Choice Theory: A New Psychology 0/ Personal Freedom. William Glasser. New York: Harper Perennial, 1998. The Language ofChoice Theory. William Glasser & Carleen Glasser. New York: Harper Perennial, 1999.

Abstract

William Glasser has been around for a long time. For the last four decades he has been at the evolving forefront of the movement for therapeutic approaches to education. Starting out with a behavioural orientation in the 1960s, his first version of reality therapy was an intuitively rich but, by his own admission, a theoretically misguided perspective. At the end of that decade he applied this concept to creating "schools without failure" and gave new life to classroom meetings. In the 70s, with added enthusiasm, he extended his outlook and wrote about an identity society and the contentious concept of positive addictions as ways to move people towards pro-social behaviours. However, it was not until the 80s that he found a deeper theoretical orientation for his clinical intuitions. Disavowing his previous behaviourist perspective, he modified William Powers's (1973) cybernetic theory in order to develop a systematic perceptual approach to counselling (1981). This approach emphasized people's internal motivation and their desire to bring about a match between internal reference perceptions and external perceptions. Later that decade he applied this perceptual approach to education and management. In the early 90s he combined his perceptual approach with the born-again Deming movement and wrote about quality schools and teachers. Now, as that decade has come to an end, he has once again consolidated his theoretical work and become even more focused in its application.

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