Linda P. Blanton

A Historical Perspective on the Role of Collaboration in Teacher Education Reform Making Good on the Promise of Teaching All Students

This article provides an analysis of how collaborative teacher education has developed in terms of practice, discourse, and the relationship between general and special education across three historical stages. It explores how collaborative teacher education between general and special education has been positioned over time in relationship to larger national reform efforts in teacher education. Approaching the history of collaborative teacher education developmentally from these three perspectives sheds light on how today’s emphasis on collaboration and multiple certifications intersects with what it means to teach in a diverse society and what it means to prepare teachers to meet the needs of every student.

Preservice Education: Essential Knowledge for the Effective Special Education Teacher

A-BSTRACT: How to conceptualize and derive the essential knowledge and skills needed by special education teachers is a current concern among professionals. The purpose of this paper is to examine the approaches currently used to define essential knowledge for teachers entering special education practice. The paper also proposes alternative models for conceptualizing essential knowledge and skills in special education.

An Exploratory Study of How General and Special Education Teachers Think and Make Instructional Decisions About Students With Special Needs

In this study, we explored how general and special education teachers think and make instructional decisions about special needs students. Teachers viewed a videotape of a reading comprehension lesson for a small group of third grade students. One student was a target for observation and was classified as learning disabled. Quantitative and qualitative procedures were used to analyze teacher responses regarding the importance of instructional variables for the student and requests about instructional recommendations for the student. We found that general and special teacher groups may possess different professional knowledge structures from which to interpret classroom events, identify and solve instructional problems, and collaborate with each other. Implications for teacher preparation are offered.

Enacting Diversity in Dual Certification Programs

This exploratory study, based on a content analysis of program descriptions, course syllabi, and related program documents, examined the curricula of three fully merged teacher education programs that were redesigned to better prepare teachers for the full range of diversity in their student populations. In these programs, graduates earn a general and special education elementary license simultaneously. Results suggest that attention to disability is more prevalent than attention to other social identity markers such as race, class, culture, or language.

Using a Classification System to Probe the Meaning of Dual Licensure in General and Special Education.

The alignment of the teacher quality provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) and the transparency of low achievement of students who have disabilities under the testing mandates of NCLB have converged to create substantial renewed interest and activity in collaborative programs of teacher education—a term used to describe program redesign that brings together teacher preparation for general and special education to improve education not only for students who have disabilities but also for all students who struggle. Such preservice efforts (often referred to as “dual certification” or “dual licensure”) are not only proliferating at a rapid pace, they are proceeding in the absence of analytic frameworks to consider collaborative teacher education more critically, to create a common discourse around this trend, to capture variations in collaborative teacher education, to clarify its multiple meanings, and to uncover assumptions under which such program development is taking place. The purpose of this article is to provide a conceptual framework to simultaneously make sense of and problematize the landscape of collaborative teacher education, based on a classification system of program models.

The Affordances and Constraints of Special Education Initial Teacher Licensure Policy for Teacher Preparation.

Initial licensure polices in special education were examined to determine how these policies support or hinder reform efforts to develop teacher education programs that prepare graduates for the increasingly complex needs of diverse students. Initial special education licensure policies are described with an emphasis on the differences across states on two key options: whether licensure for special education teachers is a stand-alone initial license or whether the state requires a general education license prior to obtaining a second license in special education. As the field grapples with how best to prepare both general and special education teachers who can teach to high standards for students with disabilities, the influence of these options is examined in relation to four contemporary issues facing special education and the trade-offs that accrue when a particular licensure option is adopted.

Interrogating the Intersections Between General and Special Education in the History of Teacher Education Reform

This article provides an historical analysis of major reforms in teacher education, beginning in the 1970s, specifically focusing on the opportunities each reform presented to build a shared agenda across pre-service general and special education, and the constraints that operated on them. The analysis revealed the existence of several such intersections, each of which created substantive occasions for joint action across general and special education at every stage of teacher education reform. However, four factors—policy, funding, timing, and norms of separation—appear to have operated as constraints upon mining the capacity of these potential intersections. If the promise of a cohesive system of education capable of and committed to supporting struggling students across multiple and intersecting diversities is to be realized, it will be critical to coalesce around a comprehensive equity agenda that builds on the intersections that continue to exist between general and special education.

A Dynamic Model for the Next Generation of Research on Teacher Education for Inclusion

In this chapter we consider the importance of, and ways to conceptualize, a more robust agenda for the next generation of research on teacher education for inclusion. Research on teacher education for inclusion, while increasingly available in the literature, is fragmented – primarily because models have yet to be developed to account for how research on both the structures and the content of teacher education for inclusion contribute to fully understanding how best to prepare teachers to serve all students well. Developing such a model needs to take into account the complexity and context in which teacher education for inclusion is practiced within and across nations so that new questions emerge to broaden and deepen inquiry.

Book Reviews: Issues and Practices in Inquiry-Oriented Teacher Education, edited by B. Robert Tabachnick and Kenneth Zeichner, New York: The Falmer Press, 1991, 286 pp.,

Just as conceptions of teaching have expanded and changed in the last 20 years, so have teacher preparation programs worked toward implementing new ideas about teaching. Two such ideas, inquiry and reflection, are explored in Tabachnick and Zeichner’s. Issues and Practices in Inquiry-Oriented Teacher Education. The contributing authors explore how these concepts might be operationalized in an approach that has become known in the professional literature as inquiry-oriented teacher education. Two purposes guide the book. The first is to describe a variety of inquiry-oriented practices presently being implemented in preservice teacher education. The second is to explore meanings of the term reflective teaching that are associated with an inquiry-oriented approach.