Maisie Soetantyo Peter Dunlavey RDI Consultant Developing Guide-Apprentice Relationship

 To learn about the Guide-Apprentice relationship development  To understand the impact of Guide-Apprentice relationship break downs  To understand the role of a guide in a remediation process  Building trust and competence for life long learning Our Goals Today 2

What is a Guide-Apprentice Relationship? Guide: Someone who shows the way to others Apprentice: A beginner at something Guide-Apprentice Relationship: A relationship involving a more experienced person sharing his/her knowledge alongside a learner through ‘active’ roles embedded in meaningful experiences and interactions

The Guiding Relationship  Universal learning process  Nurturing trust  Creates the neural architecture of the brain 4

The Role of a Guide  Providing a ‘bridge’ from familiar skills or information to what is needed to solve new problems (Barbara Rogoff)  Providing context by linking ‘now’ to ‘previous’ experiences  Structuring situations for optimal learning  Modeling how to handle new situations and challenges through actions and communication  Always think ahead to provide just enough support  Gradually transferring responsibility to the apprentice  Spotlighting competence by giving clear feedback 5

What Happens when Guiding Relationship does not Develop? 6

Autism Spectrum Disorder  Lifelong neurologically-based information processing disorder  Under and/or over-connectivity of different neural processing centers  Prevents most individuals from attaining a quality of life 7

Brain Differences Lead to Loses  Social Coordination  Emotional Referencing  Experience Sharing Language  Flexible Thinking  Resilience  Relational Information Processing  Foresight and Hindsight (Being able to anticipate what has not happened and reflect) 8

Atypical Development Creates Unreliable Feedback between Parents and Child  Children with autism often do not respond to their parents’ attempts to engage them in ways that provide the needed brain stimulation  Children with autism struggle to remain calm, focused and attentive to all of their parents’ efforts at engaging them, leaving parents confused and uncertain 9

Long Term Impact of Atypical Development of GR  Anxiety expressed in many forms of behaviors  There is a lack of awareness of loss of social coordination and the drive to restore it  Avoidant of new situations and preference to sameness  Less frequent and complex learning occurs  Long history of failures 10

Beginning Remediation Process  Slowing down  Using multi-channel communication (use of eye gaze, gestures, facial expressions, body orientation, voice inflections)  Using 80 % dynamic communication and only 20 % static communication (close-ended questions and instructions) 11

First Objective: Dynamic Communication  Unpredictable and full of break downs.  Multi-Channel: prosody, gestures, facial gazing, facial expressions, body orientation, body language and space.  The most important thing is ‘the understanding’ of each other’s intentions.  Ever changing, never exactly the same even when we talk about the same topic.

StaticDynamic  Which one do you want?  Go get the ball!  What is in this box?  Can I have that?  You have to wait for me  Hmm they smell so good!  Oh no! We lost the ball!  I wonder what’s in it (shaking the box)  I really like the shiny one.  Let’s do it together

Questions?  Peter Dunlavey, B. S. Certified RDI Consultant  Maisie Soetantyo, M.Ed. Certified RDI Consultant