Teaching Students with Disabilities: Perceived Teacher Competences

The modern teacher should be equipped with competences necessary to meet the educational needs of all students, including those with special educational needs, also those with disabilities. The components of teachers’ competences include knowledge, skills, and attitudes. The level of these competences may impact students’ academic achievements. The aim of the study presented in this paper was to assess teachers’ professional competences in working with students with and without disabilities in different types of schools (mainstream, integrated and special) with Polish students. The analyses considered sociodemographic and work-related variables in teachers. The quantitative data were collected from 416 teachers using The Survey of Perceived Professional Teaching Competences. The conducted analysis related to five categories of professional competences: evaluative, psychological, innovative, communicative as well as substantive-methodological. In the analyses, the Wilcoxon paired rank-order test, the rank-sum correlation coefficient for matched pairs (rc), Kendall’s tau, and the rpb point-sum correlation coefficient were used. Teachers rated their evaluative competences to work with students with disabilities higher than their competences to work with typically-developing students, and the students’ disability (or lack of it) was the most significant for the perception of their own competence in special education teachers. Statistically significant correlations between the evaluation of their own professional competence and selected sociodemographic variables (four) were found only in teachers of mainstream and special schools (one). Implications for practice are discussed.