ADJUSTMENT: An individual's best current overall attempt to meet most important needs or to move toward most important perceived goals. ASSESMENT: The part of an evaluation that focuses on the Quality and Style of a person's performance, or on HOW an individual processes information, answers questions, or solves problems. BEHAVIOR: What someone does, that we can come to some agreement or consensus about, by observation or from the report of the individual, including: FEELING: the emotional, subjective impact of any experience. across ideas THINKING: mental processing of impressions, including perceiving, remembering, classifying, organizing, integrating, and conclusions about what experience means, exprssed through verbal and nonverbal symbol-systems. TALKING: verbal or written self-expression using available symbol-systems, of which language is the most typically used. ACTING: any overt self-expression that is nonverbal, and can be agreed upon by independent observers. CHOICE: To pick from among alternatives or options available. CIRCUMSTANCES: The combination of experiences, contexts, behaviors and inter-personal interactions for any specific person or group of persons. COGNITION: Mental processing of experience; an innate need and capacity to "make sense" or organize, in some personally meaningful way, whatever happens in an individual's lifetime; leading to some gradually increasing measure of self-control across ideas, feelings, relationships and settings. COMMUNICATION: An exchange of verbal or written language with the intent to understand mutually, as opposed to arguing, where the intent is to be more right than the other person. Virginia Satir defined communication as "the negotiation of meanings." CONTEXTS: Places or settings where experiences occur.
DEVELOPMENT: An life-long process of change and progression from simple to complex behaviors, experiences and understandings. Usually occurring in a sequence. DISORDER: Lack of mental order, or having a sense of being disorganized, as opposed to feeling "sick." Not being able to make satisfactory sense out of one's experience. Being confused about meaning(s), the significance of experience, and how seemingly separate experiences might connect or relate. ECOLOGY: Observations and analyses dealing with the mutual, reciprocal relationships between organisms and their environments. EXPERIENCE: What it is like for the person who is existing and behaving. What something feels like to an individual, internally. You know about this only if the person can and will tell or show you, when they become ready to do so. FELT SENSE: The primary impression which registers, subjectively, in the body, during an experience or its recollection, parts of which you may be able to label and express satisfactorily. There will always be other parts which cannot be reduced to words or symbolized by language, nor available for clear expression to other persons. FUNCTIONAL: Serving a useful purpose or special activity; designed, developed, considered, etc., with reference to practical application; affecting function but not structure. INTERVENTION: Anything which is undertaken to increase the chances a person has to be successful in mastering the next task in any learning sequence or attempt to adjust. This can involve materials, techniques, and relationships used to facilitate and anhance elarning and adjustment. IRONY: Simulation of innocence; a sort of humor, ridicule or light sarcasm, the intended implication of which is the opposite of the literal sense of the words. LEARNING: Changes in behavior as a result of what is experienced. Something happening to everyone, to some degree, all of the time. A continuous, personal process. MEANING: Perceiving some experience as relating, or being relevant, personally to the self.
PERCEPTION: The process of "making sense" out of what we experience. The ways we assign meaning to what happens to us and around us. Our ways of organizing, integrating and processing information. PERFORMANCE:A selected sampl of what someone knows, can do, or what they are like. A partial, incomplete picture of who the person truly is. PERSONALITY: The unique temperamental "style" of an individual, present from birth, which influences reactions to environment and relationships. POLICIES: Rules which are relatively expressed and agreed upon, usually applicable to contexts or interactions. PROBLEM: Any experience of personal concern which an individual either perceives as needing change or has been told needs changing. Some aspect of a person's circumstances or characteristics perceived as needing voluntary or imposed change. PROFICIENCY: Reaching a specified level of mastery in a skill which indicates readiness to go on to the next difficulty level in a sequence of skill-acquisition. PURPOSE: Something a person wants to accomplish through conjscious, deliberate action. READINESS: The degree to which a person has matured and benefitted from prior experience in order to move forward to more complete self-expression, more positive adjustment, and fuller realization of learning potential. The capacity to build upon or expand prior experience. RECOGNITION: To process again; ot deal with symbols and memories multiple times, resulting in expansion of knowledge, its organization, integration and application. This can be perfunctory (emotionally neutral, matter-of-fact) or creative (novel re-arrangements) with a potential for new, and sometimes radical transformation always present. ROLE: A set of expectations for individual self-expression or performance because of some natural, chosen or imposed classification or label assigned to a person. SELF-ESTEEM: An individual' variable sense of worth and confidence, which has a range of value from low to high, depending upon life circumstances, opportunities for successes, and degree of mutuality in personal relationships available at any particular point in one's lifetime. SEMANTICS: The science of meanings, as contrasted with phonetics, the science of sounds. The historical and psychological study and the classification of changes in the signification of words or forms, viewed as normal and vital factors in linguistic development. That science dealing with the relations between symbols ("signs") and what they refer to and with human behavior in reaction to symbols, including unconscious attitudes, influences of social institutions, and epistemological and linguistc assumptions, and having as an object the systemization of the language of science and the uification of knowledge. STYLE: Distinctive or characteristic mode of expression, presentation, construction or execution which exhibits the spirit and personality of the individual (or group?). SYSTEMS: Natural, chosen or imposed groups with their own unique organization and purposes. This includes: STRUCTURE, FORMAL: Ways stated rules and roles operate. STRUCTURE, INFORMAL: Ways unstated rules and roles operate. TESTING: The part of an evaluation process which is an attempt to Quantify a person's performance in some meaningful way, related to some reference point or group (e.g., grade level, per cent correct, norms for chronological age, etc.). TRUTH: The progressive expansion of meaning(s) (see Erich Fromm, ESCAPE FROM ILLUSION); resulting from the discovery of the interconnectedness of experience(s) and the relatedness of events, persons, feelings, thoughts and symbols.