their basic skills, once I know an area that I think, ooh, we might want to work on that, whether it's behavior or reading or math, that would really help them I then tend to ask them, okay, what's your big goal? What do you want to do? Is it to make friends? Is it to get an A in this class? Is it to move on to next year? What is your big goal? Is to write book? Great, now we have your goal. Now let's talk about what might be getting in the way of that goal. And that basic things like, is it that I'm interrupting in class? And so my friends don't really like me? Because I'm constantly interrupting them? Do we need to work on that? Do we need to work on my anxiety when I'm around people? Or the tendency for me to over talk or over speak? Or do I need to work on my fluency, so I feel more competent when I'm reading in class or when I'm writing my papers, I can read at a normal pace. And then we talk about, okay, so this is the barrier, that's not getting us to this goal. Great, we've got your goal, I want to help you meet your goal, because it's important to me. And I know what barriers are there. So now how are we going to monitor those barriers? And what are we going to put in place that's going to help with those barriers, so that it's not you telling the student I see this weakness, and we need to fix it, it's more collaboratively, here's your goal, I want to help you meet that goal. And that can be a goal that they spend time on, it doesn't have to be a goal that creating the moment, but getting that goal early on helps and then talking about okay, so here's the ways we can monitor that. And I always think even if you're doing something like dibbles, like something basic, having the student graph their data is powerful. So having them put the goal at the top where they started from and having them watch their own growth, but graph that growth is really powerful. And anytime that growth starts to go in the wrong direction, stopping and saying, Okay, what do you think we might need to change because students really do tend to know what's working and not working for them, for the most part, and if they don't, the data is going to show it, If we start an intervention, we don't see growth in four to six weeks, we find a different intervention, sometimes for behavior that six to eight weeks, but helping the student to see, wow, I'm making progress. Not only does it build self esteem, because you've got to work and worry sometimes about that learned helplessness, I don't think I can do something. So it helps with that, that I know you can do this. And I know that these barriers are here, but we are working together to get rid of those barriers. And sometimes I even have them once we meet that goal, cross that barrier off their list. Okay, we no longer have that very now let's move on to the next one.  

Lisa Dieker 8:48  

I love that. So, so many things there. And, and you know, one of the things that you do well is think very futuristic. So what are some not like, aren't there yet? Cuz, again, you know, this is practical access. So I practically could use it in 10 years if it existed. But what are things that are there now that you would recommend in the tech realm that might help teachers do progress monitoring more effectively? Maybe like my three go to tools that you would use in progress monitoring, that I might want to think about if I'm new to trying to do a little more electronic monitoring?  

 Maggie Mosher 9:27  

Yeah I can tell you some that are here. And some that I hope will be here soon. And one that's already here. And I think Becky is is this really well, is that custom chat GPT I think that really when you're looking at Custom GPT for teachers, you can make sure that what they're getting is quality information. But I think as teachers we tend to assess by either a test or multiple choice or fill in the blank. And to figure out if they know the chapter, they know the content in the material. But chat GPT actually gives us the ability to start to let students have conversations and tell us what they know. And so talking  to it and finding out what they do and don't know about a situation, you can even put in certain prompts if you want to. But having that customized to valid and reliable information, I hope that we're gonna get to a place where like in science, we are having talks about what I know and discourse. And that's how I'm measuring what you know, and what you don't know. I think right now we have the ability to of course, record how, how quickly you are speaking how many words per minute. That used to be something a teacher could do right now AI does have some of that capacity to do those things. I also think you can use some features, and if it is chat GPT or whatever you decide to use, but you can use features where you take your lesson plan, or reading text and put it on a different level, you just put in the exact thing you would have and ask to you can very specifically say, I want this at a third grade reading level and an interest level that is about Star Wars. And it's interesting because it can it can take that what you want to teach and put it in some paragraphs and give you some Star Wars facts and fiction about that at that reading level. So it makes it interesting for a student, and you get some of that progress monitoring in a way that's fun. Where I hope it's going in the future is as the educator we often take progress by watching for behavior doesn't tend to work when we use progress for behavior that is like office referrals, or how many times a student got something wrong, or how many times a student was asked to sit in the back or go to timeout, those things are already too late measures like I've already failed. And I'm measuring the failure. If we can measure the thing that gets us to the failure, or what's becomes before the failure. And a lot of times teachers do that by time on tasks by behavior intervention plans, or really task analysis to figure out what comes before the antecedent and the consequence of that behavior. I think we're getting to a place where AI could do that for us where we could have the program, videotape that student and eventually kind of break down what behaviors are going on what happened before that behavior, what happens after that behavior, so that a teacher doesn't have to be taking all of those tasks analysis and frees up their time to just have relationships and not be involved in taking data all the time.  

Rebecca Hines 12:06  

Right, which hopefully, you know, we share the goal of increasing the student teacher interaction through the use of tools like AI, and I think we're often afraid of them, when actually they could really help us build those connections that you described earlier. By taking some of the other things off of our plate, I want to I want to ask you as my final question, as a former teacher of the year. And as someone who is a researcher, and writer on topics of instructional strategies, what, what was one or two of your go to, in the moment, types of strategies that anybody could put in their toolbox, and try out in their own classrooms.  

Maggie Mosher 12:53  

I think the biggest think, It's gonna sound funny that I found really useful is teacher talk time, figuring out how often you talk students with disabilities tend to actually prefer male teachers, not because there aren't many male teachers, but because they talk less. And so if I use less words, the students can focus on the words that matter. So I use a lot of gestures. If I'm telling students to open a book, I'll just open the book and tell them the page number. Instead of saying, everybody, I need you to get out your books, have a seat at your desk, there's just so much talk in that, that it tends to get overwhelming. And I'm losing the facts that you want for me, and you're already giving multiple steps. And a lot of times as teachers, we think we gave one step, but really we gave 12. And so it really makes you focus on what steps did I give how many steps were there? How can I do these steps in an order that makes sense? And can I break them down. So giving one direction at a time giving a visual of that direction and using as few words as possible, so that when you do talk, the students know, I need to listen, this is important. And that's one of my go twos. Right off the bat. I also use a lot of graphic organizers and the what I know what I want to know how I work on my, how my learning influences what I'm learning next. I think that it's important for them to see connections. And sometimes learning feels irrelevant, or like there's no connection to the future, but some connection to the past. And I think having connections in both directions is really important. So this is how this pertains to what we learned yesterday, this is how I think you're going to need this in the future. If you're looking at this job. Even sometimes kids like to know what is the job that comes with this skill? Like why am I learning the skill? Well, when you want to become an expert in developing AI, if you want to make Microsoft co pilot, you're gonna have to know how to do these specific skills. And it gets them excited about what they could do in the future. And even though we know like a lot of the jobs our kids are going to have in the future aren't even developed yet. But we can teach them basic cooperation skills, basic critical thinking skills and to get excited about learning. And I think that connections help you to do that.  

Lisa Dieker 14:57  

So my last question for you, it's gonna take us In a totally different direction, but I think I'd be remiss for our listeners not to get to hear this answer. You've been wildly successful and you've shared you know, cultural background, you share twice exceptional. What is the go to technology? If somebody says, I think I want to go to college and get an undergrad, a masters and a doctorate and be a Maggie Mosher, and I struggle in some areas, like what is it that you did with technology that you think was a game changer to get you where you are today, because I know you have so many tools in your toolbox. But again, I think for our listeners who have kids with disabilities, or young adults with disabilities, what's that 

 Maggie Mosher 15:38  

My number one go to is gonna sound surprising, but it's PDF readers. So going, I have my PDFs loaded directly to my phone, and I have them read the text out loud to me while I'm walking while I'm jogging while I'm doing other things because I physically have to keep moving. And I can't sit still for very long. And so to sit and read these articles, I want the information. But to sit and read those articles is really difficult. So I'll often have them read aloud to me as I'm walking or doing something else. And then I can take in the pieces a little at a time. And if something's really exciting, I go back to it and highlight it on my own. But if it's just like, Oh, that wasn't all that helpful and move on. And I don't keep that data in my head. I think that and then also getting all my thoughts and feelings, I use notes really frequently on my phone, I'll just start recording and start having it record all of my notes and to do I can kind of get my email and to do to work together a lot. So I use that app a lot because I can cross things off the list and I can speak them into it. And I don't have to spend as much time typing, because for me, part of my disability is muscular and my joints. And so sometimes it gets really exhausting to do all of those things. And so those two tools are really helpful for me speak to text and text to speech.  

Lisa Dieker 16:47  

Well, thank you. So the field is lucky not only that you are a teacher and teacher of the year but that you've chosen to continue your journey and to continue to influence teachers everywhere. So we thank you for joining us, Dr. Mosher and if you have questions, please tweet us at Access practical or post us questions on our Facebook page. Thank you again for joining us.  

Maggie Mosher 17:06  

Thank you for having me.