An Introduction to Consultee-Centered Consultation in the Schools

A Step-by-Step Guide to the Process and Skills

Jonathan H. Sandoval

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136506833
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Consulenza nella didattica

Drawing on historical writings about mental health consultation and on contemporary research and theory, Jonathan Sandoval lucidly explains the consultee-centered approach to consultation. The book provides an expert foundation on which to build a training program for future school-based consultants. Written for graduate students in school psychology, counseling psychology, special education, and social work, this book is an invaluable resource for mental health professionals working in schools who wish to upgrade their professional skills and grow as reflective practitioners. Individual chapters describe different stages in the consultation process; outline the processes characterized in each stage; detail useful consultant skills; review pertinent research; discuss the ethical principles underlying practice; and suggest self-monitoring questions for student consultants.

Featuring a step-by-step developmental model of the consultee-centered consultation process, this book encourages consultants to prioritize those characteristics that contribute to a consultee's work difficulty, in addition to assessing the client more generally. By detailing this unique approach, this concise volume provides an applicable, contextualized, and strategic form of consultation, and fosters a professional-to-professional relationship distinguishable from supervision, counseling, therapy, coaching or other methods.

1 Introduction Consultee-Centered Consultation and Prevention

DOI: 10.4324/9780203145814-1

No one profession or psychological specialty has an exclusive claim to the term consultation, nor is there any commonly agreed upon definition of the term. There are, however, some common elements to most conceptions. Nearly all authorities would acknowledge that it involves a helping relationship between a consultant and consultee, and that the consultant has some special knowledge or expertise that is needed by the consultee. Beyond this agreement, important differences stand out in the use of the term by different professionals and by adherents to different models of consultation within a profession.

Consultation in the Helping Professions

In business and in other nonhuman services fields, one turns to a consultant when something needs to be done that is outside of the range of expertise of the individuals on staff. Consultation means getting advice, training, or direct assistance in solving a problem. The consultant may assist the person seeking help, or may take over the job him or herself and complete it, moving on after the job is done. Thus, a company having problems with a manufacturing process will hire a consultant with appropriate expertise to solve the problem.

Usually two individuals are involved, a consultant and a consultee who may also be called a client (the client of the consultant). This form of consultation may be termed “expert consultation,” and is hard to differentiate from instruction when the process is closely examined. The consultant tells the client/consultee what to do or does it for him or her.

Differences with the Helping Professions

In the helping professions, however, consultation is often thought about differently. Most experts identify three parties to consultation: the consultant (typically a mental health professional), the consultee (a staff member from another discipline), and the client (a patient). In this usage, the client is a client of the consultee, not the consultant. The problem the consultant helps with involves the relationship between the consultee and the client in the work setting. Thus, the consultant assists the consultee to become more effective with the consultee’s clients.

In education, for example, consultation is thought of as a process of interaction between two professional persons, a consultant, who is a special services provider and an expert in some area of psychology or mental health, and the consultee, who is a teacher or administrator who is an expert in curriculum or pedagogy. The topic of consultation is the consultee’s client(s), or work related problems most often involving children, groups of children, or their parents. Contributions to the solution of the work problem come from the joint problem solving effort of the consultant and consultee. The educator’s work problem involves the management or education of one or more students in a classroom or, in the case of school administrator consultees, school personnel or school policies. The consultant and consultee share accountability for the planning and implementation of a program to cater to student needs. Consultation may involve more than one consultant and more than one consultee at a time (Heron & Harris, 1987; Idol, Paolucci-Whitcomb, & Nevin, 1995). In the literature in counseling, school psychology, and school social work, consultation has been defined as a service delivery model, as a professional role, as an intervention, or as a delivery system for creating interventions (Frank & Kratochwill, 2008; Meyers, Parsons, & Martin, 1979). There is some basis for all of these characterizations.

Certain features of human services consultation are different from practices in nonhelping professions. Besides the differentiation of the client and consultee, distinguishing features include the ideas of mutual problem solving and mutual responsibility. Mutual problem solving is common to most conceptualizations of consultation in the educational arena. Since each participant brings different skills and knowledge to the table, by blending them through conversation, new ideas can emerge. There will be a higher probability that the target problem may be successfully addressed than if each participant had worked on the problem alone. The basic notion is that two or more heads (and two or more theories) are better than one. Mutual problem solving also implies that the relationship is nonhierarchical, and that a positive, collaborative working relationship has been established.

Mutual responsibility is present in that both the consultant and consultee have some responsibility to the client and to the system in which they work. The consultee has direct responsibility for the client; that is, the teacher is chiefly accountable for the learning and development of his or her pupils. The consultant has an ethical responsibility for the welfare of the client, and a professional responsibility to the system, but little direct control over what happens in the classroom.

In addition, human services consultation “enables” or “empowers” consultees. As the process generates new understandings and the consultee practices new skills, the consultee grows as a professional. Professional self-esteem comes from solving difficult human problems, and self-confidence increases the motivation to take on new challenges.

Another feature of human services consultation is that it is an indirect service to children. It is an effort by school psychologists, counselors, and social workers to enhance, by collaborative problem solving, the understandings and skills of the adults who work directly with the children. Children benefit most from changes in the behavior of adults, such as teachers and parents, with whom they spend the majority of their time. Paradoxically, mental health workers in the schools often have the greatest impact when they work indirectly on children’s behalf (Gutkin & Conoley, 1990; Sheridan & Gutkin, 2000). Although consultation is only one part of the role of the school mental health worker, it is an important one. Other direct roles may include assessment, teaching, counseling, and working with parents, but typically these activities impact only a small group or one client at a time.

In addition, human services consultation is usually thought of as experimental. No attempts to solve human problems are foolproof, and all attempts to solve problems must be viewed as experimental undertakings. That is, possible interventions must be treated as hypotheses to be tested and verified. Consultation should involve data collection and evaluation. Formative evaluation leads to more responsive intervention.

Ideally consultation is educational for the participants. Both the consultee and the consultant will learn from each other as a result of the consultation conversation. Since each is bringing expertise from a different field (psychology versus pedagogy, for example), they will be exposed to new ideas and points of view.

Once a problem is defined in consultation, if the process is done carefully and clearly, interventions will emerge. As will be discussed in a later chapter, sometimes the working relationship between the consultee and client will improve following consultation with no explicit intervention devised. But usually the goal of consultation is to plan changes to the work setting that will enable the client to be successful.

The consultation or collaboration process, then, is a companion to other services provided by special services personnel. School psychologists, resource specialists, speech and language therapists, counselors, social workers, and others will continue to deliver traditional services. The goal of the problem solving that occurs between the consultant and the consultee is to enhance or support the consultee’s skills rather than to “tell” them what to do. The fundamental intentions of consultation are to improve outcomes for the consultee’s current clients and to increase the consultee’s ability to work with future, similar clients.

What Consultation Is Not

Consultation is not supervision, because collaborative consultation cannot function freely if the consultant is also viewed as supervisor or evaluator. Nor is it

Table 1.1 The parameters of consultation

Consultation Is	Consultation Is Not
*Enabling	*Supervising
*An indirect service to the client	*A direct service to the client
*Mutual problem solving	*Counseling or psychotherapy
*Experimental	*Advice or reassurance giving
*Educational for the participants	*Teaching or supervising the consultee
*To generate interventions	*To label a child

teaching, because there is no set agenda for what is covered in the consultation relationship. The process of consultation is educational for all concerned but it is not a teacher-learner relationship. Although they share some techniques in common, consultation is not counseling or psychotherapy, because the focus is clearly on work related problems, not intrapsychic conflicts. The educators’ and consultant’s private lives and interpersonal relations outside of the school are not the focus of the problem solving.

Finally, consultation is not a substitute for other roles held by the consultant, because the school-based professional will still need to fill other roles and provide other services. Pupil personnel workers will continue to test, counsel, teach, and deliver other direct services to children. Table 1.1 summarizes the parameters of consultation.

What the Consultant Contributes

If the consultee brings work problems to consultation, what does the consultant bring? In addition to contributing a particular set of knowledge from his or her discipline, as outlined previously, consultants also take responsibility for the consultation process once a consultee requests help. They are responsible for taking leadership in asking questions about the problem situation, for seeing to it that the problem is defined in a clear way, for reviewing past efforts to address the problem, for helping develop a set of interventions coming from the consultee’s thoughts about what is a workable solution, and for generating suggestions from psychological knowledge and theory. They often assist in collecting objective information in order to produce more ideas about the child so that the problem may be better defined (Sandoval, Lambert, & Davis, 1977). This data collection may be done by observation, informal assessment, formal assessment, or interview. The consultant is also responsible for evaluating how effective a particular intervention has been, for documenting what has occurred in collaboration, and for recording successful and unsuccessful interventions. Thus, in addition to information from their field, the consultant must also be knowledgeable about the techniques and the process of consultation.

Just how the process occurs and what expert knowledge is used in educational consultation varies from consultation approach to approach. The various schools of educational consultation have more in common than not, yet most authorities differentiate among types of consultation. Traditionally in the school psychology literature, for example, there has been a distinction between behavioral, organizational, and mental health consultation. Recent variants of these three types, such as conjoint behavioral consultation, instructional consultation, and consultee-centered consultation, have emerged and been researched (Erchul & Sheridan, 2008). This book will detail the single model of consultation practice called consultee-centered consultation, which has evolved from the older model, mental health consultation.

Mental Health Consultation

Mental health consultation is one of the oldest approaches to consultation developed by psychological professionals. It grew out of the preventive psychiatry movement starting in the 1940s. Early pioneers include Coleman (1947), Maddux (1950, 1955), Bindman (1959), Caplan (1964, 1970), Parker (1958), and Berlin (1956). Most of the founders were psychiatrists and psychoanalysts who consulted with public agencies, including schools. The most influential of these first leaders was Gerald Caplan, whose 1970 book The Theory and Practice of Mental Health Consultation defined the field. Caplan identified four types of consultation: (1) client-centered case consultation, (2) consultee-centered case consultation, (3) program-centered administrative consultation, and (4) consultee-centered administrative consultation. Both case consultation, which involves attention to problems with clients or groups of clients, and administrative consultation, which involves attention to problems with systems and programs, were further divided into those that center on either the client or the consultee. The variety with which this book is concerned is the latter.

Consultation that is focused on the consultee prioritizes the characteristics of the consultee that are contributing to his or her work difficulty, while involving little or no direct assessment of the client. The goal is to assist the consultee to overcome impediments to working productively with a client. Caplan considered there to be four major sources of work difficulty: (1) lack of knowledge, (2) lack of skill, (3) lack of confidence, and (4) lack of objectivity. He developed ...