The Common Core Standards are Right, and RTI Won’t Work

 

This is part of a presentation I gave with my friend, Rae Leeper, at the YAI International Convention in NYC this year. The Common Core Curriculum is the right way to go for all kids, and especially for kids with developmental challenges of relating and communicating. The way behaviorists work with these kids, Response to Intervention (RTI) worked alright with the memory based No Child Left Behind, (which left everyone behind), but does not work at all with the Common Core Standards. Behaviorists are left doing an ineffective intervention faster and faster to try to meet the Common Core Standards, but they cannot do it. I predict that in two years everyone will be clamoring to do our brand of respectful, developmental, individualized, child centered intervention and teaching.

Dr. Tippy Won’t Do That

 

This is little piece of a case conference I ran at the Rebecca School a couple of weeks ago. These weekly conferences include the team working with the child, the parents, and the entire 120 person staff of the school. The team talks about their program and the rest of the staff and I offer suggestions to make the program better. This clip is me talking about a child who loves the tiny details of a small locking block set, and a particular type of train set, and how he can see the trees but not the forest. I tell the staff to throw out all the tiny detailed stuff in order to invite the child into the world. I also talk about the tiny frustrations that lead to every child, not neurotypical and neurotypical alike, to be able to tolerate frustration and the challenges of the everyday world. Children beginning to understand that they have the inner resources to handle challenges is what leads to children seeing challenges as interesting problems to be solved, as opposed to seeing them as insurmountable frustrations to be controlled by rigidly sticking to set patterns.

ABA Detox, Part 5

 

This is Part 5 of a lecture I gave at Rebecca School about ABA Detox, the term we coined to talk about the difficulties children who have had a lot of ABA treatment sometimes have when they get into a respectful, appropriate developmental setting. I get a chance to talk briefly about language, and when children start talking as they move up developmentally. It is touching to me, that when I pause in the lecture and turn to the audience, that they all know that there are three words every parent wants to hear from their child.

ABA Detox, Part 4

 

This is part 4 of a lecture I gave at the Rebecca School in which I talked about the detox from applied behavior analytic treatment. The difficulty thinking that we see in kids is the side effect of a commonly applied treatment. Behavioral, memory based education, for any kid, causes trouble thinking. This is why the Common Core Standards are causing such troubles. They are thinking based standards, and are in fact what we need to teach, but our entire education system, for kids neurotypical, and neurodiverse, has been wrong-headedly memory and behaviorally based. ABA treatment causes problems for kids who get it, and this lecture, with my Pop Corn Treatment suggestion, talks about one way in which we try to help kids find their thinking selves.

ABA Detox, Part 3

This is part three of a lecture I gave at the Rebecca School talking about “ABA Detox.” This is the process of moving from a world where you are told what to do at every minute, to a world where people respect your thought and your intention, and give you some freedom. Kids in this circumstance have trouble even recognizing that they have a thought, never mind that they have a right to act on the thought!

ABA Detox, How to Help Kids with ASD Get Over ABA, Part 2

Here is the second part of a training I did at the Rebecca School, as a prologue to a case presentation on a kid who came to our school, and then was struggling as a result of what we call “ABA Detox.” This is the state of affairs where a kid who has become used to being told, “prompted”, about everything all day long becomes paralyzed and anxious when he is given the freedom to think. Kids detoxing from ABA don’t recognize that they have a right to have a thought, or they don’t even recognize that they have a thought on which they could act.

In this second part of the training, I talk about why parents go along with ABA, despite their misgivings, and then, finally leave ABA for more developmentally appropriate, effective, respectful treatment.

ABA Detox, How to Help Kids with ASD Get Over ABA

 

In this video I talk about the ways in which an ABA intervention can create the problems it is designed to try to help with. I talk about how ABA takes the child’s mistaken belief that things are causally linked because they are linked in time and space and actually uses that as the basis for the intervention. That is prescribing the Problem as the Solution for the Problem! So, when we initially see kids for DIR/Floortime support, we see a period of ABA Detox, where the kid has to learn that he or she has ideas, even what an idea might be, and that he is free to act on his or her ideas.

I think ABA causes many of the symptoms we have come to associate with ASD.

While you’re here, take a quick look at my new, updated website. I went for an entirely different look. Click here for Gil’s New Website.

Dr. Tippy Explains DIR/Floortime

On my radio show, Respecting Autism, on the Coffee Klatch Special Needs Radio Network this past Sunday, I did a show where I explained the basics of DIR/Floortime. I did the show at listeners’ requests, because there are plenty of people in this country who do not know about DIR, and who cannot get information on it. This intervention, created by Stanley I. Greenspan, MD,  is the respectful, effective, developmental support for Autism Spectrum Disorders that we use at Rebecca School, and in my private practice and consulting. I mentioned ICDL as the place to get this training, and my friends Jake Greenspan and Tim Bleecker of the Floortime Center as another source for services and training. All of those links will take you to some understanding of DIR/Floortime, they are all good resources. Listen to the radio show here, or download it as a podcast on itunes. Just type in Gil Tippy under podcasts. It’s free!

Gil Tippy has a Simple Mind, the Final Installment

The end of a training I gave at the Rebecca School on how to work simply, effectively and respectfully in the world of developmental challenges. This episode includes goals for science from simple curriculum, and includes some homework for the original audience of the training, and maybe, for you as well. Can you make simple, conscious decisions to move into the world of symbolism and abstraction, and improve your teaching, simply?

We make things more complicated than they need to be. Good developmental work is more effective than convoluted, technology bound interventions, and make for better workplaces, happier staff, and better results for consumers. Change can come quickly, and easily, and it only takes someone to guide you on your adventure.

Gil Tippy Has a Simple Mind, Part 3: Foundation Academics, Symbolism, Abstraction and How to Write Goals from Simple Curriculum

 

 

In Part 3 of this lecture, I discuss simple ideas, like how you came to know that when two things are next to each other, they have a relationship, and that there is a meaning to that relationship. This seemingly simple concept, so often difficult for kids and adults with developmental challenges, is at the core of many much more complex academics. I go on to discuss many other seemingly simple concepts, without which you cannot enter kindergarten, but which get passed over in traditional curriculums, and typical support for kids with developmental challenges. I created a term, “Foundation Academics”, which I first presented in a lecture at Rebecca School seven years ago, to describe all of the basic curriculum which really needs be the basis of any support for persons with developmental challenges. I also talk about the ease with which you could write meaningful, measurable academic goals from such a seemingly simple curriculum.