The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act advocates the inclusion of students with disabilities among typically developing students. Students with disabilities receive special education services that accommodate their unique learning needs resulting from their disability. Unfortunately, general education teachers encounter various barriers…

The use of seclusion and restraints on students with disabilities has been a major legal issue in recent years. Congress has repeatedly considered bills to limit and prohibit such use in K-12 schools, but the movement against such aversive procedures appears to have shifted to the state legislative level, with several states adding or…

In Texas, state policy anticipates that installing video cameras in special education classrooms will decrease student abuse inflicted by teachers. Lawmakers assume that collecting video footage will prevent teachers from engaging in malicious actions and prosecute those who choose to harm children. At the request of a parent, Section 29.022 of…

This quasi-experimental quantitative study examines whether six general inclusion classrooms teachers treated students receiving IDEA services in the same manner as they treated general, non-IDEA students through an analysis of teacher-student interactions of praise and desisting. The study took place in six separate self-contained classrooms that…

Inclusion of students with disabilities in district-wide and state assessments is mandated by federal regulations, and teachers sometimes play an important role in rating these students' work. In this study, trained teachers rated student proficiency in performance assessments in language arts and mathematics in third, fifth, and ninth grades. The…

This study is a preliminary examination of the reliability of frequent retrospective teacher behavior ratings. Frequent retrospective behavior ratings are an approach for creating scales that can be used to monitor individual behavioral progress. In this study, the approach is used to progress monitor behavioral individualized education plan goals…

Researchers examined roles and actions of members of "co-teaching" teams including a special educator and a regular educator in a public high school. Observational data were collected using momentary time sampling procedures. Results indicated that regular educators presented material to students in 29.93% of observed intervals; special…

This paper is part of a collection of 54 papers from the 48th annual conference of the Education Law Association held in November 2002. It discusses teachers' rights to private and public speech. Specifically, it examines the rights of special-education teachers and other special-education professionals to advocate, privately or publicly, on…

This manual contains techniques for creating successful teaching and learning environments in diverse elementary classrooms. Using humor, drawings, and a conversational tone, it provides suggestions for teaching effectively and efficiently. Special highlights include five-steps-or-less strategies that can be adapted into any classroom, an outline…