COLLABORATION BETWEEN GENERAL AND SPECIAL EDUCATION TEACHERS: DEVELOPING CO-TEACHING SKILLS IN HETEROGENEOUS CLASSES

A considerable amount of research evidence suggests that collaboration between general and special education teachers is a pillar of the effective teaching for all students, including those with learning difficulties. Adopting the above position the present study aimed to present and discuss fifteen cases regarding co-teaching in the context of “parallel support”, where a special education teacher supports a learning disabled student in a mainstream classroom. Particularly, after an in-service training for promoting effective instructional skills, fifteen pairs of general and special teachers were asked to record the co-teaching procedures in their classrooms. Data collection was carried out through the participants' self-evaluation rubrics. The quantitative analysis showed that in almost all cases, the collaboration between the pairs of educators was improved, they applied the in-service training knowledge in order to meet the different needs of all students, using the most effective strategies and procedures. The most interesting finding was that in most cases the initially adopted model of co-teaching was replaced by the parallel co-teaching where each teacher provides instruction to different students to the ‘team teaching', where both teachers are responsible for planning and they share the instruction of all students. Thus, it seems that it is achievable to build an effective co-teaching model for heterogeneous classrooms.