Chris Wenz
episode 30 to the classroom podcast
December 11, 2023
My guest today is Chris Wenz, researcher and teacher, whose dissertation focused on profiles of adolescents with Autism Spectrum Disorders. We begin our conversation with an understanding of the diverse profiles of autistic individuals, and move into a conversation about considerations for literacy assessment and teaching. In the second part of the episode I’m joined by my colleague Elisha Li, a former elementary inclusion teacher, to discuss practical takeaways.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Today I welcome Chris Wenz. Welcome to the podcast.
Chris Wenz:
Good, thank you. Thanks.
Jennifer Serravallo:
So I'd love to start off by talking about the diagnostic criteria for autism label or autism diagnosis. I've heard the saying that if you've met one person with autism, you've met one person with autism, and that in fact there are quite a lot of different diagnostic criteria and possible combinations. So assuming the audience listening doesn't know much about autism, can you just teach us a little bit about that?
Chris Wenz:
Sure. So there's two main categories in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual that that's used to get an autism diagnosis. And this is usually done with young children too, although there's adults that are diagnosed with autism all the time as well. But there's basically two main deficit areas, and that's not language that I love, but that's sort of the language of the DSM. And one is in social communication interaction. And so there's three sort of categories in there, and one is social emotional reciprocity. There's another that's nonverbal communication. So challenges with understanding and using nonverbal communication and then developing and maintaining relationships. And so all three of those things have to be present for the diagnosis to be made. And then there's another part of it that's more behavioral around restricted interests or particular patterns of behavior. And that is a longer list of behaviors. And in order to get a diagnosis, two of these four behaviors have to be present. And the other part of this is that autism is considered a developmental condition. So autism isn't something you acquire, right? So the challenges that are have been observed have to be there usually from an early point in childhood. And so these diagnoses can be made as early as two or three. And again, if an adult is seeking a diagnosis, clinicians have to look back and figure out whether these things were present at that in an early developmental stage. Then if those conditions are met, so if there are these social deficits and if there are these restricted patterns of behavior, interest and activities, then the clinician gives us severity. So requires substantial support, a little bit of support. So there's levels of that. And we often turn that into language around high functioning and low functioning, which I don't think is particularly useful language when we think about actual people sort of navigating the world. And then there's another sort of set of co-occurances, so the diagnosis is often made with or without a co-occurring intellectual disability or a co-occurring language impairment or catatonia. There's all these sort of other things. And then there are with another co-occurring disorder of some kind, ADHD, OCD, all these things are sort of common co-occurences in autism. So when you shake all this out, you have a lot of different possible combinations of what a person's neurology looks like and how that plays out in the world. If you just do the simple math of the severity and with or without and all these things, you come up with over 500 combinations and that's before you start thinking about all those other co-occurences. So one of the things that happened in the DSM V, the version we're currently under, is that a lot of different autism related diagnoses from an earlier version were collapsed into this one sort of spectrum disorder. And so by the definition of autism, we have sort of a really diverse group of people who have the label. And that's where, that's that phrase from, it's actually from Dr. Daniel Shore, that if you've met one person with autism, you've met one person with autism, that there's a lot of differences in distinction. The idea that there's one autism I think has been sort of thoroughly debunked, and it's in the nature of how we define it.
Jennifer Serravallo:
I think it's so important to be thinking about just the variety of different ways that kids might present. The different kinds of supports they may benefit from, the different strengths they may have, and to consider even with somebody with a label, there's still differences amongst them. I think that's probably a good way of thinking about any label. But your back of the envelope math in over 500 different combinations, that's quite striking. And I know we talked a little bit before this interview as well about the concept of a spike profile in autistic individuals. Would you describe what that means? I think that's going to come up later in our conversation as well.
Chris Wenz:
Yeah. So this is commonly shows up in research and I think has been sort of a source of a fascination for a lot of researchers and trying to understand autistic children and autistic adults. So when we have a general sense of someone's cognitive ability, and we could turn that into a general or a full scale IQ score to really simplify it, we have what we expect their reading ability to be based on where they are. And there's sort of an acceptable range of what we expect. And what often happens when you look at the testing that's done on a neuropsych profile or when a school psychologist sits down to test a student, is you have these unexpected peaks and valleys in scalability. So we would expect math ability to be here for this kid, but it's actually way, way, way, wa high up, and then maybe reading is really low. And so they're just these unexpected things. We do expect the sort of sameness across the skills, and there's a lot of assumptions underlying that are not perfect or great. But this also goes along with the idea that there's special interests--having a couple topics that are really fascinating and for autistic children is pretty well known and really well established. And that that's related to this idea of a spiky profile that often those skills are related to those special interests. So the areas of high motivation and high interest are often where you can see those things. When we see particular areas of challenge for autistic students, we shouldn't presume that that's where all the skills are. And on the flip side, when we see these really these real pockets of strengths, we can get trapped in that sort of like, well, you can do that. Well, why can't you do this so well? That level, that idea of just a level set of expectations developmentally and academically isn't really going to work as well for this population. I would argue that it doesn't work very well for any population, but it's maybe especially true if when we're talking about autistic children,
Jennifer Serravallo:
Yeah, I think it's a great argument for why we need to have assessments that really drill down to individual skills or look at different proficiencies and think about each of them individually and support kids with targeted goals and lean on their areas of strength whenever we're trying to teach something new. How many teachers that are listening to this podcast are likely to currently be teaching or have taught a student with autism?
Chris Wenz:
Well, the worldwide estimates are that 1% of the population is autistic. This is what we'd call a low incidence disability. It's not the most common disability in schools is a specific learning impairment of some kind. So dyslexia, dyspraxia, whatever it may be. But something like 12% of all students that are served on an IEP are served because they have an autism diagnosis. And what makes this a little funny, your average teacher interacting is that students, autistic students are much less likely to be in what the Department of Ed calls normal regular classrooms. So the goal in special education right now is full inclusion to the full extent possible, the most time with non-disabled peers as possible. And something like 64% of all students with disabilities, regardless of the disability label, spend 80% or more of their time in regular classrooms. That number is 40% for autistic students. So autistic students are less likely to be in whatever your typical normal, however you want to define that, and are much more likely to be with peers with autism or with other disabilities. So the odds are pretty good that if you've been teaching for long enough, you probably will have one, one student, but it's not as going to be as common as working with a student with dyslexia with a specific learning impairment. I, I think that the odds of encountering autistic students in a general education classroom are going to only be increasing as there as there's more diagnoses. And as frankly, I think we get better at serving autistic students in those environments because I don't think we do a great job right now. It's probably not working great for any number of reasons.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Yeah. I was going to ask you if in your opinion that's for the best that autistic students tend to be with their peers who are also autistic or in special schools or in a special class within a regular elementary school, is that to their benefit, do you think? Or it's, is it because the system is not set up to serve them well?
Chris Wenz:
It's a really good question. And having, as someone who worked in a school that I think you call a special school, I worked at a school that served only students with autism and sort of related learning challenges. And that's very antithetical to what we believe right now about what's right or what's the right thing to do. Right now, our whole special education system is built on, the best thing possible is for those students to be with their non-disabled peers. And lots of, I think that's all that's pretty valid, especially when we're dealing with a history where people with disabilities were sent off to institutions. And so we're dealing with that legacy of us really strictly segregating people who are different. So we're responding to that in some respects, and I think that's an admirable goal and probably one that we should have. But all of that to say is that maybe doesn't work all that well when we're sending them into classrooms that don't understand them and don't want them to be who they are that are trying to fit them into a box that they don't fit into. And so I certainly saw the side of this where the big bad special school that I worked at, what you saw is that when you put students who were navigated the world similarly, that they built a community that didn't exist for them anywhere else, and that there's some real value to that. And what the autistic self-advocacy groups will tell you now is that building that kind of autistic community and having elders in those communities and having this autistic identity is incredibly valuable. And on the flip side, is there any ability to do that in a traditional public school right now? And I would say probably not, right? The idea is that we're trying to strip away the autistic identity, and that's probably not going to be great for students. So it is one of these, what's interesting fairness and equity questions that are thorny to figure out, right? And what the goals of a parent, all this is going to be driven by what the parent's goals are and how they view their child's autism and what they want for them, that ability for self-determination necessarily there. So it's a tricky question for sure. It
Jennifer Serravallo:
Is. I know, and I just sprung it on you, so thanks.
Chris Wenz:
It's great
Jennifer Serravallo:
Response. A try. Yeah. Alright, so let's get into, now that we have some understanding, let's get into the specific area of this podcast, which is in literacy development. And I, I'd love to talk with you a little bit about, let's talk about word recognition. So lifting the words off the page, decoding, being able to read the print. And I'm wondering which diagnostic criteria come into play when we consider this area of developing reading proficiency? Are there some children who are exceptionally good at this because of one of the criteria in their autism diagnosis? Are there children who particularly struggle with this? And then we have, of course, all the co-occurrences that you mentioned already of a D h, adhd, you know, dyslexia maybe is a co-occurrence. If there's other things that could also be coming into play here with the word level reading.
Chris Wenz:
So the earliest research into the relationship between reading and autism, largely looking at, they were observing children and they were finding a particular profile of Leia. So real competence with word reading, often precocious reading. So kids that were reading at three and four years old, that just picked up the system pretty quickly. So the hyper alexia with at the same time challenges with comprehension. So that's an interesting,
Jennifer Serravallo:
That's a spiky again, right,
Chris Wenz:
Right. Really it's not what you would expect. A simple view of reading is you have the language skills, you have the decoding ability, poof comprehension, you should be fine, right? Right. And so there's been all kinds of, what's typically happened is researchers have tried to look at these cognitive explanations for autism. So executive function challenges or weak central coherence or theory of mind and try to figure out, well, maybe those things are probably what's going on with the comprehension part, that there's a missing to particular reading behaviors that impact comprehension. So that was the idea. That's the idea. If you read papers now, you still find the abstracts all start with, many children with a d s with autism have struggles with reading comprehension. But in all of those studies, when you look, having autism doesn't predict reading comprehension challenges at all. So interesting. Not to say that there aren't some that do, but simply having the diagnosis doesn't predict whether you have those challenges. So there's some autistic students out there that don't have a challenge with comprehension, and there are some that are do. And what's interesting is the reasons for that are just as complex and diverse as the population itself. There could be any number of reasons why that's happening. So I should say that what we're talking about is all of these investigations are primarily looking at students without the co-occurring intellectual disabilities or without the real challenging language impairments. So we're already looking at a particular slice of the spectrum or without particular challenges that students who are nonverbal are like, it's a whole different challenge. But for those that don't have that language impairment, that that's kind of the belief or the common profile is the hyperlexia really strong word, reading skills with comparably lower comprehension skills. And you can find that, but it's not interesting to me is that it's even going back 40 years, that was never a universal, but we did have, have all these assumptions about what it meant to be autistic, and that would lead to all these problems with reading. And it's picture's not quite as clear as, as it's made out to be sometimes in the research.
Jennifer Serravallo:
So understanding that there is still a range, even though you could say many or most, or it's often the case. So you would say it's often the case that kids tend to have to pick up the word reading. You're like iffy, you're shaking your head maybe more than half the time. It's hard to say exactly, but that they tend to be leic, they tend to pick up the word reading a little bit faster, and at the same time, the comprehension isn't as strong as you'd expect it to be for a child with strong word reading skills.
Chris Wenz:
I, I would say that just given what we know about and understand the neurotype of autism just, or types, that profile does make the most sense for a piece of the spectrum. And this is largely because comprehension, the way that we teach and assess it, is really there's a social component to it all. Right? And that's certainly part of it, that those tasks and the text and all of that stuff is designed for a different kind of brain. So of course, students are going to struggle with those things. They're just not designed those tasks and those, none of it's designed for them. So of course they will. So sitting
Jennifer Serravallo:
Down next to your teacher and having a conversation about a text, you're saying that kind of a social context or sitting down with peers and having a book discussion, or
Chris Wenz:
Even just the, here read this text. What's the main idea that's built on a particular way of thinking about the world? And two, people can read a text and come up to with radically different conclusions. I'm like, that's okay. But all conventional thinking. And most of us do think that way. We read this and you know, give it a passage to a hundred people and ask them to make an inference about a passage. And most people will come up with the same inference, but there will be some differences. So it is the task themselves, but it's also the text. And it's just, I guess the conventional ness of all these tasks and the whole point, the of thinking about autism is a different way of navigating the world is that it's different and it's not wrong, but it is just a different approach. So you can imagine that just, there might be a lack of understanding about how we're supposed to interpret this, how we are supposed to interact with this that might just not be there. And not that it can't be there, but it's just a different way of approaching those tasks.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Yeah. Let's talk about some specifics. So you mentioned theory of mind before, which is I think a kind of new-ish area of research. It shows up in Duke and Cartwright's active view of reading. I don't know how long that term's been around, but for me, this idea that when we're reading, we sort of step into the shoes of the character and imagine how they're thinking, how they're feeling, understand their motivations and can puzzle out, why are they doing what they're doing? So that ability to do that, of course, is related to inference, our ability to draw conclusions, our ability to determine what's most important in the text, all these different comprehension skills. So what does the research literature around autistic individuals say related to theory of mind? That kind of connection?
Chris Wenz:
I mean, that idea of theory of mind as a cognitive explanation for autism goes back to the eighties. And that autism is primarily in a disorder of mind reading, an inability to understand the mental states of other people to infer what is Jennifer feeling right now? And using facial expressions, what they both sort of literal and figurative knowledge about. And so that's been talked about quite a bit. And when we're talking about autism and reading, because that's an explanation of comprehension difficulties, that it's an inability to understand the mental states of characters. So that might be in relation to the text, but it might also be in relation to the teacher who gives a task related to that text. So Jennifer gave me this task, what is she expecting? Right? That there's a mind reading aspect to that, right? And so autistic students, just any other student might be wrong about those guesses that they're making. And so one of the solutions to that is to be really explicit about what you expect students to do. And that's good for all students. It's especially good for autistic students. But part of the, you give a student a task, they don't do it. The simplest explanation. They didn't know what you wanted them to do. We can start there. And again, so it's not, that ability isn't there, the ability to mind read. That's, that might be true when autistic students are asked to interact with non-autistic peers or non-autistic adults. But that actually doesn't happen when autistic people are communicating with each other. There's some really interesting research that shows that. So, oh, can you talk about that? Yeah,
Jennifer Serravallo:
It's that whole idea of, it's not that there's one way that's right and one way that's wrong, it's just that we're navigating the world in a different way. And if we're setting up a text and we're setting up a task for a non-autistic person and expecting a certain response, it's not wrong to see it a different way. So I'd love to hear about that research between autistic people. Yeah.
Chris Wenz:
Yeah. I mean, there's certainly communication challenges that come along with being autistic, but I think this Id, it's helpful to think about this, that it's clash. The communication challenges that an autistic child is going to have with non-autistic people, with allistic people is it's a two-way communication problem. And it's a clash of neurotypes, two different kinds of brains. And the problem is that difference, not that one side of that is a wrong type, but the wrong, just that don't, just different brains and they're experiencing the world differently. And so what's kind of going on is non-autistic people have been doing the research on autism forever, and it's been like, what's going on here? And it's only been recently that researchers have started to flip this a little bit and look at non-autistic people. And like, okay, how well do you understand autistic people? And so the research, there's a bunch of really interesting studies where non-autistic people are really bad at reading the facial expressions of autistic people are less likely to are disinclined to socialize with autistic people. So all the things that you could say about autistic people, if you just flip the script, it's all of that's true.
Jennifer Serravallo:
It's true, about allistic people. And so autistic people have the burden right now of making, of closing communication barrier by learning the preferred way for allistic people to do things, right? Right now it's a one way burden. And so this idea is all the, what's called the double empathy problem. It comes from a researcher named Damien Milton in the uk. And so there's been some really interesting studies where if you put autistic people in a group together, that those communication challenges kind of disappear. They're no different than if you just put a group of non-autistic people together. When you mix those neurotypes, that's when things get really bad. So one of the main studies is by Crompton and colleagues, it's from a five years ago or so. And what they basically did is they played a game of telephone. They gave one person in a group the details of a story, and they passed it to one person or next person, this chain of seven or eight people. Some of those groups were only autistic people. Some of those groups were non-autistic people, and some of those groups were mixed. And the mixed group performed really, really poorly. The two like groups, there was no difference between them. They performed adequately. So that if you just put people in the right around, people who understand their communication style, voila, problem solved. And so I think that's not a really specific thing that I think teachers can do in the classroom, but it, it provides this sort of stance in thinking about this. The problem here is I need to understand my students. I need to understand the best way to communicate, understand how they're getting to this thinking, how they're getting to this place, and that that's going to be the basis of any other intervention, any teaching that I'm going to do. I just need to understand what's going on in that brain. How is it different from me? How do I actually understand and interact in a way that, Yeah, and it makes me think back to that question I asked you earlier about what's best for an autistic student-- to be with other autistic students, to be with a teacher who's specially trained in communicating with autistic students or to be a real minority, 1% right, to be a minority in a sea of allistic people and be expected to conform to that way. And then from a reading perspective, you think about probably most of the books that their kids are reading have characters that are allistic. So you're trying to get into the mind of an allistic character, imagine what they're thinking and feeling. And of course there'd be comprehension challenges. That makes a lot of sense. Let's talk about something else that you mentioned around executive functioning and this idea of kids having tending to have real interests in a particular area. And it makes me think about another category of, skills or things that are important to reading instruction, which is around motivation and engagement. And you also mentioned a term earlier called weak central coherence that I think comes into play here as well. So as we're trying to help motivate children and engage children in their reading, what should we be thinking about with autistic children?
Chris Wenz:
I think the main thing, and I think motivation is the lever. To me, it's the most powerful lever to pull when you're trying to boost the reading skills of any child, whether it's comprehension, whatever it is, highly motivating, text is the simplest thing to pull and often the most powerful or attaching that to a purpose that's really meaningful. And that's just even more important when we're talking about autistic children. When you think about the special interests and the ability to have of some choice and to connect tasks that are about skill development, just connect as much as possible to those interests. It's true with all people that we work harder, we learn more when we're in situations that we're motivated to learn, right? The weak central coherence part of this is a little bit different. I mean, they're connected, but weak central coherence is kind of this, again, another cognitive explanation of autism where autistic people have a disinclination to global processing and are more inclined to what's called local processing. So looking at the trees instead of the forest and trying to take reading comprehension comprehension making meaning in the world is all sort of about looking at individual stimuli, individual things out there,
Jennifer Serravallo:
Synthesizing, putting it together, right?
Chris Wenz:
Yeah. And then making a model, a mental model of those things. And so
Jennifer Serravallo:
That's more related to comprehension or the kinds of tasks we ask kids to do, put together the whole story, come up with a theme, or put together all these facts and information and come up with a main idea. So that's really where that would come into play, right?
Chris Wenz:
Yeah. And so this was originally theorized as this is a deficit. It, it's a disability to be think that way, to have local processing. But there's all kinds of evidence now that it is a disinclination. And when you ask autistic children to switch their processing, like, oh, I see what you're doing there. Try to attend to these different things. Can you tell me how those pieces fit to, they can make that switch, right? Actually, it's just a preference for how to engage with, to how to process information.
Jennifer Serravallo:
That's such an interesting reframing and not a disability, a disinclination. So if they're taught explicitly how to do it or you're clear with your directions, they can,
Chris Wenz:
Yeah. And honestly, in most cases, they know how to do it, they can do the global processing, but without the sort of explicit, "I want you to think about it this way." Yeah. The default will be the local processing. Again, these are generalities, and that's different from istic brain. We are meaning- making machines as humans. We're always trying to do that global thing. The autism challenges that a little bit. It's not that they're not making meaning. They're just doing it a little bit differently. They're processing the information differently. And so what that often means is, again, unprompted without a set of directions, you give a child a task that you may get a very different result. What's important and what's interesting to them about that text might not be what the main idea is or what you and everyone else thinks is the main idea. So again, it's just a difference in that approach, right? And when you're asking people, students to switch that thinking, that's where the motivation and the special interest is really helpful. But if you're doing that with texts that are connected to those special interests, all that hard work of thinking about the text differently and rereading it, and that just becomes easier.
Jennifer Serravallo:
I'll do it because I care about the topic
Chris Wenz:
And that's true for any student, right? Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. So it's just the portal. It's just this superpower to harness, right? It's all of this interest and engagement are on these topics. We find ways to use it and the kinds of instruction that we need to do to support those students just becomes I heck of a lot easier to do.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Yeah. Well, I've got one last question for you that might be a good kind of sum, sum up or looking forward kind of a question. Since there's such diversity within the label of autism, it must be challenging to get straightforward answers from research alone about particular reader profiles or really clear recommendations for how to best support autistic children. What I'm getting from you is that there's such diversity, we have to really look at each individual as an individual. I'm wondering what you're noticing in the research or current research that's being published or anything you know that's underway that's trying to help support teachers who are educating autistic children or to try to think about particular profiles that are common, or where's the research going in this area?
Chris Wenz:
So there's one line of the research that's just really trying to describe the diversity that we've been talking about. So they're studies, looking at the testing, essentially the cognitive testing of large groups of students and trying to look at what are the different kinds of spiky or non spiky profiles that exist. And some of that is just figuring out how many there are and what proportion and whether those hold over time. So there's that line of just trying to describe the diversity. That hasn't yet turned into...what we don't really know necessarily is whether those profiles that we're identifying are instructionally relevant, whether it would actually require, what, I mean, what they do hint at is what the source of the challenge is. And that would hint at what the intervention should be a little bit. But I don't know that we're going to get to a place where it's like 30% have this profile and this is--. We're not there. And I don't know that we're going to get there because even within those, even if we could do that, and we identified this profile, it's 30% of autistic students. And even within that group, the efficacy of whatever that intervention is, it's not going to be like universally, it's not going to universally work. So we're not there. We're definitely not there. And so there's other researchers that have tested particular interventions and there doesn't seem to be, right now, what works for non-autistic students generally works for autistic students. I think there's probably more of coming back to the idea of a stance. I think there's probably, that maybe has a lot more to do--The effectiveness, the effectiveness of those probably has a lot more to do with a teacher's interaction and understanding of that child than the intervention itself. That it's going to always be being adapted and changed to meet the teacher's understanding of that kid is always going to come to bear. And that's probablyJ what makes it--
Jennifer Serravallo:
And how to communicate with them.
Chris Wenz:
Yeah, right. Exactly. So there are not really clear tips out there. You know what I mean? Out there in the research right now that have emerged, there are some really, I got really obsessed with this study. A couple that came out a couple years ago from, it was also from the UK and it was about police interviews. So the impetus for the article was when police interview autistic people, they use their typical strategy, which is an open-ended just what happened. And there had been some evidence and some studies that, that you don't get an accurate description when you do that with autistic, with autistic witnesses. And so what they basically tested was just the interview method was more like they put them people in front of a video here, watch this event. And this new interview protocol was at the end of it. It was like, tell me about a topic from this video that you just watched, this crime that just happened, essentially. Right? What's something that you noticed? And they put it on a sticky note and put it down, great, what's another thing, another important thing that you noticed? What's another important thing? And then they went back. So now there's five things that the person wants to thinks is important about this thing that they just saw. And then the interviewer goes back individually, one to each one, and tell me about this part of it. Tell me about this part of it. And probes the questions. And what you get at that point is a much more accurate description of the video that they just watched than if you just do the open-ended thing. So it's this very small change to the task and you get the result that you're looking for.
Jennifer Serravallo:
That's fascinating. I'm obsessed with this now too. I could totally see the implications for supporting comprehension across a longer text, or how to talk to kids in a conference or in a small group, or how to guide discussion in the classroom. Absolutely. That's really cool
Chris Wenz:
In the same way that when kids don't know what a story retell is, they don't know what to do. They don't give very good retellings. You actually have to teach them how to do the retelling. And if you haven't, that's what I mean. If it's not explicit what the task is, you're not going to get the result that you're looking for. On the flip side of the example of the witnesses is just changing the task in a way that understands that there's a particular challenge going on. So the particular challenge in this case is episodic memory, that it's hard to piece those things together. And it's kind of related to that weak central coherence thing. It's pulling all those things that you just saw into a coherent narrative about what happened.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Yes, or to figure out what's most important...
Chris Wenz:
That is a challenge. It's a challenge for all humans. It's a particular challenge with autistic people like it. That is a real thing. So you just change the task. You give a little bit of structure to it and voila, you get the result. So I think the approach, again, if we're adopting this sort of stance and this understanding that autistic students are different, not a problem like that, we can be fixed, that we can start to change tasks. We can start to change the way we intervene to the way we have those conversations. And all that comes from having an understanding of the students actually right in front of you and sort of what's going on with them.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Chris, thank you so much. You've taught me so much today, and I just love your framing of thinking about it as difference, not necessarily a problem or a disability necessarily, or there's just differences. And it's on us as educators to bridge that communication gap as much as it is on students to try to work to communicate with us. Learned so much. Thank you for the conversation.
Chris Wenz:
Oh, thank you for having me. Appreciate it.
Jennifer Serravallo:
I now welcome my colleague Elisha Li. So Elisha, I know you have a really interesting perspective on this as a former ICT teacher in New York City, and you've been a teacher to autistic students. And I'm wondering what stood out to you most from that conversation?
Elisha Li:
I mean, I think he had so many insightful things to say and it was so kind, fascinating to hear all the research out there. Obviously, I haven't heard the research, but I have worked with autistic students and I think the big two things that stuck out to me, I think one of his big ideas were, and I'm just, this is my interpretation, that the idea that autism is a difference, not a deficit, I think really stands out to me because in my experience working with students with autism, they really have so many strengths. And I think when you go into the mindset of, let me use their strengths to help them with other things they might need to work on, it's really powerful. And I think that mindset works with really any student. It's just that you really have to, I personally just understand and try to understand more than, maybe more than usual if the teacher or me the teacher is not autistic. And I think the other point he made that I found true for all teaching is he says something along the lines of the intervention is essentially only as good as the teacher or something along those lines that if the teacher is willing to get to know the student that and just adapt to what the student's needs, then that is probably more important than doing this perfect intervention. And again, I guess my two points go hand in hand, just the idea of getting to know the students and then adapting your teaching to that. I think I am simplifying it a bit, but I think listening through everything he said, it's just so important. And just that point, he said about communication differences. I thought that was really, really fascinating.
Jennifer Serravallo:
And it plays so much into, if you're thinking about the way that teachers are communicating with students and students are communicating with each other, anything that you're trying to teach, any directions that you're giving any strategy you're breaking down for them. Any expectation that you're setting. If you're not thinking about how the person you're teaching is thinking, then you're not on the same page and you're not going to meet your learning objective. That just made so much sense to me, and it sort of flips on its head this idea that, yeah, it's not that there's a problem with the student you're teaching. It's not that they're lacking in a skill or that there's a deficit. It's you're just approaching it differently, or that student has a different assumption about what you're asking for or what you want them to do, and you have to be really explicit and you have to really try to understand how their mind is working.
Elisha Li:
So I think in the classroom context, I taught in an ICT classroom, which is a co-teaching classroom with a full-time general education teacher and a full-time special education teacher. And you essentially teach, co-teach or teach collaboratively. You can do more small groups in that setting. And 40% of our students have IEPs. And obviously not all those students were diagnosed with autism, but once in a while, we did have students who were officially diagnosed. I think in that setting, it does kind of make you think as a teacher, what are the things that I can put in place that maybe that a student with autism, will need to function in the classroom, but at the same time, all students would benefit. So for example, I think this is pretty common in many classrooms I go into now, but just having visual reminders for directions for setting up and cleaning up, and I think those sorts of things really helps. I remember helped students with autism really benefit from that, but really all my students in second and third grades benefited from that, or I just remember doing a lot of, I went to a lot of workshops to learn different ways to adapt and modify classroom routines and curriculum. And one of the ones that I remember very well was using social stories. Have you heard of social stories?
Jennifer Serravallo:
Yes. Why don't you talk about it for those who haven't.
Elisha Li:
Yeah. I mean, I don't know if this is the best definition, but in my layman's term, social stories essentially. Essentially stories that spell out social interactions or maybe I guess what we would call social norms in, I guess an allistic population to help students with autism understand how these social interactions work. So it might be anything from saying hi to someone on the playground, or it could be about sharing toys during center time, and they're very simple and they'll just kind of walk the student through the steps of what you need to do or why you need to do it. First, you go up to the friend at the block center, then you ask them, "can I play after that?" After that you wait for an answer, and so on and so forth. I remember using that a lot with my students with autism, and really that kind of mindset of making things explicit helped me in all areas of my teaching. So if a student wasn't understanding something in writing, I would be like, oh, let me just make it more explicit. And it really makes you as a teacher, break things down and think about, well, why does the student have to do it this way? And sometimes I find myself changing my expectations too, a bit. Why do they have to, I don't know. Let me, why do they have to place their chair on the table every day at dismissal? Why can't they just push it in or just, that's a simple example, but just this idea that you want to create space so everyone can belong. So it just made me as a teacher think carefully through making sure my expectations were clear, but also kind of broad enough so everyone has a way, do you have to sit in a chair? No, you can sit on a beanbag sometimes. The flexible seating thing was big too.
Jennifer Serravallo:
It makes me think about one of my, just in terms of expectations, it makes me think about one of the strategies I revised from the first edition to the second edition, which was about, I think it's one of the first or the first strategy in the conversation chapter. And in the first edition, I had written something about making sure your hands are still and your eyes are facing the speaker and that your body is still, and I realized that that is really not a very inclusive way of thinking about what it means to listen. And for different kids, they need to have something in their hands to be able to listen or eye contact is actually going to be distracting versus helping them to focus. So we have to, I think, make space for those differences.
Jennifer Serravallo:
And I think the whole concept of "is the child not able to do the thing I'm asking or have I not been explicit about what I want them to do?" That is another huge takeaway for me. And I think about the importance of a few things. One is breaking down skills into step-by-step, how tos. Just being really explicit of this is what a main idea is, and these are the steps you can take to be able to get a main idea. Even the example he gave with the police interview where they're like, what is the detail? What's another detail? I love? What's another detail? Now? Put them all together now. Tell me more about each one. Like that. That's a strategy in many ways, and you could use that even with a retelling of a story. But it also makes me think about the role of using, whether it's a skill progression or a continuum of some sort with kids to be really explicit about "this is what a main idea sounds like. This is how someone got the main idea, this is the way of thinking about it. You might be thinking about it this way. This is another way of thinking about a tex.", The role of the questions that we ask. And if they're too open-ended, like there's a real benefit to open-ended questions, not leading kids along, but if we're too open-ended for autistic children, one of the messages I got is we may really not get what we are looking for. So we just have to be really explicit with our questions, with our models, and with our strategies.
Elisha Li:
I was actually just thinking when you were talking about that, I encounter this all the time, especially in the lower grades, when teachers will say like, "oh, my student can't summarize. They tell me everything in the book." And I think it's because when they were in kindergarten, first grade, the books are very short, and the teachers did want to know everything that happened in the book because it only spanned 10 pages or so. And so the students told the teacher everything that happened in the book, and that was sufficient. But as students, the books get more complex. You do want students to start summarizing. So while the idea of just telling students, I always love using the strategy, a version of 5.17 summarizing on the story mountain or summarizing with a problem in mind. As soon as I tell those students try summarizing by telling me the problem and what happens with the problem and what the character does about the problem, and it totally changes the nature of their research.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Oh, that's what you're looking for!
Elisha Li:
Because they just didn't know what a retail could be or the steps to get there. It's not that they couldn't do it, I just hadn't told them, or we hadn't told them as a teachers what they could do. So I think that shift is it's, I always think about this. Is the student not able to do it, or is it that we haven't shown them how. Or what we expect in our minds at least because doing things based on what they know. Right. So it's interesting.
Jennifer Serravallo:
It is. Yeah. And everything we're talking about makes me think about this principle of Universal Design for Learning, UDL, that if we can design our classrooms, design our instruction, think about how we're giving directions, think about how we're breaking things down, how we're asking questions, with the autistic mind in mind, there could definitely be benefits to other students by giving everybody access to that same explicitness, that same clarity, that same focus, the pictorial anchors, all of it could be helpful for everybody.
Elisha Li:
Yeah, no, absolutely. I think about that time, I think the time I spent teaching in an ICT classroom with students with learning differences, I think that actually made, I think that made me, the teacher I am today. Kind of always thinking about "what's the one thing that this student needs, but that everyone could benefit from?" And I think that's the essence of UDL. Whether it's the way you put directions on a page for on a worksheet, or how you set up a task to this, the way the seating is arranged in the classroom. I think it all goes back to this idea of what do some students need, but what can all students benefit from?
Jennifer Serravallo:
Yeah. Well, let's stop there for today. Elisha, thank you so much for joining me for this conversation.
Elisha Li:
Thank you.