PEER GROUP COUNSELING FOR OLDER PEOPLE

>For a variety of reasons, psychological services are largely unavailable for older people who want help in coping with their interpersonal problems. Group counseling, when it is used, proves to be an effective and efficient method for meeting their needs. It also addresses the reality of the limited numbers of gerontologically trained professionals currently available in the field. A readily attainable, and largely untapped, resource for working with this population is older people themselves. The Continuum Center of Oakland University selects, trains, and supervises older men and women, who serve as paraprofessional group leaders in a self‐exploration program offered in a variety of community centers in the Detroit metropolitan area. The service and training programs, and some of the outcomes for clients and group leaders, are briefly described.     

Prevention rather than cure

Storysack projects (in which sacks including books and artefacts to help children learn through play are made and distributed), are proliferating in the UK and beyond, often involving work with parents. However, little of this work has been reported. One way to find out about new storysack project ideas is to talk with those directly involved. This article documents a conversation between a university researcher and a practitioner. The focus is on the use of a grid to discuss the educational content of storyacks with parents. The work is located within a Sure Start programme in the north of England.     

The irrationality of rationalized program development

Conclusions The core of our argument rests in the nature of the relationship between regional and provincial educational authorities and local schools/communities. In the present situation the relationship is ambiguous. On one hand, the province and the boards issue guidelines and demand that local schools develop programs in conformity with them. At the same time the schools are urged to be innovative and to develop programs to meet local needs. Although the drafters of guidelines apparently see no contradiction between these two directives, we, and many practitioners we have talked with, do.It is our position that the local school/community should be primarily accountable to the community it serves for developing learning environments that fairly reflect the community's educational values, expectations, and priorities. The school should be accountable to central authorities for proper expenditure of monies and for observing basic standards of honesty and fair play in its operations. Finally we wish to stress again the importance of providing help rather than advice to developing programs. Advice coming from a source that in the recent past was primarily a legislative and policing agency cannot help but be construed by school practitioners as a thinly disguised directive. Even if this were not the case, advice is of limited value to people who lack the resources and technical expertise to implement their educational ideas. Real help, in the form of needed resources, technical services, and expert consultation, might inject a new spirit of goodwill and cooperation into what has been at best a guarded relationship between the schools and central educational authorities.OISE     

When writers visit schools: A symposium

Betty Miles, a member of the U.S. Editorial Board ofCle, asked eight other writers to reflect along with her on what it is like to talk with their readers in schools.The brief essays below are as varied as their authors' styles, but one theme runs through all of them: the importance of face-to-face encounters to writers, as well as to their young readers. These first-hand reports suggest, both explicitly and implicitly, ways of enriching author visits so that children's interaction with a real live author can enhance their interest in reading, and in writing.Betty Miles has written many picture books for young children and six novels for older readers, most recentlyMaudie and Me and The Dirty Book andThe Trouble with Thirteen. She and her husband live in Tappan, New York, where her three grown children went to school.