Teachers of autism

The John Gonzales Show to air Monday and Tuesday interviewed two students with autism. Mentioned was how a lack of autism understanding by teachers and the absence of school therapists make school a lot tougher than it should be for those with autism. While the PSS Head Start program addresses autism with some of the best teachers, therapists, and programs found anywhere, above that level they are severely lacking.

April is Autism Awareness Month. As such, for the awareness of teachers and all others that can and should be teachers to those with autism, excerpts from the book Ten Things Your Student with Autism Wishes you Knew are shared: Your student with autism is like a Mac in a PC-dominated environment. He is hardwired differently. Not incorrectly—just differently…whose operating system is different from everyone else who is not on the autism spectrum. …We need to adapt our teaching to his operating system.

…This different architectural thought process has nothing to do with your student’s ‘abilities.’ We will never know the true extent of those abilities unless we establish communication via the architecture he has in place. .…This difference in architecture impacts the skills embodied in what we call critical thinking. …These skills are missing from your ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder) students’ hardwiring. But it is emphatically not true that they cannot be developed.

…No two ASD children are alike, but all their stories echo a common denominator: individual teachers had the power to make or break their will to stay the course and achieve. At every turn in every day, we have the opportunity to help our student with autism understand our neuro-typical patterns of communicating and relating, and teach those skills that are so elusive to the autism way of thinking.

…Your student with autism has one-channel wiring in a polyphonic world. He likely processes most information via the one learning intelligence that works best for him; in most students with autism, this will be visual or tactile; less commonly, auditory. He struggles to process multiple sensory modalities. …It can be especially difficult to listen and write at the same time, or even to converse and make eye contact at the same time. The seamless integration among the senses that happens within the neuro-typical brain is missing in his brain. …Constantly under a barrage of sensory chaos, he becomes physically as well as emotionally exhausted…each bit of information taken in exists in separate, discrete “boxes” in his brain.

…Our brain organizes the information we take in and even cross-references it for us. Not so for your student with autism. Categorical thinking is difficult for him and must be taught. …As his teacher, you need to help him learn to organize, label, and associate all that information…categorize…apply concepts…identify cause and effect…think flexibly and cohesively the power of having a plan B or C…

Their extreme dependence on routine and sameness is a result of a thinking architecture that has difficulty processing change. Even small variations from expectation—taking a different route to school, having a substitute teacher, changing the student’s desks around, create cognitive chaos that can domino-affect the entire course of the day. …Metaphors, idioms and figurative language are not part of his mindset. In the classroom this can result in difficulty. …He might respond well to prompted retrieval, such as a multiple-choice or matching quiz. Difficulty skyrockets when he is faced with tasks entailing open-ended recall without aid of prompting or cueing. …Many of the social/emotional gaps in your student with autism stem from this impaired perspective-taking. He can’t anticipate what others might say or do in different situations, nor understand that what one person does in a given situation, another person may never do!

…Accept and respect that they think differently, then find effective ways to adapt our teaching accordingly. If we can’t manage to be flexible in our own approach to teaching him, if we don’t accept his basic mental functioning as valid and worthy of our effort, if we reject or disregard him at his very core level—we can’t expect him to respond with any degree of motivation or desire to connect to us or our world. The sweet spot is a meeting place somewhere in the middle. We shift our thinking enough to be able to teach to his way of thinking in a meaningful way. Then he can learn to be more comfortable with our way of thinking, and to feel competent in a neuro-typical world. Little by little the familiarity between us grows. Macs now communicate with PCs…There’s never been a better time to “think differently.” You and your student will both learn things you never knew you never knew.