ABA and TEACCH

[AndieWalsh]

Can anyone give me a layman's guide to these, and tell me what the differences are?

Many thanks

TEACCH is so old fashioned that it still has the term handicapped in its title - that's what the H stands for. When first introduced in the 70's for children and adults with severe learning difficulties it was a welcome and well intentioned initiative but it seems to have made no effort to update its game or to introduce language or cognitive skills for those children capable of that level. ABA aims to develop cognitive and language skills by introducing the child to learning by providing motivation and re inforcement of learning. There is a lot of mystification attached to ABA/VB but personally I find it just common sense and in my experience quite effective.

Some say that TEACCH over emphasises accomodating the disabled child by re designing their environment and that ABA over emphasies 'normalising' the child. These views may be at the extreme but they do underly the approaches. One of the things that annoys me about TEACCH is the assumption that I should want DS1 to live in a modified artificial world rather than the real world - I know he may never fully access the real world but I want as much as possible !

TEACCH is what you will find in special schools. White walls, low stim, symbols, visual timetables etc and often these are left in place forever. If you get the chance to visit a NAS school for open day you will see it - white individual workstations. Children are given tasks in boxes - work from left to right - complete task in each box - then hand finished symbol to teacher.

ABA considered much more effective in addressing rather then accommodating deficits. In my view you should do ABA first. But not all children do respond to ABA - although most do to good ABA - and then you might want to consider TEACCH eg for a child who really cannot cope with the world around them without it being made white, quiet and predictable. Most outreach services etc will use elements of TEACCH.

You can often see egs on youtube for different interventions eg ABA and TEACCH

All really, really useful, thanks.

My son has Asperger's and is having increasingly violent tantrums at school, as well as regularly trying to escape from school.

He is academically extremely high functioning - 99th centile on all the Ed Psych tests for verbal and non-verbal reasoning, reading age of 10 yrs old (he's 5) etc. It's the frequency and level of his meltdowns in school that are causing the most difficulties for him.

Is ABA appropriate,do you think? Sorry to ask stupid questions, but I have only very recently heard of it.

DS did ABA in one form or another for 10 years (home prog then ABA school). When he was 12.5yrs we moved him to a great residential school where they do TEACCH. To be honest, I felt he had enough grounding in ABA to have benefited greatly but did not mind letting go of it as he really needed a change. The reality is that, even though TEACCH is the system used for structured classroom activities, much of the rest of the time is either "natural" or behavioural or a bit of both. They use PECs, visual timetables, jigs (sequences), choice boards, countdowns, systematic reinforcement etc and they monitor and manage everything very well. The school and classrooms do not look clinical, bare or deliberately under-stimulating. This is all very well because, as I say, he did ABA for 10 years but don't think TEACCH may never be of any relevance, especially if you want to access a setting that is great in all other ways except not being ABA. HTH.