Teaching students with special needs

This paper will focus on a number of issues which relate to the teaching of students with special needs. After defining special education, the wide range of student diversity will be highlighted to illustrate the complexity of students’ needs and behaviours and to show the enormity of these challenges for teachers in regular classrooms. This will be followed by a brief history tracing the educational changes from segregation of students with special needs to their inclusion in regular classrooms. The history will detail the role of the teacher, school structures and culture and the influence on pedagogy and assessment in the movement toward a socially just educational system. The philosophy of inclusion and how it is disseminated in government policy and operationalised in schools and classrooms will be explored. The paper will reinforce the importance of explicit teaching of students with special needs as they do not develop skills incidentally but rather need intensive instruction to learn to apply skills in new learning situations. The importance of a collaborative school community, backed-up with support mechanisms and procedures for students, teachers and parents that aid the development of positive learning outcomes in promoting the philosophy of inclusion is emphasised throughout the paper.