No abstract

No abstract

Rapid demographic shifts in the United States’ school‐aged population require school psychology to research and address issues related to limited racial/ethnic diversity in the profession. This qualitative study explored the work‐related experiences and perceptions of 30 African American School Psychologists who practiced in the Southeastern United States. Findings revealed that African American School Psychologists perceive their ability to help children, advocate for children of color, and provide positive representations of people of color as opportunities. They perceive racial bias, including racial microaggressions, as a primary challenge in their careers. Based on these results, recommendations for research, training, and practice are provided.

To improve schools, educators must develop the capacity to implement instructional and behavioral interventions that differ from those typically employed. Yet, the central problem of building educator capacity is not determining what to implement. The central issue for improving schools is rather to find ways to help educators identify, implement, adapt, and sustain effective practices. School-based consultation could provide the means to elicit and support new behaviors, competencies, and dispositions among educators. However, little attention has been directed at fundamental consultee learning and behavioral change processes that lead to different teacher behaviors and improved student outcomes. Exceptional professional learning (EPL) is a comprehensive consultation model that attends specifically to the processes and mechanisms of consultee cognitive, behavioral, and motivational change. The model is grounded in positive psychology and self-determination theory, constructivist and socioconstructivist learning theory, situated cognition, and distributed practice. It provides a coordinated framework to elicit and sustain changed cognition and behavior among consultees. The explicit theoretical grounding provides mechanisms of conceptual change; development of content, contextual, and pedagogical knowledge; and attention to motivation and sustainability. Consultation based explicitly on learning and motivational theory is advantageous because assumptions and approaches are testable, consultation strategy selection is guided by more than clinical judgment, and the model can adapt to incorporate evolving understanding of the component theories. Examples, preliminary support, and challenges for the model are provided from consultation and professional development cases.

Counseling research on female youth of color has been limited in the application of theoretical frameworks that engage families in a practical sense regarding career issues. In this direct content analysis, 40 female middle school students of color shared perceptions of their strengths and supports for future career success. Relational cultural theory, a framework grounded in multiculturalism and feminism, was shown to be a fitting and promising theory-to-practice model for those working with female adolescents of color and their families. Implications for counselors working with female youth of color and families on career exploration are provided.

The application of Response to Intervention (RtI) to early childhood settings presents many opportunities and challenges; however, it remains unclear how best to implement this framework in settings in which children at risk of academic difficulty are overrepresented, like Head Start. One of the first steps in implementing any RtI process is the effective and efficient identification of children who are in need of additional instructional support (e.g., Tier 2 or Tier 3). This process is critical as it directly affects the amount of resources needed to support children appropriately-a factor that is particularly concerning for programs that primarily serve children who are at risk of social, emotional, or academic failure difficulties. The purpose of this study was to investigate the proportion of at-risk children who may be in need of additional instructional support when screening and norm-referenced measures are administered at the beginning of the year. In addition, the proportion of at-risk children who continued to need additional support after receiving approximately 6 months of Tier 1 instruction was examined.

With the latest re-authorization of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act (IDEA, 2004), states are allowed to use a Response to Intervention (RtI) framework to determine whether students qualify for special education services. Although RtI has promise and has been implemented well with documented results, further research is needed to bring RtI to scale and to address implementation challenges surrounding the skills and knowledge needed by educators. Overall, results of the current study reveal that teacher perceptions of their ability to use data-based decision making increased after participating in the professional development. The results of this study add to the limited literature base surrounding professional development and content knowledge for successful RtI implementation.

Issues of equity, access, and social justice in educational settings have received increased attention in the educational and psychological literature over the past several years, though there is still much to learn (Proctor, 2016; Song, Miranda, Radliff, & Shriberg, 2019). Although a number of matters are relevant to consideration of social justice in schools, historical and ongoing deficits in recognizing, understanding, and addressing systemic racism in American society are at the forefront. As expressed by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (2018), "The education available to millions of American public school students [is] profoundly unequal." (p. 9) Both historically and currently, racism permeates our educational institutions, inevitably affecting immediate and long-term school experiences and outcomes for students. Black students carry with them the unacceptable police shootings of Black men and women such as Jacob Blake, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and children such as Michael Brown and Tamir Rice, and countless others. This collective grief and resulting distrust of unjust power structures in the U.S. is compounded by racist educational practices that affect Black youth and other students of color day in and day out in schools, including but not limited to unjust disciplinary (e.g., suspension and expulsion) and special education eligibility decision making practices (Blake, Gregory, James, & Hasan, 2016; Sullivan & Proctor, 2016); implicit educator bias, and resulting microaggressions and macroaggressions (Compton-Lilly, 2020); limited representativeness of educators from minoritized backgrounds in schools (LaSalle, Wang, Wu, & Neves, 2020); and inequitable access to educational opportunities such as gifted and honors classes, and preparation for higher education (Ford, 2014). What is more, the ongoing COVID-19 Pandemic has disproportionality, negatively affected individuals from minoritized backgrounds as evidenced by health (Wan, 2020) and financial disparities (Stafford & Swanson, 2020), which can reverberate