Using a Music Therapy Collaborative Consultative Approach - World ...

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Social development. Interventions focusing on improving social skills, in children
with autism target both adults and peers. The variety of strategies used to improve social
skills in children with autism fall into three categories:
(1) adult-directed instruction of specific goals of social skills, such as joint attentions,
response by gaze, imitation, turn taking, and initiating social interactions;
(2) a child-centered approach, in which adults follow the child’s lead, encourage and sustain
interactions, scaffold to higher levels, and extend the duration of interaction; and
(3) peer strategies, in which typically developing peers prompt and maintain social
engagement (National Research Council, 2001).
According to McGee, Morrier and Daly (2001), true social inclusion only occurs by
teaching both children with autism and their typically developing peers how to interact with
one another. Peer-mediated strategies shown themselves to be the most powerful means of
improving social interactions of children with autism, and of generalizing and maintaining in
inclusive preschool settings (Strain et al., 1979; Goldstein et al., 1992; McGee et al., 1992).
When using peer-mediated strategies, teachers train typically developed peers how to interact
with their classmates with autism to model and role-playing. These strategies are then cued,
reinforced and systematically faded out by teachers (National Research Council, 2001).
Other strategies used to increase social interaction in children with autism are peer tutoring
through incidental teaching (McGee et al., 1992), adult instruction in social games (Goldstein
et al., 1988), script-fading procedures (Krantz & McClannahan, 1998), and social stories
(Gray & Garand, 1993). “(…) Peer-mediated approaches are complex to deliver, require
socially skilled typical peers, precise adult control in training peers, managing and fading