An International Immersion into Co-Teaching: A Wake-Up Call for Teacher Candidates in General and Special Education
Kevin Oh
University of San Francisco
Wendy Murawski
California State University, Northridge
Natalie Nussli
University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland, SwitzerlandAbstract: This case study explored the short-term international co-teaching experience of pre-service general education teachers who were paired up with intern special education teachers (N = 8) to provide English language instruction to students in South Korea. Pre-, during-, and post-data were collected to investigate how the participants experienced their co-teaching. The narratives of two participants were chosen for phenomenological analysis, reflecting an overwhelmingly positive and a rather negative co-teaching experience. The key ingredients to a successful partnership were identified as open communication, the willingness to accept both positive and negative feedback, the willingness to learn from or get inspired by someone who may have less teaching experience, mutual respect and trust, compatibility of personal characteristics, and frequent check-ins. The potential threats to a positive relationship were identified as mismatched personalities, incompatible teaching goals, the lack of co-planning, conflicting approaches to lesson planning, unequal roles, infrequent check-ins, and lack of trust and respect. Despite these challenges, the findings indicate that immersing teacher candidates in co-teaching experiences resulted in positive perceptions of co-teaching and increased the participants’ skills related to collaborative teaching for all but one candidate. The findings have led to recommendations for the successful set-up of co-teaching experiences.
Functional Technology for Individuals with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities: Meta-Analysis of Mobile Device-Based Interventions
Jemma Kim
California State University, San Bernardino
Christina H. Kimm
California State University, Los AngelesAbstract: This study employs a meta-analysis of single-subject design research to investigate the efficacy of mobile device-based interventions for individuals with intellectual disabilities (ID) and to further examine possible variables that may moderate the intervention outcomes. A total of 23 studies, 78 participants, and 140 observed cases that met the inclusion criteria were included in the meta-analysis. The efficacy of interventions was measured by computing the percentage of nonoverlapping data points (PNDs) and compared across participants’ characteristics, mobile device types, functions of mobile device use, target skills, and intervention strategies. The results showed that interventions with mobile devices for individuals with ID were very effective to acquire, maintain, and generalize the target skills. The magnitude of PNDs was not significantly affected by participants’ characteristics, target skills, intervention strategies or types of mobile device use. Employment of the maintenance and generalization phases and the mastery criterion were significantly associated with PND scores. Mobile devices were mainly utilized as an instructional device for this population. The discussion includes suggestions for expanding the use of mobile devices to the daily activities of individuals with ID as functional technology (FT).
Using Errorless Teaching to Teach Generalized Manding for Information Using How?
Christopher Bloh, Christopher Scagliotti, Sarah Baugh, Megan Sheenan, Shane Silas, and Nicole Zulli
Kutztown University
Abstract: Five reinforcing activities were presented to and interrupted for two participants with autism. An errorless teaching procedure was then introduced with two similar activities prompting the participants to request information saying How? in order to resume the activity. The dependent variable included both the cumulative number of times How? occurred and number of times he used the acquired information to access his reinforcer. Training was conducted across five clinicians to program for and determine generalization across both activities and people. Results suggest that one participant’s manding for information generalized across activities and clinicians, although his utilizing the acquired information was not as apparent for 4 out of the 5 activities. The second participant’s behavior suggested his manding to have generalized to 3 out of 5 activities but limited (2 out of 5) use of acquired information. A maintenance trial conducted three weeks after the study’s conclusion indicated that the target behaviors were maintained.
