 Hi, this is Pookey and today I'm going to talk you through three things to try to make your classroom more autistic friendly. You can use this video on its own as a learning tool. You can use it to inspire you to use the slides with a group that you're teaching, or you could actually play the video if you wanted within a short in set session. These three things to try are designed to be short sessions with very practical ideas that you can think together as a team about how to apply in your setting. So let's get started. Number one is calm. The first thing we're thinking about to make our classroom more autistic friendly is to try and create a calm environment. Now, the reason that we do this is because our autistic children tend to have very, very brilliant senses. This can be fantastic in some situations, but in a busy classroom environment where the ticking of the clock sounds like an oncoming train and where the very exciting things that we've put up on the walls to try and stimulate some of our kids can feel really overwhelming for our autistic children. So all that sensory input can just feel a little bit too much. Your typical classroom, your autistic child might feel a little bit like if you go to a very busy airport, for example, and it would be quite hard for you to do really good learning in that environment. So we look to create a little bit of calm. This will benefit every child and every adult, but especially those who are neurodiverse. So not just our autistic learners, but those with ADHD or other neurodiversities as well. But like so many of the ideas that we share, these are things that will do no harm to anyone and will have a great halo effect, too. And in terms of what we can do, we'll think about some practical ideas on the next slide, but think both about the physical environment. So what does the classroom look like? What does it feel like? What does it sound like? But also think about the social environment and how to create calm in things like how we can first and engage with each other as well. So things that you could try. Step into your classroom, take a look around, have a look at your decor and displays and just think about whether there's any potential that this might feel overwhelming for your autistic learners and whether there are any small tweaks that you might make to make it a little bit quieter and calmer for them. You might not want to adapt your whole classroom, but perhaps you'll make a little space which is very, very calm and neutral and quiet where children might go to seek respite from the busy classroom. This can be a really, really neat idea and can give children somewhere to go and emotionally regulate and reset when they need to as well. And then also just stand in your classroom and listen. Try to really focus in on all the sounds that you don't normally notice, because many of your autistic children will be noticing those noises all the time. The ticking of a clock, the shuffling of things. Can you hear the playgrounds in the distance? What are the noises going on in your classroom? And is there anything that you could do that might reduce those noises either for everyone or whether perhaps you can think about where your autistic learners sit within the room, for example, to take them away from the humming of the radiator or the noise of the playground. Idea number two is around consistency. Our autistic learners really thrive in a consistent environment. They need to know what's expected of them, what they can expect of us and what the rules are when they don't know the rules. And these things are less obvious to our autistic learners. There are so many unwritten rules in society, which many of us just get. I say us, I don't get them. I'm autistic, but many people just get. But our autistic learners often do not. And so what we need to do is make those unwritten rules written or shared, help them to understand exactly how things work. What they need to do, they don't want to get in trouble. And often there's this kind of underlying rumble of anxiety when they don't really know what they should be doing, where they should be going, what's expected, what the rules are. So make those rules explicit, whether they're kind of classroom rules or rules of life and rules of social engagement and rules of what's socially acceptable and so on. In order for this to work, we need to get different people involved. Ideally, all of the different adults that work with a child need to have consistent rules and routines between them. So trying to create this consistent, persistent, predictable environment for a child works best when everybody is on board with it. And they know what to expect between different adults, different classrooms, different environments. And how do we do this? We're going to make things more predictable for our children. We also need to make sure that as well as thinking about rules and routines and trying to make things just a little bit more boring, to be quite honest. We need to prepare in advance whenever there are changes, because that can be more challenging for our children who really thrive on consistency. So we can add some consistency in how we share change when there is change. So what can we try? First of all, we can be super clear about what the rules are and where we need to be flexible in our rules. And that's OK. We might need to adapt the rules for our autistic learner. Then we need to be consistent in the application of those new rules. So we can make a mistake sometimes because we think that we're being kind by being really flexible and blurring the boundaries a little bit to try and create more space and flexibility for our autistic learner. But they need to actually know what the boundaries are, what's expected of them, how do they get things right? So if you've got different rules, share them really, really clearly. You might also have bits of your day where you introduce super consistency, where things happen in the same way every single day. So introduce some routine bits, which are super predictable in your day. These are the bits that will feel really, really comfortable actually for every student and for you as well. These are the bits where you can do things on autopilot. So there are probably some parts of your day that happen in a fairly repetitive way. Anyway, just take a look at those bits of the day and think, can I make sure this always happens exactly the same time in exactly the same way and the exact same sequence of events? Maybe you'll play the same piece of music in the background or something like that. But just look at those bits that happen regularly anyway and kind of lean into them. These are moments when everyone can relax a little bit because they know just what to expect. And then you might also add in some rituals. Rituals are fantastic because they're bonding and connecting as well as feeling consistent and predictable. And so we could look at introducing daily rituals or things around things like what happens when a child arrives in the morning, or what happens when we say goodbye in the afternoon, or what happens when it's time to read or it's time to go and eat. Or maybe we have a ritual around tidying up. Perhaps we always put on a certain song or we always have a certain call and respond type routine that we do with the children at that time. You'll know what will work for your class. It's different from class to class and teacher to teacher. But these routines and these rituals feel really, really good for everyone. They make us feel part of a team. They give us a sense of belonging and they create that consistency that our autistic learners will really thrive from. Number three is around communication. Our autistic learners need to be helped to avoid misunderstandings and also to enable them to process particularly more complex tasks. So we need to adapt our communication in order to make that work. And in terms of who needs to be involved, we've got to put our learner right at the centre of this. This is true for everything, but in particular, our learner will have a very keen idea about how they like to be communicated with. We can explore that with them. And it also can be super helpful on this one in particular to work with home and to understand what works well in terms of communicating with a child at home. And how can we communicate consistently between home and school and ensure that a child is communicated with consistently at home and at school? Having a good home school relationship can really, really help our autistic learners and every learner, of course. But it makes a real difference here, having that consistency. And parents will often have loads of good ideas to share with us if we have time to ask. And in terms of what does that actually look like, how do we do that? So this communication, it needs to be simple. It needs to be concrete. So by that, I mean, don't be using kind of euphemisms and idioms and other words that I don't quite understand the meaning of. Basically, say stuff that actually describes the thing that we're saying. So we wouldn't say kick the bucket. We would say someone has died, for example. We just say it really, really simply. We call a spade a spade. And we need to keep our instructions really simple and we need to be consistent in how we communicate. Repetitions often very helpful because our autistic learners often have lots of different things on their mind or may take longer to process things. So don't worry about repeating. They won't get bored. They may need to hear it several times in order to have actually heard it once and do explore using different ways of communicating the same message in order to try to help that message get through. So we might show it as well as say it as well as write it, for example. So things that we can do to try to help in terms of this communication issue, you need to say what you'll do and do what you say. This is my daughter Lyra's favorite phrase to tell to adults in terms of how they can help her. Just be really, really clear. So a child knows what to expect from you and then do follow through on it. So you're going to say exactly what you're going to do and then you're going to go do that thing. When it comes to instructions, particularly if they are complex instructions, then we need to simplify them, share the simplest possible version that we can and chunk them down into manageable tasks rather than giving a great long Ream of instructions all at once. You can never break them down too far in my experience. So chunk them. Make sure also that your instructions are super, super clear that you have said exactly what needs to be done and that there's no room for ambiguity there and that the instructions are comprehensive. Do not assume that a student will make the logical leap to the next step. Some of our students will, of course, but some of them won't. And this can cause great frustration because they may follow instructions to the letter exactly as they've been asked to and find that it doesn't work because there was a step that felt so obvious to us that we didn't actually tell them to do it. So, for example, in a cooking lesson, we might need to say, turn the oven on, set the temperature to 180 degrees. If we just say set the temperature to 180 degrees, the student might miss the step of turning the oven on, which might seem obvious to us and the oven doesn't go on. The cake doesn't rise. Oh, dear. So, yes, tell them everything. And then another thing we can do is think about providing written as well as verbal materials and we might think about using pictures or our symbols and our icons to help with this as well. So our three things that we're going to try to create our autistic friendly classroom. We're going to try and make it calm. We're trying to keep things consistent and we're going to look again at our communication. Now, an activity for you to do within your team is to hit pause at this moment if you're watching this as a video and then explore these questions. What's working well? What are you already getting right? What can you share between the team and between different classrooms so that you can cherry pick from each other about what is working brilliantly already? And then think together about what could you try next? Did any ideas come to mind? Can you brainstorm this together? What might make a difference tomorrow? Little things that you feel are really doable are much better than lofty aims. So pick some tiny wins that you could try tomorrow that might make a difference from what you've discussed today and then think about how to actually make it happen. What are our next best steps? Write them down, share them, commit to them and try to follow up with each other to make sure that this little session actually makes a difference to your practice. So hit pause now and have a discussion about this if you have time. I hope that the session was helpful. If you would like to follow up here are a few suggestions. You might read the neurodiverse classroom, which goes way beyond autism. And there's huge range of different ideas in there that would be real food for thought and different ideas that you might share back with the team. You might watch my little video on creating an autistic friendly environment spoiler alert. It's just the same stuff that I've just kind of told you now, but with my face instead of the slides. But it might give a different way of sharing it if you would like to. And if you'd like to listen into something, then my podcast, the very first episode I ever recorded was about autistic masking with a wonderful colleague called Jodie Smitten. And that's something that might really help you to understand some of your autistic learners and in particular your autistic girls, if you want to dive a little bit deeper into the topic. And if you use the QR code and go along to my website, there is a blog post with these slides and this recording and also some additional further resources. So there's links to the ones that I've got here and links to some other things that you might find interesting to follow up with too. I really, really hope that you found this helpful. And if you did, then I will keep making them and I'll do them on other topics. Do let me know what topics you would like me to visit and I shall do so. Thank you ever so much.