Consultation in special education (Part II): Training and practice.

Abstract

This is the second article of a two-part series on school consultation from an interdisciplinary perspective as it applies to training and practice in special education. Effective teaching, and in particular, effective consultation, is viewed as being an artful science requiring skills in both the art of facilitating human communications/interactions, and the science of applying an underlying body of knowledge to the teaching/learning process and to problem solving. In the first section, a competency-based perspective is taken for the training of consultants, with a resulting set of criteria for assessing the quality of model programs (both preservice and inservice) for training special education consultants to apply both the art and the science of consultation. Included are recommendations for development of future training programs from an interdisciplinary perspective. In the second section, the current state of the practice of special education consultation is analyzed using the same five criteria established in Part I of this series: (a) the underlying theory for the consultation relationship, (b) the underlying knowledge base for problem solving, (c) the goals of the program, (d) the stages/steps of the consultative process, and (e) the responsibilities of both consultants andconsultees Included are recommendations for the future practice of special education consultation, emphasizing use of a framework (Seven Levels of Intensity of Intervention) for making instructional/curricular and program placement decisions for students who may be appropriately served through consultation.