Opinions of classroom teachers' on inclusive education

In our age, scientific and technological developments emerging day by day affect every field of human life. These developments also stand out with major alterations in the educational field. Developing science enabled us to notice the fact that it is a mistake that the individuals differing from their peers due to several reasons should be isolated from the society just because of their differences. It has been clearly understood that the people with diversified needs shall be given the optimal education by means of inclusive education. The purpose of this study is to investigate the opinions of classroom teachers on inclusive education who play the most important part in the inclusive education. The study has been performed with 308 classroom teachers from 13 state elementary schools which reside in Buca district of Izmir and which have been selected with random sampling method. In the study, "The Scale of Teacher's Opinions on Inclusive Education" developed by Yılmaz (2014) has been used in order to specify the opinions of the form teachers. In the scale, there is also an open-ended question where the participants might indicate their general opinions on the implementations of inclusive education. In the study, analysis of data has been carried out with SPSS 15.0 packaged software. Data obtained in this study has been analyzed with t-test and variance analysis. As for analyzing the open-ended question at the end of the survey, content analysis method has been benefited from. When the opinions of teachers on inclusive education has been studied carefully, the qualitative equivalent of the opinions of form teachers on inclusive education has been "I agree mostly". It has clearly been seen that the gender and seniority of the teachers have not influenced their opinions on inclusive education. No significant difference has been noticed between the opinions of the teachers who have and have not inclusive students in their classes. Even the case that there might be a disabled individual in the family has not made any difference on teacher's opinions. Opinions of the teachers who have and haven't had inclusive students earlier haven't been significantly different from each other. The largeness of class size is also another insignificant variable. It has been determined that teachers who have taken education on inclusion have expressed more positive opinions than those who have not. This observation makes us think that the education taken has guided the teachers during the implementation. Besides, it has been confirmed that there has been a differentiation between the opinions of the teachers on inclusive education in accordance with their ages. Finally, it has been emphasized in the answers to open-ended questions given by teachers, that there has been no sufficient support from family, that inclusive education program could not be successful due to the rigors during implementation, and that reports have been made without observing the inclusive students adequately. Key Words: Elementary Schools, Classroom Teachers, Inclusive Education