The aim of this research is to analyze teachers’ and paraprofessionals’ work and reflections on assessments for learning in a Swedish compulsory special school. Research has shown that assessment for Learning is a powerful tool to improve student achievement. The theoretical perspectives discuss concepts such as situated learning and collaboration. The research adopted a participatory design; the researchers followed four teams, totally 20 teachers and paraprofessionals’ work through video observation, discussions, feedback and lectures on assessment. The teams documented classroom teaching and assessment of students' abilities in different subject. The data in this study are based on teams’ written texts. The texts are analyzed using a qualitative content analysis and contribute to research on formative assessment by including teachers as well as paraprofessionals. Results show, that professions have developed their educational philosophy and their ability to give children feedback, which will help their learning. The results also highlight the discussion between learning and caring, regarding the duties of teachers and paraprofessionals. A challenge for the teams is to unite the children’s care needs with the curriculum knowledge requirements and ensure them to learn within a holistic perspective. Teaching and assessing students with extensive learning difficulties and in need of alternative communication is another challenge for the teams as well as awareness that change processes take time.

This article draft draws on an ongoing project in a school in Malmö. The project is a collaboration between Daniel Östlund, Ph D., and senior lecturer at Kristianstad University and Lotta Anderson, Ph D. and senior lecturer at Malmö University. The plan is for us to write the article together during the fall/winter. The project started in April 2014 and we are finishing the project in December 2015. We have been working with the teachers and paraprofessionals to develop their teaching and formative assessment skills over two semesters (fall 2014 and spring 2015). This fall we are evaluating the project together with the participants and they are also going to write articles about their work in the project, which will become an anthology. Overall Abstract This study reports on a research and development project in a Swedish primary school with seven self-contained classes for pupils with developmental disabilities alongside 6 additional classes of students without disabilities. In recent decades there has been movement towards more collaborative ways to develop pedagogical practice in Swedish schools and this project draws on collaboration between the special teachers and paraprofessionals in this school and, the municipality and researchers from two universities (Kristianstad university and Malmö University). The aim of the project was to contribute to the teachers’ and the paraprofessionals’ professional development in the field of assessment for learning (AfL) with the goal of improving students’ achievements. Research by Black & Wiliam (1998) and Hattie (2008) has shown that assessment for learning (AfL)/formative assessment is a powerful tool for improving students’ achievements, but there is not much research conducted with regard to students with developmental disabilities. This research and development project can hopefully contribute new knowledge to this field. The data include observations, interviews, group discussions and documents produced in the project and were collected in a Swedish primary school over a period of 12 months. Analytically, the paper is inspired by Biestas (2010) ideas of education and the model in which Biesta refers to three functions of education: (1) qualification, which involves providing participants with knowledge, (2) socialization, which is concerned with integrating individuals into existing social, cultural and political orders through the transmission of norms and values; and (3) subjectivation, which concerns the process of individuation, or becoming a free agents of action, responsibility and independence. Preliminary results indicate that both teachers and paraprofessionals have developed their educational philosophy and have developed the ability to give students feedback that helps them to improve their learning. From a student perspective, because of the professionals' changed ways of giving feedback and informing the students about their achievements, the students have become more engaged and involved in their own learning and have become more aware of the educational goals they are working towards and the strategies for “how to get there”. The project has also been using peer feedback developed with the support of the use of Ipads and smartboards as tools to give the student opportunities to reflect on their own and their peers' learning by watching videotaped lessons.

The aim is to analyze what characterizes the work of special needs teachers and what collaborations they engage in in schools for students with intellectual disability. Special needs teachers with degrees from three different universities in southern Sweden participated in the survey. The results show that a majority of the respondents had long experience before they started the special needs training program and they describe the direct encounters with students in the classroom as an important part of their work. Supervision and subject-development also exist, but not to the same extent as classroom teaching

The study is part of a three-year school-improvement program in Sweden on creating inclusive learning environments, comprising several organizational levels from policy and management level to classroom praxis (http://www.ifous.se/programomraden-forskning/inkludering/). Research on inclusive education in an international context frequently focuses the placement of individual students, administrative and organizational problems and attitudes towards policy and steering documents (Forlin, Douglas & Hattie, 1996 ; Ainscow & Miles, 2008 ). Often, a praxis of exclusion is built into educational systems (Van de Putte & De Schauwer, 2013 ) where thinking of students in categories forces pedagogues into locked positions (Tetler, 2000 ). In school development, the formation of teachers into teams may play a central part as an improvement strategy (Nordholm and Blossing, 2014 ). The aim of the present study is to document and analyze the processes experienced by 32 school teams, chosen by their school leaders in 12 municipalities to implement the intentions to create inclusive learning environments in their schools. The research interest focuses how the informants describe pedagogical and didactic prerequisites and organizational conditions and how they acted when implementing inclusive learning environments in the local school context, their role and legitimacy, the support structures and the signs of change they have seen towards a more inclusive learning environment during the developmental program. The methodological approach is inspired by on-going evaluation (Ahnberg, Lundgren, Messing & von Schantz Lundgren, 2010) as a way to contribute knowledge about longitudinal developmental processes in school development close to local school context and praxis. Group interviews with the members of the teams were conducted each year in a dialogic manner with the ambition to give continuous feed back to the school teams as a way to promote developmental learning during the program. Except for visits to the schools and interviews, the researchers took part in seminars within the program and collected written documentation from the schools. The research interest concerns intentions expressed by the teams in the beginning of the program, the processes during the implementation phases and a final evaluation after three years. Data was analyzed according to qualitative content analysis and contains a rich variety of experiences and thick descriptions from the participants. Significant shifts of perspectives during the three years appear in the findings displaying how school problems and student-perspectives were understood, how the concept of inclusion was interpreted and enacted, how the teachers used analysis and reflection to promote inclusive learning environments and how frustration and insecurity among staff was transferred into collegial cooperation. The main shifts can be described in terms of taking steps from ideology to implementation, from being stuck in locked group constellations to finding flexible solutions, from seeing the teacher as the carrier of problems to collegial professionalism, and from viewing the student as the carrier of problems to analysing difficulties on several levels. School development related to inclusive learning environment is a democratic issue relevant in a Nordic as well as a global educational context and the complexity of educational organisation on different levels (Scheerens, 2015).

The thesis should be regarded as a contribution to the development of knowledge about the interaction taking place in the educational setting for pupils with PIMD in Sweden, the training school (Sw. Träningsskola), and the contextual and interactional conditions that characterizes this educational setting. The study is expected to contribute to a deeper understanding of the pedagogical praxis in the training School and the pupils’ possibilities to be agents within the processes of interaction, participation and learning. The thesis aims to contribute to the development of knowledge about the contextual and interactional conditions that training school pedagogic practice is characterized by. The study's overall purpose is to analyze the participation and interaction in the context of five training school classes. A particular focus is placed on teaching organization and the interaction patterns appearing in the pedagogical practice and what kind of consequences the interaction has for the pupils’ participation. Participation in this study refers to how the teams and students jointly create interaction in classrooms, the patterns produced by the interaction. The study draws on a theoretical framework that is influenced by ethnometodological work and from the dramaturgical framework by Goffman, where the participant’s social actions and methodical ways of making sense in a social setting are in focus. The design of the data collection is inspired by an ethnographic approach and is constructed as a classroom study. The empirical material was collected by classroom observations and by video recordings. The data derive from video recordings that were made during spring 2009 and spring 2010 in five training school classes and all together twenty pupils (age 8-19, eleven boys and nine girls) and 28 members from the teams (nine special teachers, two music teachers, one psychical education teacher and 16 assistants) participated in the study. The results are showing that the pedagogical practice in training school was defined by six different areas: Circle time, One-to-one tuition, Group joint education, Snack time/ lunch, Breaks and play-time and Transitions. In the interaction between the pupils and the staff the pupils’ positions was constructed as: The attentive and responsive pupil, The experiencing pupil, The choice making and autonomous pupil, The exploring pupil, The pupil that shows civil inattention, The pupil as a recipient of care and The playing pupil. A starting point for further research involves studying how students' participation is constructed in more inclusive settings i.e. in interaction with other children who do not have such extensive disabilities.

Much of the research on school settings for pupils with profound and multiple learning difficulties (PMLD) has focused on the pupils special needs as learners and on what special skills teachers need to work effectively with the pupils (Ware, 2005 ; Nind, 2007 ). In a Swedish context there has been some research from an interaction point of view on pupils with PMLD focusing the interaction with their parents (Wilder, 2008 ), some research (Anderson, 2002 ) with a focus on interaction between pupils and staff has been made in a training school context. In the work with my thesis the overall aim is to explore, describe and analyze the use of interactional resources in everyday life in the special school and to explore how the pedagogical praxis is constructed out of the use of the participants’ interactional resources. The study also tries to explore what kind of learning- and socialization processes the special school setting offers the participants. This paper tries to explore interactional resources used by staff (teachers and assistants) and pupils with PMLD in everyday life situations in special school classrooms with a focus on what resources is used when members of the staff or pupils are trying to initiate and maintain interaction with each other. The study draws on a theoretical framework that is influenced by ethnometodological work, where the participant’s social actions and the participant’s methodical ways of making sense in a social setting are in focus. The design of the project is inspired by an ethnographic approach and is constructed as a classroom study. The empirical material is collected by participatory observations, by video recordings and by focus group sessions with the members of the staff. The data presented in this paper derive from video recordings that were made during spring 2009 in two training school classes and all together eight pupils (age 8-17 - two boys and six girls) and 10 members from the staff (two special teachers, music teacher, psychical education teacher and six assistants - all women) participated in the study. In this paper a small portion of the total video recordings (about 50 hours) is transcribed and analyzed. Detailed transcripts have been made out of the data from video recordings using conversation analytic notations considering both verbal and non verbal actions in the interaction between pupils and staff members. The analytic approach is inspired by Conversation Analysis (CA) and provides detailed analysis of the use of interactional resources used when the participants in the material initiates and tries to maintain interaction with each other. The results in this study are supposed to be of relevance for the understanding of the pedagogical praxis in the special schools and by studying interaction between pupils and staff in the special schools this paper also intend to explore patterns in the interaction and bring new perspectives on teaching and interaction in the special school for pupils with profound and multiple learning difficulties.

This paper will present some findings from my ongoing work with my doctoral thesis. The study deals with questions about learning and socialization in special schools for pupils with moderate to severe learning difficulties. The overall aim is to study the interaction between pupils and teachers and describe the patterns, forms and content in their vocal- and non-vocal interaction in the classroom. A point of departure is that learning occurs in a social context and in collaboration with others, and the theoretical framework in the research is inspired by a socio-cultural perspective and an interactionistic perspective . My specific research questions are: • What kind of patterns appears in the interaction between pupils and teachers in the classroom? • What kind of learning- and socialization processes appears in the verbal- and non-verbal interaction between pupils and teachers? The design of the project is inspired by an ethnographic approach and is constructed as a classroom study. In all, three different classes participates in the study and the pupils in the classes go to the compulsory special school for the moderate to severely learning disabled (särskola/träningsskola), aged between 8 and 17 years.The empirical material is collected by participatory observations, by video recordings and by interviews with the teachers and the pupils. The video recordings are analyzed using techniques derived from what Scheff calls a part/whole analysis. The process of analyzing one of the classroom studies is in progress and the findings so far will be presented in the paper.