Resource needs for regular education teachers implementing inclusion

¶ … special education has changed dramatically. Gone are the days of the special classroom down the hall where special education students were hidden away and kept from the general student population. Gone are the days when special education students were given comic books to read and passed because they were there. Civil rights mandates of the 1960's turned the world of special education inside out and today, four decades later, special education students are fully protected by federal law. Special education students are now educated in the least restrictive environment which many times means they are mainstreamed into regular education classrooms, with a variety of peer abilities. This blending of abilities is commonly referred to as inclusion, and it is so named because of the idea that it includes students of different abilities in one educational setting. Inclusion is practiced throughout the nation, and in all grade levels at this point and so far the response has been positive by many accounts. While inclusion is something that is mandated by the federal law, and is encouraged by the parents of special education students, and enjoyed by the special education students it is important to insure that regular education teachers are fully prepared to handle a group of diverse abilities within the regular education classroom. Special education students come in a variety of abilities and needs. ADHD students, learning disabled students, and physically disabled students are all entitled to inclusion settings for their education but their individual needs vary greatly. In addition the teachers have to be able to not only meet the needs of each individual special education student, but do so while not having a negative impact on the educational process of their regular education students. Teachers across the nation are working to provide positive and productive educational experiences for the special education students in their regular education classroom, but there is little structure in the resources they are being provided to aid them in their attempts. Nationwide there have been complaints by regular education teachers that they are mandated by law to provide inclusion education but they are not being provided resources to help them complete their duties. This research study was designed to determine if there is in fact a lack of resources for regular education teachers and if so where they are needed.

Introduction

Literature Review

Methodology

Participants

Instrument

Data Collection Methods

Possible Limitations of Study

Future Use of Study Results

Example of Survey Questionnaire

Conclusion

INTRODUCTION

The civil rights movement of the 1960's and the changes that it caused in the area of special education have provided tremendous protections for those students who learn differently. Special education has been totally revamped from the angle of its delivery. Today's special education student has a federally protected right to be educated with regular education peers. The students who require special education services come in a variety of different needs and issues including ADHD, learning disabilities, physical disabilities and emotional issues. Each of these children is now being taught in the least restrictive environment as is mandated by the federal act of IDEA. While the last forty years have taken the special education student out of isolation and into the classroom with other students, the teachers have been experiencing larger classrooms, more demands on teaching and a mandate to provide a free and appropriate education to each student they encounter in their class. There is an existing belief among many education professionals and paraprofessionals that teachers need to be provided with additional skills, technology and resources to teach their very diverse students more effectively.

The number of people affected by disabilities is larger than many may imagine. Currently in the United States about 150 million people are impacted by disabilities to some extent either themselves or through association."

Consider these statistics concerning the special needs population (IBM 2001; New York State Council on the Arts, 2001):

750 million people worldwide are challenged by disabilities.

Over 8 million Americans have visual impairments.

500,000 visually impaired Americans use Assistive Technology Devices.

13.5 million Americans consider themselves visually impaired to some degree.

2.7 million Americans have speech impairments.

22 million Americans are deaf or hard-of-hearing.

4.6 million Americans use Assistive Technology Devices for hearing impairments.

A of school children are reported as having a learning disability, but an estimated 15% of students are believed to have some form of learning disability.

Dyslexia affects over 40 million Americans.

54 million Americans report some level of disability -- 15% of the population."

Fewer than 15% of people with disabilities were born with them.

The increased effort to identify and label special education students has presented the general education teacher with a new professional environment because they are required to provide the education to the special education students within their regular education classrooms. Teachers across the nation take time to read IEPS but reading about the child's disability and knowing how to address their needs in a regular classroom often amounts to two different things. "

In the 1997-98 school year, U.S. states reported that 97.8% of students ages 6 through 11 with disabilities were served in schools with their nondisabled peers, with 94.7% of students ages 12 through 17 with disabilities and 87.2% of students ages 18 through 21 with disabilities. These figures represent a large increase when compared to just four years before when in 1993-94 the states were serving 43.4% of students with disabilities ages 6-21 in regular classrooms. As the percentage of special needs students served in an inclusive setting along with non-disabled students rises, the number of special education and regular education teachers prepared to provide an inclusive environment must also increase (U.S. Dept. Of Education 2000, U.S. Dept. Of Education 1996). "

With the many changes taken place about the educational rights of special education students teachers are scrambling to deliver education to these and regular education students while lacking adequate resources to help them deliver the lessons. There are several things that can be done to handle this need including:

The method by which the instruction is delivered to the student.

The amount of content material to be covered

The evaluation method or criteria

The level of assistance provided in the learning situation

The learning environment: and/or

The instructional materials that are used by the student."

The mandate to educate students with special needs in classrooms with non-disabled peers was actually strengthened in 1997 through IDEA regulations and the past six years have been an increasingly hotbed of debate in the field of education about how best to perform the task with optimum success.

While there are many suggestions tossed about the field of education about how to implement this inclusion method teachers are left with the task of figuring out how to get it done. They have to wrestle with the varying special education needs that the diversity of this law provides them with. Children with ADHD have a hard time focusing and staying on task, while children who have learning disabilities process the information being give differently than other students do. Children who have physical disabilities have their own set of needs to be able to fully received an education with their non-disabled peers. All of these individual situations enter the regular education classroom and the teacher is expected to provide a free and appropriate education to each of the students while not taking away from the regular education students. Parents are becoming involved with their special education students more than ever before and students themselves are being taught to understand their disability and advocate for their education.

With the new mandates there have been increasing numbers of special education students entering regular education classrooms as illustrated by the below chart:

Percentage of Students Ages 6 Through 21 in Different Education Environments During 1988-89 Through 1997-98

Source: U.S. Department of Education, Office of Special Education Programs, Data Analysis System (DANS).

Many different techniques have been developed for the purpose of inclusion teaching. The chart below details some of the most often suggested ways to teach students who are in an inclusion setting:

http://helium.vancouver.wsu.edu/~golden/techniques.htm

Teaching Techniques

Speak slowly and clearly, but not loudly.

Make the consequences for successful performance attractive.

Share the completion of the student's work with another adult or peer in the class, or with an interested person outside the classroom.

Use concrete manipulative materials to develop whole concepts.

Photocopy notes if the student is unable to write clearly.

Encourage peers to assist in thinking ways in which the student can accomplish a task: "How can Steven do this assignment?"

Invite the student to assist in lesson presentation, by participating in brainstorming, for example, or giving out materials.

Provide a print outline of the main points that the student is to learn from listening to the lesson, reading a passage in a book, listening to a tape, or watching a video, with blanks to be filled in as the information is given.

Allow extra time for assignments and tests.

Recognize the length of time that the student can stay on task, then provide opportunities for breaks and teach the student an acceptable way to ask for a break.

Fold paper or draw lines on paper to assist the student with spacing. This is particularly useful in math.

Use different color chalks and felt pens to emphasize different points, and to make it easier for the student to find his place on the board or paper.

Use highly contrasting colors.

Enlarge the print.

Glue steps of a math operation inside the front cover of the students math book for easy reference.

Provide a print copy of the math text so that the examples can be done on the sheet. Often errors occur when the students copies and much time is used up. The examples can be enlarged if more space is required for the answers. One or two questions can be presented at a time to make the task less threatening.

Provide written instructions of the steps to be followed to complete a task.

Provide picture instructions of the steps to be followed to complete a task.

Organize the student's materials ahead of time.

When appropriate, offer a choice of two or three materials or activities.

Structure the sequence of activities."

While all of the above suggestions are geared to ease the struggle experienced by many special education students, a teacher who has several differently abled students in the classroom has quite a task trying to get the above done while still providing a cohesive and structured lesson to all of the students including the regular education students.

Thus far teachers have said that the resources to help them accomplish their job have been extremely limited. If the government mandates that teachers will provide such education to inclusion students it is important that those teachers feel they are being supported with proper resources to get it done. This study will discover where the holes are in the resource area of inclusion teaching.

Adequate resources are considered and provided for inclusive classrooms

Personnel understand that for inclusion to be successful, considerable resources, related to both personnel and material, are required to develop and maintain effective inclusive classrooms.

The literature works to present a case for a study about resources for regular education teachers who teach in inclusion settings. The studies already conducted in the area of inclusion indicate there is a lack of resources being provided to the teachers and the lion's share of the responsibility for keeping the school system in compliance falls on the regular education teacher.

STUDY PROPOSAL

INSTRUMENT

The instrument that will be used for this study will be a survey qustionairre. Several possible instruments were discussed and discarded for various reasons with the survey being determined to be the most potentially effective tool for the purpose of this study. The first possible instrument that was discussed was the in person interview method. While this can be a valuable method for purpose of research in this case it was going to be potentially less effective than the decided upon survey method. In person interviews would limit this study in several ways. It would have the potential to prevent the participants from being open and honest about their concern regarding resources and inclusion teaching. Teachers are in a team setting and they might perceive that any negative input on their part will be held against them at a later date by their school system or direct superior. The in person method also has cost problems. The need to poll teachers from various areas of the nation would become costly in transporting or hiring local interviewers for the study.

Another possibility was a case study method. A case study is often an effective research tool because it allows the question or problem to be studied in detail with close attention paid to many aspects of the situation. It also allows a lot of latitude and freedom in the areas that are focused on as the case study begins to unfold. The case study method allows those who are performing the study to have many different questions answered through the use of the case being examined. The case study method for this study's purpose however was rejected because of the need to have a large number of participants. The cost of a case study over two hundred cases would not be an easy task to complete. In addition the case study method as well as the in person interview method leaves open the possibility of bias. The interviewer may have unconscious reactions to the person being interviewed which might affect the way the answers are presented to the research team. In addition there is the possibility that the person being interviewed will have an internal reaction to the person doing the interviewing and this can color the way the questions are perceived and answered. For all of the above reasons the study will be conducted using a survey questionnaire method. The survey will be mailed out to teachers in all four areas of the nation. There will be 500 surveys sent out that will be equally divided among middle school and elementary school teachers. The survey will include a self addressed stamped envelope for the purpose of participants being able to easily return the instrument to the research team.

The survey will be supplied online as well for those who would rather utilize that option. The survey will include a web site that the participant will be directed to with a password that will allow them access to the web site. The survey instructions will ask the participant who chooses to answer the survey online to tear up and throw away the survey rather than send it back in. This will help eliminate the possibility of double entries by single participants.

PARTICIPANTS

The participants will be selected groups of teachers across the nation. There will be 500 surveys mailed out to the participants who will be selected from union rosters in each of the four areas of the nation; south, west, east and north. The participants approached will be asked to fill out the survey and send it back in and they will not be chosen for their race, or their experience. Instead the qualifying factors will only be that they participate in inclusion instructions at their school system. If they do not they can answer the portion of the survey that asks their opinions about the resources being provided to their professional peers who do teach in inclusion settings. The participants will obviously range in age from early 20's to mid-60's. The research team is not worried about gender differences as they will be recorded as the surveys come in and at that time can note if different genders seem to view the situation of inclusion resources differently.

Out of the five hundred teachers that the survey is sent to the team hopes for a return of at least 30% for a valid measurement ability.

DATA COLLECTION

The surveys will be sent out and they will have a three-month return window. Any surveys that are returned before the three months is up will be examined for validity and if valid entered into the study. Any surveys returned after the three-month deadline has passed will be set aside and discarded as far as this study is concerned. There are several reasons for this time limit. The first reason is it provides the research team with a time limit in which to begin analyzing the results. The team can prepare for analyzation based on knowing the three-month limit will be the end of the wait. Otherwise the possibility exists that the research team will be held up indefinitely waiting for surveys to continue to arrive. This would have a negative impact on the purity of the results as members of the research team might change while waiting as well as the concerns about the topic. In addition there is a need to keep the answers and therefore the research as pure as possible. This will be better assured if there is a time limit of short duration in which the participant teachers are allowed to return the surveys to the research team. The participants will have little time to have significant changes occur in their educational professional setting from the time they begin the survey to getting it complete and sent in. The team will send out reminders to all participants that receive a survey shortly before the three-month time limit expires reminding them to send the surveys in. The laws, the methods and theoretical matters have a smaller chance of changing in three months than in longer time frames.

The surveys will be collected and they will be examined. Any survey that is not completely filled out will be set aside to be used in possible future research. Those who have all of the questions answered will be used in the results analysis. The survey answers will be entered into a computerized system according to several criteria that can be later used to pull answers and percentages by topic. Some of the things that will be linked to the ability to pull and analyze answers will be gender, grade level of teacher, years of experience, yes they teach inclusion or no they do not but filled out their opinions on the topic and other things. This will allow future researchers to re-evaluate this study for future possible questions.

The data will be tabulated as it is entered so that the research team will be able to effectively pull the data needed for this study. The data collection will be done in such a form that not only will the true and false answers be easily entered to the data base but there will be an area to scan in essay styled answers as well as these might prove to be useful in the development of future programs and research.

POSSIBLE STUDY LIMITATIONS

While many efforts will be made to limit the problems that might arise in this studyt there are several limitations that must be noted if the research team wants to protect the purity and validity of the study results.

One such limitation is that there is no control over how many experienced as compared to inexperienced teachers are going to send them in. This means the potential is present for a skewed perception because of the things that experience in a classroom will present that the more inexperienced teachers will not have.

Another issue is that there is no control over the number of teachers who will fail to send the survey in which provides a possible problem in the accuracy of those who do being a poor representation of the true feelings of the teachers in inclusion settings. Along this same line there is the possibility that the teachers who turn the survey on will be those who are most concerned with the problems they encounter, while those who believe things are fine may not bother taking the time to fill it out and send it in.

The final potential problem with this study is going to be that there is no way to gauge what the outcome is with the perceived lack of resources. While it can determine if there is a lack of resources, and how the teachers feel this impacts their ability to teach inclusion classes, without the actual tracking of the individual students the results are left to opinion of teachers with little scientific backing.

FUTURE USE OF STUDY RESULTS

This study will be useful to future studies as well. One such possibility will be a study that expands on the results of this study by taking the suggestions made in the suggestion section and parlaying it to a future study about the impact some of those suggestions might have.

Another area that this study will allow future analysis in is the area of the students. It will be interesting to see a study in the future that asks the parents of the students in the inclusion settings how they feel the resources being provided to the teachers are working. Often times parents can provide insight to what their student's teachers need to be able to effectively teach inclusion in a special education setting.

The surveys that come in and have not been completed fully and set aside can be used in the future to develop areas that are in obvious need of study. The areas that this study misses will become evidenced by the answers of those teachers who do send in the studies.

SURVEY DISCUSSION

The survey will be divided into four sections. The first section will address general information such as area of the nation the teacher lives in, the number of students he or she teaches, how many years he or she has been a teacher. The general questions will be in the survey for the purpose of being able to separate and categorize the data during the analyzation and collection phase of the study. The second section will be for teachers who do teach in an inclusion setting. It will be based on true and false answers but will also allow for essay discussion in some of the areas in which true and false answers may prove to be self limiting. The section will be divided up to include resources in place, resources needed and resources for the future.

The third section will be for the teachers who do not currently teach inclusion but have an opinion about the above areas.

CONCLUSION

The world of special education has exploded in recent years. Students are now protected by federal law against being separated from their peers simply for having special education needs. Across the nation teachers are being placed in inclusions settings and they are expected to teach to all different students with varying degrees of special education need while at the same time delivering a quality education for both the regular and the special education students. This study will help researchers determine where the school systems are lacking in resources for regular teachers teaching inclusion classes. In addition the study will allow future research to fine tune programs and needed resources for that purpose.