Meeting the Challenge of Consultation and Collaboration: Developing Interactive Teams

The roles of special educators as consultants and collaborators have long been established and supported. The rationale for these roles is also well documented. Many models—consultative, collaborative, and teaming—have been suggested in the literature; sometimes, these models exhibit similar goals, competencies, and processes. Because of intensified pressures to collaborate, successful implementation of collaborative and team efforts requires that special educators expand their roles as 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, delineate how these models contribute to interactive teaming, outline key features of the interactive team, and provide some guiding principles for successful implementation.