Case Study of Special Educator's Pegagogical Practices Beyond Year One of Teacher Residency.

Author

Ryan Derek DeRousselle, Xavier University of LouisianaFollow

Date of Award

5-2020

Document Type

Dissertation

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

Degree Name

Doctor of Education (EdD)

Department

Division of Education and Counseling

First Advisor

Renee Akbar

Second Advisor

Rachel Davis-Haley

Third Advisor

Timothy Glaude

Keywords

co-teaching, inclusion, pedagogy, social development theory (SDT), special education, teacher residency program

Abstract

The Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2008 in conjunction with Teacher Quality Partnerships requires university-based teacher education programs to develop and sustain highquality teachers (United States Department of Education, 2017). Teaching is a science grounded in a body of literature supported by effective research-based techniques. The purpose of this qualitative research study was to examine co-teaching influences on the first-year teaching practices of special educators trained in a university-based teacher residency program. Specifically, this study investigated which co-teaching strategies, if any, did special education residents implement as the teacher of record. Through the lens of social development theory, this research explored special education teachers’ perspectives on co-teaching strategies and how those strategies affected their pedagogical approaches as a novice teacher. For this study, coteaching is defined as a partnership between a general education teacher and a special education teacher that includes shared planning, instruction, and assessment of students with and without disabilities (Friend & Cook, 2010). This study involved collecting and analyzing data through questionnaires, interviews, and artifacts. The results of the analysis revealed four themes: constructing relationships, becoming a co-teacher, structural deterrents of co-teaching, and covi teaching according to the students’ needs. The key findings of this study are: it is imperative that trusting relationships are built at the onset of the residents’ experience; residents should seek to understand students’ learning needs before implementing co-teaching strategies; and, the coteaching strategies learned as residents varied from the co-teaching strategies implemented as teachers of record. The study concluded that co-teaching influenced the pedagogical approaches used by the novice teachers to meet the academic needs of all students (not only special education students) in the inclusion classroom.

Recommended Citation

DeRousselle, Ryan Derek, "Case Study of Special Educator's Pegagogical Practices Beyond Year One of Teacher Residency." (2020). Electronic Thesis and Dissertation. 15.
https://digitalcommons.xula.edu/etd/15