Principles of Intervention

While reading this article, there were many concepts and ideas that were familiar. In methods of therapy class last semester, we learned the pros and cons of different intervention approaches; child centered, hybrid, and clinician directed. In my opinion, choosing on an intervention approach depends on the client. With younger children, I think a natural environment is important, as this makes carryover easier. However, with clinician directed, the client may produce more target responses and the clinician may get more substantial data. During clinic, we tend to use a lot of drill and kill. This helps us obtain accurate data and shows progress from session to session. But how much do they carry these skills over into school and in the home? The child centered approach may be beneficial for children who perform better in their natural settings. However, in this approach there is no reinforcements which I feel are needed when working with clients. The hybrid approach may be beneficial because this approach focuses on a small set of specific goals and the clinician has some control over the session. Overall, choosing an approach depends on the client’s needs and the clinician’s preference for one over the other.
Before this class, I never heard of the developmental descriptive model of language disorders. However, we use this model with our own clients. We look at the syntactic, semantic, and phonological skills that are in the developmental sequence. We use this information frequently in our rationales for our goals and objectives. Specifically, we look at the sounds that our client’s need remediation on, and we work on earlier occurring sounds first. For example, my client needs remediation on /l/ and /r/, but I decided working on /r/ would not be beneficial because my client is only 5 years old, and /l/ occurs earlier in the developmental sequence. We frequently look at the order children develop skills, and how they acquire these skills.