This means that teachers in general education are more likely to work with students who have special needs. Still, according to the NPR reporting, the 10th largest universities in the country have a patchwork of special educational requirements for future teachers.
As for the basic teachers’ preparation programs intended to prepare students to win state certificates for teaching, six of these institutions require students to take only one special education course. The other four require more than one course.
But teacher preparation paths are developing. Some of the institutions that require only one course, including the A&M Texas University and the University of Central Florida, have told NPR that they have accumulated the rest of their courses to infuse practices designed to reach each student – not just typical.
And a new type is also becoming more common: double programs or “United” programs are intended to prepare students to win both general education and certification of special education. These programs appear across the country, including in Texas A&M, the State University of Wichita, the State University of Ohio and the University of North Iowa.
Special education lessons not only occur in special education classes
The Teachers’ Preparation Program in Central Florida has been under a gradual change in the last seven years. Mary Little is a professor and coordinator of the UCF program. She says that the school focuses on training from experience, so his special education course is taught together with a classroom internship.
“We are very (clearly) we associate theory and practice, jointly, in inclusive settings,” Little says.
When training teachers meet questions in their internship rooms, they can work them with an expert faculty in real time. According to Little, the challenges that emerge include inventing the appropriate accommodation for students with disabilities and working with individualized educational programs (IEPS), which are legal documents that outline the services and accommodation to which each student is entitled.
Little says the school is also deliberate for influencing inclusive practices throughout its teacher training program. This includes highlighting a teaching practice known as a universal learning design or UDL. It gives priority to flexible teaching methods to meet the needs of students who can learn in different ways.
For example, in a first -grade lesson for basic addition, the teacher can use photos, tactile elements and virtual tools to not only describe the mathematical problem verbally, but also tangible and visually.
“What it can have in the past is to put numbers and make students look at these simple numbers or give students a worksheet and make them count the boxes or something that has been expanded with UDL,” says Andrea Boroshak, the UCF school principal. “You are trying to be available to all students.”
It also means not waiting for the child to be identified as a disability before offering accommodation or specialized training.
“This really helps all our students (teacher) prepare a thoughtful presentations and evaluations of the lesson and ways to demonstrate multiple paths so that more than students have access, master and demonstrate curricula for content,” Little explains.
Little and Borowczak say that their school is also working on a new double licensing program in early childhood and special education.
At least 4 of the 10th largest universities in the United States are currently offering double licenses or “unified” programs that prepare teachers to work in both general education and special educational rooms.
“All students are students with general education”
Jennifer Kurt Presid down the Department of Special Education at the University of Kansas or Ku, which recently made debut a United Aimed at future teachers who want to serve in classrooms in general or special education. This requires eight more special education courses than the traditional school teaching degree.
There is only one catch: for students with disabilities to take advantage of dual -degree programs like this, people have to choose to enroll in them for traditional educational programs.
Kurt says this will require a paradigm to be transformed to philosophy, that “all students are students in general education.”
“And if you leave a unified program, knowing how to teach all students, you know how to individualize the instructions; you know how to collaborate with people from different disciplines; you know how to understand students, IEP and understand the curriculum for general education,” says Kurt. “You will just be more confident and more capable of teacher.”
Kurt says it’s too early to say whether the department will move on to an educational program for only one. But this is an opportunity.
“I could openly see a time in the near future, in which we have only a united program, because I think it is really well received,” Kurt said. “We may be a little cautious about trying to make too much changes at once.”
Ku Assistant Lisa Didion is not ashamed to put the new school unified program.
Last fall, during a special course of education required for all KU education specialties, she told her students that by joining the combined program, they would learn more strategies to reach all students.
“And it really will matter, is that if we have general teachers who are trained as special teachers, then we will really start moving this (needle),” said Didion.
Benjamin Erickson, a junior specialty in elementary education, said he was considering moving to the United Program. He said as a disabled person, it is important for him to be part of a “better system”.
