The SCERTS Model Barry M' Prizant, Amy Wetherby, Emily Rubin

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The SCERTS ModelBarry M. Prizant, Amy Wetherby,
Emily Rubin

• A comprehensive educational approach for children
  with Autism Spectrum Disorders
• Charlotte Edwards, PsyD
• Tanya Kim, MA
• New Connections Academy
• 2007

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Domains of the SCERTS ModelInterdependent Trio

• Social Communication
• Emotional Regulation
• Transactional Support

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Why SCERTS

• Ongoing debate about what is most important to
  teach and what are the most effective
  methodologies for teaching children with ADS
• Recent review of two decades of research on
  educational interventions for children with
  Autism concluded there is no evidence that any
  one approach is more effective than another

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Why cont

• Most important, the panel argued for the
  introduction of a new dynamic approach to include
  educational priorities to include, functional
  spontaneous communication, development of social
  relationships and play skills with peers and
  acquisition of functional abilities in meaningful
  activities
• The authors believe these priorities are fully
  consistent with the SCERTS model

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SCERTS

• Social Communication
• Emotional Regulation
• Transactional Support
• Recognized that the most meaningful learning
  experiences in childhood occur in everyday
  activities within the family and school contexts
• Framework is designed to target priority goals in
  social communication (SC) and emotional
  regulation (ER) by implementing transactional
  supports (TS) throughout a childs daily
  activities and across social partners

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SCERTS

• Respects and infuses expertise from a variety of
  disciplines
• Regular and special education
• Speech-language pathology
• Occupational Therapy
• Psychology
• Social Work
• Medical
• Parents and family members

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Social Communication

• Communicating and playing with others in everyday
  activities and deriving joy and pleasure in
  social relationships with children and adults
• Children must acquire capacities in two major
  areas of social-communicative functioning
• Joint Attention
• Symbolic Use
• Communicative means may be preverbal, such as
  gestures or use of objects to communicate or
  verbal, signs, picture symbol systems and/or
  speech ranging from single words to complex
  expressive language used in conversation

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SC 3 Stages of Social Communication Development
SOCIAL PARTNER Child communicates with gestures
vocalizations LANGUAGE PARTNER Child uses
symbolic means to communicate shared meanings
(oral language, sign language, picture
symbols CONVERSATIONAL PARTNER More advanced
language abilities and social awareness of
others.
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Emotional Regulation

• An essential and core capacity that supports a
  childs availability for learning
• For a child to be optimally available he or she
  must have the emotional regulatory capacities and
  skills to
• 1.Independly remain organized in the face of
  potentially stressful events that may be either
  positive or negative in nature (self-regulation)

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ER cont

• 2. Seek assistance and/or respond to others'
  attempts to provide support for emotional
  regulation when faced with stressful, over
  stimulating or emotionally dysregulating
  circumstances (mutual regulation)
• 3. Recover from states of emotional
  dysregulation or attentional shutdown through
  self-and/or mutual regulation strategies
  (recovery from dysregualtion)

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ER Levels of Development
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ER Behavior Strategies

• Simple motor activities or sensory- motor
  strategies that the child engages in to regulate
  his or her arousal level, remain alert, and self
  soothe.
• Examples looking at ones hands, seeking oral
  sensory input, etc.

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ER Language Strategies

• The child becomes a symbolic communicator.
• Language strategies are words or other symbols
  that the child uses that regulate his or her
  arousal level.
• Imitative or creative use of symbols to engage in
  audible or observable self-talk as well as inner
  language.

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ER Metacognitive Strategies

• A childs ability to reflect on and talk about
  cognitive processes that support organization,
  decrease anxiety, and regulate attention and
  arousal to guide behavior.
• The process of internalizing a dialogue that
  requires coordinating different perspectives,
  which allows for greater social problem solving,
  inhibiting behavior based on social and moral
  rules, and using reflective problem solving( If
  ___ happens, I can always do ____.)

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Transactional Support

• The third and final core component of the SCERTS
  Model.
• The most meaningful learning occurs within the
  social context of everyday activities and within
  trusting relationships, transactional support
  needs to be infused across activities and social
  partners

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TS cont

• 1. Interpersonal supports include adjustments
  made by communicative partners in language use,
  emotional expression and interactive style that
  help a child to process language, participate in
  social interaction, experience social activities
  as emotionally satisfying and maintain
  well-regulated states

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TS cont

• 3.Family support includes educational support
  such as sharing of helpful information and
  resources, direct instruction in facilitating a
  childs social communication, emotional
  regulation, daily living skills and implementing
  learning supports
• 2. Learning and educational supports include
  environmental arrangement or the ways typical
  settings and activities are set up or modified to
  foster social communication and emotional
  regulation

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Transactional SupportTS

• Learning occurs in a social context.
• Thus, a childs comprehensive program should not
  only address a childs developmental progress,
  but also the progress of that childs social
  partners (parents, teachers, siblings, and
  peers).

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TS Example Goal

• Student Goals
• Initiates conversations about a variety of topics
• Initiates maintains conversations that relate
  to partners interest
• Requests information about others experiences

• Partner Goals
• Models a range of communicative functions rules
  of conversation
• Uses supports to foster understanding of language
  and behavior.

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SCERTS Model Approaches

• Meaningful Activities Purposeful Activities
  (MA PA)
• Learning Playing with Peers (LAPP)

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Meaningful Activities Purposeful Activities

• Activity based intervention joint activity
  routines
• Consistency predictability
• Structure flexibility
• Visually based with multimodal learning.

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MA PAContinuum

• Planned activity routines
• Engineered activities and environments
• Modified natural activities and environments
• Naturally occurring events environments

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MA PA Types of Activities
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Learning and Playing with Peers

• Offers a child with ASD a systematic and
  semi-structured means to learn and apply
  social-communicative and play skills in
  predictable and supportive activities as well as
  natural activities.

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LAPP

• Planned activity routines
• Natural Interactions Settings
• Control for novelty
• Shared control reciprocity
• Unconventional behavior social play behaviors

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Continued

• 6. Intrinsic motivation
• 7. Expressing a range of social-communicative
  intentions functions
• 8. Enhancing skills of peer partners
• 9. Adult partners role

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What SCERTS Is and Is Not

• Is a value based model with core values and
  principles that guide educational efforts

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SCRETS Is and Is Not

• Is not a curriculum focused solely on training
  skills, but focuses on underlying capacities
• supports the development of functional skills,
  individualized for each child in a systematic and
  semi-structured, but flexible manner
• hierarchy of goals in social communication and
  emotional regulation informed by research on
  child development and based on each childs needs
  and family priorities

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Is and Is Not cont

• Is not exclusionary of other practices or
  approaches and flexible enough to incorporate
  from available approaches and teaching strategies
• SCERTS has been developed as a next generation"
  model for working with children with ASD as a
  vehicle for helping to move education of children
  with ASD forward in a more comprehensive and
  meaningful manner