MEETING THE CHALLENGE OF CONSULTATION AND COLLABORATION - DEVELOPING INTERACTIVE TEAMS

The roles of special educators as consultants and collaborators have l ong been established and supported. The rationale for these roles is a lso well documented. Many models-consultative, collaborative, and team ing-have been suggested in the literature; sometimes, these models exh ibit similar goals, competencies, and processes. Because of intensifie d pressures to collaborate, successful implementation of collaborative and team efforts requires that special educators expand their roles a s interactive professionals. The purpose of this article is to define and describe the consultation, collaboration, and teaming models that have been implemented, discuss their strengths and limitations, deline ate how these models contribute to interactive teaming, outline key fe atures of the interactive team, and provide some guiding principles fo r successful implementation.