Counseling Toward Solutions: A Practical Solution-focused Program for Working with Students, Teachers and Parents - Softcover

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Linda Metcalf, Ph.D., is a licensed marriage and family therapist, a former teacher and school counselor, and currently a lecturer at the University of Texas at Arlington. She is also the author of Teaching Toward Solutions (1998) and Parenting Toward Solutions (1996), published by The Center for Applied Research in Education. Dr. Metcalf is in private practice in Arlington, where she lives with her husband and three teenage children.

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For counselors and teachers at all levels, here is a new, positive program for changing individual behavior that helps empower students of all ages to deal with their own problems and gain self-esteem in the process.

Step by step, Counseling Toward Solutions shows how to help individual students begin their own change process by noticing when a problem does not occur rather than focusing on the problem or what caused it. This approach called Solution-Focused Brief Therapy is often used by private counselors and therapists and is now being applied in the schools with great success.

You'll find guidelines for dealing with specific problems ranging from incomplete homework to abuse and depression...techniques to develop small group dynamics...and ways to help staff other than counselors use the approach...plus over 80 reproducible student handout pages and dozens of delightful illustrations throughout.

For easy use, this resource is organized into nine chapters, from "Changing Our Thinking to a Solution Focus" to "A Solution Focused School Staff," and printed in a big spiral-bound format that folds flat for photocopying of full-page forms and handouts.

Here are just a few of the outstanding features you'll find in this practical new resource:

• A process for identifying exceptions to a student's negative behavior
• Actual case examples representing a wide range of behavior problems in school settings
• Dialog of what to say and questions to ask
• Guidelines for using the power of language to describe problems in a normal context to make them more solvable
• Specific strategies for parent conferences and student-teacher problem resolution

Also included are directions for adapting solution-focused brief therapy to group settings and a handy appendix packed with additional cartoons, quotations and ideas suitable for classroom bulletin boards, certificates of success, and note-writing examples for teachers, students and parents.

In short, Counseling Toward Solutions gives you virtually everything you need to start using this innovative approach today to help your students begin taking control of and responsibility for their own behavior and their lives.