Building bridges in special education: development of an instrument to evaluate the collaboration between regular and special education teachers

Collaboration between teachers of Regular Education and Special Education is a prerequisite for the implementation of an inclusive school. However, research and training in this area is scarce. In order to obtain reliable figures of reality, this study aims to present a measure that would allow assessing, from the perspective of teachers of regular education, the type and efficiency of collaboration of teachers of special education. Using the literature review, we tested a version with 244 Portuguese kindergarten teachers and teachers of regular and special education. The data allowed us to find an instrument with 21 items that accounts for 59.84% of the variance of the responses into two subscales: Functions of the special education teacher (alpha of .941, 12 items) and impact of the special education teacher (alpha .890, 9 items), with full alpha .861. These dimensions were not affected by gender or age, but there were some differences depending on the academic degree, with experience with children with special needs. The
instrument, short and with closed answers revealed potential that should be explored in further studies on this important dimension of educational inclusion. Some suggestions are presented.