Special education teachers teach special needs students who come to school with different abilities, knowledge and skills. They are responsible for doing their job well, which means they professionally plan, carry out and evaluate the lesson, they connect with other school workers, they attend professional training courses and they take care of their professional development. With the help of the evaluation they find out which activities a special needs student was successful at and which ones he/she was unsuccessful at. When a student is successful or, mainly when he/she is unsuccessful, the teachers ask themselves ''Why?''. They begin by searching for reasons in themselves, in their work and in their students, who would help them explain their successes and failures. When dealing with a student's failure a special education teacher must find a solution to reach the set goal. They are faced with the burdens that come by solving problems and it depends on the personal characteristics of the special education teacher how bravely they will bear the failure and how well they will solve the problem. If special education teachers experience too many frustrations and develop defence mechanisms, they do not solve the problems constructively, which can lead to stress.
The purpose of the research is to find out, which factors special education teachers attribute the responsibility for success and failure of special needs children to and what makes these teachers happy and what burdens them when they work with such children. With Thomas R. Guskey’s Responsibility for student achievement questionnaire we wanted to check the share of responsibility that special education teachers attribute to special needs’ student’s success and failure. With Connor-Davidson’s resilience scale we wanted to find out how well special education teachers overcome the obstacles and face problems.
Sixty special education teachers with different types of education participated in the research. They work in an adjusted pursuance programme with additional professional help, in an adjusted programme with an equal or lower educational standard and/or in a special programme of education.
The results showed that special education teachers attribute the most responsibility to the student, then to teachers and parents. Special education teachers are mostly fond of working with students. However, parents trouble them a lot. The teachers feel they are personally firm and can overcome failures well, they are capable of well-adjusting to change and facing problems.
We succeeded in statistically proving the importance of the dimension of responsibility for the success of a special needs’ student – special education teachers take greater responsibility for the student’s success and lesser for his/her failure. Statistically important correlation between the years of work experience and the responsibility was shown in the student’s failure. However, we could not prove the connection for his/her success.
We found out that a special education teacher with more years of service feels less responsible for the student’s failures than the one with less years of work experience. I could not prove a significant connection between the responsibility and the workplace of a special education teacher.
It is vital that a special education teacher believes in the progress of each student with special needs and that he/she helps them to achieve their goals.
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