There are so many needs of students with Serious Emotional Disturbance. How can one person teach them all and how can one person learn them all? It is almost impossible unless you decide to write your graduate thesis and then your master's dissertation on students with Serious Emotional Disturbance, and I am not planning to do that. Even then you could not know everything there is to know. Everyday the field of special education is evolving into a new and uncharted world of more and more complicated issues. The classifications themselves change year to year. There are more amendments to special education laws being drafted weekly. So unless you are superman, in order to keep up with this rapidly growing field, you must never stop researching. Teachers must continue to seek methods that will benefit all the unique needs of their students with severe emotional disturbances.
First we look at the roots of the students with SED and seek to find causes of their perplexing needs. It is a heated debated that will go on for years to come. Where is it all coming from? .
There are four main theoretical perspectives: biophysical, psychoanalytic, behavioral, and ecological. Biophysical refers to the genetic makeup of an individual. It places the causes of the behavior problems to lie within the person, their genetic code and physiology. It is some sort of miss wiring within the brain. Maybe the mother ingested teratogens or, harmful agents, during her pregnancy that negatively affected the developing fetus. It could be as simple as the parents just passed along the wrong traits. Whatever the one or more factors we are discussing, this theory is based on biophysical sources.
Psychoanalytic is another theory that puts the foundation of the reason for the behavior issues inside the individual. It is an intrinsic cause. This time the theorists look at the emotional damage that causes the child to lash out at the world in a physical manner.