Concerns of regular teachers about inclusive education of students with disabilities

Abstract

The legislation in the Republic of Macedonia, from the school year 2022/23, mandates full inclusion of students with disabilities in regular classrooms. In our school system, regular teachers are implementing inclusive education, but they have limited knowledge and resources for this process. The aim of this study is to determine the levels of teachers' concerns regarding inclusive education by utilizing Stages of Concern Questionnaire (SoCQ). The SoCQ is comprised of 35 statements to which the participants responded on a 0-7 Likert scale according to how true the statement seemed to them at the time from 0 (irrelevant) to 7 (very true of me now). Descriptive statistics (mean & standard deviation) were used to evaluate teachers’ concern regarding inclusive education. A total of 81 regular education teachers participate in the study. More than half of the participants were primary school teachers (N=42; 51,9%), while 80,2% (N=65) of the participants were female. Based on the SoCQ instrument, teachers reflected concern in Stage 0 (Awareness) and Stage 3 (Management), and a low level of concern in Stage 5 (Collaboration). The high score on Stage 3 indicates that teachers are more concerned about how inclusive education will actually happen. Results revealed that regular teachers have a low level of concern toward inclusion. But, we consider that policy-makers in Macedonia should focus further activities on continuous educator training and increase funding for education