SCERTS® – The Next Generation Practices for Children with Autism and Their Families

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SCERTS® is an innovative educational model for working withchildren with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and theirfamilies. It provides specific guidelines for helping a childbecome a competent and confident social communicator, whilepreventing problem behaviors that interfere with learning or thedevelopment of relationships. It is also designed to helpfamilies, educators and therapists work as a team, in acoordinated way, to maximize progress in supporting a child.The acronym “SCERTS®” refers to the program’s focus:“SC” - Social Communication – developing spontaneous, functional communication, emotional expression, and secure and trusting relationships with children and adults;“ER” - Emotional Regulation – developing the ability to maintain a well-regulated emotional state and cope with everyday stress, to be available for learning and interacting;“TS” - Transactional Support – developing and implementing supports to help partners respond to the child’s needs and interests, modifying and adapt to the environment, and providing tools to enhance learning (e.g., picture communication, written schedules, sensory supports). Specific plans are also developed to provide educational and emotional support to families, and to foster teamwork among professionals.Therapists at CW utilize the SCERTS® Assessment Process (SAP) in their comprehensive social-emotional evaluations and to create goals in individual and group therapy session when applicable. Goal targets include sharing attention, increasing reciprocal interaction, communicating for a variety of functions, repairing communication breakdowns, understanding nonverbal communication and non literal language, understanding and using early emotion words, using behavioral and language strategies to regulate arousal, etc. This comprehensive assessment helps us see the child as a whole and develop functional goals for home and school.In therapy, we utilize a variety of SCERTS® core principles including the importance of: (1) collaborating with a multidisciplinary team, (2) understanding the whole child and working on emotional regulation and social communication simultaneously and (3) parent and caregiver support and training. Therapists meet regularly to share information between Occupational Therapists, Speech Therapists, Educational Therapists and Behaviorists in order to better understand how to support all aspects of student’s development.  Parent training and education is a passion for CW therapists and every session is designed to include an element of parent involvement.  Therapists work hard to communicate with every child’s team members to effectively address his or her needs and to aide in the generalization process. In addition, we support parents, teachers, paraprofessional aides, and other professionals in the community by training them to provide children with ASD with Transactional Supports at home and at school to work toward their Social Communication and Emotional Regulation goals.The SCERTS® Model was developed by a multidisciplinary team of collaborators, including Barry Prizant, Ph.D, CCC-SLP, Amy Wetherby, Ph.D, Emily Rubin, MS, CCC-SLP, Amy Laurent, Ed. M, OTR/L and Pat Rydell, Ed.D, who have training in speech language pathology, special education, behavioral and developmental psychology, occupational therapy and family centered practice. More information on SCERTS® can be found online at www.scerts.com.