The Effective Teacher's Guide to Behavioural and Emotional Disorders

Disruptive Behaviour Disorders, Anxiety Disorders, Depressive Disorders, and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder

Michael Farrell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN:
  9780415565684
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136848872
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Gestione comportamentale

'Michael Farrell offers well sourced overviews of the conflicting and contradictory advice that is available to schools, suggests a variety of solutions to challenges, empowering the reader to make their own choices.' - Carol Smart, Special Needs Information Press

Fully updated with the latest research and advice on best practice, this new edition of The Effective Teacher's Guide to Behavioural and Emotional Disorders covers a range of conditions that cause learning difficulties for children, including disruptive behaviour, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, anxiety and depressive disorders. The theoretical underpinning is fully updated but also condensed in this edition to make way for more practical strategies for teachers.

Teachers are likely to meet children with varying types and degrees of emotional behavioural disorders. This comprehensive guide equips you with informed and practical strategies to ensure that all pupils are included and provided for in the best possible way. The new edition has also been adapted to be more widely relevant to readers in different countries, focusing more on the strategies that work regardless of national context.

Writing in his popular accessible style, Michael Farrell suggests the best ways of dealing with a variety of conditions, always with practical classroom situations in mind. In each section, the book:

• sets out the definitions of the condition
• looks at the range of provision
• suggests intervention and support strategies
• gives points for reflection and suggested further reading.

Highly accessible and authoritative, this book provides teachers with an invaluable resource to help you create a truly inclusive classroom.

Chapter 1
What are emotional and behavioural disorders? Introduction

This book aims to provide an account of approaches that are effective in educating and encouraging the development of children and young people with emotional and behavioural difficulties.

This chapter sets the book in the context of ‘The Effective Teacher’s Guides’ series of which it forms a part, and explains the features of the new edition of this title. I outline the types of disabilities and disorders, including emotional and behavioural difficulties, that are the concern of special education in England and in the United States of America. I suggest potential readers likely to find the book useful, and I then describe the content of subsequent chapters.

‘The Effective Teacher’s Guides’ Series

‘The Effective Teacher’s Guides’ series published by Routledge concerns provision for different types of disabilities and disorders. These include cognitive impairment (‘learning difficulties’ in the UK and ‘mental retardation’ in the USA), autism, emotional and behavioural difficulties, reading disorder/ dyslexia and others. Each book in the series describes practical strategies that enable the educational progress and personal and social development of pupils with particular disabilities and disorders.

The titles in the series are:

• The Effective Teacher’s Guide to Sensory and Physical Impairments: Sensory, Orthopaedic, Motor and Health Impairments and Traumatic Brain Injury (2nd edition)

• The Effective Teacher’s Guide to Behavioural and Emotional Disorders: Disruptive Behaviour Disorders, Anxiety Disorders, Depressive Disorders and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (2nd edition)

• The Effective Teacher’s Guide to Autism and Communication Difficulties: Practical strategies

• The Effective Teacher’s Guide to Dyslexia and Other Specific Learning Difficulties: Practical strategies

• The Effective Teacher’s Guide to Moderate, Severe and Profound Learning Difficulties: Practical strategies

The new edition

This book, The Effective Teacher’s Guide to Behavioural and Emotional Disorders: Disruptive Behaviour Disorders, Anxiety Disorders, Depressive Disorders and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder is the second edition of a book previously called The Effective Teacher’s Guide to Emotional and Social Difficulties: Practical Strategies, published in 2006.

The first edition was generously reviewed and well received by readers. The new edition seeks to keep aspects which readers say they found useful while improving its remit and structure. Consequently, this new edition is different from the previous one in two main ways.

First, it seeks to make the content more widely accessible to readers in different countries. The 2006 edition was set within the context of legislation and procedures in the UK. The new edition focuses more on strategies that work without undue reference to a particular national context.

Second, the new edition has been restructured to reduce repetition. Essentially, this has meant describing various perspectives in a single chapter and then showing how these approaches and others are relevant to different types of emotional and behavioural difficulties.

Types of disability and disorder and types of emotional and behavioural difficulties

In the USA, pupils considered to need special education covered by federal law meet two requirements: they have a defined disability, and the disability has an adverse educational impact. Categories of disability under federal law as amended in 1997 (20 United States Code 1402, 1997) are reflected in ‘designated disability codes’ including the following:

01 Mentally Retarded

02 Hard-of-hearing

03 Deaf

04 Speech and Language Impaired

05 Visually Handicapped

06 Emotionally Disturbed

07 Orthopaedically Impaired

08 Other Health Impaired

09 Specific Learning Disability

10 Multi-handicapped

11 Child in Need of Assessment

12 Deaf/Blind

13 Traumatic Brain Injury

14 Autism.

In England, a similar classification (Department for Education and Skills, 2005, passim) comprises:

• Specific learning difficulties (such as dyslexia, dyscalculia and dyspraxia)

• Learning difficulty (moderate, severe, profound)

• Behavioural, emotional and social difficulty

• Speech, language and communication needs

• Autistic spectrum disorder

• Visual impairment

• Hearing impairment

• Multi-sensory impairment

• Physical disability.

It will be apparent that several types of disabilities and disorders concern broad areas of development relating to all children, whether or not they have a disorder or disability. The areas of development and related disabilities and disorders are categorised in the UK and USA as follows:

UK	USA
Cognitive development	Mentally retarded
Emotional and social development	Emotionally disturbed
Communication development impaired	Speech and language
Physical and motor development/health	Orthopaedically impaired/Other health impaired

Clearly, the various disabilities and disorders relate to conceptions of typical development, syndromes or injury affecting several areas of development, the functioning of sensory faculties, and the supposed effects of brain processing.

‘Emotional disturbance’ (USA) or ‘behavioural, emotional and social difficulties’ (England) are considered in this book in terms of ‘disruptive behaviour disorders’ (including conduct disorder), ‘anxiety disorders’ and ‘depressive disorders’. The book also examines ‘attention deficit hyperactivity disorder’ (ADHD) which in the USA is seen as a health impairment and in England as an emotional, behavioural and social difficulty (Department for Education and Skills (DfES), 2001). These examples follow classifications used in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders Fourth Edition Text Revision (DSM-IV-TR) (American Psychiatric Association, 2000).

The classifications used in the present book are set out in Table 1, the list corresponding to the order in which the chapters are presented. The table gives equivalents of disorders and disabilities as they:

• are delineated in the present text

• might be categorised in the UK

• might be categorised in the USA.

Proposed readers

As part of ‘The Effective Teacher’s Guides’ series, readers of this book will include teachers and student teachers in mainstream and special schools, hospitals, psychiatric units and elsewhere. However, I hope that parents and non-teaching professionals with a role or an interest in special education will also find the book helpful.

Table 1 Broadly comparative terms

Outline of the remaining chapters

Chapter 2: Pedagogy

This chapter looks at pedagogies influential in educating pupils with emotional and behavioural disorders. Under behavioural approaches, I consider: learning theory through the work of Thorndyke on learning by trial and accidental success; classical conditioning through the work of Pavlov; conditioning emotional responses with reference to the early work of Watson; and operant conditioning through the work of B. F. Skinner. Next, the chapter looks at observational learning and modelling through Bandura’s wo...

Table of contents

• The Effective Teacher’s Guides series, all by Michael Farrell
• Contents
• About the author
• Preface
• Chapter 1 What are emotional and behavioural disorders? Introduction
• Chapter 2 Pedagogy
• Chapter 3 Key perspectives
• Chapter 4 Disruptive behaviour disorders
• Chapter 5 Anxiety disorders and depressive disorders
• Chapter 6 Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder
• Chapter 7 Summary and conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index