CHAPTER II
LITERATURE REVIEW
Over the past decades, the teaching delivery mode for students with special needs has undergone substantial changes, with reference to federal policies. Based on The Education of All Handicapped Children Act of 1975, it became mandatory for the school districts to provide students with disabilities with the education in the least restrictive environment. Within two the following decades, the Individuals with Disabilities Act (IDEA), which was adopted in 1990 and amended in 1997, provided the legal background to place students with special needs in general classrooms. It is since that time that “inclusion” has grown to be a widely used term in school districts across the United States and the philosophy of inclusive teaching has evolved. With the adoption of the No Child Left Behind Act, the emphasis on teaching every student in inclusive, general classroom has led educators to develop various strategies, one of them being co-teaching or team teaching. Due to team-teaching comparatively recent emergence, the number of empirical studies with focus on effectiveness of team-teaching remains limited. Whereas the number of qualitative research works has grown of late, the findings of quantitatively measured outcomes for students with special needs have been scarce. This creates uncertainty regarding the effectiveness of team teaching and leads to challenges in its further implementation in a given setting.
This literature review section identifies a current gap in academic empirical research into the effectiveness of team teaching in the United States in general and New Jersey in particular. It firstly traces how the problem has evolved historically into its present form. Next, it provides a theoretical framework for team teaching and discusses exemplary practices of team teaching found in the pertinent scholarly sources. It further synthesizes research into effectiveness of team teaching as a teaching strategy applied in inclusive, general classroom setting at an elementary level. Finally, it identifies the existing research gap and states the research problem in the context of the reviewed studies. For the literature review, the author has used standard data search strategies which involved the querying of the two databases ERIC (Education Research Information Center), ProQuest, Academic Search Complete, and Academic Search Premier within the last ten years. The key words used in the search included: inclusive elementary setting, team teaching effectiveness, co-teaching effectiveness, strategies of co-teaching, history of co-teaching, models of co-teaching, co-teaching quantitative research, co-teaching empirical research, co-teaching New Jersey. The peer-reviewed studies were included. The chapter ends with a summary of its key findings.
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