Rachel Erhard

School Counsellors’ Involvement in the Process of Inclusion in Israel

The purpose of the research was to identify variables affecting the attitudes and involvement of school counsellors in the inclusion of students with disabilities in regular classrooms. The sample included 220 primary and middle school counsellors in Israel. Two specially constructed questionnaires (i.e., the Involvement in Inclusion Questionnaire and the Personal and Institutional Characteristics Questionnaire) and an adaptation of the Shechtman, Reiter, and Schanin (1993) Attitude Questionnaire were employed in the research. The findings indicated that counsellors have positive attitudes towards inclusion and allocated about 36% of their time to inclusion activities. Special education training and attitudes toward inclusion were the variables that explained the greatest amount of variance in the counsellors’ involvement.

The Israeli School Psychologist A Professional Profile

This study investigated the role perception and level of job satisfaction of Israeli school psychologists. A total of 1113 (873 women and 240 men) school psychologists participated in the study. Each participant was asked to fill out a questionnaire addressing four central aspects of the school psychologists job: personal and professional background information, information regarding their job performance, preferred activities and further education preferences and information regarding the level of satisfaction from different aspects of the job. The questioning of most of the school psychologists in Israel allowed us to achieve a complete sense of what the school psychologists do and how they experience their job. Our findings showed that most Israeli school psychologists wish to practice as clinicians and prefer to spend most of their time working with children in individual therapy, counselling their parents, and to a certain extent, consulting teachers. However, both job perception and satisfaction were found to vary as a function of level of expertise.

The Schooling Experience of Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Youth in lsrael: Falling Below and Rising Above as a Matter of Social Ecology

ABSTRACT Research on the schooling experience of lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) youth in Israel and in other Western countries has been largely risk-focused, whereas extrinsic and intrinsic protective factors, which enable LGB adolescent students to cope with school homophobic bullying, are often overlooked. To address this shortcoming, the researchers conducted a qualitative study based on semistructured interviews with 20 LGB-identified secondary school students. The findings and implications emphasized the key role of adequate ecological protective factors for LGB youth in enhancing effective coping mechanisms in response to school homophobic bullying.