Professional development of educational agents: Proposal for developing inclusive strategies

Abstract

The process of school inclusion has shown that opportunities must be created to enable three educational agents to interact (the regular teacher, the special teacher and the student’s parents), in order to further students’ academic learning opportunities. The present study aimed to put into practice and assess the professional development of regular teachers, special teachers and parents in order to create conditions for shared teaching of reading and writing for students with intellectual impairment and autism included in regular schools. Five mothers, four regular teachers and two special teachers participated in the study. All the educational agents participated of a general capacitation based on orientations on the intervention that would be applied in each natural context (classroom, special teaching room and at home) and included a topic about educational social abilities. After the general training, individual supervision sessions with each educational agent using a recorded behavior protocol were carried out. The behavioral analysis was based on three measures: application of intervention according to plan, cues addressed to the student and follow-up. Even though it was newly tried out, training enabled inclusive strategies to develop so that strategies that are described in official documents addressing school inclusion could be put into practice through the engagement of educational agents.