Browsing by Author "Jolma, Essi"

The purpose of this article-formatted thesis is to provide new information on the current state of co-teaching in Finnish early childhood education and pre-primary education. The study presents how early childhood teachers and special education teachers use co-teaching as a form of teacher collaboration. In addition, the study presents what kind of roles teachers play in co-teaching. In addition, the study presents the challenges and bene-fits that teacher have experienced in co-teaching. Finally, the study examines what teachers consider to be the appropriate context for co-teaching in early childhood education and pre-primary education. Previous national and international studies have been carried out in the context of schools. This study therefore aims to add to the body of research on co-teaching by teachers in the context of early childhood education and care. The quantitative data for my study consisted of data from the Ministry of Education and Culture's research project Supporting Together!, which was collected in 2018. 152 teachers from three large Finnish cities participated in the study. The survey questionnaire was pre-pared by Päivi Pihlaja and Marjatta Takala, researchers involved in the project. My research material is quantitative, so I used methods suitable for quantitative data in the analysis. I used the SPSS program (IBM SPSS Statistics for Windows, Version 28) to analyse the quantitative data. I analysed the data using descriptive statistics and cross-tabulation. The results showed that teachers have relatively little experience and training in co-teaching in early childhood education and pre-primary education. Teachers working as early child-hood special education teachers were statistically significantly different from teachers work-ing as early childhood teachers or pre-primary teachers in terms of training in co-teaching, as they had more training in co-teaching. However, the results show that co-teaching is carried out least with special teachers in early childhood education. Further research is need-ed, for example on the barriers and opportunities for co-teaching between early childhood teachers and special needs teachers. The article "Co-teaching in early childhood education" is to be published in the Journal of Early Education Research.