Review of “Cognitive-Behavioral Interventions for Emotional and Behavioral Disorders: School-Based Practice,” edited by Mayer, Van Acker, Lochman, & Gresham, 2009. NY: Guilford Press, Paper, 409 pp.
This solid old book lays out some essential information—but more importantly is meant to get colleagues from three different fields interacting about helping young people. As an educator with an interdisciplinary background, I am excited to see when disparate paths converge.
This book brings together research, treatment methods, and explanations of approaches from the three different fields and is exciting because of the ground-breaking plan to get professionals in these diverse areas communicating more. Experts from cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), experts in emotional disorders, and educators working with behavioral disorders converge on the intersection of young persons in trouble who need special help and treatment.
The editors and authors of this book believe strongly in the importance of bringing the disparate groups of experts together in order to open a dialogue and share resources. Too often in the past, experts in therapy did not communicate enough with special education experts, and classroom teachers did not have enough background in either of these two areas to be able to forge a connection that could be used effectively in their teaching and counseling of students.
This book attempts to bring the most important issues to the forefront and get experts and educators speaking to each other.
Experts in CBT lay out the important uses of this form of intervention and show ways to adapt the approach to practical situations. The first section explains the foundations of cognitive-behavioral interventions and explains the importance of both changing the person’s thoughts and requiring the individual to complete homework to change what they are doing. These two basic components of CBT are at the heart of the text.
The second section deals specifically cognitive-behavioral interventions for anger and aggression. The third deals with the use of cognitive-behavioral interventions for symptoms of anxiety and phobic disorders. The fourth part provides relief for students faced with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder and with autism spectrum disorders.
The fifth section deals with the promise of cognitive-behavioral interventions in the classroom in the future, in addition to the challenges facing those who attempt to employ them and adapt them to serve more students. As in many cross-cutting solutions, there are immediate issues to face. For example, many classroom teachers do not have an infinite number of credits in psychopathology, counseling techniques, or research. In addition, many experts in cognitive-behavioral interventions do not have experience in teaching, and often less background for working with children in a structured classroom setting, often being instead researchers and professors in higher education.
All in all, I think this is an excellent book and a very important one for teachers, teacher candidates, and teacher educators to read.
There are some difficult and rather technical passages, and these will take more study than other parts of the book. However, it is worth it overall for counselors, researchers, and educators to work together to draw resources from each other to better serve children.
Serving young people much better—and in a much more informed way—is the goal here.