Introduction to smiLE therapy

Taster Session: a one-hour brief introduction to smiLE Therapy.

Presented on Wednesday, 9th February 2022

Content

smiLE Therapy: Strategies & Measurable Interaction in Live English was created in 2002 to give deaf students a structured and meaningful way to learn essential communication and social skills for everyday use in the mainstream hearing world. Since 2009 smiLE Therapy has extended to client groups beyond deafness, to students with Autism, Down Syndrome, Developmental Language Disorders, Learning Difficulties and Physical Disability. It is now used in a range of mainstream and specialist school settings across primary, secondary, post 16 and 18-25 college settings. This taster gave an introduction to the therapy using video clips to illustrate before and after therapy outcomes.

Deaf students face disadvantages in everyday encounters in the hearing community, which are well documented in the research literature. These include fewer opportunities to learn social interaction skills, reduced strategies to repair communication breakdown and misunderstanding impacting on daily functioning. To date smiLE Therapy is the only established intervention that targets this, by building communicative and social skills resilience. Included, is work on transferring skills through school and family training to maximise impact. Every module has quantitative pre and post therapy outcome measures. Our aim is to share this innovation, the evidence behind it and our drive to improve outcomes for our stakeholders.

Target Audience

Speech and Language Therapists and Speech and Language Therapists assistants, Teachers, Occupational Therapists, SENCOs, Educational Psychologists and Education staff

Presenter

Karin Schamroth is a Specialist Speech and Language Therapist, who worked in the NHS for 30 years.

She created smiLE Therapy (Strategies & Measurable Interaction in Live English) in 2002, initially for Deaf students to give them a structured and meaningful way to learn essential communication and social skills for everyday use in the mainstream hearing world. Since 2009 she has extended smiLE Therapy to use it with children, young people and adults, from age 7 to 25, with communication challenges due to Down Syndrome, Autism, Learning Difficulties, Developmental Language Disorder, Physical Disability. Karin trains Speech and Language Therapists, Teachers, Occupational Therapists, SENCO’s, Educational Psychologists and Education staff across the UK and internationally.

The principles of the therapy was laid down in her book smiLE Therapy: Functional Communication and Social skills for Deaf students and Students with Special Needs Routledge, 2015.