Teaching Philosophy

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How to read this. The Module 8 statement is close to a ground-up rewrite rather than a light edit, so most of it is new. Text carried over from the Module 1 statement appears in plain type; additions are green and removals are struck through in red. Paragraphs from the original that no longer appear at all are collected at the end.

Special educators should understand the costs of failure in the profession. As of 2020, we are aware that special education (SPED) suffers from three major disparities (National Center for Learning Disabilities [NCLD], 2020):

Identification—who gets access to special education services—children of color are significantly more likely to be identified as needing SPED services. Overrepresentation means students who do not need special education services receive them, which creates excess waste and undermines special education services for students who do need them (NCLD, 2020).

Placement—where children receive education—Black, Hispanic, and American Indian students are more likely to be placed in restrictive educational environments compared to White students. This can have detrimental outcomes: students with disabilities who were fully included in general education classrooms were 11 percentage points more likely to be employed after high school (Grindal et al., 2016, as cited in NCLD, 2020, p. 5).

Discipline—how students are punished or reinforced for behaviors—students of color receive more suspensions, expulsions, and mechanical restraints. Students with high rates of suspension are more likely to drop out or be incarcerated (NCLD, 2020).

While every special educator is well-intentioned, it is obvious that good intentions, while necessary, are not sufficient to reduce the risk of incarceration, unemployment, and misidentification. Public debates on the causes of these disparities typically fall along two lines: those who believe the difference is entirely explainable by racism in institutions, and those who believe it is entirely explainable by socioeconomic differences. Neither is correct, but the temptation to use “income” or “race” as a heuristic shortcut to explain away the disparities in an administrative meeting should be noted.

The data demonstrates that income and race in the United States are typically linked. Additionally, students in poverty are more likely to suffer adverse childhood experiences like divorce, witnessing domestic violence, or living with individuals who suffer from addiction. These students are more likely to be identified for special education services.

However, income does not explain the gap on its own. Racial disparities in placement and discipline persist between students of similar economic circumstances, which means something other than poverty is operating.

As a special educator, I’m concerned that the disparity is best explained by the legacies of racism and settler colonialism which have created implicit and explicit biases in the way data is collected, produced, and operated on in schools.

Collaboration in special education is important precisely because the causes of these disparities are complex and the consequences are dire. Collaboration with a priority towards cultural inclusion is a strong bulwark against biases produced by any given culture.

Friend (2021) offers a reasonable definition of collaboration that provides a way of deploying the strategy. Friend identifies six defining characteristics (pp. 8–11):

Collaboration is voluntary (p. 8)

Collaboration requires parity among participants (p. 9)

Collaboration is based on mutual goals (p. 9)

Collaboration depends on shared responsibility for participation and decision making (p. 10)

Individuals who collaborate share resources (p. 10)

Individuals who collaborate share accountability for outcomes (p. 11)

Collaboration is a powerful tool when properly understood and defined for participants in a community. Friend (2021, p. 12) summarizes several studies indicating that it improves student outcomes:

Collaboration in special education is important because it’s academia—frequently called peer review—is accepted as the best way to reduce bias while collecting data for evidence based evidence-based interventions. Any single individual is vulnerable to a cognitive bias like confirmation bias or the availability heuristic. A culturally homogenous team is vulnerable to groupthink and culturally ingrained biases. However, a culturally heterogenous collaborative partner team can provide important network of feedback to a special educator’s observations to ensure they educators are conducting their observations and make decisions in a way that reduces the risk of bias.

Collaboration is easy to endorse and hard to do. It reads like a disposition — be humble, share, listen — when it is actually a set of structures that have to be built and paid for. The research is blunt about where it breaks:

(1) Planning and Time—Friend (2021) counts time among the resources collaboration depends on, and observes that while some professionals have regularly scheduled time to collaborate, “other educators can find only a few moments to touch base before or after school or during a hurried lunch” (p. 23). Collaboration rarely fails because people stopped believing in it. It fails because it isn’t given the priority it requires.

In their metasynthesis of qualitative co-teaching research, Scruggs et al. (2007) found planning time raised in nearly all of the investigations they reviewed (p. 404), and reported that its importance and its difficulty were voiced in 30 of the studies, with “no disconfirming reports” (p. 413). When there is no plan, the lesson still happens — someone simply improvises, and it tends to fall into a pattern of convenience.

(2) Complacency—Scruggs et al. (2007) found the dominant co-teaching arrangement to be “one teach, one assist,” in classrooms characterized by traditional instruction, “even though this method is not highly recommended in the literature” (p. 392). Twenty-five of the investigations they reviewed described the special educator’s role as “an assistant or in some way subordinate” (p. 413). When schools get complacent, collaboration loses the daily feedback mechanism that makes it effective.

Despite the real challenges, collaboration is worthwhile. Much of the benefit of collaboration, I posit, is not in what it produces but in the process of learning to do it, because doing it pushes you across a cultural boundary and into contact with assumptions you did not know you were carrying. Comstock et al. (2023) name the difficulty plainly: even teachers who deliberately pursue culturally responsive practice “have difficulty seeing how their own cultural biases influence their instruction” (Young, 2010, as cited in Comstock et al., 2023, p. 15). Moving, as they put it, from “ways of doing to ways of being” demands “sustained dedication from teachers (and leaders) to interrogate the ways their long-held and implicit beliefs and practices uphold hegemonic values in schools” (Comstock et al., 2023, p. 15).

That interrogation is not something I can perform alone, and that is precisely the point. I cannot find my own blind spot by looking harder at it; I need someone standing somewhere else. The disparities I opened with were produced by decisions that felt reasonable to the people making them. Collaboration is the only instrument I know of that makes a reasonable-feeling decision fall under scrutiny before a classroom of students has to live with its consequences.

Removed from the original

These paragraphs from the Module 1 statement do not appear in the final version. Most of them described my particular workplace; the argument they supported is now made in more general terms.

Collaboration requires humility because the special educator must admit that they cannot accomplish the task on his or her own and need the assistance of someone else. The educator must admit that a particular challenge in the classroom is too big for one person and requires a partner, at minimum, to resolve.

The whole point of special education is to increase the accessability of education. We are all well-intentioned people who want whats best for the students but the real challenge is the daily labor of removing all parts of the self that may distort our limited perception of reality and undermine clear-sighted observation.

If our observations are not true than we will fail at our mission of increasing access to education for students with disabilites. The key players of collaboration in special educaiton in my life are me, my co-teacher, our manager, our CEO, and the parents. My co-teacher and I are the primary observers of the students. We share the responsibility of helping each other see clearly.

██████████████████████████████████████████████████████████ As teachers, we do our best to harmonize our interest in the education of the students with the interest of the business as a whole.

██████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████ ██████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████ ██████████████████████████████

One of the primary factors that must be in place for successful collaboration is a shared langauge. ██████████████████████████████████ The teachers are primarily english speakers. ██████████████████████████ The students are learning to debate in english.

In order for collaboration to succeed the Chinese speakers need to learn a little Enligsh and the English speakers need to learn a little Chinese. Once everyone has crossed the language barrier, there needs to be an incentive for repeated organized interactions on topics that require collaboration. Collaboration is not always fun. Sometimes feedback is hard to hear, especially when its crossing through multiple layers of translation and cultural differences. An organization in this type of environment should carefully organize opportunities of repeated “games” of social interactions that give participants several opportunties to interact for observable rewards.

Collaboration in this environment is essential to accomplish the difficult task of teaching competitive English speaking skills to students in a Chinese environment. Additionally, collaboration is absolutely essential to ensure debate is accessible to neurodivergent students in Taiwan. There is a double translation problem occuring that can only be resolved with a deep understanding of the student, the student’s family and their particular culture. As a foreigner in Taiwan my Chinese co-workers serve as the bridge between me and these families. Collaboration is the essential skill and tool to keep the bridge maintained and crossable.

Why the black bars. I chose to redact some information to protect my privacy. The redacted text has been removed from the page and from the file below, rather than covered over.

Download original, redacted (.docx)

Collaboration in special education is important because it’s the best way to reduce bias while collecting data for evidence based interventions. Any single individual is vulnerable to a cognitive bias like confirmation bias or the availability heuristic. A collaborative partner can provide important feedback to a special educator’s observations to ensure they are conducting their observations in a way that reduces the risk of bias.

Collaboration requires humility because the special educator must admit that they cannot accomplish the task on his or her own and need the assistance of someone else. The educator must admit that a particular challenge in the classroom is too big for one person and requires a partner, at minimum, to resolve.

The whole point of special education is to increase the accessability of education. We are all well-intentioned people who want whats best for the students but the real challenge is the daily labor of removing all parts of the self that may distort our limited perception of reality and undermine clear-sighted observation.

If our observations are not true than we will fail at our mission of increasing access to education for students with disabilites. The key players of collaboration in special educaiton in my life are me, my co-teacher, our manager, our CEO, and the parents. My co-teacher and I are the primary observers of the students. We share the responsibility of helping each other see clearly.

██████████████████████████████████████████████████████████ As teachers, we do our best to harmonize our interest in the education of the students with the interest of the business as a whole.

██████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████ ██████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████ ██████████████████████████████

One of the primary factors that must be in place for successful collaboration is a shared langauge. ██████████████████████████████████ The teachers are primarily english speakers. ██████████████████████████ The students are learning to debate in english.

In order for collaboration to succeed the Chinese speakers need to learn a little Enligsh and the English speakers need to learn a little Chinese. Once everyone has crossed the language barrier, there needs to be an incentive for repeated organized interactions on topics that require collaboration. Collaboration is not always fun. Sometimes feedback is hard to hear, especially when its crossing through multiple layers of translation and cultural differences. An organization in this type of environment should carefully organize opportunities of repeated “games” of social interactions that give participants several opportunties to interact for observable rewards.

Collaboration in this environment is essential to accomplish the difficult task of teaching competitive English speaking skills to students in a Chinese environment. Additionally, collaboration is absolutely essential to ensure debate is accessible to neurodivergent students in Taiwan. There is a double translation problem occuring that can only be resolved with a deep understanding of the student, the student’s family and their particular culture. As a foreigner in Taiwan my Chinese co-workers serve as the bridge between me and these families. Collaboration is the essential skill and tool to keep the bridge maintained and crossable.