Exploring the personal model of interaction with special needs children as structural component of teachers' readiness for inclusive education

Introduction. The paper is devoted to a problem of staffing in the inclusive education. Relevance of the study is determined by many difficulties experienced by educators when teaching children with special educational needs in a high school. The authors consider a personality-oriented model of interaction with children as a structural component of professional readiness for inclusive education. The objective of the study is to identify and analyze specifics of the model of teacher-student interaction at different types of high schools. Materials and Methods. The Maralova-Sitarov's questionnaire was used, enabling differentiation of teacher orientation by the educational disciplinary or personality-oriented model of interaction in the educational process. To process the study results, nonparametric statistical methods were used (Spearman's correlation coefficient and the two-sample test of Mann-Whitney). Results. Most teachers at various types of schools practice an educational and disciplinary model of interaction with children, which impedes the development of the idea and values of inclusive education (i.e. education adapted to requirement of a child with special needs) in the teachers' community. However, for teachers of inclusive-education schools and future teachers, compared to teachers of general educational and special institutions, indicators of the personality-oriented model are significantly higher when speaking in terms of target and instrumental characteristics of activities. Discussion and Conclusion. The study showed both the teacher community adherence to authoritarian stereotypes and the marked trend towards overcoming them by inclusive school teachers and students that reflects the desire for personal and professional self-development. The study reveals new explanations of teacher problems related to mastering the state-of-art educational strategy. In future, the components of the teacher's personal and professional readiness for inclusive education should be identified. The article may be of interest to educators and specialists dealing with issues of staff provision for inclusive education.