Who is Rick Welsh?

Rick Welsh has developed the Co-Teaching Strategies for Inclusive Classrooms training. He holds a MS degree in Speech and Hearing Sciences from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and began working with the public schools as a licensed speech-language pathologist in 1980. Rick has functioned as an educational consultant since 1992. While working with the public schools in NC, he designed and implemented a classroom-based service delivery model for students with language disorders and auditory processing deficits. This program yielded improved classroom performance for the identified students in his caseload and also provided effective intervention for students who were not identified, but who were at risk for academic failure.

Rick began his consulting career by presenting seminars on this topic to speech-language pathologists and other interested educators. He has addressed groups as small as 10 and as large as 300. Eventually participants in his seminars began inviting him to their school systems to assist them with their inclusion programs. As a consultant, Rick began studying the dynamics of team teaching as well as the challenges involved in adapting curriculum.

With over 30 years of field experience in schools across the country, Rick has developed a training program which yields positive, replicable results at all grade levels and in all core curriculum areas, including Foreign Languages. (Rick’s is fluent in French and Russian and also speaks some Spanish and German.) His qualifications include the ability to train and entertain large groups of educators, model the process of adapting instruction for diverse learners, work directly with students while modeling the co-teaching process and most importantly, work with individual teachers to forge effective co-teaching partnerships.

Rick is skilled in the use of technology and will demonstrate how to use it to enhance classroom instruction. He has developed two software programs. One program assesses the compatibility of co-teaching partners (TAC-T). The other helps administrators observe and report teacher and student behavior in the classroom setting (TimerData Plus). The observation/reporting software is in use in school systems across the country. Rick’s other skills include the ability to play guitar, sing and write music.