Welcome to the LEADERSproject website. We have created this website as a place where clinicians, administrators, and people with disabilities and their families can find information on the law, research, and current clinical practices related to assessment, treatment, and prereferral intervention both in the United States and internationally. The website includes videos and articles and analyses that can be cited and used to support quality services for people with disabilities.
The LEADERSproject website is designed for practitioners, educators, and families. A primary goal is to make resources available to ensure that those from lower income homes, and bilingual and minority children and adolescents receive competent services.
Our hope is simple—to ensure that children and adolescents receive quality diagnoses and services designed to ensure that they meet their highest potential.
This online resource provides a nexus of current research, law and policies, and clinical practice to identify and treat disabilities. This includes resources on how to distinguish a disorder from a difference, determine how to best address identified gaps, and ensure that practitioners acquire needed competencies.
The LEADERS site features a media library with video modules for practitioners and educators with a particular focus on appropriate disability evaluations, cleft palate and cranio-facial issues, and treatment approaches from Dr. Crowley’s international work. A resource library includes the current legal framework; relevant research with suggestions on how to apply the findings into the clinical practice; resource manuals for specific languages highlighting developmental milestones; and analyses of validity, reliability, and bias for the most widely-used IQ, speech and language, and educational tests. The site includes Dr. Crowley’s recent articles and professional presentations including “Aligning IEP goals to the Common Core Standards”, “Bilingualism and Disabilities”; and “Developing Cultural Competence through International Experience”. The site also includes a glossary, a blog, and a section that responds to questions submitted by site users.
We have designed the site for all levels of proficiency. Someone may have a question about confidence intervals, or the construct validity of the WISC-IV, or materials in Spanish for parents of children with cleft palate. Others may want to acquire a broader understanding of disability evaluations that are consistent with the federal law, state regulations, current preferred policies and practices and the research. There is a way to acquire these skills.
With only a handful of graduate programs in the United States [in speech-language pathology, psychology, and special education] with a bilingual/multicultural focus the clinical practice suffers from limited number of practitioners who acquired knowledge and skills needed to provide competent services to bilingual, bidialectal, and multicultural populations in their graduate programs.
One main focus of the LEADERSproject is to offer practitioners resources to enable them to identify those particular skills they need to acquire. For example, we have a series of video tutorials on appropriate disability evaluations for preschoolers. These video tutorials correspond with glossary terms, important research, current legal, regulatory frameworks, and policies. Practitioners can choose to review all of the preschool evaluation modules or particular ones that they feel they need to review.
We have also created reviews of the most widely used tests to identify disability in the areas of special education, speech and language, cognition, and sensory-motor. These analyses reflect the validity, reliability, and bias issues in those tests including the strengths and weaknesses in these tests.
With a focus on bilingual populations, the LEADERSproject website offers language resource manuals that provide developmental milestones and cultural and sociolinguistic information about those languages including in Korean, Mandarin, Spanish, Russian, and Haitian-Creole.
CCNMTL is helping Dr. Crowley develop educational modules for the site and determine how to integrate the project in her classes at Teachers College. In addition, CCNMTL will develop the LEADERS website, film and produce videos for the site, and help collect other site content.
