Are Special Education Teachers Trained

This first blog post is a review of the journal article "Special education trainee teachers’ perceptions of their professional world: motives, roles, and expectations from teacher training" as published by United Kingdom: Taylor and Francis in, Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice, Feb 2017, Vol. 32, Issue 2, pg. 153-170.

Summary:

The research focused on the responses of ninety-three students, who are training to be special education professionals.

Bella Gavish’s article digs into three separate research questions.

1. What are their motives for joining the profession?

2. How do they perceive the role of the special education teacher?

3. What are their expectations from teacher training?

The article goes into full detail on what motivates them for entering the special education profession. I was very interested in exploring the second and third question that was studied. The first question is important to research because by studying one's motivation for joining the profession, it may relate to how special education teachers value different factors of their position. Also, I am curious on the overall expectations for training special education teachers.

The article discusses a huge shift in the approach of teaching students with special education needs. As discussed in the article, from the mid 1970’s to now, special education has shifted from a medical approach to a social approach. Currently, special education professionals are expected to be leaders of inclusion in their placement.

Inclusion promotes “meeting the needs of all students and respects all kinds of differences – gender, ethnic, linguistic, socioeconomic, intellectual, physical health, and others. It aims to ensure that all students will have equal access to an education that will prepare them for life in the community and in society, and to try to change the system so that it meets the needs of all the children, in contrast to the perception that requires the child change in order to meet the system’s requirements” (p. 155). The article also shares the perception of special education professionals starting with the mindset that they will be working in a “closed environment,” (p. 168). A closed environment means that they work primarily on their own, with little to no help from their colleagues.

The article continues to discuss the revolution in education with special educators promoting inclusion for their students. The role of the special education teacher has shifted, from their positions of being a homeroom teacher, to being a support teacher in the general education classroom. With this shift, “Special education teachers were required to achieve more demanding aims in response to the increasing range of cultures, languages, styles of learning, disorders, and skills; to have a richer repertoire of strategies” (p. 156). Gavish therefore claims there is no denying that the task of the special education teacher has increased with the addition of the inclusion factor for students.

The question I find most appropriate in regard to this blog is the last question, of what training do special education teachers require? With such huge changes in the profession, are their changes in the training of our teachers? The article states special education teachers need to be able to find skills that best support their advancement in their education. They need to be able to evaluate behavior, become familiar and cope with a broad range of disabilities, and to be able to distinguish between “normal” and “abnormal” development. Gavish concludes that training parents to support and help with the interventions that special educators determine are appropriate.


Reflection:

While reading this article, I wanted to fully understand what most special education teachers expect to be focusing on. When you have a focus in mind, it becomes part of your motivation. Understanding the overall expectations of special education teachers is important to help me understand what gaps there are in supporting a change in population. When I talk to teachers who have twenty years of experience over me, a lot of our conversations have a common theme of change. They talk about what expectations were, how they have changed, what has improved, and what they feel still needs improvement. The purpose of my research is to improve the common problem being discussed currently, how do I evaluate English Language Learners?

When you read about special education teachers coming into their profession thinking that they will be working in a “closed environment,” you have to realize that the lack of collaboration will affect their performance. There are many teachers that have shared their experiences with me of being completely isolated in their school, that even the principal never came into the room for corrective feedback. It has become very standard in education that collaboration of teachers help support the student most effectively. This is why IEP meetings involve a team and why response to intervention (RTI) and multi-tiered support systems (MTSS) were put in place. These teams are created to put people with different perspectives and varied professional expertise together to prevent the assumption of disabilities and to find a personalized approach for each student. Do special education teachers use this same collaboration approach when having to identify students they do not have the expertise in all of the factors that these students bring to their case? If many special education professionals feel that they work in isolated environments, how can we expect that they will collaborate with an ELL teacher? As the rise of culture, ethnicity, and language are becoming more prevalent in the classroom, and in the special education realm, we need to focus on developing our teachers to break that barrier with the ELL teacher and find how our interventions relate. The ELL teacher at the school I currently work at said that the first time a special education teacher approached her about a student of hers was in 2017, and she has taught for twenty-two years at the same school. That is my personal experience, but after reading through this article, it makes me feel that more professionals have the same experience.

About

          A teacher's main priority is to do what is best for the student. All educators focus on improving their instructional strategies to meet the needs of their students. I am an elementary school Special Education teacher, who works primarily in moderate needs. Within my own school district, there has been a rise in the number of English Language Learners in Special Education programs, giving us a disproportionate ratio. If we are not distinguishing correctly between students who have a learning disability and those who do not know the language, then we are doing a disservice to our students. If we do not understand the reasoning behind their academic challenges, we are not going to be able to serve them the most appropriate instruction. Throughout my blog, I will explore the over-representation of English Language Learners in Special Education programs and the assessment strategies associated with these students.