This dissertation presents the results from a mixed methods study designed to understand what beliefs urban middle school general education teachers hold when it comes to supporting students with disabilities (SWDs) in an inclusion classroom including classrooms that implement the integrated co-teaching (ICT) model. The quantitative portion of…

Purpose: Co-teaching is a foundational mentoring model used in teacher residency programs in urban classrooms throughout the United States of America. Beyond the basic understanding of co-teaching in categorizing classroom models, the purpose of this qualitative case study is to investigate the dialectical tensions manifested in mentored…

Special education within urban, public schools does not always look the same from state to state, district to district, or teacher to teacher. More specifically, teacher knowledge, abilities, and experiences also oftentimes differs in inclusive classrooms that service both students with disabilities as well as students without disabilities. These…

The co-teaching movement began in the late 1960s when educators felt that students with special education needs could be incorporated successfully with their general education peers in a general education classroom. While the mainstream perception is that all students have the capacity to learn, when tasked with personal beliefs, coupled with…

The purpose of the qualitative descriptive study was to explore how co-teachers in one Southern California school district described their process to plan and implement instructional strategies to meet the academic needs of diverse learners in inclusive classrooms in urban secondary schools. The general population of interest for this study…

The purpose of this study was to examine how paraprofessionals and other service providers participate in co-teaching with a certified special education pre-Kindergarten teacher during dual language (DL) instruction. The study took place in two DL special education preschool classrooms located in an urban public school district in the southwestern…

In this study, I explored how (a) a team-based instructional method rather than a one-teacher-one-classroom, traditional teaching model and (b) an inquiry-based learning approach affected teachers attitudes and self-efficacy for teaching and students attitudes, self-efficacy, engagement, and connections to school. The study was conducted within…