Success Stories
Using stories of success to make a greater impression with early childhood professional development providers.
“My daughter, Tess, is a joyful eight-year old girl, with an unmatched zest for life. She happily embraces life, despite the multiple challenges that she confronts on a daily basis. Tess has epilepsy, frontal lobe dysfunction, and dyspraxia, as well as delays in language, fine motor, and gross motor skills,” writes Tess’s mother.
We’ve all heard stories that start like this as a means of sharing problems that children with disabilities may face when teachers don’t understand inclusion. This case, however, is a story of success. It ends with Tess’s mother saying, “Tess’s teacher and I both learned that differences in perspective can be addressed through creative collaboration and problem-solving.”
In recent presentations, several colleagues and I have found that using stories of success seemed to make a greater impression with early childhood professional development providers. We help providers learn to use an evidence-based practice framework to make decisions. Not only do participants prefer hearing about something that worked, they like to hear about how the story is resolved.
I imagine that there are many other ways that “Tess” could be a resource for professional development. We would love to hear about your ideas or experiences.
inclusion success stories
I would also suggest that we need to help teams to embrace the fact that they may need to pull in others to assist them--these others may not be the traditional team members--they could be other children, or other vendors not necessarily disability vendors.