Learning by teaching: Reflections on developing a curriculum for school mental health collaboration

Interdisciplinary collaboration is identified as best practice in delivering effective school mental health services. Pre-service training, however, often uses discipline-specific curriculum, limiting students' access to other disciplines and development of competency in interdisciplinary collaboration. Graduate students and faculty in this study worked collaboratively to develop a problem-based learning curriculum for promoting interdisciplinary collaboration in school mental health. Qualitative methods were used to evaluate the curriculum development process and its impact on the developers' own competency in interdisciplinary collaboration. Five curriculum developers provided narrative responses to questions developed by the authors. Using content analysis coding, several categories emerged from the data. Key categories include participants learning more about their own and others' disciplinary perspectives, training methods for interdisciplinary collaboration, and challenges and positive outcomes associated with interdisciplinary collaboration. The findings suggest that a collaborative curriculum development process in and of itself may be an effective model for improving interdisciplinary collaboration between school mental health practitioners. Recommendations for future research and practical implications are described.