Guidance Books for Teaching

This book is designed to discuss with the autistic student effective interpersonal relationships in the classroom environment, with peers, teachers, etc. Nevertheless, I find it works very well with all students, and anyone who must work with human beings on a regular basis in our increasingly alienating society. This work in fact can serve as a portal to ethical and moral theology!

Often in the classroom we encounter a majority of students whose only prior interpersonal relationship has been the electronic babysitters of television broadcasts and violent video games. The negative interpersonal effects of such modern technology has been adequately explored by a wide variety of writers from VP Al Gore’s The Assault on Reason to Sister Mary Timothy Prokes’s At The Interface: Theology And Virtual Reality. Therefore these student’s prior knowledge of effective strategies for interpersonal and human relationships may be more limited than in a pre-cathode ray tube generations.

The amount of violent death, for instance, which our students experience vicariously through their personal technology far out measures what an average child of fifty years ago might have witnessed, while at the same time a modern child has far less opportunity to interact freely with peers and establish positive, fulfilling and rewarding bonds of friendship than in the past. We have raised a generation within individual technological boxes more chilling than anything BF Skinner could have devised, and then we send them forth into the classroom and into the world, and hope they lead happy and successful lives. Let us then give them the tools, through this book, by which they may make positive choices in life.

Therefore, this book explicitly and cleverly leads us to discuss effective strategies for interpersonal relations, and why we should even bother. I now work with immigrant children who for socio-economic and cultural reasons might not have much prior experience of the standard classroom environment, and yet who seem to come with a greater aptitude for adjustment to this new environment than many of the children native to our nation. In any case, this book allows us all to discuss what works and what might not be as effective within our classroom. This book works not only for the autisitc child.

Jed Baker has devised a situational scope and sequence which motivates and involves every child. The photo sequences are very good. My gripes are that they are too small for display to a large group, and they are already labelled correct and incorrect rather than allowing the group to come through discussion and that logical process which leads to learning with retention the correct or more effective strategy.

I would love to see this excellent and useful tool republished in the form of large display cards with the photos and prompts alone, in order to guide a group discussion with a large group of smaller cooperative units. This I would find most useful in the classroom. I understand this book was written and designed for essentially one-on-one work with the autistic student, and that I am unfairly asking a very good and versatile Swiss knife to do the work of a screwdriver and hammer, but that is only because I have managed to use it effectively and could expand on this so easily in the proper format. Then we can all learn how and why to just get along, and work together for the joy and benefit of all in a cooperative and effective society which leads to peace with justice. Am I asking too much here?
Rating: 5 / 5

What a fabulous book! The layout of this book is perfect. The text is easy to read and the true life images are so much better than drawings. My twins, like many other children with ASD are visual learners, and this book takes the abstract concept of social skills and puts it into a wonderful visual format that works!
Rating: 5 / 5