Planning your intervention with Alex Kelly

Here are a few of my top tips for making your intervention work..

I like to put any intervention into the following four-step plan before I start my group or one-to-one sessions. This will help you to work out how best to work with someone on their social skills difficulties.

Step 1: The behaviour … what is it?

Make sure that you choose the right behaviour or skill to work on first. So, having assessed the person, you need to consider the hierarchy and the complexity of the skill you want to work on with them. Ask yourself: are you setting up the person to succeed? Is the behaviour too complex?

Now consider whether the behaviour has a function or a reason. Maybe the person is behaving in this way because of an underlying problem that has not been addressed, eg a sensory need. Or they may be getting something out of the behaviour: for example, people leave them alone and they like this.

Finally, try to really describe what the person is doing – the more detailed you can describe the behaviour, the more likely you are to be able to help the person understand what they are doing wrong. You may need to add how it might make other people feel or what they may think to give them insight, although I would do this jointly with the person.

Step 2: The rules … what are they?

We need to help people to understand what they should be doing instead – what are the rules?

What should be happening? So many adults I have worked with have asked me why they were never taught the rules as a child. Of course, before we can do that, we do need to know them ourselves, so that is where I hope the Talkabout resources will help you out!

Step 3: The motivation … what is it?

Every person you work with will need to be motivated at some level to come to your group, change their behaviour, and become more socially skilled. Often the key to success is to work out what the motivation is going to be for the person to want to change.

We cannot assume that all people are motivated by ‘being friendly’ or ‘friendly behaviour’ or ‘people will like me’ or ‘mum will be pleased’. It may be better to reward them with something: for example, an activity, a smiley-face chart or just saying ‘This is the polite thing to do’ or ‘This is the grown-up thing to do’. If we don’t consider the motivation, the intervention may fail.

Step 4: The strategy … which one is best?

There are many different ways of helping people to improve their social skills and usually the best intervention is the one that includes a number of them. There are eight main ways in which we can help someone.

1 The environment – in the school or at home. It is essential that the environment backs up what is being taught as much as possible. Think about getting all of the teaching staff on board with what you are working on. Making sure that everyone is encouraging and discouraging in the same way can go a long way to helping someone transfer those skills out of a group and into their everyday life. This doesn’t mean I wouldn’t work with someone if I can’t get the environment to back us up, but it may explain a slower progress. You may see people beginning to get the behaviour in certain situations but not all of them. This is OK. It shows you that the person has the ability to get it right when the environment is conducive.

2 Talk it through with them or use comic strip conversations. With many skills and behaviours, it is very helpful to talk it through with the person or to draw it using stick figures and speech bubbles. You will gain an insight into how they may describe what is happening and why it happens, which will help with your intervention.

3 Social storyTM. Carol Gray developed this approach in the early 1990s and I often use stories to help teach social skills. A social story gives someone insight into  their difficulties and helps them to know what they can do instead. It also contains perspective sentences about what other people may be feeling or thinking which can be very useful for people with ASD.

4 A visual cue or schedule. It is important to remember that many people are helped by working visually, so the worksheets and activities in this book will help, but people may also be helped by a prompt card or a poster displayed in the classroom. At our Day Service, ‘Speaking Space’, in the UK, we use a lot of ‘now and next’ symbolised strips which can work well to cue people in to what is expected of them in certain situations.

5 A reward system. Rewards can help if the motivation is very tangible: for example, stickers to get a financial reward or do an activity, or a certificate of achievement. Other rewards can include a special time with someone to talk about something specific – for example, 20 minutes at the end of the day to talk to their mum about dinosaurs. Any reward needs to work for the person, so you need to refer to their motivation.

6 Use of other media. Using DVDs and clips of cartoons or television programmes, or even video clips of you modelling behaviour, can really help to teach social skills. Many people find visual methods of learning much easier and showing a video will usually motivate most people. I often use this method in groups as well as in one-to-one sessions. The Talkabout DVD includes video clips of actors modelling inappropriate and appropriate behaviours for all of the key skills covered in Talkabout (Kelly, 2006).

7 Role play and modelling. In this book I often suggest using role play and modelling to help teach skills. Modelling is when the facilitators model a behaviour, both inappropriate and appropriate, and role play is when the group members practise the behaviour themselves.

Here are a few important points to remember when modelling:

• Keep it short and simple.

• Model one behaviour at a time.

• Start with bad behaviour and end with good.

• Never use the group members to help you model behaviours.

• Keep the situation as ‘real’ as possible – it is better to model a normal conversation between two group facilitators than to pretend that one is a child, shopkeeper or teacher.

• Ask the group what they thought was bad about the behaviour. What should have happened?

Here are a few important points to remember when role playing:

• The group members are asked to act a scenario or to practise a skill.

• It is a stressful experience for some people.

• Try a ‘getting into role’ exercise such as the magic carpet or twisting into a role like ‘Superman’.

• Remember to de-role, especially if the group members have played the part of someone else.

• Consider using puppets.

8 Social skills group. This is my favourite way to teach social skills and the Talkabout programme should give you all the resources you need to run a successful social skills group.

The advantages of group work over one-to-one work are as follows.

• It is a more natural and comfortable environment in which to learn.

• We learn from each other.

• It is easier to problem solve, play games and to set up role plays.

• It gives the opportunity to try out new skills in a safe environment.

• There is an opportunity to transfer skills to other staff, improving the chance of carry-over into the environment.

Extract from Talkabout 2e - LOOK INSIDE

Alex Kelly 
Speechmark author of TALKABOUT

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