By Jeff Sigafoos, Michael Arthur-Kelly, and Nancy Butterfield; 166 pages. From the cover: This concise, strategy-filled guidebook is the perfect introduction to improving the communication of children with moderate, severe, and multiple disabilities.
This may well be an excellent book for teachers and therapists who work with children who can't communicate in obvious ways. My review here only considers what it offers for parents, which is, not as much as I'd hoped for. If you have a nonverbal child, you may find a few useful ideas here. But otherwise, it doesn't communicate that well.
- Offers easily understood techniques for interpreting and adjusting nonverbal communication
- Includes charts and inventories for recording potential communicative acts
- Looks at how behavior can be a form of communication
- Professional text is useful for sharing with teachers and therapists
- Not excessively lengthy
- Though the cover says it's ideal for parents, it's really for professionals
- Concentrates exclusively on nonverbal behavior
- The techniques are easy to understand, but the language sometimes isn't
- Chapter 1: Key Concepts
- Chapter 2: The Assessment Process
- Chapter 3: Intervention Pathways
- Chapter 4: Instructional Procedures
- Chapter 5: Replacing Problem Behavior
- Chapter 6: Monitoring Progress
- Chapter 7: Case Studies
- Appendix A: Inventory of Potential Communicative Acts
- Appendix B: Behavior Indication Assessment Scale
Reading books intended for professionals can sometimes pay off for parents. Often, if you can hold on through the technical mumbo-jumbo, there are good techniques to try. And if the professional authors recommend something that you've been trying to get the teachers and therapists that work with your child to try, presenting a text written for them that shows how to do it is probably more convincing than proffering a parenting book.
I was encouraged by the blurb on the back cover of this particular learned text that proclaimed it to be "ideal for special educators, speech-language pathologists, behavior therapists, and parents." But though it may indeed be perfect for those first three, for parents ... not so much. There are some forms that may be useful in identifying which of your child's behaviors are attempts at communication; and some ideas on encouraging, expanding, and adapting those attempts, as well as eliminating ones that are harmful or inappropriate. But there's no particular attempt to apply this to a home setting or parent's abilities, and even at its relatively short length, the book sometimes seems repetitive.
I'll admit to some disappointment, too, that the communication discussed here is purely of the nonverbal sort. I'd hoped for some help with the communication needs of kids who can talk and express themselves, but not always in useful ways. It's not clear from the book description that the focus is as limited as it is, and I think that's a failure to communicate right there.
