Introduction
Today's session is the third of a four-part series and we are going to talk about effective strategies for decreasing challenging behavior in individuals with autism spectrum disorders. This is my favorite part of the course because now we talk about what to do. How do we change these behaviors? This is what we are going to talk about today. This is the nitty-gritty part, the strategies and ideas on how to teach new skills, how to reinforce, and all those wonderful things. We had one participant ask about toilet training, so I will make sure to address that at some point in our strategy section.
Thinking Differently
This video that we are going to watch is to get us started. It is called "Think Differently". Here in Oklahoma, we have a program that was started by a parent and is called Bees Knees. She had worked so hard getting her son, David, included in the regular education setting. Eventually, he graduated from high school. She thought “What do I do at this point? I have worked so hard.”
I do not know about other states, but here in Oklahoma there are not a lot of options for adults with autism. They graduate high school and then there is not much they can do. Some children with higher functioning autism, Asperger’s, with some supports might attend college. We have some attending college and then we have some who are at sheltered workshops. There are just not any good options. She created this organization called Bees Knees to address this population. They have a director and they work on building upon all the strengths of all these young individuals with autism.
They are all out of high school and they range in age probably 21 to maybe 30. They have put together these different art projects. The art projects help pay for them to do different activities. It has just become a statewide organization. They created this video and they have already put together one movie. They are now working towards their next movie. It is really neat. This video that you are going to see is a short snip-it, a kind of introduction, of their philosophy and how they really are trying to encourage everyone to think differently about autism, and to really think about their strengths versus just their deficits.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbCZ6ezK3uM&feature=youtu.be
That again was a parent support group called Oklahoma Autism here and they have been very proactive in encouraging people to think differently, and part of what they have done is through the Bees Knees organization. Last year the Bees Knees organization commissioned all the artwork at our clinic. It is beautiful. It is things that we could never imagine doing. It was pretty amazing.
Positive Behavior Supports (PBS)
The whole premise behind all the training is on Positive Behavior Supports. I do not know if you have been to the PBIS.org website, but they have a lot of helpful information and good forms for helping with positive behavior supports. Positive Behavior Supports is empirically based. It is all based on the data. It focuses on the why behind the behavior.
Last week that was primarily what we talked about in our course, identifying the ABC’s of behavior and figuring out the why behind why children keep doing the things that they are doing. It is based on the assumption that behavior keeps occurring because it is reinforced. Children keep doing the same behavior, not just children but adults as well. Everyone keeps doing the same behavior, because for some reason it is reinforced. We have to figure out why it is reinforced to change that behavior.
