Abstract:

Family members of students with disabilities powerfully influence students’ long-term outcomes, including employment, community living, and quality of life. The two U.S. federal education laws, the Every Student Succeeds Act and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act recognize the importance of family members in the educational process and family-professional partnerships. Despite the documented importance of family-professional partnerships, such partnerships are not often realized in U.S. school systems. In addition, there exists limited knowledge on how teacher preparation programs include information and development activities related to family-professional partnerships to prepare teachers to engage in these important relationships. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to examine the ways in which special education teacher preparation programs address family-professional partnerships in coursework. Over 113 special education faculty members across 52 institutions responded to a national online survey addressing this topic.

Results indicated:
(a) a disconnect in the value and implementation of family-professional partnership-related knowledge and skills at the program and individual faculty levels and
(b) patterns of inconsistent family-professional partnership-related content coverage across undergraduate and graduate offerings as well as across family-professional partnership-specific and non- family-professional partnership-specific coursework.

We will discuss implications for practice and future research.

Keywords:

teacher preparation, disability, family, collaboration, partnership, United States