'Developing best practice: developing best practitioners'

As I had repeatedly and shamelessly flagged up over the last few weeks, last Thursday we held our 13th annual UK Intensive Interaction Conference here in Leeds. I'd like to think that it lived up to it's reputation as a 'relaxed, friendly, meaningful' (Hewett, D. 2017) gathering of like-minded Intensive Interaction practitioners and advocates.

The focus of this year's conference was 'Intensive Interaction: Developing best practice: developing best practitioners' - which was a stroke of luck, as that was the title we'd given it on the flyer! I would just like to thank the chair and the speakers for their considerable efforts on what turned out to be a brilliant day. 

Thanks therefore to: Amandine Mourière (Chair and II Institute Associate), Cath Brockie (LD residential service owner), Ben Smith (specialist behaviour team leader), Lucy Golder and Julia Barnes (teachers), and Lynnette Menzies (Speech & Language Therapist).

Dave Hewett kindly remarked that: 'The expertise on display from the presenters was well, more than impressive, particularly since, apart from Graham, they were conference first-timers or with little experience on the podium. Praise them please, they uphold the finest traditions of what it is to be an Intensive interaction practitioner' - high praise indeed: it doesn't come much better than that!. 

If you would like to see a short illustration of the quality of their presentations, then go to: https://www.facebook.com/dave.hewett.71/videos/10154856997401123/ 

Here, I will give just a brief summation of the concluding point of my own presentation. It was my strong contention that to develop Intensive Interaction best practices and best practitioners:

We need to understand the value of structured and shared reflection in learning:

'learning from experience' should really mean ‘learning from reflection on experience’.

Without a clear process to support reflection on our Intensive Interaction experiences, we are unlikely to develop our Intensive Interaction practices, both individually and collectively, to their full potential. 

But learning from 'reflection on experience' doesn't happen by accident: we need to have, or make available, an on-going process of supportive, dare I say 'nurturing' (there I've said it), feedback to enable regular constructive reflection on our current practices - that's what will make us better at doing what we need to do, and to do it better (if that makes sense!).

p.s. I have also just got my NHS Intensive Interaction webpage back on-line. This is really important to me as my old one was cited in the UK Department of Health strategy document: 'Valuing People Now: a new three-year strategy for people with learning disabilities’. It was cited as one of only 2 places to go to get further information on the approach. (Mind you, you only get to the Intensive Interaction bit once you'd laboured past 7 voluminous pages of introductions, with glossy 'in my Sunday best' photos of 2 secretaries of state, 6 government ministers and a National LD Director!). Anyway, my new NHS 'branding & style format compliant' webpage can now be accessed at:

https://www.leedsandyorkpft.nhs.uk/advice-support/intensive-interaction/ ... why not take a look.