Sunday, July 11, 2010

More again on DIR/Floortime Institute

Sunday, July 11, 2010

Today will be a short entry.

I am impressed by the kind of conversations that occur here on a regular basis, conversations filled with love and hope for the children. There is a powerful optimism here about treating children in a positive, developmental, fun manner. This work is built on the research in attachment neurobiology, an area in which I will read deeply this summer. It is not a literature that lends itself to research on specific skills, discrete skills, single-subject research that is the domain of the ABA literature and world. Yet it is measurable, and there is research to support it, research that is continuing and much needed.

My question and task is: How to marry the worlds of ABA and developmental approaches? I do not believe that we should throw out ABA...there is too much benefit to it, too much it has accomplished. And yet ABA is limited in what it can teach a child or a family; it is time for addition of more approaches.
Posted by at 7:46 AM
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1 comments:

  1. Susan,

    I wrote another comment that, due to the requirement to log in, I could not post so this one will be shorter: I'm reading your blog entries about the DIR conference with great interest. I serve currently as the program director of Colegio Monarch Guatemala in Guatemala City. Our assessor / mother school is The Monarch School in Houston, Texas, which has a DIR-certified therapist; we hope to be able to send one of our teachers to the summer institute in the very near future.

    At our school we are also working to marry ABA (which certainly has more research supporting it) with DIR. We work with a levels system (see www.monarchschool.org for a description in English), and so we find that some of our students at the first, "Novice" level need work in acquiring those prerequisite skills of following adults' instruction (or orienting to adults, which of course DIR also works on). As well, I think ABA does a more direct job of modifying certain behaviors that stand in the way of having that consensual framework. However, using our relationship-based, developmental approach, we have been able to achieve amazing results in the Monarch School and at Colegio Monarch.

    I'd love to engage with you in more conversation about DIR and what you've learned. I think your questions are just great!

    Tran Nguyen Templeton
    Colegio Monarch Guatemala
    ttempleton@colegiomonarch.edu.gt
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