How to Effectively Include Students with High Functioning Autism and Asperger’s Syndrome

1. How to Effectively Include Students with High Functioning Autism and Asperger’s Syndrome Kimberly Bennett Educational Consultant Kbennett@tiu11.org

2. Purpose • This Power Point presentation is to help teachers understand the deficit of autism and Asperger’s Syndrome and to provide suggestions on how to successfully include them in the regular education classroom.

3. Working with children on the spectrum can be challenging but I can assure you that you will learn a great deal about yourself and teaching by having them in your life.

4. Understanding autism spectrum disorder is the first step in accepting the differences that make these individuals unique and fascinating. • This presentation just scratches the surface of the needs of each of the children on the spectrum in your classroom.

5. I attempted to cover areas that appear to affect most teachers and students in the regular education classroom.

6. I have taught children with autism for the past 7 years and have grown professionally in ways that I never would have experienced had they not entered my life.

7. Let’s begin with: COGNITIVE PROFILE OF CHILDREN WITH AUTISM/ASPERGER’S SYNDROME • Weaknesses: • Inflexibility in applying rules to changing contexts • Difficulty with Executive Functioning • Difficulty with Complex Motor planning • Difficulty with Perspective Taking We will cover these throughout the presentation

8. Rule Learning • Rules are a learned concept not a generalized concept for children with autism. Their brains do not generate the rules by themselves they have to be taught to them. • They need to be clearly stated. • Children with autism can learn things by categories but they cannot generate or organize the categories by themselves. They can learn it if you do it for them.

9. Do rules always stay the same? • When do they change? • How do we know when they change? • We categorize rules and that helps us know when to use them.

10. The rule of swearing… Where can typical kids swear and get away with it? What if kids on the autism spectrum hear kids swearing on the back of the bus and at home? While playing on the playground they swear at a teacher or another student. What discipline procedure should be implemented if these kids are caught swearing on the playground?

11. Swearing • The child with the autistic brain needs to be taught the rules of swearing because they may not be able to categorize it or apply the rule to different situations ---

12. Rules of liking the opposite sex • What are some behaviors children perform in elementary school when they like someone of the opposite sex? • What do they do in middle school? • What do they do in high school? • What do they do in college?

13. How do the rules change? • What if you were functioning at a social-emotional age of 12-18 months to 3-5 years? Failure to consider this in treatment of these students worsens the behavior and function.

14. Rules, Rules, Rules • Transition rules • Lunchroom rules • Playground rules • Hallway rules • Rules at home • Bus rules • Different teachers-different RULES

15. Rules can sometimes override concepts: example • Bill is a young adult with autism who decided to take figure skating lessons. His mother drove him to the rink several times a week. After a while, she decided to skate while he had his lesson. Bill performed his routine, but people learned to stay out of his way. He went where his program required him to go regardless of others. One day his mother forgot to note where Bill was and he ran her over, knocking her unconscious. The emergency team was called and she was given first aide and taken to the hospital. The next day she asked Bill why he did not come to her assistance, since he was an Eagle Scout with a first aide badge. He relied, “It expired.”

16. What did Bill understand and what didn’t he understand?

17. Children on the spectrum like the following: • Knowing what the rules are, what is going to happen next. • If your brain is not doing this for you, you will need some help. • How stressful would it be to never know what to expect next and then you got in trouble when you guessed wrong?

18. EXECUTIVE FUNCTIONING • The capacity to control our own attentional focus • Enables a person to do or attend to more than one thing at a time. • It enables us to recognize what is relevant shift attention, and then recall what is relevant. • Ability to Monitor Self Inhibition

19. Attention, organization, and generalization contribute to executive functioning. • With strong executive functioning we are not distracted by the irrelevant and can shift our focus to the relevant.

20. The teacher told the class to take out their black pencils. Yours fell on the floor and when you looked in the case you did not see it. The teacher continues to give directions-- what do you know to do? • What is the most relevant thing you would need to do in this scenario? • If you have trouble with executive functioning what would happen? What would the child focus on?

21. Can you talk on the cell phone to your spouse when you are lost in an area with a lot of traffic? • Can you talk to your spouse and watch an interesting TV show at the same time? • Why?

22. EXECUTIVE FUNCTIONING • Think of how many times a day you require a student to shift attention. In the first hour of school what do you require students to do?

23. Transitioning from Reading to a spelling test… • What are your instructions? • Count up the number of instructions you give your class. • If your brain did not have the ability to take in all of that information at once what would you want someone to do for you?

24. I would want someone to…

25. Poor Executive functioning • They may not be distractible in the way that others with attentional problems may be. • In fact it may be very hard to get them to shift attention.

26. If a student has difficulty writing down thoughts what can you ask him to do instead? Answer: let them tell you instead of writing For some student the act of writing and thinking at the same time is to difficult. Many students with autism/Asperger’s have fine motor delays and it is very difficult for them to write. If you want to know what a person with autism knows…ask them.

27. ATTENTION DEFINITION • The ability to see what is relevant, and shift attention to the relevant, contributes to what is called attention.

28. What can we do?Answer: Use a strength-Visual Performance Children with autism frequently have better visual performance abilities than auditory alone.

29. Live it out loud: Explain what you are doing and why i.e. verbally walk through the process of losing a pencil. THIS IS EXTREMELY IMPORTANT

30. Let the child know the sequence of events a visual schedule posted on the wall or at their desk is extremely helpful. Let them know what is going to happen throughout the day.

31. Older Children • Prepare a schedule for daily routines • What do I do first, next, last? • Books needed for each class • Completing a project • Provide information about time periods Graphic organizers Highlight important information

32. Make a task schedule for a spelling test • What does the child have to do first, next, last? (List the steps in order, place it on their desk to remind them.)

33. Executive Functioning • Tell them what is relevant. • When presenting them with a structured lessons the child needs help figuring out the relevant information so that they can answer the relevant questions.

34. The Autistic Brain • Some adults in the spectrum state that thoughts come into their heads and they can’t get them to stop unless they say the words over and over again. • I heard one man say, “When I feel my autism take over it is like a train speeding down a track and I know it will soon crash. The looks and comments that will come from others will not be nice, or understanding, but hurtful and rude.”

35. Non Fiction • Information presented in a direct way • Usually not a problem

36. Fiction • In most literature a great deal is implied. The reader is invited to understand and wonder about things. This is frustrating as the communication of most people, (the communication that is to be “understood),” is said without explicitly being stated.

37. This causes stress and anxiety

38. And then meltdown…

39. BRAIN IMAGING: Brain activation in people with autism during sentence comprehension. • Autism group has less activation in Broca’s area ( a sentence integration area) than the control group and more in Wernicke’s area ( a word processing area)

40. These results have been consistent with performance. These student have poorer comprehension of complex sentences but are good at reading words (spelling bee champs).

41. Reading a text is not a problem but being able to pull out relevant information from the text can be a problem. Some researchers feel that some people on the autism spectrum see a sentence as one big word and not individual words with different meanings.

42. Brain circuitry underlying basic abilities are intact, and these circuits plus visual processing are relied upon to perform tasks that typical individuals perform using and integrative circuitry and higher order abilities.

43. Functional under-connectivity of neural systems is a general feature of the brain in autism. • Information processing capacity is reduced so dual tasks, speed of processing, and any task relying on strategy is very problematic.

44. In other words… • If a student is feeling rushed to do more than one task at a time, they are incapable of handling all of that information at once, and performance will be effected. • Neuro pathways are not connecting information together at a high speed or at all.

45. Executive Functioning • Monitoring Self Inhibitions • Neuro-typical people can “self talk” • Children with brain damage in executive functioning areas of the brain will tend to “blurt out” what they are thinking. • Engage in self talk that is repetitive in nature at times not directly related to what is happening.

46. Executive functioning and writing • Many children do not show “what they know” when they have to write. • It is important to find out how the child learns best and how he demonstrates what he knows.

47. THEORY OF MIND(Cognitive) • Modular view of cognition that suggests the capacity to understand the intentions of others AND it follows its own propriety development.

48. THEORY OF MIND A special type of cognition that allows one to depict the psychological states of others (thoughts and beliefs).

49. Theory of Mind • Critical decoupling mechanism that allows the child to keep cognitive representations organized so his/her thoughts can easily be distinguished from the thoughts of others. **A break down in this process leads to the social and pragmatic deficits in children with Asperger’s Syndrome**

50. IMPLICATIONS • Children with autism will have significant problems understanding the social world around them. • They will be unable to predict the actions of others.