Chapter 6: Learners with Emotional/Behavioral Disorders

                Chapter six focused on learners with emotional and behavioral disorders, which included disorders due to both internal and external factors.  This is one thing I did not realize while thinking about disabilities.  I always knew that genetics could affect a child, since there are some genetic or chromosomal disorders that can affect cognition, but I never realized how much impact home life and the environment in which a student is raised can affect their learning as well.  All of the environmental, both home and school life, and the social factors with everyone a student comes in contact with, can affect the way they comprehend things or the way they react to things. 

                For this chapter, a Wordle was created on chapter six, highlighting the main points of the chapter, such as types and categories of EBD, biological factors, severity, and prevalence of EBD’s.  One thing I thought was very useful in this chapter was Wood’s model of behavioral assessment, which seems to be another type of FBA or ABC process of evaluating students’ behaviors.  These processes look at things such as the focus of the problem, a description of the problem, antecedent, and consequence of the behavior, where and when it occurs, who actually thinks this is a problem, and goals to help stop the problem behavior.  I thought the most interesting part of this process was identifying who actually thought the behavior was a problem.  This allows the specialist to look at behaviors across all environments, because what I think is acceptable behavior in my classroom, may be behavior that is looked down upon in other classrooms.  This makes sure that the behavior is actually a problem, and not just a small issue in one teacher’s classroom.  I think that it is important to always look in to these types of things to make sure a student is not being picked on or misdiagnosed with an EBD.