SPECIAL STUDENTS IN EVERY CLASSROOM:

EDUCATORS’ ATTITUDES FROM TRAINING TO TEACHING

Abstract

Federal law, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act of 1997 (IDEA 97), mandates that the education of students with special needs be maximally inclusive. In other words, students who require special education (SPED) services should be included in the general curriculum and the mainstreamed classroom as often as possible. As a consequence of this mandate students receiving SPED services often spend much of their day in the “regular classroom” with “regular education” teachers. Hence, every classroom has the potential to include students of varying educational needs. The purpose of the current study was to investigate the challenge that such classroom diversity presents to teachers as well as the extent to which that challenge is anticipated by teachers in training. Individuals at three levels of teacher training—(1) pre-training teachers who had plans of becoming a teacher but not yet taken courses in education, (2) in-training teachers currently taking coursework in education, and (3) post-training teachers who had graduated and were employed in a public school setting—were surveyed with regard to their expectations of, or experience with, involvement with special education. We found that, although the vast majority of post-training teachers identified meeting the diversity of learning needs among their students as a challenge and an area in which they needed more training, less than half of the in-training teachers and only a small minority of those at the pre-training level anticipated teaching students with special needs at all. Implications for higher and continuing education are discussed.

Diorio, S. (2001). Special students in every classroom: Educators’ attitudes from training to teaching. Poster presented at the Fourth Annual Student Research Symposium, University of Massachusetts Lowell, April.