Teaching At-Risk Students

Until recently, many at-risk children were misdiagnosed, placed in special education classrooms, or simply neglected until they dropped out of school, unsuccessful. However, with a new focus on mainstreaming in the 1970s, which developed into the inclusive classroom movement of the 1990s, the emphasis has been on finding ways to help each child succeed.

There have been various models and techniques devised to accomplish this. There is a new emphasis on collaborative efforts, teacher planning time, team learning, hands-on projects, and new evaluative methods. Still, each year, there are children who fail in the standard classroom situation, and increasing numbers of drop-outs. The problem does not seem to be lack of knowledge, but the lack of will to implement what is known to be most effective in working with a variety of students in an inclusive classroom. Teachers resist diverse classrooms, often because they lack training and support systems. If training and support are made available to them, this would go far to reduce the problems of the at-risk student population.

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gular classroom situation have no special training in dealing with unique populations. As a consequence, they may resist having at-risk children in their classrooms, preferring to have them in special education or bilingual programs, rather than in a mainstreamed, inclusive classroom. In her attempt to address this problem, Esther Levine (1997) developed a brief action research project designed to use collaborative methods in order to create strategies to meet special needs. She was working with a school system in which most students have been upgraded and placed in regent-level classes, with only students certified as unable to complete anything but an IEP diploma exempted. In other words, classroom teachers were instantly faced with teaching groups of students that included all ability levels of regular students, along with the learning-disabled student and mainstreamed emotionally-disturbed students. The study that Levine (1997) devised was one of collaborative consultation in which teachers, resource room, and the classroom engage in a collaborative and systematic study of the student, subject, and materials and how they need to be brought together in order to promote optimum learning. The Collaborative Consultation Mod
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Approximate Word count = 5861
Approximate Pages = 23 (250 words per page)

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