Strength-Based Individual Education Plans: A Microcosmic Opportunity for Inclusive Classrooms
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Inclusive education policies have arrived in Ontario’s classrooms, and increased numbers of disabled students have been included in the ‘regular’ classroom. In the face of systemic change in how we teach special education, the documents accompanying special education should represent these changing views. The Individual Education Plan (IEP) is perhaps the most ubiquitous document in special education. However, a literature review and critical policy analysis revealed that the structure and processes that guide its use have not been revamped in almost a quarter of a century and represent out-of-date perspectives and conceptualizations of ability and disability. Underpinning special education processes that guide the IEP are two similarly ubiquitous concepts: integration and inclusion. A literature review revealed that the two terms are often conflated (Nilholm, 2017) and lack a clear interpretation in Ontario's educational context (Woodcock & Woolfson, 2019). This study investigated the experiences and relationship of nine Ontario teachers and four practicing psychologists to the IEP. The participants partook in semi-structured interviews to understand how they perceive the efficacy of the current IEP in understanding and supporting student achievement. Thematic analysis of interview data demonstrated that 1) teacher participants have negative feelings towards the IEP's efficacy, and 2) relational breakdowns between important stakeholders in students' education have further impeded the IEP's efficacy. Psychologist participants endorsed teachers' challenges in making the IEP meaningful and effective for students. By examining the situational and systemic barriers affecting the IEP's efficacy, the study findings revealed that the IEP could represent a microcosmic opportunity for change. The path forward could be achieved by revamping the IEP to demonstrate a holistic appreciation of students, deeply honouring the perspectives of families, welcoming the contributions of associated professionals, and supporting teachers' enactment of inclusive mandates and their institutional knowledge.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".