For a decade now, I've had the privilege of working with pre-service teachers, exploring research and practices associated with inclusive education in Australia. The resources I put together are sourced from all over - from my classroom, from mentors, families, colleagues, current research on best practice - but most of all, I share the voices of my former students, and of stories from those early days where I learned lessons that have given the intervening years their form and motivation.

When it comes time to wrap things up for a course and wish pre-service teachers well for their own careers in the classroom, I provide a lecture on my 'top ten' inclusion strategies that try to summarise the most practical takeaways for their teaching toolbox. When I used to work in Educational Outreach, I used to run through a similar list in my head when I was working with teachers to help guide positive outcomes - I'll share them with you here.

1. Practice Kindness, Patience, and an Experimental Mindset

The first question that I ask students when we begin talking about inclusive education is, What is school for?

Who is it for? What is a good life? What does success look like? Is it the same for everybody?How might these questions impact the way you teach?

Everybody comes to teaching with different ideas about the role of school and what sort of teacher they want to be. For many pre-service teachers, particularly those focused on secondary education, they believe they will be subject matter experts first and foremost. Almost immediately, this rapidly turns out to be only part of the equation - breakfast clubs, accidental counsellors, relief teachers for subjects on the other side of the school, assistive technology tinkerers, learning support team members, you name it - teaching is everything that comes your way, and that you seek out, for the wellbeing of your students.

To my mind, there is no way to prescribe a curriculum of pre-service guidance that can take all this into account, except to remind everyone to practice kindness, patience, and an experimental mindset.

Why these three things? Kindness should speak for itself, patience because students are high-dimensional systems evolving over space and time and learning about what they most need is a long-game, and an experimental mindset because there is not a framework or set of guidelines or top ten list of strategies that will answer the question of how to best support the student who has never existed before. You need to give yourself permission to go rogue and make your own discoveries.

2. Begin with Universal Design for Learning (UDL) Principles

Right on the back of saying that no framework will set you free - consistency is nothing if not giving love to hypocrisy - the accessibility mantra of 'design to the edges' and the UDL principles contained in this are such a guiding light for all lesson planning.

I tell these students, you don't need to remember all the elements of UDL - multiple means of etc, the most important thing to remember is what UDL stands for. It stands for the thought given to planning a lesson that takes all students into account from the very beginning. Avoid bolt-on solutions later, avoid always improvising an answer for the students who never achieve mastery with what you're presenting - design this success in from the start. If you give this consideration the time it deserves, then good things follow.

3. Embrace Visual Supports and Multimodal Learning

One of the differences between when I started teaching and now is just how more present 'visual' ways of teaching are in the classroom, mostly because of the proliferation of interactive whiteboards in classrooms (I say this too as a father of a child at a Steiner school with the most wonderful blackboard chalk displays, and also with no intention of putting my foot into the 'learning styles' world of visual learners..!).

A good colleague of mine used to say that if he were only allowed one resource in the classroom, it would be a visual timetable. Its benefits are clear - it provides students with an immediate sense of structure from which they can regulate their expectations of the day, they know when break times are, they know when favourite / least favourite lessons are, they know when changes occur, and a hundred other outcomes.

And that's just a visual timetable, to say nothing of every other opportunity to incorporate visual prompts, templates, examples and associated multimodal teaching resources across any given lesson. The very first 'Universal Sandpit' AI tool I created was one in which you could provide what you are teaching and it would suggest visuals that could help explicate the content - this isn't the only way in which you can use visuals, of course, but it can be a starting point: https://theuniversalsandpit.org/visual-teaching

4. Incorporate Executive Functioning Supports

If I could have learned more about anything before I started teaching, it would have been about executive functioning. It's so core to understanding what can trip students up in almost any learning experience - these days, thanks to Jennifer Winstone, I use the analogy of the administration team in the brain (I used it in my TED talk - https://youtu.be/WCqCMUAmpuc?si=cJTMU4J4uiwEyt9c) and to understand how much resourcing our administration teams have in managing all the messages being passed around all different cognitive departments.

It doesn't matter how brilliant any of your individual departments are - you might have a powerful literacy department, a fantastic logic division - but if your executive functioning, the administration team, is not operating effectively, then nothing gets done.

The key, then, to best supporting students in this space, is to understand what it looks like when students are struggling with executive functioning, and how to best support them. Good resources to help in this space can be found on the Positive Partnerships website: https://www.positivepartnerships.com.au/resources/practical-tools-information-sheets/executive-functioning

5. Recognise and Support Sensory Needs

Simple statement, a lifetime of teaching to learn - I often quote the conversations and research that Emma Goodall has provided me with over the years, particularly the foundational idea of just how important the body is when considering the student experience. We focus so much on what's in the head, on what's contained within the conscious stew of their private language, but the physical body with its interoceptive needs - how much rest it has had, how much food and water it has consumed, whether it is too hot or too cold, any aches and pains - is what will determine the most immediate conditions for educational flow.

Listen to Emma talk about interoception here:

6. Understand Communication and Social Interaction Pathways; 7. Prioritise Mental Health and Emotional Regulation; 8. Apply the Lens of Double Empathy

Forgive the tripling up of these three, but they all interrelate and talk to each other in such necessary ways, particularly given the lens of double empathy. The power dynamics that give rise to unelected social norms are increasingly well understood, and the draining and overwhelming impact these have on students should always be part of the conversation.

My guidance to pre-service teachers is to inhabit, from the very start, a neurodiversity-affirming lens that inherently respects the lived experience of all students. It isn't your role to interrogate the quote unquote reality of what students are experiencing on a sensory, social or emotional level - what is your role, is to genuinely give yourself to double empathy and adopt a position that can listen to students and recognise the validity of what they're communicating.

I sometimes use the term neuroaletheia to reiterate this to myself -

Noun. Neu-ro-a-LEE-thee-uh.

1. The internal act of recognising and accepting the unique experience of one’s own mind, independent of external disclosure or comprehension.

2. A personal unconcealment: the mind’s unveiling to itself, without necessity or expectation of sharing with others. A relief from commonality.

3. An ethical stance, recognising the sovereign truth of every mind and calling upon others to honour mental experience without imposing frameworks of interpretation, definition, or external expectation.

(From: https://theuniversalsandpit.substack.com/p/april-2025)

This, then, connects to number nine:

9. Honour Student Voice and Identity

This should be both number one and all the subsequent items on the list, but it also makes sense to me in one way to work up to it, at the top of the pyramid. Inclusion isn’t just about access - it’s about belonging. To create a space where students feel like they belong is one of the most enjoyable and fulfilling parts of being a teacher: one of my first mentors when I was doing my own practicum teaching used to co-design different classroom themes with his students that would last a whole term. They were often moderately surreal - one term, his students wanted an Under The Sea theme, so blue bedsheets were suspended from the ceiling and students created diver's masks to swim around the classroom.

Years later, I worked with a school supporting a student who found immense comfort in Super Mario video games. So, in conversation with the student, and others, they co-designed a morning sports activity that involved green cardboard pipes, star boxes, and the Mario soundtrack played softly as ambience to welcome the student, and their peers, into the classroom to commence a series of interoceptive exercise activities.

This isn't meant to designate 'student voice' only as a simple conduit between student interests and the classroom experience - we know the rich depths of understanding gained from elevating student voice and identity across all aspects of the school environment. But what I do mean to communicate here is the sense of fun that can be at the heart of all this - I wouldn't be involved in education if it didn't involve a good laugh with students. In many ways, 'honouring student voice' could be another way for me to say 'share a sense of humour' with your students (double empathy intact, of course!), in the full Nietzscean sense of humour - from The Gay Science, 'Laughter means taking a mischievous delight in the illusory'. Nothing is fixed, the foundations are shifting - schools are not compliance factories, the experts do not know what the future holds. Listen, listen, listen.

10. Collaborate and honour your own sense of what's good

You don't quite want to say 'don't let your classroom become an echo chamber' at the start of a pre-service teacher's journey into the future, but it's not a bad sentiment. We know how much collaboration is built into present-day professional development, teaching standards, and all the rest, but it still can't be overemphasised just how important it is to learn in the company of others.

And, importantly, not just the company of other teachers - yes, to collaborate with families, those across all aspects of the education spectrum, for sure, but beyond this, as well: collaborate with artists, with writers, with musicians, with philosophers, with those in corporate industries, with local mentors. Learn in the company of diverse communities outside your own, push outside the education bubble (and definitely don't trick yourself into believing that the most prevalent posters on LinkedIn know what they're talking about..!) and, when you've done all that, sit quietly and think about what you believe. To collaborate is critically necessary, but to sit and honour your own truth must be part of the journey.

I sometimes reference Hermann Hesse, one of my earliest teachers, and my own take on his message of self-truth, in this regard:

https://www.wrenasmir.com/hesse

And, that's probably enough to keep in a note somewhere, to return to for a minute or two during an afternoon staff meeting while everyone is pulling up a chair, when questions of inclusion rise up and down in the midst of everything else contained in a teacher's day.