School Consultation

Consultation is an indirect model of delivering psychological services. Within this model, a consultant and caregiver (consultee) work together to optimize the functioning of a client in the caregiver's setting and to increase the caregiver's capacity to deal with similar situations in the future. In schools, for example, a psychologist may consult with a teacher about a student in the teacher's classroom. The practice of school consultation has burgeoned since its formal introduction into public education during the 1960s. Today, graduate training programs in various specialties of psychology and education require coursework in consultation, and many professionals in these areas spend some portion of their day engaged in consultation. Consultation can be a powerful tool in delivering psychological services in schools, but only when the consultant possesses a requisite level of skill and sophistication. In preparing this volume, we envi sioned its major purpose as reducing the level of naivete typically experienced by the beginning school consultant. Toward that end, we offer a systematic approach to school consultation that targets much of the information needed for one to consult in a competent manner. The reader should note that our use ofthe somewhat ambiguous term school consultant is intentional and recognizes that consultants working in schools today represent a variety of professional disciplines. The pri mary intended audience for this book, however, is clinical child psy chologists and school psychologists, although psychologists having other specialties are likely to find its content useful.

Texte du rabat

This innovative volume presents an integrated model of school consultation that combines the theoretically distinct approaches of mental health and behavioral consultation with the empirically validated principles of behavioral analysis, social influence, and social support. This model views the practice of school consultation as the accomplishment of three interrelated tasks: problem solving, social influence, and professional support and development. Ideal for the beginning consultant, the text features a set of three transcribed interviews with a detailed analysis of the three tasks and a tabular comparison of the key dimensions of mental health consultation and mental health collaboration.

Contenu

1. Introduction to Consultation.- 2. Promoting Change in Schools.- 3. The School as a Setting for Consultation.- 4. Bases of an Integrated Model of School Consultation.- 5. Model Description and Application.- 6. Selecting and Evaluating School-Based Interventions.- 7. Teachers as Consultees.- 8. Students as Clients.- 9. Consultation Case Study.- 10. Epilogue: The Effective Practice of School Consultation.- References.- About the Authors.- Author Index.