Current Activities at ELTE
Although I have been posting a lot about all our adventures here in Budapest and the surrounding areas, I also have to do some work! The semester is halfway through, and we have fall break next week so I figured this would be a good time to reflect on what I have done so far.
My courses are about half over and are both going well. The information seems to be very new for the students and some of it, particularly for the single case design course, is completely foreign (no pun intended!). The students are working hard at trying to understand, and ask some very good questions. One of the issues is that single-case design is best used for behavioral interventions or for things that you can measure through observation, and many of the students are interested in thoughts and feelings, which are hard to measure through observation. We keep having conversations on how to measure different traits, and sometimes it is difficult to come up with an answer. I think that is the most difficult part—trying to figure out how to measure the variable when it needs to be measured consistently over time.
In my interventions course we have to move through the material quickly. Instead of spending a whole semester on reading interventions like I would like to, we had one 1.5-hour class session. The class on reading interventions was interesting to teach since my students are all from different countries and speak different languages. I chose to discuss two reading interventions that could transcend the language barriers. We discussed Elkonin boxes and how they could be used in different languages, and each student taught the other students how to read several words in their native language using the Elkonin boxes. The second intervention we discussed was story mapping, which we used to analyze the story Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Both of these reading interventions can hopefully be used no matter the language, so I hope they will be helpful to the students in the course.
Along with teaching my two classes, I have given several presentations. I presented in two graduate level school psychology courses about behavioral interventions, which included a section on positive behavior interventions and support (PBIS). The whole PBIS system was a novel idea to a lot of the students, and many noted that these procedures that are now becoming more common in the United States were very unfrequently used in Hungary and their other native countries. We discussed how the shift to positive supports instead of punitive ones may take a long time to achieve since it is an entire pedagogy mindset shift that must be supported by both the psychologists and the classroom teachers and administrators. I also gave a presentation to the departmental faculty about my intervention research using single case design. Again, none of the faculty had used single case designs, so some of these ideas were new for the faculty as well. Hopefully this will provide opportunities for future collaborations to combine both group and single case design methodology within some larger-scale projects. I have several other presentations scheduled for after the break and will need to prepare for them.
I already discussed attending the Hungarian School Psychologist conference in Debrecen, but I also attended a few other guest lectures—one on cognitive assessments and one on the evolving complexity theory of talent development. I also attended the monthly departmental meeting, but since it was conducted all in Hungarian it was of course difficult to follow. It was interesting though and there was a lot more back and forth and discussions than in the departmental meetings I have been to at my universities.
Finally, I am trying to visit several schools in Hungary to examine the schooling system in general and specifically the use of classroom management, mental health and behavioral services, and the placement of children with special needs in the general education classrooms. It has been difficult getting in to some of the schools because of Covid, but I was finally able to visit one. I went to visit Radnóti Miklós Gyakorlóiskola, which is a primary and secondary school affiliated with ELTE. A small group of students, usually children of faculty at ELTE, begin the school at grade 1 and continue through their school years. Then in grade 5, students from other schools can petition to join the school. They are able to get into the school through academic test scores and an interview looking at motivation and potential. These students then join the original students throughout the secondary school years. This is one of the most well-respected schools in Budapest, and I could see why. I observed the fifth grade class during math, science, and English classes. I would like to discuss more about what I observed but don’t want to break confidentiality with any specific students or teachers. The director said she would connect me with the school psychologist, and I hope to get to speak with her in the next few weeks about her role in the school.
All in all, I can’t believe my time here is half over! I have been staying quite busy, and have even more things scheduled for the upcoming weeks.
