Karen L. Kilgore

Beginning Teachers in Special Education: A Model for Providing Individualized Support.

In the face of acute personnel shortages, large numbers of beginning special education teachers are abandoning their chosen careers. Under the best of conditions, novice special educators are both a valuable and fragile resource with even the most motivated and best prepared experiencing frustration, stress, and disillusionment. In this article we describe a model for providing individualized and comprehensive support for beginning special educators. The underlying assumption of the model is that support for beginning teachers must take into account the full series of dynamic interacting factors that are (a) specific to the individual and (b) specific to the teaching environment and tasks that are to be accomplished. After describing the interacting factors in the model, we provide recommendations for implementation of the beginning teacher support model.

Making Sense in a Collaborative Teacher Education Prografll: Lessons from Project PART Students

We studied the first cohort to graduate from a collaborative elementary/special education teacher education program at the University of Florida. The program was federally funded, and the curriculum was created by requiring elementary majors to take additional special education courses. However, because we exercised no control over course instructors, the content they taught and the perspectives they espoused were not necessarily consistent with ours. We were concerned that the program lacked thematic integrity and that students might flounder in the absence of a consistent message from instructors. To address these concerns, we observed students in field placements, interviewed them and their cooperating teachers, and reviewed documents. Our interpretation of these data suggests that PART students were little troubled by the diversity of instructor perspectives; to the contrary, because exposure to diverse points of view broadened their repertoires, they regarded it as a strength of the program. They also understood their responsibility to all children in their classrooms and had mastered a wide range of academic and behavioral interventions. These findings are discussed in light of recommendations for consistency within programs.

Restructuring for Inclusion: A Story of Middle School Renewal (Part I).

life of the school (Gartner & Lipsky, 1987; Reynolds, Wang, & Wahlberg, 1987; Stainback & Stainback, 1984; Will, 1986). For others, inclusion means depriving students with disabilities of the special services they need to learn and develop: small classes, individualized attention, and special ly trained teachers to teach children with disabili ties (Braaten, Kauffman, Braaten, Polsgrove, & Nelson, 1988; Fuchs & Fuchs, 1995; Kauffman, 1989, 1993; Kauffman, Gerber, & Semmel, 1988).