Instructional planning: information collected by school psychologists vs. information considered useful by teachers

A limited national sample of 49 school psychologists and 30 regular education teachers provided information on assessment for the purpose of instructional planning. School psychologists listed the types of information they most often collected for this purpose and teachers listed the types of information considered most useful for this purpose. While some indications of agreement were found between school psychologists and teachers, there were also several inconsistencies in the views of the two groups regarding assessment procedures for instructional planning. The findings are discussed in light of empirical evidence on the contribution of various types of assessment data to instructional planning.     

The polar unities as a guide to psychotherapy

The author recognizes the need for a psychotherapy that aims to be either spiritual or wholistic to ground itself in appropriate philosophical and theological constructs. As one small step in this direction, the ontological elements as discussed by Paul Tillich are applied to some specific therapeutic issues. Striking parallels are found between Tillich's first two ontological elements (individualization-participation, and dynamics-form) and the two dimensions (cohesion and adaptability) of the circumplex model of family therapy. It is suggested that Tillich's third ontological element (freedom-destiny) throws useful light on the educational and psychotherapeutic issue of permissiveness versus authoritarianism.     

Identifying emergent leaders in psychotherapy groups

This paper is the second in the series on group development and emergent leadership. It describes the design of a sociometric instrument which will be used for the identification of the four emerging leaders from the perspective of the group participants themselves. These four leaders, Task, Emotional, Scapegoat and Defiant, perform ongoing maintenance functions in the group and take up the critical function of spokesmen in the group's dialectical processing of phase-specific, group level issues. The goal here is to design an instrument which would allow both clinician and researcher to identify these critical persons early in a group's life.Ariadne P. Back is in private practice in Chicago, Illinois.     

Some comments on the role of cotherapists in group psychotherapy with borderline patients

This paper points out examples of patients in a psychotherapy group who meet DSM-III criteria for the diagnosis of borderline personality disorder and who are treated by cotherapists utilizing object relations theory. Interpretations of phenomena shown by borderline patients—splitting, projective identification and denial—are illustrated. How cotherapy lends itself to the recognition and management of the problems these patients bring to group psychotherapy is illustrated.Hope Aspell assisted in the editing of this paper.     

Engaging families in therapy: A pilot study

Engagement is reviewed as a central component of marriage and family therapy and presented as a viable means of assessing the nature and outcome of therapy. A tentative model containing six differentiated engagement categories is described and documented with clinical data and case examples. Conclusions drawn indicate engagement has merit as a construct for evaluating marriage and family therapy and as a means of generating process hypotheses in research. Recommendations to validate, refine and revise the model are posited and further research relative to engagement is advocated.James P. Trotzer, Ph.D. is Professor of Counselor Education at the University of Visconsin-River Falls, River Falls, Wisconsin 54022, marriage and family therapist in private practice     

Strategies in cross-modality matching

Subjects were tested on cross-and within-modality matching conditions with either a 5-sec or a 20-sec delay imposed between standard and comparison stimuli. Half the subjects were informed before the trial of what the comparison modality would be, while the others were not. There was a strong effect of instructions on the cross-modality conditions, but little on the within-modality conditions. The informed subjects showed better performance in the haptic-visual condition, while for the uninformed subjects, visual-haptic performance was better. The results suggest the importance of subjects’ processing strategies in cross-modality performance.