About decade ago, I had two students who were having difficulty with pronouns and made requests like, “Can you have some juice?” This is a common problem with children with autism. I did a review of the research literature and the treatment manuals, but there wasn’t much out there to use as a guide to set up a teaching program. After trying an enormous number of ways to teach these skills, the teams eventually came up with an effective procedure by making a few logical tweaks to standard methods of how to teach pronouns. Both of the students learned to use pronouns, and everyone was excited.
Since it was so effective, I decided that it would be worth publishing the procedures. It ended up taking many, many years. That journey involved teaching pronouns to probably 15-20 more students, and then getting feedback from numerous professionals and journal editors. We ran into numerous problems: The three students we taught pronouns to in a school district, but couldn’t get consent for the research; The student who was almost finished, but the school year ran out; The treatment integrity problems in two of the home programs; The student who moved in the middle of learning pronouns; The complexity of the early versions was unnecessary, and journal editors insisted it be simplified. And on and on. Finally, we had one student who learned the pronouns well with all of the controls, and we published the paper.
By the time it was ready to be published, I didn’t know what to do about the list of people who really should have been thanked. The list was so long it would have been absurd to include in such a short paper. And the procedure is not complete. The outcome we achieved is really just a promising first step. To achieve fully generalized use of pronouns takes a lot more work than the initial first step we published. And, our procedures are not perfect. In a recent clinical case of a student who needed to learn pronouns, the mom said to me,” but why don’t you …?” Turns out, her suggestion was a great improvement in the procedures.
The lesson I take from the pronoun journey is that you can’t Poogi everything. My problem was that I had an intense full-time job that had nothing to do with publishing journal articles on pronouns. This was a time-consuming side project. There were hundreds of follow up ideas that a serious researcher would need to consider to make it an effective technology. I was working on POOGI-ing lots of other aspects of practice too.
I would have made a lot more progress if I had just picked one or two things to focus on. If you remember that most things don’t matter in the long run, it is easier to focus. The POOGI should really be about focused attention on a very small number of things that will have a big impact, not trying to improve everything all the time.
If you are interested in the nitty-gritty of how the pronoun procedures work, it was published here, or you can contact me.