Improving the Teacher Training Process in Special Education: An Action Research

The special education teaching program in Turkey was united under a single roof with the decision taken by the Council of Higher Education in 2016. With this decision, the programs for teachers of the hearing impaired, the mentally disabled, the visually impaired and the gifted/special talented were organized as a new and single undergraduate program under the name of "Special Education Teaching." This research aimed to enhance the teaching practice process within the new special education program. For this purpose, the study was designed as action research. The research was conducted in a special education department in a province with a medium-sized population in Central Anatolia. The research participants included 19 faculty members, 24 undergraduate students, 12 special education teachers, one Ministry of National Education official, and one Directorate of National Education official. Semi-structured interviews, participant information forms, video recordings, documents, and a researcher diary were used for data collection. The data obtained from the research were analyzed using a systematic analysis approach. As a result of the research, arrangements were made in the new special education teacher training program in the areas needed in the teacher training process. Steps such as reorganizing the evaluation criteria and creating guidelines to determine the responsibilities of stakeholders are among these arrangements. With the COVID-19 pandemic, activities were carried out for material design and use in distance education and transfer of theoretical knowledge to the online teaching practice environment.