Jenna Mancini Rufo on Reimagining Special Education

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We post every weekday and hope that you find the stories and voices inspirational. Alright, let’s get into the episode. You’re listening to the Getting Smart podcast. I’m Rebecca Middles and today I’m joined by Jenna Mancini Rufo, co-author of Reimagining Special Education alongside Julie Costum.

Jenna is the CEO of Empowered, an education consulting firm specializing in inclusion, special education, and equity. In addition to being a special education teacher, Jenna has experience as a former assistant superintendent, special education director, and policy specialist. Today she spends her time supporting organizations and schools in rethinking special education.

Jenna, thanks so much for being here today. Thank you, Rebecca. It’s great to be here. Let’s start with a quote from your book. What if, instead of viewing disability as a problem that is inherent in the individual,

we interpret disability as a result of the barriers that exist in our system? And what if, instead of focusing on the challenges our students face, we focus on their strengths? We call this restoring our students. Can you tell us more? Yeah, I love that you chose that as the quote to start with.

So one of the things that we have historically done in special education and in education in general is that we assign these arbitrary labels to students. So we say, you have a disability, so you’re special ed, or you’re an English language learner, so you’re ESL, or you’re from a poor background, so you’re going to get Title I services. And so really what we want to start doing is, instead of looking at students from that viewpoint,

where we’re viewing students from a deficit frame, we want to really shift the narrative and look at them more from what can they do and what are their strengths? So historically, again, this idea is the medical model of disability. So in a medical model, we view disability as something that is different or something that needs to be fixed. And our solution to fixing that problem is that we’re going to send this person somewhere else,

usually a special education classroom, maybe a resource room down the hall, and that’s the area where they will receive this intervention, which promises, or which we’re told, will all of a sudden address the deficit, the students will be fixed and returned to general ed, when in reality that very rarely happens. Because while we are replacing core instruction with special education services,

the students are falling further and further behind. So when we move from a medical model of disability to a social model of disability, instead of looking at the deficits in a student, we look to see what are the deficits that are in that environment or in the classroom. So rather than saying a student needs to be fixed, we think about what do we have to do to adjust our teaching,

our classroom, our schools, so that it is more inclusive of all students and so that we’re thinking about everyone’s need and we’re interpreting disability in that way, rather than something that’s inherent in the student. I love that. Moving from a medical model to a social model. That’s a new framing of the conversation that I’ve heard others bring up,

but I love how clearly transparent that helps us understand that. Can you share a little bit more with us that was your inspiration to write this book? I think you’re kind of getting there already with just the opening, but what made you write this book? Yeah, so I have from a very young age known that I was going to go into special education and I have a personal connection.

So I have a sibling, my youngest sister Nina, who is disabled and has some significant disabilities. And I think just growing up, I really witnessed a lot of injustices that she had to endure, whether it was at school or whether it was community or, you know, even one time, she was sent to the doctors for an x-ray and the doctor said, well, we don’t need to x-ray her leg. She doesn’t move around that much anyway.

So just these really terrible prejudices that I would love to say, you know, my sister Nina now she is 37, I would love to say that 37 years later that those prejudices have disappeared, but they haven’t and they’re very pervasive in our schools. And I think it comes from a good place. So it comes from this place of,

I want to help this child, I want to support them. And while the intentions are good, the outcomes aren’t. So we’ve kind of failed to deliver on this promise that special education is going to support the students in meeting their needs, in accelerating their growth. It doesn’t. And there’s decades and decades of research that shows that.

And when it came to reimagining special education and writing the book, one of the things that, you know, I’ve been asked before was, oh, did you write this because of the pandemic? And that’s only part of the issue. So we did write the book during the initial stages of COVID-19. But the reality is that the system needed to be changed for a very long time. And it’s just that now when we have this pandemic, we have laid bare all of these inequities.

So we’ve always had students who are considered on the margins of what we would assume to be a traditional or an average student. We’ve always had students who have behavior issues or social emotional needs or trauma. And we just haven’t always done a great job addressing it. So now that we have this pandemic, it’s really exposed those areas. And it’s made the case to me much more clearer of why we need to change.

I feel like we’re beating the same drum. I’m so glad we’re having this conversation. I feel like what you’ve highlighted often really calls out the fact that we are modifying students to meet an adult centric learning model system. And since you shared your inspiration, I also, I have a daughter with a genetic syndrome and Pi, a traditional school in definition has significant cognitive challenges. She’s currently in one of those life skills programs that you hinted at, which I resisted for so long as a personalized learning advocate. Because I was always worried about the segregation of life skills and perhaps my perceived loss of urgency in academic learning that occurs in some of those environments.

And yes, she feels great, loved, she feels seen, but she also still needs literacy and numerical support with some level of urgency. And I think that’s what we’re talking about here. Yeah. And Rebecca, I love that you said that because I think there’s oftentimes this fallacy that inclusion must come at the expense of intervention. And that’s certainly not my philosophy. And that’s not the philosophy that we’ve discussed in reimagining special education. So it’s intentional.

So when you’re scheduling, you have to be very intentional about making sure do we have supports available that are there for all students. So not just kids with disabilities. So if you have an MTSS, multi-tiered systems of support framework, generally there is a period throughout the day. Some schools call it what I need, when period where that’s designed for intervention. So that should be where our kids are receiving intervention. And I think, you know, for students who have more significant disabilities like your daughter, my sister, I’m often hear this excuse, if you will, that well, they need to learn functional skills.

Or what could they ever get out of Romeo and Juliet when I like to say, well, what does anybody get out of Romeo and Juliet? Right? So it’s not like we are raising these Shakespearean authors that are all going to leave high school and then, you know, write books and poems and plays. They participate in that because we have said as a school, as a community, as a nation that this holds value and that there’s value in students being exposed to a wide variety of curricula, not just something that’s going to prepare them for what we think they’re going to do when they leave school. So and school is about so much more than the curriculum. You know, it’s about developing critical thinking skills and relationships and learning how to problem solve.

And the truth is that students get that more in the general ed classroom. There’s been lots of research that shows that when students are in self-contained or special education rooms, the expectations are lower. It’s less rigorous instruction. And I don’t say that to beat up on the special education teachers. In many ways, you know, I was one of them.

They’ve been given an impossible task. So, you know, we sell families on you’re going to go to this setting that’s smaller and more individualized. But what happens is sometimes you have kids from two, three, four different grade levels and a really wide range of skills that are all there at the same time. So it’s really not necessarily what people have it in their head is what’s going to happen there. Absolutely.

And you hit on this a little earlier. If they’re not in a pull out to go fix them kind of program, then you have other services that are provided, not based on what is student needs during the day, but actually when the adult is free based on the schools that they are probably overseen and sometimes often shared between many buildings. And so then those don’t, so that support that’s provided for students don’t always align with the day for the learner. Yeah. And Rebecca, I think for any administrators who are listening, this will rise or fall on the schedule.

So if we don’t schedule things in a way that provides these supports or that prioritizes it, then it’s it’s going to fall flat. And then what happens is we say, oh, we tried inclusion and it didn’t work. And in the book, I actually use the example and Julie and I stated about baking a cake. So, you know, you’re in your kitchen, you are ready, you have the recipe, it calls for eggs, but you decide to reach for the cream cheese in the back of the fridge because that’s all you’ve got. And it has sugar, but you really prefer artificial sweetener.

And then it says bake it 350 for an hour, but you’re really busy. So you crank up the heat and you bake it at 500 for 20 minutes. And then you pull the cake out and you say, oh my gosh, this recipe doesn’t work. Well, we didn’t follow the recipe so that no one would would think like that. But in many times with schools with inclusion with intervention programs, we try something and it’s either not implemented.

It’s either not implemented with fidelity or it’s implemented half heartedly. And then we throw up our hands and we say it didn’t work. So it’s really critical from the administration point of view to make sure that we’re prioritizing it, that we’re scheduling properly and that we have the supports and teachers because it just feeds into that false narrative that of course this wouldn’t have worked. I could still keep playing with that metaphor you brought up. But when we when we put the ingredients in and then how we decorate that cake afterward. Yeah, that’s great.

I appreciate you creating a visual for that. So that’s easily understood. I also appreciate how you use specific narrative examples to explain the shift in thinking you’ve touched on it here. And you’ve shared the cake metaphor which I love, but you also talk about realigning service delivery. There’s a quote, students with disabilities often lack access to the general education curriculum and fall further behind and a lack of common planning time.

I just let that sit for a minute and collaboration among educators contributes to piecemeal education experiences that fall short of the desired outcomes which I think you just captured. Would you share just a little bit more about realigning service delivery. Yeah, I love that you asked that because a lot of times in special ed, we assume that when a student is in the general education setting that they either need a co teacher present or a paraprofessional. And that’s that’s many times the go to model. And I want to share before I get into it that when I started my career, 20 years ago, I was an inclusion facilitator 20 years ago.

So there’s definitely parts of the country that are already doing this. And it’s not anything that’s necessarily novel but it is novel in a lot of places so I’m going to share a little bit about inclusion facilitation. So the idea of an inclusion facilitator is that we have a special education teacher whose role is redesigned. So rather than pulling students out or working with them in a resource room, they’re more of a behind the scenes person or a coach. And they work with special education students but also with the general education teachers of those kids that they support.

So they are working to provide modifications and accommodations and then also to gradually pull back so almost to coach the team of look here’s how you can do it. And then the idea is that over time you’re building capacity within the team. So in reimagining special education, my co author Julie and I proposed three different variations on this model, because what I found in my practice as an administrator was that it did look a little different depending on the kids who are in front of you. And I think that’s okay and I think that just like we want to individualize for kids we want to be really responsive to what students were seeing in our classes. So the first one is building level and in a building level inclusion facilitator model that person really is more of a coach.

So they attend the MTSS or data or leadership teams in the building. They’re providing support to teachers. They’re responsible for those heavy modifications. And then they can even push into class. If the student has a power professional perhaps provide some on the job training or modeling for them. And so this is really more of a global role the building level. And I should note that throughout all of the models I’m talking about, we remove direct service responsibilities. And what that means is that the special education teacher has a flexible schedule the inclusion facilitator so that they can be a part of common planning time, push into grade level or department team meetings, and then go into different classes as needed. And when we lock someone into that schedule, when we say, okay, you’re going to be teaching six periods a day and then you also need to modify for students, and you also need to write IEPs and have meetings.

It’s just untenable. It’s not going to happen. So in this role, we take that that responsibility away and the person teaches one maybe two periods a day and that’s it. And a lot of times people will say to me, well, Jenna, people can’t just go out and hire, you know, all of these new people or all the staffing. And I understand that. And the way to look at it is, when you start collapsing some of these other programs in favor of a more inclusive model, you start freeing people up. So when I don’t have a life skills class and an autistic support class, and a resource room, even if I take away just one of those if we say you know what we’re going to move towards more of an inclusive model, then that frees someone up for that role. So that’s sort of how you you find the staffing.

And then the other two models so one is a student specific inclusion facilitator model, and that’s really best when you have a small group of students that has a lot of needs. So in my experience, in one of our buildings that when I was a special ed director and then assistant superintendent, we were collapsing some of these specialized programs in favor of wrapping the services around the student bringing the services to them. And we did have a high concentration in one school of students who had these significant needs, because they were shipped there from all over the district. And at that point, you know, they’ve been there for a while and parents said, we don’t really want to send them back to their school like, you know, they’re comfortable, we trust the school. So we said, okay, we’ll keep them there.

And then we used a student specific inclusion facilitator model where their former life skills multiple disabilities support teacher, then became the inclusion inclusion facilitator. And she really worked with the teams and students who have those high needs have lots of service providers. So they have occupational therapists, physical therapists, speech therapists, nursing sometimes. So it’s really helpful to have one person, not just to do those heavy modifications, but to coordinate all of those people so that there’s a really thorough systematic and coordinated approach. And then finally, the third model of inclusion facilitation, I think is best used at a middle school or high school. And that is content specific facilitator.

So as we know, as students progress through the grades, they the content gets increasingly complex. So with a content specific facilitator, they are responsible for working with those departments. So someone might be assigned to the science department at a high school, they go to the professional learning community meetings for chemistry and biology and wherever the students are. And they really become very familiar and expert with that content with the modifications. And then that allows for better access for students because they have work that’s appropriately modified.

And it’s not just someone who maybe doesn’t have as great of a knowledge of it, kind of trying to make it fit or to do more superficial modifications like it’s multiple choice so we’ll take away one answer. That’s not necessarily meaningful. I like to say that’s just going to increase the chances of guessing correctly. So we really want to get at making some meaningful modifications. That’s wonderful. In the book, if people are interested in seeing you have wonderful charts to that help describe these models and the differences and how you can have a better grasp of it that are really would be really useful to do professional learning in your system. So I can see how this book and the services that you provide really help people understand those different models.

I really think that that information is not readily available for everyone. So thank you so much for highlighting that here. Yeah, and, you know, in addition to inclusion facilitation, there’s also a few other models that we highlight like push in support or consultative support. And then we do also talk about co teaching and how we can revitalize that model to make it more effective. Yeah, the consultative support model, I that’s one of the ones that often gets talked about in competency based and personalized learning. So I love that that that you highlighted that there too. I think you say the difference between the consultant teacher and the inclusion facilitator is that the consultant teacher may provide regular push and support to general education teachers while inclusion facilitators are more service coordinators which you were just sharing.

So let’s you just mentioned co teaching. That’s a pretty hot topic for some of the some of the labels that you opened with. I know there’s a recent revitalization of that and I appreciate that you discuss it with all the trending efforts. And that with any trending effort. And as a personalized learning advocate, I’m coming I’m waiting in here with you. They can also be done poorly. You said an article from Education Week where if the process and practices of co teaching are not strong. It may be better to pull learners out to get what they need. Can you share more about that.

Yes, so that’s not my quote and I don’t want people to run with that because I feel like it’s a very small thing that Marilyn friend who is the co teaching guru is basically saying that if you’re just going to have a special education teacher who is a glorified aid in the classroom. It’s not worth doing. It’s a very expensive use of your resources to add a second adult for who’s really assuming more of an assistant role. And it completely negates all of the expertise that a special education teacher really has that could benefit not just the kids with disabilities but everyone. So when we’re looking at co teaching models. Again, I’m going to come back to structurally there are a lot of supports that have to be present for this to work well. So when we have a special education teacher who is working with three or five different teachers who doesn’t have co planning time.

It’s not going to be a true co teaching model. So if we’re implementing the model with fidelity we want to make sure that there’s some planning time at least once a week. I know some people argue you might need that every day. I don’t know that you need it every day. I don’t think it’s realistic to think that two teachers every single day are going to sit down during their prep to co plan. But at least once a week in a nice solid block of time. And when I was a central office administrator, I used to say to my principles. If you don’t have co planning, don’t call it co teaching, because again, then we fall back on that we tried co teaching and it didn’t work when you haven’t set up your teachers up to be successful. So I think there’s a huge element of making sure that co planning is present training. Of course, you know, we want to make sure that teachers are trained in the various models and they know have a clear idea of what their roles and responsibilities are.

And what I like to say when I’m training co teachers is what can to do better than one. So think about you have another person in the classroom. So another person can run small groups, they can conference with people they can. There’s just so many more ways that you can shrink that student teacher ratio, then if one is still teaching and the other supporting, or if both are up in front of the room and they’re kind of bouncing back and forth. There’s a time and place for that but I think it really co teaching offers this opportunity to provide small groups and collaborative work. So we really want to make sure we’re capitalizing on it. If we are investing in that model. So many great tips. When you describe students with disabilities you also talk about other intervention challenges, such as food instability, lack of stable housing, etc.

I’m page 84. Could you share more about that. Yeah, so I think a lot of times and you know we’ve seen disproportionality with special education where we know and it’s well documented that black students, Hispanic students are overrepresented in special education and particularly in what we call those softer disability categories or categories that require more professional judgment like a learning disability or an other health impairment which generally most students characterized under that other health impairment umbrella have a DD or ADHD. So we want to make sure that we are not conflating something that’s environmental or a lack of an opportunity to learn or a racial, ethnic or cultural difference with disability. So it’s very important to make sure that we’re really making database decisions that we are designing curriculum to account for students who might not have had the same opportunities that all of our students do.

So, you know, perfect example. And, you know, I talk about this one student in the book Tyson, you know, he came to kindergarten not having school experience. He’s African American boy and, you know, phone calls home. He can’t sit still. He doesn’t know how to, you know, stand in line. He’s tearing apart the room.

Well, we can assume that all students are going to come to school having already mastered the unwritten social norms or codes of school. We have to teach them. That’s why we’re there. We’re teachers. So it’s really taking a step back being very explicit about what the expectations are teaching those expected behaviors. And now more than ever, when we have had kids who have been out of school for a year and a half, they really need that. And, you know, even your kids who previously might have had more opportunities or more experiences, they needed to they’re out of practice.

So it’s really important to not just jump to this conclusion that a child who has a difference has a disability because that label follows them for their whole life. And it can set them on a trajectory that’s not necessarily the path that we want them to be on. Yes. This is so true for personalized learning. And remember, I mean, the word discipline is supposed to be about knowledge.

It was supposed to be about learning something. And if it’s an expectation that there’s a behavior that we expect, we absolutely have to ensure that we’ve taught it. Otherwise, this bias carries through the system and is injustice at our hands. And so I really appreciate that. And I think in some ways this is even happening in social emotional learning. We’re having look for and conversations about what kids should be doing. And we have not as a system ensured that those expectations have been taught. So it’s just another gotcha form that can put a really systemic label on learners unintentionally trying to serve what we think is best, but not really thinking about the system providing that support.

I appreciate that you called it out. Yeah, and Rebecca one district that I’ve been working with so they’re really investing in social emotional learning, which is great. But one of the things that they were looking at is more of this intervention program and you know I won’t name it but a program that’s going to teach students to recognize when they are dysregulated. But the question really needs to be, why are they dysregulated so what in the school environment is so challenging for them to be able to maintain their composure and maintain their behavior. So again, it’s moving to that social model of disability where we’re not saying, student, you can’t regulate your behavior or emotions.

So we’re going to invest in these programs to teach you how to do that. Step back, what in our environment can we change because if we just keep approaching things from the same way, any of these interventions or programs is just putting a bandaid on the issue. Best definition of personalized learning right there. Getting smart listeners can buy Jenna’s book, reimagining special education and receive 20% off using the code get smart at checkout. You can follow the link in our show notes for this special offer.

I strongly recommend it so many folks have talked to me in personalized learning systems about how to support special education and so many of those models that you have highlighted Jenna and put into place work for all of our learners. And when we design with that in mind, we truly are a personalized learning system. Yeah, great. Thank you, Rebecca. Thank you, Jenna for sharing your learning with us today. So great for us all to keep learning and innovating for equity. We appreciate it. Thank you.

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