Contextual, Client-Centred Coaching Following a Workshop: Assistants Capacity Building in Special Education.

María José López-De-La-Fuente,Eva Mª Gómez-Trullén,Rafael García-Foncillas,Pablo Herrero

doi:10.3390/ijerph18126332

María José López-De-La-Fuente, Eva Mª Gómez-Trullén + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph18126332

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Abstract

Assistants serve an essential role in special education to support children with disabilities, but they should be properly trained and supervised. The coaching approach represents one trend that has been gradually implemented in occupational therapy (OT) and rehabilitation services. Still, few studies clearly define the coaching intervention, measure the fidelity of coaching practices, or evaluate capacity building of the caregivers in the long term. This quasi-experimental study compared one-on-one coaching in natural environments following a workshop with a training workshop. Both public schools do not have regular OT services. The primary outcome was the assistant’s performance, measured with the Goal Attainment Scaling (GAS). The secondary outcome was the fidelity of coaching implementation, measured with the Coaching Practices Rating Scale (CPRS). The GAS showed an increased performance of the assistants after the intervention, with significant differences between groups post-intervention (p = 0.015) and large effect size (r = 0.55), but no long-term significant improvements were found at the follow-up (p = 0.072). The CPRS showed an adequate implementation of the five coaching components (joint planning, observation, action, reflection, and feedback), with a total score of 3.5 ± 0.72 (mean ± SD). The results suggest that coaching sessions provided by OTs in schools may improve assistants’ skills to facilitate the student’s participation.

Highlights

Functional independence in self-care activities is crucial to ensure community participation of people with severe/multiple disabilities [1]
There were no significant differences between groups in terms of age, gender, marital status, or educational level
Our study shows that a coaching approach provided by occupational therapy (OT) in schools may improve assistants’ skills to facilitate children’s participation in daily occupations

Summary

Introduction

Functional independence in self-care activities is crucial to ensure community participation of people with severe/multiple disabilities [1]. Focusing on occupations and eliminating environmental barriers or creating facilitators may have a greater impact on the promotion of the students’ participation, since some personal characteristics may not be modifiable, unlike other environmental factors [3,4,5]. For this reason, recent studies have highlighted that these occupational therapy (OT) interventions should consider all the person–occupation–. OT’s best practices in school demand the adoption of an ecological approach [8], school-based OTs seem to prefer direct intervention in separate settings, in stark contrast to current research, which recommends working through collaborative, consultative, and contextual models [5,9,10,11]

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