Impact of a school consulting programme aimed at helping teachers integrate students with behavioural difficulties into secondary school: actors’ points of view

Abstract

A collaborative school consulting programme model, using functional assessment and applied behavioural techniques, was offered to secondary school teachers in two modalities: individual consultation and small-group consultation. The objective was to facilitate the integration of students with behavioural difficulties into mainstream secondary school classes. Both consulting programme modalities shared the same postulates. This article presents the stakeholders’ perceptions of the consulting model and its impacts on teachers and students. Presented here are the results of semi-structured interviews conducted with teachers (N = 42), resource persons accompanying individuals or groups (N = 11) and school managers (N = 8) in the programme’s first year of implementation. According to qualitative analysis of the interviews, these two models seem to have had positive impacts on teachers, especially in relation to their perceptions of students with behavioural difficulties and their understanding of behavioural problems. However, the group model is the one that elicited the most adhesion in all groups of actors.

Keywords:

• behavioural difficulties
• school consultation
• teacher
• functional behaviour assessment
• secondary school

Acknowledgements

Special thanks go to all the teachers, school consultants and head teachers who took part in this research. We also wish to thank the Fonds de Recherche Société et Culture du Québec (Quebec Research Fund for Society and Culture) for funding this research.

Notes

1. 1. A higher index indicates a lower income or a lower economic status.