How measuring your child's progress might actually hamper their progress!
Despite the apparent dryness of this year’s annual I.I. conference title – “Intensive Interaction - Evidencing the Outcomes”, the dilemma of measuring progress proved a popular and hot topic amongst practitioners.
Why so much interest?
Providing evidence of progress in I.I., or indeed any person-centred approach, is notoriously difficult - yet management systems, educational establishments and society demand it. Professionals also have a moral duty to prove that a particular intervention is beneficial and anyway, how else would we I.I. practitioners and parents prove to other people that Intensive Interaction works such wonders?
Traditional tools: tests, numbers, graphs, ticked boxes appeal to the professionals and parents but cannot measure the critical type of learning that I.I. brings about. And so the professionals gathered, keen to share and find out some answers.
The tyranny of measure
The true beauty of I.I. lies in the way we tune into our learners and base our interactions or teachings on where they are currently. We subtly vary our responses and teaching according to what we ‘read’ from our learner and we do this on a moment by moment basis. I am not aware of any other autism intervention that does this to the same extent as I.I..
The use of traditional measurement tools shifts the main focus of a session away from the learner’s mind, heart and body and onto the next goal to be achieved or the next box to be ticked. Thus we undermine our relationships, give less emphasis to the child’s current mindset: mood, needs, level of learning, motivation and interests. We begin to adopt a ‘teacher knows all, learner knows nothing’ type of attitude.
Just a performance?
We begin to view learners in terms of their achievements or lack of them. Sometimes this focus on ‘achievement’ takes on so much importance that we offer rewards to encourage it, placing further distance between us and our learner (perhaps reinforcing the learners’ relationships with their rewards). And, as keynote speaker Mark Barber asked at the conference: how can we tell that we’re not just seeing ‘the performance of communication, achievement or knowledge’ once the learner has worked out how to satisfy us in order to get that reward?’
This move away from agenda-less, learner-centred teaching in order to satisfy the system of measuring outcomes is what he referred to as ‘the tyranny of measure’.
The Learning Journey
I.I. is a process-therapy rather than an outcomes therapy. That means that the journey is more important than the destination and that the quality of the journey or the quality of our children’s encounters and relationships along the way are very closely connected to the quality and the richness of the learning taking place.
Our most vital learning is often messy, has no clear beginning and end, is internally-motivated and results in the most difficult-to-measure yet also the most crucial learning outcomes for our children, such as ‘happiness’, ‘ the ability to think independently’, ‘well-being’, ‘the ability to make and read subtle and changing facial expressions and body language’, ‘knowing how to connect to and learn from those around you’, ‘the ability to be flexible’, ‘self-esteem’, ‘a sense of humour’ and ‘resilience’. Mark Barber stressed that we never know what the learning outcomes of any particular session or encounter will be - we can only record and measure them retrospectively.
How I keep records
As both the mother of a child who has autism and an Intensive Interaction Coordinator who works mainly with families, I was asked to speak at this conference about my son Tom’s home programme and how we measure outcomes at home…
So why would a family want keep records?
I keep myself and Tom’s team motivated by reviewing records and seeing the huge amounts of progress he makes. Sometimes living with a child or seeing them regularly means that you don’t notice progress – in the same way that you don’t realise they’re growing - unless you measure it.
Keeping written and video-recorded records helps us to reflect on our skills and input as I.I. practitioners.
We might need to provide evidence to the LEA who release funds for Tom’s home programme.
I use written records and footage to train Tom’s team members and others I work with to use I.I.
I like to tell other people i.e., friends, family, or anybody who’ll listen about Tom’s successes!
Tom doesn’t go to school but other families use footage and written records to liaise with the child’s school or other institution.
A recent study noted that parents of children with autism and the professionals tend to have very different goals and objectives. (McConachie et al., 2015). Our goals tend to be much more holistic and general. The professionals’ tend to focus on the goals of one particular programme. I think the records I keep for Tom and that I encourage other families to keep reflect this ….
Carrying out a series of observations before starting I.I. is something that I wish I had done with Tom and that I recommend to other families. They are useful in so many ways! They help us.... slow us down, begin to think like I.I. parents, think out the practicialities of doing I.I., help us become more mindful parents and serve as a baseline assessment.
Video is the quintessential I.I. measuring tool. It captures wonderful, yet difficult-to-describe moments of progress. It is a great way to illustrate progress to other people. Often we notice more progress or ‘good things’ on video so it’s a great motivator and who doesn't want to see beautiful sessions of their child happily interacting? Incidentally, you can make great still shots from videos too! Lastly, seeing yourself on video really helps you to reflect on your technique.
Written records go in a page-a-day diary which doubles up as a family keepsake. We record progress as well as funny and cute stories in it and also staple in the odd example of Tom's writing (previously Tom only wrote out film credits). We retrospectively fill in gaps in his progress, e.g. "For a couple of months now Tom has been ..." We add more detailed descriptions of progress following discussions or detailed descriptions of videos.
Tom makes very significant progress in areas generally recognised as ‘typical school learning’ or ‘academic subjects’ so we keep what I call ‘retrospective lesson plans’ but, of course, we never know which ‘subjects’ might be covered in any particular session. Amongst Tom’s range of ‘subjects’ we see ‘modern languages,’ ‘the planets’, ‘story telling’, ‘physical education’, ‘drama’ ‘poetry’ and ‘maths’. To avoid the temptation to teach towards these outcomes, which would alter them from emergent outcomes to goals, we use words and phrases such as ‘gained experience in’, ‘gained competence in’ and ‘explored’.
In meetings we sometimes chose a particular activity of Tom’s and make a note of how it has grown, expanded and developed over the years.
Tom produces a lot of writing and some drawing. Sometimes we staple these into the diary to keep a record of how they change and progress.
We use an ‘interaction session sheet’ (a little bit like the one on page 96 of the I.I. handbook) which records some details of the interaction, significant moments and reflections on the practitioner’s technique.
If you have any questions on record-keeping or any other aspect of Intensive Interaction, please do not hesitate to contact me, either pm me on Facebook (Sara Moroza-James) or email me: smjiicoordinator@gmail.com
