Nesrhtens…..

Today I spoke to some special educators working in a Kindergarten criticizing ABA and the work we are doing on EIBI with a child, because it was in conflict with their ethic code as special educators. This makes me both sad and somewhat angry. This is obviously based on lack of knowledge on what ABA is, both the fundamental views, principles and the application. Their critic was that we did not treat children as independent human beings when we did the ABA-program.

And this can only come about if you do not understand ABA. Behavior analysis is all about teaching integrity and independence, and the primary goal is to arrange the learning environment to make each child make use of their strengths to maximize their potential and learn as many independent skills as possible. The ABA program focuses on the child learning as he or she has a great time, laughing a lot, and focuses on teaching the child to make choices, influence their environment and be independent, so the need for extra support is minimized.

I´m next week going to attend one of their staff meetings, and hope we can sort most of the misconceptions out… I really hope we some time in the future get past these discussions based on ideology and misunderstandings, and can focus on giving each child the best treatment and education possible!

Searching through tweets using tweetDeck with the keyword autism I again came over what seems like a great website concerning autism – AutismSpot.

This website is like many other great sites founded by parents of children with autism, who in 2007 founded ProjectLD. ProjectLD “seeks to change the world through digital education, information and social networking.” This project is a private organization. So Autismspot´s mission is to “Empowering the Autism Community™.”

It looks like a well designed and good maintained web site with lots of great information. You should really visit the site and read some information or watch the great videos.

In the previous weeks I have been doing a lot of assessments using Dr. Sundbergs VB-MAPP. As I have written previously it´s a great assessment tool to design and monitor ABA programs for early learners with autism (probably others also..). And I´m now using VB-MAPP instead of ABLLS-R. This to get some more experience with VB-MAPP, maybe I will use ABLLS-R for some children in the future. I´m not sure yet.

As it´s a great tool, there are some things I struggle with so far. This may be due to lack of experience with the assessment tool, or is it due to the design of VB-MAPP?

The element of VB-MAPP that I so far experience as a weakness of the tool, it that to many milestones seems to be done by clinical judgement, and is difficult and seems impossible to test objectively in a test-session. This also includes some of the milestones that’s marked with T for Testing. I´m of course going to get more experience, and exchange my experience with others to see if there are smarter and better ways for doing this. And of course I´m really interested in hearing your experience……

British researchers has discovered that finger lengths may yield if a person has autism or not. I´m amazed to read what autism research spends time on, and at first sight this seems meaningless! But as the researchers stat this research is linked to other genetic research, and by linking this to high testosterone and genetics contribute to the important research on causes of autism.

Most interesting about this possible sign or pointer is that the “relative finger length is determined in utero by about 14 weeks´gestation an does not change as we age.” This opens great possibilities in preventing autism and early intervention! Maybe one can identify children with high risk of autism before birth and implement effective interventions from birth……..

I have now installed WPtouch so this blog is now optimized for iPhone and iPod Touch. This will of course not affect the regular site, but only if you browse this blog with an iPhone or iPod Touch.