Urban Schools Spotlight

LeadScape Principal Carol Kindt Selected for Senior Executive Director of HR

Dr. Carol Kindt, a founding member of our LeadScape community of inclusive school principals, has been selected as the new Senior Executive Director of Human Resources for Orange County Public Schools in Orlando, Florida. As principal of Chain of Lakes Middle School, Dr. Kindt has been transforming practices to support students of all backgrounds and abilities by focusing on rigor and relationships, including implementing Positive Behavioral Intervention Systems, training staff in effective strategies for English language learners, and continually increasing inclusive scheduling for students with disabilities. We applaud Orange County Public Schools' excellent judgment in selecting Carol Kindt for this position, as she brings excellent understanding of how hiring talented staff members can help to create schools where all kids can be successful.

Equity Alliance at ASU

Online learning can take place in many spaces. One of these includes online communities. The Equity Alliance at ASU has joined the online communities of Facebook and Twitter. Facebook and Twitter are both online communities of students, educators, and others that allow users to communicate and form networks with people from all over the country. Our Facebook community is named equityallianceatasu, and our Twitter community is named eQuinews. Online communities generate a unique venue for discourse that is informal and uncensored.

simSchool- Extending School Experiences to Include a Virtual Reality

What is simSchool? simSchool is an online simulated classroom experience with students from a variety of backgrounds and with a variety of characteristics. The participant plays the role of teacher by making a series of instructional decisions and responding to student comments and questions. The teacher can witness how students respond verbally and behaviorally, can review students' academic and personal backgrounds, and view their academic and affective responses to the instructional choices the teacher makes.

simSchool was designed to provide pre-service teachers with a safe environment for experimenting and practicing new techniques, especially methods of addressing different learning styles, and wide variations in academic and behavioral performance of students. The objective of a simSchool user is to align their instructional tasks and conversations with the capabilities and learning styles of the simSchool students in order to learn how to reduce barriers to learning and engender positive academic outcomes.

Spencer Foundation Grant for Inclusive Education

Alfredo J. Artiles and Elizabeth B. Kozleski have recently been awarded a small Spencer Grant for a project hosted at the Institute for Inclusive Education at Arizona State University to produce new knowledge and design an international study of equity issues in inclusive practices in countries from four continents. This project will produce a series of manuscripts identifying critical equity issues for inclusive education in each of the participating countries, as well as a culturally and historically situated paradigm of inclusive education.

Inclusive education models in countries with different historical commitment to inclusive practices are affected differently by economic opportunities, systems of stratification, policy climates, levels of investment in social policies, and educational expectations. The Institute will look at differences within countries that are considered first generation inclusive education nations (e.g., U.S., England, Germany) and second generation nations (e.g., India, Tanzania, South Africa) to examine how local educational systems' norms and regulations create disparate opportunities for groups to benefit from inclusive programs.

The project will deepen our understanding of how inclusive education is defined, studied and implemented, resulting in more equitable programs and opportunities for marginalized groups across the globe.