The Effects of On-Going Consultation for Accommodating Students with Disabilities on Teacher Self-Efficacy and Learned Helplessness

Introduction Gone are the days when a student once identified with a disability would be educated apart from his or her typically developing peers. For years, many school systems have educated students with disabilities alongside their typically developing, same-aged peers in partial-inclusion classrooms with the benefit of supplementary and specialized assistance in a learning support classroom and specialized education plans. Indeed, many school systems have instituted full inclusion so that students with disabilities receive all instruction, including specialized and supplemental support, in the general education classroom. However, current efforts in education, inspired by the federal legislation known as the No Child Left Behind Act, ask school systems to systematically adapt instruction for any child who has been found failing to achieve to grade-level expectations. Accountability efforts geared at ensuring that all children are achieving to expectations have helped to illustrate the need to intervene early with students who fall behind grade-level benchmarks. These considerations have led to frameworks for monitoring academic progress with the intent of implementing accommodations as soon as a child shows signs of struggling academically and/or behaviorally. One such framework is the three-tiered system of Response to Intervention (RtI). RtI starts with the premise that students benefit from an empirically-validated curriculum delivered with fidelity. Through the implementation of universal and continuous progress monitoring, the academic progress of all students is monitored and interventions of varying intensities are provided to students who are determined to be achieving below benchmark. The general education classroom teacher is expected not only to teach from the empirically-validated curriculum but also to monitor student progress and intervene in the early tiers in an RtI model. The general education classroom teacher is typically the only interventionist in tier 1 and may hold much of the intervention responsibility in tier 2, placing an even greater expectation on any one teacher's skill to differentiate instruction enough so as to impact measurably on a child's progress. In the event that the student does not make sufficient progress with the first two tiers of interventions, additional and specialized assistance may be provided but this assistance, in most cases, still occurs in the student's general education classroom. This model assumes that all students can learn if given the appropriate instruction in the right way and at the right time. The change in approach and philosophy that comes with RtI signifies a much more proactive stance than even inclusion, and has the potential to significantly affect the landscape of K-12 classrooms. Asking teachers to monitor the progress of every child routinely and make accommodations where needed raises the questions of how well-prepared teachers feel in working with the data that continuous progress monitoring brings; how knowledgeable they assess themselves to be in choosing and implementing interventions; and how confident are they in their ability to do so. In cases where teachers may not have had opportunities to develop the skills needed to collect and interpret the data associated with continuous progress monitoring or to develop a repertoire of empirically-validated interventions, their sense of efficacy as teachers might suffer. Self-efficacy in a general sense refers to the evaluations one makes of one's ability to be effective in a given task or domain. Teacher self-efficacy, specifically, refers to the degree to which a teacher believes that the act of teaching is able to overcome the effects of outside influences and the degree to which the teacher believes that he or she can do what is needed to facilitate learning for all students, including those who do not learn easily (Chan, 2008; Tschannen-Moran & Hoy, 2001). …