Counselling Students with Special Needs

Students with Special Needs are a growing familiarity in mainstream schools.

As the education landscape becomes more welcoming of diversity, stakeholders throughout the education sector have also begun to look for answer and strategies to make the inclusion more seamless as Singapore evolves towards a more inclusive society.

Counselling Students with Special Needs is probably the first of its kind that addresses th urgent need for educators to look into challenging issues faced by such students. This book helps readers to understand the importance of working collaboratively with other professionals in counselling students with special needs (CSSN) and the essential that need to be taken to achieve it. It also includes understanding the mental states od mind, indentifying and prioritising issues of special needs consern, designing an individualised counselling plan and evaluating the counselling programme.

About The Author:
Dr Noel Chia Kok Hwee is an assistant professor with the Early Childhood and Special Needs Education Academic Group at the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Currently, he is the only board certified educational therapist registered with the American Association of Educational Therapists outside the United States. Besides, he is also a registered professional counsellor with the Australian Institute of Professional Counsellors, Perth, Western Australia. In addition, he is also a board certified diplomate (Special Education) with the American Academy of Special Education Professionals and the first Singaporean diplomate (Measurement Techniques in Distance Education) of the London-based Association of European Correspondence Schools. He sits on the Educational Standards Collaborative Committee of the International Association of Counsellors & Therapists and the International Medical & Dental Hypnotherapy Association-both based in Pennsylvania, USA. In Singapore, he sits as a member on the MCYS Advisory Board/Discharge Committee.

Dr Chia has published numerous papers in both local and overseas refereed and non-refereed academic journals and articles in professional magazines and periodicals for general readership as well as authored, co-authored and edited a series of monographs and books. In addition, he is also one of the two coordinating editors for the Journal of Reading & Literacy-the flagship publication of the Society for Reading & Literacy, Singapore, as well as the Journal of the Reading Specialist-the official publication of the Reading Specialists’ Association (Singapore).

Dr Chia, a former Japan Air Line scholar (Asian Studies) at the Sophia University, Tokyo, Japan, holds two fellowships-one in literacy awarded by the College of Preceptors, UK, and the other in dyslexia awarded by the College of Teachers, UK. Recently, he has been awarded the Lee Kong Chian Research Fellowship by the National Library Board, Singapore, to study the growth of imagination in Singapore children’s literature in English: 1965-2005. Dr Chia is an alumnus of three Australian universities-Edith Cowan University, the University of Southern Queensland and the University of Western Australia. He is married with a daughter.