UF takes lead in $2 million study of special education teacher development

Nowhere is the teacher shortage more painfully obvious than in the special needs classroom – but in special education, being shorthanded is only part of the problem. The teachers who do work in the field need a wider range of skills than other teachers, but they are often the least prepared teachers to do their job and frequently do not have sufficient on the job learning opportunities to learn the sophisticated skills they need. Equipped with a $2 million federal grant, COE Professor Mary Brownell and her colleagues are investigating a professional development model that could help teachers get the skills they
need.

This grant was based on previous teacher quality research conducted by Brownell and her colleagues under the auspices of the Center for Personnel Studies in Special Education. This research demonstrated that while special education teachers were very successful in managing student behavior and knowledgable about teaching reading, they needed more opportunities to deepen their skills in word study and fluency instruction.

"When teachers have the opportunity to learn more content, figure out how to put it into action, and reflect on how their efforts are working, they become better teachers," said Brownell, a professor of special education in UF's College of Education and principal investigator on the project. "We're trying to find a better way to make that experience available to teachers."

Brownell and James Algina, a professor in UF's Department of Educational Psychology, along with co-researchers from two other universities – California State University and the University of Colorado at Boulder – recently secured a highly competitive grant from the U.S. Department of Education's Institute for Education Science to see whether students perform better when their teachers participate in a new kind of professional development model.

The new model puts special education teachers together in groups of five, each working under the guidance of an instructor. Each group attends a training institute, then delves more deeply into training institute topics in small group meetings and an e-community. The small group meetings are intended to enable teachers to work more deeply with topics and examine how students are responding to their instruction. The e-community is intended to provide a forum for tackling implementation barriers, sharing great ideas, watching examples of outstanding instruction, and supporting their colleagues as they try new ideas.

"Our model is a combination of a top-down and a bottom-up approach," Brownell said. "The teachers get assistance from us, but they also create a learning community that advances their understanding of the topic."

The four-year grant will put 60 teachers per year through professional development courses here in Florida, and another 60 in California and Colorado. The course will focus on teaching reading to teachers of special-needs children in upper elementary grades, where students may have their last chance to truly develop good reading skills.

This project may reach only a few hundred teachers – but if the study shows that the new professional development model leads to better student performance, the study would give school systems nationwide a new tool for improving special education teacher quality in the area of reading.

Brownell and her colleagues are now selecting the first cohort of teachers to participate in the project. For the Florida portion of the project, Brownell is seeking teachers in Levy, Gilchrist, Alachua, and Duval counties.

"Recruiting teachers for this study may be tough," Brownell said. "Clearly, these teachers are busy, and we are asking for  more of their time and effort, but hopefully we can provide them something worthwhile in return."

Brownell said the researchers are currently seeking "observers" among the faculty in these school systems – people who can suggest teachers who would be good candidates for the study, as well as former teachers and principals who might help with data collection.