The professional literature has called for special education practices to be responsive to students' culture and language as well as disability (

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This article introduces the Early Childhood Foundations Model for Self-Determination and provides a rationale for the need to consider the foundations of self-determination behavior that begin early in life. This model is based on the premise that young children with disabilities benefit from a collaborative partnership between important adults in the lives of children to provide a supportive, stimulating, and coordinated environment between inclusive classrooms and home settings. Within partnership, the Foundations Model establishes the proposition that the basic foundational skills for developing selfdetermination in later life require young children with disabilities to gain skills in (a) choice-making and problem solving, (b) self-regulation, and (c) engagement. In this position paper, the authors review literature related to these three foundational constructs and present a rationale for use of the Foundations Model as a guide to developing systematic interventions to start young students with disabilities on the road to building a foundation for self-determination.

Educating a nation of culturally, ethnically/racially, and linguistically diverse (CLD) students is one of the many challenges facing teachers and teacher educators, resulting in teachers' questioning their ability to improve learning for these groups. Yet teacher efficacy is significantly related to student achievement, motivation, and students' own sense of efficacy (Tschannen-Moran & Hoy, 2001). Given continuous patterns of disproportionate representation of CLD students in special education, as well as inadequate services, it is important to understand the relation between teacher efficacy and success of CLD populations. The purpose of this pilot study not only examined the reliability of newly developed survey instrument but also investigated urban in-service special education teachers' perceptions about their abilities to teach CLD students. Thirty-one teachers participated in this study. Among these teachers, six agreed to join the follow-up debriefing. The results demonstrated adequate reliability, and several hypotheses were formulated during analyzing data and discussed with peer debriefers. Implications of this study will be provided. Article 386Education and Urban Society 45 (3)