Talking Together

In the Community Building Series, the general goal is to create safe and supportive learning environments for students with disabilities in inclusive classes. This is done through teaching students about concepts such as respect and tolerance and providing each student a partner who can provide support during the learning process.

Talking Together is an instructional program designed for introducing the concept of learning community to students and for teaching them how to participate respectfully in class discussions.

In a research study involving 20 teachers and 377 students, results showed that students in experimental classes that had participated in Talking Together lessons knew significantly more about how to create a classroom community, participated more frequently, and engaged in fewer behaviors that would disrupt a discussion than the comparison classes.