Building and Sustaining a Collaborative Educational Team: Teachers and Paraprofessionals

Collaboration is an expected responsibility of special education teachers in the United States because they coordinate their efforts with others, including paraprofessionals, service providers, administrators, and families (Pfeiffer et al., 2019). Collaboration is also an integral facet of student success. High-quality collaboration improves instructional quality, which appears to result in higher student achievement across developmental domains (Da Fonte & Barton-Arwood, 2017; Stehle Wallace et al., 2022); in particular, gains have been noted in math and reading (Goddard et al., 2015; Rondfeldt et al., 2015). For students with significant disabilities, the quality of their education is heavily impacted by the quality of instruction by the paraprofessional (Brock et al., 2021).