ABA at Woodbury

Woodbury uses ABA techniques as the basis of their teaching, providing a functional learning environment in both individual and group settings, teaching fluidly across a variety of situations, contexts and settings.

Woodbury creates an individualised education plan for every student who attends the school. The program’s focus depends very much on each individual student needs and current learning style and is adapted and updated as the student progresses. To develop this program a variety of research-based curriculums are utilised and drawn upon.

ABA principles and techniques can foster basic skills such as looking, listening and imitating, as well as complex skills such as reading, conversing and understanding another person’s perspective.

Woodbury combines the national curriculum with its own unique group skills curriculum to assessing children across the following skill repertoires:

 

Communication: Woodbury works closely with our “in house” speech pathologist to develop a speech and language intervention appropriate to each student. We have the ability to work on a wide range of communication skills ranging from requesting to get basic wants and needs met, assessment and intervention for augmented communication systems, improving articulation and speech clarity and supporting language development. 

Group skills and classroom participation: The ability to learn and participate within a group setting is one which all of our students will require throughout their education and beyond. Learning in a group is not as simple as listening and following the rules. It requires students to be able to attend for extended periods, observe their peers and learn from them, wait, take turns, discriminate between instructions, generalise across concepts and independently manage their own behaviour, schedule and learning tasks. Each group skill required is systematically broken down into smaller, manageable steps which allow successful teaching.

Academic literacy and numeracy: As a school we are required to report upon the key learning areas as set out by the New South Wales curriculum. Being a “school of a kind” we have some leniency in the selection of appropriate targets for students allowing us to teach across a broad range of pre-requisites and academic skills to suit each student’s individual needs.

Social skills and play skills: Play and social skills go beyond the ability to appropriately engage in leisure activities; the ability to interact with the everyday environment, to learn through play and to learn from others are all key skills in each students development.

Daily living skills: Independence in a variety of daily living skills is important to both school and community participation. Where appropriate, Woodbury includes daily living skills into their curriculum working on tasks such as toileting, dressing and eating independently.

Behaviour Support: One of the main barriers to inclusion is challenging behaviours. We work on understanding the WHY which allows for equivalent skills to be taught to replace the challenging behaviours.