Implementing Intensive Interaction in Schools

Guidance for Practitioners, Managers and Co-ordinators

Mary Kellett, Melanie Nind

• Publisher: David Fulton Publishers
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135398316
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

First Published in 2003. By taking a detailed look at the implementation and management of Intensive Interaction, the authors of this book offer practical guidance on how to get the most from the approach in the school context. This book includes: guidance on managing priorities, training issues, power dynamics and coping with Ofsted; advice on setting up and running evaluation projects; clear links to the National Curriculum for SEN; case studies from special and mainstream school and a glossary of terms. This book is for practitioners, coordinators and managers in schools using Intensive Interaction with pupils who have severe and complex learning difficulties.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

This is not the first book about Intensive Interaction, and it is not intended to take the place of other key texts that explain the approach. It is, however, the first book about Intensive Interaction written specifically for teachers, head teachers, learning support assistants and all staff working in schools. It is addressed to this audience because it is about the particular challenges of implementing the approach in schools. Our concern with some of the broader issues of assessing progress and being accountable will also make it relevant for those working in further education colleges and other educational provision.

The origins for the book are a doctoral study undertaken by Mary Kellett (Kellett 2001), supervised by Melanie Nind and Gary Thomas and funded by Oxford Brookes University. The funding was for a replication of Melanie’s PhD in which she researched the effectiveness of Intensive Interaction with adult participants attending the ‘school’/education centre of a long-stay hospital. We wanted to apply a similar research design to evaluate the efficacy of Intensive Interaction with children who lived at home and attended schools in the community.

In contrast to earlier evaluations of Intensive Interaction (Nind 1993; 1996; Watson and Knight 1991; Watson and Fisher 1997) the approach was relatively new to the schools and they had to get to grips with what it meant for them as a staff and an organisation, operating within a constrained context. Inevitably, the study evolved in an organic way to tell us as much about the issues of implementing the approach in schools as about the effects of using the approach for the pupil-participants. There was an overwhelming sense from the in-depth investigation that, while the use of Intensive Interaction was associated with positive outcomes for the pupils, these could have been greater if school issues were addressed. Indeed, such school issues have been little understood and under-researched prior to this study.

All researchers want their research to make a difference and we are keen that the lessons learned from this study are shared with others working in schools. We are also keen to encourage practitioners in schools to adopt their own research orientation and to find out and share more about implementation and optimum efficacy issues. We are assuming that readers of this book already have some familiarity with Intensive Interaction and some desire to see it used, or used to better effect, in their establishment. We do rehearse the key features of Intensive Interaction and outline the journey of how the approach has been implemented and evaluated across its evolution, but this is not a book about how to ‘do’ Intensive Interaction per se. This is already available in detail in Access to Communication (Nind and Hewett 1994) and in a readily accessible format in A Practical Guide to Intensive Interaction (Nind and Hewett 2001). Interaction in Action (Hewett and Nind 1998) provides reflective accounts of using the approach in a range of different contexts, including some educational ones.

The essence of this book is that we, as advocates of Intensive Interaction, must engage with the fact that practitioners in schools cannot concern themselves with approaches like Intensive Interaction in a vacuum. They operate with finite resources in largely preordained organisational structures. They are required to conform to curricular guidelines, which, in the case of the National Curriculum, can feel quite constraining. They exist within an educational marketplace whereby parents inevitably become consumers of their services, with all the implications that this entails for having something worth selling and being able to market it. And every now and again they are inspected by people with varying degrees of expertise in relation to their pupil groups and with an agenda that does not always match that of other bodies, such as the Qualifications and Curriculum Agency, who issue curricular guidelines. The context of the standards agenda means that the focus is often on the product of their efforts rather than the quality of their educational processes. Not only this, but there is a national and international drive for inclusion.

We are aware that this context is challenging. Teachers are leaving the profession and among those who stay there is considerable cynicism. They have less time to devote to reflective practice or to engage in meaningful continuing professional development. But the pupils continue to stimulate and reward. They continue to present challenges which lead to practitioners and managers grappling with major tensions, like how to address quality interactions within prescribed curricula, how to demonstrate our value of progress that is not easily recognised by all and how to make best use of the resources we have.

In this book we discuss many of the checks and balances having to be made by those doing Intensive Interaction and working in schools (and colleges) in the current era. We offer a mix of critical reflection on the issues and straightforward practical guidance. We show where we see opportunities for doing quality work and for optimising what can be achieved with Intensive Interaction in schools. All of our discussion is informed by our individual and joint research and by our ongoing communications with practitioners in the field.

The content is organised into four sections. Some of these will be more relevant for practitioners and others for managers and those with an academic interest. We hope that all are of interest, however, regardless of professional concern. In the first section, Right from the Start, we address the need for an informed basis for implementing Intensive Interaction in schools. Thus, we outline the key features of the approach and what is already known about its efficacy. Readers already very familiar with the approach may want to skim this chapter. We then explore some of the theory about innovation and implementation so that we have a vocabulary and some conceptual frameworks for discussing the more specific implementation issues. And we give practical guidance on putting firm foundations in place and giving serious consideration to Intensive Interaction as an important part of school practice.

In Part Two, Learning from Experience, we use each individual case study from the in-depth doctoral study, to inform us about implementation issues. The stories of the six individual children who took part in the study are also stories of how practice goes well and not so well. They are stories of classroom dynamics and school factors as much as stories of individual progress. While looking for patterns of communication and social development in the pupils, we learned much about the barriers and opportunities for learning in their environments. We share our lessons about emotional well-being, personal and professional support and the need for reflective practice and efficient coordination. These were real lessons learned in real classrooms with real human benefit and cost and thus we find them immensely powerful.

Part Three seeks to step back so that we can pull together some of these lessons and develop an understanding of Best Practice in implementing Intensive Interaction in schools. Here are some of the critical reflections and ultimately practical guidance on how we might seek and recognise optimum progress. We look at curriculum and accountability issues and share our thoughts on how these might best be addressed. And we discuss Intensive Interaction and inclusion, showing how we see this interactive pedagogy as inclusive pedagogy. This is a heavier section in that the issues we address are challenging ones and our responses reflect this and our reluctance to be drawn into simplistic or ‘quick-fix’ responses.

Finally, in Part Four, the Research Frontier, we encourage readers to engage in their own school-based research projects and provide some tools for doing this. It is practitioners working in schools on a daily basis who are doing creative, innovative, problem-solving work on implementing Intensive Interaction and other interactive approaches in challenging circumstances. There is much to be learned from these practitioners who, with or without support from mentors, and with varying degrees of resources and different levels of systematic study or formality, are finding out about what works in schools. The guidance we offer for conducting research into Intensive Interaction is deliberately pitched at readers who are relatively new to research. Other readers may also welcome the transparency this offers about our research process.

In this book we share our own findings and hope that this stimulates further finding out and dissemination, as well as more good and even better practice in Intensive Interaction. We hope that the book helps to make a difference to readers working in schools and ultimately to all those with whom they interact. We are grateful to everyone who took part in the project for their part in furthering our communal understanding.

PART ONE
Right from the Start

CHAPTER 2

Key Features of Intensive Interaction

Defining Intensive Interaction

Intensive Interaction was recently summed up as an approach ‘to facilitating the development of social and communication abilities in people with severe learning difficulties (SLD) based on the model of caregiver infant interaction’ (Nind and Hewett 2001: vi). This is typical of the way Intensive Interaction is defined in the literature in that it foregrounds both the aims of the approach, which focus on particular domains of learning, and the processes of teaching and learning, which are nurturing and naturalistic. The approach is also defined in relation to the community of learners for whom it is intended, that is, pupils (or anyone) with severe and complex learning difficulties who have not yet learned the fundamentals of early social communication. Included in this are pupils with profound and multiple learning difficulties (PMLD) and pupils on the autistic spectrum.

More detailed definitions of Intensive Interaction explain what actually happens when the approach is used:

Intensive Interaction is characterised by regular, frequent interactions between the practitioner and the learner, in which there is no focus on the task or outcome, but in which the primary concern is the quality of the interaction itself.

(Nind 1999: 97)

As we explained in the introduction, the purpose of this book is not to explain what Intensive Interaction is or how to do it. This is already done elsewhere (in Access to Communication, Nind and Hewett 1994, and A Practical Guide to Intensive Interaction, Nind and Hewett 2001). Indeed, we assume that readers will already have some familiarity with the approach from workshops or these and other texts. In pursuing our different remit of exploring how Intensive Interaction can most effectively be implemented in schools, however, we outline the key features of the approach here, together with its origins and recent developments, in order to re-familiarise the reader with what it is we are discussing.

Origins of Intensive Interaction

Intensive Interaction was developed by Nind and Hewett and colleagues at Harperbury Hospital School in the late 1980s with young adults. This was in the context of an LEA ‘school’/education centre serving some of the younger residents of the long-stay institution. The historical context was a pre-National Curriculum era in which pupils with severe and complex learning difficulties had only recently been deemed educable. There was a surge in teaching methods based on a behavioural model in which curriculum experiences were broken down into small skill-based tasks that could be taught or trained incrementally and measured so that educational outcomes could be made visible. The assumption of the time was that these pupils were not capable of incidental learning.

There is notable resonance with current contexts in terms of the lack of faith in the creativity of teachers and learners, or awareness of teaching as an art rather than a science. The main difference is that in the 1980s this was seen as applicable only to the education of these pupils with special needs who were relatively new to the education system, rather than more generally applied as today.

Intensive Interaction, however, developed and became popular against a background of considerable change. Disaffection with behaviourist teaching was starting to spread (Wood and Shears 1986; Billinge 1987; Byers 1994) with growing concern that it did not promote real learning or real understanding (McConkey 1981; Smith, Moore and Phillips 1983; Collis and Lacey 1996). This was a concern in relation to the domain of social and communication development in particular. There was an acknowledgement that learners needed a reason to communicate in order for language to develop and that meaningful learning takes place in context. Interest in interactive approaches was growing (e.g. Smith 1987). These offered a different style and philosophy from the behaviourist model in their emphasis on learners being active participants – being empowered to take control of their learning wherever possible.

The teachers who developed Intensive Interaction responded to the needs they perceived their students to have and sought to address the inadequacies of the existing curriculum to meet teaching and learning priorities as they understood them. This was before teachers lost control of the curriculum or their feeling of ownership of the whole teaching and learning process. Teachers at Harperbury were able to reject other curriculum models and make use of models of learning in infancy that they saw as eminently relevant for their older learners.

Inspired and guided by Ephraim’s (1979) work on ‘augmented mothering’, Intensive Interaction had its theoretical origins in the psychological research of the 1970s and 1980s (primarily from Britain, America, Australia and Europe) on the rich ‘intuitive pedagogy’ (Carlson and Bricker 1982) found within caregiver-interaction. While borrowing from the nurturing interactive style that caregivers use with infants, Intensive Interaction was never intended to ‘re-parent’ and was distinguished from naturally occurring caregiver-infant interactions in two important regards. Firstly, the interactive games formed a core ‘curriculum’ of the approach and as such were constantly reflected upon, intellectualised and evaluated in a professional, pedagogical way, which enabled structure and progression to be built into the approach. Secondly, Intensive Interaction was developed in a team teaching environment as opposed to the exclusivity of the caregiver-infant relationship.

Key Features of the Interactive Style in Intensive Interaction

Intensive Interaction was firmly rooted in key elements of caregiver-infant interaction found to be associated with optimum social and communication development (see for example, Brazelton et al. 1974; Schaffer 1977). These key elements are:

• the creation of mutual pleasure and interactive games, being together with the purpose of enjoying each other;

• the teacher adjusting her/his interpersonal behaviours (gaze, voice, linguistic codetalk style, body posture, facial expression) in order to become engaging and meaningful;

• interactions flowing in time with pauses, repetitions, blended rhythms; the teacher carefully scanning and making constant micro-adjustments, thus achieving optimum levels of attention and arousal;

• the use of intentionality, that is the willingness to credit the learner with thoughts, feelings and intentions, responding to behaviours as if they are initiations with communicative significance;

• the use of contingent responding, following the learner’s lead and sharing control of the activity.

(Nind 1996: 50)

Mutual pleasure/interactive game

Central to Intensive Interaction is that the teacher seeks to foster interactions that are enjoyable and game-like. This directly relates to assumptions about reciprocity. Teaching/nurturing is not something that is done to pupils/infants; it is something that happens between them while they enjoy each other. The purpose of mutual pleasure as a motivator in interaction is emphasised throughout the psychological literature (Bruner 1975; Schaffer 1977; Stern 1977; Field 1979; McCollum 1984). The feedback of pleasure each interactive partner gives the other is crucial to sustaining and repeating the interactions. The pleasurable interactions then provide the perfect context for the pupil/infant to explore and discover the effects of her/his behaviour on others.

The teacher assumes responsibility for...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Glossary
• Chapter 1 Introduction
• Part One Right from the Start
• Part Two Learning from Experience
• Part Three Best Practice
• Part Four Research Frontier
• References
• Index