Team Teaching in an Early Childhood Interdisciplinary Program: A Decade of Lessons Learned

Abstract

Preparing students in the early childhood field to work with children both with and without disabilities and to collaborate with different professionals is an important endeavor for colleges and universities. The purpose of this paper is to articulate a unique model of program collaboration between early childhood special education and early childhood regular education that demonstrates a cohesive preservice teacher education program across two departments within one university. This unique 10-year history of interdisciplinary collaboration and team teaching provides insights into many of the benefits and challenges of this type of program. This paper presents an historical overview of the development of this collaborative program and describes the logistics of operating an interdisciplinary program at the administrative level. Information collected from faculty and students illustrates the benefits and challenges of team teaching. Finally, strategies for developing a successful program are discussed.

Building inclusive preschool classrooms: How desirable and feasible is a set of strategies that facilitate teacher-child relationships?

“…Although there is evidence suggesting that inclusive settings may be of higher quality than non-inclusive settings, other studies report no differences across settings. For instance, while Hestenes et al (2009) found that infant and toddler classrooms that include children with diagnosed disabilities were significantly higher in quality than classrooms that did not include children with disabilities and the enrollment of children with disabilities did not diminish the overall classroom quality below the level of what is considered to be developmentally appropriate (a score of 5 on the 7-point scale); in Portugal, previous research focusing on the associations between global classroom quality and the social acceptance of children with disabilities in inclusive ECEC settings found no evidence of such associations (e.g., Aguiar et al, 2010).…”