Effective School Consultation: An Interactive Approach

This practical text provides special educators with strategies they can actually use in collaborating with other professionals and parents. The authors cover such topics as when to ask for help and when to refer and offer readers a compilation of the best practices to follow for effective consultation and collaboration. Designed primarily for special educators who work with other educators in planning, implementing, and evaluating education programs for students with learning and/or behavior difficulties, this text provides a systematic approach to the skills of consultation. The authors approach, prescriptive case consultation, emphasizes modifying teacher behavior and classroom environments, using social learning principles to assist consultees, and applying a direct approach to intervention selection and decision-making. Unlike other texts that focus more on the process of consultation, this text focuses on practical skills, including: * How to choose an appropriate intervention * How to use change in client behaviors as a measure of consultation and intervention success. * How to collect useful assessment data, including published assessment instruments, functional analyses, curriculum-based measurement, and ecological assessment. * How to identify and analyze problems * How to implement and monitor basic building, classroom, and individual behavior management strategies * How to manage meetings, communicate with others, prepare written communications, and work on specific problem situations