Literacy in the Inclusive Classroom

I’d first like to start off by talking about executive functioning. We know that executive functioning impacts children with autism in all kinds of ways, particularly in reading comprehension. We also know though it’s not specific to children with autism, so children with ADHD struggle with executive functioning and children with traumatic brain injury suffer with delays in that area. When we talk about reading however, executive functioning really comes into mind, because what we know about good readers is — what do they do? They check themselves. They go, “Oh, did I understand that? 

That kind of repair and reflection is part of executive functioning and that’s very difficult for them. Another part of executive functioning is flexibility. And so the ability of being able to attack something flexibly is very difficult. So somebody might be reading, and it may go off in a different way and it throws them something within a reading passage may remind them — may have “pounce” on it — and remind them of The Lion King. And so then they’ve gone to The Lion King and they have difficulty bringing themselves back. As you can see as I’m going through, executive functioning is a really broad term that encompasses a lot of things. In fact people call it the CEO of the brain. Other things it involves are the working memory. If I have to hold things in my memory — so for instance if I said, “say ‘horse, chicken, dog,’” and then, “horse, chicken, dog.” 

That’s no problem. But then if I say, “Okay, say those three words in alphabetical order,” I have to hold that in my memory and then be able to put “chicken, dog, horse,” in the right order. So that ability to hold something in the short-term memory is sometimes difficult for children with autism, although if they’ve put it in their memory — their long-term memory is wonderful, and they are the proverbial elephant. They just never forget. Many times those kinds of things — being able to follow through on a project — which really involves, you know, homework, science projects, all of those kinds of things — in what order — how do I get started?  All of those things really involve executive functioning issues.

One of the things I feel very strongly about is that as much as possible children with autism should be educated and have access to the general education curriculum. But because their learning style is sometimes not conducive to the learning style of the typical classroom, I find that if we can use the evidence-based practice that works with all the other children and just tweak it a little bit — so it works for children with autism, that makes that more possible and it makes the teacher be able to incorporate that child into the classroom.

Primarily we have a few things that are — literature that is specific to children with autism like anaphoric reference, some graphic organizer work, some grouping kinds of things and shared storybook reading — but for the most part what we do is take the evidence-based strategies that we know of and make them more visual to help the child with autism really understand the focus of the evidence-based strategy that we’re working on, or to make the social communication part of the comprehension easier for that child to understand.

A lot of times I use thought bubbles for instance, so, “Here’s Mr. Smith, he thinks that the penny has had its day and it should go away, right? And here’s Mr. Robert, he thinks the penny is very, very important.” I’m showing these two people who are kind of arguing with each other, and they both have a different thought bubble. Well then, I’ve made those two different perspectives visual for that child with autism, and they can understand the premise of what’s being asked of them.

The next strategy I’d really like to address is summarizing, because we know summarizing is kind of the gold star of knowing that you comprehended something. You took something you read and you put it in your own words. That means I have to choose what’s important in that article. I have to choose what supports those arguments in that article and what really doesn’t belong in that article.

When I’m first starting, I try to make the differences really very wide. I might take a short story and clip them — the sentences — and then put a few sentences of their narrowed and restricted interest such as Star Wars, Chewbacca, something like that in there. And I have three boxes. One says, “main, important facts of the story.” One says, “supporting details.”  And one says, “unimportant.”  So I’m going to have them sort which ones of those stories are there. So they start to develop that pathway and that organization of their brain that as they’re reading, “Oh no, I don’t need that.” 

That also follows over in math kinds of word problems — where people may put excessive sentences in a word problem, and even though Bobby has 17 cents I don’t need that Bobby has 17 cents in that word problem.

These kinds of reading comprehension issues not only impact their reading scores but also impact their math scores, because typically children with autism do very well on the computation end of things — but the minute the language starts coming in it’s a problem, because you have to use those little words, all together, you know, things that are not visually seen.