Teacher Education Reform Initiatives and Special Education: Convergence, Divergence, and Missed Opportunities. Literature Synthesis. CEEDAR Document No. LS-3

Overview & Synopsis

Teacher education as a field of study has steadily grown since the press for an identifiable knowledge base first appeared in the 1970s. Almost simultaneously, calls for teacher education reform abounded and have, for more than 40 years, existed alongside the development of research in teacher education. However, these longstanding teacher education reform agendas have, for the most part, avoided addressing the issue of how to prepare teachers to work with students with disabilities. The goal of this report is to offer teacher education practitioners, policymakers, and teacher education researchers new perspectives on teacher education reform in terms of its implications for the current and urgent press for teacher education efforts--wherever they may take place--to prepare all teachers to effectively work with students with disabilities. For this analysis, the authors closely looked at teacher education reform documents to identify where there have been implicit connections--typically not acted upon--between the preparation of general and special education teachers for working with students with disabilities. The authors framed the historical analysis of major reform initiatives in teacher education in terms of convergence, divergence, and missed opportunities between general and special teacher education. In so doing, the authors first examined the influence of these reforms on general and special education teacher preparation, and then focused on the ways in which these two fields intersect around reform initiatives. Three assumptions guided how the authors approached and discussed teacher education reforms, the intersections between general and special education, and recommendations for the collaborative reform of teacher preparation. The assumptions are that: (1) both general and special education teachers are responsible for teaching students with disabilities; (2) both research on the preparation of teachers and research on teaching influence teacher education reform; and (3) the preparation of teachers occurs along a continuum that extends from the pre-service years into experienced teaching.