Collaborative Teams for Students with Severe Disabilities: Integrating Therapy and Educational Services.

This book is written as a guide for people who must work together as a team and who desire a means of personal growth through which a collaborative unity can be established and have its impact on the education and life outcomes for students with severe disabilities. The content is clearly aimed at promoting successful education, with the ultimate goal being community-based inclusion. Collaboration, in this text, is dealt with in a historical manner through legal mandates and practice models that were designed to improve educational services for all children age 3 years and older. History has been woven beautifully through the demonstrated personal growth of the contributors and their many colleagues.

The essence of collaboration is defined and given depth and a framework. Each chapter clarifies a distinct part of the educational process and gives a design for a collaborative approach. The chapter entitled "Parents as Team Members" provides useful information that establishes the basic premise of equality of all team members and delineates the roles and functions of each team member based on this equality. There is also a brief summary of the best educational practices for students with severe disabilities that delineates the step-by step process of inclusion using a systematic approach. Legal mandates and precedents are also listed throughout the various chapters and should be quite useful to teams daring to venture into change via collaborative effort.

Additional chapters cover the topics of curriculum and how an ecological model can be used as a natural context for therapy provision, assessment in a collaborative approach, individualized education program writing and instructional design, and, finally, organizational strategies for collaborative teamwork.

This text is as much a celebration of growth in service and education models as it is a useful guide to individuals just coming into the fields of occupational therapy, physical therapy, speech therapy education, and parenting of children with multiple and long-term needs. It will no doubt be a timeless resource and could easily be used as a model for collaboration across the populations.

The authors should be congratulated for the growth and contributions they are making, which are bringing quality and inclusion to the lives of many children and their families. I highly recommend this text, but with one word of caution: Its use may change the very notion of who you think you are and create a more human-like team composition.