Collaborative Teaming: Teachers' Guides to Inclusive Practices / Edition 2

by Martha E. Snell

Overview

Save 10% when you order all four books in the Teachers' Guides to Inclusive Practices series!

Collaborative teaming is the glue that holds an inclusive school together, but most teachers don't get the training they need to put this critical process to work. Schools can fulfill that need with the new edition of this book, an easy-to-use guide to forming effective collaborative teams that help stimulate students' academic progress and social behavior in general education. Educators will learn how to

• select team members (educators, parents, counselors, SLPs, paraprofessionals, and others)
• define the team's purpose and focus
• schedule and preserve time for teaming, and
• facilitate smooth communication during team meetings

Teachers will also get new and expanded information to help them

• identify problems, decide on solutions, and create action plans
• work cooperatively with family members and paraprofessionals
• co-teach with other professionals
• avoid or resolve conflict

Filled with vignettes that show the strategies and suggestions in action, this guidebook will increase teacher motivation for collaborative teaming, bring about better decisions and outcomes, and facilitate the active involvement and learning of all students.

The book is part of theBrookes Publishing Teachers’ Guides to Inclusive Practices series

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781557667113
Publisher:	Brookes Publishing
Publication date:	04/01/2005
Series:	Teachers' Guides to Inclusive Practices
Edition description:	Older Edition
Pages:	158
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 10.00(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Martha E. Snell, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus, Special Education, Curry School of Education, University of Virginia, 405 Emmet Street, Charlottesville Virginia 22904

Dr. Martha Snell is a Professor Emeritus of Special Education at the Curry School of Education, University of Virginia where she directed the teacher preparation program in severe disabilities for 30 years. With others, she has authored a number of books on teaching methods and the definition of intellectual disability and has been an active member of TASH and the American Association for Individuals with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities. She directed both federal and state grants directed toward the preparation of teachers and research with individuals having intellectual disability and autism and their teachers; more recently her research has concerned Head Start classrooms and young children at risk. Her research topics have encompassed the inclusion of students with disabilities in general education classrooms, effective teaching strategies, communication intervention, and positive behavior support for problem behavior.

Rachel Janney, Ph.D., is an independent scholar and consultant who has worked with and on behalf of children and adults with disabilities in a number of capacities, including special education teacher, educational and behavioral consultant, technical assistance provider, teacher educator, researcher, and author. For a number of years, she was a professor in the School of Teacher Education and Leadership at Radford University in Virginia, where she taught courses and supervised student teachers in the special education program, specializing in the inclusion of students with extensive learning and behavior support needs. Dr. Janney received her master's degree from Syracuse University and her doctorate from the University of Nebraska—Lincoln.

Read an Excerpt

Student Snapshot

Ms. Brown is late once again to Walter's team meeting — this time by 20 minutes — and the meeting is almost over. Ms. Hill reacts, "How do you expect us to work together if you are never here on time?" "You always blame me," Ms. Brown retorts and stomps out of the room in tears. To make matters worse, Walter's mom refuses to sign his IEP, even after the lengthy process his teachers used to involve her. Team members are disappointed and angry. "What does she want anyway? We put everything in his program!" "She doesn't know how good that IEP is!"

Even good teams experience laspes in trust, negative stereotyping, miscommunication, and impasse. No team can operate without having some internal conflict. A team's members, experiences, and outcomes are dynamic and changing, as is a team's relationship with its supporting school environment. This chapter addresses the characteristics of strong and effective teams: establishing team trust, promoting accurate and unambiguous communication, being sensitive to diversity and avoiding stereotyping, fostering positive staff-family interactions, and addressing disagreement. These interrelated characteristics contribute to the interpersonal relationships and communication among team members, both of which are essential for creative and cooperative work conditions. Inevitably, even when these characteristics are in place, most teams periodically experience problem behavior from one or more team members and nonconstructive conflict within the group. The last section of this chapter discusses strategies for addressing these threats to team effectiveness.

ESTABLISHING TEAM TRUST

Establishing trust among team members is not a simple process; it requires both trusting others and being trustworthy (Johnson & Johnson). When each team member trusts his or her fellow team members, several qualities are realized:

• Interdependency — Team outcomes depend on others as well as on oneself.
• Shared risk — Team outcomes can be good or bad and can result in gains or losses for oneself, the student, and/or the team.
• Confidence — Team outcomes will be good and will yield benefits (Deutsch, 1962).

Interdependency, for example, involves a willingness on the part of each team member to contribute to the achievement of team goals by 1) sharing their resources for group gain (e.g., talents, materials, ideas, time, energy), 2) giving help to others (e.g., modeling skills, volunteering for tasks in team action plans), 3) receiving help from each other (e.g., learning from one another's demonstrations; seeking and listening to the viewpoints, advice, or information of other team members), and 4) dividing the team's work. These interdependent behaviors are associated with team members' open expression of ideas, feelings, reactions, opinions, and information (Johnson & Johnson, 2000).

Student Snapshot

Ms. Wilson wonders whether there will be harmful or beneficial outcomes if she confesses her frustrations with Sam to her teammates: "As Sam's teacher in English 9, I am a member of Sam's team. I contributed to the design of his support plans, which were drawn up in August. However, after 2 months of using these plans, I'm very frustrated by the way in which other students seem to push his buttons, which almost always causes him to get upset; then I get upset and off task. Co-teaching with Ms. Elliott is working well; however, she seems much more able to ignore these interactions, to let them just go, or to prompt him (like we agreed in the action plan) to say things such as, 'get off my back' or, 'lay off.' I get tense and fearful that Sam will explode, I won't know what to do, and the whole class will fall apart. I've decided to say something, even though I'm concerned that the problem might really be my problem, but I worry: If I openly express myself, will you use it against me? Will you think I'm less capable or that I'm not trying?"

The way in which Ms. Wilson's teammates respond to her trusting and open expression will have a lasting influence on her comfort with the team as well as on her eventual ability to be successful in supporting Sam.

How Team Members Gain Trust

DeBoer (1995) identified three basic strategies for facilitating trust among co-workers and team members:

1. Empathy toward other team members occurs when one team member is able to take the perspective of others.
   "You know I feel the same way sometimes," says another teacher. "I see Sam a lot every day, and he's not the first challenging student I have had; however, I remember that same fearful feeling when I first met Sam!" Ms. Elliott adds.
   
   
2. Acceptance of the other team members for what they are means showing genuine positive regard for another person's capacity, experiences, talents, and unique viewpoints.
   "I can understand how scary it can be — you've seen one of his worst explosions," says a counselor, who remembers Sam's anger in English during the first week of classes. "He exploded the day he forgot to take his medication; school had just started, high school was brand new for him, and he was confused about his schedule. He has not fallen apart like that since, thank goodness — and I think it's because of all of our supports, including his parents' help with the medication schedule!" the counselor adds.
   
   
3. Credibility means that team members perceive each other as compatible or similar and competent (i.e., having talents to bring to the team that others value) and as someone who openly speaks his or her mind and takes the group's interest to heart.
   Ms. Wilson and her teammates have many years of high school teaching experience among them. They have strong respect for each other's talents. Each team member interacts with Sam regularly, and, for the most part, their team-generated action plan for supporting him has been highly successful.

Trust is built when an individual takes a risk in initiating an interaction with another person and is affirmed, which leads to team members' open sharing (disclosure).

Although trust is essential to team effectiveness, there are limits to trust. Trust in another team member is appropriate only when the potential for benefit is greater than the potential for harm. This requires "sizing up" the situation and initiating or reacting accordingly.

PROMOTING ACCURATE AND UNAMBIGUOUS COMMUNICATION

Team members who want their messages to be understood have to meet three rudimentary requirements (Johnson & Johnson, 2000):

1. Phrase the message in a way that listeners can understand. Avoid acronyms and technical terminology, use examples, and adjust language to the audience (see Figure 7.1).
   
   
2. Be a credible message sender. Receivers must regard your messages as trustworthy.
   
   
3. Ask others for feedback regarding their understanding of and reaction to what was communicated.
   
   

Communicators have credibility when they are viewed as being knowledgeable about the content under discussion, when their motives are not suspect, when their tone and style are friendly, when listeners regard them as trustworthy, and when they are assertive and emphatic in communicating their messages.

The skill of listening to or receiving a message has two fundamental requirements: 1) communicating, primarily through nonverbal behavior, that you want to understand the speaker's message and feelings, and 2) actually understanding the speaker's message and feelings (Johnson & Johnson, 2000). Communicating intent is achieved mainly through the receiver's nonverbal behavior (e.g., facing the speaker, establishing eye contact, looking interested, not interrupting).

When a receiver makes immediate judgments regarding a speaker's message without first confirming his or her understanding of the message, he or she often stops listening or leaps to conclusions based on a premature or erroneous evaluation of the message. Trust is consequently eroded. Premature evaluations by receivers also cause senders to be defensive, closed, and less able to explain or expand on their message.

Student Snapshot

In Melanie's school system, transition to middle school occurs at the end of fourth grade because middle schools house grades 5 through 8. When Melanie's team met with her future team members at the middle school in March, trust had not developed between both groups. Ms. Ramirez and Ms. Pitonyak narrated the video that Melanie's peers had made of class activities that showed off many of Melanie's talents. The two teachers described the various ways the team supported Melanie (e.g., small group pull-in, co-teaching, peer tutoring) and emphasized that pull-out was rarely needed anymore. Two of the fifth-grade teachers started frowning; one shook her head but said nothing. Ms. Ramirez, who had been happily sharing Melanie's successes, felt judged and angry, as if her ideas were being discredited. She abruptly stopped talking; the meeting room became quiet and was filled with tension.

After Ms. Ramirez abruptly stopped, one of the fifth-grade teachers sensed the tension and misunderstanding. She said, "It seems as if you and Ms. Pitonyak have experienced a lot of success in teaching Melanie alongside her fourth-grade classmates. This makes your whole team feel successful."

"That's right," beamed Ms. Ramirez, happy that one of the listeners understood her message. "It was hard at first because I had never had someone like Melanie in my classroom, and it took some creative team problem solving to make it work as well as it has. Melanie, however, has met all of her IEP goals, her family is happy with her success, she never misses school anymore, she has friends, and, as you saw in the video, her classmates have positive things to say about having her as a classmate."

The fifth-grade teacher who had spoken up added, "We might need your help . . ." Ms. Ramirez spoke up: "We'd like to help . . . and we know that middle school is not elementary school. You might have to change our strategies to fit middle school a little better, and you probably will think up lots of new ideas that work better with your class schedules. We'd be very willing, however, to show you all that we have learned about fourth grade academic work and social issues."

The expressions on the faces of all three fifth-grade teachers brightened.

Tough listening times occur when a speaker sends a message that takes a judgmental position (DeBoer, 1995). Often, the message conflicts directly with strongly held beliefs or values of the listener, but the listener should still listen to what the speaker is saying during these situations before responding or waiting until a later time to make a reasoned response. Figure 7.2 provides examples of these situations, in addition to guidance on how to listen.

If a team's comfort level is low in seeking clarification of a message through questioning each other, they might want to 1) devise interesting exercises to practice the skill (e.g., give incomplete directions, tell a story/joke but leave out a key line), 2) modify their ground rules ("Listen and understand me before you judge my ideas"), and 3) recall examples of their own tough listening situations and discuss alternative ways they might have used effective listening strategies.

Giving and Receiving Feedback Effectively

Any improvement that results from constructive feedback given to a teammate depends equally on the talents of the person giving and the one receiving the feedback. Givers must be sensitive to the receptivity of the receiver, only provide credible feedback, tailor their wording to suit the individual, and have positive motives. Receivers must be able to listen, seek clarification without being defensive, explore suggestions regarding change, take steps to self-improve, and seek feedback from teammates on their behavior (see Figure 7.3). The process of giving and receiving positive and constructive feedback may be the best way to prevent conflict among team members and to improve effectiveness in collaboration.

BEING SENSITIVE TO DIVERSITY AND AVOIDING STEREOTYPING

Cultural diversity, when combined with intercultural knowledge, communication, and positive experiences, is always an asset; however, misunderstanding, stereotypes, prejudices, and even racism can result when knowledge, communication, and experiences are lacking (Harry, 1997). Ignorance often is due to a lack of experience with the minority culture/group in a particular environment or inadequate knowledge of the practices, beliefs, and characteristics of the members of that culture/group. Stereotypes reflect false beliefs about causal connections between two unrelated, and often negative, factors (e.g., being poor and being lazy). They are dangerous because they guide thinking about groups of people and are highly resistant to change. Trent (1997) found that teachers' sociocultural stereotypes regarding students' abilities and their home life were negatively associated with their reduced expectations for students with disabilities and for students' lack of progress. Johnson and Johnson (2000, pp. 463'466) listed the ways that stereotypes are perpetuated:

• Stereotypes influence what people perceive and remember about the actions of non-dominant group members.
  
  
• Stereotypes create an oversimplified picture of non-dominant group members; the larger the non-dominant group, the more likely oversimplifications are to occur.
  
  
• Individuals tend to overestimate the similarity of behavior among non-dominant group members.
  
  
• People tend to have a bias toward false consensus: They believe that most people share their stereotypes.
  
  
• Stereotypes tend to be self-fulfilling.
  
  
• Stereotypes lead to scapegoating.
  
  
• People often develop a rationale and explanation to justify their stereotypes and prejudices.

Collaborative teams must be vigilant in identifying, discussing, confronting, and eradicating the conditions that breed or perpetuate stereotypes:

• When one or several team members' cultures are different from that of the rest of the team, the familiarization phase should involve time for the team member to share information about his or her culture. This might include learning vocabulary, recognizing a holiday, sharing ethnic food, or learning personal information about the individual.
  
  
• When the dominant culture of the professional staff differs from that of the paraprofessional staff and the students in a school, the effort to educate dominant and non-dominant groups must be extensive and ongoing.
  
  
• Schools should prepare staff and students to understand the background of the nondominant group(s) in ways that do not overgeneralize the information. Consider, as an example, the large range of linguistic and intracultural differences among people often identified as Hispanic, including Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Central and South Americans, Spaniards, and Mexicans (Harry, 1992a; Mardinos, 1989). Likewise, individuals who are recent immigrants often differ in their cultural practices and language from first and second-generation immigrants.
  
  
• Professionals must recognize their own cultural values prior to developing a sensitivity to the diversity in language, culture, customs, and attitudes of the students and families with whom they work (Harry, 1992b, 1997; Salisbury & Dunst, 1997).

When family members are from a nondominant culture, several steps should be taken to make members' styles more congruent (Sileo, Sileo, & Prater, 1996). First, differences in team members' regard for time might mean that the team needs to allow more time to think aloud together and not just aim for a "quick fix." Second, when there are conflicts in beliefs concerning the target student's independence, professionals should encourage extended family members to join the team to design programs that reflect their home practices of shared child rearing responsibility. Finally, when the equity beliefs of team members differ from those of the student's family, professionals should regard the target student's family's view of itself as an expert view in its own right.

Excerpted from Chapter 7 of Collaborative Teaming, Second Edition, by Martha E. Snell, Ph.D., and Rachel Janney, Ph.D.

Copyright©2005 by Paul H. Brookes Publishing Co. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Table of Contents

1. Overview of Collaborative Teaming
2. Building Team Structure
3. Learning Teamwork Skills
4. Problem-Solving and Action Planning
5. Coordinating Team Action
6. Teaching Collaboratively
7. Improving Communication and Handling Conflict

References

Appendix: Blank Forms

Editorial Reviews

"Provides an excellent array of practical information, ideas, and strategies . . . a must have for professionals committed to successful collaboration and inclusive practice."

Richard A. Villa

"Any team using this book will make a difference in the lives of children, as well as families and professionals."

Executive Director, Center on Disability and Community Inclusion, University of Vermont - Chigee J. Cloninger

"An invaluable resource for supporting the development of high performing collaborative instructional teams. By implementing the research-based practical strategies and tools, [educators] can bridge the gap between inclusion as a value and inclusion as a way of life in schools."

Associate Professor, Educational Policy and Administration, University of Minnesota - Jennifer York-Barr