Consultation and Collaboration - Research Paper Example

Collaboration is essentials when ensuring that all students, including those with special needs, are included in the general classroom appropriately. The teachers and their counselor collaborators must also be aware of what the best approach to the use of collaboration to the benefit of the students is. Owing to the fact that teachers normally do not possess qualifications that are necessary in the provision of the best possible education to all students, using a counseling expert aids in the creation of appropriate environments for learning.

While collaborative consultation happens away from the general classroom, whereby the counselor provides information to the teacher in the general classroom, it can also occur where a counselor consults many teachers in more than one classroom through offering help to students without being present during all lessons in the general classroom (Coleman & Yeh, 2008). The most popular form of consultation today in schools is the collaborative process model, while the expertise-driven model is a less popular method.

In this collaborative consultation, the counselor works with the teachers in the school as a partner or as a co-expert (Kampwirth & Powers, 2012). This is different from the expertise-driven model of consultation that has the counselor as the only expert for the topic. Collaborative consultation is mainly focused on the building of rapport, finding solution to problems, as well as building the capacity for systemic-organizations, groups, or individuals to benefit the identified population of clients or single clients (Kampwirth & Powers, 2012).

School counselors who use collaborative consultation processes can involve teachers and school principals as co-experts during the identification of contributing factors and the generation of solutions to issues concerning absenteeism of students (Kampwirth & Powers, 2012). The school counselor in the expertise-driven model undertakes the whole process alone in order to determine the best possible solution, which they then provide to the schoolteacher. School counselors are influenced in choosing the correct method of consultation based on various theoretical paradigms that govern the counselor’s and teacher’s viewpoint (Brigman, 2009).

There is varied support for the framework of consultation with particular model premises being easily tested through the use of linear and empirical means than others. For this reason, it is essential for counselors in the school setting to investigate the framework that is supportive of their practice in effect. With regards to the developed frameworks for consultation, there are three main frameworks, which include behavioral-eclectic consultation, mental health consultation, and systemic-organizational consultation.

The framework for mental health consultation focuses mainly on capacity building with regards to individual counselors so as to help them work well with their clients, issues that concern their clients, as well as the organizational context (Brigman, 2009). The behavioral-eclectic model of consultation has its main focus on the alteration of problem behaviors that are clearly articulated and engaged in by the clients whom the teachers have already identified. The process through which clients are involved in behavior change has the ability to improve individual counselor capacities.

The framework of systemic-organiza