Supporting children with ASD

If you have a child with ASD, the Walden Approach can help them reconnect with the classroom, says Walter Solomon...

Q

The autistic (asd) children in my class wander around and cannot seem to focus on any one task. how can i help them?

A

One of the greatest problems ASD children face is the expectation placed on them to engage at their chronological age level. This leaves them disoriented and likely to fall back on ‘safe’ strategies, such as avoidance and self delighting, in order to tune out classroom activities.

A possible solution is to introduce the Waldon Lesson: a one-to-one session with a teacher or TA that lasts from 30 minutes up to one hour and is ideally performed on a daily basis. In the lesson, the child will be given tasks appropriate to his or her level of understanding and helped both to commence and continue the tasks so there is no question of failure.

Geoffrey Waldon, a neurologist by training, identified the ways in which newborn infants develop their understanding through movement and experimentation. Children with special needs often have not followed the natural developmental pathways and unless any gaps in their development are filled, they will always have an incomplete foundation of understanding.

This is exactly what the Waldon Lesson is designed to avoid. An understanding of expressive language is not needed as the child is physically aided to perform the activity. Any resistance to the lesson is slowly overcome as the child comes to realise he is not being given tasks to perform that he does not understand. He is gradually able to drop his avoidance behaviours.
Following this approach, it is remarkable how an ASD child can focus on and enjoy lesson activities for periods of up to and including one whole hour.

Q

I have heard that the term ‘asocial lesson’ is used in the waldon approach. what exactly does this mean?

A

To answer this question, let’s go back to the way in which infants and young children learn. Waldon and others have hypothesised that all early learning is derived from movement.

As children grow and their limbs become longer and heavier, they extend their kinesphere – the sphere around the body whose periphery can be reached by easily extended limbs (Laban 1976). This makes it ever more arduous to engage with the world around them.

So the question arises: why do they expend all this effort to reach out and find objects and pick them up, mouth them, pile them, drop them and generally explore and experiment within their ever growing environment? Waldon hypothesised this is because of their internal ‘motivation’ – the pleasure they derive from the activity. And it is through this motivated, but undirected, play that they develop understanding.

So now we can return to the question: what is the ‘asocial lesson?’ If it is true that children learn from activities performed for their own pleasure and undirected by an adult, then the teacher in the asocial lesson must be as much a part of the furniture as possible. For this, and only for this short period in the day, the teacher will be behind or beside the child so that there is no facial clue of pleasure or displeasure, no signal of rightness or wrongness, nor any praise or disapproval. It is important that children participate in the lesson only for the pleasure derived from the activity itself and never in an attempt to please the teacher. This is the meaning of the ‘asocial lesson’.