Behavioural Interventionist and Visual Supports for Children with Aserger's Disorder

I visited another school a few weeks ago and asked the parent of the child I was observing if I could go over my observations in the blog, "YES! Share so that other people realize this!"

So, parents are always arguing for classroom aide, a paraprofessional, to work with their child. And they often want that assistant there ALL the time. But there is a problem with this, actually a few. See if you can tell what the problem will be from the old cartoon I often show parents to explain the issue.

Heres number 1: Your child should be getting his or her cues from a couple of places in the classroom environment. Often teacher aides become the only place they look. Where should the social cue come from? First, the classroom teacher. And second, other students. When I do my observations in a school I pay close attention to the number of cues a child picks up, and usually the number from the teacher, other students or the white board or classroom schedule is near zero. Almost all of the social cues, what to do when, are obtained from the teacher aide.

This is why as a behavioural consultant I push the use of visual prompts and cues over verbal prompts and cues. Verbal prompts end up being requested, they end up being waited for, and students end up reliant on verbal prompts.  "Use visual prompts - point, and stop talking so much," is my usual advice. Yes, I know we want students with ASD and Aspegers to talk more and give eye contact, but you need to be careful. The eye contact becomes a prompt for the teacher aide to tell the student what to do.  Look at the cartoon. Got it?

Here is an example: The bell rings for recess (environmental cue ...a big one!), the teacher says, "Let's get our desks cleaned up and line up..." (another Massive prompt here, but regretfully not from where the student is use to looking. He or she usually looks to his classroom aide for prompts!) At this point the other students all start to put their coats on for recess. (a GIANT social cue). But what is this a prompt to do? The student sees the other students getting their coats on and turns ......to his aide!!!!!! At that point she says, "Now lets get your coat on."

READ THE CARTOON. See what happened?

This is why its necessary to occasionally have your behavioural interventionist go to the school and observe what's going on. In most professions observation and feedback is a critical part of quality control, but who is doing that for the teacher aide? The teacher? I don't think most teachers have the behavioural expertise to take on that task.

So, that's that. All of this could have been avoided by using the classroom aide (the schools behavioural interventionist) use visual supports to guide the student, not to getting things done, but to learning how and where to find social prompts as to what is going on and what I should be doing. The aim of a support person is to teach skills that lead to independence, not get todays math done or your child's coat put on. Independence comes through learning to use environmental and social prompts to navigate the world.

Besides that, the cartoon is funny. Just so typical, right?

For information of behavioural interventions services, autism diagnosis and treatment that Dr. Roche provides please visit his website at www.relatedminds.com