For the past 4 months, I’ve been working in a new role in my school district building capacity across 2500 teachers, 100 administrators and 13,000 students for connected teaching, learning & leadership.
Let’s face it, students have the potential to be a bit disorganized. How do we give students the ability to organize and track their assignments from as many as seven different classes when the reality is that most of them have trouble keeping their rooms from looking like disaster areas!
Students with autism have special needs in language based learning that includes a focus on increasingly more complex ‘symbolic’ or abstract learning and integration of how words are ‘social’ tools and characters have social motivations and goals.
Every student, and every teacher for that matter, is a unique individual with characteristics, beliefs, abilities, needs, and preferences. Variation, rather than standardization, is the reality in our classrooms, our lives, and for our students.
Students with autism can achieve great success in environments that help them succeed. How does that work? Settings that are “autism communication friendly” provide a variety of little things that result in big positive changes in student participation.
April brings us a month of celebrating our families and friends with Autism. It is AWARENESS about Autism, that each person with a diagnosis is a unique individual who is a brother, sister, son, daughter, aunt, uncle, neighbor, student, or friend.
Last year, before our professional development hours were due, I was short. I had been at plenty of PD sessions, I was just teaching them all, and you don’t get credit for that. (Strangely enough.) So, I scrambled and found a few cheap workshops in the area that I could attend, though I did end up having to take a personal day to attend one. I knew there had to be a better way.