Inclusive teaching strategies: teachers’ practices and perspectives

Background Over recent decades, inclusive education has become a central international policy objective, with the number of young people identified as having special educational needs (SEN) and educated in mainstream settings increasing. Research has focused primarily on teachers’ attitudes towards inclusion (both in relation to SEN and more broadly), but comparatively little is known about how teachers themselves report enacting inclusive practices in their classrooms, or about the social representations that underlie and give meaning to these practices.Purpose The study reported in this paper explored how classroom teachers in France understood and reported implementing inclusive pedagogical practices for students with SEN. Grounded in social representations theory, it examined how they made sense of inclusion and connected these meanings to their reported classroom strategies. It posed the following research questions: 1) What pedagogical strategies do teachers report using to make their classrooms more inclusive? 2) What do teachers report as motivating their use of these pedagogical strategies?Method The qualitative study was based on semi-structured interviews, each lasting approximately one hour, conducted with 31 teachers across eight schools in France. Teachers were asked open-ended questions about how they identified students’ needs, anticipated difficulties and adapted their teaching practices. The data were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis.Findings Inclusion was described by teachers as a continuous, interpretive process rather than a set of fixed techniques. Four themes were identified, each in turn relating to the importance of: preparation through observation and anticipation; differentiation of teaching according to students’ needs; individualised tools supporting autonomy and participation; and strategies sustaining motivation, engagement and classroom regulation.Conclusion The findings suggest that inclusive teaching is best understood not as the application of isolated strategies, but as a professional practice embedded in teachers’ broader representations of learner diversity, autonomy and participation. This highlights the importance of supporting teachers’ preparatory reasoning and professional judgement, alongside the pedagogical tools they use, in efforts to strengthen inclusive education.