Collaborative counselling: influence on the teaching professionals' conceptions as promoters of children's communication and language

Abstract

This article presents the results of an action-research project. The project consisted of a reflection process involving a year-long collaboration between a teacher, a teaching assistant and a speech therapist in a special education school, together with two researchers acting as counsellors. The reflection process sought to promote changes in the participants' approaches to working on communication and language in the classroom. This article sets out to identify and describe the processes of change in the three teaching professionals' conceptions of communication and language teaching and learning, and about their teaching role. The collaborative counselling lasted 32 weeks and consisted of a total of nine group counselling (GC) sessions. All of the nine GC sessions were transcribed in order to analyse the changes in the teaching professionals' discourse. The ATLAS.ti 7.0 program was then used to select speech quotations and to group them into thematic clusters based on content analysis. The results indicate that the teaching professionals' conceptions subtly changed during the collaborative counselling process; specifically, their conceptions about how to develop communication and language, classroom interaction, the educator's role, organisation of context and curriculum planning