Mozilla

Teacher consultation is a part of most school psychologists job.  Below is an example of how you can make consultation with teachers more effective with the !Observe software.

Mr. Hall has taught math in the special education department of his high school for ten years.  In that ten year period six school psychologists have come through, and then left the building.  Having never fully established a rapport with any of the parade of psychologists that he has known, he is a little wary of the ideas that any school psychologists presents to help him with classroom management.  Marni Casto is new to the district and has only been a school psychologist for two years. After looking in Mr. Hall's class, she instantly saw three or four things he could do to help maintain order in his very disorganized class.  Marni knows Mr. Hall's history of not taking advice from the psychologist and needs to establish credibility with him.  Fortunately, Marni knows how to use the !Observe software to lend credibility to her plans.

Marni goes to Mr. Hall and asks if she can train him and his aide to take behavioral data on his students.  The reasoning for this is two fold.  First, she want to be sure that Mr. Hall is in control of the data and not being "manipulated" by a psychologist with some kind of "agenda".  He must "own" any process of change in his class.  Second, Marni has read research finding that the most effective way to get teachers to change classroom management is to have teachers objectively take behavioral data in their classroom.  Mr. Hall is wary, not rude, and agrees.  After using a single planning period to be trained Mr. Hall and his aide start taking data on three areas that seem to be taking up quite a bit of his instructional time.  When he and Marni are done with the template it looks like this.

The plan was simple.  For a week Mr. Hall would take data on his third period class.  He would ask each student at the beginning of class if they had their materials.  If they did, he clicked the Materials Ready button, if they didn't, he clicked the No Materials button.  His classes always have an instruction, questions, and work phase.  During the questions phase his aide would click the Talk Out or Raise Hand button depending on what he saw.  During the work phase, Mr. Hall would look at every student in the class and see if they were in or out of seat and click the appropriate button.  After the first week of data Marni and Mr. Hall got together again to look at the results.  They combined all of the sessions into one to get the following summary.

By subtotaling by class the behaviors could be easily compared.  Mr. Hall was surprised by the results.  He couldn't argue with the data though, it was his hand that took it.  Marni and Mr. Hall then started working on a classroom management plan together.  Marni suggested that Mr. Hall take data on this class once a month for a week to see if the plan was working.  If it wasn't, they could again work together to modify it until it showed the results Mr. Hall wanted.  Marni helped herself, Mr. Hall, and the students in his class by conducting the consultation in this way.  She had established some credibility with Mr. Hall (and therefore the rest of the teachers in the department), Mr. Hall had new techniques to manage his classroom that he could verify as effective or not, and the students had a better learning environment.