School Clinical & Consulting Services (SCCS) is an organization dedicated to helping schools provide the most successful educational experience for children who are impacted by social, emotional, behavioral, developmental, and neurological conditions.
Through staff education and embedded training, SCCS supports all staff who work with an identified child, with tools for practical interventions that can be carried out in the classroom, and with customized programs for children that become a permanent part of the school independent of outside consultation.
SCCS Intervention Assistance Approach:
School Clinical & Consulting Services helps schools meet the needs of students who have performance problems due to social, emotional, behavioral, developmental and neurological conditions by developing resources within the system and helping the system develop their own interventions rather than providing the interventions directly. This is an Intervention Assistance Approach based on the following consultation guidelines and objectives.
Guidelines
1) Consultation is conducted in a collaborative fashion rather than using an expert authority model. An informal intervention assistance team is pulled together by the consultant utilizing the existing resources within the school. Service providers, teaching staff, and sometimes parents meet regularly to collaborate on intervention strategies and share expertise. Everyone is part of a problem solving team. All members of the team are expected to learn from each other and to teach each other, and to incorporate multiple specialty areas into one intervention effort.
2) Resources are developed within the current school staff. Training is provided onsite to all staff and it is embedded in the process of solving a problem, answering a question, sharing an observation, explaining or demonstrating a strategy, or helping to create a new intervention. Embedded training is effective because it is relevant to the current need, it focuses on practical everyday experiences in the classroom, it is tailored to a specific staff concern or knowledge gap, and it is a two-way process allowing for clarification and fine tuning on the spot. Members of the intervention assistance team learn new skills, techniques, and approaches to solving difficult student problems, and they develop their own consultation expertise.
3) Programs, interventions, and approaches are developed for teachers that become a permanent part of the classroom and school rather than an “add on” service that ends when the consultant leaves. Strategies further develop the teacher’s expertise, they are applied to other students, shared with other teachers, and they are used the following year.
Objectives
- Provide students with more immediate, less stigmatizing help in their more natural environments
- Help schools make better use of their existing resources
- Raise the level of staff expertise and enable the staff to help similar students
- Reduce job stress, frustration and staff “burnout” by solving problems before they get too big to solve and empowering the school staff to feel more effective
- Make the most out of the student’s current placement, and reduce the number of needless evaluations and unnecessary placement changes
- Help schools better articulate what they do for their students by improving program evaluation, developing measurable goals, and maintaining a results oriented approach
- Share new methods and technology across school districts
- Help schools become independent of ongoing consultation by working toward school self-sufficiency regarding all interventions.
When the Intervention Assistance approach works well, the consultant leaves behind a successful student, a well-designed program, a trained staff, and a smoother functioning school. Consultation services are activated when a different problem emerges, new staff are involved, or when support of an old program is required.
If you have any questions, please contact Kevin Plummer, Ph.D.