This paper describes a federally funded, 5-year (1989 to 1994) personnel preparation program for unendorsed teachers of students with severe disabilities in Virginia. The program involved a cooperative union of training and technical assistance from 3 state universities and the Virginia State Department of Education. The program was designed to be inexpensive to participating teachers and minimize their travel, to allow supervised application of content schools, and to meet state endorsement requirements for severe disabilities. Teachers were selected for their demonstrated teaching talents and their predicted job stability. The 61 teachers who completed the program participated in 1 of 3 repeated training cycles. This article presents evaluation findings on the training program and explores other solutions to personnel shortages in low incidence disability areas in most state.

This study examined the effects of a self-management procedure designed to teach three 13- to 14-year-old middle school boys with learning and behavior problems to improve the completeness (inclusion of identified story elements) and quality (organization and coherence) of their story compositions. The procedure was based on two strategies: teaching the students to plan stories composed in a narrative style, and teaching them to monitor the inclusion of elements from the plan with a check-off system. A multiple baseline design was used to assess the effectiveness of the procedure, and a combination of holistic and atomistic ratings was used to assess the completeness and quality of the students' written work. Results indicated that stories were more complete when students used a simple check-off system to plan and monitor their work. In addition, there was a moderate correlation between the atomistic and holistic measures used to assess stories, with the total number of words written correlating most strongly (r = .49) with the overall rating for story quality.

We conducted intensive group interviews with 11 special education and 3 general education teachers regarding the educational placement of pupils with emotional or behavioral disorders. We sorted the teachers’ comments to identify their views on recurring topics. Major themes emerging from the interviews included (a) teachers have diverse opinions about placement alternatives, (b) schools are faced with problems they are not able to handle, (c) administrative procedures often impede appropriate services, (d) collaboration and support among those making placement decisions and providing services are often lacking, and (e) teachers feel they have little influence in placement decisions. We discuss implications for practice and further research.

This article describes how we have begun to integrate the Internet and World Wide Web (WWW) into preservice teacher education in hopes of expanding the instructional use of technology in special education classrooms. We have provided examples showing how faculty members can instruct both practicing and prospective teachers in ways to integrate the Internet and the WWW into their K-12 classroom instruction. The growth in educational technology has been tremendous. The Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) estimates that the number of computers in K-12 schools increased by 300,000 to 400,000 a year from 1985 to 1995. The total number of computers in schools was estimated at nearly 6 million during 1995, or 1 for every 9 students. This represents a great advance from the 1984 average ratio of 1 computer to 125 students (OTA, 1995). Despite this growth, the decade of the 1990s has witnessed a limited use of computers in K-12 classrooms (Hunt & Bohlin, 1995; OTA, 1995). To develop technological competencies and understand how they can be integrated into classroom instruction, critiques of teacher education suggest focusing on three areas. 1. Teacher educators must model appropriate use of computers and related software applications for instructional purposes, either in courses or field experience (OTA, 1995; Sheingold, 1991). 2. Teacher education programs need to incorporate the use of technology across the curriculum. Walters (1992) argued that traditional technology courses designed to stand on their own and teach student-specific applications fail to teach prospective teachers how to integrate technology into their instruction. 3. The instruction provided to preservice teachers must focus on newer, more sophisticated tools (e.g., the Internet, integrated media, problem-solving applications) that support the development of students' higher-order thinking and problem-solving skills, leading to classroom integration (OTA, 1995). U.S. teacher education programs should have as a major priority the infusion of technology into preservice teacher education-particularly in special education, where technology integration can be beneficial to student development (Schmidt, Weinstein, Niemic, & Walberg, 1986). INTERACTIVE CASE-BASED TEACHING One way we model the use of technology in our own teaching links a teaching model-casebased teaching-with the Web (see box, "Case Method"). Cases created for the WWW offer students video and audio clips to illustrate the situation being considered.

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