The Autism Society Event and Education Recordings Archive

This session is designed for parents and professionals supporting children from third grade through high school. Strategies will be shared for preparing for middle school, smooth transitions into both middle school and high school, and successfully navigating these particularly challenging and rewarding years. While deep in the middle of caring for, enjoying, and implementing interventions for an elementary school child with an autism spectrum disorder, it is very important to “come up for air” from time to time, in an effort to look ahead and plan ahead. The challenges presented by the middle and high school years can be made more manageable when parents and professionals anticipate, discuss, and get a jump start on providing the knowledge, skills and strategies that a child and school staff will need in order to plan for success in the middle school and high school years. Parents and professionals providing supports for children either approaching, or already experiencing, these fascinating years will learn strategies and receive encouragement for their journey.

Attendees of this session will be given a guided tour through the middle school years and freshman year of a teenage boy named Shawn, who has a wide range of the exceptional gifts and needs that make up Asperger's Syndrome. His mother Jeanne Lyons and social/emotional coach Cindy Hart created and implemented his inclusion program in a regular education, parochial school during his fourth through eighth grade years. They then orchestrated his transition into a large public high school where he is successfully making his way through an arts and sciences magnet program – in an environment that is extremely different from his middle school program.

The many ups and downs of this real life journey will be presented, as well as ideas that worked, didn't work, or resulted in a positive , but “delayed reaction” sort of success. As a much smaller support team for a child than what is typical for children moving up through elementary into middle and high school, Jeanne and Cindy have been able to observe an unusually clear “time-lapse photography” style picture of Shawn's development. Having the luxury of working as a team with Shawn for several years (incorporating Jeanne's experience as a former inclusion teacher, and Cindy's former work with younger, more severely affected children with ASD) has given them a great deal of information that they are eager to share with others. They have been witnesses to an intimate “case study” that has revealed lessons that have the potential to benefit many. Although Shawn's experiences will be used to illustrate many of the topics covered, the presenters will also draw from their experiences with the incredible diversity of individuals across the autism spectrum. They will emphasize that any strategy must be tailored and adapted to the unique constellation of gifts and challenges within each child. Their hope is that Shawn's story will provide attendees with lots of ideas and techniques that they might adapt to suit the children they serve.

The following paragraphs describe topics that will be addressed during this session:

We will discuss the pros and cons of various educational placements, such as public vs. parochial schools, small vs. large class size, highly structured vs. more free spirited schools and teachers, and ideas for transitioning a child into the placement that seems most appropriate for him or her.

Many suggestions will be given regarding ways to promote organizational skills in children with ASD. Organizational skills become increasingly important as a child transitions from elementary to middle school. More long-term assignments and schedules that may place courses on alternating days demand that a student develop more advanced organizational skills. Even children with extremely high academic skills can experience falling grades and rising levels of frustration when they have not developed adequate organizational skills.

As with all of these topics, examples from Shawn's experiences in middle and high school will be used to illustrate the points made. Throughout his elementary and middle school years, through Jeanne and Cindy's efforts, Shawn had well trained teachers. The majority of his classmates received autism awareness training, specific to Shawn. Many of these classmates actively demonstrated concern and a desire to encourage Shawn, but even in this setting, the brutality of middle school peer interaction could not always be avoided or controlled. Cindy and Jeanne developed many ways to teach self-advocacy skills to Shawn. His resilience and perseverance in advocating for himself became inspiring.

In his third month of attending a new high school (in which most peers had no autism training, and to whom Shawn chose to NOT disclose his ASD diagnosis) an incident occurred in which a peer brought marijuana to school. Shawn's strong sense of right and wrong compelled him to report the peer. He successfully came up with and executed a plan to report the peer in a discreet way. However, because Shawn is still not as “street smart” as most of his peers, his well executed plan fell apart when he couldn't resist telling some friendly peers what he had done. Shawn was astonished to find that by the following day, everyone knew that he had “snitched.” He was even threatened by the student he had turned in. The process of working through this episode with Shawn and the school personnel, dramatically demonstrated how much Shawn had benefited from learning ways to be a self-advocate. This story highlights that while it is impossible to anticipate and train a child how to handle every social situation, and guarantee that he or she will be able to generalize previously taught skills while in the heat of any given situation, bit by bit the child will assimilate what they are learning. With proper support, they can learn a great deal from their mistakes. Jeanne has learned to value and almost welcome the mistakes that Shawn makes as a young person, because of the uniquely powerful learning opportunities they present.

Jeanne and Cindy will stress the importance of effective communication among the parents, teachers, school administrators and staff, and of course with Shawn. This involves everything from learning ways to ensure and participate in teacher training, to strategies for presenting essential information in ways that teachers are most likely to digest and apply in their classrooms. As a child with an ASD matures, they need to become an increasingly integral, self-advocating part of this communication web.

For Shawn, an effective incorporation of sensory integration exercises, as needed throughout his day, has been essential to his survival and success in elementary, middle and high school. A main goal of Cindy's was to teach Shawn to gradually recognize and find appropriate ways to meet his own sensory needs. Consultation with an occupational therapist specializing in sensory integration is essential. Many suggestions will be given for ensuring that sensory needs are met and that strategies for meeting those needs are understood by school personnel and applied in ways that are sensitive to how the sensory activities are likely to be regarded by peers.

Cindy and Jeanne have had extensive experience with the process of training peers to understand the gifts and challenges of students with ASD. More importantly, they have seen how this training has impacted the interactions and relationships between Shawn and his classmates. They have provided this training in both formal and informal ways. In elementary and middle school, Shawn's peers always knew they could approach Cindy and Jeanne, with questions about ASD. Peers knew the questions must be asked respectfully and would be answered with respect for Shawn. Some classmates even felt comfortable asking Shawn some of their questions, which provided him with meaningful experiences in self-advocacy. It was also important to give Shawn opportunities to interact with peers who had no ASD awareness training. Shawn, Jeanne and Cindy have had many wonderful discussions with Shawn about the differences in how he felt he was treated by informed vs. uninformed peers. He continues to learn to differentiate between when it is appropriate, inappropriate, helpful, or hindering to explain why he does some things differently than most people.

An important topic that will also be addressed is that during the middle and high school years, the numerous and enormous changes a child will face can be extremely taxing. Parents and professionals should not expect a child's path toward greater independence to be a slope of steady improvement. Especially during times of great change, like adolescence, many children will experience times when they require increased, rather than decreased, levels of support. These times should not automatically be regarded as evidence of or predictions of failure, on either the part of the child or his or her educational program. A successful middle and high school experience can sometimes feel like an awkward dance that contains both forward and backward steps in the process of making one's way to the other side of the dance floor. By describing some of Shawn's experiences, Jeanne and Cindy can give parents and professionals a glimpse of real life situations in which this has occurred. Sometimes Shawn's “backward steps” caused unnecessary alarm, but as Cindy and Jeanne increased supports during times of need, Shawn was able to regroup and resume moving forward.

The final topic that will be addressed is social skill development. Several ideas will be presented for helping a child to build the typical peer interaction skills that become increasingly important and complex in middle and high school. Some persons feel it is impossible to support a child socially in the shark infested waters of peer social interaction among teens -- that a child must be brought as far as possible during the elementary school years because by the time middle school arrives, they simply must be independent. The rationale for this seems to be an idea that providing social skill support beyond the elementary school years will cause peers to ostracize the child even more.

However, social rules for peer interactions change drastically during the middle school years, and kids with ASD typically have a hard time noticing and adapting to those changes. Cindy and Jeanne have many ideas to share, once again illustrated by situations with Shawn, in which his social skill training was continued through middle school and into high school in a different, more behind the scenes way. He was encouraged to study his peers' interactions almost like an anthropologist and to report his findings to Cindy and Jeanne. They found ways to support these episodes of discovery, provide fun ways for Shawn to report and discuss what he had observed, and help him to process and generalize and apply his findings. The trick was in keeping the discussions either as light-hearted or as anthropologically scientific as possible for Shawn during times in which he witnessed or experienced the sometimes devastating power of teen angst. It is very important for children with ASD to be free to make some kinds of social mistakes in an environment that provides supports and is conducive to learning and practicing. However, a child needs to be able to walk the teen, social skill high wire many, many times with a net in place, before they are ready to work without a net in an increasing variety of situations.

Attendees will come away from this session with several strategies that they will be able to use, or modify for use, to support preteens and teens within the autism spectrum. Attendees will have ideas they can use for choosing an appropriate school environment and for fostering effective communication within that environment. They will have many strategies for promoting the development of organizational skills and self-advocacy skills. They will have strategies for helping students enhance their own comfort and productivity through sensory integration techniques, for appropriately educating peers about ASD, and enhancing social skill development. Attendees will have been given an encouraging glimpse into the inner workings of how one can provide structure and support for the improvised dance of forward and backward steps that eventually makes its way across the dance floor of adolescence.

Content Area: Education