The Rules Grid: helping children with social communication and interaction needs manage social complexity

This article introduces a new practical visual approach, the Rules Grid, to support children who have social communication and interaction needs. The Rules Grid involves a system whereby behaviours of concern can be broken down into smaller behavioural manifestations which in turn lead not only to problem identification and specification, but provide a visible structure to support behaviour change at a reasonably micro level. The paper provides an overview of the theory and research that support visual approaches before outlining some important examples of visual strategies. This is followed by a presentation of a single case study which illustrates how the Rules Grid could be used.