Children’s Workshop provides a special education and therapy program for up to 50 students, aged 3-12, with severe communication, learning, social, and behavior problems associated with autism and other developmental disorders.

School is in session for 210 days on a traditional calendar, typically starting the day after Labor Day each year.  Our school day is from 8:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. Monday thru Friday.

We strive to provide our students with the necessary foundation skills so they can benefit from education in more typical and less restrictive settings.Because our students require precise, specific instruction with many 1:1 opportunities in order to learn new skills, Children’s Workshop is a highly structured Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) and Direct Instruction (DI) program. Each day, we provide many dozens of discrete-trial and incidental learning opportunities for our students. We emphasize positive reinforcement for desired student behaviors, so our students become eager learners.

Our team includes credentialed special educators and their assistants, a Speech/Language Therapist and assistant, and an Occupational Therapist, and is led by a Program Coordinator and Director, both of whom are Board Certified Behavior Analysts (BCBA). We collaborate closely with one another and with the parents of our students to provide as comprehensive and intensive a program as possible.

We know that a student’s educational and social success is greatly enhanced through effective collaboration and communication between the school, the student’s family, and the personnel representing the referring public school district. As is true of all TIEE schools, we at Children’s Workshop are committed to increasing our students’ growth by creating and implementing systems that support meaningful collaboration with our students’ families. Families are welcomed and encouraged to participate in our various social events throughout the year.

Parents of Children’s Workshop students are involved in all aspects of the Individualized Education Plan (IEP) process. They participate with our instructional teams in both the development and the implementation of IEPs. Prior to IEP meetings, we gather information from families so that their concerns and hopes are considered in their child’s educational plan. Parents are informed of their rights and empowered by participating in the development of goals. They have an active role as decision-making members of the IEP team.

Parents are informed of student progress on a regular basis through telephone contact. Formal progress reports are provided quarterly to families and home school districts. These reports are designed to provide clear and concise information on the achievement of each student’s goals and benchmarks. Children’s Workshop also provides video views during which parents have the opportunity to observe their child in instruction and discuss the methods and outcomes with their child’s teacher.

The CW curriculum is an amalgamation of several published curricula for young children, including young children with Autism; the Individualized Education Plan (IEP) goals that we have developed during the history of the program; and our own observations concerning what our students need in order to be successful in transition school environments, in the community, and in their homes with their families.

 

 

We have designed a category system of 12 curriculum areas, which has proved to be a desirable in part because it causes us to evaluate the “entire student.”

• Observation & Attending—ranging from responding to the presence of others to sustained attending and joint attention
• Generalized Motor Skills—ranging from basic gross motor coordination to fine manual skills and oral and lingual skills essential to eating and speaking
• Imitation—ranging from imitating simple bodily movements to imitating manipulation of objects to imitating sound patterns to imitating complex movements.
• Receptive Language—ranging from response to safety commands, to following complex instructions, to learning adventitiously
• Expressive Language—ranging from getting basic needs met by others to conversing with others to teaching or informing others
• Play Skills—ranging from fundamental play with action toys to socio-dramatic play to complex games with others
• Self-Help—ranging from washing hands to toileting to organizing materials for an activity
• Social Skills—ranging from tolerating the presence of others to helping others to prolonged positive interaction with others to displaying emotions to others
• Reinforcer Parameters—ranging from acquiring new skills only with edible or tangible reinforcers delivered on each trial to acquiring new skills only with social reinforcers given infrequently
• Inappropriate Behaviors—the only category in our curriculum that includes behaviors that need replacing; ranging from severe tantrums and assaultive behavior to echolalia and stigmatizing repetitive behavior patterns
• Learner Skills—ranging from looking at the teacher to brief periods of learning readiness behavior to prolonged learning readiness behavior to learning without being specifically taught
• Pre-academics and Academics—ranging from basic conditional discriminations to learning from text, writing sentences, performing simple arithmetic calculations and so on

For each of these curriculum areas we have a rationale, subcategories, and a skills list. The teaching procedures essential to address all skills are individualized for each student.

Methods
Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) is the science of applying experimentally derived principles to improve socially significant behavior. At CW, we utilize the principles and methods of ABA to design and evaluate our interventions, which include, but are not limited to the following:

Discrete Trial Teaching, Incidental & Naturalistic Teaching, Fluency Building, Video Modeling, Conditional Discrimination Training, Activity Schedules, Verbal Behavior, Functional Communication Training, Direct Instruction, Functional Analysis and Functional Assessment, Behavior Intervention Planning, Data Based Decision Making

DIS Model
CW has both a licensed speech pathologist and a registered occupational therapist on site. We have adopted an integrated model to implement their services. The specialists train the professional and paraprofessional personnel on how implement therapy relevant tasks throughout the school day. This allows for many more opportunities for our students to practice these skills than would occur in a “pull-out” model.

Transition Criteria
Nearly all of the students who attend Children’s Workshop acquire the skills that permit them to benefit from instruction in less restrictive school settings.  We consider the skills they have acquired, how rapidly they acquired those skills, and the programs that are available when we recommend a transition placement.

Students who can learn academics
Many of our students become ready for elementary school academics while still young enough to transition to an elementary school program, but they continue to require a highly structured program emphasizing positive reinforcement, a low student-to-staff ratio, instruction in social skills, and reliable implementation of behavior intervention plans. For these students, we are likely to recommend COOK Education Center’s Foundations Program.

Students who require skills of independent living
For students who are at or are approaching the age limit for enrollment at Children’s Workshop and who continue to require instruction in functional skills and who continue to require a highly-structured program with a low student-to-staff ratio that is based on positive reinforcement for desirable behaviors, we are likely to recommend the COOK Education Center’s Secondary program.

Transition is an IEP team decision
Transition is always a decision of the student’s IEP team and we collaborate closely with the student’s parents and other members of the team to arrive at a placement decision that is optimal for the student. Whether the transition placement is to a program of the COOK Education Center or to a classroom in the student’s public school district, we work hand in hand with teachers and other personnel to develop a plan for transition, ways to measure the success of the transition, and a plan to fade our support systematically. In addition to the high level of staff skill and involvement with each student that characterizes the programs of COOK Education Center, the advantage for our students in transitioning there is that the process is as seamless as possible.

We have identified certain critical skills that help to predict the student’s likelihood of success whatever the transition placement. These include, but are not limited to the following:

• The student attends to instruction involving new skills for at least 10 minutes without displaying problem behavior or disruptive behavior
• The student follows multiple step instructions that include moving away from the teacher and subsequently returning to the teacher
• The student requires only social and/or token reinforcement to acquire new skills
• The student attends to the lead teacher when in a moderate sized group
• The student engages in independent activities for up to 5 minutes without teacher prompting and reinforcement
• The student Is toilet trained at least to the level of voiding on a time schedule
• The student displays problem behaviors, if at all, at frequencies and intensities that are manageable by the transition school personnel