Purpose and principles

The main objective of the program is to prevent unnecessary institutionalization, helping to prepare people with ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder) to live and work more effectively at home, at school, and community. Special emphasis is placed on individualized plans to help people with ASD and their families to live together more effectively. It teaches parents how to work with their children / as to control behavioral problems and improving social skills, language and learning. Thus, the person with ASD is ready to function in a school, in a sheltered workshop, working under supervision, in a competitive employment in a group home or other community setting.

The goals of intervention are not given in advance, but emerge, individualized observation of that person, in different contexts. This process of reaching individual goals set consists of four phases:

• Evaluation of skills.
• Interview with parents to determine their views on the child's abilities and priorities for change (goal seeking consensus with families).
• Set priorities and express them in the form of written goals.
• Based on these objectives to design individualized skills training.

Specifically, TEACCH treatment goals include:

1. Developing special ways in which the customer can enjoy and understand other people and live more harmoniously at home.
2. Increase the motivation and the client's ability to explore and learn.
3. Improve disharmonious development of intellectual functions. Therapists and teachers evaluate the learning skills of the client and design teaching methods and strategies appropriate evolutionary sequences to improve social skills, communication and client autonomy. In collaboration with the family develop behavior modification programs and self-care skills. All programming is designed to detect the specific needs of each client and their family.
4. Overcoming difficulties in areas of fine and gross motor skills through exercise and integration activities.
5. Reduce the stress of living with a person with ASD to other family members.
6. Overcoming the problems of school adjustment of the client.

There are 7 principles that focus research and educational priorities of TEACCH.

Principle 1: Optimal adaptation

• Teach new skills
• Environment to accommodate the individual deficit

Principle 2: Collaboration between parents and professionals

• Early age: clinicians, pediatricians, speech therapists.
• School-age teachers.
• Adulthood: Supported employment, companies, brokers ...

Principle 3: The most effective intervention

• Emphasis on skills
• Recognition and acceptance of weaknesses

Principle 4: Emphasis on cognitive and behavioral theory

• Communication curriculum.
• Metaphor of the iceberg.

Principle 5: Assessment and early diagnosis

• Scale Childhood Autism Rating (CARS).
• Psychoeducational Profile (PEP-3).
• Psychoeducational profile of adolescents and adults (AAPEP).

Principle 6: Learning structured visual

• Physical space.
• Timetable.
• Work Systems.
• Organization of tasks.

Principle 7: Training multidisciplinary generalist model

• Characteristics of autism.
• Diagnosis and evaluation of formal and informal.
• Structured teaching.
• Collaboration between parents and professionals.
• Communication.
• Social and leisure skills.
• Independent work.
• Behavioral Control

Educational principles of TEACCH

Strengths and Interests

All students have strengths and interests that can be functional for them. For example, if a student is very close to red, the most important parts of their work can be marked in red. Students who pay close attention to visual detail, we teach sorting and matching skills that can be used in employment situations in real life. We can not trust that the compulsion of a student to complete tasks in a set sequence will show the use of checklists for a variety of jobs, such as personal hygiene, household chores, vocational skills, and even time-use skills off. While autism can not change, lodge in use as a context to help students acquire the skills that our culture requires.

Careful assessment and constant

All students have the potential to develop better skills. From the severe degree, not verbal, and behavioral health problems, to high-functioning person who can read, write and spend time alone in the community, all students with ASD have difficulties in certain skills, and all have the potential to progress. In the TEACCH program, start the process designing an educational program after observing the child's approach to a variety of materials, instructions and activities, presented in different modalities with different amounts of structure. We pay particular attention to the areas of communication, self-help, vocational skills, and abilities of recreation / leisure use. The needs are arranged in order of priority, and then set objectives in each area.

Understand Meanings Assistance

All students with ASD are limited in their ability to understand the meaning of their experiences. The difficulty in understanding the meanings is central to autism. We can never assume that our students understand: why we ask you to do certain things, and how are the skills and behaviors that we teach, or even what, specifically, we are asking. Students with ASD with higher IQ, often confused or uncertain about expectations and morals in our culture. Teachers should not lose sight of the student's continued need a guide who feels empathy and help them with our environment so confusing and difficult to interpret.

Failure Resulting from Lack of Understanding

Most students exhibit behaviors that are due to their cognitive difficulty to understand what is expected of them. It is extremely rare for a student with ASD is deliberately challenging or provocative. Unfortunately, some observers interpret their behavior in this way, particularly when the student with ASD look them directly and then do the opposite of what has been asked, or does what is forbidden. Other students might assume correctly that such behavior runs to express anger, or to assert the independence of the student.

These explanations are rarely appropriate for such conduct when dealing with students with ASD, however, is much more likely that the student can not understand the words used, facial expression and body language of the speaker, or the social expectations of the situation . The student may be driven by strong impulses to act regardless of the rules or consequences, or may be nervous or overwhelmed by sensory stimulation in the classroom. The rules may be too abstract or too vague. Failure is rarely a useful concept in autism.

Parent Collaboration

Educational planning must be sensitive to the environment that the student will go when I get home at night, and where he lived as an adult. It is important to incorporate the wishes and lifestyle of the family of the student's educational program. If parents want or need a student to take his dinner with the family or to occupy their free time productively, trying as best as possible to teach these skills.

Educational goals of the TEACCH

The primary cognitive deficit conceptualized as a problem of understanding meaning, is one of the main educational objectives is to teach the student to the environment if it has meaning. It is not enough to teach what he asks to meet the master, follow the rules, or materials or language skills, because teaching a variety of behaviors and skills that the student's eyes, we are related, does not address the problems or basic failure to understand, make connections, and generalize. Our most important goal is that our students find that there are patterns in the universe, and that they can identify these patterns and this follow whether or not a teacher or an adult family member to the student. Although teachers are the ones who train their students to achieve this goal, ultimately what we want is for students with ASD are able to function without the intensive supervision of a teacher, among other things, because our culture does not provide resources for teachers for life. Therefore, the educational objective of teaching students to find meaning and order in his world is a practical reflection of the overall objective to help you fit into our culture as an adult.

Another objective is to teach education students with the concept of cause and effect. While some children with normal development and many people with ASD learn this at an early age, some people with ASD, particularly as it has a significant degree of intellectual disability do not understand that they can cause events that happen in a reliable and predictable. This is a key concept in understanding the universe is our culture and is absent in some people with ASD. It is a prerequisite for communication, and is important for other skills, such as to understand how to dress (when shot, the shirt comes out of my head), or how to use the materials (when I move a cloth, dust disappears). The domain of the concept of cause and effect is a tremendous advance in the ability of a person to take care of itself, productive work and live in a community.

Communication is an extremely important educational goal for all students. Some students with ASD must first learn that communication exists, it is possible that a person has influence over the behavior of another by some expressive acts. The nature of this action can be individualized to the student level, with a range of options including a sound, ringing a bell, to exchange an item, pronounce words or use symbolic gestures or signs. Students who have some communication skills they can and should teach some refinements, such as additional vocabulary, complex sentence structure, or extending the language systems (eg. Language written and oral language).

TEACCH educational objectives are also planned to develop significant skills for adult life. Skills and behaviors that do not have their own good as it looks, but for their functional utility to the individual's future. Even the youngest children to try to teach them basic skills so that they have the greatest possible independence in the areas of self-help, communication, vocational skills and interests of leisure, community living, and so on. So the school day focused on very specific events such as: toileting, putting on shoes, pedirayuda or something to drink, walk to a restaurant, or riding the bus to a pool.

TEACCH educational techniques

Of all the educational techniques used, the most important is the reliance on visual presentation of information. The use of verbal explanations and unique teaching method is ineffective for teaching children with ASD. You can use words, a physical key that will be useful, but the materials and the physical structure that visually guide the student toward understanding and success are the most effective. In any mode, complex presentations or congress have high quantity of materials likely to create confusion, overwhelming or incomprehensible to the student. Therefore, we teach students the strategies of working from top to bottom and from left to right. This spatial organization is culturally normal for us, and as organized as possible so most of the classroom experience of our students. For example, find the parts that make your work on the left, and finished products are placed on the right.

In addition to visual information, whenever possible, students are taught the concept of ASD over. This is an important concept that needs to be incorporated in all activities because many students with ASD, as part of their difficulty inferring the meaning of events, are unable to get an idea of ​​how long it should last for an activity. This may cause them distress, so often impose their own view on how long it will work or what amount of work performed. Through visual media, they are shown how many repetitions of the activity conducted prior hope to complete the task. Sometimes the same materials clarify this. For example, when the parts box is empty, the job is done, when you reach the bottom of the page, the work session is ending. Sometimes it is necessary to be more creative to make visible the passage of time: for example, when hapas certain amount of time, the teacher removes a clothespin sleeve or belt student, when there are no clips, activity has over. For these students, it is usually more satisfactory complete an activity in a clear and definite to receive a compliment, candy, etc.. In fact, when using these rewards are more likely to tend to serve the function of indicating that something is "finished" to serve as reinforcers envez for which the student will work next time.

Another educational technique used during the day is to teach the routines built-in flexibility. There are three important reasons for this. First, the routines provide the student with a strategy to understand and predict the order of events around him, elcual generally decreases agitation and aid in the development of skills. Second, if the teacher does not provide routines, it is common for students to develop their own, which may be less adaptive or acceptable. For example, the student may develop a routine of entering the classroom every morning and throw down all the shelters that are placed on the hanger, or maybe insist on licking all the spoons that takes in the dining room table, because this was what made the first time. Routines such as "hang coat, light music" or "put the spoon down (monitoring) and then go to the playground" can help reduce undesirable alternative routines. Third, the routines taught to be flexible because it reflects the reality of our culture. Our world is not invariable, and this is what makes it so confusing for a student with ASD. His attempts to do so must be respected but negotiated by the teacher, via the use of slightly different work materials, the paths that are taken for
rides, games played, food is presented, and so on. The essential structure must remain predictable, more details should vary so that the student is led to focus on structure rather than on details.

Individualization is a key concept in the educational programs of TEACCH. These students, despite the autistic characteristics may have in common, they are extremely different, in terms of strengths, areas of deficit, and idiosyncrasies. These students do not learn well in groups, because of the variety of skills and difficulties with learning by observing others. Also remember that these students, the skill levels are generally not correlated with the extent to which they are in other students. For example, some excellent skills in visual perception can not tell us anything about the student's language skills. Expressive fluency may mask significant gaps in receptive language. Students are able to read, cook, and process data may be unable to ask for a glass of water in public. Moreover, students with ID TEApueden be important and talented artists or musicians. Therefore, teachers must know their pupils extremely well and be prepared to teach the same student at different levels in different skill areas.

The trends of people with ASD to focus excessively on the details and resist change imply that we should teach them in different contexts, with a variety of materials to help them be as flexible as possible. In this regard, it is also important to teach skills in their natural contexts, since the ability degeneralización of these students is limited. From there we hope to teach to work inthe workplace, community skills in the community, skills for preparing meals in the kitchen, etc..

In conclusion, the TEACCH program, completing its fourth decade as a statewide program in North Carolina for people with ASD, continues to refine the concept that people with ASD work differently to those who do not, in terms of thinking and learning and special educational needs, based on such differences. Structured teaching has evolved as an educational strategy that responds to those that characterize individual needs of people with ASD. The physical structure of the environment, the use of schedules and work systems, and development of materials visually clear and organized labor, are the central components of this proposal. Students with ASD who use these strategies are calmer, more confident and able to work productively and independently for longer periods of time.