The Theory Behind TALKABOUT

TALKABOUT was first developed in the early 1990s when I was working as a speech and language therapist in London, UK. I was particularly interested in social skills but was frustrated by two aspects of my work as a therapist. First, there was nothing in the literature to guide me on where to start intervention following assessment; and second, my experience showed me that I was not always successful in what I was trying to teach and I could not always predict which children were going to improve and which were not. I set about to solve these two problems over a period of four years.

I started my investigations at a college of further education where I was working with 60 students who had a mild to moderate intellectual disability. We assessed all of the young people I was working with using an adapted social skills assessment from the Personal Communication Plan by Alex Hitchings and Robert Spence – now published in Kelly (2000). The students were involved in this assessment which gave us some insight into their own awareness of their difficulties. From these initial results, we grouped students into their main area of need: body language, conversational skills and assertiveness. We evaluated success through retesting on the original assessment and also compared students with poor and good awareness of their needs.

The results were fascinating. They showed that the students who had been working on their conversational skills progressed more if they had good existing non-verbal skills (ie body language), and students who had been working on their assertiveness progressed significantly more if they had good existing non-verbal and verbal skills.

In addition, we found that students who had poor self and other awareness struggled with all aspects of the work. From this, we established a hierarchy which forms the basis of the Talkabout resources.

Over the next four years, we piloted this programme using different client groups and a group of willing therapists from throughout the UK. We all found consistently that the success of intervention increased if non-verbal behaviours were taught before verbal behaviours, and if assertiveness was taught last (Kelly, 1996).

This original hierarchy then formed the basis of the first Talkabout book (Kelly, 1996) but it has been adapted over the years to include self-esteem and friendship skills. The hierarchy now looks as follows.

Using this hierarchical approach, teachers and therapists can start work with the person at a level that is appropriate to that person’s needs. They can then progress up the levels to enable the person to reach their full potential, ensuring that basic skills are taught before the more complex ones. So a student who needs work on all areas of his social skills would start work first on his body language skills and then would progress to working on his paralinguistic skills, then his conversational skills and, finally, his assertiveness skills.

If this student also had poor self-awareness and low self-esteem, he would need to work on this before working on his social skills. And if a student also had difficulties with his friendship skills, he would only work on developing these skills if he had good self-awareness and good nonverbal and verbal skills.

Of course, success is not just about what you teach first; it is also down to how you teach it.

Extract from Talkabout 2e - LOOK INSIDE

Alex Kelly 
Speechmark author of TALKABOUT

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What do you think about when you have toothache?

Please consider that question before we move on?

I was in Bradford recently. Facilitating a team of workers who are on the frontline
and facing difficult behaviour and aggression daily. Yet they love the young people they work with.

Those who had been excluded from school, little response, little change and little sign of hope. Still each of the group yearned to be of developmental assistance to them.

I asked them that question:

'When you have toothache, what do you think about?'
No pause.
An immediate answer from one worker
as we all stood in the circle -
"Toothache"
was the answer.

If we have toothache we struggle to concentrate on anything else.
Restless as a wolf - we feel like the cheese is falling off our cracker. Nothing else really matters.

We can see a person's behaviour but we cannot see their experience.
We can be so preoccupied by their behaviour that we don't see
beyond behaviour.

Difficult behaviour can get under our skin.
Feelings rise within us.
As emotionally intelligent as we may be the feelings we have stimulate us, sometimes, to make a regrettable response.

This is applicable in the staff room, the classroom, the team meeting, the prison, the street, the office, at home, and certainly not only when we are transacting with humans with special needs.

The way I work on awareness and skill development is by using Experiential Exercises including Blob Tree Tools.

The objectives are:

•          Become more aware of our own feelings.
•          Becoming more able to get into contact with them.
•          Develop emotional literacy by being able to give each a feeling name.

So there in Bradford we throw the Blob Feelings Ball around the circle.
'Motion changes emotion' I say.

An activity, doing, is the best way to learn - to practise.
So the ball is thrown around the circle, the miss-catching it is part of the-bouncing-around fun as the ball creates smiles as humans live in expectancy as to who will receive the ball next.

The Blob figure nearest your right thumb -
'what does that Blob feel like?' I ask.
I ban the use of 'happy or sad' as all feelings can be tossed in those headings.
So minds are stretched - everyone engaging in the struggle to articulate.
Even seasoned professionals struggle to find the appropriate word.

I often ask more questions as 'right thumbs' develop their literacy.
'Describe a young person you know who feels like that?'

'When one of your youngsters feels like that, what behaviour does it drive?'

When a group is ready - the questions may become deeper and more personal-
'When did you last feel like that?'

Awareness always precedes skill.
By becoming aware of our own emotional literacy, or lack of, we can then be more sensitive to the feelings of others. More importantly, we can begin to see beyond behaviour to be more in touch with a person's toothache.

Next time I will click about working with special needs groups. I want to share some methods of how I engage them with the crisp objective of making available more tools for their life toolbox.

- Pip Wilson
Beautiful Human Person
Speechmark author of Blobs