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School Consultation:

It is common for children with various disabilities to have problems in school. The problems can run the gamut from underachievement to disruptive behavior and poor peer relationships to disabling social anxiety. I’ve found that children with disabilities often are inadvertently scapegoated in school, which further compounds the situation.

Teachers and school personnel are like the rest of us. We all like to be successful, and tend to direct our energies into activities where we experience success. When it comes to problematic school behavior, teachers initially try various strategies to address the issue. If these are successful, teachers stay highly motivated to help the child.

If the strategies are not successful though, subconsciously teachers (just like we would) will tend to blame the child and/or parent for their lack of success and subtly become less invested in helping the child. Teachers will rationalize to themselves (correctly) that they’ve got 20 plus other children that they are responsible for and will shift their focus towards those children with whom they experience the most success. This can then lead teachers and school personnel to work at cross-purposes with parents of children with school-related problems. At such times, it is helpful to bring in an outside expert to develop a new approach for addressing the problem.

I have extensive experience in providing professional services within schools. I have conducted numerous treatment outcome studies within classroom settings. Six of these studies have been published in professional journals. Through the years, I have consulted numerous times with teachers and IEP team members to implement novel strategies for resolving school-related problems. I’ve learned through these consultations that it is critical for the intervention to be easy for teachers and school personnel to implement to gain their buy-in and compliance. The best-designed intervention will always fail if it is not reliably implemented. As with any intervention that I design, in addition to changing the target behavior(s), I strive to implement strategies that are sensitive to the child’s wishes and that are likely to have a positive impact on the child’s self-perception and peer relationships.