Educating towards Inclusive Education: Assessing a Teacher-Training Program for Working with Pupils with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) Enrolled in General Education Schools

Overview & Synopsis

Implementing inclusive education is one of the major challenges facing the educational system. One of the main difficulties in implementing inclusive education is that general education teachers receive insufficient training to work in complex teaching contexts and to respond to the unique needs of all the pupils in their classroom. The objective of this research was to assess the components of an innovative integrative training program, developed in a teacher education college in Israel, that integrates special education studies with elementary/secondary general school studies (curriculum and field experience), thus contributing to graduates' sense of self-efficacy in integrating and including pupils with special educational needs and disabilities and helping them develop teaching methods that promote inclusive education. On the practical level, the findings can help training program designers adapt and/or improve existing training programs. On the conceptual level, this study can contribute to research in the field of inclusive education from the perspective of teacher education.