Experiences of special education teachers specialised in moderate to severe intellectual disabilities about maintaining contact with parents

Abstract

Background and aims: This work discusses the communication patterns between parents and special education teachers specialised in moderate to severe intellectual disabilities, focusing on the special education teacher’s side. Kinds of communication patterns used and the topics discussed, emotions and impressions special education teachers might have about their relationship with parents and suggestions we could use in the future to help expand their toolbar were investigated. The importance of the topic emerges from the multidisciplinary teams - nowadays including parents as well - typical for special education.  In recent years, the topic became more popular as a result of changes in education policy and the society, but the researches usually focus on families and educators in the mainstream education, therefore we felt the need to focus on the field of special education as well.

Our goal is to examine the special education teachers’ communication patterns and their attitudes and impressions towards their relationships with the parents. Based on our results, we hope to find useful ways to provide support for their practice. We would also like to map out the fields for future research in this topic.

Method: We chose to use an online questionnaire as our research method, including 17 questions for this research according to previous papers.

Results: Results of our research show that our respondents prefer two-way communication techniques the most and find these techniques the most useful. There was a bigger emphasis on social media than anticipated. Three-quarter of our respondents valued their relationship with the parents as positive. Our research also showed that the topic of conversations mostly revolves closely around the children.

Conclusion: There is a connection between the esteemed usefulness and the usage of the communication techniques. Respondents who have been working for only 1-5 years in this field, felt less prepared and less content, and show the most need for further training in communication. Similar tendencies were found among respondents who have been working for more than 15 years. Further researches would be worthwhile focusing on the possibilities of supporting the beginners in this field along with the factors - like burn-out, changing family structures and education policies - influencing the feeling of being content of those who have been in the field for more than 15 years. Furthermore, it would be important to investigate the changes in the forms of keeping in touch in the light of the spread of social media usage.

Keywords: Parent-teacher relationship, parent-teacher communication, contact, parental involvement