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Special teams
School of Health Professions students are engaged in valuable research in a variety of areas. These stories represent the efforts of students from the Department of Occupational Therapy and Occupational Science.
Just Ask! | Getting a read on autism | The stronger side | Special teams
For most kids, playing a sport with a team is a rite of passage. For kids with special needs, and their volunteer coaches, mixing with a team can be hard. With little or no information presented to them, the coaches can feel overwhelmed by how to involve children with disabilities or other special needs, manage communications and handle behavior issues that could develop. Occupational therapy students Kate Schoen and Holly Light have developed a new game plan that offers coaches an in-service training session with a spotlight on results.
One of the goals of occupational therapists is to help people best do those things they enjoy or work at in life. Light says recreation is often very important to children and adolescents. Watching her brother coach a youth soccer team with no training on working with children with special needs inspired the research.
“We wanted to target children who had mild disabilities because it seemed that these were the children that would need extra support from the coaches in order to participate in recreational programs,” Light says. “Without that extra support it seemed that their recreational sports experiences might not be positive, not only for them, but for coaches and other players as well.”
Light and Schoen developed a training module to be presented as an in-service learning opportunity. It contains strategies to manage behavior outbursts, develop communications systems and integrate children with mild disabilities successfully. A test was administered to the Columbia area coaches volunteering for the students’ research project to determine how successful the in-service was.
“When we presented to the coaches, most of them were thankful and a few of them were surprised about the information we had to give them,” Light says. “They were generally very receptive to the information.
Light has talked with the Recreation Council of Greater St. Louis about presenting the in-service there and hopes to see other OT students continue the project. An online version could be an easy, accessible way to offer the training to a wider range of coaches, Light says.