Jura Tender's thoughts from the ABIA's 'ABA Today' Conference
Overall I did not find the conference as exciting as the last one, but there were certainly several good ideas to take away.
One was Mitch Taubman's (Autism Partnership) keynote address: 'Contemporary ABA - Social Skills - Relationships - ABA is still finding its heart'. He started with the history of ABA and a tribute to Ivar Lovaas, whose emphasis was on life-changing basic skills. Social validity was emphasised from the start. But today we have a problem with much of ABA becoming simplified, mechanical, and superficially rote. Alternate approaches, not supported by research, are added on because of their 'socialness.' These include Floor Time, ROI, Social Cognitions and Social Stories (the last in particular thoroughly proven to be a useless add-on).
Taubman sees the task as needing to capture naturalness and meaningfulness, with emphasis on what ASD needs to learn, without losing the basic strategy.
He points out the lack of a comprehensive curriculum and a need for social skills taxonomy, listing all the separate elements of social skills. He listed these as Social Awareness, Social Communication, Social Interaction, Social Learning and Relatedness.
I was sufficiently impressed by this attempt to provide a ground plan for social skills that I immediately bought the book. Yes, much of it will be based on face validity, but for now we have little else to go on, and a mud map is a good start.
The other Keynote was Peter Gerhard (Organization for Autism Research Behaviour Analyses Centre for Autism) whose address was entitled 'Adults and Adolescents with ASD - what constitutes evidence based practice?', and started off by saying there was very little in the literature, compared to children.
Little has changed in the last 30 years and he made several conclusions:
- Teaching the wrong things the right way is no better than teaching the right skills poorly.
- Intervention is tested by what happens outside the classroom, not inside, and generalisation is too often blamed on parents.
- Adulthood is hard work - if you are not tired you are not doing it right.
He pointed out some sad observations : that once contingencies are removed the behaviours taught disappear, clients may have the skills but do not use them, and once the teacher was out of the room students did nothing. Added to this, verbal prompts are most likely to lead to abuse as tone rises on repetition. ABA needs to be person-centred if it is to work.
Some helpful hints were suggested:
- Teach resilience to extinction; allow the making of errors as that leads to problem solving. Too often we teach learnt helplessness by being overly protective.
- Teach to make choices.
- Teach the typical population to adapt to ASD as well.
- Teach skills in context and accept an error rate as risk taking is needed.
- Note the laws of economics: high value - high effort is worthwhile, high effort - low value is not.
- And accept that life is not perfect.
He finished off by pointing out that 'common sense' was a rare commodity and hence the field is open for improvement, particularly in what we choose to teach with advice "Aim at future quality of life - not failure in academic skills they cannot cope with and will not use". A sentiment I could not agree with more.
Jura Tender