Autistic Students

Working with autistic students is something that I truly cannot wait to do. For an in-field experince, I was assigned to work at Little Tree Preschool for a semester. This school and the staff who work there truly have my heart. They do an amazing job with their autistic children, and the kids are advancing at an unbelievable pace.

This school practices ABA, Applied Behavior Analysis, which in my opinion is the very best practice for autistic children. I feel that these children advance far beyond others who are not using this analysis. Applied behavior analysis (ABA) is the science of applying experimentally derived principles of behaviorism to modify behavior. ABA takes what we know about behavior and uses it to bring about changes of the behavior (frequency, topography, latency, speed, fluency). The behavior is analyzed utilizing behavior assessment to determine the functional relationship of the behavior within the environment(Wikipedia).

I found this conversation off of this website
Here's how a trained person might make this an opportunity for practicing conversation skills:

Teacher: Hi, Alex, are you excited about Christmas?
A: [no response]
Teacher: Are you excited about Christmas? Say, Yeah, I want to open my...
A: Yeah, I want to open my presents!
Teacher: [Smile] Me too! What presents did you ask for?
A: I asked for presents.
Teacher: What presents did you ask for? Say, For Christmas, I asked for...
A: I asked for a bike. For Christmas.
Teacher: Cool! [Small tickle] Are you excited about Christmas?
A: Yeah, I want a bike.
Teacher: [Bigger tickle] A bike! That's great! I've got my tree all decorated with ornaments. I put lots of ornaments on MY tree. [Point to A's tree.]
A: I put heart ornaments on my tree.
Teacher: Alex, that's so great! [Great big tickle]
A: Ahhhhh! Cut it out!

There are six main ways that ABA positively affects children with Autism
I found this information at this website (ShapingBehavior.com)

1.to increase behaviors (eg reinforcement procedures increase on-task behavior, or social interactions);
2.to teach new skills (eg, systematic instruction and reinforcement procedures teach functional life skills, communication skills, or social skills);
3.to maintain behaviors (eg, teaching self control and self-monitoring procedures to maintain and generalize job-related social skills);
4.to generalize or to transfer behavior from one situation or response to another (eg, from completing assignments in the resource room to performing as well in the mainstream classroom);
5.to restrict or narrow conditions under which interfering behaviors occur (eg, modifying the learning environment); and
6.to reduce interfering behaviors (eg, self injury or stereotypy).

I hope this information has been helpful to you. I am clearly a fan of ABA, and being a future Early Childhood SPE teacher, I will certainly use its practices.