Mission Statement

By readers1  |  2009/08/15 10:57 Posted in General  |  Comments (4)

By Sara Fineganjigsaw_green_10

When I began teaching in Southern California several years ago, I assumed that the fact that an entire department of my school district was devoted to autism meant that I would be able to get information on best practices and the latest research to support my students in learning.  Accordingly, I would invite people from the Autism Support Department to my classroom to observe individual students in order to help me figure out the best ways to help them access academic learning.

They came and watched and gave me odd suggestions such as “well, you could use a checklist…” or “maybe you could reward him with toy time when he finishes,” neither of which really addressed my desire to help my students with autism read better.   It took several months of frustrating interactions between me and two Department employees before one of them finally informed me, “Sara, we handle behavior.  Not learning.  The academic stuff is not what we do.”

I was on my own.

From that point on, I’ve been on a mission to discover and try out whatever instructional strategies I can find to support and shape the intellectual work of my students with autism.   There hasn’t been a lot out there.  We have research up the wazoo on autism, but most of it is wrapped around behaviors and causes, not how kids learn and what helps them learn. 

I’ve come to the conclusion that parents and teachers are on our own here, and that just as parents have been pioneers in locating therapies and supports for their children, so must we teachers with autism in the classroom dig our own trails and share everything we learn. The mind of a child with autism is the mind of a child is the mind of a learner, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to wait around for our school districts to find funding to add cognitive issues to traditional autism support.

My purpose in creating this blog is to found a forum where I can share what I learn and what I’m trying on, and parents, teachers, and other people who love learners with autism and are committed to showing them how to learn can come and get ideas and share what works for them.

Readers with autism experience difficulty with tasks such as making inferences about characters and situations in text, making predictions about what will happen next, negotiating figurative language such as metaphor and simile, questioning for meaning, and a myriad of other strategies we take for granted when we navigate through a novel or short story.

Research has shown that most readers with autism do not connect parts of text.  In other words, a child who is reading a story may not recognize that what happened in the last paragraph is related to what is happening in this paragraph, and thus will not be able to keep track of the plot at all.

Assisting a child in developing, strengthening and regularly using the strategies and understandings needed to fully comprehend text is the job of parents, teacher, and other support providers such as occupational and speech therapists, tutors, and teacher aides.   

Our job is enormous, but we must not be daunted by the size of the task; instead, we must focus on and customize individual interventions and lessons that bridge the gap between a child’s deficits and strengths.

During my teaching career, I’ve developed some interventions and instructional strategies that seem to work well with many readers with autism, particularly those with hyperlexia.  I have also used many ideas given to me by my colleagues and parents of my students, who are my best and most wondrous partners. Support providers at every level are encouraged to try them, modify or expand them, and customize them to fit the needs of their own readers with autism.  Your comments, suggestions, and questions are always welcome.

Our goal is to provide Help for struggling readers on the autism spectrum.bookshelf

Asperger Syndrome rolled into new Autism Spectrum Disorder

By readers1  |  2010/02/10 14:20 Posted in Autism spectrum  |  Comments (2)

By Richard Finegan

The new proposed DSM-V, the Diagnostic Statistical Manual that is the bible for mental health professionals, would eliminate Asperger’s syndrome (first added to DSM-IV in 1994) as a diagnosis separate from autism.  Those now diagnosed with Asperger’s will presumably fall into the milder end of a broadened “Autism Spectrum Disorder.”  Numerous articles about the proposed change are available, including this one from National Public Radio.

The new name for the category, autism spectrum disorder, includes autistic disorder (autism), Asperger’s disorder, childhood disintegrative disorder, and pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified. 

For those like me curious about the actual wording of the new proposed section of the DSM-V (and I’ll admit I’m a wonk and want to see these things verbatim, not just interpreted for me by someone who thinks I can’t read well enough to understand it), here it is:  [Bold face and words in brackets I have added]

Autism Spectrum Disorder

Must meet criteria 1, 2, and 3:

 1.  Clinically significant, persistent deficits in social communication and interactions, as manifest by all of the following: 

a.  Marked deficits in nonverbal and verbal communication used for social interaction:

b.  Lack of social reciprocity; [and]

c.  Failure to develop and maintain peer relationships appropriate to developmental level  [and]

2.  Restricted, repetitive patterns of behavior, interests, and activities, as manifested by at least TWO of the following: 

a.  Stereotyped motor or verbal behaviors, or unusual sensory behaviors 

b.  Excessive adherence to routines and ritualized patterns of behavior

c.  Restricted, fixated interests [and]

3.  Symptoms must be present in early childhood (but may not become fully manifest until social demands exceed limited capacities)

http://www.dsm5.org/ProposedRevisions/Pages/proposedrevision.aspx?rid=94

What were they thinking? Teach vocabulary!

By readers1  |  2010/02/06 09:00 Posted in Expressive language  |  Comments (0)

By Sara Finegan

There was a time in recent memory when teachers were actively discouraged from teaching vocabulary disconnected from academic subject areas.  Word walls were always subject specific.  Wordlists were always dictated by the text being studied. 

You never taught the words “subtle” or “reckless” or “arrogance” until the particular text the child was reading required it.  As a consequence, word groups, antonyms and synonyms, were learned haphazardly and shallowly, if at all.

The rationale for this was mysterious.  Subject and text specific vocabulary always was and always will be taught as needed.  What children needed was a deeper, richer, broader vocabulary and teachers were discouraged from providing it directly.

Children with autism often (and with hyperlexia, always) recognize  and fluently read words most of their peers stumble over.  But this does not translate into understanding those words.

Those of us attempting to help struggling readers on the spectrum to comprehend what they read in narrative, in text, are limited by the breadth of the child’s working vocabulary.  Anything we can do to expand that working vocabulary pushes us closer to a grade-appropriate level of reading comprehension.

Both expressive and receptive language difficulties are made worse when the child has a limited bank of words with which they are familiar.  To help address this very issue, I use what I call “sorting cards” which I finds can be employed to integrate not only subject-area vocabulary but also word lists (adjectives, adverbs, active verbs) used for descriptive writing.

Recently, I’ve begun using my “smart board”…yes, in these difficult times, when I may be taking a pay cut, I still have cutting-edge touch-screen technology in my classroom, thanks to a bond issue.  But where was I? 

Oh yes…I use my Promethean smart board to let kids move words around on the board, grouping them into synonyms and antonyms.  In small groups they talk about them, match them, rearrange them, and use them while having fun at the same time.

Whatever we need to do to expand vocabulary is also promoting comprehension as well as expressive and receptive language.  Not just for our kids with autism but for all the children in our classrooms.

Hope for Haiti Telethon, Jan. 22; Need, today

By readers1  |  2010/01/16 12:20 Posted in General  |  Comments (0)

It has nothing directly to do with reading or autism but everything to do with being a caring human being.

At 8 p.m. Eastern Time on Friday, January 22, a voluntary collection of cable networks will simulcast the Hope for Haiti telethon to raise money for earthquake relief.

Actor George Clooney, Musician/singer Wyclef Jean (himself a Haitian) and CNN journalist Anderson Cooper will cohost the programming.  Scores of celebrities seem to be rearranging their schedules as we write this in order to appear at one of the three venues.

Laudable as this event will no doubt be, Friday is six days away.  People are in desperate need now, today.  We encourage our readers to find an organization you trust (examples: Doctors Without Borders, the American Red Cross, UNICEF) and give now.  Don’t wait.

But then we already knew Sara was edgy…

By readers1  |  2010/01/15 17:22 Posted in General, Questioning  |  Comments (0)

We Teach We Learn (www.weteachwelearn.org) hosts a monthly blog carnival they call “The Edge of Education.”  We submitted Sara’s post Say what? Asking questions as one reads to the sponsors of the carnival, and they recently published the results, announcing that if they had an award, they’d call it an Edgy and declare Sara to be January’s winner! 

Chris Wondra was effusive in his praise of the post and this blog.  We appreciate it, and recommend this carnival to anyone interested in education issues and blogs. 

We’ve been less active here at Readers With Autism this month because Sara has been in New York.  But she hasn’t been lying around, she’s working on a book!  More on that later.

Richard 

Happy New Year!

By readers1  |  2009/12/31 21:50 Posted in General  |  Comments (0)

 

Our New Years Eve was hectic.  We got hacked and had to restore both our websites, this one and The Demanding Classroom.  Readers With Autism is now back up and running and we’ve added security measures that should make us less vulnerable to a repeat performance.

Sorry if anyone was inconvenienced during the time we were offline.  Everyone (except that one guy, who knows who he is) have a happy and prosperous 2010.

The Finegans

Why I object to the term shadow

By readers1  |  2009/12/25 21:28 Posted in Paraeducators  |  Comments (0)

(Following is a cross-post from our sister blog, The Demanding Classroom.  If you haven’t  already done so, please take a look.  There are several other posts of mine there on paraeducators, plus a wide variety of  articles by Sara, on maintaining rigor across the curricula in a special education classroom.)

By Richard Finegan

You may call me a paraeducator, a paraprofessional, a one-on-one aide, a classroom assistant, a special education technician, even a teacher’s aide (though I am there for the student, not the teacher) but please don’t call me a shadow or describe what I do as shadowing.

The term shadow suggests that the aide never leaves the side of the child. That describes a bodyguard, not a paraeducator. I would not be doing my job if I hovered as close to my student as Malia Obama’s Secret Service agent.

True, I am what used to be called (and I still call) a one-on-one aide, and I do move from classroom to classroom with the same child. But my job is to help that student become more independent, more self-regulated and self-sufficient. I’ve never heard anyone explain how this can happen if I am constantly elbow-to-elbow with my kid.

A better analogy to what we do might be a sheepdog: Constantly alert and watching his or her charges but only moving in and out again as circumstances require. Yes, this analogy works better; shepherding is an improvement over shadowing. Even so, I don’t think I’m quite ready to be called a sheepdog either. Smile.

This is more than just a semantic issue. When others refer to me as a shadow or to what I do as shadowing, they consciously or unconsciously suggest that I should be sticking like glue to my student and that I am perhaps not doing my job properly if I am halfway across the classroom taking notes or, more often, walking around interacting with other students.

Worse even is what it suggests to new paraeducators trying to learn to do what we do. What they should be hearing is: Get up. Step back. Give your student some room to grow!