Discuss: Consultation

As an infant mental health consultant in the field of early intervention, I consider my role as a consultant to be defined by the request of an agency or practitioner. My consultation duties range from observing a home visit/intervention with a single practitioner to meeting with an agency's management team to discuss ways to increase hte quality of the agency's relationship-based work. When working with a single practitioner, we get together after the visit/session to discuss our perceptions and reflect on responses and behaviors. Then we make a concrete plan for the next step - additional assessment, referral(s) for other resources, reading professional material, enhancing therapeutic approaches, and such. Consultation with an agency follows a similar format, but generally takes more time. Follow-up sessions are encouraged.

I define consultation as a meeting with the provider outside of the classroom in order to discuss the issues at hand. I might be sharing ideas and resources in response to a need within the classroom. It could take place over the phone, via mail, or in a private meeting where we are not distracted by the activity of the classroom.

According to the work of Zins, Kratochwill, and Elliot (1993) consultation is an indirect method of service delivery. With this definition, most times the consultant does not work directly with the client who is focus of the service. So truly, consultation ought to involve, at the very least, three individuals, the consultant, the consultee, and the client. The idea behind consultation is that there is a systemic problem and the consultant has been asked to provide some suggestions to the consultee who has the right to accept or reject the suggestions. Consultation, while problem based, many times includes a piece of prevention so that the problem at hand is delt with earlier before a more serious problem occurs.

I appreciate the effort to come to some common understanding of terms used to define quality practices in early childhood. I would like to suggest that as we define terms, we include language related to the centrality of relationships to all learning. As early childhood practitioners, whether classroom-based, home-based, developmentally-oriented, educationally-oriented, focused on early childhood mental health, etc. we are each imppacted tremendously by our work with young children and their families. Ours is highly evocative and emotionally charged work that is centered on supporting healthy, nurturing relationships between children and their caregiviers as well as between caregivers and their supervisors/consultants/mentors/advisors. Maybe in the "strategies" section of the definition, we might include such relationship-based practices as: a) holding multiple perspectives (all as equally alid and important)related to the consultation situation: the child's (children's), the parent's/caregivers', the team/staff, the program administrator/superivsor and the consultant's own perspective while being aware of how these varying perspectives are affecting the situation; and b) acknowledging the strong feelings that are evoked in the work with young children and how these feelings affect the direct work as well as the consultation; and c)using the consultation relationship to support exisiting competenices while helping the consultee(s) identify additional copetencies that may be helpful in the situation, then supporting the development of those additional competencies; and d) seeking to increase use of reflection and self-awareness as one of the desired outcomes of the consultation process, etc.

Jacqui, Your points, which I really appreciate, make me think about the qualities or competencies that consultants and other professional development providers engaged in relationship-based approaches must possess to be effective in their roles. Have there been systematic attempts by programs, organizations or states to develop such competencies? Does anyone have an example to share?

Reading the "Strategies," I noted that coaching is referred to as part of the consultation process. I agree, but this illustrates that the approaches are not just separate items but are sometimes embedded in one another. It also occurs to me that the "examples" should always have at least two--in this case, maybe another that illustrates consulting at the systems level.

Good point ...and it may be that we need to think about both the relationships as well as the intensity of the approaches.