The Vision (Additional Content soon!)

There are several reasons why school based interventions fail. These include: 

1. Fidelity: Not implementing the intervention as intended

2. Implementing the wrong intervention

3. Coming to the wrong conclusion from the assessment

4. Assessing the wrong way

5. Asking the wrong referral questions.

There are steps a school psychologist can take to minimize potential intervention failure and they start in reverse order of the above. And the success of each step is dependent on the soundness of the previous step. If we begin with asking the wrong questions such as "Does the student qualify for services?" Every step that follows is not going to lead us to effective intervention. You are challenged to start asking the question "What does the student need to be successful?".

The tools published by big assessment companies are limited. These tools that school psychologists are accustom to using have great psychometric properties of validity, reliability and norms. However, they lack treatment utility. A WISC does not tell you what to do with a child who has intellectual disability. A Key-Math doesn't tell you how to intervene with Math Skills Deficit. A BASC doesn't tell you what do with a student with depression or anxiety. An observation of "off-task" behavior is probably one of the worst uses of a school psychologists time. This site is dedicated to the sharing of tools practices that have utility for the development, implementation, and evaluation of academic and behavioral interventions.

Every School Psychologist knows that to change student social or academic performance we must change the educational environment. Because the school psychologist is not in the immediate educational environment as much as the teacher, we must rely heavily on the teacher to make the change happen. Teachers may lack the skills and motivation to implement our recommendations. Simply making a broad recommendations does not translate into student growth. 

This is where we must improve our practice. We must become the change. No longer can we simply make a a generic recommendation. Our recommendations must be specific. However, at the same time we cannot simply write explicit step by step instructions for individualized interventions and expect them to be put in place with high levels of fidelity.

We must be willing to enter the classroom and train the teacher in intervention implementation and remain there until the teacher is able to implement the intervention with fidelity. This direct behavioral consultation approach coupled with direct assessment of specific skills and social behaviors is a critical key to student growth.