Teaching Students With Autism Spectrum Disorder: A guidebook for parents and new teachers

By Stephanie L Lindner

Teaching Students With Autism Spectrum Disorder: A guidebook for parents & teachers, sheds light on the different ways students with autism can be supported in multiple settings, including school and the home environment. This includes the fundamentals a new teacher and parent should know, including h

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stephanie Lee Lindner
• Release date: Sep 14, 2023
• ISBN: 9798218285555

Book preview

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Teaching Students with

Autism Spectrum Disorder

in the

Early Childhood Classroom:

a guidebook for parents and new

teachers

by

Stephanie L. Lindner

i

Copyright © 2023 Stephanie L. Lindner All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Printed in the United States of America First Printing, 2023

ISBN 979-8-218-28555-5

Independently Published

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Teaching Students With Autism Spectrum Disorder DEDICATION

I dedicate this book to my former students, who were some of my best teachers, and to the many children being diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder every day. May this book support those who will contribute to your educational journey.

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Stephanie L. Lindner iv

Teaching Students With Autism Spectrum Disorder CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ..................................................................... vii Foreword ................................................................................... viii Chapter 1: Sensory Therapy ....................................................... 1

Chapter 2: Behavior Interventions and Support Systems .... 24

Chapter 3: Parent/Teacher Conferences .................................. 34

Chapter 4: The Classroom Environment ................................ 42

Chapter 5: Meltdowns ............................................................... 52

Chapter 6: Speech and Language............................................. 68

Chapter 7: Assessments and Lessons ...................................... 79

Chapter 8: Writing the IEP ...................................................... 104

Final Note .................................................................................. 118

About The Author .................................................................... 120

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Stephanie L. Lindner vi

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Acknowledgments

I want to thank my former students, and all the colleagues that I worked with at Yonkers Public Schools, New York City Department of Education, and New Milford Public Schools. Your support has helped me become the teacher I am today.

I want to thank my family, my husband Jared, and Uncle Alex for believing in me and pushing me to keep writing.

I want to thank my son Bret for giving me the love and strength that I need to be the best version of myself.

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Stephanie L. Lindner

Foreword

As soon as I graduated with a B.A. in English Literature, I started working with students as a Teacher’s Assistant. I had my own resource room where I would pull students who were struggling out of class and work on targeted skills for grades K-8th grade. Afterward, I worked in a nursery school assisting children ages 2-4 years old. Then, I worked in a 2nd grade ICT (Inclusive Classroom Teaching) Classroom. I was a student teacher for a classroom with a 6:1:1 ratio, with students with multiple disabilities and a classroom teacher for a class with a 12:1:1 ratio with students who had multiple disabilities.

I graduated from a dual-master’s program in special education and early childhood education.

Nothing I studied in college, could have prepared me from what I learned in the classroom on my own. The best learning came from the students themselves. They were the best teachers. Reading a textbook could give you some pointers that may or may not work.

The first year of teaching in a special education classroom gave me my hardest but best lessons. As each year went by, I learned more and more how to teach students with disabilities. I started writing down things I learned, and what my colleagues would tell me so I would have it all in one place for reference, a viii

Teaching Students With Autism Spectrum Disorder sort of guidebook to myself.

Overall, I have had a lot of success in my classroom. With effort, you can help teach a student self-control to manage meltdowns and outbursts, and how to read and move on to a less restrictive environment. Seeing a student make progress doesn’t happen overnight, and there’s no one magic solution.

The best strategies take consistency, effort, and time before you’ll be able to see any progress, but when you do, it’s one of the most priceless feelings in the world.

My aim and sole purpose for this book is to help parents and new teachers with a general guide to different aspects of teaching students with autism in the classroom. Before we begin, let me explain that this is a guidebook based on the strategies that I have personally tried in my years of experience teaching in multiple settings with children who have multiple disabilities. The strategies that I share are because I have directly enforced them or have observed them working for myself. It is important that you understand that what I share in this book, may not work for every single child with autism. It is important that you understand that these are my opinions that are based on my experiences and you have a right to disagree. To protect the identity of students, I have chosen to omit their names; however, I feel confident that you will take something out of it that you can use to support students with disabilities.

This guidebook started as a guide to myself, but as I started adding more and more pieces of information, ix

Stephanie L. Lindner I felt like parents can use it as well as a reference. I worked as a coach for new teachers and a lot of what I wrote in this book I have shared with my Student Teachers. In my experience, parents of children with autism often feel like they are alone. New teachers feel like they are like the proverbial fish out of water. I know I did.

In my first year of teaching students with multiple disabilities, I felt vastly unprepared. I was a decent student. My cumulative GPA was a 3.8. I certainly was well read, to say the least, but on my first day of school, I felt completely clueless. I remember being surrounded by my new colleagues and the first five minutes I had to help a student with Oppositional Defiance Disorder who was also mentally disturbed and had autism. He was having a severe meltdown. He could not sit in his chair to eat breakfast. He was screaming and crying. I felt powerless. I did not know what to do. All I could do was try my best to help him sit down so he would stop squirming on the floor.

Upon reading my students’ IEP’s (Individualized Education Plans), I came to realize that 10 out of 12

were categorized as emotionally disturbed, had Oppositional Defiance Disorder, Autism, and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).

In the classroom, I faced challenging obstacles with students and colleagues alike. When a student would have a meltdown to the point where he would cause himself or others’ harm, most of the time I was alone. The security guards in my school refused to help x

Teaching Students With Autism Spectrum Disorder me. Not once did anyone help me. There was no crisis management team. I sometimes had paraprofessionals who did not want to be responsible for helping the kids during their meltdowns so they would not assist me either.

During my observations, my room could be chaotic. I had to be in twelve different places at once while also trying to teach and differentiate a lesson and delegate directions to my paraprofessionals. The second I would step away from one student, another would be trying to climb up the top of the closet. It was a tough time, but when students can learn to trust you, they are able to learn and have rewarding experiences that will help them in their lives. I spent twenty minutes in total for the entire year with a teacher who was supposed to be my mentor. I collaborated with occupational therapists, speech therapists, and physical therapists on a weekly basis. A lot of what I learned over time through trial and error, I was able to incorporate into my daily routine with my students.

Let us begin by talking about those strategies, and how to teach students with autism and multiple disabilities. Students with autism need boundaries just like any child, but they also need accommodations and modifications to set them up for success. We will review real-life scenarios, and cover different topics such as academic, behavior, assessments, collaboration with therapists and parents.

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Stephanie L. Lindner

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Chapter 1: Sensory Therapy

All students need sensory breaks, regardless of whether they are on the spectrum. I, for one, can barely sit down for a long period of time; I need to get up and move around. In general, sometimes getting up and using the bathroom can be a break enough for adults, stretching for five minutes, browsing social media, or opening your emergency snack drawer and selecting your cheat fix. Whatever it is, we tend to find excuses to take a short break and move our bodies. Students with autism should be given an opportunity to do this as well. So it’s imperative that you are flexible enough to end a lesson early to allow for transition time, but also a short Sensory Break.

Sensory breaks were a part of the routine I established because students needed it every day. I