A Phenomenological Analysis of the Views on Co-teaching Applications in the Inclusion Classroom

Abstract

It is necessary to provide students both with and without special needs and the classroom teachers with special education support services in order to achieve successful inclusion applications. The determination of teachers' opinions about the applications they carry out is important in the planning and achievement of the future applications. The purpose of this article which was designed as an action research was to analyze the opinions of special and general education teachers, working in inclusion classes based on co-teaching approach, about the preparation stage for the application, planning meetings and applications they carried out. Research participants were composed of a researcher who is a special education teacher, a classroom teacher and second grade students. In the scope of the research, semi-structured interviews were conducted with the classroom teacher; planning meetings were arranged with the aim of preparing for the applications; and reflective daily data sources compiled by the researcher were utilized. The data were analyzed from a phenomenological perspective via inductive analysis. The findings were compared with those recorded in the related literature and were discussed. Consequently, classroom teacher voluntarily participated in the research process and stated that there was no problem about classroom applications. The teacher declared the importance of planning meetings, however, did not allocate sufficient time for meetings and did not give details about the lessons. Therefore, ambiguities were recorded lesson applications about the role and responsibilities of teachers. The teacher stated that all co-teaching approaches can be applied in inclusion classes however stated that these applications were not so new for her and this process could not have any contributions to her.