Your Students, My Students, Our Students examines shared responsibility for learners across general and special education. Jung, Frey, Fisher, and Kroener organize their argument around changes to special education roles, placement, instruction, community, and leadership. School examples and reflection activities address K-12 teachers, administrators, and support teams working on equitable inclusion.
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The authors ask schools to reconsider how separate professional roles and placement decisions shape students' access to learning. Their five proposed disruptions address the purpose of special education, student placement, instruction and assessment, school community, and leadership. Inclusion is discussed as an organizational responsibility involving all adults who work with learners.
Examples show special educators as collaborative partners and explore accessible instruction, assessment of growth, and participation in grade-level content. Reflection questions and action steps provide material for individual reading and staff discussion. Classroom teachers, school leaders, and support personnel can use the book to examine the assumptions behind current arrangements and consider how collaboration relates to the opportunities available to students with differing needs.
Inclusion fails when it is left to one department, the authors argue. Jung, Frey, Fisher and Kroener propose five disruptions that move shared responsibility across general and special education, from the purpose of services to placement, instruction, community and leadership, so that every adult who works with a learner owns the outcome.
The book's argument is structural: separate roles and separate rooms quietly decide which students reach grade-level content. Five disruptions take in why special education exists, where students are placed, how teaching and assessment work, what community means, and the role of leadership. Across them, special educators appear as collaborative partners rather than gatekeepers, and instruction is judged by access and growth rather than labels. Assessment of growth and participation in the general curriculum recur as the measures of whether inclusion is real. Reflection questions and action steps make the material usable in staff meetings, and examples keep the discussion tied to K-12 practice.
The title states the thesis: a student belongs to the whole school, not to whichever adult is formally assigned. The authors argue that when ownership is divided by role, some learners fall into the gap between general and special education. Shared responsibility is presented as an organizational commitment rather than a sentiment.
The first disruption asks what special education is for. If its purpose is access to the general curriculum, then services should be judged by whether they deliver that access. The question unsettles arrangements that have become habitual and redirects attention from eligibility to outcome.
Where a student is taught determines what a student can reach. The text examines placement decisions as access decisions, asking whether separate settings expand or restrict opportunity. The point is not that one setting always wins, but that placement should follow from the learning a student needs rather than from convenience or tradition.
Accessible instruction and honest assessment are treated as a pair. If lessons are designed for a range of learners and assessment tracks growth rather than fixed labels, then progress becomes visible. The authors connect this to participation in grade-level content, so that support does not become a parallel, watered-down track.
Inclusion is also a matter of school community: whether students share spaces, routines and relationships. The book treats belonging as an outcome that leadership must cultivate, not something that follows automatically from placement. Community is where the abstract language of equity becomes visible to students day to day.
The last disruption places the burden on leadership: schedules, staffing and expectations either enable collaboration or prevent it. Special educators as partners and general educators as co-designers require time and structures that only leaders can create. The text closes by turning reflection into action steps for staff discussion.
K-12 teachers, administrators, special educators and support teams working on inclusive practice and shared responsibility.
Edition, audience, and study-guide details at a glance.
Your Students, My Students, Our Students examines shared responsibility for learners across general and special education. Jung, Frey, Fisher, and Kroener organize their argument around changes to special education roles, placement, instruction, community, and leadership. School examples and reflection activities address K-12 teachers, administrators, and support teams working on equitable inclusion.
K-12 teachers, administrators, special educators and support teams working on inclusive practice and shared responsibility.
Yes. This page includes an original study guide with six thematic sections, key takeaways, and a topic map for structured reading.
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