The Challenge of Co-Teaching in Inclusive Classrooms at the High School Level: What the Teachers Told Us.

ABSTRACT Meeting the needs of students with disabilities in general education classrooms requires collaboration between general and special education teachers. In this article, the challenges of co-teaching at the secondary level are explored through the voices of general and special education teachers who co-taught in inclusive classrooms at a large suburban high school in the southwestern United States. Semi-structured interviews were conducted and analyzed for common themes and these themes were then checked with the teachers. Critical issues for teachers clustered around three major areas: the nature of collaboration, roles and responsibilities, and outcomes. These themes are discussed and examined for the implications they hold for other schools implementing co-teaching. INTRODUCTION The Individuals with Disabilities Act (IDEA) (1997) requires that students with disabilities be placed in the least restrictive environment (LRE). According to IDEA this means: To the maximum extent appropriate, children with disabilities, including children in public or private institutions or other care facilities, are educated with children who are not disabled, and special classes, separate schooling, or other removal of children with disabilities from the regular educational environment occurs only when the nature or severity of the disability of a child is such that education in regular classes with the use of supplementary aids and services cannot be achieved satisfactorily. [IDEA Section 612 (a)(5)(A)] What does this mean for high school teachers? This article will report the experiences of teachers in a large suburban high school in the southwestern United States as they work to include students with disabilities in the general education classroom. In order to meet the challenge of educating students with disabilities successfully in the general education classroom, collaboration between general and special education is essential (Rainforth & England, 1997). One of the ways in which teachers collaborate is through co-teaching which is "the collaboration between general and special education teachers for all of the teaching responsibilities of all students assigned to a classroom" (Gately & Gately, 2001, p. 41). The benefits and challenges of co-teaching at the elementary level have been relatively well documented (Jackson, Ryndak, & Billingsley, 2000; Manset & Semmel, 1997). Co-teaching at the secondary level brings a different set of challenges and has taken longer to be embraced by educators (Moore & Keefe, 2001; Scruggs & Mastropieri, 1996). This article will explore the lessons learned from general and special education teachers who have been co-teaching in a large suburban high school. WHAT DO WE KNOW? There is a critical shortage of research into the inclusion of students with disabilities at the secondary level (Mastropieri & Scruggs, 2001). The majority of the research to date has focused on teacher perspectives. Secondary teachers have been found to have more negative attitudes toward inclusive education than elementary education teachers (Scruggs & Mastropieri, 1996). This literature has been criticized because it involves teachers who are not actually teaching in inclusive settings (McLeskey, Waldron, & Tak-Shing, 2001). In contrast, when McLesky et al. (2001) compared the attitudes of teachers in inclusive versus non-inclusive settings in grades K-6, they found the teachers in the inclusive settings to be far more favorable toward the inclusion of students with disabilities in general education. Smith (1997) examined teacher perspectives in an inclusive ninth grade team of four teachers and one paraprofessional in an urban high school. She found that teachers in this team had varied interpretation of diversity, belonging and the status of students with disabilities within the class. The teachers in that study used a variety of strategies to adapt curriculum but reported that the demands of high school curriculum for students with disabilities was seen as challenging. …