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A program was designed to teach meta-cognitive reading comprehension skills to two high school students with learning disabilities (LD). As students with LD enter high school, they are expected to read and understand increasingly complex and detailed text. Their inability to comprehend what they read in high school has serious consequences, especially in light of the current trend toward standardized testing and its potential use as a gate to graduation. Several factors exacerbate reading comprehension difficulties during high school. The first involves the inherent "unfriendliness" of content text. Unknown words cannot be found in context and sentences can be more structurally complex. There is no identifiable story grammar with which to make connections (Keene & Zimmermann, 1997). Another factor involves the increasing acceptance and implementation of inclusive education. As more school districts practice full inclusion, students no longer have access to a small group pull-out model of instruction (Stainback & Stainback, 1995). Finally, even if students do have the opportunity to learn reading comprehension strategies in a small group setting, they may not know how to transfer the skills for use in the classroom.
The Setting
As a special educator at a small suburban high school actively working toward full inclusion, I felt the ramifications of this move on several levels. Because I now co-taught with general education teachers in their content classes, I saw the daily struggles of students with LD in classes where teachers were unsure of how to reach all types of learners. Learning to establish a co-teaching relationship with a general education teacher raised new and different issues for me. I began to explore how to define workable teaching roles and how to integrate different teaching styles (Dicker & Murawski, 2003). Overall, implementing inclusion is a complicated process, one that affects all aspects of high school life for teachers, administrators, and students (Thousand & Villa, 1995).
In spite of the challenges that inclusion offered us all, I found I enjoyed co-teaching in the classroom. I cotaught a U.S. government class with Jen, a young and enthusiastic first-year social studies teacher. Our small class consisted of three girls and nine boys between 15 and 18 years old. Although the school embraced inclusion, classes were still "leveled." Our class was a lowerlevel class...