A plea for more intervision

The author presents an argument for tolerance, mutual understanding and reconciliation in psychotherapy, instead of a continued emphasis of schools. Psychotherapists' work with clients is proposed as a likely area for mutual understanding, rather than continued emphasis on their particular theories and academic matters. Psychotherapeutic intervision groups in which a small number of therapists voluntarily discuss their cases with peers from various backgrounds have become increasingly common again in recent years.Slightly revised version of a presentation made at the Georgetown Family Center Symposium in November 1995.     

One size doesn't fit all: Full inclusion and individual differences

Recent studies have documented the increasing trend among school districts toward adopting full inclusion as the predominant model for serving students who qualify for special education services. Although these data may suggest that a paradigm shift has already taken place and that a consensus of opinion has been achieved, several organizations representing students with specific disabilities continue to support a continuum of placement options. This paper challenges a one size fits all approach to special education, and highlights the importance of considering the individual characteristics of students. The relevance of research on full inclusion, as well as methodological issues that limit generalizability of findings related to student outcomes, are discussed. The radical perspective of full inclusion is rejected in favor of an approach that emphasizes the complexities of placement decisions.     

Teacher efficacy: A model for teacher development and inclusion

Students with special needs must have the opportunity to learn in inclusive classrooms. However, this requires that classroom teachers believe that (a) students can learn in spite of any negative environmental influences in their lives, and (b) they personally have the ability to reach any student. Securing this teaching efficacy for teachers in inclusive classroom settings requires paradigm shifts in preservice and inservice teacher development programs with the precept that all students can learn and that we can assist them. The authors, one a regular and the other a special education teacher educator, collaborate to explore the issue of how best to provide and maintain a positive personal teaching efficacy among regular teacher education candidates who are faced with the challenges of having students with varying levels of ability and behavioral responses in their classrooms.     

Effect of listener age and situation on the politeness of children's directives

Twenty-one children between the ages of 46 and 52 years made a speaker doll address other dolls that represented an adult, a peer, and a younger listener in command and request situations. Analyses of the politeness of the elicited directives revealed that the effect of the listener's age was greatest in the command situations,with the adult listener receiving the politest directives, followed by the peer and the younger child, respectively. The listener age effect diminished in the request situations, where the child had to ask a favor of the listener. In these situations, the children were very polite to all three listeners. The results are discussed in terms of status relationships between the speaker and the listener.This article is taken from a doctoral dissertation completed at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, under the direction of D. K. Vetter.     

A real-time satellite system based on UNIX

One solution to the difficulty of running real-time applications under UNIX is to develop the application programs on an available UNIX system and execute them on a dedicated satellite processor. This combines the advantages of a powerful timesharing operating system with the real-time capabilities of a single-process system. PARASITE, a real-time satellite system, provides tools for developing the application program on the host and executing it on a satellite. A host utility serves to invoke the standard UNIX C compiler and link its output with the PARASITE library. The PARASITE library consists of routines that mimic the standard library and routines that read and write the real-time peripherals. PARASITE currently supports digital inputs and outputs, asynchronous serial-line interfaces, program-mable real-time clocks, and analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog converters. Another PARA-SITE utility downloads the object code of the user program and PARASITE support code into the satellite, where it runs independently. Once the application routine is executing on the satellite, it controls the satellite processor at all times and is continuously available for servicing hardware-generated interrupts. When a real-time peripheral interrupt routine is invoked by a hardware interrupt, it sends a software signal to the user program, in addition to processing the interrupt. This allows the user program to perform additional tasks that are specific to the application. All data to be permanently stored must be transferred to the host. Since the satellite has no direct access to the resources of the host, a process running on the host receives the data and manages files. PARASITE provides packet driver routines on both the host and the satellite, which together handle the data transmission protocol.