Naturalistic Instructional Approaches to Support Inclusion of Preschool Children with Disabilities

Educating preschool children with disabilities along with their typically developing peers with in- and out of class support is a common practice that has been used since 1970s in the United States and other developed countries. Over the years, the practice has been named as mainstreaming, integration, and inclusion. For inclusive education to be successful, teachers who work with children with disabilities in inclusive settings should be able to adapt their instructional practices and have the skills to identify and use naturalistic instructional approaches. The purpose of this paper was to describe five commonly used naturalistic instructional approaches designed to support development and learning of preschool children with disabilities in inclusive settings, explain active ingredients of these approaches, and present a summary of scientific evidence for their effectiveness. These approaches included incidental teaching, milieu teaching, activity-based intervention, transition-based teaching, and embedded instruction. At the end of the paper, the author discussed the features of effective professional development programs for training pre- and in-service teachers to use naturalistic instructional approaches.