Blueprint For Action
Research Methodology
In order to inform my blueprint for action, I interviewed ten individuals from across PBHA, including PBHA professional staff who have been involved with the development and evolution of PBHA trainings, a special education teacher and former Director of Programs on PBHA staff, and seven former Senior Counselors from the summer of 2022. Through these interviews, I heard about the lived experiences of those working on the ground at SUP and gained a more thorough understanding of Senior Counselor training in general and the areas in which it can be improved, especially as it relates to working with neurodiverse campers.
Key takeaways from my expert interviews with PBHA staff members, one of whom is a current special education teacher:
- There is a limit to the individualized/differentiated attention SUP can provide – we want to be as inclusive as possible, but we must recognize our capacity as a student-run nonprofit with limited resources. SUP is not designed and cannot function as a 1-1 special education program.
- Meeting with families and teachers of students with disabilities and/or IEPs is absolutely crucial to the success of both that student and their Senior Counselor!
- On the technical side, Senior Counselors should all be trained to have a basic understanding of how to read and interact with an Individualized Education Plan.
- It may be helpful to offer additional coaching/training for Senior Counselors with known neurodiverse classrooms and/or with an interest in the field that goes beyond the baseline provided for all Senior Counselors.
Common themes from interviews with former Senior Counselors:
- Many Senior Counselors would have liked a better general understanding of neurodiversity and what it means to have students with disabilities.
- From the perspective of Senior Counselors, training often focused on the best-case scenarios with kids – more examples of problem-solving strategies when things don’t go as planned would have been helpful.
- Training also felt overly theoretical and Senior Counselors would have benefitted from more opportunities to put this theory into practice.
- There should be a clearer support structure outlined for who to reach out to when you are struggling in this area.
Additionally, I performed a deep analysis of previous SUP and PBHA training guides through my access to PBHA's online records in order to create a complete picture of the training that has existed in the past for SUP. Many of these training guides included great general suggestions for how to manage a classroom that would be helpful for students with disabilities, (e.g. meeting with families, restorative practices, some acknowledgment of differentiated instruction), but little mention of how to specifically approach students with disabilities/IEPs.
Recommendations
With all of this research in mind, I created slide decks for two training sessions. The first is SUP-wide training that teaches all counselors a general framework for approaching Individualized Education Plans and best practices for working with neurodiverse students, and the other is a more intensive training for Senior Counselors with identified learning needs and/or disabilities in their classroom.
It is important to note that these are preliminary training sessions. Although I have deep experience with kids with disabilities and have grounded many of the concepts in these trainings in a scholarly literature review, I am not an expert in special education. Ideally, a special education teacher or another expert would review and revise the training before in order to ensure accuracy and even be the one to present the training. I also adapted some of the information and graphics in my training sessions from prior PBHA trainings, from a handful of online sources, or from the literature that I reviewed earlier in the semester. I have attributed credit to each of these sources when applicable.
