Special Education Certification – Things You Should Know

Special education certification is a special sort of certification that addresses the teachers involved in the education of students with special needs. It is not a compulsory certification but rather one meant to act complementary to the certification a teacher is required to have in order to be able to teach in a public school. Clear enough for now, let’s see what is special about special education.

Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) defines special education as being a “specially designed education, at no cost to the parents, to meet the unique needs of a child with a disability”. What is important about special education is that it provides additional services to the students with special needs in a way that ideally deals with each single student’s needs in order to ensure it gets a proper tailored education.

Which teachers might be interested in special education certification? The settings in which special education is provided can be categorized as it follows: inclusion, mainstream, segregation and exclusion. While in the inclusion approach, students with minimal to moderate special needs attend most of the classes alongside regular students, the segregation model assumes there is no time spent in regular classes by students with special needs. Even though is easy to see why an educator teaching in a special school or to a special education classroom would be much more interested in a special education certification, other teachers might as well take advantage of such a special education certification.

The statistics present that the demand for a special education certification has continually increased over the last years. This is clearly a reason why the Bureau of Labor Statistics is anticipating an above the average increase in the need for professional teachers with a special education certification.

What kind of challenges does a special education certification address? There is a plethora of challenges that might be addressed by a special education certification, more common being communication challenges, emotional and behavioral disorders, challenges with learning (also called learning disorder) and physical disabilities.

Instead of a conclusion to the aforementioned things, we want to add some brief information about how to obtain a special education certification. This kind of certification can be obtained in two different ways: either as a part of a Master’s degree in Education or independently. If choosing to acquire a special education certification independently, a very convenient way of doing that would be to opt for an accredited online program, which can normally accommodate almost any schedule and thus allows you to fulfill your professional obligations. http://www.specialeducationcolleges.net/ is a website which provides more info about special education.