Wondering How You Could Improve Educational Inclusion?
This 10-minute conversation with Dr. Rachel Juergensen might change how you think about inclusion and getting better at it.
How effective are the inclusive practices in your school right now? How do you know? What don’t you know? What could you do tomorrow to improve things, whatever your current role?
Take the Navigator App - it’s a web app. Nothing to download!
Get your Inclusion Navigator Score in 10 minutes!
Then choose your priority Pathway. What do you want to improve first?
Get 3 action steps - options you could start tomorrow.
In this conversation, we unpack the Joyful Inclusion Navigator App—a simple self-check that turns your answers into a powerful radar graph showing exactly where you stand.
But it doesn’t stop at insight - you’ll get three tailored action steps based on your role, so you know what to do next.
With eight different stakeholders shaping inclusion, this tool helps you see your part clearly - and act on it immediately.
Watch the video, find your pathway, and take your first step toward making inclusion work for everybody.
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Hi, Rachel. I haven't seen you in a while and I'm so excited to be back in touch with you. I thought we'd talk today about the new Joyful Inclusion Navigator app.
Sounds good.
Okay. How are things going at the university?
Things are going great. Busy as always, but moving right along.
Well, they're lucky to have you.
Thank you.
So, the here's the question that I got when I was talking to people about the app. They said, "Why did you create it?" And I thought, "Well, first of all, it's a challenge and I wanted to try, you know, could I create my own app?"
Yeah.
So, there was the challenge to do it, but that I had a bigger vision, but I think you see what that is, too.
Yeah. I think it's about making what inclusion is and how we define inclusion accessible and helping people see kind of where they're at.
So, we always talk about, you know, using data to make decisions for our students, but we can do that as educators, too. So, it's a way to really collect this data and then use that data for improvement in the same way that we do in our classrooms and in our schools and in our districts.
That's a great way of thinking about it. I wouldn't have said it quite like that, but I like what you just said.
What I'm thinking is. there are so many people out there that are part of inclusion from their perspective. In fact, we looked at eight different stakeholders. Everything from special and general ed teachers to principals to parents to college professors to - who am I forgetting? Did I say principals? There are eight stakeholders.
Anyway, and they're like, "Well, what can I do about inclusion?" And so, the app is designed as a self-diagnostic tool that they would complete, answer some questions. They would get a radar graph, which is really cool. And they get some next steps, what they could do to improve, expand inclusion, what from their perspective.
Yeah, to add to that, I just want to say I think too a lot of times in education or just in life in general, we say we're doing something, but this app really helps you see exactly how you are or aren't doing it.
And then again, like next steps for continuing in that growth process.
Yeah. Because we don't know what we don't know. Like we think what we're doing is - is this best practice? I don't know. It seems to be working, but maybe there's another way to look at it.
So it gives people a chance - kind of secretly - to you know to do like how am I doing?
Mhm. So I think too - sorry - it's it's a self assessment, right? So it's not someone else coming in and saying, "This is how I think you're doing." It's a self-reflection, a self assessment, which I think is important as educators that we take time to do that that self assessment and reflection.
Right. Somebody asked me if if this is for students, too. And I think that's the next version. We'll do one, but the one for students has to look a little different than one for adults. So, so that's down the road.
When I was just beginning the process of what in the world this app would look like, um, how it would be designed, I came to you because you are the Joyful Inclusion Evaluator and I like - how do we create something that's not just somebody's good idea, but is really grounded in something and you gave us some really good advice. You want to share?
Yeah. So, first of all, Amy, you always come with the most amazing ideas and it always gets my wheels spinning.
So, as soon as you came to me with this idea for the app, and it was about kind of like, you know, self assessing where you are with inclusion and then next steps, it had me thinking about how to think about making that a reliable and valid kind of like measure for our own um assessment on inclusion.
And so I thought about this method, the Delphi method, where you really get together a group of experts, a panel of experts from all different places with all different kinds of backgrounds and experiences and expertise.
And that's really what this method is about is really putting together this panel of experts and then going through several rounds of looking at um the survey, looking at the questions, and then providing feedback so that they get to a final place where it's you know a product that you would want to put out and what you ended up using within the app.
Yeah, I was excited that we had 14 different stakeholders and most of them did the the review from more than one point of view. Like, “I was a general a teacher and and now I'm a principal so I'll do those two,” or “I'm a parent and I'm a college professor”. So we had you know them looking from different perspectives and that their feedback was amazing.
Yeah. And it's just this method is really cool because it's the the feedback that helps inform the next version that the expert panel is looking at. And you go through several - I think you ended up going through two rounds of feedback from um all of the members of your panel. And it's it's that feedback and those different rounds of iterations and improving the the wording and the the questions and taking out questions and making sure we have the questions that are solid that really make this this framework or this method um really valuable when you're creating something like this app.
What was really interesting in that process was sometimes somebody would make a comment about a particular word and they were talking just about the survey for that one stakeholder. But then I looked to see if that word showed up with other stakeholders and I used their feedback to revise in other places. So it that was a really valuable whole experience.
So the app is published.
Yay!
Link down below and I'm really excited as the early um the early stages are coming in.
What happens is it's you don't have to download anything. It's a web app. You just go to the site, put in a little bit of information about yourself and then choose which stakeholder you are and it will give you - you answer some questions. It gives you a radar graph and it gives you some recommendations.
Well, you choose one one stakeholder pathway because we can't make changes in five different areas.
So, you pick one, one pathway and then it will give you three suggestions.
So what are you what are you thinking for the future as we look forward to - first of all people will get great ideas those three ideas hopefully they will move forward and improve inclusion just a little bit where they are.
Yeah I mean and I can say I tested it out last week and even as someone who was part of this process, even me seeing the ideas I was like, “Okay yeah this is something that I need to work on in my you know when I'm working on preparing teachers.”
So, yeah, I mean, I think moving forward, not only is it a good self-reflection tool and little um, you know, tidbits of things that teachers or educators or principals or whatever stakeholder group you're a part of can use to improve your inclusive practices. You know, I think there's honestly the possibilities are endless with this data.
So you know disaggregating it by stakeholder group and seeing you know what areas - is it collaboration, is it instruction that you know is a strength or an area for improvement, but also it could be, I think it could be used with um in a professional development session at a at a school level.
So, like there's so many different ways to use it, not just at the individual level, but maybe in a small group, in a professional learning community, in a grade level meeting, in a district-wide meeting. I think truly the possibilities are endless.
And the way that you've designed it with action steps makes it not just something that you're doing, but you're able to really take something from it and move forward so that you can be better when it comes to inclusion and supporting your students with disabilities.
So I'm thinking we will - we have this dashboard so we can look at the trends and we can say, “Gee, most of the people who were general ed teachers said this was a an issue” and then we could say, “What do we - is this a blog we could write or there's materials is this a presentation that we could do and it can be comparing one state with another for different stakeholders.”
Oh yeah, interesting.
I mean, there's so many fun things that we could do with it. Um, if a school wants to do it across their whole faculty, then we could find all of the responses that came from that school and package it for them um and give them anonymous data. They won't know who said what.
But I'm really excited about the possibilities and go.
So, as we said, there is a link down below and um go to navigator.joyfulinclusion.com
and let us know your feedback.
Oh, you know what? We could also send a message out because we'll have their email.
We could also send a message out and say like a month from now or two months from now, “What did you do? What did you try?”
Yes. Yeah. I like that.
Really cool. They don't have to answer.
Yeah. Yeah.
Little nudge like that might get them in action if or maybe they will have some amazing stories. Maybe I could interview them on this blog.
That would be really cool because then you see the true impact of implementation from what you learned from your um your report from the app.
So, well, thanks for talking with me. I know you stepped out of a meeting to have this little conversation. I won't tell.
It's all good. Anytime.
Okay. Bye for now.
Bye. Thank you.
