Teacher Collaboration Essay Research Paper Included

Teacher Collaboration Essay, Research Paper Included as defined in the Webster s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary is a verb meaning to take in or enclose. Today many times children feel excluded because of their differences, whether it is the way they look or a learning disability they have. This exclusion has forced the education system to reform their ideas about how are children should be educated. One of the newest reform ideas is to encourage “inclusion” special education programs. Teacher collaboration and inclusion is beginning to be encouraged by many of the education journals and more information is accessible to help move this idea in a positive direction. In Childhood Education, a five-page report was dedicated to teacher collaboration in school reform. An

education journal, Young Children also published a telling article, “Children Blossom in a Special and General Education Integration Program,” on the collaboration of a daycare and a school that benefited all the children who were involved. An education Internet sight included an informative article, Inclusion! The Bigger Picture, about the meaning of inclusion and how educators should view their students. Although the three articles suggested different strategies to collaborate and include everyone, all of them defined the reform as a necessity to the school system. All three articles held that the schools could not reform the special education system alone. Teachers, parents, administrators, students, and the whole community must get involved in classroom collaboration in

order for progress to take place. Schoen, Auen, and Arvanitis report named the disabilities of special needs children to be: down syndrome, autism, and physical, behavioral, and cognitive impairments (58). All of these disabilities appear in the public school system, yet many schools are having difficulty collaborating. For many normal children, the only place they are around special needs children is in school and many times they are unsure of how to react. In the same report, many programs were outlined that schools might implement to successfully achieve the integration of special and general education programs. Many group activities were integrated into the curriculum. While this change was sometimes stressful on the teachers, it encouraged the children to become involved and

interact with one another. Another positive change made in the classrooms was that the entire room was labeled with words and pictures to match. The labeling enabled all the children, no matter what their capabilities, to learn to read and make decisions quicker about which center they wanted to participate in. While Gable and Manning s article focused primarily on two types of collaboration, direct and indirect, while their approaches could be applied to other school situations. Indirect collaboration takes place usually before or after school or during a common teacher preparation period. Usually two or three teachers will help each other devise a plan to help accommodate a child who is having difficulty in class. Direct collaboration, brings two teachers together too equally

plan and instruct a group of students. The article defined several cooperative-teaching methods, from shadow teaching to team teaching and suggested the teachers choose the best method for them (221). Several basis were listed in order to assist the teachers in choosing the best method, things such as the needs of the students , the amount of time available, the amount of prior training each teacher had, and the nature of the relationship between the teachers were suggested. Forest and Pearpoint s article focused on the meaning of inclusion which can be applied to every classroom and later to each student s everyday life. According to the article, inclusion is about learning to live with one another. Inclusion means being with (1). The article points out that children do not