This is a pretty impressive study by Petr Svojanovský and colleagues, published in Learning and Instruction, where you shouldn’t get too hung up on the sample size. It seems relatively small, with 2 schools, 42 students, 6 teachers, and 2 teaching assistants. But the researchers wanted to know how teachers who are strong in inclusive education handle the differences among all students in their classrooms, and to this end, they chose an ethnographic approach.

In concrete terms, this meant following everyone for a full school year, with weekly research, 290 hours of observation, 167 interviews, and written material from all 42 students. They observed a total of 218 hours of lessons and another 72 hours of other school activities. That is pretty exhaustive, in several senses of the word!

How did they find the schools? They started with 24 Czech demonstration schools that work with a teacher education programme. Based on inspection reports, assessments by people from the university, and assessments from within the schools themselves, they selected the two schools that scored highest on differentiation and individualisation. They then selected one class in each school.

What did they want to find out in such an intensive way? Besides mapping what the teachers did, they wanted to reconstruct, for each individual student, which characteristics both the student and the teachers considered important for learning. In the next step, they linked this information to what the teachers were actually doing. To know the latter, the researchers combined observations, different types of interviews, and students’ work. You have to admit, this is rather different from the results of a survey asking, “Do you differentiate in your lessons?”

The researchers, by the way, did not start with a list of predetermined student types. From the enormous amount of material they collected, five broad categories of characteristics eventually emerged that mattered for learning:

• performance level and pace,
• engagement,
• classroom relationships,
• personal characteristics,
• special educational needs and socio-cultural disadvantage.

That last category in particular is interesting. A diagnosis or background characteristic certainly doesn’t disappear, but it is only one part of a much broader learning profile. The researchers point out, for example, that official diagnoses mainly describe needs, whereas in everyday practice teachers also see a range of other strengths and needs in students that may not necessarily align with their label. A child is more than a diagnosis, you know.

So what did these highly inclusive teachers actually do in practice? The researchers found 43 different strategies, which they again grouped into five broad categories:

• differentiating according to performance level,
• supporting engagement,
• creating a safe classroom environment,
• determining and supporting learning progress,
• collaborating with a teaching assistant.

This sounds remarkably unremarkable. Giving students more time. Offering additional and/or more difficult assignments. Activating prior knowledge. Using peer learning. Checking whether students understand something. Explaining it again. Giving feedback. Scaffolding. Making sure students experience success. Anyone spotted anything spectacular?

The researchers went looking for inclusive education and found a striking number of things we also know from research on simply good teaching. The authors themselves point to this overlap between research on inclusive practices and research on generally effective teaching strategies. This is also in line with what both Fuchs and colleagues and Van Herwege and colleagues found using different research methods.

If you zoom in on one student in this study, Helena, you can nicely see what this actually means in practice. She is a Ukrainian refugee. In mathematics and geography, she works quickly. When she finishes, she therefore gets additional assignments. But in Czech, her limited knowledge of the language creates challenges. In this case, the teacher needs to check more carefully whether Helena understands the task, explain it again when necessary, and provide Helena with additional support outside the lesson. The same student therefore needs extra challenge at one moment and extra support at another. A label such as “Ukrainian refugee” doesn’t tell you that.

You have to admit that this is a different kind of research from a typical effect study. There is no causal claim and no information about average classroom practice. The strength of this study, in my view, lies precisely in its detailed look at what happens when teachers try to address all the differences in a classroom. And what we learn is that inclusive education does not have to mean that every student constantly gets their own individual lesson. For these teachers, it mainly meant looking very carefully at who is in front of you, what that student needs at that particular moment in order to learn, and responding to that in a targeted way.