When I was hired in November of 2015

Mr. Ramos posed this question to the administrative team:

"How are you going to move the district from good to great."

So I reached out to Dr. Sharon Azar

an educational consultant and expert in inclusive practices

including co-teach.

We were able to partner together and provide professional learning opportunities for our

special education and general education teachers on co-teach approaches

that yield better results for our students.

I'm Dr. Sharon Azar an educational consultant working with Castleberry school district.

We've been working together for a couple of years

on the journey of becoming a more inclusive school district.

One of the first things that we did

was sit down together as a team and we

designed and implemented a co-teach training.

It's been quite an exciting journey working with Castleberry.

We've seen some great strides and great gains

in outcomes for our students with disabilities,

and I'm super excited to be part of this journey.

Hi, I'm Heather Kennedy

I'm the special education inclusion teacher

at A.V. Cato Elementary

and I've have been with the district for one year.

My name is Sarah Lowry

and I'm a 3rd grade math and science teacher at A.V. Cato

and I've been with the district for four years.

This year Castleberry ISD has started a new program to

implement inclusion and co-teach strategies in the classroom.

Miss Kennedy comes into my classroom in the mornings,

and has really helped my students with retention.

Especially on assessments, quizzes, assignments, things like that.

We've decided that we would do like a parallel teach.

And I really love this for our special education students because it allows them to stay in

the classroom with their same age peers.

And it allows them to still pick up their grade level content that they would be missing

if they were pulled out for resource.

I'm coach Galvan I'm the chemistry teacher as well as the AP chemistry teacher and this

is my second year here.

And I'm coach James I'm the inclusion teacher in both biology and chemistry, and this is

my first year at Castleberry.

Some of the benefits that we've seen is that kids have different personalities so some

adjust to coach James some adjust to me.

There's days where maybe a kid doesn't really want to interact with one of us, but he connects

with the other.

There's days where he'll be gone at a track meet or I'll be gone at a softball games and

the kids were always like where's coach James, wheres coach James and you know there's kids

who take it hard when he's gone and then I'll be like alright well he'll be here tomorrow.

They get excited and all.

It's not my classroom, it's not his classroom it's both of our classroom.

And we've done really well at that.

Yeah, and coach Galvan has done a really good job of getting through to the kids that.

Because it's not easy for coach Galvan to say "hey, I'm gonna share my classroom with you."

And he's done it with open arms and really told the kids

"Hey, this isn't just my classroom it's coach James' classroom too."

My name is Stacey Adams and I am the secondary English coordinator in Castleberry ISD.

I believe that the inclusion classroom offers the optimal opportunity for us to work as

educators to promote the success of all students.

In the inclusion setting the students should work together.

Inclusion does not mean that you have the students in the general education classroom

but they are separated and put over to the side

and working with the special ed inclusion teacher.

They are mixed in the general population working with those cooperative groups,

partnering with the general education students.

and showing their knowledge in the regular classroom.

And in an inclusion classroom it should look like

two teachers just working cooperatively together.

You should not be able to tell who the regular education teacher is

and who the special education teacher is.

it should just be that everybody is coming together and helping all students succeed.

In my opinion, inclusion is the direction we're moving in towards the future.

And teachers need to learn to embrace that with that special designed instruction

and really hone in on what makes each student rise to your level of expectation.

Through Dr. Azar's guidance and the high fidelity practices of our teachers

we have seen student progress improvement over the last year.

And I'm excited to see where the next step takes us

as we enter into the 17-18 school year.