Working with Teachers in a Mainstreamed School Environment: Towards True Collaboration

Abstract

With integration into local schools, intervention for students with such special educational challenges as language learning disabilities, mental handicap and autism needs to be functional, pragmatic and relevant. Increasingly, many school based Speech Language Pathologists are turning away from direct pull-out therapy and are looking for alternatives. Classroom based assessment and intervention is best facilitated through a process of collaborative consultation. This approach does not translate as “therapy in the classroom”. The intention is that the language of the classroom curriculum should provide the context and content of the intervention. In this way, specific deficits may be addressed in the context which creates or maintains them. Teachers are actively involved in classroom based assessment, programming and planning from the initiation of the referral, as opposed to being the recipients of a finished package and therefore have a greater sense of ownership of the student and their difficulties. Talking with teachers about a student’s difficulties, sharing assessment information and providing programmes is certainly not a new idea, however working together with teachers to develop and conduct their own programmes is. Within a framework of collaborative consultation, direct therapy is seen as just one of a range of options.