Date of Award

5-2014

Degree Type

Creative Project

Degree Name

Master of Education (MEd)

Department

Special Education and Rehabilitation

Committee Chair(s)

Timothy A. Slocum

Committee

Timothy A. Slocum

Committee

Charles Salzberg

Committee

Scott Ross

Abstract

First year special education teachers enter an extremely complex and challenging profession. Even those who come from strong university preparation programs need substantial coaching to become effective in the many responsibilities of a special education teacher. Among the crucial targets of this kind of coaching program are basic, essential, effective teaching skills. This creative project took place within the context of a broad mentoring program developed by the author. It focused on evaluating one component of that program: video-supported coaching on essential effective teaching skills. The teaching skills here were: (a) providing frequent opportunities for student responses (OTRs), (b) error correction and (c) positive interactions with students (a two part teaching skill that includes both: ratio positive: negative interactions and praise rate). The specific target-behavior chosen for each teacher was based on: first, the strength of their OTRs; second, positive interaction which entails rate/ratio of praises; and finally, the accuracy of their error correction abilities, in that order. This information was acquired from the observational baseline data. The order of teacher behavior acquisition was chosen according to research from Archer and Hughes (2011) and Sprick (2009) who believe that high OTRs can assist in getting higher rates of praise simply because OTRs provide a vehicle on which praise can be attached resulting in the enhancement of both areas simultaneously. Using this criteria three of the teachers' target area were OTRs and the other two teachers focused on "praise". Error Correction tends to be the most difficult of the three behaviors to master and although data was collected during baseline phase it did not continue after baseline as all teachers were focusing on the first two behaviors, as per the order of emphasis previously mentioned. This project evaluate5 the effects of video-supported coaching on these targeted teaching behaviors.

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