An Equitable Educational Experience For All: Strategies For Secondary General Education Teachers to Meet the Learning Needs of Special Education Students Learning in Their Classrooms
This capstone project focuses on the issue of providing equitable educational experiences for all students. More specifically, the project examines the most effective strategies for secondary general education teachers to provide modifications, accommodations, and differentiation for special education students in the areas of instruction and assessment. A central tenet of contemporary special education policy is the principle of inclusion. In accordance with this principle, students with special needs are increasingly learning in the general education classroom among their peers. This places an additional responsibility upon general education teachers to ensure that they are meeting the unique learning needs of special education students learning in their classrooms. This capstone project seeks to equip general education teachers with a useful strategy for providing modifications, accommodations, and differentiation in the instruction and assessment that they deliver to their students with special needs. The project is designed as a professional development workshop that consists of four different sessions taking place throughout the first semester of the school year. During the initial session, secondary general education teachers are introduced to the I.N.C.L.U.D.E. strategy and have the opportunity to practice applying it to a hypothetical classroom situation. Over the course of the following three sessions, teachers reflect upon their own use of the strategy throughout the first semester. The utility and effectiveness of the I.N.C.L.U.D.E. strategy is measured by comparing teacher responses to a survey administered prior to the first session with teacher responses to the same survey after the final session
