Lectorale rede Passend onderwijs

Inclusive education: competences for teacher training

Based on research on inclusive education and years of experience with the minor program, the teacher training institutes at the University of Applied Sciences of Leiden and Rotterdam now offer a solid extracurricular program.

The students are trained during one semester to become specialists in inclusive education. The Solution Focused Approach is the leading technique that is being used by these students to properly respond to the child≠s educational needs.

We train the students to respond to children with special educational needs on the field of cognitive, behavioral and task related needs. The whole spectrum of the child's educational needs and how to recognize and respond to them has our attention, not to forget the needs of gifted children.

The curriculum is inspired on current research findings on teacher competences for inclusive education and effective educational arrangements for more inclusive classrooms and teaching. These findings have been used to improve the curriculum and are a guideline for the content of the minor program.

In this presentation I briefly present the recommendations of the research done by my colleagues Marja van Oudheusden, Marije van den Steenhoven and Janine Haenen, which we also use to improve the curriculum. In addition, yearly we use the evaluation of the minor program; this concerns the validation and feedback of students, teachers and other persons related to the minor program.

The Solution Focused Approach offers an effective technique to work with children. These techniques derive from the idea to emphasize on talents instead of deficits. This lies strongly in line with the views and proven effects by our research group on inclusive education. Therefore we work with these techniques in order to train the students on making inclusive education more possible.

In this presentation we will present the key competences for inclusive education and how these competences are trained in our teacher training institutes.