Peer Tutoring and Support: Making Inclusive Education Work - A New Book Published by PEAK Parent Center
PEAK is excited about our newest book, Peer Tutoring and Support: Making Inclusive Education Work, a strategy-packed guide on the use of peer tutors as supports in inclusive schools! This book is co-authored by Rebecca Bond-Brooks, MA, and Elizabeth Castagnera, MA, and was developed from their first-hand experience working with students in inclusive classrooms and schools.
“I was kind of getting embarrassed because I always had, like a mother right there.People were like looking at me and stuff, and saying, “Why do you always have this person with you who is twice as old as you?” –Broer, Doyle, & Giangreco, 2005, p. 420
This quote comes from a study on perspectives of students with intellectual disabilities about their paraprofessional supports. This participant expresses a sentiment that is shared by many learners with disabilities, and it illustrates how the benefit of extra support in the inclusive classroom can too often result in a cost that many students do not want to pay: decreased social connections, status, and sense of belonging.
Since the earliest days of inclusive education, teachers have struggled with this problem. Many students need more support than a classroom teacher can provide, but how do we give them what they need without isolating them from their peers? Making them feel different? Providing too much supervision and, likely, too many cues and too much assistance?
In this read-in-a-day, user-friendly guide, Rebecca Bond-Brooks and Elizabeth Castagnera have answered these questions and more. These authors understand that when we advocate for inclusion in 2010, we cannot be merely sharing positive stories and providing a rationale for the “why” of inclusive education. Now it is critical that we provide teachers with real solutions and propose strategies, methods, and programs that are tested and that will profit not just learners with disabilities but their peers as well. In this guide, they have thoughtfully created a program that will certainly not replace the work of teachers and paraprofessionals but will artfully and effectively supplement it.
Peer Tutoring and Support: Making Inclusive Education Work will provide educators with every tool they need to propose and launch a peer tutor program. Not only do the authors provide us with many tips and tools (and checklists and charts and forms and examples) but it also comes with a rich and thoughtful curriculum to use in educating peer tutors. With content on disability history, communication diversities, and teaching and learning, the lessons they propose will not only help you to prepare your tutors but will provide students with information, concepts, and experiences that they will not find in any other course in the secondary school.
In addition to providing needed support and giving tutors a unique educational experience, the proposed program undoubtedly has social benefits for participants. I know this from personal experience as I am the product of a peer support program. In my senior year, students from a segregated facility were brought to my high school. The savvy special education teacher immediately began seeking opportunities to connect her students to their peers. She began by starting a peer support program. I became a tutor for Alison, a student with intellectual disabilities, and after many basketball games, off-campus lunch dates, and shopping excursions, we eventually became friends as well. This experience not only gave me great personal satisfaction but helped me choose the career I have today. And while I am grateful t
o Alison for inspiring my life’s work, I am more grateful for her friendship.
As a consultant, advocate, and former teacher, I know that it is not uncommon for tutoring and support relationships to result in friendships. As a tutor I spoke to recently conveyed, “This friendship means a lot to me and I learn so much more from [my tutee] than she does from me. I have learned sign language and I now know how to do art without using my hands!” It is certainly true that friendship cannot be structured, but every educator can plant the seeds for it by creating conditions that will give students opportunities to strengthen social relationships, learn about and from each other, and get and give support.
In sum, I was thrilled to get this book in my hands. Peer support has been under used for too long, and this resource is an ideal answer to the plight of the uncomfortable student I referenced in the opening paragraph as well as to any student who needs more support as well as more connection to the classmates. Hats off to Rebecca Bond-Brooks and Elizabeth Castagnera for creating a solution that both meets individual needs and builds community at the same time.
Click here to order your copy of Peer Tutoring and Support: Making Inclusive Education Work from PEAK Parent Center today!
PEAK Parent Center www.peakparent.org August 2010 SPEAKout Newsletter
Copyright 2010 © by PEAK Parent Center, Inc. All rights reserved. Permission to reproduce may be obtained from PEAK Parent Center.
The contents of this e-Newsletter were developed under a grant from the US Department of Education, #H328M110023. However, those contents do notnecessarily represent the policy of the US Department of Education, and you should not assume endorsement by the Federal Government. Project Officer, Carmen Sanchez.