Session Information
11 SES 09 A, Inclusion and Quality Assurance
Paper Session
Contribution
This ameliorative research aims to harmonize the activities specific to special education with the quality requirements, the intervention being placed at the institutional level by proposing quality practices used in the quality management. Among the functions that quality management has to achieve at institutional level: planning, organization, coordination, involvement, control, quality improvement (the classification differs in the literature), most specialists believe that the quality improvement define the concept of quality. Taking into account the difficulties identified locally in Romanian schools, our proposal for improvement is a model for the development of internal quality referential based on consultation and co-ordination mechanisms to access community resources. We believe that in the current socio-economic and cultural context, the main difficulty of the school as an organization is to identify and exploit its resources. We explored how the schools in the sample implement the proposed model by studying / analyzing multiple cases.
The specific objectives of the research are:
- Developing a corrective intervention model for quality management for the schools under study, based on the results of previous research;
- Inventory and exploration of the support needs of the beneficiaries of the schools included in the sample of the research;
- Analyzing the specific implementation of the corrective model proposed in the process of elaborating the internal quality reference for the target group institutions;
- Highlighting the relationship between the development directions within the institution's internal referential and the support needs of its beneficiaries.
Method
The sample of this study includes 5 special schools and 5 inclusive schools. The Romanian legislation assigns responsibilities to the special school for the schooling of the pupil with special needs in the mainstream school by providing the support teacher and having a clear record of the child's evolution. The proposed model is focused on the application of the quality methodology (Beneficiary Voice, Stakeholder Sheet, Solution / Objects Tree, Tree decision-making) at institutional level. These commonly used methods in modern quality management offers a viable solution for the development of a real quality management system, based on the needs of the beneficiary ("explicit and implicit"). The selection of these methods is designed to create an intervention model that complements the usual approach to planning (made predominantly by SWOT and sometimes PESTEL by the school principal) bringing the beneficiary to the forefront and how it turns from a passive element "reflected" in the mirror of the school principal, in an active element, involved in institutional development that makes known its specific development needs and solutions. This model also investigates the resources of the community and the interested groups for their valorization through a consultation and a coresponsibility approach.
Expected Outcomes
Analysis of the support needs identified by the Beneficiary Voice technique as well as the clustering analysis of the affinity matrices illustrate the presence of a significant number of support needs that are placed outside of the educational-therapeutic act but which can influence its effectiveness through quality management practices. Need for support such as: afterschool with specialized support (20), unity in approaching the child on behalf of all services (37), the possibility of evaluation at school request (40), social support (donations) (45), counseling for children with the ESC (41), the opening of the school to the community (57), the school offers alternatives to post-academic activities (59) involves searching for resources to satisfy them outside of school and its educational-therapeutic activities. In this context it is confirmed that the support needs of the beneficiaries of special education imply the extension of the concept of the quality of education to the elements related to the economic-socio-cultural ensemble of the community of belonging (the "social opening of the school"). As a continuation of the process of processing and interpretation of the given data, the solution tree as elaborated by each school appears as a result of the transformation of the problems identified by the Beneficiary's Voice in solutions that use the identified resources of the community.
References
Alexander, R. (2008). Education For All, The Quality Imperative and the Problem of Pedagogy. The Consortium for Educational Access, Transitions and Equity Alexander, R. (2014).Teaching and Learning – The Quality Imperative revised, Teaching and Learning for Development the 2013/14, Education for All Global Monitoring Report, UNESCO Kania, J., Kramer, M. (2011). Collective Impact. Stanford Social Innovation Review Kania, J., Kramer, M. (2013). Embracing Emergence: How Collective Impact Addresses Complexity, Stanford Social Innovation Review Kavale, K. A, & Spaulding, L.S (2012).- Efficacy of Special Education, The Oxford Handbook of School Psychology Kellaghan, Th., Greaney, V.(2001) . Using assesment to improve the quality of education. Paris: UNESCO
Search the ECER Programme
- Search for keywords and phrases in "Text Search"
- Restrict in which part of the abstracts to search in "Where to search"
- Search for authors and in the respective field.
- For planning your conference attendance you may want to use the conference app, which will be issued some weeks before the conference
- If you are a session chair, best look up your chairing duties in the conference system (Conftool) or the app.