Frank H. Wood

Making sense of reports on the incidence of behavior disorders/emotional disturbance in school-aged populations

A review of estimates of the incidence of emotional disturbance/problem behavior in school-aged children leads to the conclusion that schools should anticipate a need for alternative programming for the 2–3% of their students predicted to have recurrent or persistent problems in adjusting to school situations. In addition, there is a need to assist teachers in dealing with the stresses created by the high incidence of transient problem behavior affecting 25–30% of the total school population. Some programming possibilities are suggested.

CCBD: A Record of Accomplishment.

A personal history of the Council for Children with Behavioral Disorders (CCBD) is given, with special attention to CCBDs beginnings. The development of the organization is traced since its inception, with emphasis on origins; growth; and changes in membership representation, committees, publications, and awards. CCBDs history of political activism is recalled, including position papers and cooperative efforts with other groups. The article concludes with a mention of how theory and practice in the education of students with emotional and behavioral disorders have developed over the span of CCBDs existence.

The Lora Case: Nonbiased Referral, Assessment, and Placement Procedures

Lora v. Board of Education of the City of New York, a suit filed to correct abuses in the identification and placement of Black and Hispanic students in segregated special day schools for students disabled by emotional disturbance, was decided by a consent decree agreement contained in a court order issued in 1984 following a 9-year history of testimony, decisions, appeals, consent orders, and judgments. Monitoring of the final order continues until 1986. An unusual aspect of the process in Lora was the appointment by the court from nominees suggested by the parties to the suit of a special advisory panel of experts on special education programming to provide advice and technical assistance regarding nonbiased assessment and placement procedures. This article describes the history and resolution of the Lora litigation, and the standards and procedures intended to prevent future discriminatory practices or to detect them as soon as they occur put forward in the final order.

Followup Training Program Graduates.

The MA level training program for teachers of emotionally disturbed children at the University of Minnesota enrolled its first class of full time students in 1962. In 1967, a questionnaire follow up brought replies from 43 of the 46 graduates who had completed the program through 1966. The questionnaire required responses to open ended questions about the types of students and classes with which the graduates were working, the physical characteristics of classroom situations, the nature of support services available to them, and their retrospective evaluation of the relevance of the training program content for their work. Twenty of the graduates (47 percent) were teaching children with learning and/or adjustment problems at the time they completed the questionnaire, and 90 percent had been or were currently involved in other ways with the education of students with such problems. Most graduates were working with small groups of children in relatively structured, academically oriented programs. Many reported physically unsatisfactory or difficult classroom environments and lack of appropriate supervision and support services. Classrooms were frequently located in basements or other out of the way places in school buildings. Immediate supervisors, such as building principals, lacked familiarity with the characteristics of disturbed children and the purposes of the special program. Special education program directors and school psychologists were described as more understanding and supportive of the classroom teachers work than principals but frequently unavailable for immediate consultation. In these situations, the personal rewards for the teachers were most often byproducts of teacher-pupil interaction, such as observations of pupil progress. Those teachers who worked in more adequate physical settings and had close working relationships with professional peers and parents reported additional satisfaction from those sources. In their retrospective evaluations of the training program, the graduates .spoke favorably of the varied experiences they had re-

Media Review: Books: Writing Instruction for Verbally Talented Youth: The Johns Hopkins Model

So many publications that purport to help teachers teach writing actually provide little more than activities for generating story ideas or figures of speech. Writing Instruction for Verbally Talented Youth is different. Authors Reynolds, Kopelke, and Durden assume that highly verbal youngsters already have ideas and some experience in expressing them in writing. What they offergoes beyond this elementary level to the real work of writing, critique, and revision. The book describes the method and exercises used in an introductory writing course at Johns Hopkins Universitys Center for the Advancement of Academically Talented Youth (CTY). While the method and exercises were developed for use with verbally talented youth, for whom they are especially appropriate, they are also applicable to average-ability youth. A central feature of the method is the workshop in which students critique and edit each others work. The authors describe in helpful detail two workshop formats designed to move the group from teacher-led discussions of strategies and techniques in professionally written model essays to peer evaluation of studentauthored work in an environment that is psychologically supportive to young authors. To handle such a workshop effectively, the teacher must initially be a strong model for constructive inquiry into content and form in literary work, then gradually shift to a nonleadership role when students reach the point of being able to teach one another, a goal of the workshop technique. Obviously, much of the success of a writing program using this method rests on having such a teacher, which the authors do not hesitate to point out. Writing Instruction for Verbally Talented Youth has 13 chapters, divided into sections

Media Review: Children and Adolescents with Mental Illness: A Parent's Guide

applicable manual, it falls short of providing specific guidelines for developing and delivering educational programs, Rather, it portrays some of the difficulties encountered in trying to translate legislation into practice and offers general suggestions for establishing teams, developing parent groups, and facilitating cooperative arrangements between various agencies and schools to coordinate services for handicapped students and their families. The book would most likely be of interest to individuals in school administrative positions.

Media Review: Developmental Therapy in the Classroom: Methods for Teaching Students with Social, Emotional, or Behavioral Handicaps (Second Edition):

Developmental Therapy is a psychoeducational approach to educating emotionally and behaviorally disordered children, which was developed by Dr. Mary M. Wood and her associates at the Rutland Psychoeducational Center in Athens, Georgia. The approach emphasizes the teaching of skills for normal social and emotional behavior by focusing on the developmental milestones that all children face. These milestones are ordered, sequential stages through which all children pass in the development of thinking, feeling, and behaving. According to the theory of developmental therapy something has gone awry in the passage of emotionally or behaviorally handicapped children through these stages. It is the task of the educator, through the use of the highly positive and sequentially structured developmental therapy approach, to rehabilitate these children. Developmental therapy uses a therapeutic curriculum with developmental objectives as guidelines for treatment. The developmental curriculum consists of four areas: behavior, communication, socialization, and academics. The teacher, by using the Developmental Therapy Objectives Rating Form (DTORF), locates the childs stage of development in each of the four areas. Students are grouped in accordance with their particular stage of development. Educational activities, materials, behavior management strategies, and individual education plan goals are formulated in accordance with the social-emotional level. The developmental therapy program, therefore, is conducted differently at each of the five stages of development. Students in the first stage of development (the most severely handicapped) are characterized by distorted fears and extreme disorganization. The goal of the developmental therapist with children in this stage is to teach

Media Review: Books: An Educative Approach to Behavior Problems: A Practical Decision Model for Interventions with Severely Handicapped Learners:

In their book, An Educative Approach to Behavior Problems, Ian Evans and Luanna Meyer provide a clear direction for teachers and other educational behavior managers in their efforts to make humane, helpful, and socially valid decisions regarding the application or nonapplication of behavioral procedures. Synthesizing work from the. areas of decision making, ecological behavioral assessment, and behavior management, the authors point out that the characteristics of the educational system lead to a unique configuration of relevant questions and realistic alternatives when addressing the problems of excessive behavior. Insofar as the authors present these issues in a practical manner, the book is relevant and helpful to educators facing questions regarding changing the excessive behavior of their students.

Media Review: The other Side of Delinquency, the Lives of Mentally Retarded People

The authors of these two books share a common purpose-to educate their readers about two groups of Americans who, for different reasons, are excluded from full participation in our society. They wish to educate us in the fullest sense, presenting factual information in an emotionally involving context. Both have solid academic credentials for the tasks they have chosen. Dr. Brown is a criminologist; Dr. Evans is a sociologist with extended experience with mentally retarded people. However, the method through which they approach their common goal is quite different. While Evans writes from the broad experience mentioned, Brown writes out of his personal experience as a juvenile delinquent. Evans writes as one who has come to respect and enjoy people whose lives are different from his own. Brown writes autobiographically, probing painful memories as he attempts to describe and come to terms with part of his past as a delinquent and emotionally disturbed adolescent. Not all of Browns book is autobiographical. One of the features that makes his account different is the blending of his own retrospective narrative with extensive quotations from school, agency, and court records. He reminds us to use care in generalizing from his observations about his own behavior to delinquents in general. His experiences were those of one white teen-ager from a lower-middle-class family with severe social and economic problems in a middle-sized eastern industrial city. There is a great difference between the environment of York, PA, and that of another Brown who wrote of growing up in New York Citys Harlem at about the same time (Claude Brown, Manchild in the promised land), although both wrote partly to discharge the debt they felt to those who helped them through times of trouble.

Media Review: Books: The Pelican and after

The purpose of this book is to examine the neural framework for language, reading, and spelling. Additionally, the book seeks to provide its reader with an appreciation for the complex relationships between the various neural structures that constitute the physiological basis for oral and written language. The books intended audience is those individuals already possessing a basic knowledge of central nervous system anatomy and interested in the amalgamation, or interfacing, ofthe psychoeducational aspects of oral and written language with the neuroanatomical basis of language-related behavior. The primary thesis of Neuropsychology of Language, Reading, and Spelling is that the neuroanatomical underpinnings of language are highly complex, possibly highly variable, perhaps changing with age and definitely not well understood at present. The editors intention, has been to bring together individuals who have studied the brain-behavior interrelationship from a diversity of professional vantage points so as to provide the reader with an awareness of parallel as well as highly divergent interests and findings. This permits those interested in the study of brain-language behavior relationships to view current thoughts and findings from perspectives different from their own. The book appears to have limited success in handling the wide array of viewpoints contained within its pages. At times the diversity of the individual chapters, ranging from depth of coverage of detail to general professional perspective, makes it difficult for the reader to focus on a unifying theme, or to view the individual chapters as contributing to a central theme. Although this diversity may limit the books usefulness as a graduate level textbook, the individual chapters do address valid issues and raise interesting points with respect to the neuropsychological foundation of language. Moreover, those individuals interested in brain-language behavior relationships may find the variety of professional views both revealing and helpful with respect to formulating opinions concerning the neuropsychological foundation of language.