1. Preparing Early Childhood Special Educators to Collaborate: A Deductive Qualitative Content Analysis of Course Offerings
- Author
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Renee Mattson
- Abstract
Background: Upon completion of their undergraduate educator preparation program (EPP), early childhood special educators obtain roles within inclusive school settings. As part of these roles, they will participate in collaborative interactions with other educators, related service providers, paraprofessionals, and their students' family members. The goal of inclusive collaboration in school settings is to work together to design and implement specialized instruction and supports that can improve childhood outcomes. ECSEs gain understanding of necessary collaborative concepts, skills, and dispositions through a standalone course on collaboration or through multiple courses where collaboration preparation is infused into the curriculum. It is important for faculty in these courses to determine if their assignments do a comprehensive job of covering the elements of collaboration and that this coverage encourages high levels of processing including application, analysis, evaluation, and creation. Method: An exploratory deductive qualitative content analysis retrieved 27 collaboration course assignments by way of snowball sampling from six undergraduate early childhood special educator preparation programs from across the state of Ohio who submitted 12 syllabi for review. High-leverage collaborative practices (HLPs) from McLeskey et al. (2017) and the Revised Bloom's Taxonomy (RBT) (Anderson et al., 2010) served as the historically agreed upon frameworks that assisted when analyzing the course content on collaboration for the presence of HLP and RBT terms. Findings: Patterns of term usage were determined across a course, a program, and across the state. Course assignments were found to regularly include little more than half of the terms that are indicative of high-leverage collaborative practices. Course assignments focused most heavily on family collaboration and garnering a general understanding and practice of communication and collaboration skills. The following crucial elements of collaboration were missing or rare to find in the term usage including paraprofessional collaboration, transition, co-teaching, giving and receiving feedback, and cultural and linguistic responsivity. Application and creation were high level processing terms used most regularly in these programs. Analysis and evaluative processing terms were rare to find. Some programs had a heavy emphasis on dispositional term usage going well beyond the dispositions mentioned in the HLPs. Flexibility and openness were rare to find among dispositional terms. Conclusion: Strengths and weaknesses were identified in covering high leverage-collaboration practice terms and incorporating high levels of cognitive processing around collaboration. Course and program design could contribute to the use of high levels of cognitive processing and a higher frequency of HLP term usage. Themes emerged and practical steps to increasing the comprehensive use of high-leverage collaborative practice terms at analytical and evaluative levels of cognitive processing are presented. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]
- Published
- 2023