The Asperkid's-Secret-Book of Social Rules
12/04/13
The Asperkid's (Secret) Book of Social Rules
The Handbook of Not-So-Obvious Social Guidelines for Tweens and Teens with Asperger Syndrome
Paperback: £13.99 Written by Jennifer Cook O'Toole
ISBN: 978-1-84905-915-2 Jessica Kingsley Press
There’s two kinds of stuff in this world; the stuff you can see, touch, taste and generally get hold of, then there's the stuff that comes under the heading 'invisibles’. These could also be called secret signs, ideas, concepts, thoughts - the stuff that is really hard to get hold of for people with autism.
People with autism live in the here and now. They deal well with stuff you can see and experience. They are sensory experts.
So much of what connects people to people - and forms the backbone of social communication - is invisible to people with autism.
Where this book excels is in making the invisible visible. It explains the needs of neurotypicals (NTs), revealing their hidden rules and codes that can leave people with AS confused or worse - annoyed!
A book always has faults. Right? Not in this case! I just can't find a bad thing to say about it. Written as a self help guide for 'Asperkids' it's chock-full of insightful, practical advice on how to successfully sail the seas of planet NT and succeed. It has advice on social boundaries (NT's highly burstable 'bubbles'), handling criticism, finding and keeping friends, and decoding NT language.
Example: Your friend has a new pair of jeans and asks if they are too tight. Honest (but insensitive) answer? "Yes! They make you look awful!" Honest and tactful answer? Personally I always go a size up in skinny jeans - it's so hard to tell from one designer to another!
All the guidance is sensitively done with humour and great visuals (Illustrated by Brian Bojanowski).
Perhaps it's most valuable advice is around understanding, making and keeping friendships. It takes the Asperkid reader through what constitutes friendship and what doesn't and delineates friendship levels in detail. They are described as:
Acquaintance
Possible friendship
Evolving friendship
Bonded friendship
On again, off-again friends
Very close friends
The book is warm, witty and wise and at £13.99 it's a bargain. It's written to be read by 'Tweens and Teens' on the spectrum but could easily be used by teachers, parents, and therapy folk as resource material for individual or group teaching and support. Go buy it!
This review also appears in Learning Disability Today
Paperback: £13.99 Written by Jennifer Cook O'Toole
ISBN: 978-1-84905-915-2 Jessica Kingsley Press
There’s two kinds of stuff in this world; the stuff you can see, touch, taste and generally get hold of, then there's the stuff that comes under the heading 'invisibles’. These could also be called secret signs, ideas, concepts, thoughts - the stuff that is really hard to get hold of for people with autism.
People with autism live in the here and now. They deal well with stuff you can see and experience. They are sensory experts.
So much of what connects people to people - and forms the backbone of social communication - is invisible to people with autism.
Where this book excels is in making the invisible visible. It explains the needs of neurotypicals (NTs), revealing their hidden rules and codes that can leave people with AS confused or worse - annoyed!
A book always has faults. Right? Not in this case! I just can't find a bad thing to say about it. Written as a self help guide for 'Asperkids' it's chock-full of insightful, practical advice on how to successfully sail the seas of planet NT and succeed. It has advice on social boundaries (NT's highly burstable 'bubbles'), handling criticism, finding and keeping friends, and decoding NT language.
Example: Your friend has a new pair of jeans and asks if they are too tight. Honest (but insensitive) answer? "Yes! They make you look awful!" Honest and tactful answer? Personally I always go a size up in skinny jeans - it's so hard to tell from one designer to another!
All the guidance is sensitively done with humour and great visuals (Illustrated by Brian Bojanowski).
Perhaps it's most valuable advice is around understanding, making and keeping friendships. It takes the Asperkid reader through what constitutes friendship and what doesn't and delineates friendship levels in detail. They are described as:
Acquaintance
Possible friendship
Evolving friendship
Bonded friendship
On again, off-again friends
Very close friends
The book is warm, witty and wise and at £13.99 it's a bargain. It's written to be read by 'Tweens and Teens' on the spectrum but could easily be used by teachers, parents, and therapy folk as resource material for individual or group teaching and support. Go buy it!
This review also appears in Learning Disability Today
Listening with All Our Senses
02/08/12
Establishing communication with people on the autistic spectrum or those with profound learning disabilities and sometimes distressed behaviour
Phoebe Caldwell Pavilion, 2012
In the 1970’s, Carl Delecato wrote a book about autism called The Ultimate Stranger. I still like that title. In what is a very personal book, Delecato comes to the conclusion that autism far from being the result of austere and damaging parenting is of neurological origin. Following on from this (at the time) revolution in thinking, he also concluded that the unusual mannerisms and behaviours in autism had a physiological basis - they were ways to instigate, modulate or control experience.
Much in the same way the work of Phoebe Caldwell (this current offering is kind of three books in one) has given us a simple, revolutionary way to understand and engage with the inner world of the person with autism. More - she has given us a simple but amazing ‘hyperdrive’ which allows us to teleport into autistic experience and make ‘emotional connections’. Caldwell uses Intensive Interaction and innovative communication techniques to ‘tune in to people on the spectrum’. It’s a technique that’s easy for parents and practitioners to learn - you certainly don’t have to be an expert. It starts with listening.
Caldwell’s new book makes use of very ‘everyday’ case studies to illustrate and stimulate our thinking and approach to autism. It’s a very practical handbook of ideas and strategies covering topics like sensory overload, emotional overload, the ‘time’ problem, the choices ‘problem’ - but all are covered in an insightful and empathic way that really gets you thinking. Understanding autism from the inside. That’s my kind of revolution.
Chris Barson
This review also appears in Learning Disability Today
Positive Behaviour Support
17/11/11
A brief guide for schools
Mark Wakefield and Sharon Paley: BILD
The booklet is intended to be a quick guide for teachers, classroom assistants and other staff working in school about the key principles of Positive Behaviour Support (PBS). The booklet is part of a series of short guides published by BILD.
There are descriptions of the philosophy behind PBS, what we mean by ‘behaviour that challenges’ and positive strategies/action in the classroom.
The booklet forms a positive, precise and compact guide to responding to difficult and hard to manage behaviours which result from unmet needs and place the student, staff and other students at risk. Mark and Sharon have done a great job and this book should be essential reading for everyone in school who needs a toolkit of positive responses to challenging needs.
A niggle. The books brevity is both its strength and its weakness. John Clements’ phrase “The reasons we do the things we do are messy and murky...Most behaviours are the result of the interactions of several factors, only some of which we will understand” should remind us that difficult behaviour defies a simplistic approach. The booklet (with only 24 pages) probably doesn’t do the messiness and the murkiness of the topic justice.
Another niggle. The price. This is a great little book and ALL teachers should read it. It’s short enough so no arguments over the amount of TIME it might take to read but it’s hard to justify its £7.00 price tag.
It’s hard to disagree though with the penultimate paragraph– Mark and Sharon remind us that behaviour management is not the goal – the goal is no longer needing it! This will take leadership, workforce development and empowerment. Bring it on!
Hazel Ratcliffe and Chris Barson
Mark Wakefield and Sharon Paley: BILD
The booklet is intended to be a quick guide for teachers, classroom assistants and other staff working in school about the key principles of Positive Behaviour Support (PBS). The booklet is part of a series of short guides published by BILD.
There are descriptions of the philosophy behind PBS, what we mean by ‘behaviour that challenges’ and positive strategies/action in the classroom.
The booklet forms a positive, precise and compact guide to responding to difficult and hard to manage behaviours which result from unmet needs and place the student, staff and other students at risk. Mark and Sharon have done a great job and this book should be essential reading for everyone in school who needs a toolkit of positive responses to challenging needs.
A niggle. The books brevity is both its strength and its weakness. John Clements’ phrase “The reasons we do the things we do are messy and murky...Most behaviours are the result of the interactions of several factors, only some of which we will understand” should remind us that difficult behaviour defies a simplistic approach. The booklet (with only 24 pages) probably doesn’t do the messiness and the murkiness of the topic justice.
Another niggle. The price. This is a great little book and ALL teachers should read it. It’s short enough so no arguments over the amount of TIME it might take to read but it’s hard to justify its £7.00 price tag.
It’s hard to disagree though with the penultimate paragraph– Mark and Sharon remind us that behaviour management is not the goal – the goal is no longer needing it! This will take leadership, workforce development and empowerment. Bring it on!
Hazel Ratcliffe and Chris Barson
Video Interaction Guidance: A Relationship-Based Intervention to Promote Attunement, Empathy and Wellbeing
17/11/11
Edited by Hilary Kennedy, Miriam Landor and Liz Todd
Published by Jessica Kingsley Publishers, London
Reviewer: Dr Greg Pasco, Research Fellow
Centre for Research into Autism and Education, Institute of Education
When Chris asked me to review this book I agreed as a favour to him, but I wasn’t expecting to enjoy reading it or to learn anything of particular interest from it. Within half an hour of picking it up, however, I was loudly proclaiming its merits to my wife Anita, a speech and language therapist who works with young children. Now she wants my copy…
The obvious first question to ask about this book is “What is Video Interaction Guidance?”, which is helpfully answered by Hilary Kennedy in Chapter 1. She states that Video Interaction Guidance (VIG) is an “intervention where the clients are guided to reflect on video clips of their own successful interactions…in a process of change towards better relationships with others who are important to them.” (p.21). Subsequent chapters explain the breadth of contexts and important others that are the focus of VIG, from the relatively familiar approach aimed at promoting responsive and sensitive parental communication styles with infants and young children to the completely unfamiliar (to me at least) initiative to enhance interactions between lecturers and their students in higher education.
What holds the diverse applications of VIG together as a relatively coherent theme for this book is the underlying philosophical and theoretical orientation behind the use of video technology in relation to the facilitation of better communication and interaction and reflective practice. This is eloquently articulated by Colwyn Trevarthen in his contribution. For over four decades Trevarthen has been at the forefront of work that illuminates the dynamic and rhythmic nature of interactions between young infants and their mothers. He describes how he was introduced to the work of Harrie Biemans, one of the pioneers of VIG in the Netherlands:
One idea that grew from discussions with Harrie ….. was that [his] course on Video Home Training might parallel or reproduce the sequence of stages in communication with an infant – from ‘courteous’ proto-conversations of the early weeks, through the fun of games in the middle of the first year…preparing the way for object use and for language. (p.204)
Readers with experience of the range of communication-focused interventions for children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and their parents will be familiar with the Hanen More Than Words and the National Autistic Society’s EarlyBird programmes that use video feedback to enable parents to reflect upon and modify their interactions with their children. Mentioned briefly in Chapter 8, which focuses on ASD, the suggestion is that these approaches are probably only scratching at the surface of the potential benefits of VIG. Whilst the evidence base for VIG (along with many other approaches) in relation to ASD is still very limited, Ruben Fukkink, Hilary Kennedy and Liz Todd describe the growing body of evidence in support of VIG across the range of contexts in which it is used in Chapter 4. This includes large-scale, methodologically rigorous studies as well as more descriptive single case and case series studies. Relatively few of these studies have been conducted in the UK, but whilst the familiar appeal for more research is repeated here, this should not detract from what appears to be an impressive set of positive outcomes in support of the use of VIG and similar video-based approaches.
My one slight niggle with the book is that, given the wide range of applications of VIG, I don’t feel that it is appropriate to describe it as an ‘intervention’ – perhaps it would be more accurately characterised as an ‘approach’. This is an inspiring book for anyone engaged in working with young children with disabilities and their families, and should serve to broaden the understanding of how powerful this approach can be. However, regardless of our field of work, anyone whose life and work involves interaction and communication with people we care about, including our children, partners, friends and colleagues, might benefit from reading a few chapters from it. Now, what has Anita done with my copy?
Dr Greg Pasco, Research Fellow
Centre for Research into Autism and Education, Institute of Education
The Autistic Child’s Guide to How to Behave
02/06/11
The Autistic Child’s Guide to How to Behave introduces spark*, the Self-Regulation Program of Awareness and Resilience in Kids. spark* is an innovative programme for teaching self-regulation of behaviour, thinking and emotions to young children on the autism spectrum as well as those with other developmental disabilities.
I have to admit I’m a big Heather MacKenzie fan. That’s the bias out in the open. The Autistic Child’s Guide to How to Behave represents a really new direction in teaching. Heather describes her approach as establishing a ‘positive working alliance with a child’. It’s this mediational approach that’s key.
“For many years, I have watched these children grow up to be dependent on adults for absolutely everything that happens in their day. They wait to be told to do some things and not others; when to stop or start an activity; to calm down, stay still, even when to eat and sleep. They never get a chance to shift from being adult-regulated to being self-regulated,”
The book contains 69 step-by-step lessons for helping the child move from imitation of easy actions through to self-direction and self-control. What’s more they are fun (for therapist and child!).
The focus on ability and the positive belief that independence isn’t a pipe dream for these youngsters is stamped all over this brilliant book. Sometimes (with the best of intentions) we teach dependence rather than independence. This great resource shows us another way. Well done Heather.
I adapted one of the ‘lessons’ and incorporated it into a recent workshop with a group of support staff. We worked all morning on how we could improve a child’s “ignoring skills”! It was great to see the group get hold of this approach and run with it.
You can download one of the lesson activities here
The autistic child’s guide to how to behave – Introducing spark*, the Self-Regulation Program for Awareness and Resilience in Kids. Author Heather MacKenzie
I have to admit I’m a big Heather MacKenzie fan. That’s the bias out in the open. The Autistic Child’s Guide to How to Behave represents a really new direction in teaching. Heather describes her approach as establishing a ‘positive working alliance with a child’. It’s this mediational approach that’s key.
“For many years, I have watched these children grow up to be dependent on adults for absolutely everything that happens in their day. They wait to be told to do some things and not others; when to stop or start an activity; to calm down, stay still, even when to eat and sleep. They never get a chance to shift from being adult-regulated to being self-regulated,”
The book contains 69 step-by-step lessons for helping the child move from imitation of easy actions through to self-direction and self-control. What’s more they are fun (for therapist and child!).
The focus on ability and the positive belief that independence isn’t a pipe dream for these youngsters is stamped all over this brilliant book. Sometimes (with the best of intentions) we teach dependence rather than independence. This great resource shows us another way. Well done Heather.
I adapted one of the ‘lessons’ and incorporated it into a recent workshop with a group of support staff. We worked all morning on how we could improve a child’s “ignoring skills”! It was great to see the group get hold of this approach and run with it.
You can download one of the lesson activities here
The autistic child’s guide to how to behave – Introducing spark*, the Self-Regulation Program for Awareness and Resilience in Kids. Author Heather MacKenzie