The Autism Society Event and Education Recordings Archive

This session offers a holistic model for developing interdisciplinary educational and therapeutic curricula geared specifically for Asperger adolescents. The model operates under the principle that reducing a student’s pullout time from the classroom for therapeutic services makes for a less fragmented school day and provides more opportunities for learning real-time skills in authentic settings. In a team-planning situation, teachers, OTs, SLPs, school psychologists and social workers follow a protocol for creatively combining disciplines for successful classroom work. As students with Asperger's syndrome make the very fragile transition from primary school to the adolescent years of middle and high school, opportunity for learning academics, let alone learning about themselves and their particular challenges in social, sensory, and speech/language arenas, becomes problematic.

If a child is in an integrated setting, chances are the social skills support he or she is receiving is utterly isolated from actual, lived social events in the hallways and in the classrooms of the school.

Even when a school is able to provide what a student IEP stipulates for related services and educational programming, the teachers and therapists involved in providing those very services are themselves working in isolation. This is because related services are often structured in pullout fashion, fragmenting a student's school day, which in turn only exacerbates anxiety, sensory and social overload, and organizational challenges.

For example, AS students often receive social skills support once or twice a week in a therapist's office, at lunch, or during the occasional field trip. In such settings the student might enjoy a successful conversation with a teacher or another adult, but whatever skill is learned rarely transfers to genuine social interactions with peers in or out of the classroom.

In other instances, teenagers with AS are perceived as people who no longer need the related services of OT, PT, or speech therapy as they might have once had as young children in the primary grades. And yet, many teens with Asperger's syndrome spend their time in school coping with sensory, motor, and social challenges with little support. They are adrift, directionless, and given little structure other than an imposed regimen of bells, lockers, and the switching of classes, teachers and faces. They experience no real unifying place, person, or experience.

As educators scramble to cover required academic curricula and as therapists rush through their busy days fulfilling IEP requirements, communication among school staff deteriorates. Any possibility of truly problem solving in a student-centered fashion is undermined by bureaucracy and a paucity of development opportunities for those who work with children with AS.

In order to have access to academics they are capable of doing, to deepen their social understanding, to learn tools for self-regulation, and to practice the art of pragmatic communication, Asperger teens need “real time” learning in authentic educational settings.

Cross-disciplinary, team developed curricula can target common adolescent needs right in the classroom, thus providing the student with the structured home base that is so sorely missing in many schools.

Integrated team planning and teaching also provides in-depth staff development and fosters an environment in which teachers feel supported and respected and therapists feel they are a part of the bigger picture of a student's life.

This session introduces a step-by-step protocol for developing and teaching lessons in an integrated team fashion. The model offers teachers and therapists the flexibility of determining the length of a curricular event, ranging from a single class period to an entire unit within an academic subject area. The model also adapts easily for work with individuals or groups of students in both mainstreamed and separate educational settings.

To begin, participants learn the basic principles of successful collaborative teaching, such as how to “share” class time, the various roles of instructors in the room, and the basics of modeling for students a cooperative work ethic.

Participants will then be guided through the process of creating holistic, interdisciplinary curricula. Worksheets, checklists, and protocols for collaborative lesson planning, as well as review and self-evaluation materials, will be provided.

Participants will also be given sample lesson plans that integrate special educational teaching with therapeutic strategies for the development of social understanding, self-modulation, and greater pragmatic ability in speech and language. Brief video clips will be screened as demonstrations.

Learning Objectives: