Mary Brownell: Exploring the hearts and minds of special education teachers
School is the last place some kids want to be. For Mary Brownell, the best place on earth is a classroom full of precisely those kids.
“Students with disabilities have often experienced years of failure both academically and behaviorally before they enter the special education classroom,” said Brownell, a professor of special education at the University of Florida’s College of Education. “School is not a pleasant place for them, and their attitude and behavior can show it.
“Turning such a scenario around takes teachers who never give up, who always believe they have more to learn, who pay careful attention to the students and what they need.”
Brownell speaks from experience. Before joining the UF faculty, she thrived as a teacher in some of the toughest conditions the system had to offer: low-income rural schools and juvenile detention centers. She’s still trying to figure out how she managed it, and why she tried.
In her 17-year career in research, Brownell has explored the qualities that make a good teacher in both the general classroom and the special education classroom. She has asked how school systems can convince these teachers to stay in the profession. And she is looking for ways to help more teachers develop the attitude and skills they need to become that “teacher who makes a difference.”
For the past seven years, Brownell and her colleague, Professor and Associate Dean Paul Sindelar, have overseen UF’s Center on Personnel Studies in Special Education (or COPPSE), designed to improve educators’ understanding of how to increase the supply of special education teachers who are prepared to meet the tough demands of their jobs.
“I’m very interested in the people who do choose this job, and do it well,” Brownell said. “What motivates them? How do they keep their passion? What is it that they know about teaching students with disabilities? How can we teach these qualities and knowledge to future teachers?”
School administrators around the country are asking themselves the same questions – and there is more behind those questions than simple intellectual curiosity. The nationwide shortage of K-12 teachers has hit hardest in the special-needs classroom, where heart-wrenching labor and low pay come together in a job recruiter’s nightmare.
Unfortunately, those students who need the best teachers are not the ones who are receiving them, and Brownell sees this as one of the most serious issues facing our educational system.
“You ensure that students are left behind when you do not have the teachers who can move them forward,” she says.
Still, Brownell knows excellent special education teachers can be found in the most unlikely of places. Brownell herself was “discovered” in, of all places, a piano class.
“I started out with the intention of teaching music and being a music therapist,” Brownell said. “As an undergraduate at Duquesne, I was a music education and therapy major, and I had this nun for a piano teacher, Sister Carole Riley.”
The nun asked her student to tutor others in the class. She encouraged Brownell to believe in her own ability to teach, and gave her a book on seeing the human spirit in people with even the most profound disabilities.
For Brownell, the piano soon moved into the background, and teaching came to the fore. After college, she became a special education teacher, working first at a local facility for people with mental retardation. Later ,she moved to a school in rural Texas, then to a juvenile detention center in Kansas City.
Brownell was able to survive in the field because of a natural ability to manage student behavior, and because of key beliefs she held.
“You have to care about students unconditionally, no matter how badly they behave one moment or how little they seem to know at the time,” she said. “You have to let them know you will give them a chance.”
These days, Brownell is researching a new professional development model that could help special education teachers teach reading more effectively. With a $2 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education, Brownell, UF education Professor Jamie Algina and colleagues at California State University and the University of Colorado are ushering a multi-state group of special education teachers through a new professional development program that allows teachers to do their own research on projects arising in their classrooms.
Together, all of Brownell's projects add up to more than $11 million in grant funding. Each of those efforts has the same goal: finding ways to attract, keep, and educate teachers who work with students with disabilities.
“Unless we have good teachers who are prepared and have the right values, we cannot serve these students. The bottom line is that the students and their parents are depending on us.” she said.
