Question

As a special educator, you will often be the contact person for your administration, school counselors, and other general educators on your campus. Therefore, how could you use your position to help educate all staff on campus? What would you do to help promote a climate of collaboration? Why is this important, and who benefits from this type of school climate?

Answer 1

Note: This response is in UK English, please paste the response to MS Word and you should be able to spot discrepancies easily. You may elaborate the answer based on personal views or your classwork if necessary.

(Answer) Whether or not an individual or group is responsible for liaising with other departments, it is still essential to maintain seamless communication. In the case of a special educator, administration, counsellors and general educators, it is even more essential to maintain communication simply because the client, in this case, is the same – the students.

For one’s position as a special educator, it would be essential to get the feedback necessary about the child’s progress from all departments of the school. In this way, the special educator would be entitled to know what methods worked best, what changes in the environment helped the child, what did not help etc. In order to get the data necessary, all departments would have to cooperate with supplying information.

In order to do this, the special educator could maintain a file for each student about their weekly progress and the activities they had and their behavioural responses. These files could be filled by a member of the faculty of each department by the end of each week.

Furthermore, the other contributing faculty members could use the data from the file as a reference to improve their methods based on what brings about the most desired results for the children. In this way, all departments could communicate well and collect the information necessary in an organised manner.

The faculty members would easily benefit from this as it would cut back on extraneous work of maintaining separate records. Also, they will be able to adapt their techniques to the preference of the child and the students would experience a faculty that is familiar with their ways.