Framing the Progress of Collaborative Teacher Education.

Abstract

Each of the 10 postulates in this article describes what we believe to be true about collaboration in special education. Each program description offers an important example of serious advancement toward collaborative programs in teacher education. Within this collective movement some programs can be placed at one end of a hypothetical continuum of development, and others at the other end. Despite these evolutionary differences, each program and each group of faculty has made significant steps toward programmatic reform in teacher education. After considering what these programs have accomplished already, we thought about how they might be improved. We asked ourselves questions such as: Have these programs gone far enough? What areas haven 't they addressed? Would differences in the nature of the process used to arrive at the new program have changed the outcome in any way? As we questioned certain features of the existing programs, we also thought about programs yet to be developed. We then generated sets of questions, starting on page 8, which we hope will serve all of our readers as they work to strengthen existing collaborative programs and promote the development of new ones.