Making All Students Our Students: Where to Start

Educating students with disabilities in the mainstream classes must include collaborative team approach between general and special education teachers. In getting to this level of collaboration, there must be a mindset established that would allow ALL future educators to think of serving children with disabilities as "OUR" responsibility. There must be a coordination of services for better teacher preparation programs, grades PreK-12, so as to create an understanding that ALL teachers will be working with both typical (general education) and students with special needs. Also, there must be support for every general education and special education preparation programs to work in a co-active and coordinated fashion. These preparation programs must jointly train heterogeneous groups of future teachers/educators to incorporate curriculum that better prepares them to serve students with disabilities in an inclusive environment. This article focuses on the outcomes of a Personnel Preparatio