For over a decade, special education providers at The Stepping Stones Group have been delivering services via telepractice to schools, re-formatting the landscape of special education services.
In our commitment to empowering students with the tools they need for academic success; we have witnessed firsthand the transformative potential of telepractice in delivering highly individualized interventions.
Telepractice offers a unique opportunity to address the diverse needs of children. Keeping individualized services truly individualized, the telepractice provider can design instruction that is tailored to each student’s strengths, challenges, and learning preferences while addressing Individualized Educational Program (IEP) goals. Telepractice is truly reshaping how special education services are delivered.
The Stepping Stones Group's school-centered telepractice approach ensures that students receive educational services of the same quality and achieve the same outcomes as they would in an on-site model. This model has developed into a pivotal solution that addresses longstanding challenges - limited resources, overwhelming caseload sizes, geographical barriers that hindered a school district’s ability to provide much needed and effective support to students. With the introduction of telepractice, schools gained a powerful tool to overcome these obstacles and enhance service delivery. By leveraging technology to connect special education providers with students, regardless of their location, telepractice has opened new solutions for providing comprehensive and individualized support to students with educational needs. Providers have seemingly infinite resources to draw from. School districts benefit from a larger talent pool, allowing them to meet each student's individualized needs with instruction that leverages technology and engages students more effectively.
Telepractice can address the diverse needs of students at any age, in a variety of educational settings, which includes those requiring alternative and augmentative communication (AAC) systems. It allows for tailored interventions that accommodate a wide range of communication modalities and developmental levels.
Telepractice can provide a supportive framework for accommodating the needs of preschool, elementary, middle and high school students, all the way up to young adulthood as older students prepare to enter the work field. Telepractice provides a platform not just for engaging play-based intervention, but also for social skills, life skills, and everything in between that supports optimal outcomes in the educational environment.
Many telepractice providers are quick to comment on how naturally web-based interaction leads to stronger involvement and attending skills, and more easily maintain student engagement. Through interactive tools, multimedia resources, and virtual game-based activities, special education providers can create dynamic and stimulating sessions that captivate students' attention and promote active participation.
Building rapport and engagement in virtual sessions is essential for the success of telepractice interventions. Many students are accustomed to digital environments, virtual sessions provide a familiar and comfortable setting where they can thrive. By creating a supportive and interactive environment, telepractice providers guide students to meaningful, measurable and impactful outcomes, on a highly interactive journey.
Author: Joseph Comeau