Abstract
Dual elementary and special education teacher preparation programs focus on preparing educators with the skills to work with all students and to collaborate with their general/special education colleagues. However, many dual programs do not engage in program or curricular coordination between general and special education resulting in an absence of, or minimal, collaboration and coordination of programs. It is important for teacher candidates to be prepared in programs that model collaboration and make explicit the connections between elementary and special education content knowledge and skills. A merged, co-taught elementary and special education teacher-training program holds potential to improve the delivery of course content and field experiences to improve the preparation of teacher candidates, and produce teachers more capable of working with a diverse population of students. This paper describes the five-year experience of the Departments of Elementary Education and Special Education in their efforts to design a fully merged elementary and special education program to model best practices in preparing teacher candidates for inclusive elementary classrooms. Our process included: plan, prepare, pilot, scale-up, and evaluate. This information may be useful to other teacher educators who are engaged in integrating general and special education curricula.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
"Teacher Preparation", " Inclusive Education"
