Speech, OT, PT and Schedules?

One of the main factors that challenge elementary school educators is scheduling.

While a classroom teacher may be responsible for 25 students, those students are also served by a host of therapists and specialists too. So as teachers facilitate learning endeavors, students are often coming and going from those specialist activities. The challenge in this is that those students miss parts of the classroom lesson or activity.

As much as possible we try to schedule for this so that when children are leaving, the class is in a workshop mode--a type of learning that students can easily engage in when they return.  This becomes very challenging when you have many students coming and going, yet the addition of more adults to support student learning is always welcome.

In Massachusetts our evaluations will now be centered on a tight evaluation process and SMART goals. I've been piloting this system this year, and it has opened my eyes to both scheduling possibilities and challenges.

I am not a therapist, and I don't usually know exactly what children do when they go to their 30-minute therapy sessions. I wish we could integrate the therapies with curriculum goals and standards more, but I realize that therapists have their own goals and standards to meet.

I am wondering if we can meet students' individual needs and schedules while also supporting and helping classroom teachers meet the curriculum goals and needs for all the students in their classrooms.  How can we change schedules to meet this need.  A change has the potential of reducing stress, better learning targets and more success.

Here are a few ideas I have about this subject.

1. Where can therapists and therapies be integrated into the curriculum and included in the classroom activities providing extra support to students with regard to both therapies and curriculum goals?
2. How can therapies be scheduled so that they don't interrupt the flow of essential classroom lessons?  Do we create a specialist block for grade levels where it is essentially a study block and students move into specialized instruction during that time only?
3. Can therapies be scheduled prior to the start of the student year so that students are receiving those services from day one until the last day of school?
4. How can we schedule other school events so that therapies are not interrupted?
5. Can therapists take on some of the responsibility for grading, curriculum planning and student response with regard to the many standards classroom teachers are responsible for--skills and goals that students are tested on each year and that mostly, only classroom teachers and special educators are seen as responsible for?  While I support streamlined standardized testing, I also believe that all professionals in the building should be responsible for the tests, not just the classroom teachers and special educators.
6. Could specialists' services be scheduled as a quarterly project.  For example if you have a speech goal could you work on that goal intensively for a quarter of the year each morning for a half hour.  As it stands now a child with 30 minutes of a therapy a week gets a total of about 15 hours of therapy a year spread out over a year's time. Would those therapies be more effectively met in an intense period of delivery?  I don't know about this as I'm not an expert at the therapies, but I do know that this kind of scheduling might mean that a therapy becomes a project block focus and the therapist could possibly integrate a content area with the therapy goal. 
7. Do we integrate therapists and therapies into our RTI blocks so that when you're working on a therapy such as OT and keyboarding, you might also be working on a specific writing goal--a goal that the therapist plans for, evaluates, coaches and assesses.

I think one of the main issues standing in the way of student success is the way we service students.  I think collaboratively we can continue to look at the way the school day and year are structured so that we can target our work and efforts more effectively so that children obtain essential skills in engaging ways.

Often, as a classroom teacher, you have before you a few students who simply struggle to embrace the curriculum in a large class setting because they need more targeted teacher attention, and one teacher with 25 students has limited time when it comes to that kind of small group or one-to-one attention.

How can we better leverage the skill, expertise and time of professionals in a building so that we are teaching students well.  Our school has started moving in this direction with RTI and PLCs--this has been a terrific first move. I think we can continue to strengthen this system and also begin looking at skills' blocks and project-base learning blocks where the teachers in charge is responsible for all aspects of the project from planning to grading to meeting some of the many, many standards we're responsible for.  

I'm one voice in this and there is so much to consider, but I think moving down the road of revisiting and rethinking roles, responsibilities, school structures and schedules will help us to better meet the needs of all students.  Essentially this means taking down many old structures and replacing them with new structures, structures that include the use of technology and other wonderful tools.