Background: Different roles and responsibilities are required of school professionals to facilitate students' successful transition from school to post-school lives. Special educators' involvement in transition services is essential for better post-school outcomes for students with disability. Method: The Transition Involvement Survey with five…

The growing frequency, duration, and intensity of children's challenging behaviors makes general and special education teachers' professional lives hazardous to their health. The focus of this article is on helping teachers leave the classroom each day with a feeling of accomplishment and a belief that they have made a difference in the lives of…

Inclusion in general education and attention to belonging are the first steps toward greater achievement for all students. This must be followed by improving the core teaching and curriculum to enhance learning of all students through differentiation, and teaching to multiple modalities and learning preferences. For these changes to occur,…

A growing body of evidence suggests teachers first experiences in the classroom have an impact on their effectiveness, their students' achievement, and the teaching practices they will use for many years. New special educators experience many of the same challenges as other new teachers. Both general and special educators struggle with addressing …

Recent federal legislation is affecting how special educators assess students, select curricula, document growth, teach, and consult--in short, how they spend their time during a school day. This study empirically measured special educators' use of time over the course of several weeks. It compared actual time use with its perceived value by both…

Atlantic High School, a small rural school in the state of Virginia, offered co-taught inclusion classes as an optional placement for student with disabilities for the first time in the 2008-2009 school year. While inclusion was thought to afford multiple benefits for students with learning disabilities, it also presented instructional challenges…

This study concentrates on the work of special education teachers in mainstream education in Finland, where these professionals work with children from various classes, usually in a separate room. The research reported in this article by Marjatta Takala of the University of Helsinki, Raija Pirttimaa of the University of Oulu and Minna Tormanen,…

Today the issue of how young children with and without special needs play and learn together is getting more and more attention and support from a variety of sources. Although many educators and parents realize the importance of having effective early childhood programs that serve children with all abilities and their families, less clear are data…

Two recent pieces of federal legislation have greatly influenced how schools educate students with disabilities. While Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act (2004) requires that schools assess students with disabilities using the same assessment instruments with which their non-disabled peers are tested, the No Child Left Behind…

In this article, the authors discuss the context of urban special education and the complexities of meeting the demands of standards-based reform in urban settings. The study presented highlights the voices of urban special educators in two large urban school districts as they navigate meeting the demands of teaching students with disabilities,…

Co-teaching, the pairing of general and special education teachers in a general education classroom, requires a high degree of expertise on the part of both teachers. Done well, it can be compared to a strong marriage--partners sharing and planning, reflecting and changing. Done poorly, it can be described as a blind date--co-teachers just waiting…

The proliferation of mentoring programs for new teachers has led to a tremendous interest in the skills that mentors develop in order to effectively support their mentees. Consequently, a substantial body of research has focused on the practice of mentoring and mentored learning. Majority of these studies have relied upon data collected at single…

Finding appropriate instructional settings in science for students with disabilities is challenging, and the range of services or placements used is currently unknown. This study identifies administrative structures, instructional settings, and special/general education teacher roles in teaching science to students with disabilities. A phone…

In the US, there is a significant number of learning-disabled high school students included in regular science classrooms. It has been argued that students with learning disabilities can succeed in science if they receive the kind of instruction they need. To facilitate such instruction, the special education teacher is often incorporated into the…

We propose that Disability Studies in Education (DSE) offers a framework that (a) grounds policy and practice in the experiences and perspectives of people with disabilities, (c) challenges practices/ policy that isolate, de-humanize individuals, and (c) leads to new questions to pose. In this session, we describe the pedagogy that we used to…