As we continue to work on our classroom setup another area to remember is Clinician Collaboration. This is such a critical factor that we sometimes forget to plan from the start of the school year. Many of our students have speech therapy, occupational therapy, social work services, physical therapy, nursing, and there can be any combination of those services for each student.
Take some time to review your students IEPs and see what other services your students receives. Each IEP should also have a set number of consultation minutes. As a speech therapist I feel if I am providing direct services for a student I also need to make sure I include consultation minutes on that IEP. It is a team effort and if the teacher does not know what I’m working on or I’m not familiar with the classroom curriculum and the teacher’s goals than we are not supporting our students in the best way possible. Even if consultation minutes are not listed on the IEP if your student is receiving minutes from a clinician you should set up some consultation time with that person. The amount of consultation minutes to set aside with service provides will vary and depend on how many of your students are working with that clinician and what the need for the collaboration is.
I think it helps to plan a set time everyone week or every other week to meet with the clinicians supporting a majority of your students or those providing a significant amount of direct services to your students. As the year gets busy it’s hard to squeeze more into our schedule or remember to collaborate but if it is a set time built into our schedule it makes it more manageable. For me the required collaboration minutes are something I can set into my schedule and then when a specific situation comes up with a student or it is time for the annual review IEP I can spend more time with the teacher if needed.
As a speech therapist, I try and set up a time with the special education teachers for the classrooms that I service the most or all of the students in that classroom. For example, I provide direct services to every student in Sasha’s (The Autism Helper) classroom. What we do each year is set up a working lunch every other week. This just seems to work well for us with our busy and very different schedules. For one we actually then get a lunch break and the other benefit is we have the whole time to talk about our students and plan the lessons for the upcoming month. In my schedule I set up the other 2 lunch times in the month with 2 other teachers who I see a majority of their students. It works for me so I know one day of the week I always have a working lunch to meet a large portion of my collaboration minutes listed on my student’s IEPs. Sometimes it works to set up a collaboration once a week, every other week, or once a month during a teacher’s prep or right before or after school depending on schedules.
I feel collaboration is so important for our students because the teacher and I both have different strategies and suggestions on how to meet the students’ needs. We also work on problem solving situations together and help with lesson planning. I have definitely learned so much over the years from the teachers I work closely with and have established a great working relationship. It’s not easy but if you can set up a schedule from the beginning of the year it makes the collaboration happen and helps build a strong working relationship between team members.
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