A New Challenge for Special Education Teacher Training in Turkey: The Newest and Applied Master’s Degree Program’s Effects

Abstract

After the new education reform made in Turkey in 2012 under the leadership of the Minister of National Education Prof.Dr. Omer DINCER, considerable steps have been taken in training teachers who will work in the field of special education. According to Sari (2013), it is known that 48% of approximately 5580 teachers in 2468 special education institutions in Turkey are the graduates from special education departments and 52% of these teachers are the graduates from other departments. Turkey is urgently in need of the appointment of 22000 teachers graduating from the department of special education in 2014 and afterwards. Within the scope of this need in Turkey, one of the steps taken in order to train teachers having required competence in this field is the Applied Master’s Degree Program (AMDP). It is a program, which was suggested to the Council of Higher Education by the Minister of National Education Prof. Dr. Omer Dincer, who was on duty between 2012 and 2013, and Assoc. Prof. Dr. Hakan Sari, the General Director of Special Education and Guidance Services of that period. It includes a total of 857-hour training and at least 4-semester compulsory education with a 196-hour learning practice in the field of special education, which is the first in Turkey.  It is a program in which students are chosen among students graduated from the faculties providing education for teachers or among students having pedagogical formation (knowledge of teaching field) graduated from other faculties. As it is a program which is being applied for the first time in the world, it is necessary to introduce the practices carried out in special education institutions after completing the courses successfully and the tasks that students must perform within the process of practice, and to share its practicality in other countries.Therefore, the purpose of this research is to provide a basis to be able to apply this model in other countries by sharing the acquisitions of the program, which is being applied for the first time in Turkey in order to train qualified special education teachers in both institutional frame and implementation phase. In this research, ‘Document Analysis’ method was used. With this method, the research was completed by analyzing all admitted correspondences, written documents that would form a basis though ‘Content Analysis Method’. Until now, most of the applied solutions to the case of teacher training in special education have caused concerns in terms of quality problems.  It is believed that the special education teachers that graduate from AMDP will be able to continue their professions with a more qualified and sufficient capacity.This paper is just a sample template for the prospective authors of IISTE Over the decades, the concepts of holons and holonic systems have been adopted in many research fields, but they are scarcely attempted on labour planning. A literature gap exists, thus motivating the author to come up with a holonic model that uses exponential smoothing to forecast some quantitative variables in labour-intensive production. These varying parameters include the machine utilisation that reflects the demand and the worker absenteeism and turnover that constitute the disturbance. Collective equations are formulated to periodically compute the number of workers required. For model validation purpose, twenty-four-month data analysis is conducted on a mock-up basis.

Keywords: teacher training, special education, applied master’s degree program in special education, teacher education