More DIR Thoughts

I am about to head into the 4th day of this DIR/Floortime conference/institute. Last night I experienced "information overload"....one of the presentations I attended was a comparison of traditional speech therapy methods and developmental interventions. Of course, given that the video clips were chosen by the presenters to give a 'nice' picture of developmental therapies, the contrast was stark. The traditional therapies were stilted, awkward at best, laughable at worst...and the developmental therapies were lively, fun, engaging, warm and friendly. My first reaction was that the developmental approaches were clearly successful with the younger, early developing children, and harder to document for the older children.

I did attend two fascinating sessions that I will report on later, due to my need to re-read my notes to fully understand them: (1) A session on the neurobiology of attachment, and the neurobiology of autism, showing a great deal of overlap, and (2) a summary of the research supporting DIR/Floortime, which I will also take some time to summarize. I will just say here that the research on DIR/Floortime is much more limited than that on ABA, but the two types of research are decidedly different.

One thing is for sure: with high affect and child-directed activities, the engagement (participation) in activities is much higher in DIR/Floortime than in traditional ABA. That said, a talented teacher using ABA and creativity can get high engagement from his/her students. It is also much easier to document specific skills progress in ABA, which is very fulfilling (reinforcing) for the teacher and families. Which to use? My thinking right now is that it is not an either/or phenomenon, but a marriage of approaches. At the moment, I don't see DIR replacing ABA anytime soon, although the videos from DIR schools are very compelling.

One thought: If childhood is supposed to be fun, then go with DIR/floortime. If childhood is supposed to be about acquiring discrete, specific skills, then go ABA.

More later!