Specialized Instruction within General Education: A Case Study of One Elementary School
Journal article by Joseph R. Jenkins, Norma Leicester; Exceptional Children, Vol. 58, 1992
Journal Article Excerpt
Specialized instruction within general education: a case study of one elementary school. by Joseph R. Jenkins , Norma Leicester * Today the majority of students with mild disabilities and others who are at risk for school failure are served in programs that combine classroom and pullout services where they receive instruction both from classroom teachers and specialists (e.g., resource teachers and Chapter 1 teachers). In these programs, classroom teachers share responsibility with specialists for developing educational plans and instructing eligible children, but specialists appear to hold primary responsibility for designing and delivering whatever individualized or specialized instruction these students receive. Prompted by concerns about high referral rates for special services, dissatisfaction with pullout programs, and a proposed reconceptualization of special and regular education, educators have been discussing an increased role for classroom teachers in the education of students with mild disabilities and other low-achieving students (Jenkins, Pious, & Jewell, 1990; Will, 1986). One outcome of these discussions is that some states and school systems have introduced requirements for systematic individualized intervention in regular classrooms before students can be referred for a special education assessment. A second outcome has been the development of a range of technical assistance systems to aid classroom teachers. Some of the better known assistance models are the Chalfant, Pysh, and Moultrie (1979) Teacher Assistance Teams, the Pugach and Johnson (1989) Peer Collaboration Procedures, and various consultant models (Fuchs et al., 1989; Idol-Maestas, 1983). Ideas about an expanded role for classroom teachers have not been limited to prereferral intervention and collaborative consultation. Some of the more radical reform statements suggest that all responsibility for educating students with disabilities and students who are educationally at risk be shifted to classroom teachers (Gartner & Lipsky, 1989; Stainback & Stainback, 1984). These ideas challenge the basic premise underlying remedial and special education programs, that is, that children who perform poorly in school may require treatments that differ from those ordinarily provided in general education classrooms. Proponents of reforms that call for the elimination of special programs question the rationale for these programs and, in effect, argue that classroom teachers can duplicate the results and, by implication, the treatments associated with them. As far as we can tell, even the strongest reform advocates accept the idea that individual differences found in classrooms, particularly those classrooms that include students with cognitive disabilities, cannot be accommodated adequately by instructional models that honor the mode; they acknowledge that extraordinary (i.e., nonmodal) treatments are required. At issue is whether classroom teachers or specialists should be responsible for designing, managing, evaluating, and modifying these special treatments. Tradition has assigned this responsibility to specialists, radical reformers propose to assign it to classroom teachers, and most current innovations divided responsibilities between classroom teachers and specialists. In light of the debate about roles and responsibilities of classroom teachers and specialists, we believe that it is useful to examine how classroom teachers, on their own, would approach the problem of designing specialized instruction for individual students who are performing at an unsatisfactory level. Research on how classroom teachers plan, design, and implement remedial and specialized treatments may presage the prospects for expanding their role in educating and managing students with learning problems. In this article, we attempt to characterize how classroom teachers in one elementary school viewed their ability to individualize instruction, analyzed their students' problems in reading, designed interventions to help remedy the reading problems, implemented those interventions, and affected their students' reading proficiency. Where possible, we compared our findings about the classroom teachers' approach to and success with individualizing instruction with those that other researchers have reported in studies with special education resource teachers. METHOD Subjects Setting. The school in which this research was conducted was participating in a research and development project to redesign instructional services for students with mild disabilities and other low-achieving students. At the beginning of the year, the school had introduced a peer tutoring program (Jenkins & Jenkins, 1981) and replaced instructional pullouts with in-class assistance from specialists (Jenkins & Heinen, 1989), and concurrently was field testing Stevens, Madden, Slavin, and Farnish's (1987) Cooperative Integrated Reading and Composition program along with Deno's (1985) Curriculum-Based Measurement (CBM).Teachers and Students. The 12 elementary classroom teachers, Grades 1 through 6, who participated in this study had received approximately 8 hours of orientation and training on CBM during the school year. School staff collected reading performance data on all special education, Chapter 1, English as a second language, and 5 randomly chosen regular education students in ... |
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