Firstly, teachers need to know that it is important to differentiate
between forms of provision and the teaching and
learning that occurs within them. This is an important distinction
because often they are confounded in the literature
on special educational needs. As the places where formal
learning occurs, forms of provision are the contexts within
which teaching and learning take place. The actual teaching
approach adopted by the teacher is generally determined by
the teacher’s beliefs about how people learn. Some schools,
such as Steiner Schools, develop an approach to teaching
around a particular philosophy of education, but generally
teachers are attracted to working in these types of schools
because they agree with the philosophy that underpins the
educational approach. Because special needs provision was
historically organised around types of impairment, teaching
approaches and forms of provision are often confounded.
The conventional wisdom is that teachers who work in
specialist forms of provision use specialist teaching methods
and procedures that cannot be used or found elsewhere. In
reality, as discussed above, it is not the actual teaching
methods or procedures that are different, although the
context may be quite different. This begs a number of questions
about the relationships between forms of provision or
context, theories of learning and teaching approaches. While
there are many important discussions to be had about these
relationships, this article will focus on teachers in mainstream
classrooms