TRAINING PROCESS CYCLES FOR SPECIAL EDUCATION TEACHERS AND UNIVERSITY SUPERVISORS: A TURKISH CONTEXT

The most important purpose of teacher training programs is to train qualified teachers. As applications in teacher training stabilize and research in this field increases, these applications will develop and improve in quality. The significance of the supervision throughout teaching practicum is widely agreed for the effectiveness of teacher training programs. Particularly, at special education teacher training programs, its significance comes to the fore, due to wide and intense practices for teaching children with developmental disabilities. UNESCO discussed this issue at the Education Conference in 1996 and emphasized the necessity of solving the problem of teacher training globally by developing effective action plans, strategies, and applications by the respective country’s. In spite of different studies on the characteristics and effectiveness of the supervision to the pre-service teachers during teaching practicum, there is not any study investigating in depth the process of training the supervisors who provide supervision to the pre-service teachers by observing, giving feedback and guiding. Therefore, this study aims to address this gap by explaining and revealing the process of training university supervisor within the cycle of this process during teaching practicum. Within the action research design, the study focused on two main themes as implementation process and practice cycle as well as sub-themes for the candidate university supervisor. The study included two kinds of participants: those were involved directly and those who were involved indirectly. The direct participants were the university supervisor candidate, university supervisor and reliability committee coordinator. The indirect participants were nine pre-service teachers and three cooperating teachers who worked in special education. Consequently, it was observed that the practice process provided multi-dimensional learning and teaching opportunities for all direct and indirect participants; namely university supervisors, candidate university supervisor and pre-service teachers. A detailed explanation of the process of practice and training for the special education teacher would serve as a road map for the instructors or candidates teaching practicum courses. At the same time, this study is important because it reports the process of training special education teachers in Turkey on the basis of data. It is hoped that this well-planned and carefully conducted process improves the quality of education presented to children with special needs.