Counseling is determined to be a related service when students’ social/ behavioral deficits adversely impact their school performance and relationships. Counseling may include direct assistance to students and/ or consultation to those working with them. In order for some students with disabilities to access and receive benefit from their educational setting comparable to their nondisabled peers (i.e. FAPE) and make adequate progress, their skill and knowledge deficits in the social/ behavioral/ school expectations arena must be remediated. In such cases, teams should enlist the help of their school psychologist in assessing the deficits, designing interventions, consulting with others, or directly delivering remediation.
There are many options for delivering counseling services under an IEP. It may strictly involve the school psychologist in a one-on-one weekly counseling session. However, most of the time, it will be a mixture of instructional/ counseling contacts either in an individual or group format along with regular consultation with the student’s teacher(s) and/ or administrator to arrange practice or generalization to the broader school environment.
To accomplish goals for counseling, most school psychologists adopt an approach to remediation based on a “learning” model with a skills focus. Since students come to school expecting to learn new skills/ knowledge, learning models of counseling are often more instructional, more palatable to the student in the school environment, and easier to generalize to other school settings like the classroom. Learning-based approaches are also preferred by school psychologists because there is far more research supporting their efficacy. While learning theory is the foundation for conceptualizing many social/ behavioral deficits that require counseling, a problem-solving model is the preferred vehicle for identifying, establishing the scope, designing interventions, and monitoring changes in the behaviors that are the target of counseling as a related service.
Talk to your school psychologist for more information or if you have a student whose social skills deficits or maladpative behaviors are interfering in their school success.