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Teaching the World About Sensory Processing Disorder
BY Michelle Clarke
Education Program Manager
What do we mean when we say we are "teaching the world about Sensory Processing Disorder"?
In part, we mean we have a long record of educating people about SPD. We started in the early 1980s, when Dr. Lucy Jane Miller was teaching two-day workshops where professionals learned to administer the Miller Assessment for Preschoolers (MAP). These seminars were incredibly well-attended, which Lucy attributes to telling participants: "We don‘t know what we‘re doing! We have got to start doing more research!"
"We explained that we needed to know if what we were doing was working, and that standardized assessments were one way to begin measuring what we do," Lucy says now. She had learned in being mentored by Dr. A. Jean Ayres – the pioneer of sensory processing research and treatment – that "education is more about the questions you ask than what you do." The MAP workshops were the Foundation‘s first attempt to apply that philosophy to a large-scale education program.
So, at first, the Foundation just covered the map with the MAP, doing workshops in 20 or 30 cities coast to coast. Eventually, that proved so demanding that Lucy and the Foundation began educating other therapists to teach the MAP and the whole philosophy about the need for research in occupational therapy. "We trained five trainers - Wendy Coster, Ric Carasco, Diane Parham, Linda McClain, and Mary Schneider – who were then available to teach the MAP around the country. By the time the next standardized scale was done, a "train-the-trainers" model was in place, and we had 25 OTs who could teach others to administer, score, and interpret the First STEP" (now also available in Spanish as Primo Paso).
For subsequent tests that we developed, clinicians involved in standardization came to Colorado for training in large workshops where we also engaged in fun activities such a white water rafting to encourage team spirit. "In all, I now have developed nine standardized scales, so that‘s a lot of teaching," Lucy says. "I never could have done all that research alone. It takes a village to develop a standardized scale."
At the same time she was working on the scales, Lucy was teaching in university programs. Especially significant was her appointment in the departments of Pediatrics and Rehabilitation Medicine at the medical school of the University of Colorado. "At the med school, I showed medical students and residents what Sensory Processing Disorder looks like, what occupational therapy really is (e.g., not "just playing"), and discussed how doctors could use this information in their practices someday," she says. "To this day, there‘s a population of young physicians in Colorado who are strikingly better-informed about SPD than others because they went through the CU program during this period."
As crucial as all these early efforts were, the Foundation‘s vision was always to teach more professionals. In 2004, the Foundation produced its first large-scale Colorado conference for professionals and parents. The two-day program was attended by 550 people hungry to learn more about Sensory Processing Disorder and strategies for treating and living with it. Nine conferences later, we‘re just a few weeks away from our 10th major program, now called the International Symposium, and the one-day Pre-Conference Institute we‘ve added to the schedule.
In 2008, still another educational program was added to the Foundation line-up: Intensive Mentorships, a small-group experience where clinicians learn advanced methods and clinical reasoning the way Lucy learned them as a graduate student mentored by Dr. Ayres. In 2009, every one of our entry-level mentorships (Level 1) sold out, and we held our first Level 2 hands-on treatment program for those who had graduated from our mentorship Level 1 courses. Our dream is to someday run mentorships year-round.
As a new decade dawns, we are continuing the educational programs of the 2000s but embracing new educational technologies at the same time. E-Learning programs like our new "In the Clinic with Dr. A. Jean Ayres" allow people at computers anywhere in the world to experience our teaching without ever leaving home. "I‘m especially excited about our new Ayres e-Learning module because it includes the rare historical footage we were able to tape in 1981 of Dr. Ayres demonstrating her strategies and discussing key aspects of her approach," says Lucy, who narrates the one-hour online program for professionals and parents.
Next up on the education front: webinars in the digital classroom. We‘re also at work on a publishing program to provide professionals and parents with helpful instructional booklets for use in practice, in the schools, and at home.
You often receive mailings from us with the signature line "teaching the world about Sensory Processing Disorder." In one way or another, we‘ve been teaching about SPD for 30 years. We‘ve changed our content and our delivery methods as needs and technology have changed, but what was constant then and remains constant now is our conviction that knowledge is power and that by growing knowledge, we empower people to make the world a better place for "sensational kids" everywhere.
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