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 will give 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, SENCO’s, 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 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.

www.smiletherapytraining.com

Please note that for this event you will have to provide your own additional support through access to work. Captioning may be possible. If any of this applies to you, please get in touch by sending an email to sscsec@ed.ac.uk so we can facilitate and provide access.

The event will take place on Zoom. You will receive details on how to join once you have registered via Eventbrite.

To join you will need a decent internet connection and a suitable device. Test your equipment in the Zoom test room: https://zoom.us/test

SSC Webinar: Introduction to smiLE therapy