Comic strip stories

[appropriatelyemployed]

What are your views on these? S&LT is recommending them. I have suggested that staff be trained to use them as, like social stories, I think they can become quite judgmental and preachy in the wrong hands!

I don't really 'get' them tbh.

How do you measure that the child understands the images in the same way that you do? Do they mean anything to the child?

I love PECS for various reasons, but wouldn't trust many people to deliver it. You can't just decide that a symbol MEANS something to you and then assume that it will mean the same to the child. For example, a hand often means 'STOP' which we might understand given our experiences of the world and ability to understand social context, but to child, often it is simply a picture of a hand that means 'HAND', if anything.

Do you see what I mean?

I see the same problem with social stories.

Sometimes I use stick men with ds, for 3 pics max to explain something. I have to label everything. 'This is DS, and this is x. DS is TOO CLOSE to x, why don't you draw DS and x and show me how close DS should try to stay from x' etc. So I don't think the concept is bad, just probably often the delivery of it.

Thanks Star. I agree. I have persuaded the SLT to do some training on them which is a rarity.

That you should advise that someone without any ASD training or training in ASD strategies should start using comic strips to 'review the day' seemed to me to be an alarming thought!

What graphics would she use?
In what order are they presented?
How will she measure their effectiveness?
Behaviour should change in some way after their use.

Star is dead right about using pictures and assuming they mean something to the child (my pet hate is random Bliss/Widgit/Boardmaker symbols stuck together because the creator thinks it makes them look all right on and communication aware. This sort of thing-God knows how anyone with communication issues is meant to make head or tail if it.

Used properly they can be massively helpful.
I advocate using them on claendars but I can measure how efffective they are at helping children understand and use the following:

Past,present and future tenses
Temporal concepts like 'today' ,'yesterday' 'next week' 'first' 'last' 'before' and 'after'.

Social stories as devised by Carol Gray have a very specific protocol that most people (including s/lts) are totally unaware of. They just whack down a few bossy directives with a random picture or two and think the job is done.

I love Carol Grey and have spent the last few weeks reading her latest book which is terrific.

I went to a workshop on social stories recently and they talked about designing the story together with your child if that was at all possible. That way you will be sure that you are using pictures which mean something to your child.
I remember that school have tried to use them and the TA said that one she did involved a playground scene, but DS couldn't transfer the concept of the teachers he knew to the adult in the picture and so the whole purpose of the story was lost.
I think that the same would be true for comic strip stories. You would need to be sure that they are understood by the child in exactly the correct way, and usually this would involve them helping to design it in the first place as they are so open to interpretation otherwise.

Moondog - I went to a conference with Carol Gray and Michelle Garcia Winner and it was fabulous.

She made us make up social stories and she was so strict about the protocol and annoyed about examples in books (not published by her) which she felt were prescriptive and judgmental. So I as very wary when the S&LT raised this.

I was particularly concerned that they were being used to 'review' rather than teach. So, for example, if DS doesn't like doing something in particular, rather than using them as part of a package of strategies to support/motivate changes in behaviour, they were being used retrospectively to sit with his TA talking about why he did something etc.

If you have had a falling out with your TA, it is not appropriate to have her 'teach' you why you were wrong by comic strips or anything else. The fact is he is not always in the wrong when he has a falling out and the TA has had no training to deliver these non-judgmentally.

Oh, I'd love to see her.
All you have said sums up the appalling inadequacies of SEN provision.
The amonut of people I encounter who assure me they use PECS?Social Stories/Makaton/TEEACH/Intensive Interaction and so on and so on but who haven't got a clue is just unbelievable.

Even the so called 'professionals' have no qualms whatsoever about passing themselves off as authorities when what they have is a few dog eared photocopies of what someone reported on in a meeting 6 years back.

I find the frequentmismatch between the knowledge base of SEN 'professionals' and their desire to be taken seriously as experts alarming.

I overheard a conversation about 'phonemic awareness' the other day in an office amongst professionals. The thought that these people are unleashed on children who are having problems.....

Well when I raised this with out ''highly specialist ASD SLT' (for that is her title) she said social stories are very different to comic strip stories

I also couldn't see how viewing the day like this to point out the error of his ways was supposed to teach him about 'other people's feelings' which is the target of the strategy.

To be fair, she has promised training and also dropped the idea.

I always ended up facing a brick wall with these things because I would ask 'how will that teach Ds x? And how will it be delivered?'

I always got the response 'these are recognised strategies for x!' and occasionally 'there is research behind them'.

I usually had to then just reply 'No. Just no!. Which I know made me sound unreasonable, but when we started getting into any detail it became apparent that the WAY they were going to be delivered would do more harm than good.

It's like allowing a GP to do a heart bypass for a blocked artery because the research shows that heart bypasses are effective for this kind of thing, and he is after all a medical professional! And when you protest you're treated as if you are unreasonably denying the benefits of the surgery!

But Star, our focus group of 5 politicians showed that all GPs are useless and can be replaced with NHS direct. A two-day course for receptionists is plenty, and then they can do the heart bypasses; after all, those doctors might go on strike and surely anyone in the health sector deserves to be called a health professional.

the strip

Back to the original thread, AE, since comic strip stories / conversations are, essentially, a way of illustrating a communication, the usefulness will be entirely dependent on who talks to him, what they are discussing, and what the purpose of the interaction is.

So, as a tool for sensible people who already 'get' his needs, quite handy, but less useful in the hands of the type of person who usually talks LOUDLY BUT WITH A LITTLE SMILE when dealing with dc with SEN / deaf people / foreigners / parents of said dc...

Comic strips are a CG development so should be good (I saw examples ofthem in a recent conference I attended) and well thoguht out.

However it still leaves the crucial question which is
'How will my child's behaviour (in its loosest sense-I mean physically maifested and observable behaviour of any sort here, not just 'good' or 'bad' behaviour) change for the better as a result of this intervention.

People will of course tell you stuff like this (from NAS website)

'By seeing the different elements of a conversation presented visually, some of the more abstract aspects of social communication (such as recognising the feelings of others) are made more 'concrete' and are therefore easier to understand.'

Well yes., Sounds great, I'm all for it. But how will we know this happens?
If the persomn advocating the intervention can't tell you this then I'm afraid what they offer isn't up to standard.

Sorry.
I come over as utterly illiterate on MN these days.
No idea why.

Thanks Moondog - that is really helpful.