Psihološka obzorja / Horizons of Psychology, 26, 61–70 (2017)
© Društvo psihologov Slovenije, ISSN 2350-5141
Intervju / Interview
* Naslov/Address: dr. Mojca Juriševič, Oddelek za temeljni pedagoški študij, Pedagoška fakulteta, Univerza v Ljubljani, Kardeljeva ploščad 
16, 1000 Ljubljana, e-mail: mojca.jurisevic@pef.uni-lj.si
Članek je licenciran pod pogoji Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence. (CC-BY licenca).
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Šolska psihologija na prvem mestu: 
intervju s prof. Frankom C. Worrellom
Mojca Juriševič*
Oddelek za temeljni pedagoški študij, Pedagoška fakulteta, Univerza v Ljubljani
School psychology first: 
An interview with Professor Frank C. Worrell
Mojca Juriševič*
Department of Education Studies, Faculty of Education, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia
Ključne besede: psihologija v izobraževanju, šolski psihologi, kultiviranje učnih potencialov, zaznavanje časa, eminentnost, intervjuji
Keywords: psychology in education, school psychologists, cultivation of learning potentials, time perception, eminence, interviews
Dr. Frank C. Worrell is Professor in the Graduate School of Education at 
the University of California, Berkeley. His current appointments include 
Faculty Director of the School Psychology program, Faculty Director of 
the California College Preparatory Academy, and Faculty Director of the 
Academic Talent Development Program. Prof. Worrell recently completed 
his term as the editor of Review of Educational Research and is an active 
member of several professional organizations, among them a Member at 
Large on the Board of Directors of the American Psychological Association 
(APA), an elected member of the Society for the Study of School Psychology, 
a Fellow of the American Educational Research Association, and a Fellow 
of the Association for Psychological Science. His areas of research include 
academic talent development and gifted education, the education of at-
risk youth, ethnic and racial identity, scale development and validation, 
teacher effectiveness, time perspective, and the translation of psychological 
research findings into school-based practice. Prof. Worrell is a recipient of 
many national awards for his outstanding work as a psychologist. He has 
been recently honored for contributions to school psychology with the 2016 
Nadine M. Lambert Outstanding School Psychologist Award, sponsored 
by the California Association of School Psychologists. The award 
recognizes outstanding work of practicing school psychologists providing 
direct services to students, teachers, parents, or community agencies.
The interview was conducted on April 10, 2017, during my time as a Visiting Scholar at UC Berkeley. Its aim is to present an 
interplay of Prof. Worrell outstanding contribution to psychology and education. Because the scope of the professor’s work 
is extremely large, the interview is divided into two parts. The first half presents Prof. Worrell’s reflections on the role of 
psychology in education and focuses on school psychologists’ education and training, while in the second part, three areas of 
research that Prof. Worrell conducts research in are introduced, i.e., fostering learning potentials, cultivation of giftedness, and 
time perception. All three domains are discussed in the framework of school psychology.
62
Part 1 of the interview
Professor Worrell, first, my sincere congratulations for 
the Nadine Lambert award. Please explain, what makes 
this award special to you and your career?
Thank you. The Nadine Lambert award is particularly 
special to me because Professor Nadine Lambert was my 
doctoral adviser. She founded the School Psychology PhD 
program here at UC Berkeley and I took over as Director from 
her in 2004. It is also special in another way because many of 
us who are academics are not seen as to do applied work and 
this award is really for applied work. Thus, the committee 
recognized that some of the work that I have been doing in 
whole school reform is school psychology work. You know, 
typically we just think about school psychology as giving tests 
or diagnosing the students for special education and so forth. 
However, in this particular project involving the University-
Charter District Partnership, what we did is we worked with 
the whole school to improve achievement of the students from 
the low income and minority backgrounds. They saw that as 
applied work and I think it is, so I am particularly touched to 
receive this award.
What led your career towards school psychology? Who 
influenced your understanding of psychology and made 
you think as a school psychologist?
Well, that is interesting … hmm … I mean... I came to 
school psychology by accident (laugh). Namely, first I was 
studying educational psychology that in the U.S. is primarily 
research. I had been studying educational psychology at the 
University of Western Ontario and I was going to do that for 
my PhD. A friend of mine was attending Berkeley at that time 
and sent me the Berkeley catalogue. Actually, that is when I 
read about the school psychology for the first time. Realizing 
this very powerful intersection of research and practice trig-
gered my interest and led me towards school psychology. Ac-
tually, I do think that research should inform practice so that 
in fact science will guide what we do, while practice should 
inform what research is studying; that synergy is really im-
portant for both of them to speak to each other.
At the beginning of my career, I was lucky in the sense that 
I had my adviser Harry Murray in Canada with whom I had 
done educational psychology. He was also my undergraduate 
adviser and I did my masters in educational psychology with 
him. He studied teacher effectiveness at the university level 
and he took research very seriously. In fact, my education in 
Canada, in general, was very strong: we treated psychology as 
a science. We approached questions with appropriate humil-
ity and skepticism and tried to let the data speak rather than 
trying to let your opinions and forms say what the outcome 
should be. I think that that basis provided a strong foundation 
that served me well when I got into the program here, met 
Nadine Lambert, and other faculty members who I worked 
with. Mark Wilson who is still here was also a member of my 
dissertation committee and got me interested in measurement 
issues. Early in my career at Pennsylvania State University, I 
was lucky enough to be mentored by Robert Hale and Marley 
Watkins. I have written, I think, a couple of articles with Dr. 
Hale; he helped me focus on the appropriate use of statistics in 
answering questions. Dr. Watkins helped me take the school 
psychology assessment to Trinidad and he and I have writ-
ten several papers together on our work on Trinidad. I will 
always remember one of his frequent messages to students: 
“Hear everything, believe nothing, trust in data.”
You contributed the definition of “school psychology” for 
Oxford Bibliographies, the world’s largest authoritative 
research guide for a variety of academic topics. Relating 
to that, what would you especially underline of what school 
psychology is today and what it is not?
I think school psychology is really the application of psy-
chological science in its broadest terms: to the development 
of children, youth, and families, and specifically not just their 
psychological development but also their educational devel-
opment. It is psychology in the service of learning. There-
fore, we are concerned not just with the depression, anxiety, 
behavioral problems and ADHD, but also, for instance, with 
learning to read, learning to calculate and learning to write. 
Thus, school psychology is really a psychoeducational prac-
tice focused on all aspects of the child. Furthermore, you can-
not work with children and youth successfully if you do not 
work with their teachers, their parents, and the significant 
adults in their lives. School psychology then is a general prac-
tice that is focused on youth. In fact, one can take it up at the 
university level as well, although most school psychologists 
do not practice in university. They practice from kindergarten 
through the end of high school. It is general in the sense that 
you need to be able to do a multiplicity of things as a school 
psychologist. You need to be able to do assessment, you need 
to be able to diagnose, you need to be able to do consulta-
tion as necessary, you need to be able to do psychological, 
behavioral, and other types of interventions, like counselling 
and so forth. You need to be able to do program evaluation 
because sometimes the problem may be at school level. For 
example, if there is a lot of fighting going on at a school, the 
issue might not be an individual student but systems that are 
not in place. Therefore, it is really a very broad specialty but 
with a focus on the educational systems. Because of that, in 
addition to your training in psychology, you need to have 
some understanding of education and education as a system 
… how do schools work … you know, what is the nature of 
the relationship between the curriculum and what the teacher 
does. Therefore, those are all things that school psychology 
is. Then, of course, you have to be able to deal with crises sit-
uations that do not occur typically. For instance, there was a 
shooting in a school in Southern California yesterday. A spe-
cial education teacher and her student were shot by the teach-
er’s ex-husband. Now the school psychologist is going to have 
to work with the other students at that school, work with the 
teachers in crisis. Sometimes the crises may be a hurricane or 
a flood, a car accident, or a hurt member of the community. 
Thus again it is a very, very broad-based specialty. Then, of 
course, there is research on all of these issues. Right? (pause) 
M. Juriševič
63
I think what school psychology is not is a hard question to 
answer because school psychologist is a kind of like as a gen-
eral practitioner; you need to be able to do multiple things. I 
think if I had to say what the school psychology is not: it is 
not just learning how to do therapy and taking it into an in-
dividual school context. Right? Because of everything as we 
do in the school context … umm … I mean … yes, we want 
not to appear depressed, to be able to interact well with their 
peers, but we have a goal. We always have a goal in mind 
and that goal is students’ academic, behavioral, social, and 
emotional development. We are always thinking about the 
development and in fact, their learning. You know, because if 
you believe that education itself is a public health issue, that 
the more educated the person is, the less likely they are to be 
physically and the less likely they had to have mental prob-
lems and so forth, the less likely they are to be unemployed. 
That in fact school psychology then is an engaging in a public 
health enterprise that is really a social good for a society. It is 
not ... umm … sitting in an office just doing private practice. 
If in fact what you are doing with a kid in your office is hav-
ing no impact on the child’s performance; he is still acting up 
in the classroom, still refusing to learn, then I would say that 
you are not actually engaged in effective practice. 
Ultimately, school psychology from my point of view 
deals with anything that facilitates teaching and learning in 
the broadest school context.
What is therefore, in your opinion, the distinction between 
school psychology and educational psychology? Namely, 
many times we use these concepts interchangeably, but we 
can also observe different understandings between the US 
and the EU contexts, which can provoke some kind of a 
terminological mess.
Well, I do not know if it is a European problem or an 
American problem or a combination of both (laugh). I am not 
sure but I think the term school psychology was first used 
in the US in the early 1900s to signal that, in fact, we are 
interested in education, but we are interested in the educa-
tion in the school context. Public school is a very important 
aspect of life in the US because our laws require us to edu-
cate everyone, and this is why the idea of school psychologist 
being present in school settings to help students learn is so 
important. On the other side, the term educational psychol-
ogy I know, in much of the rest of the world speaks to people 
who work in research settings as well as the people who work 
in practice settings and who have gotten more training. In 
the US, we make a distinction where educational psychology 
… umm … educational psychologists study learning issues 
but they get no clinical training at all. School psychologists 
get the research training but they also get clinical training. 
Therefore, it is almost as if school psychologists are getting 
two degrees in parallel, the research degree in educational 
psychology but they are also doing a clinical psychology 
degree, and applying those clinical skills in the context of 
schooling. That is how we really made a distinction in the US 
between the school psychology on one hand and educational 
psychology on the other.
You have been the director of the Graduate School of 
Education’s School Psychology PhD Program at UC 
Berkeley for 12 years. What are the main features of 
this program? Why is it so good?
Hm ... I am not sure I can say why it is so good (laugh). 
Most psychology programs have behavioral psychology as 
the theoretical foundation. I think behavioral psychology is 
very important, and certainly, we teach that. However, our 
theoretical foundation as a program is developmental psy-
chology. We think that if you are working with, you know, 
children, very young children, pre-schoolers, elementary 
aged, middle school aged, no school age, high school age 
kids, that in fact, developmental psychology makes a better 
umbrella theoretical framework. We also embed prevention 
into the program, as it is an integral aspect of the program. So 
for example, consultation is often taught in other programs 
in the third year, but we teach it at the beginning of the sec-
ond year. Moreover, we teach it alongside part of consultation 
practice and include the role of prevention. Because we see 
the consultation as a tool for a school psychologist to work 
with teachers and principals to help avoid problems. So that 
the prevention is an integral part of the program. Some of the 
things we do, I think, others do as well. We actually have the 
students in the field; the students are in the field from the 
very first semester. They are doing various things, but there 
is a strong connection between practice and research, even in 
the internship year. In many places, student interns go off to 
different parts of the country. Our interns do their internships 
in the Bay area because they receive supervision on campus 
in the addition of what they get in the field. They have super-
vision and consultation on the campus every week. So that 
we are always in close proximity with them and with what is 
going on, so that we can help them process their experiences 
and make recommendations as things go forward. We can 
visit sites if there is a problem, even though the internship, 
because they are all local. That is actually one way in which 
we are different.
Let us help understand: what is the share of practice and 
academic work at the university in your six-year PhD 
School Psychology program?
Well, it is somewhat hard to say what the exact percentage 
is but we like to think that it is split fifty-fifty. I think the stu-
dents often want to spend more time on practice because they 
find it a little bit easier than research (laugh) but we try to do 
a somewhat relatively even match. One of the other things 
we do differently: in most school psychology programs, the 
doctoral advisors are all school psychologists themselves. In 
our program, the doctoral advisors are leading developmen-
tal psychologists; actually, I am the only one who is a school 
psychologist. Others, for instance, Elliot Turiel, is a leading 
researcher in social and moral development and he advises 
those students who have that as an interest. Anne Cunning-
ham on the other hand is the leading developmental psycholo-
gist in reading; thus, she advises students who have reading 
interests and so forth. People who have more measurement 
interests that go beyond my expertise will go to Mark Wilson 
Interview
64
… so that is the way ... The idea is our students are trained 
with the best researchers, the best scientists for their science 
and then they are getting practice from good practitioners. 
One of my students who graduated last year, for example, 
is teaching the assessment course in this university. I do not 
teach the assessment course here. The people who teach the 
assessment course and prevention course are people who are 
out in the field; they are what we call the clinical faculty. So 
they are using these tools every week, they come in and they 
teach those tools that they are using daily. Therefore, that I 
who am not doing practice every day is not the one teaching 
them how to engage in the practice. I teach consultation be-
cause I do a fair amount of consultation, so I teach a consul-
tation seminar. However, people who are actually practicing 
in the field part-time teach all of the other school psychology 
seminars, assessment seminars, the seminars on prevention 
and so forth.
Are mentors in the field or field supervisors paid for their 
work?
No, they are not, we don’t pay field supervisors. It is a 
standard thing that there is a benefit ... umm … I think, you 
know, there is a trade-off ... On the one hand, they get a stu-
dent who is bright and committed and who can share some 
of the work, right? On the other hand, our students get the 
benefit of learning from people who we respect in terms of 
their competencies. Therefore, there is a reciprocity to this, it 
is professional relationship.
It is somewhat unusual that your program at UC Berkeley 
is delivered at Graduate School of Education and not at 
the Department of Psychology …
I think that is an interesting thing that has happened in 
American psychology that two types of psychology there are 
more likely to be found in Schools of Education than in De-
partments of Psychology. School psychology is one and the 
Counselling Psychology is the other, because Counselling 
Psychology programs often also prepare counsellor educators. 
These programs prepare professionals for school-based prac-
tice. Therefore, because of their tight connection to schools, 
both programs are often found in Schools of Education. Just a 
history of the way it is developed. And I think that ... hmm … 
you know, Educational Psychology actually, I guess, which is 
not a health service psychology but Educational Psychology, 
sometimes is often found in Schools of Education as well. So, 
I mean … umm … I think it is about 60% of School Psychol-
ogy programs in Schools of Education but 40% of them in the 
Psychology departments. It just worked out that way.
How do you recruit the candidates? Who do you select? 
What are your selection criteria?
Right (laugh). We are lucky to be situated in the university 
that has quite a stellar reputation both nationally and interna-
tionally. Furthermore, students who are looking for a gradu-
ate school and who are pretty interested in PhD often want to 
work with the best researchers and so we have some of those 
here at Berkeley and so ... we get ... hmm … we hope for a class 
of about four to six students. Every year we get somewhere 
up to fifty applications and in very heavy years we make as 
many as eighty or ninety applications and … hmm ... and so 
there is a first pass we screen them for their academic back-
grounds, how well have they done as undergraduates, how 
they have gotten the breadth of training that we would like 
them to have. After we look at the letters of recommendation 
and you are looking at ... umm … are these students who are 
bright but who are curious, who want to learn, who get along 
well with others. I mean, at the end of the day we are training 
people who are going to be in health service psychology; they 
need to be able to consult with people and so forth. Then we 
identify a subgroup, based on all of those things, and we iden-
tify a subgroup for interviews. What we typically do is we 
invite the student to come to campus; we will typically have 
an interview day. We have four sets of interviewers. First, the 
students meet with me as program director. I am not on the 
admissions committee; I meet with them individually, so I 
can have a sense of them. They also meet with two members 
of the faculty who make up the admissions committee and 
they have interviews with them separately. Then they have 
an interview with two different sets of student teams, which 
typically are made of two or three students. At the end of the 
day, you have me, the two faculty members, and typically 
four to six students, who have actually interviewed these can-
didates. We get together and we share our observations, so if 
there is a discrepancy in what an interviewee said with one 
versus another and so forth, it comes out ... A number of years 
ago there was an interviewee who all the students felt that he 
would not fit in, that he would be too arrogant and so forth. I 
myself did not necessarily feel that but I am the director of the 
program and his approach with me may have been very dif-
ferent than the way he presented himself to others. Therefore, 
the Admissions Committee did not admit him. We really use 
that sort of collective-judgement as well as how would they 
fit in here; will they come in and be a part of the team or will 
they be disruptive, not really at ease ... because getting the 
doctoral degree is difficult and so you don’t want to increase 
the additional difficulties to the process that you do not have 
to do that with.
The admission procedure is quite personal, isn’t it? And 
the percentage of those students who finish their studies 
is very high?
Yes. The majority of our students finish and when they 
don’t it is actually sometimes because of life choices. Since 
I have been here, we had several students who had left. One 
of them was just not doing well clinically … hmm … I think 
she was not doing well with psychological work and after 
a while, she decided she wanted to be a nurse and that was 
much more hands-on for her. We have a young man who is 
now a principal. He decided, you know, I want to work more 
close with teachers than a psychologist can. He came to visit 
me and he said, “I am sorry to disappoint you.” and I said, 
“No, you are not disappointing me, I am glad that you have 
found what your passion is.”, and he is a principal now. There 
is one who decided that she didn’t want to work with people 
and she wanted to be a basic researcher, thus she went to the 
developmental psychology. We had those kinds of things. The 
M. Juriševič
65
majority of students finish ... I mean ... we did not have non-
completion as a big issue but occasionally we will have some-
one with poor competencies leave but that is very atypical.
What is the share between offers and applications from 
your candidates?
We typically make about eight to ten offers. This year, for 
example, they are cutting back on the number of the graduate 
students on the campus, so we were given seven slots. That is 
not determined by us, we have been told (laugh) by the Dean’s 
office how many offers we can make; this year we were given 
seven, so we made seven offers and five of seven have said 
“yes”. The two who did not say “yes” yet, they are very good 
students, but I would not be unhappy if they do not come be-
cause five is a nice size class. One year, we had tremendous 
difficulties as we made ten offers and ten students said “yes” 
and they all came, we were expecting five or six, and then it 
becomes difficult because you have a large cohort you have 
to serve.
… and do they all pay for their studies?
Right, they do. The way tuition works in the US is ... well 
… there are several things. There is full tuition which students 
who come in from outside the state or outside the country pay. 
Then there is in-state tuition, so the state government gives us 
a certain amount of money for each local student, as we are 
the state university. Let’s say, if the tuition is 15.000 USD, an 
in-state student will probably pay the tuition of 7.000 or 8.000 
USD per semester because the state government will give the 
rest of the money to cover for that student. And yes, there are 
also fellowships and scholarships, so that some students who 
will get the partial fellowships, for example 5000 USD, but 
there are students who get the full tuition ... you know ... it is 
competitive and based on what the student is bringing. Some 
students will be fully covered for 5 years. Moreover, the tui-
tion is one of the reasons that, in fact, the campus is cutting 
back on the number of doctoral students, because they are 
moving toward being able to fully fund all of the PhD stu-
dents, which we do not do at the moment.
How do you monitor and evaluate the quality of your 
program?
So, yes, with accreditation. You have periodic site vis-
its. Our last was in 2014 and we were given five years, they 
will be back in 2019. So we can get anywhere from two, I 
think, it is to be seven or ten years. It is interesting because 
our model is not well understood as we use developmental 
theories as our basis and because we have a clinical faculty 
that in many other places don’t play as big a role as they play 
here. We have clinical faculty we consider core faculty be-
cause they are half-time here ... hmm …to be a core faculty 
member by APA’s definition, you have to give at least 50% 
of the time to the program. Moreover, the title under which 
our clinical faculty works is a lecturer. In most places, a lec-
turer is somebody who comes and teaches one course. How-
ever, our lecturers are continuing lecturers because that is the 
way the UC Berkeley model works. So, when the site visitors 
come from other universities, they always find it difficult to 
understand how we do what we do and why we do it in the 
way we do it because their programs do not do it that way. 
However, we have always gotten positive reports, I think, as 
a program from a site visitors, because they get here and they 
spend three days or whatever and they understand it. But then 
they don’t make the decision. The decision is made by a com-
mittee back in APA, they write a report, and often we are in 
argument with that committee and they will say, “We don’t 
like what you do.” and I said, “But the site visitors said that 
it was fine, so I don’t know why you don’t like it.”, but I have 
to spend a lot of time writing additional explanations because 
they were not here on the ground so they didn’t see it in action 
and they don’t understand. We also have ongoing evaluations 
... I mean ... the faculty meets at the end of every year and 
think about the program. Our students give us feedback, we 
have several committees, one of them is a program advisory 
committee; each committee is made of the program, students, 
and faculty, and the program advisor committee ... (pause) … 
their task is to say what we can do better. One way or another, 
we are always self-evaluating.
Part 2 of the interview
In this second half of the interview, Prof. Worrell discusses 
the fostering of learning potentials in school, giftedness, 
and time perception.
The book Achieving College Dreams, which you co-edited 
with Rhona S. Weinstein, was published last year. How are 
you as a school psychologist in academia and the Faculty 
Director of the California College Preparatory Academy 
(CAL Prep) related to its story and success?
Right. I think it is important to know from the outset 
that in fact, it is the CAL Prep work for which I got the Na-
dine Lambert award. I think a way to think about this is to 
use the metaphor, that there is a story that you probably have 
heard about ... umm ... Two people are standing by the riv-
erbank and there is somebody who comes down in the river 
and asks for help and is pulled out, and then another person 
comes down the river and is pulled out, and the third person 
comes down and is pulled out. Then, one person of the two 
people who have been helping them starts to walk upstream 
and the other says, “What are you doing ... I mean … we have 
to pull these people out of the river.” And the other says, “No, 
I need to stop them from going into the river.” Right? “I need 
to find out what is happening that these people are falling into 
the river.” That is in essence what CAL Prep is about, what 
Achieving college dreams is about. Namely, we have data for 
many, many years that students who are from low-income 
backgrounds, students from certain ethnic groups in the US, 
such as African-American, Latino, or Native American, are 
less likely to graduate from high school and less likely to go 
to college. They are more likely to live in poverty when they 
are adults because they do not have education. Therefore, one 
of the things that we as researchers are supposed to be do-
ing is, in fact, dealing with societal problems ... I mean ... 
umm ... we are the University of California, we are a public 
Interview
66
university, we are supposed to serve the state, and the people 
of this state. Therefore, the idea of CAL Prep was ... umm 
… could we create a school where we are not selecting who 
we take and we take just everybody that comes. In fact, we 
are encouraging people to come whose parents did not go to 
college. They don’t have the educational-social capital that 
many families have. Could we create a school, a school where 
those kids ... umm … can we provide them with such a qual-
ity of education that they then will go on to college, and break 
the cycle of poverty for their families. That is the basic idea 
that the book is really an overview of the years from 2002 to 
2012, actually it is a ten-year ethnographic longitudinal study. 
We started talking about opening the school in 2002, after a 
lot of debate the school was opened in 2005. The first class 
of high school graduates graduated in 2011 and the second 
class graduated in 2012. However, you see, Berkeley is not 
unique in this endeavor. Actually, there are a number of other 
universities that have engaged in this particularity, in the US 
system. The first school opened by UC system was at UC 
San Diego. They opened the Preuss school in 1999, and then 
UC Los Angeles community school, I believe they opened it 
in 2007 ... UC Davis opened the secondary school ... There 
are four of the nine undergraduate UC campuses that have 
schools, and you see ... San Diego is now working ... I think 
... with two schools, not just one, as is UC Los Angeles. Each 
of them is doing a little bit differently because we want to 
say there are multiple ways of getting to this issue but we are 
certainly serving the same populations; low-income students, 
mostly first in their families to go to college and that kind of 
things, try to get them into college. One of the great success 
stories, I think is, Marco, who you met, my postdoc. Marco 
was a graduate of the first school that was opened by the one 
in UC San Diego, the Preuss school. He graduated from that 
school, he did his dissertation research at UC Los Angeles 
with the UC Los Angeles school and now he is doing a post-
doc with the Berkeley school. He has gotten a doctoral degree 
but he was one of these people, Latino, young man, first in 
his family who went to college. That is really the goal of it. 
Thus, one can think of school psychology as the person pull-
ing the individuals out of the river or you can think of school 
psychology as a person going up-stream to stop the kids, the 
people being thrown into the river ... and that is what the CAL 
Prep is. That is why I think it is an important aspect. Right? 
To be thinking at a more system level rather than just on the 
individual diagnostic level. Let me actually diagnose this kid 
with a learning disability and then grow an intervention ... 
you know, if I can stop something in the kindergarten maybe 
I will not have any diagnoses of learning disabilities at grade 
four.
How did you choose teachers for this particular project? 
Did they receive any special preparation?
These were part of the discussions that we had; what is our 
expertise, I mean, Rhona Weinstein and I are both committed 
to ... she is a community clinical psychologist. She has done 
a lot of work on school reform and her major area of research 
is teacher expectations. I was a secondary school teacher and 
a principal in Trinidad before I did my PhD. I think that this 
is one of the reasons I was recruited to this project, but we 
recognized that as Berkeley I am not going to be the principal 
as I have a job. As we could not do this on our own, we col-
laborated with a charter management organization that has an 
infrastructure for choosing teachers and so forth. The reason 
we chose a charter management organization and not one of 
the public schools is because we needed assurance on the part 
of the school … I mean … that they would not change their 
mind in the middle of the project but instead keep it going. 
That has happened before: you start the project in a school 
and then the principal changes and the new principal decides, 
“I don’t want to do this anymore.” That is why we are working 
with a charter management organization. I actually served on 
the selection committee for each of the principals that has 
been chosen at the school. In fact, I co-chaired the principal 
search committee for the first principal. In the first two years, 
we met with the principal every week during the school year. 
It was a tremendous commitment of time on the part of the 
university. I got a course release because I spent a lot of time 
doing the CAL Prep issues. However, this is the way that our 
voice, our expertise got into the school. Rhona Weinstein ac-
tually developed the first advisory curriculum; she wrote it 
herself, she also trained the teachers in it and then evaluated 
it as it is written up in the book. I started a choir at the school 
that I conducted because they did not have many teachers for 
extracurricular activities. I supervised psychology interims 
at the school so that it had additional psychological support. 
Therefore, we were very much intimately involved in this 
school and the school success. That is CAL Prep. 
One of your major research interests includes time 
perspective and time attitudes. What attracted you to that 
area of research?
I think ... umm … it is interesting … Erik Erikson is a 
theorist whose work was of great interest to me because I am 
very interested in identity, not as much in ego identity but in 
ethnic and racial identity. I was also interested in academic 
identities. Moreover, I was very interested in students who 
dropped out and in students who were gifted and talented. 
For instance, you are working with a student who is gifted 
and talented and that student thinks that they will get less 
than A and they come to you and say, “Can I get extra work 
so I do not get a B?” On the other hand, you work with the 
students who are at risk of dropping out and they are going to 
get a D and you are trying to get them to do extra work to get 
a C and they don’t want to do the work. Therefore, I was very 
interested in what are the things that distinguish between stu-
dents who are willing to engage versus those who are not. 
Those who get caught up in school and even if they are gifted 
and talented versus who they are not. In reading the litera-
ture on adolescence and particularly reading the literature of 
Erikson and others, it becomes very clear to me that it seems 
that a conceptualization of the future played the role. And 
so ... I was very interested in looking at Erikson ... I mean 
... Erikson’s first stage “trust vs. mistrust” the resolution of 
that is hope (laugh) ... and hope is a future looking construct. 
I believe that something positive is going to happen. That is 
how I started to get interested in this and so for my doctoral 
dissertation, I studied, I looked at students who are at risk. 
I chose a sample of students who are at risk and I compared 
them with a sample of students who are not at risk. What I 
found is that students who are in school and who were at risk 
M. Juriševič
67
but graduated believed that the future was going to work out, 
whereas those who were equally at risk but dropped out did 
not believe that the future was going to work out. Therefore, 
hope acted as a protective factor against the risk. That is one 
of the things that started me down this path. I was also able 
to show, and I showed it at the talk yesterday, that when you 
compare students who are at risk, but who graduate, with the 
students who are not at risk, you find the major differences of 
course in the students who are not at risk don’t engage in risky 
behavior, so those who are at risk engage in risky behavior in 
a way higher levels that the ones who are not at risk. The 
ones who are gifted and talented have a way higher academic 
achievement than the ones who are at risk. However, when 
you look at them on hope in the future they do not differ. So, 
again, while hope in the future is useful for those who are not 
at risk, it is a protective factor for those who are at risk. That 
is what led me down the path towards time perspective. You 
know ... a lot of my work has been done collaboratively ... For 
instance, I met a graduate student, Zena Mello, and she asked 
me to be in her dissertation committee. She was very inter-
ested in time and expectations. After she finished she came 
to do her postdoc with me and one of the reasons she chose 
to work with me is that we had discovered that a new scale 
measuring time perspective was not working well with the 
adolescents; therefore, we wanted to develop a measure that 
will work with the adolescents. She came to work with me in 
2005, and now, 12 years later, we have an instrument which 
is translated into 12 different languages and that is showing 
very promising results in terms of its predicting anxiety, de-
pression, even alcohol use to some extent, and also predicting 
academic achievement and educational expectations. So we 
are quite ... I think ... excited about the possibilities for this 
and some of my graduate students are starting to look at these 
constructs in their own right. For example, Dante Dixon, who 
looks at hope, found this really beautiful result: students who 
are high in hope do much better than those who are low in 
hope and those kinds of things. So, it has been a very produc-
tive area research for us, and, importantly, I think as potential 
for people who are intervention researchers. Namely, I see 
myself more as a basic researcher, less as an intervention re-
searcher, although the CAL Prep I guess is a large interven-
tion, that for intervention researchers gives some guidance 
about some of the things that we are trying to intervene to see 
if they would be useful in helping us keep adolescents more 
adaptive; more adaptive educationally, socially, behaviorally.
Extensive research connected with direct application ... so 
... this is a great example of school psychology dynamics, 
isn’t it?
Yes. I do think so. I do think it is a great topic. In fact, we 
have one of our papers in the Psychology in the Schools … 
In this paper, we found that adolescents with positive time 
attitude profiles reported higher educational expectations 
and self-esteem and lower perceived stress than adolescents 
with negative time attitude profiles. Because school psychol-
ogy generally does not publish these types of papers, the field 
does not get to see this kind of thing.
The article Rethinking Giftedness and Gifted Education 
from 2011 you co-wrote with Rena F. Subotnik and Paula Ol-
szewski-Kubilius was extremely sound in gifted education 
context and has had an enormous influence in the area of re-
search and practice all around the world. In that masterpiece, 
you presented a MEGA model of giftedness, which probably 
has an important role in time perspective. Could you explain 
from this point of view the basic highlights in your under-
standing of the development of individual’s learning poten-
tial?
I think if you think about giftedness in essence what we 
are doing and what our model talks about is that we are start-
ing with kids and the potential they have. Thus, our goal in 
gifted education is to get them on the pathway towards pos-
sible eminence, although we cannot guarantee eminence. 
However, even if they do not get the eminence we want to 
put them on the path where they develop their talents as fully 
as they can. So the person who is good in mathematics may 
not go on to win a Nobel Prize in mathematics but maybe 
go on to become a math teacher or math professor. Right? 
They develop their talents even ... umm … from being very 
good with numbers in elementary school they get the career, 
an accountant, somebody who works in the Wall Street or 
something, I guess. That requires an investment of resources 
and effort over time. In some sense, I mean so, we are think-
ing of time potential; if you are thinking of gifted education 
you can’t help but think of the past, the present, and work-
ing toward the future. For example, it is easy, I think, to see 
in the non-academic domains. My sister, for instance, loves 
ice-skating, although she has never ice-skated. You know, we 
grew up in the Caribbean ... but she watched it on TV every 
time it came on. One day I was at the house and we were 
watching finals, and the reporter was interviewing the person 
who had won asked, “So, you have been preparing for this for 
the last couple of years?” and the response was “No, I have 
been preparing for this for my entire life ... since I was three 
years old.” (laugh) So, and this is it ... I mean ... in some sense, 
development is something that takes a lot of time and that is, 
I think, the intersection ... umm ... that in fact time is required 
for developing gifts and talents. For instance, I am sitting here 
today in large part because of the education I received at Ber-
keley but before that the education I received in Canada and 
before that, the education I received in the secondary school. 
Right? So each of those built on the other, luck played a role, 
I might not have come to Berkeley if my best friend hadn’t 
sent me the Berkeley catalogue ... so ... you know ... chance 
plays as well, but hard work and effort and so forth and get-
ting the right mentor who is supportive and taught me things 
I needed to know and this is it. Therefore, the MEGA model 
really is about movement along the developmental pathway. 
To become eminent ... I mean ... he or she has to move along 
the pathway ... and one becomes very good in the field even if 
you do not become eminent right away.
You serve as the Faculty Director of the Academic Talent 
Development Program at UC Berkeley. How does the 
program fit in your MEGA model?
Yeah, I think it does relate to the theoretical model in 
several ways. I think one way, which it does, is that we are 
focused on domain-specific talent, so students who are com-
ing in are coming to us to study writing or mathematics or 
chemistry, biochemistry, you know ... anatomy, whatever. 
Even in the elementary program we have a math course, a sci-
Interview
68
ence course, you know ... humanities courses. For kindergar-
tens, for example, we had a science course called Oviparous 
Animals about animals that lay eggs, and so these students 
studied animals that lay eggs, and the course allows them to 
go deeply into the topic, right, and so in some sense one con-
sidered embodying the kid who had a very deep interest in 
that topic could potentially become embodied in something 
... but it all started with the fact that they started at looking 
at chickens and other animals that lay eggs ... so exploring ... 
motivating them ... Again, if you are talking about the model, 
right, we talk about early teaching for falling in love with 
the subject. That is what the elementary division teachers are 
being told they need to do. Well, whether you are teaching 
mathematics, writing, or whatever, you are teaching these 
kids, you are sharing your passion for this subject with the 
kids in your classroom. In addition, we encourage parents to 
have the kids choose, so that the parent does not say, “I want 
you to be a doctor so you need to take the anatomy class.”. 
You know, we encourage the parents – we cannot force them 
– to allow the students to choose which course they want to 
do. Right? Then, as we get into the secondary division and 
we are teaching for technique ... they do not get grades at the 
elementary school, but we give grades in the secondary divi-
sion, because now we are teaching you skills. This is beyond 
you having the passion for the subject, you need to develop 
the technical competencies, you need be good, for instance, in 
mathematics, or you get to be a good writer. Therefore, from 
now on, we are grading your performance; we are holding 
you accountable, and so forth. That is the idea of movement 
from potential to achievement to set you on the pathway. The 
other thing that I think our program does for many students, 
especially if they are the top students of their schools, is that it 
brings them into the situation where they not only meet teach-
ers who are passionate about the subject but they need other 
students who like the subject, who are maybe as good as or 
better than they are. That is an important thing because there 
are some top students who never have been challenged in 
school ... when it happens first in college, they meet students 
who seem to be getting things much more easily than they 
are, and they are intimidated. But our students on account of 
the program have been challenged while still in elementary, 
middle high school, and so on ... and they learn that meeting 
someone who learns more quickly than you doesn’t take away 
from you ... your talent ... and so that in fact it sets them up 
to continue.
Can we assume that the role of school psychology is very 
important to work with parents and teachers?
Right, exactly. Therefore, we need to prepare parents and 
teachers. Our teachers need to be prepared to teach talented 
students, and parents of many of the kids who are in gifted 
and talented programs including ours need to be prepared 
about how to best support their children.  Many of these par-
ents have a lot of money and feel they know how best to teach 
their child and so we get comments from parents every day. 
We listen to the comments, some of them are legitimate and if 
they are legitimate and the teacher could be doing something 
better we speak with that teacher, we work with that teacher 
so they do that. In many cases, however, it is just that the par-
ent wants that the kid would be the “best” kid in the class-
room and in that case, we work with the parent (laugh) ...
Is this program interesting also for your PhD students?
Right. Many of our students in my program work in the 
summer program as summer counsellors, but some as teach-
ers themselves. Of course I do research and so on ... umm ... 
I will assign someone our readings to our classes that I teach 
and so forth. The process is very synergistic. Some of the stu-
dents will also work as research assistants in the program.
You are dedicating your recent work to achieving 
eminence in life. What does the fact of “being excellent” 
mean to you?
Well, eminence and excellence. I mean ... hmm ... let’s say 
that most people who are very good at their job do excellent 
work. Eminence is a way of saying that you are at the very 
top of the field. You have changed the field so that every-
body in the field knows who you are because you have done 
excellent work. Now, there are differences between what we 
call the performance and the production of eminence. If we 
think ... if we think about basketball as a case point: many 
people who are not interested in basketball know the name 
Michael Jordan. Jordan has not played basketball for many, 
many years now, for at least ten or fifteen years he has not 
been playing, but he was such a phenomenal player when he 
played he has become eminent. Thus, his name is associated 
with eminence, right, and we can think eminent names from 
the history, in music Mozart, for instance, Beethoven, in writ-
ing Shakespeare, Goethe, and others. The same thing contin-
ues today. We have the eminent players in the NBA, we have 
eminent people in other fields ... I mean ... Meryl Streep as 
an actress, you know, she is eminent ... I mean ... she does not 
always win the Academy Award, but her performances are at 
such level and for such a long period of time that she raises 
above the rest and … umm ... that is ...what we are saying is 
that giftedness is relative to your peer group. Therefore, if I 
am a five-year old and I can recite a twenty-line poem I am 
quite an outstanding five-year old. If I am a twenty-year 
old and I can recite a twenty-line poem that is not a big deal; 
many twenty-year olds can do that, right? Therefore, if you 
are a gifted five-year old and you stay there while everybody 
moves you are not gifted anymore. To continue to be gifted 
you need to continue to move up and to be at the up end of the 
distribution and so what we think is that at the very top per-
formance, mathematicians, hmm …, surgeons, tennis players, 
whatever, at the very top the people who  reached the very top, 
the top of the very top, the eminent ones, are the ones who are 
fully gifted. Therefore, when we think of the current national 
basketball association, I think that there are three hundred 
players or something like that at the National Basketball As-
sociation; every player in the NBA is gifted compared to the 
general population, but we only think that some of the players 
in the NBA are gifted. We think of the very best, they are the 
best of the best, Steph Curry, LeBron James, Kevin Durant. 
There are certain names that everybody knows. These people 
are the best of the best. Those are the ones who are eminent 
or on their way to eminence.
M. Juriševič
69
What is, in your opinion, the role of school psychologists 
in cultivation of eminence pathway in students?
Well, one role of the school psychologist I think is to 
help people get on the pathway, keep them on the pathway. 
We cannot guarantee eminence of course, like everything 
else, I mean, if there is one prize you think the Olympics, 
you know, one person gets the gold medal. Now, I made the 
point, for instance, in the 1976 Olympics, the 100 m sprint, 
actually Hasely Crawford won the gold medal. That was the 
one and the only time ... he never won in the Olympics again 
... I mean ... he is not remembered, right? However, think 
about Usain Bolt from Jamaica who has now won gold med-
als in several Olympics; he has become eminent. Right? So, it 
is not just a one shot thing. The goal of the school psychology 
is to put somebody on the path ... we cannot guarantee the 
outcome, right, but we can say, “This is what you need to do.” 
to become outstanding.
Does it make sense to you that this may also be the way to 
prevent Big Fish Little Pond Effect?
Right. Exactly. This is the other side, right. Because the 
BFLP effect is that when you are put in a more selective en-
vironment, your academic self-concept falls. The question is 
does that encourage you to work harder or does it stop you 
from working at all (laugh) ...
Moreover, there are some people who if they don’t think 
they are very best they stop trying. However, there are the 
people if they don’t think they are the very best they try hard-
er, right? I would argue that the school psychologist’s job is 
to try to make everybody try harder. Because the ones who 
try hard are more likely to have a chance of getting to emi-
nence, of becoming eminent.
No doubt, your bibliographical references show a very 
clear pathway towards academic eminence in your career. 
What, in your opinion, are the major contributors to it?
Well, I am not sure I would agree that I am eminent but 
(laugh) … I do think I have been incredibly lucky in terms 
of messages I have gotten over my career. From my par-
ents, I mean, starting with my mother. Once I was ... I think 
about 17 years old, and I was taking my mother and a friend 
to a concert or some meeting ... and they were sitting in the 
back seat, I was the chauffeur. I am driving them and the 
friend says to my mother “What do you want Frank to be 
when he grows up?” I remember thinking “Oh, why is she 
asking that?” You know ... a teenager boy and my mother is 
now going to say she wants me to be a doctor and blah-blah-
blah ... She always said she wanted me to be a doctor. Instead, 
my mother did not give that answer that day. What my mother 
said was this: “Frank can choose to be whatever he wants to 
be, but whatever he chooses to do I want him to do it at the 
highest level possible.”. So that, if we are walking down the 
street in the capital and you say to me “Oh, my God, look 
at the street how clean it is; it is the cleanest street I have 
ever seen”, I need to be able to say to you “My son cleans the 
street (laugh). That is why it is so clean”. That is the message 
that my mother gave to all of us. I got those messages as a 
kid growing up. I do not know if I always listened to them 
(laugh), but I got them. When I became an academic, I got 
mentors who gave me similar messages ... umm ... to put in 
work and a lot of work. I remember I was also involved in the 
music festival in Trinidad and I got the same message there. 
In fact, I have shared it with all my students all the time ... 
A music festival adjudicator was asked by a reporter if any 
group stood out for him, and he named my secondary school 
choir. The reporter asked, “Why do they stand out?” and the 
adjudicator said, “Because they are professionals.”. And the 
reporter said, “These are school kids, they don’t get paid for 
what they do, how can you call them professionals?”. And the 
adjudicator said, and this is a lesson I have never forgotten, 
“A professional is not somebody who gets paid for what they 
do. A professional is a person whose work never falls below a 
certain standard.” He went on to say, “When that choir came 
on the stage they did not always win the prize but I always 
knew I was going to hear a very good performance. Because 
their work met a minimum standard.” That is the true defini-
tion of a professional and I have never forgotten that. Moreo-
ver, I have tried to do this with my work.
What would be your final message to young psychologists 
just entering the field of school psychology practice?
I think what I would say to school psychologists entering 
the field is that never forget that your ultimate goal as a school 
psychologist is to put yourself out of work (laugh). You want 
to get teachers to be teaching so well, you want kindergarten 
kids to learn their alphabet or their numbers so that they do 
not have problems, so ultimately you are working to make 
teachers the best they can be and students learn as much as 
they can early on and not make mistakes. Moreover, so if you 
think about it, we are working towards a time when there is 
no need for school psychology. Right? Because everybody 
will be doing exactly what they are supposed to do ... and 
education will truly be something that is serving all students 
regardless of their backgrounds. Now, of course, that is “a 
pie in the sky” vision. I mean that there will be no need for 
special education and so forth but it is a vision of thinking 
through what, where we are aiming, what is our ultimate aim. 
If in fact we can wave the magic wand, that is, you know ... 
that there will be peace on the earth ... everybody would be 
competent nd doing what they are supposed to do. That is in 
some sense what we are trying to think about as school psy-
chologists in the work we do in schools.
What would be your message to experienced colleagues 
in the field?
I would say to professionals that it is important to remem-
ber the issues we had at the beginning of our careers. I think 
it is easy for us to get arrogant and to forget that the mistakes 
that some teachers are making and that some junior psycholo-
gists are making, we once made ourselves (laugh), and that 
we are where we are because we were allowed the oppor-
tunity to make and learn from those mistakes with support. 
Therefore, to never forget that that support is what we need to 
pass on, that as we pass out of the system we need to pass on 
the things that allowed us to get to where we are. We need to 
do the same thing for the next generation.
Interview
70
Suggested reading and resources
Academic Talent Development Program (ATDP). 
(n.d.). Retrieved from https://gse.berkeley.
edu/academic-talent-development-program-atdp
Andretta, J. R., Worrell, F. C., & Mello, Z. R. (2014). Predicting 
educational outcomes and psychological wellbeing in 
adolescents using time attitude profiles. Psychology in 
the Schools, 51, 434–451.
Centre for Educational Partnerships. (n.d.). CAL Prep. 
Retrieved from http://cep.berkeley.edu/cal-prep
Nadine Lambert Outstanding School Psychologist 
Award (Region II), California Association of School 
Psychologists. (2016). Retrieved from http://casponline.
org/awards/#winners
School Psychology. (2017). Retrieved from https://gse.
berkeley.edu/cognition-development/school-psychology
Subotnik, R. F., Olszewski-Kubilius, P., & Worrell, F. C. 
(2011). Rethinking giftedness and gifted education: 
A proposed direction forward based on psychological 
science. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 12, 
3–54.
Weinstein, R. S., & Worrell, F. C. (Eds.). (2016). Achieving 
college dreams: How a university-charter district 
partnership created an early college high school. New 
York, NY, ZDA: Oxford University Press.
Worrell, F. C. (2013). School psychology. In D. S. Dunn 
(Ed.), Oxford bibliographies in psychology. New York, 
NY, ZDA: Oxford University Press. Retrieved from 
http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/
obo-9780199828340/obo-9780199828340- 0132.
xml?rskey=dpHQB0&result=114&q
Worrell, F. C. (2017, April). Thoughts about the past, the 
present, and the future: Implications for educational 
and psychological functioning. Presentation at the 
Graduate School of Education Colloquium, University of 
California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA. 
Worrell, F. C., Subotnik, R. F., & Olszewski-Kubilius, P. (in 
press). Talent development: A path towards eminence. 
In S. Pfeiffer (Ed.), APA handbook of giftedness and 
talent. Washington, DC, ZDA: American Psychological 
Association.
Worrell, F. C. (2017). CV. Retrieved from https://gse.berkeley.
edu/sites/default/files/WorrellCV.4.2017.pdf
Prispelo/Received: 29. 8. 2017
Sprejeto/Accepted: 3. 9. 2017
M. Juriševič