Teachers’ noticing in inclusive and special school systems: the same or different?

Abstract

ABSTRACT The quality of teachers’ noticing in the inclusive classroom is supposed to depend on teachers’ expertise. As part of professional development in video clubs, we compared Austrian and Swiss teachers’ noticing of inclusive teaching. While, in Austria, teachers worked in an inclusive setting, in Switzerland the participating school ran special educational needs (SEN) classes. This led to the interesting question of whether there were differences in teachers’ noticing between the two forms of special needs education. We conducted a video club with mainstream and SEN teachers four times locally and twice cross-nationally. A qualitative content analysis was carried out and the frequencies of categories were compared quantitatively between the groups and over time. Overall, the two groups did not differ in their noticing, which is somewhat surprising but can be explained by their generally high level of expertise in relation to heterogeneous teaching. Lesson content was the only significant category where teachers in inclusive classrooms showed higher frequencies of noticing. It appears that teachers with experience in either setting were able to assess meaningful heterogeneous teaching, but that opportunities for development of inclusive teaching practices are not yet being used fully.