How the Rapid Prompting Method Gave Me A Voice

March 29, 2010

My son, Jeremy Sicile-Kira, wrote the article below about the Rapid Prompting Method (RPM) which appeared in the January 2010 issue of The Autism File. If you watch the HBO movie on April 2, A Mother’s Courage: Talking Back to Autism, you will see  Soma Mukhopadhyay teaching a child using RPM.

Litewriter

litewriter

How the Rapid Prompting Method Gave Me A Voice

Having Autism is hard enough, especially when it comes to communication for people who are non-verbal like myself. The Rapid Prompting Method (RPM) is not only a learning method but a door to open-ended communication for different people with autism. It is my good fortune to have been taught by Soma  Mukhopadhyay, who pioneered  RPM.

Soma, originally from India,  has a son with autism named Tito, who is the mighty inspiration  behind RPM.  Soma needed to create a method that would help him not only  to learn, but to communicate as well. Soma was frustrated with the schools in India, where they lived, because they wouldn’t accept Tito as a student. Just like they told my parents in France, where I was born, they told Soma that Tito was mentally retarded. I was “diagnosed” with mental retardation too, yet here we are both using RPM to discuss our similar past experience.

RPM is a method that  can be used with different people as it is adapted to the needs of each individual. Some are auditory learners, some are visual learners and the RPM teacher uses the learning channel that is best for that person.  RPM uses a “teach and ask” paradigm for eliciting responses through intensive verbal, visual and or tactile prompts.  RPM starts with the idea that all students are capable of learning. Despite behaviors, the academic focus of every RPM lesson is designed to activate the reasoning part of the brain so the students becomes distracted and engaged in the learning. The prompting competes with student’s self-stimulatory behavior. Continue reading »

Successful Inclusion

March 22, 2010
Nancy Brady

Nancy Brady

Providing Literacy Opportunities to Students with Autism

For those who are not aware, once a month I moderate webinars for momsfightingautism.com. It’s a great resource because I interview all kinds of experts working in the field of autism and you can  send in your own questions to be answered. You can listen in for free live the night of; after that you can download it for a fee  by that organization.

Tuesday March 23 at 6:00-8:00 PST, my guest is Nancy Brady, MA-EdSP, ATS. Nancy is an Inclusion Specialist and Assistive Technology Specialist who strives to include those with the most severe disabilities in general education classrooms.    She has been working for the past 7 years on including those who have autism and are nonverbal in the general education classroom environment, advocating and emphasizing literacy opportunities through the use of Assistive Technology.

Nancy is actually my son’s inclusion specialist, so I can personally attest to her talents. Life has been much easier for me in terms of my son’s education and inclusion in the general education population. We had a willing school and wonderful staff, but having Nancy’s expertise in there has made my son’s experience so much more effective.

The topic of the webinar is Successful Inclusion:  Providing Literacy Opportunities to Students with Autism and some of the points Nancy will be covering include: Inclusion as a philosophy; Accommodations vs. Modifications; “Bottom up” support strategies; Teachers’ attitudes toward inclusion; Literacy Ladders vs. Literacy webs; How to create a successful team; Assistive Technology in the general education classroom; Independent Yes/No and A-B-C-D multiple choice – high tech vs. low tech; Motor planning in Autism; Presuming Competence as the Least Dangerous Assumption.

More things to know about Nancy:  Nancy has a Bachelor’s Degree in Communication Studies and Sociology from UC Santa Barbara, and a Masters Degree in Special Education from Chapman University.  She received her certificate in Assistive Technology through the Orange County Department of Education and California State University, Dominguez Hills in 2009. Nancy completed the Mentorship Project for Communication Partner Support through WAPADH in Santa Fe Springs in 2008 and the FC Institute Summer Conference at Syracuse University in New York in 2005 and 2006.  Nancy is a professional member of RESNA and a parent member of TACA.   Nancy’s agency, S.T.A.R. – Supported Typing and Autism Resources, is located in Laguna Hills, CA and teaches those who are unable to communicate verbally an alternative communication strategy using Assistive Technology.

Also, this week, my latest book 41 Things to Know About Autism is being published by Turner, just in time for April – Autism Awareness Month. I wrote this book for the parents who wanted a book to hand their relatives and neighbors so they could ‘get’ what they are living though. It’s a small book and a quick read, great for spreading community awareness.

Back to School 101: Tips for general education teachers

March 20, 2010

Tips for general education teachers

Back in August, I wrote this post for my Autism and Adolescence column in the Examiner.com, and I’m re-posting it here because I’ve received a few emails with questions recently from general education teachers. Maybe there are others who could use these little nuggets of information.

Often junior high and high school teachers have teenagers with Asperger’s Syndrome included in their classrooms, and are not given much in the way of useful information. This column will provide a few practical tips that may be helpful to educators with no practical knowledge about students on the spectrum.  For more information, check out this webpage.

Asperger’s or High Functioning Autism (HFA) is often described as an ‘invisible disability’ because students on the spectrum do not look different frorm most students. Most teachers expect them to act like everyone else, but often the student gets in trouble for behaving in a way that seems rude, disruptive or non-compliant.  A diagnosis of Asperger’s or HFA is based on challenges in the areas of communication, and social relationships, as well as what appears to be an obsession or passion for a particular area of interest.

Here are some tips that may help the school year go a little easier for you and your student on the spectrum:

  • It’s a good idea to have a hard copy of the homework assignment to hand to your students on the spectrum, because most of them are mono-channel. This means they cannot look at the assignment on the board, write it down and still be able to focus on what you are saying. By the time they have finished copying down the assignment, they have missed your intro to that day’s lesson. This mono-channel aspect makes it hard for a student to multi-task, and by only requiring him/her to do one thing at a time, it will be much easier for the student to stay focused. Continue reading »

One Small Step Towards Self-Regulation

February 6, 2010

How to teach your teen with autism to request a break

Self –regulation is a needed life skill  not practiced  by most teenagers. Often teens on the spectrum need sensory breaks to help them self-regulate, yet some are unable to communicate the need for one. If you are a parent or an educator, you may want to consider teaching the teen to request a break using a “ I need a break” card.

Let’s  say you have a student that you work one-on-one with for a one hour slot of time. Every time you sit down to work with him, after about 20 minutes he gets up and leaves the worktable and there is no holding him back.  What you need to do is teach him to communicate to you when he needs a break,  and allow him  to have  those needed breaks within reason.   Here is one way to do that: Continue reading »

Dr. Bernard Rimland 1928 – 2006

January 27, 2007

Dr. Bernard Rimland passed away just a few days before this past  Thanksgiving and will be mourned by many.  At times controversial, always searching for answers, he changed the way autism was viewed  worldwide. Those of us who knew him as Bernie will always feel a twinge of sorrow around this holiday, a reminder of how  much we have  to thank this pioneer who  played  David to the medical establishment’s Goliath.  As  research would prove, fighting Goliath  was not a lost cause  but a righteous endeavor.

The first time I heard  Dr. Bernard Rimland’s name  was the  day after a visit with my son to a psychoanalyst  for the only treatment on offer for autism  in Paris at the time. The bookshelf in the  waiting room   included  a few copies of ‘The Empty Fortress’ by Bruno  Bettleheim,   who believed that autism was a reaction to bad parenting and expounded  the ‘refrigerator mother’ theory of autism.

Dr. Rimland’s  book,  ‘Infantile Autism: The Syndrome and Its Implications for a Neural Theory of Behavior’(1964),  would have been a  better choice in this psychoanalyst’s  waiting room. In his book,  Dr. Rimland  lambasted  the then generally held view that autism was a psychological disorder, brought on by cold and unloving parents. His conclusion was  that autism was the result of   biochemical defects underlain, perhaps, by a genetic predisposition, but ultimately triggered by environmental assaults. This book grew out of the research he did searching for answers when his son, Mark,  born in 1956, displayed behaviors which are now easily recognizable as symptoms of autism but were rarely seen in those days.

The psychoanalyst I visited informed  me that  my son had autistic behaviors due to separation issues from breast feeding. This she  gleaned form watching my son play with two round objects, and  crawl across the floor  in an attempt to retrieve  one that he accidentally dropped.  Following this Allen Woodyesque moment, and looking for some  useful advice, I called an old friend and former colleague from a state hospital  for the developmentally disabled in California.   She gave me the telephone number  for  the Autism Research Institute, the non-profit  founded by Dr.Bernard Rimland in 1967. Continue reading »

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