ABSTRACT
During the past 20 years there has been a marked decrease in the amount of time students with disabilities spend outside of general education classrooms (Snyder & Dillow, 2010). Whereas in 1989, 31.7% of students with disabilities spent 80% or more of the school day in general education classrooms, by 2007 the number of students doing so had grown to 56.8% (Snyder & Dillow, 2010). Because students with disabilities spend larger portions of the school day inside general education, these classroom are more academically diverse today than at any time in the preceding 20 years. Given these facts, access to the general curriculum requires that general and special educators use instructional activities and practices that support a broad range of student abilities. For many teachers, their pre-service training was not designed for nor prepares them for the realities of instructing diverse learners1 within the same classroom.
