Fostering an Inclusive Leadership Team: A Critical Ethnography of a Learning Support Team for Students with Severe Intellectual Disabilities
Bibliographic record
Abstract
High school principals grapple with how to effectively reform the bureaucratic and social culture of their schools to be more inclusive of students with severe intellectual disabilities while also maintaining high standards of academic excellence for all students. There is a paucity of scholarship examining leadership from within an inclusive learning support team (LST) for high school students with severe intellectual disabilities. The purpose of this study was to describe how a learning support team informs inclusive leadership practice. The researcher studied learning support team members from one Alberta school and district, including a director of learning, a learning support specialist, a high school principal, a learning support teacher, two secondary teachers and two education assistants. The inquiry was guided by this research question: How does a learning support team for high school students with severe intellectual disabilities inform inclusive leadership practice? A critical ethnography approach was taken and involved both observations and interviews, with a systems analysis of the findings informing concepts like teamwork and the distribution of power among the learning support team. The resulting model for fostering an inclusive leadership team provides guidance for school leader teams in similar contexts when including students with severe intellectual disabilities. Specifically, the model emphasizes the need for a coherent relationship between the classroom, school leadership and district leadership teams so together they can: (1) make curriculum connections for students; (2) provide reflective practice opportunities for staff; (3) integrate teamwork into professional development activities; (4) innovate high school instruction to be more inclusive of this population of students; and (5) develop more inclusive policy directions. Conclusions point to a need for modified curriculum development at the high school level and collaborative professional development among principals, teachers, and education assistants.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".