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Trusting Family-Professional Partnerships: Preventing, Resolving, and Moving Beyond

DisputesAnn Turnbull

April 2, 20152:30 pm – 3:45 pm ET (11:30-12:45 PT)

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Trusting Family-Professional Partnerships: Preventing,

Resolving, and Moving Beyond Disputes

Ann Turnbull – turnbull@ku.edu

www.beachcenter.org

CADRE WebinarApril 2, 2015

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Meet “JT Turnbull

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Professionals Having Power Over Families

Professionals

Families

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Families Having Power Over Professionals

Families

Professionals

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Shared Power

Power through partnerships

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Are We Doing Our Best on Family-Professional

Partnerships?“You have no concept of what your best effort is, so you must continually strive to do better today than you were able to do yesterday. If you will make a concerted effort every day, your best effort will grow in ever-increasing circles.”

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What if Our Best Effort Grows Every Day?

Best Effort

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Beach Center Research Program on Partnerships

• Qualitative research – 33 focus groups and 32 individual interviews

• Participants included families of children with and without disabilities, service providers, administrators

• Broad representation of cultural diversity

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Exceptional Children: Dimensions of Family and Professional Partnerships: Constructive Guidelines for

Collaboration

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Family-Professional Partnerships: Six Components

• Communication

• Professional Competence

• Respect

• Commitment

• Equality

• Trust

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Communication

• Be friendly

• Be clear

• Be honest

• Provide and coordinate information

• Listen

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Listen: Professionals

“Ask questions. If a parent comes in and says I found this new program down the road 50 miles, and I want that for my child, it’s an error to say we don’t do that or we’re not going to provide that. The best response is, “Come in. Have a cup of coffee. Tell me about it. What did you like about the program? You went and saw it, did your son see it? What did he like? How were you treated? What did you see there that particularly impressed you? Because it’s the answers to those questions that reveal a person’s needs and interests….So try to think of our negotiation without walls, without artificial boundaries between what you can do and what you can’t do”. (Lake & Billingsley, 2000, p. 246)

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Listen: Professionals, continued

• Listen with non-defensiveness to concerns and problems from the teacher’s perspective.

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Professional Competence

• Provide an appropriate education

• Continue to learn

• Set high expectations

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Set High Expectations: Professionals

Families of children with disabilities are not allowed – or at least not encouraged – to have a dream or a vision for their children’s future. What the past has given as possible outcomes for people with disabilities is far less than inspiring. If all we have to look forward to is an extension of the past, I should think we would want to avoid the pain of that future as long as possible. But I have a motto: Vision over visibility. Having a vision is not just planning for a future we already know how to get to. It is daring to dream about what is possible. (Vohs, 1993, pp. 62-63)

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Set High Expectations: Parents

• Be open to considering opportunities involving greater risks than you might think is warranted.

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Respect

• Honor cultural diversity

• Treat students and families with dignity

• Affirm strengths

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Affirm Strengths: Professionals

“The last two years have been like in a dream world. It is like I want to call them up and say, “You do not have nothing negative to say?” This educational system – this school itself has worked wonders with my son. It has taken a lot of stress off ME, so that when I go home, I do not have to get into it with him and say, “Oh, you know, the school called me today about this and that.” They will call me, but they have already worked it out. Or they will call me to praise him and tell me how wonderful and how positive a role model he is now, and it’s because they have worked with us. It is like I said, it has been a dream world to me.” (Beach Center, 2000)

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Affirm Strengths: Parents

• Using a variety of ways to affirm strengths and gratitude to professionals who are especially helpful – verbal comments, emails, handwritten notes, letters of recommendation, nominations for awards, etc.

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Commitment

• Be sensitive to emotional needs

• Be available and accessible

• Go “above and beyond”

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Go “Above and Beyond”: Professionals

“It was the first day of summer vacation, and my son was off the wall, because he really needed structure. I was freaking out, and I couldn’t deal with it. I called the teacher and told her I didn’t know what to do. She came across town and took him to her house and said, ‘Do something fun for two hours.’” (Turnbull & Ruef, 1997, p. 219)

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Go “Above and Beyond”: Parents

• Honor special occasions – birthdays, happy events, sad events, holiday celebrations

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Equality

• Provide options

• Foster empowerment

• Share power

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Share Power: Professionals

“I said, you intend to do this regardless of what I say. I said, if you made the wrong mistake, what will happen to you? Nothing. I said, I have to live with the outcome of any erroneous decision for the rest of my life because I will be caring for my child until I’m gone from this planet and I have to reap the consequences…I said, I want to make the decisions about my child, and I’ll live with the consequences if I happen to make the wrong one. But it’s difficult to live with the consequence for the decision you made that I was against.” (Beach Center, 2000)

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Share Power: Parents

• Work on systems change to gain necessary resources for professionals to do a good job

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Trust

• Partnerships can be thought of as a mobile where all of the principles of partnership must hang together in order for trust to be balanced

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Partnerships as Support: From Qualitative to Quantitative Research

Qualitative Domains

1. Communication

2. Professional Competence

3. Respect

4. Commitment

5. Equality

6. Trust

Factors

1. Relationship between service provider and child

Treat your child with dignity

2. Relationship between service provider and parents

People that you can depend on and trust

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Measuring the Quality of Family-Professional Partnership in Special Education Services

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Beach Center Family-Professional Partnership Scale

• Beach Center Family-Professional Partnership Scale

2 domains – child-focused; family-focused

18 items

Resource: Full-text articles and information on availability of the scale is at: http://www.beachcenter.org/families/family_research_toolkit.aspx

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Sample Excerpt from Beach Center Partnership Scale

Beach Center Familiy Professional Partnership Scale http://www.beachcenter.org/resource_library/beach_resource_detail_page.aspx?intResourceID=2478&Type=Tool

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Sample Excerpt from Beach Center Partnership Self-Assessment Scale

Beach Center Family and Professional Partnership Self-Assessment Guide http://www.beachcenter.org/resource_library/beach_resource_detail_page.aspx?intResourceID=2479&Type=Tool

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Family-Professional Partnerships: Quantitative Research

• Families from three age groups of children (birth-3, 3-5, 6-12) place equal importance on different aspects of partnerships.

• Regarding satisfaction with partnerships, parents of children ages 6-12 are uniformly less satisfied than parents of children ages 3-5, who also are less satisfied than parents of children birth-3.

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Family-Professional Partnerships: Quantitative Research, cont.

• Low income families rate all the items related to partnership as equally important as compared to middle and high income families; but low income families are significantly less satisfied.

• Families who have higher satisfaction with partnerships also have higher family quality of life.

• Partnerships partially mediate the positive difference that services make for families.

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Families, Professionals, and Excemptionality

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Family Textbook• Delineates a family systems theoretical orientation.

• Provides students with historical and legal foundations related to family roles.

• Describes partnership principles with trust being the keystone.

• Applies partnership principles to enhancing partnerships in student evaluation, development of the IFSP/IEP, and implementation of the child’s IFSP/IEP program.

• Has extensive website with case studies, role plays, resources, and test questions (www.prenhall.com/turnbull). In 2008, the Beach Center will have an online version of the course.

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Module 4: Family-Professional Partnerships

http://community.fpg.unc.edu/connect-modules/learners/module-4

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Moving Beyond Disputes: Group Action Planning

• Inviting support

• Creating connections

• Sharing great expectations

• Solving problems

• Celebrating success

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Beach Center on Disability – Person Centered Planning

Beach Center Person Centered Planning http://www.beachcenter.org/families/person-centered_planning.aspx

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What if Our Best Effort Grows Every Day?

Best Effort

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Gratitude

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References

Blue-Banning, M., Summers, J.A., Frankland, H.C, Nelson, L.L., & Beegle, G. (2004). Dimensions of family and professional partnerships: Constructive guidelines for collaboration. Exceptional Children, 70(2), 167-184.

Summers, J.A., Hoffman., L., Marquis, J., & Turnbull, A.P., Poston, D., & Nelson, L.L. (2005). Measuring the quality of family-professional partnerships in special education services. Exceptional Children, 72(1), 65-82.

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Judy Swett, PACER Center & ECTAAmy Whitehorne, CADRE

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