Lynn Wilder

Dr. Lynn K. Wilder is an associate professor of Special Education in the Department of Counseling Psychology and Special Education at Brigham Young University (BYU) in Provo, Utah.  She teaches undergraduate, licensure, and graduate students in Special Education and School Psychology. As the co-director of an OSERS federal project at BYU, she administers a personnel preparation grant that provides full tuition support for ethnically diverse, bilingual, or those pre-service teaching candidates with disabilities who earn dual licensure in Special Education and English as a Second Language (ESL). Her emphasis and research areas are: behavior disorders, behavioral assessment, family adaptation to disability, and ethnic and cultural diversity. She has numerous professional publications and serves on the editorial board of several professional journals.

In addition, Dr. Wilder directs a project that trains graduate students to teach the principles of Positive Behavior Supports to parents. Graduate students support parents in conducting a functional behavioral assessment of their child’s challenging behavior at home. Together they create a behavioral intervention plan and implement it, measuring progress in (a) the child’s behavior and (b) the parent-child relationship.

Working in the public schools for almost 20 years before entering the world of higher education, Dr. Wilder has taught special education to students with various disabilities at all age levels, including preschool and adults. She spent a decade of her career teaching high school dropouts in public school facilities, a juvenile center, a jail, a mental health facility, and in homeless shelters. She has been a literacy coordinator and once directed a federal grant that provided educational services to the residents of several homeless shelters. Her interests and experiences have led her to work with and love to work with students at risk, including ethnically diverse youth, drug addicted young men, pregnant young women, ESL students, and children of migrant workers.

Dr. Wilder is quite passionate about her work and her students.