This study explored the use of coaching as a way to bring research-based teaching practices into general education classrooms to improve the quality of reading instruction provided to students with learning disabilities. Project staff trained and mentored district special educators on the process of coaching. Qualitative research methodology was used to analyze the process of expert consultation and to better understand the process of change. Key issues that emerged included differences in the ways that special and general educators conceptualize teaching, the differing concerns and priorities between special and general educators, and the anxieties inherent in an observation and feedback process.
THIS ARTICLE REVIEWS THE EMERGING KNOWLEDGE BASE ON PROCEDURES AND STRATEGIES THAT APPEAR TO CONSISTENTLY LEAD TO TEACHERS' SUSTAINED USE OF INNOVATIVE RESEARCH-BASED PRACTICES IN CLASSROOMS. IN PARTICULAR, WE FOCUS ON THE IMPORTANCE OF PROVIDING BOTH BEHAVIORAL/TECHNICAL SUPPORT AS WELL AS OPPORTUNITIES FOR TEACHERS TO EXPLORE AND UNDERSTAND THE CONCEPTUAL ASPECTS UNDERLYING THE RESEARCH. A CASE STUDY ILLUSTRATING THESE COMPONENTS MAY PROVIDE SOME INSIGHT INTO WHY TEACHERS SOMETIMES REJECT INNOVATIVE PRACTICES EVEN THOUGH GROWTH IN STUDENT LEARNING IS DOCUMENTED.
Special education classrooms often become convenient places for teachers to send struggling students they don't want in their classrooms.-US News and World Report, quoted from Shapiro, Loeb, & Bowermaster, 1992, p. 49 John Ogbu, noted ethnographic researcher and theorist on minority issues, recently stated: Minority children receive inferior education. .. through what occurs inside the schools, inside the individual classrooms. Among the mechanisms discovered to affect minority education adversely, none is more important than teachers' low expectations. ... (T)oo many minority children are treated as having educational "handicaps." A disproportionate number are channeled into "special education," a pseudonym for inferior education. (Ogbu, 1990, p. 156, emphasis added) The findings of prominent special education researchers have led to similar conclusions (Gottlieb, Alter, & Gottlieb, 1994). Public concern about the quality and appropriateness of special education services for minority students in general, and language-minority students in particular, is high.
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