Professional Development
Workshops/How To Work With Families » Preparing Personnel to Work With Parents and Families
A Collaborative Consultation Model: Changing The Way Your Personnel Work with Families at School, at Home and in the Community
Rationale for the project: "We must encourage Head Start to forge partnerships with key community and state institutions...and we must ensure that these partnerships are constantly renewed and recrafted to fit the needs of families..." (Shalala, 1994, p. 8). This edict accompanied the proposed bipartisan reauthorization legislation, creating a broad set of recommendations to be fulfilled by Head Start in the 21st Century.
Partnerships and community collaboration may be examples of what the future Head Start will look like "outside" in communities and neighborhoods, but will Head Start staffers and families also see themselves as competent collaborators and partners "inside" Head Start centers and in families homes? Will they be equipped to employ such consultation strategies as a) consultative scheduling, b) multi-sensory conversational instruction, c) shared expertise, d) child-family evaluation, e) classroom collaborative brainstorming, and f) paired response teaching and learning. Innovative staff development and training methods will be needed, if the answer is to be a resounding "yes!"
Purpose and Background: This research tests the effectivenss of a collaborative consultative training model aimed at Head Start teachers and paraprofessional personnel, as a result of participation in six, ninety minute collaborative consultative training sessions. This activity-based training model grew out of a personnel preparation project, funded by the Ohio Department of Health, Bureau of Early Intervention, to prepare an 18-hour Early Intervention Personnel Verification Curriculum for professionals from 12 disciplines.
The Personnel Preparation Curriculum was successfully field tested at 36 sites with 230 professionals, including Head Start teachers, parents and paraprofessionals. Results indicated three promising and positive effects. First, trainees demonstrated retention of collaborative and consultative working strategies after six months.. Second, participants reflected they routinely used the research-based knowledge acquired by participating in family-focused activities in their day-to-day professional work with families. Third, professionals, regardless of discipline or level of experience, indicated they understood the meaning of "shared expertise" and felt comfortable working as co-partners with parents and family members, instead of feeling as if they were the "experts."
Personnel Preparation Training Protocol: The collaborative consultation model views families as "being in charge," and teachers, professionals and paraprofessional staff, as "co-partners" with parents. Professionals and paraprofessionals share their expertise with families, but find ways to allow parents to have an equal role in the teaching and learning of their children.
This collaborative design has been successful for elementary school programs (Thousand, Villa, Whitcomb & Nevin, 1996.) Early education of handicapped children programs and early intervention programs have also used the model successfully in both home and classroom settings (Turben, 1997.)
Six collaborative consultative skills constitute the body of training. Parent and professional co-trainers teach one collaborative consultative skill at each session:
- Cooperation
- Consultative-time sharing
- Conversational instruction
- Shared expertise
- Self-evaluation
- Collaborative brain-storming.
Conclusion: Diverse staff backgrounds and varied levels of experience present a significant challenge to Head Start administrators, regional trainers, specialists and professionals and paraprofessionals, who are responsible for the training of personnel. Generally, staff members consider most training workshops chores, perhaps because training is generally designed by content area, rather than skills directly related to an individual's skills and strengths.
An activity-based "collaborative consultation" model, skill-based and family centered, appeals to staff because the training answers the question, "What do I get out of it?" They receive resource information they can use in their jobs, and they receive practice in performing six practical skills they are able to reinforce every day. These skills promote self-development, group cooperation and inclusiveness. These traits will become essential if Head Start is to fulfill both the edict and promise that prompted legislators to reauthorize this program.
