Students with special needs facts

However much has been done by various stakeholders including both the government and a number of states so as to ensure that these learners are not left behind. This article will highlight the various concepts surrounding the experiences of students with special needs from a perspective of both the general education setting and the individualized educational program. The presentation will also be analyzing the various challenges or reasons that a general education teacher might be having or facing, thus inhibiting their efforts to ensure inclusivity. INTRODUCTION Over a couple of decades, ensuring the inclusion of learners with various special needs in the classroom setup has been such as a major area of focus in the educations sector. In understanding this puzzle concerning learners with special needs, a number of concerns have to be settled.

From this legislation, every student was to benefit from a free as well as an appropriate public education irrespective of an individual's ethnicity, sexual orientation, race, and ability. As a result, a problem emerged as soon as immediately after this legislation sailed through. Most people found it quite tough to comprehend the actual interpretation of the word appropriate as used in the legislation. As a result, different stakeholders have ended up with totally different versions of interpretations across different states around the country. (Brian Abery, 2017). In the incidence where the student's school is adequately inclusive, then home-based mainstreaming will be understood to be a general education program where the necessary support has been provided to ensure the optimal educational outcome. In implementing home-based mainstreaming, the needed support is taken to the student rather than having the student moving to where support is.

In this model, both the special education staff and the general education teachers collaborate through consultation. The special education instructor provides a better part of the instructions and support to be executed. The decentralized nature of education across the U. Having expounded on the various pieces of legislation and their outcomes, there is one major issue that stands out as much as instances of misinterpretation and lack of clarity in the implementation of specific legislation have been a significant challenge, there one major problem inhibiting the fate of the development of students with disabilities. The existence of a dual system of education, that is the general education and the individualized education system, appears to be contributing towards a bigger problem. This dualism has left a good number of teachers generally unprepared to handle those students with disabilities.

This has especially been the case among general educators who feel that the work of handling learners with special needs is someone else's responsibility. This renders a good number of general education teachers incapable of handling children with special essentials in an inclusive classroom (Lehman, 1998). Just to understand what it is all about to teach learners with disabilities more so from the perspective of special education, there are a number of struggles that special education instructors have to contend with. They include; pedagogical challenges concerning securing of materials, teaching multiple content areas, management of student behaviors and conducting assessments. Another major challenge includes collaborating with general education teachers and the need to pay varied roles in classrooms. These challenges are faced by all special education teachers regardless of one's experience (Billingsley, Griffin, Smith, Kamman, & Israel, 2009).

This explains why integrating students who are having special needs into general education classes has been such a tough issue. Inclusive education and more generally inclusion simply entails the various philosophies which usually based on value systems and are meant to maximize an individual's participation in society. This is achieved by minimizing discriminatory and exclusionary ideologies and practices. (Booth, 2005). In the U. S. Apart from just teachers, most parents have also failed to embrace the ideology of inclusive education, making it even harder to see this issue find a breakthrough. Most schools around Arkansas and the U. S. at large have been clinging on the claims that they are actually inclusive. On the contrary, going by the estimated figures shared by the National Center for Education Statistics (2016), it indicates that by 2014, 96% of learners with disabilities aged 6- 21 years had been placed in regular schools.

In a more simplified definition, action study entails the study of a given social situation with the aim of making the quality of action within it much better (Elliot, 1991). With action research, the researcher puts more emphasis and attention on the process of learning and not the product of learning. Stringer (2007) points out that action research is a step-by-step investigation that makes it possible for individuals to establish effective solutions to various problems they do face in their daily lives. When you bring together the work of Stringer (2007) and Kurt Lewin (1946) who was a social psychologist, what comes out of this is the concept of Teacher-Researcher. Lewin (1946) came up with what is known as the four cycling steps. Additionally, it will be fair to recall that most general educations teachers have been signaling that they are lacking the necessary skills to enable them to monitor learners with special needs.

Given the fact that this general education teacher is the one who is to come up with the curriculum for the school, it should be quite obvious that not all the requirements of the students with disabilities will be taken into account. Another point to note is that, through the 2004 IDEA amendment, the general education teacher saw more responsibilities being imposed on them concerning the management of students with disabilities. For instance, they were to start being part of those who were to implement the IEP program. Additionally, they were to oversee the district-wise or even state-wide examination of the students with special needs (Rosenzweig, 2009). This being generated by the perception that those students with disabilities are a responsibility meant for someone else who has been trained just for that.

A perception that has meant many students with special needs have been somehow neglected. Secondly, the fact that the concept of inclusive education lacks what can be understood to be a universal definition also proves to be another major problem. With this, different educators have a different understanding of what inclusive education entails. As discussed, what a teacher might have been perceiving as inclusive in one region might be viewed by another teacher as simply too restrictive. This is actually 13% of all students learning in public schools. Taking a look at these students with disabilities, a significant 34% of them were found to be having learning disabilities. In most cases, students with special needs are usually identified by a team of professionals such as teachers.

In terms of prevalence, as from 2000 and 2005 school years, the number of students identified with special needs and aged between 3-21 years increased from 6. 3 million to 6. Ainscow, M. , Booth, T. , & Dyson, A. Improving schools, developing inclusion. Routledge. National Center to Inform Policy and Practice in Special Education Professional Development. Blanton, L. P. , Pugach, M. C. Dick, B. Action research literature 2006—2008: Themes and trends. Action Research, 7(4), 423-441. Elliot, J. Action research for educational change. Rosenzweig, K. Are Today's General Education Teachers Prepared to Meet the Needs of Their Inclusive Students? Smith, T. E. IDEA 2004: Another round in the reauthorization process. Remedial and Special Education, 26(6), 314-319. M. , & Lehman, L. R. Teacher, student, and school attributes as predictors of teachers' responses to inclusion. The Journal of Special Education, 31(4), 480-497.