Practices and policies of special (needs) education are built on concepts of ‘special educational needs’ and ‘individualized teaching’: it is argued that some students’ needs cannot be met by mainstream teaching but the students need more individualized teaching that can only be provided by special education professionals. This way of argumentation also forms basis for justifying practices of identifying and labelling ‘special needs students’ and providing them teaching in segregated arrangements. At the same time both of these concepts have been found highly problematic and unclear, researchers finding it impossible to clearly define ‘special educational needs’ (e.g. Wilson 2002) or ‘individualized teaching’ (Brantlinger 2005) or the relationship between the two. My paper approaches these concepts by analysing teachers’ and students’ descriptions of ‘special needs’ and ‘special/individualized teaching’ and my ethnographic observations of everyday teaching practices in special education groups. The paper asks, how students’ ‘special needs’ are defined by the educators, how do these definitions relate to everyday teaching practices, and how do the students’ build understanding of their ‘needs’ in the context of special needs education. The paper is based on my ethnographic PhD project studying everyday practices of special education in Finnish lower secondary school.