Autism Education: The Way I See It E-Book

Temple Grandin

• Herausgeber: Future Horizons
• Kategorie: Ratgeber
• Serie: The Way I See It
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 135

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

Dr. Temple Grandin discusses the real issues that parents, teachers, and kids face every day. Here is a concise handbook that illustrates what Temple has found to work in the field of education. Topics include:

• The importance of early intervention

• Teaching for different types of thinking

• Developing talent

• Motivating students

• Keeping high expectations

• And much more!

In these helpful pages, Dr. Grandin offers dos and don’ts, practical strategies, and try-it-now tips, all based on her insider perspective and extensive research. Interestingly, she argues that education for kids on the autism spectrum must focus on their overlooked strengths to foster their unique contributions to the world.

As Publishers Weekly noted "For educators or parents of autistic children, this will be a valuable resource."

"Grandin (The Autistic Brain)...delivers an insightful and pragmatic guide to helping autistic children thrive...The authors pinpoint guiding principles (high expectations yield results) and brass-tacks recommendations (strategies for teaching turn-taking or mastering basic life skills) combine to create a program that’s thoughtful and comprehensive, but not overwhelming. For educators or parents of autistic children, this will be a valuable resource." — Publishers Weekly

A valuable tool for both parents and educators centered on Grandin's personal experiences and her many years in the fields of autism and behavior science. This is essential for parents with an autistic child. — Library Journal, * Starred Review *

Leseprobe

Autism & Education: The Way I See It

All marketing and publishing rights guaranteed to and reserved by:

[phone]

[phone] (fax)

E-mail: [email protected]

www.fhautism.com

© 2023 Temple Grandin

All rights reserved.

No part of this product may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of Future Horizons, Inc., except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews or unless noted within the book.

ISBN: 9781957984070

Contents

CHAPTER ONE

Foreword

Answers to the Most Common Recent Questions

By Temple Grandin

In this book focusing on education, it is important to address some recent concerns that have been raised by adults who are on the autism spectrum. I also want to help parents and teachers to avoid getting locked into the label of autism and failing to see the whole child. The abilities of autistic children are often underestimated.

Today, many parents who receive a diagnosis that their young child has autism may find many conflicting viewpoints on the best type of therapy. Autism specialists all agree that young two- to five-year-old children who are not talking should receive therapy. The worst thing a parent can do is to do nothing and allow the child to zone out on electronic devices. The child should immediately start therapy. If therapy is not available, a student or a grandparent could volunteer to work with the child.

Some autistic adults have websites and other online media where they adamantly oppose the use of ABA (Applied Behavior Analysis) as a treatment for autism. Studies show that modern ABA is an evidence-based treatment for very young children. Some of these advocates were subjected to harsh, punitive ABA that forced them into sensory overload. In these poor programs, there was also too much emphasis on compliance and not enough work on developing the child’s abilities.

There is another recent development that may make some autistic treatment programs a poor choice. Since ABA is covered by insurance, private equity firms have recently purchased ABA practices. They discovered that these clinics were a lucrative financial investment. This may provide an economic incentive to teach all children with the same “cookie cutter” program. A good ABA clinic will carefully tailor each program to fit the needs of each child. The incentive for more insurance dollars may also motivate a clinic to recommend excessive amounts of therapy. They may also use poorly trained staff to handle big caseloads.

How to Evaluate Effective Early Educational Program for a Young Nonverbal Child

Little kids between the ages of two to five who are not talking need about ten to twenty hours a week of one-to-one teaching with an effective teacher. That teacher could be an ABA therapist, an occupational therapist, a speech therapist, a parent, or a grandparent. I have observed that effective teachers have a “knack” for engaging the child and making progress. There are four simple ways to evaluate the effectiveness of a teacher for a child under five years of age:

The child learns more and more speech.The child learns how to wait and take turns at games. This is an important skill to learn because it helps the child to reduce impulsive behavior.The child learns more and more skills such as hand washing, eating with utensils, and putting on a jacket.The child should like going to therapy. If the child hates therapy, the program must be changed.

Recommendations for Older Children and Answers to Recent Common Questions

By the time I was five, I had learned to talk and I no longer needed one-to-one therapy with a teacher. I am concerned that a clinic that is making money from insurance may have an economic incentive to continue intensive therapy when it should be phased out. If a child does not quickly learn language, they must be provided with an alternative method to communicate, such as sign language, an electronic augmentative communication device, or a picture board. I can remember the total frustration of not being able to communicate. Sometimes I attempted to communicate by screaming. Meltdowns and aggression may be triggered by either a lack of a method to communicate or sensory overload. Some autistic individuals are more likely to become aggressive in noisy environments. Their sensory system may be more sensitive to sudden loud noise.

Another common question I get asked is “Should a child be allowed to stim?” Stimming is repetitive behavior such as rocking or spinning objects. I was allowed to stim for an hour after lunch and again in the evening. It helped to calm me down. I was not allowed to stim at the dining room table. Another common recent question is about “masking” (camouflaging) and suppressing autistic behavior. Masking is used to appear more normal. For example, I learned not to bite my fingernails in front of other people. I have replaced stims, such as spinning an object, with intricate doodles I do on a piece of paper. This “stim” does not bother other people. When I was younger, I used my squeeze machine every day to calm down. It is described in detail in my book Thinking in Pictures. The use of deep pressure and other effective sensory methods is covered in several chapters in this book. Some people wanted to take my squeeze machine away. That would have been very detrimental to me. Another calming method was watching old Star Trek episodes in the late afternoon to help me chill.

Another common question is about autistic burnout in young adults. Many advocates maintain that this is caused by constantly having to “mask” autistic behavior to appear more normal. In many of my publications, I have written about serious problems with panic attacks and anxiety. During my twenties, they got worse. By the time I was in my early thirties, my health was deteriorating due to constant colitis. The stress caused by panic attacks was damaging my body. A complete description of my symptoms is in Thinking in Pictures. My symptoms may be similar to the autistic burnout that is described by some adult advocates. Starting a low dose of an antidepressant in my early thirties greatly reduced my anxiety. My colitis issues were almost eliminated. This may have helped me avoid autistic burnout. There are extensive discussions of medications in this edition of The Way I See It and in Thinking in Pictures. I have been on the same low dose of an antidepressant for forty years. It is likely that my health would have really deteriorated if I had not discovered the use of antidepressants.

I want to emphasize that way too many medications are given to young children. Parents have told me about elementary school age kids who were on four to seven medications. Discussions with them often indicated that every time the child had a behavior problem, another prescription was added. This is bad because some medications have severe side effects, such as obesity.

Recently, I attended a meeting where autistic adults discussed masking. Another cause of burnout may be social situations where there is rapid back-and-forth chitchat. I do not have sufficient brain processing speed to follow these conversations. I usually avoid the evening happy hours that contain them. Some people at the meeting also had problems with hearing in noisy environments. Others and I at this meeting agreed that learning some basic social skills, such as being polite, is not difficult and that some masking is necessary to survive. One woman said there is a fine line between doing some minor masking and suppressing her identity. I express my identity by wearing western clothes, but I had to learn to be clean and polite.

The happiest autistic adults I have known have careers they love, where they have lots of friends through shared interests. For me, the best conversations are about interesting subjects such as animal behavior, construction, autism, and brain research. Autism and Education: The Way I See It will help autistic children and adults to achieve their full potential.

Further Reading

Advisory.com (2022) Private equity in autism care: The advantages and trade-offs, www.advisory.com/dailybriefing/2022/08/16/autism-private-equity.

ASAN – Our motto: What is “nothing about us without us?” https://autisticadvocacy.org/about-asan/what-we-believe/.

Bannow, T. (2022) Parents and clinicians say private equity’s profit fixation is short changing kids with autism, www.statnews.com/2022/08/15/private-equity-autism-aba-therapy/.

Bascom, J. (2020) Problematic and traumatic: Why nobody needs ABA, https://autisticselfadvocaatesagainstaba.wordpress.com/2020/04/13/problematic-andtraumatic-why-nobody-needs-aba/

Cook, J. et al. (2021) Camouflaging in autism: A systematic review, Clinical Psychology Review, Vol. 89, 102080.

Danesh, A.A. et al. (2021) Hyperacusis in Autism Spectrum Disorders, Audiology Research, 11:547-556.

Fry, E. (2022) Private equity is the biggest plyer in the booming autism therapy industry: Some therapists say the money grab is hurting the quality of care, Fortune.com.

Leaf, J.B. et al. (2022) Concerns about ABA based interventions: An evaluation and recommendation, Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 52(6):2838-2853.

University of California, San Francisco. First-hand perspectives on behavioral intervention for autistic people and people with other developmental disorders, https://odpc.ucsf.edu/training/best-practices-behaviorsupport/first-hand-perspctives-on-behavioral-interventions-for-autisticpeople.

Van der Boogert, F. et al. (2021) Sensory processing and aggressive behavior in adults with autism spectrum disorder, Brain Science, 11(1)95.

Yu, Q. et al. (2020) Efficacy of interventions based on applied behavior analysis for autism spectrum disorder: A meta-analysis, Psychiatry Investigation, 17(5):432-443.

The Importance of Early Educational Intervention

CHAPTER ONE

The best thing a parent of a newly diagnosed child can do is to watch their child, without preconceived notions and judgments, and learn how the child functions, acts, and reacts to his or her world.

Both research and practical experience show that an intensive early education program in which a young child receives a minimum of twenty hours a week of instruction from a skilled teacher greatly improves prognosis. The brain of the young child is still growing and evolving. At this age, the neural pathways are highly malleable, and intensive instruction can reprogram “faulty wiring” that prevents the child from learning. Plus, behaviors in a young child have not yet become ingrained. It will take less practice to change an inappropriate behavior at age two to three than it will to change the same behavior at age seven to eight. By then, the child has had many years of doing things his way and change comes about more slowly.

For early childhood programs, ABA (applied behavioral analysis) programs using discrete trial training have the best scientific documentation backing up their use. But other programs, such as the Early Start Denver Model (ESDM), have been validated in a randomized trial. Additional evidence-based programs are pivotal response, speech therapy, and occupational therapy. The autism spectrum is vast and diversified. Children have different ways of thinking and processing information, and it is important that an intervention method be aligned with the child’s learning profile and personality. Detailed descriptions of different types of early intervention programs can be found online.

A book I recommend is Early Intervention and Autism: Real Life Questions, Real Life Answers by Dr. James Ball (2012) from Future Horizons, Inc. While this book is written for parents of newly diagnosed children, more than 75 percent of the information on interventions, effective teaching strategies, program planning, and behavior management is valuable for parents of children of all ages.

My Early Intervention Program

I had a wonderful and effective early education program that started at age two and a half. By then, I had all the classic symptoms of autism, including no speech, no eye contact, tantrums, and constant repetitive behavior. This was in 1949, and doctors knew nothing about autism, but my mother would not accept that nothing could be done to help me. She was determined and knew that letting me continue without treatment would be the worst thing she could do. She obtained advice from a wise neurologist who referred her to a speech therapist to work with me. She was just as good as the autism specialists today.

My talented speech therapist worked with me for three hours a week doing ABA-type training (breaking skills down into small components, teaching each component separately using repetitive drills that gave me lots of practice) and she carefully enunciated hard consonant sounds so I could hear them. At the speech therapy school, I also attended a highly structured nursery school class with five or six other children who were not autistic. Several of the children had Down syndrome. These classes lasted about eight hours a week.

My nanny was another critical part of my early therapy. She spent 20 hours a week keeping me engaged. For instance, playing repeated turn-taking games with my sister and me. She was instrumental in introducing early social skills lessons, even though at that time, they weren’t referred to as such in a formal manner. Within the realm of play, she kept me engaged and set up activities so that most involved turn-taking and lessons about being with others. In the winter, we went outdoors to play in the snow. She brought one sled and my sister and I had to take turns sledding down the hill. In the summer, we took turns on the swing. We were also taught to sit at the table and have good table manners. Teaching and learning opportunities were woven into everyday life.

When I turned five, we played lots of board games such as Parcheesi and Chinese checkers. My interest in art and making things was actively encouraged and I did many art projects. For most of the day, I was forced to keep my brain tuned into the world. However, my mother realized that my behaviors served a purpose and that changing those behaviors didn’t happen overnight. I was given one hour after lunch where I could revert back to repetitive autistic behaviors without consequence. During this hour, I had to stay in my room. I sometimes spent the entire time spinning a decorative brass plate that covered a bolt that held my bed frame together. I would spin it at different speeds and was fascinated at how different speeds affected the number of times the brass plate spun.

The best thing a parent of a newly diagnosed child can do is to watch their child without preconceived notions and judgments and learn how the child functions, acts, and reacts to his or her world. My book, Navigating Autism, will help prevent parents from becoming label-locked and underestimating the abilities of their child. That information is invaluable in finding an intervention method that will be a good match to the child’s learning style and needs. The worst thing parents can do with a child between the ages of two to five is nothing. It doesn’t matter if the child is formally diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) or has been labeled something less defined, such as global developmental delay. It doesn’t matter if the child is not yet diagnosed if there are signs that the child may be on the spectrum: speech is severely delayed, the child’s behaviors are odd and repetitive, the child doesn’t engage with people or his/her environment, etc. The child must not be allowed to sit around stimming all day or, conversely, tuning out the world around him/ her. Parents, hear this: doing nothing is the worst thing you can do. If you have a three-year-old with no speech who is showing signs of autistic behavior, you need to start working with your child now. If signs are appearing in a child younger than three, even better. Do not wait six more months or a year even if your pediatrician is suggesting you take the “wait and see” approach or is plying you with advice such as “boys develop later than girls” or “not all children start to speak at the same time.” My advice to act now is doubly emphasized if your child’s language started developing late or his/ her language and/or behavior is regressing.