Special Education teachers’ Perceptions about meeting the learning needs of Twice Exceptional students within the Inclusive Classroom
Paper details:
Twice – exceptionalism refers to co – existing evidence of high achievement and identified disability according to IDEA’s defined eligibility categories. Students who are gifted have specific areas of strengths and weakness that need to be addressed in the classroom. When a student is twice – exceptional, their needs are based both on disability and giftedness. Special education teachers must be prepared to utilize the curriculum in order to plan instruction that is designed to meet both disability and giftedness. Currently, there is a lack in determining how special education teachers appropriately meet these needs of the twice – exceptional populations (Akar, 2020). With school populations changing, instruction must be designed to meet the needs of such diverse populations (Dimitriadis et al., 2021). Special education teachers are tasked with ensuring that the individualized learning needs are met for each student with a disability to include planning and implementing instruction that addresses varied learning needs. Within the classroom the special education teacher must provide instruction that addresses the twice – exceptional students’ weakness as well as expand on their areas of strength to maximize their learning outcomes. The twice – exceptional learner may have an area of strength or weakness in the areas of reading or math and need instruction designed to meet the students need. There may be areas of executive functioning that need to be addressed. There is a gap in the research that fails to explore special education teachers’ perceptions for utilizing the curriculum in order to design instruction that meets these various needs among twice – exceptional populations (Akar, 2020). Obtaining special educational teachers’ perceptions would aid systems in furthering the support of special education teachers in planning and implementing instruction for twice – exceptional populations (Gierczyk, 2021).