My first SIG: Intensive Interaction & PODD

On Monday I attended my first SIG.  The London Autism SIG.  I had no clue what to expect and was going alone, so armed with my Kindle and my diary I prepared to be sat alone not being able to network with anyone.  How wrong was I! I met a lovely NQP to start with and she told me all about her past 6 months working and how autism was a new area to her so she thought she’d join the SIG.  Then a lady she knew arrived and I got talking to her, followed by another lady who sat to my left who also joined in.  It was lovely.  The SIG hadn’t even started and I was beginning to feel like a real SLT, able to discuss clients and other SLTs I knew. 





Graham Firth

The first presenter of the day was Graham Firth.  He has a lot of experience in Intensive Interaction and is the current project leader for it in the Leeds Partnership Trust.  He also has a book out about it and has developed the Framework for Recognising Attainment in Intensive Interaction.  The FRA is a tool I’ve been using recently with my Communication Partner as it is really easy to use and shows clearly where my client is at.  But on Monday, Graham talked about how to use it most effectively and boy oh boy is there ways for me to improve my recording of intensive interaction! I was also surprised as there were activities to watch a videoclip of II and then map it to the framework, I was surprised that so many of us had different opinions about which level the client was at.  This made me realise that best practice for II, may in fact be video recording the interaction and gathering a colleague or two to discuss where you may place them on the FRA.  This way you will get to hear peoples clinical reasoning out loud and develop your own.  It was a packed hour with lots to learn about the framework and great opportunities to practise it, but by then I was bursting for a drink and a stretch and before I knew it, it was break time. 

After the tea break Hayley Parfett, an Australian SLT now currently working in the UK.  She came to talk about a method of AAC called PODD (Pragmatic Organisation Dynamic Display).  Now I had never heard of this before and upon showing us a big hefty book chocker full of symbols I began to doubt this method.  Would a child with autism who was reluctant to engage in communication actually use a book of symbols so big? Then Hayley said “How often do you provide a system with just the words that you know they are able to achieve?” “How are you pushing your clients to learn and to grow?” – Well, she certainly had my attention! She stated that we need to widen our expectations of our clients and not be masked by what we have seen them achieve.  And that is exactly what PODD does, whilst a child may not know the symbols or words to start with, when adults, staff, family are facilitating their speech/communication with the symbols within the book, the adult is facilitating the child to learn that they can use these too.  She then went on to ask us, if we had the option to leave the SIG right now, and be free in London, with no responsibilities, what would we like to do with our afternoons? Then she produced two pictures, one of the big ben and one of tower bridge.  Then she said “which one do you want to do?” “you choose”. 

 

Well, it was fair to say nobody in the room had even had these two options in mind, and in fact we didn’t want to choose either of those 2 pictures.  Hayley then detailed that often this happens, we give our clients a choice of 2, in a situation where there could be endless choices and then we view our client as being incapable of making a choice if they don’t make one out of the two limited ones presented.  That, she stated, was what PODD also tried to achieve, to give a range of possibilities to the child to support them to be able to communicate.  I am hoping to learn more about PODD and read up on the evidence base, but I wonder how much these display communication books are currently being used? I haven't come across PODD before, have you?

Overall, it was a very interesting thought provoking day, which not only supported my skills using the FRA for II, but also began to change my views on communication and how we work with people with autism.  I will definitely be going to the full day SIG in June that is for sure!