Inclusive Teacher’s Competence

The goal of inclusive education is to create a process that allows all students to learn in their own community, to their full learning potential and to feel a genuine sense of belonging to their own school community. Inclusive education requires teachers who are able to make flexible solutions in building learning environments for all their students. According to our previous research, a teacher's socio-emotional competence is a key factor in promoting students' learning outcomes, participation and well-being. Also, Buyse has found that the core elements of successful inclusive education are the professional skills and support of teachers, which have a positive impact on the school climate, learning processes, academic performance, and relationships in the classroom. The ability of inclusive teachers to support each individual in the context of “everyone”, their positive belief in the abilities of their students, and their commitment to teaching everyone are important. An inclusive teacher could be seen as an educational planner who can be a reflective practitioner and develop his or her own work guided by inclusive values.
In teacher education, inclusive education should be seen as a thread running through the education program. After graduation, all teachers need to have attitudinal and educational resources to engage diverse learners from various cultural background. They should also be able to identify the individual needs and conditions of the pupil, and support individual and collective learning processes. The student teachers’ learning processes should touch them emotionally and students need to have possibilities to develop their socio-emotional competences during their studies.
In my presentation, I describe professional competencies teachers need when they are implementing inclusive pedagogy and Universal Design for Learning framework in their heterogeneous classes. The results are based on our collaborative action research, which was carried out together with three teachers, who implemented Universal Design for Learning framework in their classrooms. As a theoretical framework for teacher competence, we used the Multidimensional Adapted Process (MAP) model of teaching, developed by Finnish researchers and teacher educators.
According to our results, the most needed competence was the teachers’ cognitive skills. Inclusive teaching required the ability to flexibly change one’s own teaching and learning situations. In addition, teachers ’social skills seemed to be an important feature. Their students were very heterogeneous and had different needs, and teachers had to collaborate with many other professionals and parents. The personal orientation of each teacher, such as values, beliefs and ethics, also played a crucial role, as teachers shared common values that strived towards inclusive education. The big challenge is how to enhance these competences in the pre-service teacher education in an optimal way.