By Sara Finegan
When I began teaching in Southern California several years ago, I assumed that the fact that an entire department of our 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.
One Comment
Hi,
Please give Richard my & Ed’s regards. Sara, I am a special educator with 34 years experience. The Edmark Reading Series as well as SRA Reading Mastery has proven very beneficial to my students who fell under the PDD Umbrella. I am shocked you were told that classrooms that serve these children were only about behavior-that is never the case in a classroom with a special educator who knows what they are doing. Luckily, it has been my experience over the years to know some very excellent teachers whose autisitc students greatly benefited from their expertise.