Collaboration to Inclusion

I remember a time when providing speech and language services in an early childhood setting filled me with anxiety. As early childhood intervention programs began adopting coaching and routine based intervention, I adapted to the changing practices. Unlike families’ homes, many early learning and child care centers have structured schedules. You can also encounter multiple children competing for both the client/student’s and teacher’s attention. So, how does one implement what they learned in professional development? And how does one build rapport in the busy early childhood classroom?

First, providers should establish a relationship with the family to develop a clear plan of their needs. Early intervention providers should have regular communication with parents to share about ongoing sessions, ask for any changes they have noted in the home, as well as discussing how the child care provider communicates the child’s progress in class. Solidifying a communication plan among the parent, child care provider and myself has been essential to develop and sustain a good rapport within the team. I tried to time my visit when the parent arrives to either drop off their child or pick up their child. This was helpful as the parent speaks with the teacher at these times. Visiting child care centers at these times ensured we-parent, teacher and I- could have ongoing conversations about the child’s routine participation between visits.

I also developed a relationship with the lead and assistant classroom teachers. I scheduled the first few sessions at a time the teacher would be the most available to speak with me. We would be able to identify routines that they would need the most support with the child’s participation. Often, we met as children were preparing for nap time, morning arrival, or afternoon/evening pick-up. During those discussions, we would highlight good activities for me to join and reflect at a later time. The teachers and I also discussed how to lead certain activities or strategies with all the children to provide peer modeling for the young child to imitate.

As time progressed, I became more comfortable and noted teachers feeling more empowered implementing inclusive changes. I can think of a specific example in which I worked together with a preschool curriculum coach and classroom teacher. Half of one preschool classroom had students with a service plan. I frequently “pushed-in” to provide therapy. The coach, teacher and I discussed how to implement receptive and expressive language support especially for the students with IEPs. In order to best support these students, I re-arranged my schedule to attend bi-weekly teacher planning sessions to learn the curriculum as well as provide suggestions for targeting speech and language development, specifically, in curriculum-based activities. The curriculum coach and I met to discuss using classroom assessments to look at individual and overall classroom needs to develop communication and pre-literacy skills. I also provided an in-service for the preschool teachers on communication development for preschool-aged children. We collaborated on classroom and individual student needs to build teacher capacity while individualizing curriculum for the student success. Unfortunately, I was called for jury duty that took me away from the school for two months into the winter holiday break. However, to my delight when school resumed in January, I saw the hard work the teachers implemented in their classroom to support language development. The classroom teacher and coach used sentence strips during morning circle and tabletop learning to provide scaffolding support language development. They also used pictures and objects to provide options for all the students to make decisions during group activities. The classroom also included visual schedules for each pretend play station in the classroom. Not only did these strategies help the students with IEP, all the students received multi-sensory input to build their communication skills.

Supporting disability-inclusion in early childhood is critical to provide opportunities for young children to strive and thrive. In my experience, supported by research, collaboration among IFSP and IEP teams are essential for providing a foundation. Teachers and parents are key partners who will need support in helping their child/student become active participants in their daily routines.