When you provide special education services, you are never doing so alone, nor should you. Research indicates that there is a causal relationship between effective collaboration practices and improved student outcomes (Ronfeldt et al, 2015). As a 2017 report from the Council for Exceptional Children & CEEDAR Center puts it,

Collaboration is not explicitly mandated in the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), nor is it generally part of formal policies related to educating students with disabilities, but the requirements of the law and established school practices strongly infer that it is through collaboration that the effective education of students with disabilities is achieved. (McLeskey et al, 2017)

One way to think about collaboration is “how individuals share their work . . . [including] voluntariness, mutual goals, parity, shared responsibility for critical decisions, joint accountability for outcomes, and shared resources” (Friend & Cook, 2017). All of these elements require healthy communication practices, but all too often, communications between partners in the special education process can break down.

Wiio’s Law, quoted above, has become an oft-cited, humorous commentary on the inevitable human experience of interpersonal communication going awry. Who hasn’t made a good-faith effort to convey information, only to have it misconstrued as something entirely different than what was intended? Communication between humans is based on symbols—letters, words, colloquialisms, even body language—that are grounded in our personal, cultural, and geographical histories. We all have variations in our histories, and we tend to encode our meaning by using symbols the way we understand them, while the recipient of our communications decodes those same symbols the way they understand them. Thus, these miscommunications are inevitable (Korpela 2010).

This can cause challenges for the special education process.

• If a teacher communicates a need they see for the student while that student is in their learning environment, but the parent/guardian hears the message as a criticism of their child or has a strongly different opinion about what their child needs to learn, an IEP process can end up becoming a due process hearing.
• If the Local Educational Agency (LEA) representative hears a description of a student’s needs as a demand for expensive or hard-to-obtain services, they might be inclined to push back rather than consider ways to meet the need.
• If a student perceives the conversation in an IEP meeting as a plan for unpleasant rules or daily practices to be forced on them, rather than as a path to learning becoming an enjoyable and empowering experience, they could withhold the most important element to the success of an IEP: their cooperation.

All is not lost, however! While we can’t assure you that following the guidelines and practices outlined in this module will always help you avoid miscommunications between members of an IEP team, the approach laid out in this module can help you analyze situations when communications break down, resolve or even avoid conflicts, and build your professional skillset to minimize miscommunications.

This module starts by providing an overview of key communication theories and ways to think about how you approach communication with your partners in the special education process. Because the IEP process is central to the provision of special education services, we then focus on practices that will help you communicate—and, as a result, better collaborate—with your partners on an IEP team while still adhering to key legal, ethical, and practical considerations in your collaborations with others.

References

Friend, M., & Cook, L. (2017). Interactions: Collaboration skills for school professionals (8th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson.

Korpela, Jukka. (2010). How all human communication fails, except by accident, or a commentary of Wiio’s laws. IT and communication. English version accessed 13 December 2023.

McLeskey, J., Barringer, M-D., Billingsley, B., Brownell, M., Jackson, D., Kennedy, M., Lewis, T., Maheady, L., Rodriguez, J., Scheeler, M. C., Winn, J., & Ziegler, D. (2017, January). High-leverage practices in special education. Arlington, VA: Council for Exceptional Children & CEEDAR Center.

Ronfeldt, M., Farmer, S. O., McQueen, K., & Grissom, J. A. (2015). Teacher collaboration in instructional teams and student achievement. American Educational Research Journal, 52, 475–514. doi:10.3102/0002831215585562.