Special Educators’ Experiences of Interpersonal Interactions While Serving Students With Emotional/Behavioral Disorders

Students with emotional/behavioral disorders are increasingly included in general education settings, requiring their special educators to coordinate with other educators. Yet, research provides limited insights into their interactions with other educators. Thus, we qualitatively examined how special educators experienced and navigated interactions with other educators when serving students with emotional/behavioral disabilities in self-contained classes that were actively moving students into more inclusive placements. Participants emphasized that their work was interdependent with others; they relied on others for work essential to meeting students’ needs. They shared that interactions were shaped by conceptions of students’ needs, the division of responsibilities, and resources. They experienced interactions on a continuum from alignment to misalignment; when experiencing alignment, they felt supported to meet student needs, whereas they felt misalignment challenged those efforts. Participants described using varied strategies to promote alignment. Results have implications for coordinating teachers’ efforts to serve students with emotional/behavioral disabilities.

Observations From the Architects of the Fields of Learning Disabilities and Emotional/Behavioral Disabilities

In 2010, Intervention in School and Clinic undertook a project to interview “giants” in the fields of learning disabilities and emotional/behavioral disabilities. The purpose of the interviews was to document the perspectives and reflections of leaders who had contributed to their respective fields over several decades (i.e., in most instances spanning back to the 1950s or 1960s) in order to provide a historical context for current and future professionals to envision a successful future. Contributors were asked to discuss their careers and their historical perspectives about their fields and to focus on areas of success and struggles. Interviews from 29 contributors were reviewed for this article, which focuses on concerns and reasons for optimism in both fields. Themes across interviews are described, along with highlights of contributors’ observations.