Supporting Children with ASD in the Classroom

This text-based course is a written transcript of the course, "Supporting Children with ASD in the Classroom", presented by Dr. Sylvia Diehl on January 19, 2011.

Click Here to View Supplemental Handouts

>> Amy Hansen: Good afternoon everyone. Welcome to the Nancy McKinley Lecture Series focusing on Autism Spectrum Disorders and Asperger Syndrome. All events this week are in cooperation with the University of Wisconsin Eau Claire and we're very pleased that you could join us today. Today's expert seminar, " Supporting Children with ASD in the Classroom", is presented by the talented Dr. Sylvia Diehl. Dr. Sylvia Diehl is a faculty member of the University of South Florida Communication Sciences and Disorders department where she teaches courses in autism, augmentative and alternative communication, language disorders and developmental disabilities. She has served as a consultant in the area of autism spectrum disorders for the National Education Association, American Speech and Hearing Association, along with numerous state organizations and school districts. Dr. Diehl has created online course work for the Florida Department of Education and a master clinician series for ASHA. Her research and publication interests focus on consistent frameworks to support learning and communication in children with ASD in classroom settings. So welcome Dr. Diehl and thank you so much for sharing your expertise with us today.

[Applause]

Introduction

>> Dr. Sylvia Diehl: It is my pleasure to be here today to discuss "A Problem Solving Process for Teams Serving Children with Asperger Spectrum Disorders" and I'm so happy to see so many of you excited and getting empowered to work with children that I love. So let's get started because we have an awful lot to get to in one hour. First the objectives of today are to identify established interventions defined by the National Standards Project, to describe characteristics of children with autism spectrum disorders that influence communication and learning success in the school context and to apply a teaming process that aligns learning priorities with evidence based practice. We'll also discuss a few of those evidence based practices as it applies to the case study that we will look at and investigate.

National Standards Project

So first let's consider the National Standards Project. Before this time we really looked to the National Research Council for their report, which is still a fine report. But the difference between the National Standards Project and National Research Council's reported of 2000 is that this report includes both group and single case studies and this is really vital in our quest to use evidence based practice for children with autism because much of our work has been done with single case studies because of the idiosyncratic nature of our children. It is available for you for free at the website provided on these slides (www.nationalautismcenter.org/affiliates/reports.php) and what it did was it took treatment literature that really targets the core characteristics of ASD between 1957 and the fall of 2007 through a series of reviewing which we'll talk about briefly.

It categorized those interventions into Established, Emerging, Unestablished and Ineffective/harmful. However, in our quest to provide evidence-based strategy for our children we can't just look at this report and say, "Oh, that is an established treatment. I'm using that. That is an emerging strategy. I'm not going to use that." and make those kinds of judgments without really understanding why certain interventions are in certain categories. So it is really important to know the study and literature to interpret the categories correctly. We're going to talk just briefly about those.