Featured Speakers:
- Linda Brault, Director of Working Together for Inclusion and Belonging at WestEd
- Ine Jack, Program Manager and Training and Support Specialist at WestEd
Host:
- Danny Torres, Associate Director of Events and Digital Media at WestEd
Danny Torres:
Hello, everyone, and welcome to the sixth session of our Leading Together series. In these 30-minute learning webinars, WestEd experts are sharing research and evidence-based practices that help bridge opportunity gaps, support positive outcomes for children and adults, and help build thriving communities. Today’s topic, Nurturing the Whole Child: Supporting Early Learning Approaches that meet the needs of all children.
Our featured speakers today are Linda Brault, Director of Supporting Inclusive Early Learning and Working Together for Inclusion and Belonging at WestEd, And Ine Jack, Program Manager and Training and Support Specialist for WestEd. Thank you all very much for joining us. My name is Danny Torres, I’m Associate Director of Events and Digital Media for WestEd. I’ll be your host. Now, before we move into the contents of today’s webinar, I’d like to take a brief moment to introduce WestEd. As a non-partisan research, development, and service agency, WestEd works to promote excellence, improve learning, and increase opportunity for children, youth, and adults.
Our staff partner with policymakers, district leaders, school leaders, communities, and others, providing a broad range of tailored services, including research and evaluation, professional learning, technical assistance, and policy guidance. We work to generate knowledge and apply evidence and expertise to improve policies, systems, and practices. Now, I’d like to pass the mic over to Linda. Linda, take it away.
Linda Brault:
Terrific. Welcome, everybody. So, I bet you’re thinking, how can we meet the needs of all children? I know that’s a question that comes up a lot in the work that Ine and I do, and we both have backgrounds in special education and early childhood and inclusive practice. So, as Danny said, I’m the director of several projects here at WestEd that guide educators who work with young children who might need additional support due to disability or behavior. We find that when you keep the focus on the whole child, it’s really useful, because it keeps us grounded in the fact that children are more alike than they are different.
We have a few outcomes for this brief session. We want to help you understand some of the intentionality that children possess from their point of view. We also wanna talk about how developmentally appropriate practice is such a useful guide and some ways to support the whole child. And finally, to receive some practical tools, strategies, and resources that you can use right away. Our vision for the work that we do is that all children, including with children with disabilities, health conditions, or delays, have access to quality childcare with active participation and appropriate support.
So you will hear us talking to those tools as we go. And I happen to love this photo because it does show a very inclusive setting where the young man who has Down syndrome is reading a book to his peers. Many of the strategies that are shared in today’s webinar can be found in this publication, “Inclusion Works!”, which they will drop a link in the chat where you can download it. I was the primary author of this, and it is available to download for free in English and in Spanish. So, the link is, as I said, will be dropped into the chat. One of the things that we tried to do is give you a definition of inclusion because, as we know, sometimes people misunderstand what this word means.
So this is the definition we offer from “Inclusion Works!”, “The full and active participation of children with disabilities or delays in community activities, services, and programs designed for typically developing children, including childcare. If support, accommodations, or modifications are needed to ensure full, active participation, they are provided appropriately. This participation results in an authentic sense of belonging for the child and family.” So, you can find this on page 8, and now I’m going to push this over to Ine.
Ine Jack:
Hello, everybody. So, like Linda was saying, some children are identified at birth, some children are identified before birth for their disabilities or diagnoses, but we just wanna recognize that inclusion just doesn’t mean that you’re starting from scratch, it is you’re doing the work that is intentional and it’s meant to be responsive for everyone. So, when we make thoughtful adaptations, we are enhancing the learning of all children, not just those with disabilities. And it’s a win for all children, all families, and educators.
I know there are more people here than just educators. Gimme one second. So, who are these children with disabilities or delays? So, children may have a formal diagnosis, like I said, earlier, or none at all. When they come to us, as educators, we want to be able to provide them with access to what we’re teaching and what they’re learning and supports. Sometimes it’s behavior, sometimes it’s health conditions, and developmental differences that aren’t always labeled, but they still have an impact on a child’s experience.
So, we really want to wait and see and really focus our attention on being inclusive, because every child will benefit from an environment that we create that allows for flexibility and support. Passing it back to Linda.
Linda Brault:
Thanks. So, part of nurturing the whole child is to ground ourself in developmentally appropriate practices. And many of you are probably familiar with developmentally appropriate practices. It’s something that’s been around for quite a long time, and it emerges when you make decisions about what you’re doing with children based on information and knowledge that’s age appropriate, individually appropriate, and culturally and socially meaningful. So, I like to think about that and to explain that in this way, that we have things that are age appropriate, so if you have a group of two-year-olds, you know that in general, there’s things that two-year-olds are interested in.
And then if you have a group of four-year-olds, it might be in a different group of things. So, one of the things that will happen is, you will find some understanding if you know development and learning. One of the things that we’re also aware of is that children don’t wake up on their two-year-old birthday and say, “Now I’ve gotta do these skills.” You know, development happens over time. There’s quite a variation in interest, ability, and skill, and that’s where inclusion can be found. So that’s what we add. The plus is, we add individually appropriate knowledge, so you find out what are those things that are unique to this child.
And if a child has a developmental delay and has many skills that are more like a two-year-old, but is in fact a four-year-old, you might wanna think about other four-year-olds who are interested in cars and trucks. I wanna make sure I have cars and trucks this child can play with that won’t be dangerous when he puts the wheels in his mouth. So you might wanna be thoughtful about how you individualize while still taking into mind the developmental appropriateness for that child. And then finally, you add everything in the context of social and cultural context.
So, we know that families influence children and communities influence children, so we wanna really keep that in mind. As you are staying grounded in this developmentally appropriate practice, one of the things we’re seeing recently in our state is that we’ve greatly expanded transitional kindergarten. And so, we’re seeing younger children in some of the traditional preschool environments, Head Starts, preschools, et cetera, and so forth. So everybody’s seeing somewhat younger children than they might have been used to seeing.
And I think that it’s important to help people revisit developmental expectations for the different age groups because sometimes we forget that we think we have children whose behavior is challenging. In fact, we just have a room full of two-year-olds, and they’re very different than a room full of three-year-olds. And also, we know that there was experiences that happened during the pandemic that were very unique and different for every child and family, so that may have impacted some context that children are bringing into your group.
So, understanding and thinking about these parts of the developmentally appropriate practice, age appropriateness, individual appropriateness, and context can really help you take everything into account and make room for all children. The other thing we hear when we are looking at programs who are hesitant for including a child with a disability or a challenging behavior, is that they’re really afraid. And what we find is they’re not afraid of the child, they’re afraid for the child.
So, when they’re afraid for the child, it’s because they’re worried, “I can’t do a good enough job. You know, what if I’m not able to meet the needs?” So what we can help people do is, remember how much knowledge they already have about young children, so that when you say, “Oh, you’re getting a new child next week, and he’s kind of quiet and doesn’t talk a whole lot and he has really specific things he likes to do when he plays.” And so the teacher’s like, “Okay, I’ve got some ideas.” “And by the way, he got a diagnosis of autism.” And suddenly, a teacher will say, “I don’t know anything about autism. I can’t work with him.”
But they already knew a lot about children and if they say, “Oh, what do I do for other children who have language that’s a little different or maybe has a certain way they like to play?” So, as people gain knowledge and they remember what they know about children, that fear can fade and they’ll be more confident. And we find that people are really able to be successful at including children with disabilities and delays, particularly if they pay attention to the things that we talk about in our definition, which are support and participation.
And it’s not just being together, so we’ll talk more about that in a minute. But one of the biggest factors we want people to kind of focus on, as they’re looking about nurturing a whole child, is belonging. So we want you to think about the term belonging. What does that mean? And I think that most of us have had an experience at a time in our life when we didn’t fit in, when we thought we were separate or different. It might’ve been a recent memory, it might’ve been something happened recently, or maybe distant memory.
You know, I know I moved in the middle of sixth grade. That was a really time that I really felt at odds in my new school. Sometimes, when you get braces or just being a teenager puts everybody sort of on that other piece. And if you’re comfortable putting in the chat, you don’t have to, but if you’re comfortable, when you think back to this time that you felt maybe that you weren’t in a belonging place, what kind of emotions or feelings come to mind? So we’ll just let you, if you’re comfortable putting things. So, I see outcast, anxiety, lonely, uncomfortable, scared, invisible, fear alone, anxious, scared, empty, “Something’s wrong with me.”
So you can see there’s a lot of sort of intense emotions, and I’m sure some of them are still coming in. And I’ve done this activity many times and people absolutely have a lot of strong feelings, and every single person can come up with a time they felt like they didn’t belong. And what’s very interesting about that is, when you are experiencing these emotions, when this is how you’re processing the world, it’s really hard to focus on anything else. It’s hard to think clearly. And part of that comes from what we know about Maslow’s hierarchy.
So, many of you, I’m sure are familiar with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Oh, and that’s right, and that top one doesn’t show up for some reason. I fixed it once, but it’ll come in a minute. So, we start with the things that are physiological needed. What do you need for your physiological needs? That’s food, water, shelter, warmth. If you’ve ever been in a training where you’re freezing, you have trouble paying attention to the speaker, you know? If you are not able to get access to water, you might really be unable to focus and listen. So, that’s a basic need that all human beings have.
What builds on top of that is safety. We wanna feel secure, stable, and free from fear. So, that’s the other thing that you wanna be sure that, you know, you know where you are and what door you can leave by, and those sorts of things. And then after those two kind of elemental needs are met, we start looking for connection, belonging, love. We reach out for friends, families, et cetera. And after that, we start learning and we really gain mastery of skills and abilities. And then from there, we move to hopefully self-actualization, where we become our best selves.
So, Norman Kunc is a disability advocate and an author, and he posited that when a child has a disability, the system inverts the middle two levels. So basically, you have to earn your way into belonging. So, if a child doesn’t know how to talk, we have to wait until they talk before they can come into this classroom, or we have to wait until they can walk, or we have to wait until they aren’t hitting somebody. So we have these kind of things, the conditions that we put on belonging. But for a child, all they’re aware of is, “At any minute, I have to leave. I may not be here.”
So, their energy, all their energy, is going into connection and belonging, and they’re not able to relax and learn. And so we have to realize one of our primary measures of inclusion should always be, am I fostering that sense of belonging? Am I helping the child feel that they’re connected to the rest and that they’re not alone and isolated? Because think of all those emotions that you all were putting in the chat. Those emotions make it very challenging to be open to learning. So we… There it is. Came in the wrong side.
Norman Kunc, I believe it’s in that same article, has given this quote that we really love, “When inclusive education is fully embraced, we abandon the idea that children have to become normal in order to contribute to the world. Instead, we search for and nourish the gifts that are inherent in all people. We begin to look beyond typical ways of becoming valued members of the community and, in doing so, begin to realize the achievable goal of providing all children with an authentic sense of belonging.” So, I believe they’re posting in the chat a place that you can go and access more information about Norman and hear from him himself. And I’m gonna pass it back to Ine. And I did too much.
Ine Jack:
Yes, that’s okay. Here we are. So, with the right supports, we really want everyone to realize that the segregated environment isn’t the best place for children with disabilities. They really can thrive in inclusive settings academically, socially, emotionally, with the right supports. So, these environments also just don’t benefit children with disabilities, they benefit everyone. They foster peer learning, compassion, and really a deeper sense of community. And we grow together when we have that sense of community that Linda was talking about, that sense of belonging.
Inclusion isn’t about lowering expectations, also, it’s about expanding opportunities for everyone. So, the early years are foundational. We know that. Historically, we know that from many, many different areas. So, children learn how to learn and how to relate to others during this time. That’s why it’s such a critical period. And inclusive environments can provide those models for empathy and understanding and cooperation and respect for everyone. So, children without disabilities benefit from these inclusive strategies.
Also, they can strive with the same supports, those visuals that we can put into a classroom. Routines, flexible expectations, helping peers, these are all tools and supports that just don’t benefit children with disabilities, they benefit all children. And the key elements that we really want you to understand for successful inclusion are these three things, access, participation, and supports. And like Linda mentioned briefly earlier, access doesn’t just mean being in the room. It means that we are designing an environment that has tools and ways for children to enter, that they feel welcomed, that they feel like they are a member of the community or the classroom or the environment.
Participation, again, we wanna remind the children that they need and have opportunities to engage meaningfully, and this is where we have individualized accommodations and supports to allow this participation to happen. And then those supports to ensure that they have different services that might be specialized like occupational therapy or speech, some behavioral guidance, that they’re not separate, we don’t want them to be pulled out. We want them to be integrated into everyday environment of learning.
And to just see whether this is your environment or an environment that you know that you have a child in, we have created this tool, and a link will be dropped in the chat for you to access it. And it just really helps with programs assess their ability to have access, participation, and supports for their environments. So, it’s called the I Belong! checklist. And you can just sit with this tool with your educators that you come into contact with. If you’re an educator yourself, you can think about this for your own setting. Where is access present? How does my environment support this? How do children participate? What supports are in place? What’s missing?
So, after the webinar, we really invite you to use this tool to spark that reflection and some planning, whether that is with you, yourself as an educator, with your team, or you’re gonna do this in the context of your child’s environment, in their classrooms. I’m gonna pass it back to Linda.
Linda Brault:
Thanks. I even remembered to unmute myself. Always the trick. So, as I’m sure you’re aware, behavior of young children is often cited as the barrier for inclusion. So, it’s sometimes related to the fear that the child’s behavior will be challenging in the group setting, or, you know, it may be that the other children may get hurt. So, we know that sometimes, that’s related to a disability, sometimes it’s not, but people may treat children differently or assume because of disability. So, one of the things to just keep in mind is that behavior equals communication.
That for an infant, we don’t expect them to raise their hand and say, “Excuse me, I need a bottle right now.” They’re gonna just cry or squirm or make looks at us. And that communication through behavior works for them. And what’s interesting is, we all continue to use our behavior. In fact, I say that’s why we all have emojis. If you just say to somebody, you know, “Oh, great training,” but you put a rolling eyes emoji, that means something very different than, “Great training,” and a thumbs up. So, you know, just realizing that behavior communicates a message when we don’t have language.
And even when we do have language, especially young children, they still use behavior as a way of communication. And certainly for many children, it becomes the defacto. You know, when they’re under stress, they go to behavior. And this is why we go back to the understanding development. There are a lot of behaviors that people perceive as challenging in young children, but they’re really expected and typical development. And it can be difficult because we have a very large compliance culture, that we want children to just do what we say, and that doesn’t really work for most two-year-olds. They aren’t that tuned in to what we say.
And so, we need to be thinking about that their behavior has communication and it has meaning. Yet, what adults often do is we assign adult intention. So, we might say if a child hits another child to get a toy, you know, we might say, “Oh, he’s so mean. He just wants to hurt other children.” Rather than, “Oh, he really wants that toy. He doesn’t know how to get it otherwise.” So, it’s just a little difference in that meaning. So, behavior is communication. You know, when a child does something we find annoying, we have to stop and figure out what is it that they’re trying to communicate.
Most young children are not waking up in the morning and saying, “How can I ruin my teacher’s day?” Or, “How can I make my parent really upset?” That’s not where their intentions come from. They are in the moment. Children are very responsive to their own desires and needs, and so this happens very quickly. In fact, we teach some children behavior that we then find challenging. The example I always give is whining. You know, if you are watching a group of children, and they’re all playing and you hear this kind of (babbles) in the classroom, you’re just going along. And suddenly somebody goes (screeches). And you turn and you say, “What?”
So, the whining cuts through that kind of general noise and gets your attention. Pretty soon, the kids go, “Oh, if I make that lovely whining sound, I will get their attention more quickly.” And I watched people, I watched my husband teach our children to whine, ’cause he would just not hear ’em until they did. So we have to think about some of the skills that we are annoyed by. Maybe coping skills, maybe things that children have learned work for them, maybe in their home environment.
So, we can find the behaviors challenging, but we have to figure out how do we adjust and change so that we can help the child find some other more acceptable ways to communicate that. So, if you think children as, like, little budding scientists, and I just love that image, you know, that if you watch children, that’s what they are doing. They are exploring, they’re discovering, they’re expressing, they’re testing, they’re researching, and they’re doing all sorts of really interesting things like, “What would happen if I drink out of the dog bowl?” You know?
So. I’m sure we’ve all thought of that. And if we can think about, what’s the big idea, what’s the good idea or healthy impulse behind a behavior that may in fact not be something you want to have happen? You know, they’ve seen the dog do it, they wanna do it. So, understanding that good idea or healthy impulse. If we can figure out how to honor the child’s intention, “Oh, you really love picking up these big empty boxes. I wanna make sure that your sister’s not in the way when you go to put them down.” You know. Instead of, “Ah! Don’t hurt your sister.”
So, we can respond in ways that will help children adopt the more positive behaviors, the things that we’re really looking at. So, this is my favorite one here, that children will often do something and the teacher will look over or the parent will look over and say, “Why is he making such a mess on the planter? He’s doing that, so I’ll have to clean it all up.” And what he’s thinking is, “Ooh, these rocks are fun to touch. They’re easy to move. I can move lots of them.” And I keep saying he. You know it’s all. It’s he, they, she. All sorts of children will do this.
And so, what we wanna just plant a seed for you to think about, what is the intention from the child’s perspective when they have only been on this planet for 24, 36, 40 months? What is their motivation? Because it’s not usually things like trying to manipulate us or other pieces. So we’re going to now transition to thinking about getting attention because that’s one thing that people do. Go for it.
Ine Jack:
Yeah. When we think about that getting attention, we hear that voice in our head saying, “Oh, they’re just trying to get our attention. They are doing a really good job at it, so let’s see what they need.” Because getting attention is their job. And we can always think about babies. We’re really, as a society, think it’s acceptable for babies to cry and whine and do these things, and it’s developmentally appropriate, again, up through those early years. Children really want attention for connection, they want attention for interaction, they want attention for help.
And sometimes, they just want that attention to be seen, to be heard, to be cared for, to say, “Look at me, I’m here on this planet. I’m new here.” So, we want you to think about attention as you continue with all of these things that we’ve given you today. Adults, we want you to help give children perspective, which leads for them to use strategies on how to get attention appropriately or what you deem as appropriate. So we want to support those children in seeking that attention, a connection, ways for asking for help, or ways to just ask for interaction. Because sometimes, that’s what they need also. Back to Linda.
Linda Brault:
Okay. And of course, I just moved my cursor in the wrong place. So, we want to invite you to think about intentionality with development in mind. Remember that range of developmental skills, and that social and emotional skills, they develop just like everything else. And that’s one of the things that people forget, is that they are developmental and progressing. Also, we have to keep in mind, some children look older than they are, or they may talk in a more sophisticated way and we jump to thinking that their social and emotional skills are higher than they are, and so we need to be aware of that impulse control.
I know some adults who don’t have impulse control yet. And really looking at how hard it is when a child wants to do something. So, get to know the child and the family. Are there some ways that parents are responding or how they’ve learned about communication. And effective strategies to support all children. So, the focus on the whole child, we’re hoping, helps you lead to individualizing. Strategies sometimes are implemented as “one size fits all.” And a quick example, during a group activity, everybody sits on the floor with their legs crossed. And I was brought into a program once as a behavior consultant.
And the child, they said, “This child doesn’t wanna sit in our group time.” Yeah, I’m gonna say she. She was very wiggly and, you know, distracting other children. So, they were trying all sorts of things, thinking the reason the child was doing that is they didn’t wanna be in the group time. In watching that child, it became really clear to me that I don’t think that child was physically comfortable sitting with their legs crossed, so we looked for some alternative ways for that child to sit, and all the problems went away. So, we have to be careful that sometimes, we jump to a conclusion.
And if we wanna sit back and say, “What’s really happening for that child? What’s the intention behind that behavior?” Otherwise, we might be using strategies that are not effective. So, when you keep intentionality in mind, you can use all the effective strategies you know, while considering the child’s perspective and point of view. So, we wanna leave you, and our 30 minutes are up, practical steps for tomorrow. Observe for intentions, see what children are drawn to, try to think about where they’re coming from developmentally.
Reframe behavior as communication instead of, “Why are they doing this?” Think about, “What are they trying to tell me?” And then really make some space for individual strengths. If we can offer flexible ways to have children participate meaningfully, we’re gonna be including and nurturing all the children. So, with that, we’re gonna just say one of our programs is Beginning Together, which does focus on caring for young children in inclusive settings, so I wanted to mention that. And then I think Danny’s gonna take it away.
Danny Torres:
Thank you, Linda and Ine, for a great session today. And thank you to all our participants for joining us. We really appreciate you being here. For those of you interested in learning more about the Working Together for Inclusion & Belonging work at WestEd, visit us online at cainclusion.org. That’s C-A-I-N-C-L-U-S-I-O-N dot O-R-G. And feel free to reach out to Linda and Ine via email if you have questions about the work we discussed today. You can reach Linda at [email protected], and you can reach Ine at [email protected].
And finally, you can also sign up for WestEd’s email newsletter to receive updates. Subscribe online at wested.org/subscribe, or you can scan the QR code displayed here on the screen. You can also follow us on LinkedIn and Bluesky. With that, thank you all very, very much. We’ll see you next time.