The concept of serving students with disabilities in their least restrictive environment is a fundamental principle of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. This mandate emphasizes that students with disabilities should receive their education alongside their non-disabled peers to the greatest extent possible. This is often achieved in…

Computing education has growing inclusion and equity challenges (e.g. exclusionary online learning experiences, biased assessments, inadequate student feedback mechanisms). Many groups experience minoritization in computing education, including students who are Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC), women, non-binary students, transfer…

It is imperative to understand how teachers are prepared for their role as co-teacher. The purpose of this study was to investigate how general education and special education teachers in one elementary school in Georgia are trained in the instructional practice of co-teaching and their perceptions on how prepared they feel to implement the…

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act mandates that all school districts provide a free appropriate public education to students with Individualized Education Plans in their least restrictive environment. Co-teaching in inclusion classrooms is a collaborative effort, with a general education teacher and a special education teacher, to…

As schools reopen their doors and students return to the classroom, what will the "new normal" of special education look like? The pandemic exposed educational inequities and areas of urgent need--and now, schools have a unique opportunity to press pause and reimagine their practices. This book helps K-12 school leaders and educators…

Rural school leaders are faced with challenges to close the achievement gap between subgroups, mainly general and special education. Schools and school systems face several barriers to move forward with positive trends in the data provided by the Alabama State Department of Education. The purpose of this study was to examine teachers' perceptions…

As schools turn towards co-teaching models to implement inclusion practices (US Department of Education, 2010), teachers are increasingly being asked to operate with a co-teacher (Scruggs et al., 2007). However, most research on co-teaching remains at the survey level; it does not examine factors that may influence co-teaching relationships over…

Too many students still experience the factory model evident in most U.S. high schools, which were designed to put young people on a conveyor belt and move them from one overloaded teacher to the next, in 45-minute increments, to be stamped with separate, disconnected lessons 7 or 8 times a day. While these factory-model designs may have worked…

School administrators are instructional leaders responsible for ensuring high quality inclusive education for all students including those with disabilities. In this article, the authors review legal mandates, discuss inclusion of students with emotional and behavioral disorders (EBD) in practice, and obstacles to effectiveness. Recommendations…

Co-teaching is a popular means to support students with disabilities in the general education classroom. However, despite its widespread use, there are no meta-analyses examining the effects of co-teaching on academic outcomes for secondary students that analyze both study quality (e.g., the Council for Exceptional Children's "Standards for…

This paper presents some of the emerging outcomes from the experiences of a Maltese school that decided to embrace the philosophy of inclusion using a whole school approach based on the social model of disability. This was a qualitative study based on focus groups. A thematic analysis was used within an interpretative approach of hermeneutic…

Presented in this article are the rationale and construct of a new consultative teaching model for the inclusive instruction of students with learning disabilities in secondary schools. The inclusive consultation model (ICM) is a proposed alternative to traditional co-teaching models as described in the extant literature. In recognition of the…

Current educational policies that have articulated from IDEA are driving the adoption of inclusionary practices in schools. These policies present challenges to general education, secondary education, and dual-licensed teachers at the secondary level. Secondary general education teachers may lack the pedagogical knowledge necessary to accommodate…

Special education and general education teachers must work collaboratively in a single classroom that serves the diverse needs of all children due to federal regulations such as the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act of 2004. Evidence-based practices that foster collaboration are scarce. The…

How do you support busy school leaders and teachers to take advantage of the strong body of evidence now available about effective teaching, school, and leadership practices? How do we grow our understanding of teaching, school, and principal leadership practices nationally, so that the system can learn and improve? What are the strengths and…