Effective Teaching Practices by Teaching Assistants To Support the Education of Children With Special Educational Needs and/or Disabilities, 2024

Internationally, teaching assistants (TA) support children with special needs and/or disabilities in completing classroom tasks while teachers manage whole-class instruction. Given the limited training available for TAs, influential researchers recently developed a framework to help TAs effectively design such a relevant practice. This ‘scaffolding’ framework encourages TAs to offer minor, neutral support, such as prompting, to students encountering difficulties completing tasks. This way, TAs maximise children’s thinking and learning.

To further inform the scaffolding framework, this research explored TAs’ views in England. Four primary-school TAs participated in a focus group (Focus Group 1) to discuss the scaffolding framework and examples of effective teaching practices across multiple task contexts, such as open and closed tasks. To facilitate the discussion around effective practices, two videos were illustrated to the participants including a TA supporting a child with SEND; the TAs were particularly invited to use the teaching context in the videos to describe effective strategies that they might adopt in comparable circumstances. Video 1 illustrates a TA supporting the child with SEND completing an open task, namely describing a picture, while Video 2 shows the dyad dealing with a closed task: identifying a grammar mistake in a sentence.

The data drawn from Focus Group 1 were finally thematically analysed. To this end, the author transcribed the data verbatim and then interrogated the transcript in relation to scaffolding theories and practices. This process resulted in a list of thematic codes identifying the co-constructed meaning of effective TA scaffolding practices along with practical examples and the factors (such as types of tasks) influencing the applicability of the scaffolding framework. These research findings drawn from Focus Group 1 were finally shared with the participants in a second round of focus group discussion, Focus Group 2, for confirmation and further elaboration.

Drawing from this research, this dataset includes pseudonymised transcriptions of the two focus group discussions. Video 1 and 2 and their transcripts are excluded from the dataset. Additionally, the dataset contains demographic information of the participating TAs gathered through a questionnaire.