P. J. McWilliam

Research Assistant Professor of Special Education

Ph.D., University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 1987

Research Area

Early intervention personnel preparation

Short Biography

Dr. McWilliam received her doctorate in clinical psychology from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Much of her 22 years of experience in the field of early intervention has been gained through her direct service work. She served as Assistant Director and Senior Coordinator of Child and Family Services for the Family, Infant, and Preschool Program in Morganton, NC from 1982-1989 and, more recently, as director of the inclusive child care program at Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (1999-2003).

Dr. McWilliam has extensive experience in providing training to others and in developing and evaluating training materials for professionals and paraprofessionals. A primary focus of her work in early intervention personnel preparation over the past 14 years has been promoting the case method of instruction (CMI). She has developed numerous case stories and related training materials for training early interventionists, many of which appear in her 3 published books (Working Together with Children and Families:Case Studies in Early Intervention, 1993; Lives in Progress: Case Stories in Early Intervention, 2000; Practical Strategies for Family-Centered Services, 1996).

Dr. McWilliam has used the case method of instruction extensively in both in-service and pre-service training. She is currently Principal Investigator of the CMI-Outreach Project (U.S. Department of Education, Office of Special Education Programs) and co-directs the project with Dr. Patricia Snyder at Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center. The project is designed to train university faculty and inservice instructors how to use CMI in their training of early intervention professionals in preservice and inservice settings.

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