Overview
Professional collaboration has been viewed as a beneficial tool for helping teachers and other professionals serve students with disabilities (Brownell, Adams, Sindelar, Waldron, & Vanhover, 2006; Ritzman, Sanger, & Coufal, 2006) and has been deemed as the best practice in special education (Cross, Traub, Hutter-Pishgahi, & Shelton, 2004; Barnes & Turner, 2001; Kurjan, 2000; Pena & Quinn, 2003). Gable, Mosert, and Tonelson (2004) recognized the growing emphasis on collaboration as an important strategy for educators asked to take on a wider range of responsibilities in today’s schools. Ritzman et al. (2006) noted the support collaboration offers to teachers when working with students with significant …show more content…
This model, Collaboration: Access to the General Education Curriculum (or, more simply, “Applied Collaboration”) represents a compilation of collaborative and instructional strategies that general and special educators can apply—as a team—in the general education classroom.
Intended to be both interactive and dynamic, Applied Collaboration is a professional development training model in which teams of general and special educators work together to identify mutual goals to address the needs of students with disabilities.
Within the general framework of the training, teams are provided with (a) collaborative strategies to raise communication and facilitate cooperative working relationships between educators, and (b) instructional strategies in which teams learn about various teaching strategies (e.g., differentiated instruction, shared classroom management) that are “practiced” in the classroom setting. The model is quite simple and kept intentionally so: it relies on a few effective, yet easily implemented collaborative and instructional …show more content…
Conclusion
Collaboration is a method through which professionals and educators can get close their communication with each other and parents; it is based on voluntariness, equality, mutual goals, shared responsibility for important decisions, shared accountability for outcomes, shared resources, and the emergence of trust, respect, and a sense of community. Collaboration has happened for many years, but IDEA has bolstered its performance in the delivery of services to students with special needs.
Collaboration will occur, if professionals admit that it is a valuable approach, use effective communication skills, follow clear processes (e.g., interpersonal problem solving), build programs and services that support it, and work with admin administrators to create a culture that promote it. In addition to informal collaboration, three formal applications are common in today’s schools: teaming, co-teaching, and