RLFA-212; No. of Pages 11 2 F. Vega et al.Collaborative counselling; Teachers theoretical perspectives. The main objective is to promote processes of reflection and criticism regarding strategies, tools and guidelines that teachers can progressively incorporate in the classroom to optimise the way they approach communication and language work, with the ultimate goal of improving the communicative and linguistic competence of students with disabilities. The counselling takes place over nine meetings, eight counselling meetings and one closing meeting, through which teachers are taught, mainly to: a) optimize the organization of the classroom, b) follow to a greater extent the students' lead, c) use strategies to promote interaction and lengthen conversational turns, and d) use language modelling strategies. The effectiveness of the counselling programme has been proved in a collaborative Action-Research with three special schoolteachers, providing different results both in relation to the professional development of the teachers and in the development of the communicative and linguistic competence of the students. The results indicate that the collaborative counselling model is a useful tool to help teachers to build a more appropriate environment for the development of students' communicative and social competence.