Barriers to the implementation of specialized reading instruction in secondary co-taught classrooms: an exploratory study

ABSTRACT

This exploratory research underscores Bandura’s social learning theory on collective agency to investigate co-teaching partners’ collaboration regarding reading instruction for students with disabilities. Students whose Individualized Education Programs stipulate reading are dependent on special educators to deliver such instruction. In the current research, we investigate barriers to implementation of specialized reading instruction in co-taught classes. One hundred seven secondary special education co-teachers across the United States, who primarily teach students with learning disabilities, responded to a questionnaire about their co-teaching experiences and delivery of specialized reading instruction. Emphasizing the impact that co-planning has on barriers to the implementation of reading, our results indicate the moderating role of special educators’ perceived co-teaching benefits. Empirical findings are discussed, and implications for research and practice are offered.     

What Science Offers Teachers of Reading

Although educators may teach well without knowledge of scientific research, students obtain greater benefits from knowledgeable teachers who ensure that scientific research is incorporated into their instruction. In this paper, scientific findings and practical implications are compared and some suggestions to close the gap between science and practice are provided. In this article we examine what science offers general and special educators who teach reading. We review some well‐established scientific findings about reading and their practical implications, not only for children with reading disabilities, but for other children as well. In addition, we consider some broader ways that science may be useful to educators. We conclude with some suggestions for individual teachers interested in becoming more familiar with scientific research on reading.     

A meta-synthesis of co-teaching students with and without disabilities

A meta-synthesis of qualitative research was conducted on co-teaching by general and special educators working with students with and without disabilities in primary and secondary general education classrooms. We sought to update the Scruggs et al., 2007 meta-synthesis to discern new knowledge, including co-teaching's impact on students and teachers. Although challenges are identified, co-teachers perceive that co-teaching can enhance their and their students' learning. Findings suggest that school personnel, researchers and policymakers can consider co-teaching as a learning context for co-teachers as well as a dynamic framework that can potentially foster effective instruction for all students in the co-taught classroom.     

Science in the schoolhouse: the critical role of the school leader

School-level administrative support has been identified as an essential component of programs that promote research to practice. In this discussion, I address the critical role that school leaders play in supporting special educators and ensuring effective instruction for students with learning disabilities. Emphasis is placed on the need for teachers to be supported by administrators who are knowledgeable about special education and for administrators to receive the preparation and guidance they require to support science in contemporary schools.     

Stimulating tensions in special education teachers' figured world: an approach toward inclusive education

I examine special educators’ professional identity emergence and tensions within a researcher-facilitated teacher learning community. I introduced tools to evoke and challenge inequities in educational systems and via which participants examined and planned general education instruction for students with dis/abilities. Initially, professional identity, or figured world, emerged as performance of pathologising and relatedly, remediating students. Over time, participants expressed tensions as they engaged tools to examine structural limitations and design more universally accessible instruction; figured worlds shifted to critical sense-making about their positioning by general education colleagues and school structural barriers, and procedural identity performance tied to investigating student assets. Findings suggest potential for purposefully designed artefacts to mediate special educators’ development as (more) inclusive educators.     

Response to Intervention: Following Three Reading Recovery Children on Their Individual Paths to Becoming Literate

Research Findings: In the United States a shift has occurred in how children are identified for long-term special education services. Since 2004, U.S. funding for special education services has included a provision for early intervention services, focusing on the importance of providing supplemental instructional opportunities to students who are not successful in learning from the core classroom instruction. Commonly referred to as response to intervention, this model involves educators monitoring how well students respond to intervention instruction, with referral for special education services for those who make little progress. Practice or Policy: In this article, we propose that intervention instruction should be responsive to the learner as well as focus on how well the learner responds to the intervention. Given that contextual circumstances, including instructional experiences, impact the child's literacy achievement, providing intervention instruction that is contingent upon each child's literacy strengths and needs is the best way to ensure each child's successful response to intervention instruction. As an example of an intervention using responsive instruction, this article describes different instructional approaches provided by Reading Recovery teachers with 3 children who were initially the lowest readers and writers in their classes. All 3 children were able to progress to on-grade-level reading and writing proficiency as a result of the intervention.     

A comparison of Korean and American elementary educators’ self-determination practices

Korean general and special educators (n = 229) and American general and special educators (n = 348) were surveyed to explore (a) their perceptions of the importance of self-determination for students with disabilities, (b) how frequently they teach it, (c) the relationship between their perception of the importance of teaching self-determination and how often they teach it, and (d) the barriers they perceive that inhibit them from teaching it. American general and special educators attached higher importance to self-determination instruction than their Korean counterparts, but Korean educators taught self-determination skills to their students with disabilities more often than American educators did. There was greater incongruence between the value American educators placed on promoting self-determination and the time they devoted to teaching it than there was for Korean educators. Educators of both countries shared some perceived barriers to promoting self-determination (e.g., communication difficulty, students were too young, and other more urgent instructional needs), but each group cited barriers the other did not (e.g., teacher lacked sufficient skill, difficult to empathize with student, and no instructional latitude). Limitations and implications are discussed along with suggestions for future research.     

Do Research Findings Apply to My Students? Examining Study Samples and Sampling

Special educators are urged to use research findings to inform their instruction in order to improve student outcomes. However, it can be difficult to tell whether and how research findings apply to one's own students. In this article, we discuss how special educators can consider the samples and the sampling methods in studies to examine the relevance of research findings for their students. We describe two approaches for examining the degree to which research findings apply to one's students—the classical generalization model and the case‐to‐case transfer model. We also note additional factors and caveats to consider when evaluating the applicability of research findings, examine the implications of samples and sampling in two research studies, and provide a take‐away message that educators should determine the relevance of research findings for their own students by examining studies’ samples and the sampling methods.     

All Children Can Learn To Read: Critical Care for the Prevention of Reading Failure

In this article, we present the position that students with special needs, regardless of causation, share the same basic needs for literacy instruction. What sets special needs learners apart from higher performing learners is that systematic, explicit instruction appears to be critical rather than merely beneficial and that special needs students require more instructional time and opportunity to practice reading. The need for greater explicitness and time intensity does not, however, change the content of what composes good literacy instruction. We take the position that general education should maintain primary responsibility for literacy education for all children, with special educators and reading specialists providing instructional support and, if necessary, additional instructional intensity and practice opportunities. Obstacles to providing quality literacy instruction are examined, and a school-based case study in which these obstacles have been largely overcome are presented.     

Elevating Instruction for Secondary‐School Students with Learning Disabilities by Demystifying the Highly Qualified Subject Matter Requirement

The highly qualified mandate of the No Child Left Behind Act and Individuals with Disabilities Education Act has created unnecessary confusion, particularly among secondary‐school special educators and administrators with respect to instruction in core academic subjects. The pursuit of compliance solutions to meet this requirement has generally distracted stakeholders from re‐examining the mission of secondary‐school special education for students with learning disabilities (LD). Because effective subject matter instruction within inclusive classrooms is dependent upon general and special educators capitalizing on each other's areas of expertise, the necessity of requiring special educators to possess a comparable level of subject matter knowledge as the general educator is not only of questionable merit, but often counterproductive. This article poses and examines several fundamental philosophical questions related to the delivery of core academic subject matter to students with LD.     

We Talk About It,But Do They Get It?

This article reports on the last of a series of iterative research studies involving students with learning disabilities in reform mathematics classrooms at the intermediate grade levels. This study reports the findings from a larger, year‐long case study that focused on ways to include students with learning disabilities and other students who are at risk for special education services in classwide discussions of problem solving. The data reported in this article detail the changes in teacher and student discourse over a nine‐week period in one classroom. Sources of data for this study included videotapes, audiotapes, and informal interviews with the teacher, a paraprofessional, and students. A quantitative analysis of the results indicates clear patterns of change in teacher and student discourse. Nonetheless, intentional efforts to include target students in the whole‐class discussions yielded instructional dilemmas that are underdescribed in the mathematics reform literature. Findings from this study have implications for special educators interested in mathematical problem solving, as well as math reformers who value the role of classroom discourse in daily instruction.     

Video Modeling and Explicit Instruction: A Comparison of Strategies for Teaching Mathematics to Students with Learning Disabilities

As classrooms begin to adopt a greater number of digital technologies such as computers and tablets, it is important for educators to understand how effective such tools can be in aiding in the delivery of instruction to students who struggle in mathematics, such as those identified with a learning disability in mathematics. One digital‐based instructional strategy with a limited research base for students with a learning disability is video modeling. Through a single subject alternating treatments design, this study compared the use of video modeling to face‐to‐face explicit instruction for teaching geometry word problems to three secondary students with a learning disability in mathematics. Across 10 sessions of intervention, all three students demonstrated improved performance on all dependent variables with both interventions, while the explicit instruction condition produced slightly greater accuracy scores for two of the three students. The results and their implications for the field of mathematics are discussed.     

What Influences the Quality of Research: Findings from an Editorial Management Database

Abstract

This paper details the use of the Internet by educators and parents of students with disabilities, software tools that make the Internet accessible to students with special needs, and the state of Web-based instruction for these students. Issues are discussed that relate to current research with students with various disabilities as well as the scarcity of research with special education students using the Internet.     

School district administrators’ perspectives on the professional activities and influence of special educators in Norway and Sweden

The purpose of this study is to investigate school district administrators' perspectives concerning the professional activities and influence of special educators in Norway (n?=?266) and Sweden (n?=?290). We examine three themes drawn from a survey of practices and policies in each country: (a) the organisational arrangements in which special educators work, (b) perceived changes in special educators' activities, and (c) ratings of special educators' influence on the content of instruction and the availability of resources for children with special needs. Findings suggest that special educators frequently work in teams, function largely as advisors, and spend less time working with individual students than in previous years. There appears to be a more pronounced increase in special educators’ time devoted to advising and documentation in Sweden than in Norway. Swedish special educators were also more frequently described as working in multidisciplinary teams. Participants in both countries rated the influence of special educators significantly higher than that of parents and teachers on the availability and distribution of resources; and significantly higher than politicians, public officials, teachers, and parents with regard to influence over the content of instruction. We discuss these findings in relation to the goals and development of inclusive education in Scandinavia.     

Special educators’ knowledge of high-leverage practices: Construction of a pedagogical content knowledge measure

Teachers who draw upon specialized knowledge in their instructional practice can be drivers of positive student outcomes, especially for students classified as having special educational needs. Although there are generally agreed upon characteristics of high-quality instruction that can be measured with well-constructed instruments (e.g., Danielson, 2011), supporting the development of teachers with specialized credentials (e.g., special education teachers)—whose instructional practice is grounded in a qualitatively different professional expertise—necessitates measurement tools that reflect that unique practice. Given the field’s recent agreement that special educators should possess deep knowledge of 22 High-Leverage Practices, there is a need for well-constructed tests that can be interpreted to support teacher capacity building in this body of knowledge. This study describes the construction of the Teacher Knowledge of HLPs, an instrument that measures special educators’ knowledge of High-Leverage Practices, and initial validity evidence for instrument use.     

Subskill mastery among elementary and middle school students at risk in mathematics

In the present study, we evaluated the number of attempts required to master specific subskills for working with whole and rational numbers among students at risk for math difficulties. Participants included a subset of students in grades four through eight receiving supplemental math support. Mastery—defined as 85% correct on short tests—was assessed following instruction for each subskill. Using survival analysis, we evaluated the number of attempts required to reach a .50 and a .90 probability of mastery on each subskill. The number of required attempts varied across subskills, with many subskills requiring more than one attempt to demonstrate mastery. Further, some of the most difficult content was aligned with curricular standards below students’ grade level. Thus, among students identified for supplemental support, it may be worthwhile to remediate select subskills that fall outside of the grade‐level curriculum before providing additional instruction on grade‐level content. Implications for math subskill assessment and remediation are discussed along with limitations and directions for future research.     

Changing What We Might Have Done on Our Own: Improving Classroom Culture and Learning through Teacher Collaboration

Abstract

Student achievement is not always the equivalent of what students learn, especially when educators use their feedback to shape daily instruction. When students share their classroom experiences, we can determine better ways to create interdisciplinary partnerships, manage workload, enhance historical understandings, and communicate conclusions. Being able to trust in what students are doing in class, how well they are doing it, and what they will be able to do motivated the authors, who are two veteran educators, to reevaluate when their own teaching seemed most effective. What they discovered is incongruent with the traditional delivery of instruction by a single teacher. The authors found that their collaboration as co-teachers not only benefited their students but increased their own professional learning in terms of pedagogy, content knowledge, and the use of disciplinary literacy.     

Normalizing difference in inclusive teaching

Inclusion practices and special education can be transformed by using a disability studies perspective, which constructs differences as natural, acceptable, and ordinary. Although inclusion is a moral imperative in promoting social justice, some inclusive practices continue to marginalize students with disabilities. A truly inclusive school reflects a democratic philosophy whereby all students are valued, educators normalize difference through differentiated instruction, and the school culture reflects an ethic of caring and community.     

Virtually in the Middle: Alternative Avenues for Parental Involvement in Middle-Level Schools

The incidence of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is increasing in the United States. The rate of diagnosis, combined with the trend towards more inclusive classrooms, means that general education teachers will most likely be teaching some students with ASD. In their teacher preparation course in special education, pre-service teachers learned about characteristics of students with ASD by reading literature with positive portrayals of individuals with ASD. In conjunction, pre-service teachers received instruction on teaching strategies to use in the classroom for students with ASD. By combining good literature with instruction in inclusive teaching practices, teacher educators can model the use of disability literature in the classroom to the benefit of all students.