Teachers’ Knowledge, Skills, and Readiness in the Guidance of Self-Advocacy Skills to Students with Special Needs

Abstract

Self-advocacy skills are important skills that must be possessed by all individuals, including students with special needs. However, these skills have to be guided by important people, such as teachers for students with special needs. This case study used a fully qualitative approach in obtaining the study data. The purpose of this study was to explore the knowledge, skills, and readiness of teachers in guiding self-advocacy skills to students with special needs. The study data were obtained from semi-structured interviews using an interview protocol on fifteen participants consisting of ten special education teachers and five guidance and counselling teachers. Framework editing from Miles and Huberman was executed to analyze the data. The data was given codes or themes predetermined before the in-depth data analysis. The study results revealed that participants have a lack of knowledge regarding self-advocacy skills. Most participants were also less prepared to teach or guide these skills to students with special needs. However, they are willing to teach with proper training and exposure to self-advocacy skills.  This study implies for the development of training modules on teaching self-advocacy skills for teachers.  The training modules would help them to enhance their knowledge, skills, and readiness to teach more effective self-advocacy skills to students with special needs.