Teacher Preparation Programs, Partnerships, and the New Landscape for the Profession

2024-08-01

Staff Capacity Building and Accountability in Transition Services

Career Development and Transition for Exceptional Individuals · 2021-01-27 · 8 citations

Transition services, particularly those that feature work-based learning experiences, often require designated staff to spend the majority of their time in the field. They also require that staff have the skills and supports to properly and effectively deliver these services. Training and monitoring these staff is critically important to ensure youth with disabilities experience strong employment outcomes. Maryland PROMISE was a statewide experimental, multicomponent, and community-based transition project that served 997 youth receiving Supplemental Security Income and their families. To ensure that staff effectively delivered services, Maryland PROMISE provided carefully designed professional development activities that included training, field-based coaching, and performance monitoring. This article reports on the Maryland PROMISE capacity building activities for project staff, provides data on the results of that process, and offers implications for the effective delivery of community-based transition services.

What was that session like? An empirically-derived typology of group therapy sessions.

Group Dynamics Theory Research and Practice · 2020-09-03 · 3 citations

Engaging and retaining youth SSI recipients in a research demonstration program: Maryland PROMISE

Journal of Vocational Rehabilitation · 2019-08-02 · 3 citations

BACKGROUND: Unbiased estimates of treatment effectiveness in longitudinal randomized clinical trials require meeting many design criteria, especially ensuring full exposure to intervention services. However, engaging participants into interventions, and retaining them at high rates, can be thwarted by everyday challenges faced by disadvantaged populations. We are unaware of studies evaluating effective strategies for engaging and retaining transition-age youth with disabilities in clinical trials of community-based transition programs. OBJECTIVE: The purpose of this paper is to describe and qualitatively assess the effectiveness of strategies used by Maryland PROMISE staff for reengaging youth, who have disengaged from services, and are at high risk of study dropout. METHODS: Data collected from the project’s management information system, and from interviews with staff assigned solely to reengaging participants, was analyzed to describe effective strategies for reengaging youth in program services. RESULTS: Staff successful at reengaging hard-to-serve youth into program services are persistent, flexible, and trustworthy. They increased the overall engagement rate from about 50 to 80 percent by study endpoint. CONCLUSION: An intensive and proactive focus on engagement improves retention rates of youth participating in field-based randomized controlled trials of intervention programs. We suggest investigators conducting similar trials for hard-to-serve populations develop plans and allocating resources for engaging youth in program services.

Strategies for recruiting participants into randomized controlled trials: A cross-program profile of the PROMISE demonstration program

Journal of Vocational Rehabilitation · 2019-08-02

BACKGROUND: Recruiting and enrolling participants into randomized controlled trials is difficult. Reviews of the extent to which trials achieve targets on time and within budget commonly report failure or delay. PROMISE—Promoting Readiness of Minors in Supplemental Security Income (SSI)—a six program cooperative study of randomized trials testing effectiveness of service programs for transition-aged youth with disabilities receiving SSI benefits on employment and educational outcomes, provides an unusual opportunity to describe successful recruitment and enrollment into large-scale trials. OBJECTIVE: The purpose is to profile recruitment strategies used within and across the six PROMISE programs for meeting enrollment targets of SSI youth and families. METHODS: From descriptive data extracted from process analysis reports of each of the six PROMISE programs, we constructed cross-program profiles of recruitment strategies. RESULTS: All six programs met their enrollment targets on time. Although they contacted most potential participants through initial mailings and telephone calls, the programs reported that multiple contacts using multiple strategies, especially resource-intensive in person meetings and assignment of staff full-time to recruitment activities, were needed to meet enrollment targets. CONCLUSIONS: Because all PROMISE programs met their required enrollment targets, researchers designing large-scale, field-based randomized controlled trials may benefit from using a mix of recruitment strategies deployed by full-time recruiters.

It’s complicated: Using group member process-feedback to improve group therapist effectiveness.

Psychotherapy · 2018-06-01 · 8 citations

Experienced leaders of psychotherapy groups are surprisingly inaccurate in their judgments about their members' perceptions of positive bonding relationships with the leader and other group members. The practical implication is worrisome: the lower the leader's degree of accuracy, the worse the member therapeutic outcomes tend to be. A promising approach to improving leaders' appraisals of their members' perceptions of positive bonding relationships is to provide them, after each session, feedback about their own and their members' bonding relationship perceptions. Profiling trajectories of leaders' and members' perceptions over time yields rich "stories" of relationship development, that if strategically packaged into brief, concise, and vivid reports, and delivered as a formal "group member feedback" intervention, would direct leaders' attention to those emerging, but easily overlooked, countertherapeutic relationships, requiring immediate, well-informed targeted interventions. To increase the utility of such reports, training leaders use intuitively appealing, but structured heuristics ("interpersonal-fit-with-the-group" and "intrapersonal-split-relationships"), accelerate leaders' recognition of patterns in perceptions as they change over time, and free up their cognitive resources for determining whether to intervene into the group process at the appropriate level: intraindividual, interpersonal, or group-as-a-whole. To illustrate the use of these heuristics, we present two hypothetical cases, with visual displays of congruent and discrepant perceptions of bonding relationship perceptions between members over time, and make tentative recommendations about where and when leaders might intervene to achieve optimal impact. (PsycINFO Database Record

Michael J. Patton (1936-2016)

The Counseling Psychologist · 2016-12-08

What Was the Session Like? A Typology of Group Counseling Sessions

PsycEXTRA Dataset · 2016-01-01

Errors of commission and omission in novice group counseling trainees’ knowledge structures of group counseling situations.

Journal of Counseling Psychology · 2015-03-02 · 7 citations

This study investigated how novice group counseling trainees' knowledge structures about group situations differed from experts.' Eight highly experienced group therapists and 54 novice trainees indicated which of the 19 leader interventions they would consider using to respond to the 21 group situations described in the Group Therapy Questionnaire (GTQ, Wile, Bron, & Pollack, 1970). Pathfinder Network Analysis (Schvaneveldt, 1990) was used to generate knowledge structures (cognitive maps) about group situations based on the aggregated response of experts and each trainee's response to GTQ. Comparing trainees' maps with the referent expert map, we found no common errors of commission, that is, relationship between situations in trainees' knowledge maps but not in experts' knowledge maps, but 10 common errors of omission, that is, relationships among group situations in experts' knowledge maps but not in trainees' knowledge maps. Cluster analysis identified 2 subgroups of trainees. Neither of these trainee subgroups incorporated the group's developmental stage into their map of group situations as experts did: experts saw the situations during the beginning and ending phases of the group as similar but different from situations in the middle phase of the group. The first group of trainees had a holistic approach to group situations but tended to make errors in dealing with group situations involving a problematic member. The second group had an atomistic approach to group situations but lacked a clearly differentiated and structured general organization for the situations. They tended to make errors in dealing with challenging situations where the group is avoidant and lacks engagement.

Are Single-Item Global Ratings Useful for Assessing Health Status?

Journal of Clinical Psychology in Medical Settings · 2015-10-22 · 122 citations