UNC School of Education

>> Knotek, Steve

Two overarching scholarly interests define Knotek’s research agenda: the process and outcome of consultee-centered consultation and the impact of socio-cultural influences on children’s development of emergent literacy.

Consultee-Centered Consultation

School-based consultation has traditionally used a highly directive expert model: teachers serve as conduits, reporting student problem behaviors to a consultant who prescribes a solution. This traditional approach does little to enhance a teacher’s ability to conceptualize a problem, create new skills or transfer a successful intervention to new problems.  Additionally, this model is not focused on prevention and early systems intervention. 

Knotek has launched a theory-building agenda and field-based research on an emerging indirect intervention: consultee-centered consultation. Designed to meet the needs of at-risk students, the intervention’s goals are two-fold: to enhance the ability of consultee teachers, principals and school systems to solve work-related problems thereby decreasing the number of low income children incorrectly identified for special education; and to support the delivery of effective services to the consultees’ clients, i.e. students and school systems. A promising preventive approach, consultee-centered consultation is designed to lessen the incidence and/or severity of future problems and decrease student drop out rates. Four studies are in progress, two of them in affiliation with the Laboratory for Instructional Consultation at the University of Maryland investigating the implementation of instructional consultation – an application of consultee-centered consultation – in North Carolina. Knotek serves as principal investigator on both. The first study is investigating the impact of external accountability as found in No Child Left Behind on the psychological climate of a school’s work environment, especially its group problem solving. The second study is examining how systemic factors can either impinge on or support teachers’ shift from reactive to proactive behavior in meeting the academic needs of at-risk students. Preliminary results from each of these studies have been presented at national conferences and at least two publications from each study are expected within the next two years.

Combining his interests in consultation and emergent literacy, Knotek is also an investigator in two large-scale studies funded by the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute for Educational Studies: the National Research Center on Rural Education Support located in the School of Education and the Center for Developmental Science, and the Latino Literacy Project located at the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute. Each of these studies uses consultation as a means to further educators’ professional development while improving the literacy skills of young and elementary school children.  Knotek’s involvement includes overall design of the interventions and responsibility for their qualitative components. He will undertake an ethnography of the process and measure the impact of each intervention upon selected teachers and students. Publication of the results will follow.