Using a Music Therapy Collaborative Consultative Approach - World ...

collaborative consultation are critical components for appropriate and successful
implementation of teacher-mediated interventions using music therapy principles. There is a
need for music therapy-based staff development activities to ensure both the teachers’
comfort level and the sharing of professional knowledge. There are several ways to provide
musical training to teachers as an intensive one-to-one training, as part of the classroom
curriculum including both children and teachers, as an in-service, or as a part of the
university early childhood intervention curriculum. Best practice depends on the time
available, on the childcare curriculum, and on classroom demands the teachers face.
For these studies, ongoing collaborative consultation was necessary. We do not know
whether or not the teachers’ accurate implementation of the interventions will continue or
decline over several months if they are not supervised. We also do not know if the
implementation of the intervention by a trained music therapist will result in equal, greater,
or less children’s acquisition of independent functioning. More research supporting the
efficacy of a music therapy collaborative consultative model of service delivery in early
intervention/early childhood special education is needed.
Toward this end, the fidelity ratings in this study introduce a preliminary measure of
how effective the collaborative consultation component can be in imparting intervention
partners with adequate tools for intervention sustainability. In this inquiry, only Experiment
III contained a systematic process for monitoring the degree of teachers’ and peers’
adherence to the intervention model; as a result, fidelity as a potential predictor/moderator of
intervention success could only be analyzed in this one experiment. (In Experiments I and II,
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