Problem
A colleague told me recently that my models were good for
needs assessment but professioanals needed to know what to do during actual intervention.
Ouch. The Routines-Based Interview (RBI) has become well known and implemented,
but people stop there. They don’t go on to finish the book, so to speak. Here,
I explain that it’s what happens after the RBI that’s really important—and that
intervention is a huge part of my models, Routines-Based Early Intervention (RBEI)
and the Engagement Classroom.
RBEI
The RBEI model (confusingly close to “RBI”) consists of five
components: understanding the family ecology (ecomap development), family-centered
needs assessment (RBI), integrated service delivery (primary service provider),
support-based home visits (family consultation), and collaborative consultation
to child care (individualized within routines). The ecomap and the RBI often go
together. To master these is to master finding out what families’ real
priorities are for their children and themselves, based on an in-depth
exploration of functioning in everyday contexts. The result is a long list of
goals designed to increase children’s meaning participation in their routines
and to meet family-level needs. But that’s it. And yet that is the springboard
for effective interventions. Therefore, in my way of thinking, the RBI is
necessary but not sufficient. It is very hard, for example, to use good family
consultation, also known as coaching, if you don’t have meaningful, functional
things to discuss with the child’s caregivers such as parents and teachers. The
RBI sets the stage and was always designed for that purpose; see the original book
(now out of print, so good luck), Family-Centered
Intervention Planning.
What the RBEI model has to offer after the RBI is a method
for organizing service delivery (the primary service provider), a method for
conducting home visits (family consultation), and a method for visiting
children in their group-care settings (collaborative consultation). These
methods are well articulated, they come with supporting materials (e.g.,
checklists), and they are being successfully implemented in numerous places
around the world.
Engagement Classroom
The Engagement Classroom model is a package of practices
also but for the running of a classroom. It doesn’t cover all the things a
teacher has to consider. For example, it is designed to be used with almost any
curriculum and with almost any developmentally appropriate approach. (Although
currently I’m inspired by its application with the Reggio Emilia approach.) The
Engagement Classroom model features (a) inclusion, (b) incidental teaching, (c)
integrated specialized services, (d) functional needs assessment (i.e., the
RBI), (e) the zone defense schedule, and (f) engagement data collection. Again,
the purposes of the RBI in this model are to assess functional needs by looking
at child behaviors in everyday contexts of the classroom (and home) and to
produce a set of family-chosen goals pertaining to those needs. Once we have
those goals, incidental teaching and integrated services (i.e., therapists and
itinerant early childhood special educators) occur meaningfully. Everybody is
on the same page, and the focus is on function—engagement, independence, and
social relationships (EISR) in the routines of the child’s school day (and home
time). The classroom has some organizational features to promote this
functioning, such as children of all abilities, the organization of adults, and
the organization of classroom space. Adults are trained to focus on EISR.
Price of Success
The success of the RBI has improved the development of
intervention plans and has give professionals a tool for working closely with
families in that process. The popularity of the interview has overshadowed the
other parts of the RBEI and Engagement Classroom models, or perhaps mastery of
the first course (i.e., the RBI) has been so filling that the main course has
been forgotten about. The metaphor stops there, because a first course is
optional, whereas we have found the RBI to be almost a prerequisite to the
intervention parts of the models.
