Skills in Collaborative Classroom Consultation

Anne Jordan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415038638
• eBook ISBN: 9781134956166
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

As the integration of children with special educational needs into ordinary classrooms progresses, most special needs professionals spend an increasing amount of time in mainstream schools, working with teachers in the classroom on interventions for individual children and with head teachers and senior management teams on whole school policy.
Skills in Classroom Consultation is a practical guide to the tools and techniques required to work effectively with colleagues in defining goals, allocating responsibility and formulating strategies. It shows how consultative skills can be used to solve particular educational problems and also how the consultant professional can act in a more far-reaching way as an agent of change within an institution.

Chapter 1

Collaborative consultation in context

A leader is best when people know he exists, not so good when people acclaim him, worse when they despise him, but of a good leader who talks little, when his work is done and his aim fulfilled, they will say ‘we did it ourselves’.

(Lao Tse, 565 BC)

The education literature on consultation has burgeoned in the last ten years. The movement to locate all pupils in integrated or mainstreamed¹ classes has given rise to delivery systems in schools in which special-education-trained personnel, formerly deployed in direct remedial work with pupils in segregated or withdrawal settings, are now required to provide support to regular or ordinary classroom teachers. This resource support is increasingly taking the form of collaboration and consultation within the ordinary classroom. Collaboration, as a means for teachers to learn from each other's experience, and consultation, as an in-school, in-service procedure, has recently become prominent in all forms of teacher training and upgrading (e.g., Hunt, 1989; Yarger, 1990).

This book is about the development of teachers’ skills during their regular work day. The purpose is to describe some practical approaches to working collaboratively and to equip the consultant to plan for successful collaborative projects and to anticipate and deal with possible resistance and even sabotage of the projects. The description of consulting skills, however, is couched in a larger plan for creating changes in the way in which classroom teachers have traditionally worked with special-needs and at-risk students. For several decades, special and remedial needs have been the exclusive domain of specially trained personnel who work outside of the ordinary classroom. With the advent of integration or mainstreaming, some important changes are taking place in teachers’ understanding about their roles and responsibilities, and in their skills for teaching special-needs pupils and for meeting their educational and physical needs. The potential power of collaborative consultation, as represented in this book, is to scale down the traditional way of providing special education, by changing people's expectations about who is responsible for meeting the needs of pupils, and by supporting ordinary teachers to acquire the skills to meet the needs.

A major movement in current teacher training is based on the initial work of Schön (1983,1987) who claims that the acquisition of skills in the human services professions requires an apprenticeship component in which the novice learner works alongside a master or mentor colleague in the profession. The purpose of the collaboration is to reflect upon and make explicit the personal knowledge and theories which teachers are developing about their art in practice, and to tackle ongoing practical problems as cases-in-point to enrich their reflections. Essentially the collaborative relationship is reciprocal, for each learns to make explicit his or her knowledge and skills in interaction.

As a result, both pre-service and in-service teacher education programmes have begun to incorporate such collaborative endeavours. Research and practices in teaching have involved mentoring and coaching as a series of events in the classroom (Joyce and Showers, 1980,1988). Onetime only or ‘one-shot’ professional development activities or INSET programmes are unfavourably compared to a series of in-service activities in which participants apply their learning in their daily classroom settings, often in conjunction with a peer with whom they can discuss the form and outcome of their practice (Fullan, 1982).

A large area of research has also evolved in the exploration of teachers’ personal professional knowledge (Connelly and Clandinin, 1988; Diamond, 1988). Through encouragement to ‘tell their stories’ and to provide a spoken narrative of their implicit perspectives about their work, teachers come to know their own competencies and their art. This approach has given rise, among other things, to teacher support groups which meet outside of school to discuss ongoing professional problems in the manner documented by Miller (1990).

This book will not attempt to synthesize these developments, although I do not view them as incompatible with the approach I have taken. Teachers’ practice is probably influenced not only by their own experiences, but by the knowledge and practice of others. Therefore, I will attempt to import some ideas and techniques from fields as disparate as psychotherapy and industrial management and to apply them to the field of teacher in-service development. But in so doing, I hope to contribute to Yarger's (1990) requirement that modern teacher education acknowledges that teachers are experts and that their self-determined needs are an essential prerequisite to success. In the chapters to follow, I suggest tools and techniques for consulting teachers to use in order to arrive at a consensus with others about the objectives to be achieved, the division of labour and each person's responsibilities in solving day-to-day educational problems. The book also discusses how to deal with resistant, entrenched colleagues, how to work at changing the attitude of others, and even how to confront people bent on sabotaging your joint endeavours. I do not intend, however, to offer a guaranteed prescription for how people should behave in consulting situations. I am attempting here to offer some suggestions, tips and techniques which you might try in your own work setting, and if useful, incorporate into your own professional repertoire. More than that, I hope that you will derive a framework and rationale for the consulting which you undertake. I anticipate that you will wish to adapt or modify much of what I propose, if only because your style of interacting, your personality, and indeed your language are unique to you. I therefore see one purpose of this book as that of providing some tools of the teaching trade which, upon reflection and with use in your own setting, you may wish to adopt and adapt.

In an attempt to make the book as practical as possible, I have not discussed the theoretical context, no matter how interesting, if I thought it did not have direct practical application. Idol and West (1987) and West and Idol (1987) have already provided much of this context.

In assisting you to generate an overall framework in which to conduct your daily work, and a rationale for your selection, I favour an approach to the school-based delivery of services² to students which is here termed ‘prevention’. As will be discussed, its focus is on the establishment of a school ethos in which all staff members share responsibility for all pupils, regardless of the differences of each child from the norm, or the causes of such differences. It is an approach in which the consultant or support teacher defines his or her role and then sets out to model that role and create expectations among staff about how to collaborate in a way which reflects a shared responsibility. The prevention approach, its underlying assumptions about pupils and teachers, and the means to implement it are offered, once again, with anticipation that local school structures, staffs and social contexts will result in different forms of implementation and outcome. Prevention is offered as a framework in which you might review your current role, take stock of your strengths and those of your colleagues, and identify areas for change. Much of the book proposes the techniques and skills which might be useful to you in setting out upon a course of change, which ultimately could improve the delivery of services to pupils throughout the school.

I am inviting you then to consider how your tacit and explicit knowledge about teaching, and your beliefs about your purpose as a colleague consulting to fellow adults, might be linked to how to structure your role and how to be effective in implementing it in the broader context of school improvement.

The prevention approach is a way of considering the special needs of pupils. It will be used as the context for the discussion of consultation in this book. One aspect of prevention is often termed ‘pre-referral intervention’ in the North American literature. The resource teacher assists the ordinary or regular classroom teacher to deal with minor learning and behavioural problems of pupils before they become so severe as to merit referral of the pupil to a special programme. The purpose of this type of intervention is preventive in that it enables the teacher to meet the pupil's learning needs before performance deteriorates to the point where the pupil can no longer remain in the classroom. Prevention implies more than early intervention, however. Later in this chapter, the beliefs and attitudes of teachers towards their responsibilities in prevention will be considered as a part of the issues which the resource consultant may need to address.

The second aspect of the prevention approach that can draw upon collaborative consultation is the complement or flipside of the first. It commences when a pupil is already designated as having special needs, but is being integrated for a portion or for all of the school day into the ordinary classroom. Increasingly, integration is seen to require more than the placement of a child in the classroom. As Thomas (1986, p. 22) states, ‘with the best will in the world, it does not seem possible for the class teacher on her(his) own adequately to meet the needs of children who are experiencing difficulty when they are part of a large class. She(he) will need effective assistance.’ Such assistance takes the form of support, resource, ancillary and peripatetic staff, who will work within the context of that classroom to enable the teacher to address the needs of special, at-risk and ordinary children. Integration is viewed as part of the prevention approach here, because the purpose of collaboration is to ensure that the child's gains which were previously made with special-needs teachers are sustained in the ordinary class, and built upon in the context of the ordinary classroom teacher's programme.

In both the pre-referral and the integrative cases, the resource teacher will draw upon two types of skills; the technical skills of assessment and designing an intervention which are applied to the pupil's difficulties in the context of the teacher's classroom, and the interpersonal or consulting skills. The consulting skills of contracting, reporting and developing an action plan will form the ‘how-to’ section of this book, in the context of prevention and integration. These skills will enable the support teacher to collaborate with the ordinary teacher, to ensure that the teacher is successful in meeting the needs of the special-needs and at-risk pupils and the class as a whole.

There are at least two dangers inherent in the application of collaborative consultation to classroom problem-solving. The first danger is that, by promoting collaborative consultation as a method for increasing mainstreaming, teachers will inevitably reject it because other problems of mainstreaming will be left unsolved. Indeed, effective consultation in ordinary classrooms should lead to a decrease in the referral rates for withdrawal or ‘pull out’ procedures, and segregated, remedial and special-education programmes. The decrease in demand for the removal of pupils from ordinary classrooms will be a slow process, however, as the transfer of skills through collaboration enhances teachers’ comfort levels and confidence to work with a wider range of pupils.

Collaborative consultation should not imply that all pupils will eventually be served in the ordinary classroom. It is not a substitute for segregated or other remedial programmes, and should not be equated with mainstreaming as a process. Ideally, a variety of placement options exist which range from segregated to ordinary class placements. It is the criteria used to select these options, not the placements themselves, which may be affected by the consultative process.

The second concern is that consultation skills cannot be learned in isolation. They require that the consultant has a purpose and a direction to which the skills are applied. One purpose may be to introduce or refine the manner in which pupils are mainstreamed or integrated in a school, but not necessarily so. In this book, I will argue that the use for the consultative skills which are outlined is one which enhances the functional objectives set by ordinary classroom teachers for all of the pupils in their care. Consultation, as a tool for enhancing classroom practice, has three goals: to solve an immediate problem about a learning situation as defined by a colleague (ordinary classroom teacher or other professional or parent), to assist the colleague to master the skills and knowledge to deal with similar problems in the future, and ultimately to change the way in which that person works.

Consultation skills can be applied to assist others to solve educational problems. But they can also be applied to make overt the perception of teachers (and others) about their roles in adapting instruction to meet pupil needs, and to achieve a consensus about the nature and purpose of their roles. This requires that consultants view themselves as change agents within their schools. They will need to make an assessment of the current attitudes and beliefs of the staff towards pupil differences and difficulties. They will then be in a position to plan the delivery approach which their school might adopt and to work towards implementing the approach through consultation and collaboration with administrators, parents and other education professionals.

Before describing the specifics of consultation, therefore, the reader is asked to consider the purpose and the plan for which consultative skills are to be used. The essence of consultation is to give away expertise, so that others will be able to assume ownership of their successes in dealing with the problems of learning and behaviour of the children in their charge. This implies a turnaround in many schools in the expectations which both teachers and parents hold about the ways in which they provide instruction and resources to children.

In this book, the subject of our discussion, the consultant, will be viewed from the perspective of the support (British) or resource (North American) teacher role, not because consulting skills are most applicable to this role, but because this role is used to illustrate consultation skills as a case in point. However, consultation skills should not be considered as limited to this person's work. Special- and remedial-education teachers who supervise segregated classes of pupils are increasingly assuming a consulting role as they negotiate with ordinary classroom and subject teachers to align the instruction which they provide with that offered in the regular classroom. System-level support service personnel, that is, psychologists, speech and language specialists, social workers, and others deployed directly from the central office of the school system or LEA, also find themselves increasingly involved in educational consultation. Psy-chologists no longer merely pull pupils out of classrooms for testing, but focus on pupils’ difficulties within the classroom setting (Reschly, 1988). Speech and language pathologists, itinerant resource teachers for hearing-impaired, visually handicapped, and culturally different pupils, system-level curriculum leaders and programme specialists all spend a part of their day consulting with teachers to provide follow-up training for pupils within the regular programme. School librarians and teacher assistants are increasingly aware of the need to provide resource support to fellow teaching staff. The skills to be discussed are applicable to any professional who works collaboratively with teachers. But for simplicity, ‘you’, the audience, will be addressed as a support teacher, and your colleague or client, with whom you are working, will be addressed as ‘teacher’ or ‘client’.

In this book, the term ‘support teacher’ is used as a generic term to indicate many different educational roles. In North America, most school boards deploy one or more resource support teachers in each elementary school. This person is designated by one of many acronyms; Special Education Resource Teacher (SERT), Methods and Resource Teacher (M and R), Developmental Teacher, School-based Support Teacher (SBST), etc. In Great Britain, also, the remedial or peripatetic teacher and teachers who formerly taught segregated classes are increasingly becoming support persons for ordinary classroom teachers (Bines, 1986; Garnett, 1988; Thomas, 1985, 1986). Acronyms include Special Needs Assessment and Support Teachers (SNASTs), Teacher Consultant (TC) and Designated Teachers (Hodgson et al., 1984; Heward and Lloyd-Smith, 1990).

There are some differences in special education provisions, however, between Great Britain and North America. In Great Britain, only 2 to 3 per cent of pupils have been statemented or designated as having special needs, although Warnock indicated that 20 per cent of children in ordinary classrooms may have required special help at some stage in their school lives (DES, 1978; Gipps et al., 1987). In Canada, and in North America in general, approximately 12 per cent of pupils are designated as ‘exceptional’, and are eligible for special education services. In addition, as many as 20 per cent of children might be termed ‘at risk’ of failing to reach their academic potential. With the popularity of mainstreaming, many segregated special-needs schools and special classes in ordinary schools have been closed, and special-education teachers, trained to teach in segregated settings, are finding themselves redeployed in support roles in regular or ordinary classrooms.

A second major difference between British and North American schools can be seen at the secondary level. American and Canadian schools have placed little emphasis on the secondary school support role, preferring to create learning centers staffed by teachers who tend to work directly with pupils who have either been referred by teachers, or who themselves select some remedial assistance. In Great Britain, the secondary schools, and in particular the comprehensive schools, have chosen to construct a more collaborative approach to meeting pupil needs through the pastoral care system. Staff work together to ensure that pupils’ progress is monitored through a cooperative network. Designated support staff may then be drawn upon through the pastoral care network. Postlethwaite et al.. (1986) describe how the majority of secondary and middle schools in Oxfordshire, for example, combine mixed-ability pastoral groups with support in ordinary classes. Special-needs staff are deployed in Oxfordshire schools on a ratio that varies from 1 per 200 pupils to 1 per 500 pupils. Staffs of North American secondary schools might consider borrowing from the innovations of the British secondary system and, in turn, the resource consulting models in some Canadian and US elementary schools might be informative for British primary school support staff.

The function of the support teacher, then, is evolving in both North American and British schools. There is considerable variation from school to school and school system to school system as to how these teachers operate. The proportion of time which they spend in direct service to pupils, compared to indirect service through consultation to ordinary teachers, depends largely on the philosophy and practices operating in that school, and the assumptions and beliefs of the teachers and administrators about the role (Wilson and Silverman, 1991).

It is assumed that you, the reader, will be working in some capacity as a consultant to teachers. You have an interest in learning more about collaborative consultation, and in honing your skills. These topics are discussed in Chapters 3 to 5. You will, however, be attempting to bring about changes in your school or school system for which collaboration...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Collaborative consultation in context
• 2 Elements of alternative school delivery models
• 3 Consulting skills: contracting
• 4 Consulting skills: assessment, feedback and developing a plan of action
• 5 Difficult consulting situations
• 6 Working with parents, administrators and service professionals
• 7 Drawing on the resources of the school
• 8 Overview of classroom consultation: getting ready to begin
• Appendix 1 The contracting meeting and identifying needs and offers
• Appendix 2 Responding to resistance
• Appendix 3 Exercises and case studies
• References
• Name index
• Subject index