The Intensive Interaction Handbook

Intensive interaction is an approach to teaching the pre-speech fundamentals of communication to children and adults who have severe learning difficulties or autism, and who are still at an early stage of communication development. This book is a practical guide to help those wishing to implement intensive interaction in their setting, and it provides detailed advice and step-by-step guidance as well as a consideration of all the issues associated with carrying out this approach.

It considers:

• Preparing for intensive interaction
• Observing intensive interaction in progress
• Doing intensive interaction at home and at work
• Teamwork
• Wellbeing
• Record-keeping

This book is a straightforward guide for anyone wanting to use intensive interaction with people with severe and complex learning difficulties, people who have very severe learning difficulties, profound and multiple learning difficulties, multi-sensory impairments, and people who have a diagnosis of autism.

Dr. Dave Hewett has been working in the field of special education for 40 years. He was headteacher at Harperbury Hospital School throughout the 1980s, where he and the team worked on the development of Intensive Interaction, producing the first publications and first research on Intensive Interaction, resulting in his doctorate. With Melanie Nind he produced the first Intensive Interaction book in 1994. Since 1990 he has been an independent consultant, continuing to publish extensively and work on the development and dissemination of the approach. Dave also publishes and gives courses on challenging behaviour issues, though as he maintains in the challenging behaviour section of this book, ‘behaviour difficulties are communication difficulties’. It is therefore not a separate topic.  He is now director of the Intensive Interaction Institute, travelling and broadcasting the Intensive Interaction message increasingly worldwide.