Developing Guide-Apprentice Relationship

1. Developing Guide-Apprentice Relationship Maisie Soetantyo Peter Dunlavey RDI Consultant RDI Consultant

2. Our Goals Today • 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

3. 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

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

5. 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

6. What Happens when Guiding Relationship does not Develop?

7. 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

8. 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)

9. 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

10. 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

11. 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)

12. 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.

13. Static Dynamic 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

14. Questions? • Peter Dunlavey, B. S. Certified RDI Consultant 650-483-3580 pdunlavey@comcast.net • Maisie Soetantyo, M.Ed. Certified RDI Consultant 650-483-7174 catchmaisie@comcast.net