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13 DON’TS of an Inclusive Learning Environment

Creating an inclusive learning environment is crucial for supporting all students, especially those who are neurodiverse.  Often, educators believe they are promoting inclusivity but still have rules, expectations, and beliefs rooted in ableism. 

To create a truly inclusive environment, you must be willing to shift your perspective, break the status quo, and recognize, accept, and validate neurodiverse experiences. 

Characteristics of an Inclusive Classroom:

Key characteristics of an inclusive classroom include:

  • Diversity and Representation: Curriculum and materials reflect a wide range of cultures, perspectives, and experiences, ensuring that every student feels represented and valued.
  • Differentiated Instruction: Teaching methods and materials are adapted to meet the varying learning styles, abilities, and paces of all students, allowing each one to access and engage with the content effectively.
  • Follows Universal Design for Learning (UDL) Framework: UDL is a teaching approach that accommodates the needs and abilities of all learners and eliminates unnecessary hurdles in the learning process. This means developing a flexible learning environment in which information is presented in multiple ways, students engage in learning in a variety of ways, and students are provided with options when demonstrating their learning. 
  • Positive Behavioral Supports: These are strategies and practices that enhance the school environment and aim to support students’ emotional, social, and academic growth. They are proactive and are designed to create a classroom culture of respect and belonging.
  • Collaborative and Reflective Practices: Teachers, support staff, and students collaborate and communicate openly. There is a continuous effort to reflect upon and adapt practices to improve student inclusivity and engagement.
  • Accessibility: Physical and digital learning spaces are accessible, ensuring that students with physical disabilities or learning differences can participate fully in classroom activities.
  • Social-Emotional Support: Emotional and social skills are actively taught and supported. The classroom environment is sensitive to the emotional and social needs of all students, creating an environment where kids feel safe to express themselves and grow.
  • Respect for Student Voice and Choice: Students are encouraged to have a say in their learning processes, and their preferences are considered when making educational decisions. This empowers students and makes the learning more relevant and engaging.

Don’ts of an Inclusive Learning Environment

The following practices are incompatible with an inclusive classroom.

1. Forcing Eye Contact

Demanding eye contact can be extremely uncomfortable for people who are autistic. It can cause anxiety or distress, making it harder for them to focus on communication.

Forcing eye contact pushes students to conform to social norms that are unnatural or uncomfortable for them. This teaches kids to override their instincts to fit in or at least blend in (teaching them to mask).

2. Withholding Comfort Items

Often, autistic children (and adults) have a comfort or security item they like to keep with them at all times. These items provide predictability, support their emotional regulation, and are a useful transition aid.

Comfort items may be a favorite toy or a sensory tool, but sometimes, they’re objects like a string or a rock. These items help reduce anxiety and provide a necessary outlet for self-regulation. 

Removing them can make students feel unsafe and unsupported. If kids feel unsafe and unsupported, they’re more likely to experience dysregulation and less likely to communicate their feelings or concerns to the adults around them.

3. Stopping Stimming

Stimming (self-stimulatory behavior) is a way for many neurodiverse individuals to manage sensory input, self-regulate, and express a range of emotions from excitement to distress.

Some examples of stimming include hand or arm flapping, rocking, jumping, playing with their hair, bouncing their leg, lining up objects, making repetitive noises, and many more.

Everyone stims in one way or another.

When you stop someone from stimming, you force them to inhibit self-regulatory behavior. Doing this will lead to more incidents of dysregulation, increased anxiety, and disruptive behaviors because you’ve taken away their coping mechanism.

The exception to this would be stimming behaviors that may cause physical harm, such as head banging, biting, skin picking, etc. In these situations, it’s essential to reach out for professional support to help the child replace the stim with one that isn’t harmful. 

4. Only Accepting Verbal Communication: 

Not all students communicate verbally. Ignoring or not facilitating other forms of communication, such as gestures, communication boards, or AAC devices, excludes non-verbal students.

Most people are happy to accept other forms of communication from someone who is non-verbal. But, what a lot of people fail to understand or honor is that sometimes, especially when distressed or experiencing anxiety, someone who is typically verbal can become unable to verbalize their thoughts and feelings. 

In this situation, it’s not a choice or willful disobedience if someone stops talking. They can’t communicate verbally. You need to accept other forms of communication and not shame or impose consequences on them because they didn’t “use their words.” 

5. Forcing Compliance: 

Prioritizing obedience over understanding leads to compliance without connection, which doesn’t equate to an inclusive or respectful learning environment.

Forced compliance teaches children that their boundaries and consent are not respected, pushing them to conform to external expectations at the expense of their own comfort and autonomy.

Shifting from forced compliance to more inclusive and respectful approaches involves understanding and addressing all students’ underlying needs and perspectives, including neurodiverse students.

Stepping away from forced compliance does not mean there are no expectations in your learning environment. 

Providing students with choices in their learning activities, environment, and ways they can express themselves helps increase their sense of control and autonomy. This empowerment can reduce resistance and non-compliance as students feel more invested in the outcomes. 

Collaborative problem solving is another strategy that focuses on working with the student to identify the problems leading to challenging behavior and collaboratively finding solutions. It respects the student’s perspective and helps them develop critical problem-solving skills.

6. Token Economies: 

These are just a method of forced compliance, a very widespread method, and they are harmful and not inclusive for many reasons. 

  • No control or consent: Token economies are typically imposed by adults and are not negotiable with the students. This means children often have no choice or consent regarding participating in these systems.
  • Uses external control: Token economies focus on external control of behavior through rewards rather than on building intrinsic motivation or connection. 
  • Lacks empathy: Token systems can be rigid, offering no room for empathy or consideration of individual circumstances. So, if a child is having a bad day and acts out, they might lose tokens or rewards, which doesn’t acknowledge or address the root cause of the behavior. This punitive aspect damages the trust and relationship between students and teachers and harms a child’s self-esteem.
  • False Equivalence with Adult Employment: Often, people justify token economies by comparing them to adult employment, but they aren’t comparable. Adults can select jobs that match their skills and have the option to change jobs if they are unhappy or if the conditions are not suitable. Children, however, can’t change their teachers or learning environments. They must follow the rules without a say, highlighting a significant imbalance in agency and control.

Educators must prioritize creating meaningful connections, building genuine relationships and understanding, not exerting control through rewards.

7. Food Rewards: 

Food rewards go hand in hand with forced compliance and token economies. However, using food as a reward can also complicate a child’s relationship with food and undermine any possible feeding therapies for picky eaters.

Food rewards can teach children that they must perform neurotypical behaviors to be rewarded rather than being valued for their authentic selves.

It can also pose a problem for children with dietary restrictions, eating disorders, and allergies.

8. Not Giving Access to Sensory Breaks: 

Regular sensory breaks are crucial for neurodiverse students to manage sensory overload and stay focused. Without these breaks, students can’t regulate their sensory needs and are more likely to be disruptive and dysregulated.

According to the CDC, 1 in 6 children have a developmental disability. Recognizing the importance of sensory breaks in educational settings is crucial, as it can significantly enhance learning conditions for these students.

Using sensory tools and equipment is not a reward, and it is not playtime. It’s an essential preventative strategy and a need for students.

9. “Planned Ignoring”: 

“Planned ignoring” is a behavioral management technique in which an adult intentionally ignores certain unwanted behaviors to reduce their occurrence. 

This strategy is often used when a behavior is considered “attention-seeking.” Using this strategy, especially with children who have developmental or emotional needs, is detrimental.

When adults use planned ignoring, they fail to provide emotional support to children who are acting out due to distress, confusion, and unmet needs. And, make no mistake, attention is a need. 

By ignoring a child’s behavior, adults miss critical opportunities to understand and address underlying issues, such as anxiety, frustration, sensory overload, and unmet emotional needs.

All planned ignoring does is teach children that their feelings and needs are not important or recognized by you. This damages the trust and relationship with the child, leads to feelings of abandonment and low self-esteem, and does nothing to help them develop the necessary self-regulation and social-emotional skills to choose different behaviors in the future. 

10. Making Them Play a Certain Way: 

Play is the basis of almost all learning in early childhood. Decades of research by professionals show us that play is an essential part of a child’s development. Through play, gross motor skills, fine motor skillssocial and emotional skills, and life skills develop from a young age.

Play should be a time for self-expression and exploration. Forcing children to play in a specific way stifles their natural creativity and self-expression, critical components of their development and learning. 

Forcing a specific type of play is also exclusionary because it does not accommodate diverse learning styles and abilities. 

11. Hand-Over-Hand: 

Hand-over-hand is a prompting technique that involves someone assisting someone in performing a task by physically directing their hands with your hands. Sometimes, this technique is used during skill acquisition as a way of providing physical support.

This technique is problematic because it does not respect the child’s personal autonomy. It can feel invasive and disempowering, reducing the child’s chances of trying a task independently.

Hand-over-hand also teaches children that adults can override their own choices about their bodies. This sends the wrong message about their right to give or deny consent, something that is very important in protecting children from abuse. 

The exception to this is circumstances where a child is actively working on a motor skill but has yet to be successful. Then, with the child’s permission, it’s okay to guide their hand to help them perform the skill correctly.

12. Expecting “Whole-Body Listening”: 

“Whole-body listening” is a popular concept in classrooms. Posters supporting this expected behavior are everywhere. In whole-body listening, kids are expected to show they are listening by sitting still, making eye contact, keeping their hands on their lap or desk, and being quiet. 

This expectation is not only unrealistic but also exclusionary because it doesn’t consider the diverse sensory needs and capabilities of all children. For kids who fidget naturally or find eye contact distressing, whole-body listening forces them to conform to a norm that doesn’t align with their personal experiences.

Kids can become so focused on ensuring that they look like they’re listening that they don’t actually hear what you’re teaching.

By setting a standard that’s only achievable for neurotypical children, “whole-body listening” alienates or penalizes those who are unable to meet these criteria. This approach can exacerbate feelings of inadequacy or anxiety among kids who can’t comply, affecting their self-esteem and participation in the classroom.

13. Expecting Students to Suppress Emotions: 

Encouraging students to hide their emotions invalidates their experiences and can hinder emotional development and self-regulation skills.

Parents and teachers will often tell kids to “calm down,” “control yourself,” “stop crying,” or say “I don’t want to hear it” when they are upset or angry. 

This encourages kids to suppress their emotions rather than express and deal with them constructively – a skill that must be taught. It prioritizes outward peace over genuine emotional engagement and resolution, teaching kids that their emotional responses to challenges or injustices are invalid or unwelcome. 

This hinders kids’ ability to develop healthy emotional regulation skills and leads to internalized emotional issues. It’s why so many adults struggle to have constructive, healthy disagreements in their personal relationships and often become avoidant or explosive. 

The most critical skills for children to learn are skills relating to understanding, coping with, expressing, and regulating their emotions in a safe, healthy way. 


An inclusive classroom is a welcoming and supportive learning environment that accommodates all students’ diverse educational, emotional, and social needs, regardless of their abilities, backgrounds, or challenges. 

If you strive to create a truly inclusive learning environment, you must eliminate the thirteen practices discussed in this article. Today’s students need educators with the empathy, compassion, and understanding necessary to make schools a better place. 

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