Collaborative Consultation: A Resource Model of Mainstreaming Mildly Emotionally Disturbed Elementary School Students
Abstract
The child who marches to a different drummer is often the child who finds an education label on his/her forehead. Emotionally Disturbed elementary children are often viewed as being weird or crazy to those who do not know and understand their needs. Under the direction of qualified ED teachers, these children can become in step with their nondisabled peers in the mainstream classroom environment. Collaborative Consultation is one musical score which permits mildly Emotionally Disturbed students to be instruments in the mainstream education orchestra. Following the Collaborative Consultation score, students are mainstreamed one hundred percent of their academic day, and the ED resource teachers come to them for academic support and behavior improvement strategies. The traditional pullout model of mainstreaming found mildly ED elementary school students receiving a fragmented curriculum from their nondisabled peers. ED teachers, who are educated to be masters of behavior modification and content remediation, were left to work only with ED children. Their instructional expertise was not used with other children, and they had little interaction with mainstream teachers. If an ED child failed in the mainstream classroom, he/she simply returned to the ED classroom. Under the direction of Collaborative Consultation, the mildly ED student is a member of a mainstream classroom, and so too is the ED teacher. The model views the mainstream classroom as that which prepares the student for the mainstream of life long after structured schooling is completed.