Page 27 - SEN116 January-February 2022

Autism
About the authors
Dr Rebecca Docherty is an independent educational psychologist (psychologyfoundations.co.uk) who offers supervision and consultancy at Kisimul School.
Alex Robinson has been an assistant educational psychologist at Kisimul School for 9 years. She conducts intervention sessions with the young people in relation to SEMH topics or cognition and learning outcomes.
The intervention was carried out in conjunction with Nicola Williams, a speech and language therapist who has been working with Kisimul School since September 2020.
■ Expressing musical preferences.
on the objects without visual supports, only requiring a slight prompt of “Toby th...”. As the sessions progressed, he no longer required verbal prompts and began to spontaneously verbalise his thoughts about the items.
We could see that Toby was starting to embed this new concept as he began to verbalise it outside of the structured session, commenting that he liked things “in my head”, or expressing emotions with comments such as, “I feel frightened in my head”. He was developing an awareness that thinking and feeling happened internally.
‘I like thinking about minecraft’
Toby began to consistently express what he liked to think about, as well as that thinking happens in the head/brain. He would tell us:
“I like thinking about skeletons” “I like thinking about Minecraft”
‘What’s your favourite thing to think about?’
Toby grasped that his peers’ talking mats indicated their thoughts. He began to show curiosity about his peers’ thoughts, asking a peer:
“Louise, what’s your favourite thing to think about in your head?”
Toby did this whilst looking directly at Louise, before waiting for a response. It showed us that he was developing an understanding that she had thoughts in her head that were different from his own, and that he could not know these thoughts unless he asked her.
Feedback from Toby’s mum, Carla, showed that he was generalising this new concept of different people having different thoughts into the home. She shared examples of family conversations:
Toby: ‘Do you want to play Minecraft?
Brother: ‘No Toby. I don’t like Minecraft. I think it’s boring’ Toby: ‘Oh I like Minecraft. What do you like to play? Brother: ‘I like to play Fortnite.’
Mum: ‘I like doughnuts’
Toby: ‘I don’t like doughnuts. I don’t like the sugar on them. I like cookies, not doughnuts.’
Differences can be okay
There was an emphasis through the sessions that people can think the same or differently about things, and that this is ‘okay’. The concept that it is okay to ‘change your mind’ was discussed too. This was tricky at the start. In the first few sessions, Toby would express confusion when voicing that he ‘liked’ something, if previously he had stated that he ‘disliked’ it, trying to amend his sentence to keep it in line with the original statement.
With revisiting this concept and staff modelling, Toby began to grasp this new concept, thoughts could change! Eventually this also became integrated into his spontaneous language. He told us:
“I changed my mind, I like it today”.
Moving forward
Toby worked hard in the sessions and it was great to see him clarifying some tricky new cognitive concepts. His emerging understanding within the structured sessions was a good start, but his spontaneous use of newly acquired ideas in real life situations meant he could make genuine use of them. This was made possible through the reinforcement of new key learning, modelling of new language both in and out of sessions, and sticking with learning content until generalisation had finally taken place.
Toby’s real name has been used here. This is at the request of his mother, to honour Toby’s role in the piece of work. Toby’s views were sought regarding publication of this article and use of his name. Toby is unlikely to have full understanding of these concepts, but showed enthusiasm about sharing this piece of work with other people.
senmagazine.co.uk
SEN116
27