Steps to Achieving the ‘Good Life’
- Kindness is the first step in ‘Achieving the Good Life’
- Identifying the Cause
- Agreeing Preventative Strategies to use Before a Situation Escalates
- Practice, Practice, Practice! Teaching to the Point of ‘Critical Mass’
- Sharing Successful Strategies and Future Goals With Everyone Involved in the Care and Support of the Child or Young Person with Autism
- Measuring Success
1. Kindness is the first step in ‘Achieving the Good Life’
A kind and considerate parent or professional will take the time and effort to consider the student’s behaviour and try to identify, understand the causes of anxiety.
Listen to Brenda Myles (who quoted the following statistics) discuss Kindness:
- 86% of teachers worry the world is an unkind place for children
- 70% of parents say the world is unkind to their children
- 73% of parents and 78% of teachers believe that being kind is more important than academic achievement
Kindness involves understanding another person’s perspective. This can be a difficult concept for some children and young people with autism to develop. Understanding emotions and explicitly teaching the feeling and emotions of others in social contexts is essential.
Click here to watch Patsy Daly’s interview and for more information click here.
2. Identifying the Cause
Understanding a student’s needs and strengths is essential for identifying appropriate structures or supports that can be put in place to support the achievement of ‘The Good Life’.
- For information on identifying needs and strengths please Click here
- Middletown Centre for Autism have developed a ‘Strengths and Needs Gas thermometer’ which is a helpful tool when considering the students’ needs and strengths and identifying which areas to focus on.
- Identifying a student’s ‘trigger’ or cause of a behaviour can be difficult. Talking and observing are key elements in understanding a person’s unique triggers. To read more about identifying situations which may lead to anxiety: click here.
- Kari Dunn Buron’s 5 Point scale is a very easy to use and understand strategy which can be helpful in identifying difficult or stress inducing situations for the child or young person and also identify what strategies they could implement to lessen their anxiety.
It is important to remember that no amount of ‘tough love’, negotiation, bribery or punishment will ever work in the fight against anxiety or challenging behaviours. Trying these ‘tactics’ when someone is experiencing anxiety, especially during a fight or flight response (and therefore in full survival mode) will only escalate the situation and makes things a lot worse.
3. Agreeing Preventative Strategies to use Before a Situation Escalates
“Challenging behaviours are often symptoms of the anxiety and frustration that go hand in hand with an inability to predict, organize and order one’s own life.” (Kari Dunn-Buron)
- Preventative strategies also known as antecedent strategies are essential for maximising a child or young person’s ability to predict, organise and order.
- They are designed to prevent and reduce the occurrence and strength of challenging or upsetting behaviours. They are proactive strategies.
Antecedent or Preventative Strategies include:
- Altering or adapting routines to better suit the needs of the student
- Altering the environment to better suit the needs of the student
Examples of some Antecedent or Preventative Strategies that have been successfully used with students with autism in education include:
- Priming, Preparation & Predictability: Always prepare the student, using visuals can help make the student feel more secure and comfortable about what is going to happen now and next. Click here.
- Teach Changes: Only when the student is in a calm and alert state of mind, can we communicate to them about any planned changes in advance. If something has gone wrong, talk about how it could be different next time, and plan for it to be different (watch Kari Dunn Buron, Ain’t Just Misbehaving video). This can be reassuring for them as well as helping them to communicate about how they are feeling.
- Understand the student’s unique likes and dislikes: The 5 point scale is a teaching tool created to teach social and emotional concepts.
- Teach Anxiety Management Strategies
- Consider the environment and sensory stimuli: Access to Sensory Strategies
- Teach emotions and how to regulate when emotions start to change: Zones of Regulation
- Teach Relaxation Techniques, Mood induction (doing a preferred activity at the same time every day). This is not earned, this is scheduled; Visualisation; Self Talk. Click here to listen to Kari Dunn Buron speak on the matter.
- Teaching the ‘Hidden Curriculum’
- Support the development of friendships: Friendships teach:
- Resilience and flexible thinking. Flexible thinking is necessary for a person to realise there are several options for solving a problem.
Social skills groups or special interest groups can help individuals forge friendships with others who share interests and strengths.
- Have a back up plan, for when implementing the preventative strategies don’t go to plan… Kari Dunn Buron suggests:
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- Remain calm (emotions are contagious)
- SILENCE
- Protect others and yourself
- Afterward, rethink the student’s support
- Plan to increase chances for a successful day tomorrow
- Avoid catastrophising (language of doom)
4. Practice, Practice, Practice! Teaching to the Point of ‘Critical Mass’
One way to teach a skill to the ‘point of critical mass’ and help make a skill more familiar is to afford the student enough time and opportunity for practicing or rehearsing the skill throughout the school day.
Research shows that in order to generalise new skills from a teaching situation to real life, students need meaningful and ‘real life’ opportunities to use those skills (Scheeler, 2008; Roehl et al., 2013). Again, this means having opportunities within the school day to practice.
When it comes to learning and using a new skill, particularly under times of stress, the more a student has used that skill in their daily life, the more familiar and accessible that skill becomes.
To find out more information on the Steps of Deliberate Practice: click here.
5. Sharing Successful Strategies and Future Goals With Everyone Involved in the Care and Support of the Child or Young Person with Autism
As highlighted by Brenda Myles, it is essential that the support team around a student with autism communicate effectively and share information about future goals, successful and unsuccessful strategies. Effective multi-professional communication is especially important between home, school and healthcare as:
- It promotes continuity of support across different environments
- It promotes opportunities for practicing skills and therefore contributes to goal achievement
- It reduces anxiety for the individual (knowing that the same resources or supports will be available in each environment with each supporting adult)
- It makes therapeutic time more effective and efficient
- It can aid transitioning
- It means the young person can ‘hit the ground running’ at the start of each academic term, as new staff will know what suits the strengths and needs of the student.
There are various tools available which can aid communication and continuity of support between home, school and healthcare; as an example, see Comprehensive Autism Planning System (CAPS).
6. Measuring Success
To listen to Patsy Daly ‘Extreme Parenting: click here.
To read more about Measuring success please click here for additional reading.