About us
Hickory Learning Group provides evidence based practices to best serve individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder in the Hickory, NC area. Our vision is to provide individualized treatment plans through consultative services using our “hexagonal approach” to independence. Our philosophy is the belief that independence is built in six essential behavioral and environmental domains.
Functional Communication: Functional Communication refers to the ability to communicate one's private events and basic needs effectively. When individuals learn functional communication, they may no longer demonstrate challenging behaviors. To achieve this, we must teach communication strategies that serve the same purpose as the behavior and with using an effective modality.
Practical Socialization: Practical Socialization focuses on two important principles: Pro-social behaviors to help an individual to develop confidence, form friendships, and get along with people around him/her. Social avoidance behaviors to help an individual appropriately avoid or terminate unwanted social interactions.
Daily Living Skills: Learning daily living skills is essential to increase independence at home, at school and in the community. By introducing these skills early and building block by block, individuals build the foundation that will allow him or her to increase self esteem and lead to more happiness in all areas of life.
Preferred Vocational Skill Training: This domain focuses on the development of the skills need to gain meaningful employment. However, our main philosophy on teaching vocational skills relates to two specific questions that need to be answered: What does the individual like to do and what “can” they do willingly? By focusing on developing preferred skills, reinforcement for work is embedded into the task itself, leading to natural reinforcement of completing vocational tasks, leading to happy and healthy employment.
Replacing Unsafe Behaviors: Unsafe behaviors do not go away, they are replaced. The way to replace unsafe behaviors is by replacing those behaviors with ones that result in the same type of reinforcement. Teaching and reinforcing replacement behaviors will lead to an increased opportunity for learning and for contacting social reinforcement in the environment.
Parent and Caregiver Collaboration: Parents and caregivers can learn how to help their child generalize and maintain skills they are learning. By participating in this collaboration, parents and caregivers are now involved in their progress. Once the parents and caregivers have a foundational understanding of ABA, they can begin to practice these complex skills that clinicians are using. This collaboration leads to empowerment. In being involved with the hexagonal learning approach, they can examine the best ways to help without having to constantly consult with experts, eventually leading to the fading of services and an increase in independence.
Each domain focuses on the importance of three questions that need to be answered in order to foster independence.
What: What behaviors are we going to teach that will foster independence?
How: How does the client learn and how can we teach these behaviors effectively?
Why: Why does this particular behavior have importance in this domain or why is it significant?
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Our mission is to foster independence through functional skill learning through individualized creative treatment plans and errorless learning.
“The hexagonal approach has the power to catapult individuals into a lifetime of independence and learning.”
