Advancing Preservice Consultation Training Through University-Community Partnership

ABSTRACT This paper describes consultation training experiences offered through a decades-long partnership between a university school psychology graduate program and a local Head Start center. The collaboration provides a field placement setting where beginning students engage in activities tied to first-year coursework, and an advanced practicum site for doctoral students who oversee first-year students’ classroom-based activities and in turn are jointly supervised by program faculty and the center’s Special Services Manager. Through these experiences, graduate students develop competencies in client-centered, consultee-centered, and systems-level consultation, with opportunities to engage in an array of activities aligned with key updates to the 2020 NASP Professional Standards particularly in Domains Six (Services to Support Safe and Supportive Schools), Seven (Family, School, and Community Collaboration), and Eight (Equitable Practices for Diverse Student Populations). By focusing on the school environment, community collaboration, social justice, and equitable practices, these updated domains highlight the role of ecological and systemic factors in school psychology practice and training. Trainees support the center’s efforts to function as a trauma-informed organization whose members recognize and respond to trauma in a manner that promotes safety, collaboration, empowerment, and other trauma-informed practice principles. They do this by consulting with parents and teachers, contributing to staff professional development on such topics as adverse childhood experiences and caregiver stress management, and facilitating meetings with parents and teachers around issues such as trauma-informed discipline. We discuss how these activities align with the 2020 NASP domains, with particular attention to ecological and systemic perspectives.