Week 5: Autism Spectrum Disorder

This week our focus was ASD and the challenges students with autism face with reading comprehension. Often student with ASD have excellent decoding skills and can read fluently and correctly easily and are described as 'great readers'! However, those decoding skills belie an absent or shallow comprehension of the text they read. We got to look at some research on autism while reading in Teaching Children with Autism to Read for Meaning: Challenges and Possibilities (Randi et al), as well as through Yvonne Rafuse's presentation.

1. Autism and Theory of Mind

One of the main reasons students with autism struggle with reading comprehension is a deficit in Theory of Mind (their ability to see from others' perspectives and understand or predict their thoughts, beliefs, motivations). Students with autism require explicit teaching about emotions and non-verbal communication which helps them to learn to infer while reading, relying on clues in the text. One thing that stood out to me while learning this was how fantastic it is that schools are putting a bigger emphasis on social-emotional learning these days. My school is doing the Caring Schools program which I think is wonderful as it prioritizes time every day to work on social and emotional learning. I received PD on it this year, as did every teacher in my school. It's heartening to see the council for education backing social-emotional learning which is critically important. We also worked through the Zones of Regulation program with our school guidance counselor and I have seen tremendous progress in my students' abilities to identify, self-regulate, and understand their emotions. These types of programs are beneficial to all students, but are vital for students with ASD as they explicitly teach about emotions, thoughts, and behaviour. I gained a lot of ideas for teaching theory of mind for autism today, from apps to instructional strategies.

This is an example of a question students with autism might find challenging. They know the chocolate is in the blue cupboard, but they might not understand that Max doesn't know that too.

2. Virtual Reality in the Classroom

Do you ever feel like your students are so zoned out that they could be in another world? Now they can be! ;)

Teaching French Immersion, we actually have an expression for this "être dans la lune" which means to be 'on the moon'.

'Etre dans la lune' is an idiom similar to 'to be out to lunch'.

Now, with VR, students can (virtually) be on the moon. I'm really excited to try virtual reality with my students because it is incredibly engaging and students get a simulated tactile/3-D experience that they often cannot have in the classroom. Merge Cube and the VR headsets were neat to try. In terms of who can benefit from it from an AT perspective, I have a few ideas:

• Thinking of students with autism, I imagine the apps with different emotions would be useful to develop theory of mind. Additionally, students with ASD sometimes have more limited life experiences so this might be one way to help them gain a simulated experience before reading. One VR video I looked at was showing life in a trench and I was thinking about how this could help a student with autism imagine herself there at war (maybe to do that assignment about the life of a soldier that Barb mentioned). Perspective taking could become easier when they can simulate being right there in the situation using VR. I'm sure as it develops, there will be even greater applications for social and emotional learning.

• For students with attention deficits, it's super engaging and if you're wearing the headset, it actually isolates the video, blocking outside distractions. I think VR could provide ways for students to learn about topics in a more realistic and interesting way which I'm sure would appeal to students with ADHD.

• Could benefit students with visual impairments. It would depend on the specific visual impairment, but I am thinking of how students can gain an up close view of things virtually. Could improve access to things like exploring anatomy when dissecting a pig might be challenging for students with visual impairment.

There are tons of reasons to get hip to VR!

3. Looking back over the course

We worked on making our course trailer this afternoon, which lead us to think back on everything we've learned in this course. For me, one of the biggest things is taking a UDL perspective and that starts with digitizing. After that, I think having the courage and willingness to learn new technologies and seek out creative ways to use technology to teach all students and engage all students.

I learned about the importance of balancing remedial and compensatory strategies and making the conversation around that explicit. The ultimate goal is to reduce barriers through universal design for learning and assistive technology. I want to help students be successful and create access to literacy using the best methods possible. I'm excited to see more technology and AT in my classroom in the future and I'm feeling confident about managing it!