Abstract:

Background:
As advocated by the European Agency for Special Needs and Inclusive Education, teacher competencies are crucial to ensure the effectiveness of school inclusion processes: indeed, one of the Five Key Messages is “Highly qualified professionals: the importance of having highly qualified professionals in general, and teachers in particular”. However, not only is there no set of standards to recognize an inclusive specialized support teacher, but there are reasons that make difficult to define the essential skills and to assess them: i.e. the different factors that contribute to the definition of the complex and dynamic construct of inclusion; the specific aspects of school systems in different countries; the different models designed to define the support teacher's profile; the inherent difficulty in establishing criteria, indicators and modalities for assessment.

Purpose:
The final goal of our work is to identify a set of indicators of competencies to assess the impact of teachers’ training, particularly those specialized on special needs and school inclusion processes. Benefiting not only from the national but also from the international literature implicitly means being able to conduct a comparative study. We therefore carried out a preliminary scoping review to systematically and thoroughly examine and map the existing literature on the topic, identifying key trends, adopted methodologies and emerging evidence: this process allowed us to highlight gaps in current research as well as to better understand the different perspectives and approaches used in various educational settings. The next step will be to develop a systematic review. Because of the work carried out so far, we arrived at an appropriate research question and a query, this preliminary approach provided us with a solid basis for outlining the inclusion/exclusion criteria, and defining the analysis methods and categorization process following the qualitative assessment of relevant studies. We are now able to structure an analysis that accurately reflects the needs and challenges of the field.

Methodology:
The scoping review was conducted using academic databases such as ERIC, Scopus, Web Of Science, Proquest, PsycInfo, EBSCOhost, and others that contain peer-reviewed articles, empirical studies, and literature reviews, as well as peer-reviewed journals and reports from government sources and international organizations concerned with educational policies and special pedagogy and inclusion. Rigorous criteria were applied to ensure the quality and relevance of the selected studies.

Results:
The results will provide a solid basis for future educational research and policies, helping to improve evaluation and training of support teachers globally. We expect that the research as a whole will provide useful insights to develop common standards and promote more effective and inclusive teaching practices, to guide the new future cycles of the Specialization Course that institutional decision makers are planning in Italy and to strengthen the refresher program for in-service teachers.

Keywords:

Inclusion, skills assessment, indicators, quality process in Italian schools, special education, special needs.