Special education: a degree programme with high social motivation

Professor Dr Michael Grosche researches and teaches at the Institute for Educational Research in the School of Education

"One teacher is better than two books" says a German proverb, implying a high degree of professional, social and organisational competence. However, for children with special educational needs, a teacher must bring research methodological knowledge into the school day, in addition to additional patience and sacrifice. The Institute for Educational Research in the School of Education at the University of Wuppertal is there to adequately impart these skills. With the aim of imparting educational science skills for the teaching profession, conducting school-related educational research and coordinating those involved in teacher training, academics from various disciplines teach and conduct research there. Professor Dr Michael Grosche is one of them, working in the field of "Rehabilitation sciences with a focus on learning".

Working memory and implementation research

Born in Detmold, Grosche has been working on learning impairments, mostly the cognitive facets of working memory, in his professorship since 2015. "It's a fact," he says, "that the working memory of people with learning disabilities is limited and there are indications that these limitations are responsible for people developing learning disabilities." This, let's call it "reduced" working memory, is part of his research, and he is always thinking of ways to help teachers. "We look at many diagnostic procedures, some of which we develop here, and then try to change teaching on this basis." Grosche is also involved in the new research field of implementation research, as it starts directly in the schools. "We go into practice, see what the teachers are doing on site and then try to develop this further together with the teachers," he explains. "For example, we have further developed a diagnostic tool for grammar acquisition for the verb position, which has been very well received in practice." The children's skills can then be assessed at various grammatical acquisition levels.

The response-to-intervention (RTI) concept

All new concepts have a long way to go before they can be changed. The so-called response-to-intervention concept, or RTI for short, which is being investigated in special educational areas, evaluates the support offered to the child in order to find out whether this support is actually effective. "In this concept, we diagnose the learning status of all children and young people around three times a year and then see who may need more or different support." This support is then tested in small steps to see if it matches the learning needs. Grosche calls this "experimental teaching", as a support hypothesis is taken as a basis, tested in reality and, in the negative case, adapted even more closely to the needs of the child.

Inclusion

The term inclusion immediately springs to mind for the layperson in this context, and the educational scientist also sees the RTI concept as a possible model. "It is," he explains, "one of the most controversial inclusion models because, on the one hand, it attempts to achieve the best possible support for all children in a very pragmatic way. On the other hand, however, it does not assume that teachers can always do justice to all children. RTI is therefore a tiered system of cooperation between regular school teachers and special needs teachers to support inclusive teaching."
Grosche is well aware of the problems involved in dealing with inclusion models and recognises them. "The multi-tier school system at secondary level already has a certain tension with inclusion. Inclusion is about ensuring that many people, perhaps even all people, can participate in as many processes of school life as possible. And if we continue to have a selective transition recommendation and only certain children go to grammar or secondary schools, we will have a large social and performance-related gap. And that's a bit contradictory to the basic idea of inclusion."

The group puzzle

But how can inclusion be implemented effectively? The 37-year-old illustrates it using the example of the so-called group puzzle. "It's about understanding a text. We have a relatively large text and we cut it up into different sized blocks. And a child with learning difficulties, who may not yet be able to read very well, is given a very small section of the text, which is nevertheless important in order to understand the entire content of the text. Children with better reading skills would be given larger text blocks. This is a method for dealing with heterogeneous small groups in everyday school life." The children are dependent on each other due to the different text modules, in technical jargon they are socially interdependent. In order to solve the task, they discuss the respective content and present a joint final task on the text content, in which children with special needs are just as important for the group result as children without special needs. So you need a learning task that can be divided into different subtasks and whose overall result can only be achieved together.

"It is actually a fundamental scientific problem that we have not yet managed to develop a good theory of inclusion"

Grosche can well understand the difficulties outsiders have in understanding the topic of inclusion and knows that implementation is not always completely feasible. "This is also due to the theories of inclusion, because they are not worked out concretely enough or are sometimes even contradictory. So it's not necessarily a practical or political problem, but also a scientific problem. And we need to become much more precise, especially in terms of theoretical research," he points out. His desired goal would be a precise and unambiguous theory of inclusion, for which he still sees a great need for development.

15,000 primary school teacher vacancies in the next ten years

The example of the group puzzle mentioned above alone pushes many teachers to their limits, and the scientist agrees. But he points out: "The alternative of only offering support for children with special needs at special schools is not necessarily the better alternative. It's not the case that special schools work extremely well across the board and have offered really great support. And perhaps children with special needs actually learn better in inclusion, even if inclusion is not yet being implemented particularly well."
Politicians have recognised that there is a need for action, as Minister Gebauer reports that there will be a shortage of 15,000 primary school teachers alone over the next ten years. However, the 500 newly created study places for special needs education per semester mean time, learning time for the prospective young academics to be able to take on the important tasks in the teaching profession. "It takes many years before they are ready," says Grosche. "But then the chances of being hired are excellent. Everyone who completes our special needs education degree will get a job."
And that brings us to the requirements that prospective students of special needs education should bear in mind. "We expect our students to have a high level of social motivation and responsibility. But building on these high social motives, our degree programme is a very scientifically oriented course, with a large proportion of empirical research and diagnostics, for which you need a lot of research methodological skills. I think this is a big surprise for many students."

Different system logic of university and school

Collaboration with four primary schools in the Bergisches Land region is going well, and a further collaboration with a special school is in the pipeline. The scientist sees a decisive difficulty in the different system logic of university and school, which restricts the room for manoeuvre. "We are currently launching a project, a short-term spelling programme, which we are implementing at around 10 schools. The programme lasts seven weeks. Many schools are happy to take part because the additional support is provided by our students," he explains. At the same time, however, he raises the question of sustainability when the students leave the schools after the programme.

Increasing the attractiveness of the teaching profession

Grosche knows how strenuous the profession of special needs teacher is. "You need an extremely high level of social motivation, as well as intellectual, research, leadership and management motivation, and you have to be able to cope with conventional office tasks, such as formal application procedures and documentation, and carry them out conscientiously," he concludes. "You should see your job as lifelong learning and constant research into whether what you are offering pupils really works."
"Teachers were once pupils too," says Swiss theologian Walter Ludin, expressing the advantage of all student teachers who aspire to a profession that they themselves have been able to observe for years.

Uwe Blass (interview from 04.12.2018)

Professor Dr Michael Grosche studied special education at the University of Cologne and completed his doctorate there in 2011. From 2013 to 2015, he was a professor of inclusion education/special needs language at the University of Potsdam. Since 2015, he has been working at the Institute for Educational Research in the School of Education at the University of Wuppertal. His field of work is rehabilitation sciences with a focus on learning.

More information about the research area