Explaination of Instructor Position

I am currently running a home ABA/RDI program for my four-year-old autistic son, Jace, and I have had a position as an instructor open up. The program has been running for a little over two years.

The hours are very flexible and would be 6 hours a week (3 hours/twice a week), with a need for a preschool shadow in Fall 2013, for an additional 5 hours per week (2 1/2 hours/twice a week). Pay is $12.00 an hour. No experience is needed. Training will be provided.

I live in Highland (Northern Utah County), just off the Highland/Alpine exit from I-15.

For this position you will need to be creative, fun, dependable and willing to think outside the box. The therapy depends on fun reinforcements to help the program progress. I need someone who will be able to commit a year and a half (Until August 2014)  to working with Jace).

For BYU Psychology students, this position also fulfills internship credit.

To Apply

Please email me your resume and references along with available hours to angelacochran811@gmail.com.

What is ABA?

Applied Behavior Analysis helps teach autistic children what normal children automatically learn from their environment. Typically developing children learn without intervention--the world around them provides the right conditions to learn language, play, and social skills. Children with autism learn much, much less easily from the environment. They have the potential to learn, but it takes a very structured environment, one where conditions are optimized for acquiring the same skills that typical children learn "naturally." ABA is all about how to set up the environment to enable our son to learn.

Any new behavior that a person may try, but is never rewarded, is likely to die out after a while (how often will you dial that busy number?). And, as common sense would have it, a behavior that results in something unpleasant (an aversive) is even less likely to be repeated. These are the basics of behavioral learning theory. ABA uses these principles to set up an environment in which our son will learn as much as he can as quickly as possible, with a constant emphasis on the use of positive rewards. It is a science, not a 'philosophy.' Even the "as quickly as possible" part is based on science, since there is some--not conclusive--evidence that the developmentally disordered brain "learns how to learn" best if the basic skills are taught in early childhood.

Behavioral learning is not the only type of learning. Most learning in schools is from an explanation or from a model, what people call natural learning. Typically developing children learn from their environment (other people) at an astounding rate, usually completely unassisted. The whole point of ABA is to teach the prerequisites to make it possible for a child to learn naturally.

What is RDI?

Relationship Development Intervention (RDI) is a trademarked proprietary treatment program for autism spectrum disorders (ASD), based on the belief that the development of dynamic intelligence is the key to improving the quality of life for individuals with autism. The program's core philosophy is that individuals with autism can participate in authentic emotional relationships if they are exposed to them in a gradual, systematic way. The goal of treatment is to systematically build up the motivation and tools for successfully interacting in social relationships, to correct deficits in this area that are thought to be common to all people with autism.

RDI focuses on cultivating the building blocks of social connection—such as referencing, emotion sharing, coregulation, and experience sharing—that normally develop in infancy and early childhood. RDI is a family-based program, where trained consultants support families to alter their interaction and communication styles. There is a period of parent education, followed by an assessment of both the child and the child-parent relationship. After that consultants support the family through a set of specific objectives to build a "guided participation" relationship between parents and child that will allow the child to once again become a "cognitive apprentice" to the parents. Once the cognitive apprenticeship is in place, the family can move on to specific cognitive remediation objectives for the child. These are developmentally staged objectives designed to restore optimal neural connectivity through a series of "discoveries" and "elaborations".