Today we visited Domino preschool on EWU campus. The school has a total of twelve students, six of them are autistic. The pupils in this school learn by positive reinforcement. Praise, food and games are used to get the pupils to learn something. Instead of telling the students what they did wrong the teachers only tell what they need to do. Bad behaviour is ignored. There is an observations room from which you can see the whole classroom. The room has a one-side window so that the pupils can not see that somebody is watching them. This observation room is used by some teachers and students but also by the parents who want to see how their child behaves in the classroom. Every familiy is visited once in a month for about one hour by a teachers of this preschool, to make sure that the program meets the needs of the parents.I do not have any experience with autistic pupils. In Germany we generally seperate children with disabilities from typical developing children. They go to different schools with special educated teachers that were trained to deal with pupils who have problems with following regular classes. At first I was shocked when I saw that the teachers primarly used food to reward the pupils for positive answers. It reminds me a bit of Skinners experiments with animals. But it seems to work that way.
We talked about differents views on how to deal with autistic pupils. Some people are of the opinion that is important to help autistic pupils to behave like a typical developing pupil. Some others think we should not change the behavoir of those children. We just had to learn to accept them the way they are instead of trying to make them behave the way we do.
I think that it must be a combination of both. In my opinion it is important to make the people aware of the fact that not everybody is the same. We should learn to accept differences and how to deal with them. On the other hand it is a fact that those children how are autistic have problems to find their place in society and to interact with other people. So they can benefit from a program like this. It maked it much easier for them to communicate and to find their place in the regular classroom after preschool.
I think, that it is sad, that we here in Germany seperate people on other schools. It would be better, when other pupils get in contact with authentic or disabled people to break the edge. First they get the chance to feel normal and pupils from normal schools get the chance to help these pupils and they learn from them. Today, the school system in Germany is changing. For example in elementary school, pupils from the second year help pupils from the first year. That is normal for us today, but disabled people or authentics were sepearted and it's hard for them to be integrated in our society.
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