Brooke teaches an intensive class at the Willamette Education Service District, Early Childhood Center.  Brooke and her team went through the complete process of creating an OrPATS training site.  Initially staff attended a 2 day workshop followed up by on-going support and training from one of the OrPATS Autism specialist's. The students are young so they are learning the beginning skills of attending, imitation skills, and matching skills. In expressive language many are working on sound pairing and imitation of words. Support was given in multiple areas within the class: direct instruction, small group instruction, visuals, schedules, pivotal response training, independent work systems and other areas of instruction. Brooke and her team worked (and continue to work) diligently to effectively use many research-based strategies. Once all the members of the team felt comfortable with the functioning of the class, the team moved forward to the next phase of the training process.  One of Brooke's colleagues was invited to visit the site to receive training. The purpose of this initial visit is to practice training a new team to implement the evidence-based practices. This allows both the coach at the site and the staff to gain an understanding of what takes place when providing training to others. During this visitation the visiting teacher was able to observe how Brooke's class was run, how student schedules were being used, along with staff schedules.  The teacher was able to observe the "rotations," which included discrete trial teaching, pivotal response training, independent work routines and small group instruction.  Follow-up training was then provided by both Brooke and an OrPATS Autism specialist to the visiting teacher. Brooke and her staff run a nice program and are officially open for visits!

A recent research study was published in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry examining the impact of parent education and its effect on increasing functional communication skills with children ages 2-6 years. Two types of parent education was provided.  One group with instruction specific to Pivotal Response Training (PRT) and the second group instruction with existing autism parent psycho-educational program.  Both groups included parent-only group meetings and training with parent-child dyads.  Children whose parents received instruction specific to PRT demonstrated improvement in frequency of functional utterances and greater improvement in adaptive communication skills.  Consistent with recommendations regarding the critical role of parent education in early intervention (National Research Council, 2001), this study provides support for the model of training parents to implement PRT (Hardan, A., Gengoux, G., Berquist, K., Libove, R., Ardel, C., Phillips, J., Frazier, T., Minjarez, M. 2014). The National Standards Project, Phase 2 identified Parent Training as an Established Intervention.