By Sara Finegan
The autism spectrum is a vast and invisible entity and as I explore and write about the world of the reader with autism, you are probably wondering “well, just a damned minute here. Is she writing about someone like my kid, or does she teach the high-level kids who just have some social skills deficits?”
The answer is: I don’t know.
We don’t have a piece of tape marking off the gradations of the autism spectrum, much less where each individual child would stand if we lined them all up along the edge. I have a feeling that with the exception of the extremes on either end, placement on the spectrum is rather subjective.
Bobby was high functioning…
I stopped worrying about what level each of my readers with autism was on when I had an interesting conversation with Bobby’s mother Patty right about the time he finished his third year in my class and got ready to go off to middle school. Patty and I had become friends during Bobby’s time in my class and you could not find a better partner to work with. During this particular conversation I mentioned that Bobby was high-functioning and she said “well…”
Turns out, Bobby was anything but high-functioning when he came to me in the beginning of the fourth grade. I didn’t know that, because he was the first kid with autism I’d ever had in my class, if you don’t count several with Asperger Syndrome I’d had in previous years. He was somewhere, according to Patty, in the mid-functioning area, leaning toward lower, though his compliance with rules and procedures was so high that we never had any major behavior issues.
In my naivete, I thought that since he wasn’t banging his head against the walls, he must be at a high level.
The point is that by the time Bobby left my class, he was pretty high-functioning. True, he continued to have difficulty expressing himself and would freeze up when asked for answers to some problems, but here’s the big deal: he’s been out of my class for awhile now, and he’s been getting A’s and B’s in all general ed classes ever since.
I would like to attribute Bobby’s success to my brilliant and innovative teaching. I would also like to be able to run a marathon next month, but the truth is, I can only do three miles at a time and even then, it’s ghastly towards the end.
Bobby, it appears, progressed along the spectrum due to several factors. One of them was what I taught him, which was the subject of my masters thesis and will be a blog entry as soon as I get back from vacation, because I do not carry my thesis around with me when I’m out of town and I want to cut and paste copious quantities of it into my blog.
Kids “on the spectrum” are not static
I think, though, that Bobby’s amazing jump into inclusion-land was mostly due to his own personal growth and development as a person. Kids with autism are just like other kids, who aren’t able to do some things in the second grade that they can in the fourth, and I don’t know why some of us get the impression that they are static creatures. It might have taken Bobby three years instead of two to be able to write a personal narrative, but that was okay with me.
But Bobby’s growth was also due to very high standards held by me and his mom regarding his thinking and work. We never assumed he couldn’t do things, and if he seemed overwhelmed, we would just divide tasks and lessons into smaller chunks for him.
Bobby was held to the same standard as other kids
Patty and I realized early on that it was all a matter of how we customized the learning experience for him while at the same time holding him to the same standards as others in my class. It was an interesting balancing act and we had to keep in touch regularly.
On the one hand, we had no expectations about Bobby’s capacity to learn and use new knowledge and skills, because we couldn’t read his mind or get much insight into how he processes information. I wasn’t able to compare him to anyone because he was unique. 
On the other hand, we expected him to do the same homework, the same math, and the same social studies work as everyone else. Sometimes this meant that I gave him sentence-starters to get him going on a writing assignment, or he was allowed to draw a picture to show his understanding of a math problem rather than writing a complete sentence, but he did the same math as everyone else.
Now, I had those high expectations of his work because I was assuming that Bobby was a high-functioning learner with autism. If someone had told me at the beginning that he wasn’t, I’d probably have lowered my sights. And that would have been to his detriment.
Pay no attention to “level”
What I learned from Bobby was not to pay any attention whatsoever to what “level” any of my students with autism are on with regard to the spectrum when it comes to ability to learn and do work. Each one is his or her own world of learning, and that’s the universe I want to live in.
So can the strategies I’ve developed work with lower-functioning readers with autism? Sure. Every strategy is created to be customized according to the individual students’ needs and strengths.
Tips: If your child is non verbal or has expressive language deficits
So, if you’re using the “Who….did what?” strategy with a student who is pretty non-verbal, give the child a series of boxes on paper and ask him/her to draw a picture of each thing that a character does in a given passage. And if you have a child with expressive learning deficits that are more profound than the kids I’ve described, give him/her multiple choice options for inferences, predictions, or other activities.
And finally, don’t assume that because a reader with autism cannot perform some tasks right now, you shouldn’t keep teaching them or modeling them. You should. The more they observe a skill or piece of information in a variety of contexts, the more likely it is that the kids will internalize them and begin to use them.
