In a world that’s ever changing, routine and structure provide great comfort to a child on the autism spectrum. Define routines clearly.
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12 Tips to Setting up an Autism Classroom « Principal Kendrick - 6 views
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autism special education special needs students SPED ASD:teaching classroom ASD:educators tips
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Make sure children know what to do if they finish ahead of time. Typically, children with autism do not use free time productively; therefore strive to have as little downtime between activities as possible.
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Remember to keep explanations simple and short about each picture or concentration will wane. Give written instructions instead of verbal whenever you can. Highlight or underline any text for emphasis.
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People with autism like order and detail. They feel in control and secure when they know what to expect
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Make sure you have this schedule in a very visible place in your classroom and direct the students’ attention to it frequently, particularly a few minutes before you begin the next activity.
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Written schedules are very effective for good readers. These can also be typed up and placed on a student’s desk.
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Many people with autism find it difficult to filter out background noise and visual information. Children with autism pay attention to detail. Wall charts and posters can be very distracting.
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Always keep your language simple and concrete. Get your point across in as few words as possible.
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Give very clear choices and try not to leave choices open ended. You’re bound to get a better result by asking “Do you want to read or draw?” than by asking “What do you want to do now?”
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Children with autism are not rude. They simply don’t understand social rules or how they’re supposed to behave.
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Despite the lack of reaction they sometimes present, hearing you speak about them in a negative way will crush their self esteem.
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Children on the autism spectrum feel secure when things are constant. Changing an activity provides a fear of the unknown. This elevates stress which produces anxiety
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Using schedules helps with transitions too as students have time to “psyche themselves up” for the changes ahead.
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Making decisions is equally important and this begins by teaching students to make a choice. Offer two choices.
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When giving a directive or asking a question, make sure you allow for extra processing time before offering guidance. Self help skills are essential to learn
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Avoid this temptation and make sure you allow ample time before you abandon an idea. Remember that consistency is a key component of success. If you’re teaching a student to control aggression, the same plan should be implemented in all settings, at school and at home.
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We all love being rewarded and people with autism are no different. Rewards and positive reinforcement are a wonderful way to increase desired behavior
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There are many reward systems which include negative responses and typically, these do not work as well.
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Focusing on negative aspects can often lead to poor results and a de-motivated student. When used correctly, rewards are very powerful and irresistible
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Every reward should be showered in praise. Even though people on the spectrum might not respond typically when praised, they enjoy it just as much as you!
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People on the autism spectrum respond well to order and lists are no exception. Almost anything can be taught in a list format.
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While typical people often think in very abstract format, people on the spectrum have a very organized way of thought. Finding ways to work within these parameters can escalate the learning curve.
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It helps to be creative when you’re teaching students with autism. People on the spectrum think out of the box and if you do too, you will get great results.
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Often, people with autism have very specific interests. Use these interests as motivators.
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Another great strategy to use is called “Teaching with questions”. This method keeps students involved, focused and ensures understanding.
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Don’t demand eye contact if a student has trouble processing visual and auditory information simultaneously.
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By correcting every action a person does, you’re sending a message that they’re not good enough the way they are. When making a decision about what to correct, always ask yourself first, “Will correcting this action help this person lead a productive and happy life?”
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Autistic Aphorisms: Intelligence, Genius, and Autism - 0 views
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aphorisms intelligence autism genius Pythagoras Plato Aristotle Archimedes Newton Gauss Einstein
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Professor James Flynn has incorporated an interesting sidebar into his book What is Intelligence? In it he lists his seven choices for Western civilization’s greatest minds: Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Archimedes, Newton, Gauss, and Einstein.
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Hundreds of research teams, maybe even thousands by now, have so convinced themselves that intelligence must originate from inside our skulls, have so convinced themselves that only within networks of cranial neurons can be found the secrets to humanity’s growing mental capacity, that all have managed to overlook completely the far more plausible alternative—the one existing right before our very eyes.
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It is time to reconsider that conventional wisdom, time to regard genius with a different set of eyes; for genius is not a function of greater intelligence, genius is the description of how intelligence grows.
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Look at the content of any intelligence test—language, arithmetic, patterns, designs. What we measure with the aid of those I.Q. booklets are not the abilities we inherited from out our animal past, but instead their exact counterpart; we measure only those skills the species has been adding throughout all its history since. In some sense, an intelligence test measures the modernness of an individual; an intelligence test measures an individual’s ability to appropriate for himself the same set of skills the species has been appropriating as a whole—skills that do not find their origin in our biological nature, but instead owe their existence to the strange, brewing mixture of non-biological pattern, structure and form that has been rapidly taking shape all around us.
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The unusual characteristics of humanity’s transformational individuals are not the result of their genius, they are genius’s prerequisite
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But counter to prevailing wisdom, there are many autistic individuals—most likely a majority—who do make substantial progress by means of an alternative perceptual course, a course that allows them not only to navigate meaningfully their surrounding world, but also to assimilate, if somewhat awkwardly and belatedly, to the human species itself (and thereby explaining how autism, estimated to be present in nearly one percent of the human population, could go entirely unrecognized until as recently as sixty-five years ago).
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all autistic individuals must crystallize their existence by means of this alternative perceptual course—it becomes, in essence, autism’s most salient feature.
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The unusual behaviors and interests of autistic children—lining up toys, staring at ceiling fans, twirling, flapping hands repeatedly, fascination with knobs, buttons, switches, letters, shapes and digits, watching the same video again and again, singing the same song over and over—these activities betray a form of perception completely unlike that of most other children, a perception noticeably absent in social and biological focus, but also noticeably drawn to symmetry, repetition and pattern.
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The unusual routines of autistic children are the natural, indeed the expected, mode of expression for a form of perception engaged primarily by the structural aspects of the non-social, non-biological world.
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Autistic individuals would have been the first to notice the inherent structure contained in the natural world—the geometry of plants, the isomorphisms of natural objects, the logic of the celestial seasons—only they would have had motivation to embrace such form, only they would have had the need to perceive nature’s symmetry, repetition and pattern in order to form their cognitive grounding.
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We know only bits and pieces about the four Greeks on Professor Flynn’s list, but filling in with the traits from the list’s more modern members, we can reasonably summarize all the unifying characteristics: late- or strange-talking, socially awkward, irascible, obsessed with structure, compelled by form, unusually—not necessarily greatly—intelligent.
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The continuing medicalization of autism, the insistent demonization of autism’s spontaneous effect—these carry the danger of an unforeseen consequence. For the cure of autism will not be the end of a tragic brain disorder; autism’s eradication will not see the passing of a troubling mental disease. The removal of autism from the entire human species will produce only an ironic solution to the mystery of our expanding human intelligence, it will produce the ignoble end to the Flynn effect.
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When confronted by data that runs counter to our accustomed way of seeing things, we as humans have but two choices: we can try to explain the results away, or we can adjust our perception of the experienced world. The former choice paves the all-too-common road of modern academic science; the latter, as described above, walks the more promising path of genius.
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Autism is not a mental illness, not a brain disorder, it is instead the source of humanity’s changing perception of its experienced world; it is, with care and understanding, genius’s fertile soil.
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it is possible to be bright, verbal, and autistic as well as mentally retarded, non-verbal and autistic.
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The only significant difference between AS and High Functioning Autism is that people with AS usually develop speech right on time while people with autism usually have speech delays.
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Even in an ideal world, "including" a child with autism in a typical class may not be the best choice. Decisions about autistic education are generally made by a team made up of parents, teachers, administrators and therapists who know the child well.
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Since every person with autism is different, however, such "always" and "never" statements simply don't hold water.
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Facilitated communication: Facts, Discussion Forum, and Encyclopedia Article - 1 views
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autism Facilitated Communication FC facilitator dyspraxia mental retardation research Independent Typing
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The procedure is controversial, since a majority of peer reviewPeer reviewPeer review is the process of subjecting an author's scholarly work, research, or ideas to the scrutiny of others who are experts in the same field. Peer review requires a community of experts in a given field, who are qualified and able to perform impartial review...ed scientific studies conclude that the typed language output attributed to the clients is directed or systematically determined by the therapists who provide facilitated assistance. Some peer-reviewed scientific studies have indicated instances of valid FC, and some FC users have reportedly gone on to type independently.
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Harvard UniversityHarvard UniversityHarvard University is a private university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts and a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1636 by the colonial Massachusetts legislature, Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and currently comprises ten separate academic units... psychologist Daniel WegnerDaniel WegnerDaniel M. Wegner is an American social psychologist. He is a professor of psychology at Harvard University and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is known for his work on mental control and conscious will, and for originating the study of transactive memory and... has argued that facilitated communication is a striking example of the ideomotor effectIdeomotor effectThe ideomotor effect is a psychological phenomenon wherein a subject makes motions unconsciously. As in reflexive responses to pain, the body sometimes reacts reflexively to ideas alone without the person consciously deciding to take action..., the well-known phenomenon whereby individuals' expectations exert unconscious influence over their motor actions. Even FC users and proponents do acknowledge the possibility of facilitators at times "guiding" users, consciously or unconsciously. Other theorists (Donnellan and Leary, 1995) argue that autism is in significant part characterized by dyspraxia (a movement disorder), and that there exists a synchronistic "dance" to communication in all mammalian social interaction which accounts for the mixed results in validation studies.
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Stephen von Tetzchner, the author of another leading textbook on Augmentative and Alternative CommunicationAugmentative and alternative communicationAugmentative and alternative communication is communication for those with impairments or restrictions on the production or comprehension of spoken or written language.-Definition :... has done theoretical research about facilitated communication. In his opinion "The existing evidence clearly demonstrates that facilitating techniques usually led to automatic writingAutomatic writingAutomatic writing is the process or production of writing material that does not come from the conscious thoughts of the writer. Practitioners say that the writer's hand forms the message, with the person being unaware of what will be written...., displaying the thoughts and the attitudes of the facilitators."
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Mark Mostert (2001) says: "Previous reviews of Facilitated Communication (FC) studies have clearly established that proponents' claims are largely unsubstantiated and that using FC as an intervention for communicatively impaired or noncommunicative individuals is not recommended." In March 2007, Scott Lilienfeld included facilitated communication on a list of treatments that have the potential to cause harm in clients, published in the APSAssociation for Psychological ScienceThe Association for Psychological Science , previously the American Psychological Society, is a non-profit organization whose mission is to promote, protect, and advance the interests of scientifically oriented psychology in research, application, teaching, and the improvement of human welfare... journal Perspectives on Psychological Science.
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The phrase "independent typing" is defined by supporters of FC as "typing without physical support", i.e., without being touched by another person. Skeptics of FC do not agree that this definition of independence suffices because of the possibility of influence by the facilitator. For example, Sue RubinSue RubinSue Rubin is a functionally non-verbal published autistic author who was the subject of the Oscar-nominated documentary Autism Is A World in which she communicated via the controversial communication technique of facilitated communication...., an FC user featured in the autobiographical documentary Autism Is A World, reportedly types without anyone touching her; however, she reports that she requires a facilitator to hold the keyboard and offer other assistance.
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The procedure is controversial, since a majority of peer reviewed scientific studies conclude that the typed language output attributed to the clients is directed or systematically determined by the therapists who provide facilitated assistance. Some peer-reviewed scientific studies have indicated instances of valid FC, and some FC users have reportedly gone on to type independently.
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A study published this week by Patricia Howlin of King’s College, London, reinforces this point. It suggests that as many as 30% of autistic people have some sort of savant-like capability in areas such as calculation or music.
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Francesca Happé of King’s College, London, is one of them. As she observes, obsessional interests and repetitive behaviours would allow someone to practice, albeit inadvertently, whichever skill they were obsessed by. Malcolm Gladwell, in a book called “Outliers” which collated research done on outstanding people, suggested that anyone could become an expert in anything by practising for 10,000 hours. It would not be hard for an autistic individual to clock up that level of practice for the sort of skills, such as mathematical puzzles, that many neurotypicals would rapidly give up on.
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Simon Baron-Cohen, a doyen of the field who works at Cambridge University, draws similar conclusions. He suggests the secret of becoming a savant is “hyper-systematising and hyper-attention to detail”. But he adds sensory hypersensitivity to the list. His team have shown one example of this using what is known as the Freiburg visual acuity and contrast test, which asks people to identify the gap in a letter “c” presented in four different orientations. Those on the autistic spectrum do significantly better at this than do neurotypicals. That might help explain Dr Happé’s observations about coins and raindrops.
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The upshot of these differences is that the columns in an autistic brain seem to be more connected than normal with their close neighbours, and less connected with their distant ones. Though it is an interpretative stretch, that pattern of connection might reduce a person’s ability to generalise (since disparate data are less easily integrated) and increase his ability to concentrate (by drawing together similar inputs).
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Dr Snyder argues that savant skills are latent in everyone, but that access to them is inhibited in non-savants by other neurological processes. He is able to remove this inhibition using a technique called repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation.
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A study published this week by Patricia Howlin of King's College, London, reinforces this point. It suggests that as many as 30% of autistic people have some sort of savant-like capability in areas such as calculation or music. Moreover, it is widely acknowledged that some of the symptoms associated with autism, including poor communication skills and an obsession with detail, are also exhibited by many creative types, particularly in the fields of science, engineering, music, drawing and painting.