Professional and educationally sound

Recently, the concepts of ‘professional’ and ‘educationally sound’ were raised in discussion around the 5energies table. We had heard on the grapevine that 5energies was discussed in a network meeting with particular reference to our professional approach and the educationally sound nature of the program we offer to children and their families. More recently we have begun working with a number of schools, implementing our integrated approach, and allowing teachers to screen children for their learning delays, and to provide targeted and more effective learning programs.

Quite rightly, teachers view themselves as professionals, offering highly competent teaching to a variety of learners, with direct reference to curricula and jurisdictional accountability frameworks. Speech Pathologists and Occupational Therapists also have such frameworks, to satisfy their criteria for professionalism. While we are a private learning consultancy, we too view that we set an amazingly high standard for services to our clients. We demand not only registered and qualified personnel to work for us, but we also demand that they maintain our professional standards of behaviour, support, mentoring, interaction and communication with our clients. We believe in optimising each child’s chances of success, and to do that, parents are an integral part of the learning process.

While we do not necessarily follow any particular jurisdiction in terms of curriculum, we are at all times aware of the contents of curricula around the country, and the need for strong educational programs. Not only are our consultants trained, registered and experienced teachers and professional practitioners, we have in place a stringent training program and ongoing mentoring and support.  More importantly, we view that we are ‘educationally sound’,  in that our program focusses specifically on the acquisition of underpinning learning skills and on the development of functional literacy and numeracy skills, surely a sound approach for any educational program.

However, we genuinetly feel we go past ‘educationally sound’ into the arena of ‘professionally sound’. We don’t ask teachers to do anything in addition to their current hard work - we ask them to work smarter, not harder, and offer programs to enhance existing learning programs. We work from a framework of integration of high standards from the three professions of education, speech pathology and occupational therapy. This is, of course, a very sound way of working.

What are your thoughts about what constitutes ‘professional’ and ‘educationally sound’ practices?