Teacher collaboration for inclusive education and co-teaching—a necessary condition, too simplistic, or overrated?

Abstract

Interdisciplinary collaboration between special education teachers and general education teachers has been considered a central necessity of inclusive education or even a conditio sine qua non since the first school experiments on inclusive education in the 1980s. However, it is difficult to assess whether collaboration actually improves inclusive education. On the one hand, there is a lack of precise and unambiguous theories on the exact mechanisms of interdisciplinary collaboration of teachers, which could explain what exactly explains the assumed effectiveness of cooperation. On the other hand, a review of empirical studies on the effectiveness of collaboration shows that the evidence base—contrary to what is presented in the relevant inclusion literature—is extremely thin. Therefore, this article argues that theories of teacher collaboration in inclusive classrooms should be clarified and that targeted empirical studies of effectiveness should be conducted to test them. Starting points for this are outlined.