Dr. Lindy Crawford

For Dr. Lindy Crawford, no distance is too far to travel when it comes to education. Crawford recently traveled 10,000 miles to the Maldives to present a multi-day workshop on the meaningful inclusion of students with special needs.

The invitation developed last April when Crawford provided the keynote presentation at a special education conference in Dubai. There she met special education leaders from Asia and the Middle East, including Ifham Hussein, director of the Maldives Autism Association.

“Hussein works tirelessly to educate teachers in her small nation about the benefits of inclusive education,” said Crawford. “Only recently have these countries begun to include students with special needs with typically performing students in public school classrooms, and her invitation to present at this international workshop was an honor for me.”

In the workshop, Creating Inclusive Learning Environments: Meeting the Needs of All Students, Crawford addressed ways for educators to create a positive classroom environment so all students can learn; design of instruction so students do learn; and design of assessments to measure student learning.

Crawford is a professor of special education and the Ann Jones Endowed Chair in Special Education. Additionally, she is the director of the Alice Neeley Special Education Research and Service Institute and conducts research on the validity of large-scale assessments of students with and without disabilities, use of curriculum-based measures in the classroom, and mathematic interventions for low-performing students.

The ANSERS Institute, part of the College of Education, works in conjunction with the TCU laboratory schools–Starpoint and KinderFrogs–to create and coordinate professional development opportunities for local teachers, informational sessions for parents and learning experiences for students interested in becoming special education teachers.