Minding the gap

Last night I had a Skype call with Jill, a consultant at Inclusion Expert, and at the end of our conversation she recommended that I read a book by Daniel Sobel entitled Narrowing the Attainment Gap: A Handbook for Schools.  As this book was only published a couple of months ago, I was interested to see if I could get a Kindle download from the Amazon India store - and yes, I could.  So I downloaded it and read the first chapter yesterday.  My plan is to blog about my thoughts on this issue over the next week or so.

Daniel Sobel is an expert in the field of inclusion and his book is aimed at supporting schools leaders to understand the attainment gap in their own school context, and then give practical advice on meeting the needs of children who struggle in school, thus reducing the gap.

Here are some of the key take-aways from the introduction to the book:

• The key barriers to inclusion are time, money and attitudes
• Inclusion and the attainment gap are mostly to do with soft data (motivations and barriers for individual students and school contexts)
• The two main challenges that underlie inclusion are classroom teaching and whole-school systems.  Addressing these two things together can transform schools.

Clearly as an educator who writes a blog called Tech Transformation, I'm interested in anything that can transform the educational experience for students.  I'm very much looking forward to learning more about this important issue and hopefully getting involved in the transformation once I'm back in the UK in the summer.

Photo Credit: actionhero Flickr via Compfight cc