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A teacher adapts Writing Workshop for children in her class who have learning and behavioral challenges and addresses larger issues of belonging in a community of learners.
Special education evolved as a means of resolving the problems of resource distribution in classrooms by simultaneously "allowing mainstream teachers to work with homogeneous groups of students and provide individualized attention to students who were the most different" (Manset & Semmel, 1997, p. 163). However, homogeneous grouping practices have been challenged because they often separate students from mainstream education, limiting their interaction with their mainstream peers and often resulting in inferior instruction for students with learning disabilities (Jenkins, Jewell, Leicester, O'Connor, Jenkins, & Troutner, 1994). Thus, inclusive education models seek to help render more equality in educational experiences for students in special education.
Since the passage of Public Law 94-142, known as Individual with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), the number of inclusion models of education has increased significantly, and inclusive education has developed multiple meanings (Corbett, 2001). As schools design systems to educate students with disabilities in regular education classrooms, a continuum of services has been implemented, but the goal of inclusion has remained focused on providing students with disabilities with the "least restrictive environment" (McLeskey, Hoppey, Williamson, & Rentz, 2004) while at the same time benefiting all students involved in the grouping design. In this article, we present a case study, selected from our research, that focuses on the growth of a group of students who qualified for special education services and who participated in writers workshop within a regular fourth-grade classroom. The study was conducted in a school in a southeast state of the United States. The school, with about 300 K-5 students, the majority of which were students of color (85% African American) and of low socioeconomic status (93.4% on reduced or free lunch), had a long history of "low performance" and struggled to achieve passing test scores. The school administrators decided to adopt an inclusion model at the 4th and 5th grades because newly legislated state policy mandated that all students, including students enrolled in special education programs, were required to participate in state standardized tests, and their test scores would be equally counted in school evaluation criteria. By exposing the students with...