Inclusive and Supportive Education Congress
International
Special Education Conference
Inclusion: Celebrating Diversity?
1st - 4th August 2005. Glasgow, Scotland
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Inclusive and Supportive Education Congress 1st - 4th August 2005. Glasgow, Scotland |
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David Paterson, PhD
University of New England,
Armidale, 2351, AUSTRALIA
dpaters1@une.edu.au
This paper shall explore the importance of taking risks in learning. In particular, the role of adaptive help-seeking as a means of meaningfully engaging in learning shall be examined. Adaptive help-seeking is seen as being particularly important for students with disabilities who are included in regular classes where the provision of assistance may depend on students being willing and able to solicit that assistance of themselves.
The context for this discussion is a school system which is increasingly including all students in regular classrooms. Another important and relatively recent contextual variable, however, is an increased recognition by education authorities that high expectation of intellectual quality is a critical aspect of effective teaching and learning (Newmann & al, 1996; Quality teaching in NSW public schools: A discussion paper, 2003; Ramsey, 2000) . While the provision of emotional support and psychological safety for students with special needs in inclusive classroom has been a feature of educational practice for some time, the provision of appropriate intellectual challenge is often more problematic. It is not enough for students to occupy a place in a regular classrooms, nor even to simply engage in classroom activities. In contemporary classrooms, there is an increasing expectation that all students will learn.
Those with special educational needs must have access to regular schools which should accommodate them within a childcentred pedagogy capable of meeting those needs (UNESCO, 1994)
Students with disabilities who are included in regular classroom instruction frequently experience difficulties engaging with the content and process of regular classroom instruction. One solution to this difficulty has been to remove students from that context and provide specialised instruction in segregated settings for a period of time. Another solution has been to modify the curriculum or the mode of instruction such that all learners can meaningfully engage in the lesson. Both of these solutions, however, are essentially controlled by the teacher. (Marfo, Mulcahy, Peat, Andrews, & Cho, 1991) Another approach is for students to take control of their own learning. This might involve students employing strategies that will make learning more meaningful or modifying the learning environment themselves such that they can engage in learning. It should be seen that attention to approaches is useful in the development of effective learners; ultimately, however, students need to be able to regulate their own learning (Zimmerman, 1990) .
Cognitive and metacognitive strategy instruction is an approach that has been used for students with disabilities in regular classes with some success over a number of years (Ashman & Conway, 1997; Mulcahy, 1991; Schunk & Zimmerman, 1994) . In this approach students are taught strategies which will assist their own learning in areas such as memory, note taking, questioning, organising and evaluating information. Students are attending to their own cognition and affect, recognising that in most classroom situations they have limited control over the instructional tasks or the way these are presented by the teacher. Instead of passively allowing instruction to be controlled by either instructor or instructional material, a goal of instruction is seen to be that students have both knowledge and control of own cognition. For many students, particularly those with disabilities, this is not their experience of classroom learning.
A strategy for learning which is within the control of most learners, however, and which is associated with self-regulated learning is to seek assistance. This is one way that students can modify the nature of the instructional task such that learning can become personally meaningful. Where a single explanation from the teacher is inadequate students may, by using adaptive help-seeking strategies, receive extra explanations, prompts, hints, or cues. The term ‘adaptive help-seeking’ has been used to describe student behaviour where they ask for the help that is needed for them to learn independently, not simply to get the correct answer (Nelson-Le Gall & Glor-Scheib, 1985; Newman, 2003)
In an inclusive classroom, all students engage in learning that is personally meaningful. School systems in most western countries, however, operate on a structure whereby students are grouped in age/grade/curriculum cohorts. In other words, 13 year old students in NSW will be usually be in grade eight and meaningfully engaging with the prescribed curriculum for students in this grade. This structure is based on an assumption that students of a certain chronological age are at a similar developmental stage in terms of cognitive and social skills and that curriculum can be designed to meet the needs of those students. Not all students, of course, are appropriately served by this organisational structure. For some students, those described as being gifted, for example, the grade eight curriculum may not be challenging at all and some form of acceleration may be implemented whereby at a chronological age of 13, they are placed in grade ten and engage in the curriculum designed for students aged 15.
Similarly, for some students with disabilities, although they may be 13 years old, the organisational structure of the regular school may be inappropriate. For a 13 year old student finding the grade eight curriculum too difficult, one option may be to place that student in grade six. Another, and more appropriate, option would be to adjust the curriculum but not the grade thus permitting age appropriate social interaction as well as cognitively appropriate instruction.
Finding this balance, however, is difficult within the constraints of our large secondary schools. This places a greater responsibility on the shoulders of the learner to monitor the appropriateness of instruction, their own progress, and to seek help where this is necessary. Put simply; in educational contexts where the work is difficult, learners have an increased need to seek help.
A study investigating the ‘inflight thinking’ of teachers provided some interesting perspectives into the contexts of help-seeking (Paterson, 2000) . This study was conducted in inclusive junior high school classrooms and initially involved participants engaging in semi-structured interviews about the principles guiding their teaching in these inclusive classrooms. These interviews were followed by a stimulated recall interviews (Calderhead, 1981; Keith, 1988; Marland, 1984; Marland & Osborne, 1990) in which the teachers recalled thoughts that they had had during observed lessons.
The focus of this study was to explore the cognitions of teachers as they taught in these inclusive classrooms. It was decided, however, that interpretation of these inflight cognitions would be facilitated by an understanding of the principles which guided their teaching in these contexts.
In a case study of one teacher, Laurie, connections between safety and students taking risks with their learning were particularly evident. A guiding principle noted in semi-structured interviews was the importance of establishing a safe environment. An environment in which students were safe from physically harm may be assumed in this statement. More specifically, however, Laurie was referring to the creation of an environment in which students felt psychologically safe, a place where their self-concept and emotions would not be ‘harmed’. While the role of the teacher was to establish the safe environment, this was done in order to develop students’ willingness to take risks. These two related issues: a safe environment, and taking risks, both subsequently emerged in Laurie’s inflight thinking.
Analysis of Laurie’s guiding principles suggested that she had made a connection between choice and the taking of risks. This was that people make choices to act in ways which may be more or less risky; things said as well as physical actions. The degree to which actions are risky, however, can only be perceived by the person carrying out that action. To the observer, in other words, something that a person says may not seem to be particularly risky while to the speaker it may.
A person cannot be forced to act in ways that are inherently risky to them, they must choose to do so. It follows that if a teacher believes the taking of risks to be a worthwhile learning experience, the most that that teacher can do is to create a in which students will choose to take risks. Such an environment may be described as one which is perceived by the students to be ‘safe’.
Laurie’s understanding of a safe environment seemed to be that it was an environment in which individuals felt sufficiently relaxed as to be willing to act in ways which may attract negative feedback. Typically, it would be expected that these actions would involve presenting for outside scrutiny something which had previously been kept private: an opinion, a belief. The nature of the feedback, however, is more complex than simply positive or negative. In a safe environment, an individual might accept a greater degree of negative feedback because the feedback was perceived as being constructive or delivered with favourable intent. In a less safe environment, an individual may choose not to engage in acts likely to attract either positive or negative feedback if it were anticipated that the intent of that feedback was not favourable.
The teacher’s role, accordingly, would be to ensure that the intent of any feedback was seen to be favourable. More specifically, the teacher would have to assume that all student actions involved a degree of risk to the student and respond accordingly; by acknowledging the act and giving credit for that act. An implication of this would be that if the teacher responded in this fashion and the act involved no risk then no harm would have been done and the student would have been made aware of the likely response from the teacher if at some later time they did engage in a risky act. If, on the other hand, the teacher assumed that student action involved no risk and failed to acknowledge the act, it would be unlikely that the student would engage in further risky activity.
Related to this was the issue of classroom ‘climate’ and the presence of unspoken codes of behaviour. If, for example, the climate of the classroom was generally critical and there was an unspoken code within which it was not acceptable for a student to volunteer an opinion then that environment could not be described as being safe for the student who wishes to venture an opinion. Further, an environment in which rules and expectations are not made clear and where there appear to be erratic or unpredictable responses from the teacher could not be described as being psychologically safe. In addition to treating all student responses with respect and consideration a teacher must also be explicit about her own expectations and the rules of the classroom. Finally, she must either be consistent in her responses to students or be honest in explaining any inconsistency.
In inflight thoughts relating to the students, however, Laurie seemed to be reminding herself that all acts should be considered as potentially risky for the student and that the safest environment would be one in which students would be prepared to engage in any act. On a pragmatic level it must be noted, however, that safety is a relative concept and that while a teacher might endeavour to create a safe environment in the classroom there are features of classrooms and of schools which mean that there will not be unqualified support for every student action.
Taking risks, in this context, is understood as active learning in which the learner ventures into ‘new’ territory; territory in which there is a chance of discovering new and exciting things but also a chance of expending intellectual and emotional energy for little or no gain. In the preceding discussion, the concept of risk to the individual learner has been described in a general manner as relating to any action of that individual. One action may be attempting an academic learning task which carries with it a risk of failure. It can be seen, however, that for many students the act of seeking help in a classroom context is a particularly significant example of an act which is risky.
Seeking help in the classroom is risky for several reasons. One relates to academic self-efficacy; students who have low self-efficacy tend to believe that by seeking help others will believe that they lack ability (Ryan, Gheen, & Midgley, 1998) . These students will, therefore, avoid drawing attention to their difficulties by seeking help. Ironically, as Ryan et al (1998) observe, “the very students who need help the most seek it the least” (Ryan et al., 1998. p528) A related reason is the risk of negative feedback not directly related to ability. Students are not likely to ask for help where they have either experienced or witnessed a teacher responding angrily to a prior request (Le Mare & Sohbat, 2002) . Finally, students’ social status within a class, their relationships with their peers, may be put at risk by help-seeking (Ryan & Pintrich, 1997) . Apart from teachers’ perceptions of a student’s ability, the attitude of classmates towards a student who seeks help may be negative and a powerful disincentive to engage in that behaviour.
There has been some interest in the area of adaptive help-seeking in recent years (Karabenick & Collins-Eaglin, 1997; Le Mare & Sohbat, 2002; Newman, 2002, 2003; Newman & Schwager, 1993; Ryan et al., 1998; Ryan & Pintrich, 1997; Ryan & Pintrich, 1998) . An assumption of this research has been that students who attempt to remedy difficulties they are experiencing in the classroom by appropriately seeking assistance are exhibiting mature and strategic behaviour, are more likely to avoid failure, maintain engagement, and increase the likelihood of future self-regulatory learning behaviour.
Some directions for facilitating adaptive help-seeking have been suggested by Newman (2002) who has proposed that several specific personal resources are required by students to engage in adaptive help seeking; cognitive and social competencies, personal motivational resources and contextual motivational resources. Personal and contextual motivational resources are particularly relevant in this discussion of risky learning. This is what Laurie was suggesting by identifying the importance of students being willing to speak up in class and in stressing the importance of creating a relational context within which students believed that the teacher expected them to take risks with their learning.
The research, then, has strongly supported the importance of the social context of the classroom; specifically the relationships between teacher and students and between students themselves. Another finding has been that perceived goal structure of the classroom is a significant factor in explaining student help-seeking behaviour (Ames, 1992; Le Mare & Sohbat, 2002; Midgley, Anderman, & Hicks, 1995; Midgley et al., 1998; Newman, 2002; Ryan et al., 1998) . It seems clear that in classrooms with a task-focussed or mastery goal structure where individual improvement and the intrinsic value of learning are communicated to students, adaptive help-seeking behaviours are more likely to occur. Conversely, in the classrooms with a relative ability or individual performance goal structure, students are more likely to avoid help-seeking (Ryan & Pintrich, 1997) .
Adaptive help-seeking is seen as a critically important aspect of self-regulatory learning. It is a means by which learners can meaningfully engage with classroom instruction however it brings with it significant risks of social alienation and threats to self-efficacy. Research in this area has suggested that attention to classroom goal structure is a means by which adaptive help-seeking can be facilitated. Little research, however, has been conducted which specifically explores the experiences and perspectives of students who have learning difficulties or disabilities. It can be assumed that these students, by the nature of their disabilities, are students who are in the greatest need of instructional techniques and personal learning strategies to expedite their classroom learning. At the same time, much of the attention to including these students in regular schools and classrooms has focussed on the social dimensions of learning. The perceptions of these students, then, may provide insights as to ways that inclusive classrooms can be structured to encourage risky learning by all students.
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