 appreciate it. Thanks for your kind attention. Thank you Scott. I will go ahead and and we'll introduce Catherine Holly who's the lead training and school consultant and the ABA team lead at the UW Autism Center. Catherine as I understand it is actually office at the University of Washington Tacoma campus. So Catherine welcome and we'll be happy to let you start whenever you're ready. Thank you I am going to share my screen just take me a minute. Okay I'm trying to break the habit of asking everybody if they can see my screen after three years of doing things virtually. I think we've mastered it hopefully. All right um all right so are we okay to start? Yes all right great um all right I am not on the first page. There we go. Okay welcome everybody my name is Catherine Holly. I am from the University of Washington Autism Center and I'm really excited to be invited here today to talk about effective communication strategies and classroom management strategies for neurodiverse learners. We'll talk a little bit more about the things we're going to cover during this time. I also have with me my co-presenter Patty Matestic so we're both going to take a minute to introduce ourselves and talk a little bit about our backgrounds. This is me Catherine and my cat Zoe who may or may not make an appearance today. I am a board certified behavior analyst or BCBA so trained in applied behavior analysis. I have a variety of experience working in homes with people ages zero through adulthood as well as working quite a bit in the school setting mostly in the secondary setting and a little bit in the community college setting as a consultant so working with students and programs to try to set students up for success in terms of meeting their needs and helping the students and the staff to manage the unique needs that our different learners have. I will now pass it over to Patty to introduce herself. Hello my name is Patty Matestic and I am a clinical psychologist by training and I also I wear a lot of hats at the Autism Center so I co-direct our ABA launch program which is an early kind of intensive ABA program. I oversee the parent component so it's for children that are under the age of six trying to kind of start early with parents understanding neurodiversity and different aspects of how their child may communicate and learn and then I'm also the director for Tacoma Clinic Location just overseeing daily operations. Clinically I do a lot of diagnostic work and then have also worked outpatient therapy cases around typically teens and adults with anxiety management and everyday living skills and then I'm a member of the training team so I enjoy coming out to situations or events like this where I can meet with other community members and help support the autism community so thank you for having us. Thanks all right so today we have like an aggressive agenda for our 90 minutes together we're going to talk kind of touch on these four main areas talking about general supportive strategies how do we set expectations sort of fairly communication strategies and then at the end a little bit about managing disruptions and while I understand the audience say we're talking about neurodiverse learners a lot of these strategies apply to all of our learners including the pieces around managing disruptions so we're going to kind of talk broadly and then talk more specifically being from the autism center both Patty and I that's our area of interest and expertise so we'll be talking quite a bit about autism but also acknowledging that neurodiversity does not just pertain to people with autism or autistic folks which we will talk about in a minute and on that note we or I and Patty as well which she's talking we make every effort to use identity first language so saying autistic person versus person first language a person with autism we are continuing to work on making that language shift it's been a long road for us as mo or at least Patty and I were trained to use person first language initially so likely I will go back and forth and I appreciate everyone's sort of patience and understanding as we work to make this language shift all right so we will get started so when we talk about supporting neurodiverse learners in the classroom there is quite a bit that falls under this umbrella of neurodiversity so this overwhelming list of things are some of those diagnoses or identities that fall under this umbrella and from my experience I will say that this first group autism anxiety ADHD OCD these are things that initially or traditionally are thought of as areas of neurodiversity and then the umbrella has kind of expanded again and now we look at things like learning differences like dyslexia or praxia or hyperlexia and that is becoming more common to be sort of included under this umbrella and then we are also seeing now expanding into including different types of mental health and so like bipolar disorder borderline personality disorder schizophrenia so all of these things under the umbrella of neurodiversity certainly means that in 90 minutes we can't cover every area so as we talk as I mentioned my expertise is autism so I will talk a lot about that I think we take in information from the whole community so not just from the autistic community but also to know that this is very much like take what works for you and leave the rest and what may work for one student was obviously not going to work for all students and then also including on the autism spectrum that what will work for one student one autistic student may not work for every autistic student and as we talk about the language that we use and understanding that neurodiversity is this big umbrella we also want to think about one of the first ways that we can support our students is in thinking about how we sort of talk about them and how we conceptualize our students so traditionally when we think about the autism spectrum it has been presented as this linear spectrum from essentially like more autistic to less autistic so if you are quote unquote more autistic you might be referred to as low functioning traditionally thought of as maybe somebody who is non-speaking or who communicates using a different method than verbal communication somebody who maybe we think about low functioning wouldn't be expected to be college bound or to live independently and then we have our other end of this linear spectrum that we've used where we say high functioning and when we say high functioning we think like can live independently should be college bound um maybe able to easily make friends and get married this is more what we've thought of as like um Sheldon from the Big Bang Theory although he has not been identified as autistic um or people like Greta Thunberg who we see in the community doing amazing things as we've learned about autism and many types of neurodiversity we know that it is not a linear spectrum and it is not a binary that you can have lots of skills in some areas and less skills in others so one of the first ways that we can work on sort of supporting our students in this environment is to kind of abandon this idea of this binary of being higher low functioning and look to be more specific essentially and so this image is often circulated in the autistic community and you will see different descriptions on the sides these are not the diagnostic criteria for autism these are areas that have been commonly identified as maybe an area of strength or difficulty in this community and what we see now is this desire to look at these different areas and say these are the areas that I need more or less support so if we look here if we assume that the further you are out in the circle the more support you need this person might need more support around the sensory environment maybe they have lots of sensory sensitivities and we need to be aware of that when they're in the classroom and their executive functioning needs more support there but it's not their largest area of need um and then maybe around movement they're going to need to have access to more movement than other students including other autistic students so when we look at an image like this and conceptualize autism and other types of neurodiversity in this way we're acknowledging that everybody has areas of strengths and of challenge or areas where they need additional support and really that's probably true for all of us I would imagine um but when we look through this lens we are not making automatic assumptions based off of a more arbitrary descriptor like high and low functioning and depending I think you know of course in the community college setting it's different than in high school or in public you know k-12 education one of the things that happens in k-12 education and I think sometimes in higher education depending on the disability services and how they operate is that we will get information about a student before they arrive and so that information often um is gives us an idea of what this person might be like and so when we see a description like this student is high functioning we come in with a set of expectations that may or may not be appropriate and so that is part of also what we're trying to work against here and when we talk about how we set expectations and how we meet you know these unique needs that folks have we want to try as much as we can to kind of abandon our preconceived notions about what this person must be like because of their diagnosis because of the way that maybe they're described in a static document like a face sheet or an IEP or something like that all right so along with this when we recognize and realize that neurodiversity is not a sort of one-size-fits-all and it's not a more or less what we end up with is a lot of competing needs in the classroom and so one of the ways that might show up is that when you have one student that has very clear needs we might see a situation where in order for me to make this accessible to you it's now inaccessible to me so there are times when for example if I'm going to use Patty as my pretend student here that if I'm walking and talking with my student and I am claustrophobic and so I don't want to go into the elevator but Patty wants to um Patty has chronic fatigue syndrome and so she's not able to use the stairs so we could probably just each go our own way and meet at the top so sometimes that's possible but if I told Patty you have to take the elevator or you have to take the stairs or you have to take the elevator these are going to make it inaccessible for one of us and when we talk about making accommodations and modifications in the classroom one of the things we want to work towards is not making any one thing completely inaccessible to somebody else so there are times when an accommodation that somebody needs may impact the entire class in a way that is not going to work so for example if you are in a science class and we need to use microscopes and we need to do labs we probably can't have it be pitch black in there for somebody who has light sensitivity so we want to they're going to be these larger examples of people who need really significant accommodations and that's going to really be a very individualized plan and then we're going to have this other area where folks need accommodations that we can make and sometimes we will make them and it will be great for everybody and there will be times when we make these modifications and accommodations to support these students that maybe they don't work as well for one of us but it still is going to work and so one of my favorite examples anybody here and you don't have to identify yourself who is highly verbal I put myself in that category I'm extroverted I like to talk I like to socialize it's pretty much always my preferred to call somebody to talk about something or to talk face-to-face a lot of the folks that I work with that is not their preferred method of communication they want email text message things mailed home I absolutely can do that and it is not probably that much extra work for me but it's not my preference and so but that's an area where I can say this is something that it's much less work for me to email you than it would be for you to adjust to the idea of me calling you at any time of the day or night or me asking you to come in and meet with me when we could do this over email and so when we think about how we support our students part of it is the accommodations that we make and part of it is also this idea of like the cost of the choices that we're making and who is it costing quote unquote more to and of course that is subjective but in this example it's much easier for me to adjust my communication method than it would be for the person that I'm working with to adjust to my communication style and there are times when that can feel frustrating or it can feel like you have to learn to be able to talk on the phone in this world and then often my clients say but do I like how often do people that are like not and then they say old call people on the phone I don't like to think of myself as old but I guess this may be one way where I still fall in that category and so this is part of what we will think about as we move into setting expectations and so when we think about making the classroom accessible there are certain areas where it's the way we've always done it and it may or may not still be working so I love a cartoon I grew up reading the comics and so we see here in this cartoon the teacher our green maybe like triceratops telling this t-rex looks like it'll be another f in class participation rex and our t-rex is holding up his shorter arm shorter than all the other dinosaurs and he says this is so unfair and so there are ways that we have traditionally participated in education that are really solidly founded in the principles of sort of being neurotypical non-disabled able to participate as quote-unquote everyone does and as we learn more about diversity we see more diversity we invite more diversity into our educational spaces we have to think about how do we change our expectations or how do we adjust them to meet everyone's needs or to meet them more people's needs everyone's needs may be like a lofty goal depending on the size of our classes in our schools so one of the questions we ask ourselves is how difficult are the things that we're asking and there are things that we probably traditionally think of as pretty simple but as we think about different types of brains and different types of folks we learn that they may be more difficult than we originally thought so my made-up scale here when we think about how difficult something is we maybe go from one end which is like this is no problem to this other end where we're thinking about something that is overwhelming to the point of shutdown and then in the middle is that kind of sweet spot where it's difficult but manageable so if we think about something like reading the syllabus the majority in my pretend scenario of students say this is pretty much no problem like maybe i don't love this activity but i am able to access the syllabus i can read it i can take in this information and then some of us maybe we're going to find a little bit difficult but it's manageable and maybe it's difficult because of the reading maybe it's difficult because of the amount of information i was recently enrolled in a graduate level class and i really think the syllabus was 32 pages which was a lot of information to take in and then there's going to be some of us where this document is so overwhelming i can't look at it i can't read it i might not even be able to stay in this class because looking at an entire semester or quarters worth of information at once is not that does not work for me or i find it overwhelming and i maybe don't have the skills yet to manage that anxiety or that overwhelm and then we have everybody's other favorite uh school activity the group project um and some people love them i even as an extrovert don't love a group project um i like to be able to do things on my own time which is usually at the last minute and i like to work in sometimes the middle of the night or the early morning when other people don't want to be working and so this is a more maybe common example where we see this difference in difficulties so there's like the couple of people or the one person who's like love a group project this is my dream come true again in my made-up class the majority of people feel like this isn't my favorite um but i can handle it and then we're going to have folks that this is really not going to work for them and this may be somebody who is uh very introverted it may be somebody who um doesn't have or doesn't feel confident in their social skills or doesn't relate to others in the quote-unquote typical way it could be somebody like me with ADHD who has a really difficult time with time management and has difficulty adhering to other people's timelines um because i work in my own way um and then also the anxiety of knowing that and knowing that other people may get frustrated with me or other people may be relying on me for something that then doesn't get to them when it was planned to and so there's a lot that goes into these different types of activities that are more like traditional learning and then there's also this other piece that i hear in the back of my head and have heard from um educators around like you kind of have to be able to do group projects like in the world very few of us truly work in a silo um and that is true but there's also again these like push and pull of what is what are we doing here are we preparing you to go into the working world are we trying to teach you this academic skill are we trying to work on your socialization and your ability to relate to other people uh there's often multiple things we can learn from doing one activity but for folks who find something like a group project so overwhelming that they may not be able to complete it or even start it we might ask ourselves is the point of this project the sort of social piece of learning to work together or is the point of this project to learn this academic material and if the point of this project is to learn the academic material then maybe for our folks who truly find this aversive maybe they are able to work by themselves because the point is not the working together piece but then in the times where our goal really is to work together maybe we can be more flexible in how we work together or in what we're working on um and so as we think about setting expectations we want to keep these differences in mind and we want to think about how we can work off of somebody's strengths to help them to be successful within sort of the confines of our class topic the subject matter the things that we need to accomplish so part of um looking at a strengths based model is occasionally understanding where we also don't have strengths so we having awareness of that but then when we know what is difficult we also then can look at what are we good at and how can we build on that so I'll speak from my experience in applied behavior analysis and working in the school system oftentimes or previously and I was certainly trained this way in behavior analysis we would look at what is the least developed skill what is the area where you have the most difficulty and we would be you know we would be instructed to and work with families and say this is the area where this person has the most difficulty this is where we need to start because this is where they have the most room to grow um now I look back on that and I'm horrified um because nobody wants to do the thing that they're the worst at all the time and so what we now want to look at is what what are you good at what do you like what are you successful with and let's build off of that and then maybe we will also bring in some of these areas where we want to learn more skills but we don't want to spend all day asking you to do things that you're really not good at or that you really don't enjoy that's certainly not going to be motivating and so when we think about making you know differences in expectations either for one student or all of our students working with them to kind of recognize their strengths and how they think they can be successful and then figuring out if that meets with our essentially bottom lines so again these strategies can be applied in kind of a one-on-one setting with a student also with a whole class where we sort of share the discussion of for me if I'm the teacher what is my bottom line and knowing that what has to get accomplished in this quarter or semester for me to feel like we can I can you know either pass you or move you on to the next phase of your education and that's going to be very different depending on our environments and then we can also work on understanding the bottom lines of our students as well as their strengths to share this discussion in a sort of in a collaborative way to hopefully the dream is to meet everybody's needs and so as the professor or the teacher you get your bottom lines met and as the student I get to work in a way that is you know works with my neuro type works with my skill set and I leave feeling like I've learned the material I needed to learn again often easier said than done especially depending on how much flexibility you have in the curriculum that you're teaching or the type of class you're teaching like if anybody here like you know working with like nursing students doctors like or pre-med maybe there's not as much opportunity to change the bottom lines there are certainly there more specific skills folks have to have but maybe there are other areas where we can be more flexible like excusing you from the group project or maybe you don't turn in homework daily you turn in a cumulative assignment maybe something that can meet both of our needs and then the other big piece of this idea of kind of understanding what is something that somebody can't do versus something that they won't do and there is no hard and fast formula here more traditionally with folks who are neurodiverse there could be misconceptions that they're refusing to do something or looking for a way out of assignments of activities that really fall under this category of something that I quote unquote can't do and in this case I would consider a can't do something that is I'm either physically unable so I have a skill or a motor skill deficit or difference it could be something where I don't have the prerequisite skills to be able to complete this but then there's also this other category that is less clear where the cost for me to do this so far outweighs the benefit that it becomes essentially impossible and so whether this is like how much it's going to cost me emotionally or cognitively or it's going to be exhausting to me in some way even though I really want the thing at the end which is maybe to complete the class or to get the degree the cost of this activity or this thing is so much that it outweighs that benefit and so theoretically I can do it but really realistically I'm not able to and I think that's the for me I'll say that's the hardest area to balance is to understand that cost and then there's this other area of the won't do's and this is the like I don't like this I don't prefer it I don't really want to do this sometimes that's okay there's also sometimes where we want to think about like I understand that you don't prefer this but maybe this is an opportunity to work work on learning some distress tolerance in an appropriate way with the right supports but when we see something that falls under this category of can't do we want to be this is the time where we really need to change the expectations for the person to be successful in the won't do category it's a little bit more gray I would say and yeah I appreciate your comment Crystal in the chat about the can't do versus won't do in the area of OCD and I agree that it's very difficult for people to understand I also think for like different levels or different I don't want to say levels but people with different types of neurodiverse brains it can be hard for them to understand too there are certainly things that I even though I identify as neurodiverse have difficulty understanding about other neurodiverse people all right and then our last when we think about setting expectation area that we want to talk about is this idea of compassionate humility this is not my phrase this came from a student at the Stanford neurodiversity project I think that is the name of their project and they are working so this came from a video of they were talking about dorm living in college and what this student was talking about was this idea of putting these two things together to understand and sort of give what I would call the benefit of the doubt to understand that we don't understand everybody's circumstance the level of difficulty that they experience with different things the level of maybe like suffering or sadness or depression that they may experience around their individual differences and being able for us as like typically the people in power right the professor the teacher the providers to be humble and understand that despite everything we may know we don't know everything and we don't know an individual experience and so I said at the beginning that Patty and I both have a lot of interest and expertise in the area of autism but neither of us are autistic and so we can't ever have that lived experience so as much as we may know we also have to know that we don't know and then I think of the example I think of when I heard this was I worked with a client in the home setting and we were working on emptying the dishwasher it's a little bit of a different type of programming and it would take sometimes like two to three hours and this was like mind-blowing to me because in a lot of ways this would be a person who would have been considered pretty quote-unquote high functioning lots of skills and I remember working with this child or this young adult's parent and we both were kind of scratching our head of like is it a can't do is it a won't do how can we make this happen faster and essentially like do we really believe that it really takes this long to empty the dishwasher and I think this was one of like for me the most salient times of like practicing this compassionate humility because it came very clear to me like I don't need to academically understand everything that is happening here to accept that this is a very difficult and complex process for you and perhaps this isn't a realistic or desirable thing for us to be working on and so what I think for me part of what was happening was I wanted to be able to explain it and say this is a manifestation of this of this processing delay or this symptom of autism or this symptom of ADHD and while it could have fit into those categories it was quite extreme and so sometimes we just have to know that we don't know and we have to believe what people are telling us and then utilize that information to maybe make different change our expectations make accommodations make modifications even if we don't fully understand what is happening Alrighty we are going to now move on to talking about communication to start this section we are going to do a quick activity so we are going to go into breakout rooms and four folks here that do not want to be in a breakout group you don't like to talk to strangers this is not your jam or this is not your preference please this is optional activity so don't feel as though you must participate it is we find a meaningful activity that can give us some perspectives especially if we do not have a communication difference so what we will do in our small groups of two to three folks will be to go into your group and talk or tell others about your weekend without using any words with the letter R and so if you communicate verbally this means you wouldn't say any words with the letter R if you communicate via a communication device that would mean we would take out all the words with the letter R and if you are communicating via sign then to take out again all of the words with the letter R so if you use in a communication device or if you communicate via sign language you already have a communication difference and so this activity may be less salient for you but for folks who don't experience a communication difference this can often give us a small glimpse into what that experience might be like okay I think we are all here yes perfect all right so if anybody is comfortable or whoever is comfortable would like to share about their experience either as the listener or as the talker or the communicator without using the letter R we would love to hear from you you can either unmute yourself or you can utilize the chat maybe what you noticed or what was difficult or what was if there was something that was easier you'd have a comment in the chat oh oh you were yes thank you for okay so Chris says that their vocabulary is not large enough yeah so we were having to use different words to describe maybe we were less specific so just trying to get to the point I saw that in my group so we were maybe one sentence to describe our weekends and then having to really focus and think about the words maybe that was different than typically when you're talking or communicating taking more time to figure it out yes and let's see here have you to split your attention so this I'm going to come back to that in a minute a little bit like trying to communicate in a foreign language where you don't know or you're searching for the words and then Scott's noticing that maybe they were looking up and off to the left or right to try to find the words yeah and fewer nonverbal behaviors um because you're thinking more and more about what you're going to say so these are all great observations um and very in line with typically um the types of experiences that folks have we had an R group and likely in some other groups uh the R police so somebody who is listening to hear if others use R I am also often that person um and so when we think about being the listener in this situation some of the things that we notice are yes absolutely our split attention so I'm both trying to hear what you say but I'm also really thinking about what I'm going to say because it's taking me more time to get that ready because I have to think so much about it and so when we think about students or people that have um either a communication difference or a processing difference so maybe it takes them more time to take in information and figure out what to do with it um this may um be similar to the experience that we're having in this very small short um activity um we also see like sometimes in some groups we've seen people use what we call compensatory strategies so they want to write it down before they say it those are typically are like very uh detail oriented sort of type A folks who want to make sure they do it right the first time um and then we have others who um may kind of fly by the seat of their pants do their best and go oh I missed I made a mistake I did an R and that's okay so we've learned a lot about different ways of communicating and how difficult it can be the other thing and I noticed this in our group um but I've seen it in other groups as well is that there's much less reciprocity the going back and forth that we maybe see more typically so um like somebody in my group just now was talking about um they didn't say reading but I'm gonna say reading reading a book and normally I would say what are you reading do you like it should I read that what kind of books do you like in this case no follow-up questions too difficult without using the letter R and so we see like essentially everybody just took their turn and then we kind of awkwardly sat in silence for a few minutes so we see these differences that can sometimes mimic the communication differences we see in others and while if you don't have a communication difference we can never really have that experience um because for those of us without a communication difference we knew it was only five minutes until we could start using the letter R again so there was that end in sight but we do this activity as a way to sort of experientially remind ourselves that communication is not always as straightforward as it seems um and that there can be quite a bit that goes into it and this is true for folks with autistic folks that is a big part of being autistic is communication differences but also for people who English is not their first language who have communication differences like aprexia where it's physically harder to get the words out um and if we were did this activity perhaps in the chat where the expectations for reciprocity are different we expect more time in between what somebody says and when they respond we might have seen more back and forth and we should remember that patty because maybe we should do that next time to see the difference and so also thinking about like a couple people mentioned like they were looking away they were looking down so the difference is in our body language and that is one of the things that we often see with autistic folks is that they don't use as much body language they don't talk as much with their hands um and there's a variety of reasons for that um but one maybe that they're so focused on what they're going to say that that is where the energy is going um and then I appreciate this comment that nancy made about follow-up questions that if we ask a lot of follow-up questions it could also be putting the burden back on that person who has the communication difference so if I know that patty has a lot of difficulty communicating verbally and I want to catch up with patty I might make a different kind of coffee date where we both have coffee at home and we use instant messenger to catch up so that I can feel like I can ask her lots of questions and she can have a chance to you know sort of tell me about things without that additional burden of having this high-level long-term verbal communication okay so when we think going forward about how we can implement some strategies to improve communication in the classroom uh just to belabor the point a little bit we want to always remember that there are the behaviors that we observe the things that are above the waterline in our iceberg here which could look like a variety of things in this case I'm giving an example based around autism because that is what I know the most about so we might see students that don't answer when we call on them they might monologue quote-unquote during class where they tell a very long maybe relevant story maybe only closely related um maybe coming to you asking for accommodations or modifications in a way that feels like demanding or maybe they wait until the very last minute to ask for an extension so we see these observable behaviors but then there's all these things that we like under the waterline here of our icebergs all the underlying reasons that this may be happening and so we might see some difficulty with expressing wants and needs again that difficulty with verbal communication some difficulty with adhering to social norms or more traditional social norms and so depending on what we know about our student and how familiar we are with them oftentimes the things that we see are not always like so clearly related to what is happening under the surface or we're not aware of all of the things that are happening under the surface and so one of my like aha moments was working with somebody who did have quite a long processing delay and I was just convinced that they did not want to participate um and really what was under the surface there was I wasn't waiting long enough I wasn't giving him enough time to participate I had to be patient which is certainly not my strong suit and I had to learn to sit in that what was uncomfortable for me amount of time in between asking a question and getting a response so some strategies we can use in our classrooms or in our environments to help support communication differences we can really look at this multiple means of communication how can people get a hold of you how can you get a hold of them how can they communicate with their peers being really clear and concise with our expectations and so oftentimes knowing the why behind things is important but we also know like especially for autistic folks that when we can be as direct as possible um that is helpful in being able to meet those expectations there are lots of sort of we call them sometimes hidden rules or hidden expectations in an educational setting uh often the most obvious one is like when we come into a physical classroom the students sit at like the tables and desks and the teacher or professor is at the front of the class uh maybe like in kindergarten that gets specifically addressed but typically on the first day of a college class we don't say I'm going to sit here and you guys sit there it's implied um and people may or may not know that so we also when we think about being clear and concise with our expectations it also means considering things that typically go unsaid and so I have a friend who teaches at UW Tacoma and UW Tacoma some departments you call professors by their first name some you call them doctor some you do whatever they tell you to do in her department specifically they all go by doctor last name um and so because the expectations on this campus are not consistent across departments she makes a point to say that on the first day of class I want you to call me Dr. Holly um but it's not me um and that way as opposed to having to like reactively correct the person or be upset or feel disrespected that is something that is important to her and to this department and so they say it up front and um another way that sometimes gets addressed is people hear what other people are calling the professor so they hear other students and so maybe they have a student that they've had many times and that student does use the professor's first name but that's more of an indication of the level of sort of working or professional relationship they have or friendship and it wouldn't be expected that on your very first day of school you call this person by their first name so that's one example of a sort of hidden or implied or inferred rule but there are lots of them and lots of them are social and people with different types of neurodiversity or neurodivergence may have more or less skills around so meeting social expectations or observing what is happening in the environment and then acting on it um in addition everybody's favorites probably pretty common now but utilizing rubrics and I think we typically see rubrics utilized in a specific assignment but also thinking about if there is an expectation for participation what does that actually mean what does a rubric for that look like does it mean showing up every day does it mean raising your hand and volunteering at least once per class so for somebody who is very very um adverse to sharing in a group setting raising their hand and answering a question once in a quarter could feel like a huge level of participation um I think traditionally we would think of that as or I honestly I would not think of that as a lot of participation but for that person it is and so whether it's sort of individually with your student thinking with a specific student thinking about what their participation will look like or setting that expectation at the beginning of the quarter or the semester so everybody knows and knows what to expect and is able to address that if they think they can't meet these expectations or this is going to be a problem um in some way or difficulty and then also thinking about chunking information and so we often think about chunking in terms of teaching academically related material together we also can think about this with like expectations and how we are delivering information to different types of learners where as opposed to sort of jumping around that we're really focusing on giving like information at the same time so like when we're talking about assignments for the year to talk about them all together um and then also continue to address them as we go uh but there also will be times when for you as the person who's designed the class or who has been in is very familiar you will see the relationships between different types of materials that other people may not see especially if that is an area that is more difficult or impacted for that person so folks with ADHD they often have difficulty relating their own thoughts and ideas and then also seeing the relationship between other people's thoughts and ideas uh this also can mean on the other end that for your students that have more difficulty relating information um what they turn in may be kind of like a hot mess as the kids say where it's not as easy to see how all of these thoughts are related um in a coherent like in a page or in a essay so for somebody who has difficulty relating their thoughts and ideas they may benefit from as opposed to writing a paper turning in a concept map where we have a more visual representation of how these thoughts and ideas are related some other other strategies we can use uh having frequent breaks so this type of learning that we're doing right now with lots and lots of verbal output and for you guys so graciously lots of listening for people who are auditory learners this works for them um as we know there are lots of different kinds of learners so there are likely people here who are like I wish this lady would stop talking and that is okay um and so when we have a lot of any one type of input whether it's verbal whether it's lots of reading lots of watching having frequent breaks can really help and everybody has a different idea of what frequent breaks might look like so for me frequent breaks is like if I'm giving a presentation about 10 minutes every hour um because I know people need to get up they need to walk around they need to like check their phones all those things um and then but for somebody else that might look like every five minutes like I need a one minute break every five minutes so probably in teaching a class like if we took a one minute break for every five minutes of this presentation we would be here a for a long time and then also it would be pretty disjointed so sometimes the frequent breaks are something that we build in to our class and then sometimes it's a more individual accommodation that we make where it's like if you need to get up and walk around every 10 minutes I'm going to know that and I'm not going to penalize you for it um because you are maybe you are missing more class than others but that is okay because that's what you need um and then the last two thinking about making those connections explicit so really being clear about how these things are related or maybe why or highlighting what is more important so some ways that we indicate something is important when we're giving lectures is repeating the same point many times sometimes we emphasize and we start to we say something louder or we talk more slowly or we give a cue like this is really important and if I'm a student when a professor says this is really important I think this is probably going to be on the test or something um that might not be as obvious to folks who have different learning styles or who don't pick up on the same social cues or connections so we might have to say you might notice I've repeated this quite a bit I'm repeating this because it is a really important point um and so making those things known um or saying like when we talk about setting expectations when I underline something on the board or something is in bold on the PowerPoint that means you need to pay attention to this because it's going to be on a test or a part of an assignment so making that clear and then the last one my most favorite uh visual supports so writing it down showing a picture giving a product sample if you are assigning um like a paper let's say um that you're showing example of this is an A paper this is a B paper this is a C paper or if it's a group project providing a sort of end result and using that as a way to help people to understand what is expected because as helpful as a rubric maybe that may not be the most accessible way for that person to understand what's expected for example like me somebody with ADHD I look at the rubric and I'm like yes the first day of the assignment I'm like I'm going to check off every single one of these things I'm going to get like an A plus plus plus plus plus um and then when the time actually comes I'm like I can't even look at this rubric because it's so overwhelming but if I have an example that I've seen of what is it is supposed to have looked like I can call on that in a less sort of overwhelming and threatening way and say okay this is kind of what I need to do um and so these are some additional ways that we can kind of help to communicate sometimes verbally but also our expectations um and I see in the chat comments about syllabuses or syllabi syllabuses I don't know which it is um it's syllabi okay thank you um that there are yes institutions require so much specific information in the syllabus um and that it makes it difficult because you can't just like take that information out and I'm guessing depending on your institution maybe you're not supposed to say things like don't worry about this part only read this part I'm guessing that probably um is not always allowed but I so I do agree that they can often be very very overwhelming but if there are ways visually that we might be able to make certain points more salient like if it's like a PDF like using different colors or I've seen some professors who put boxes around certain paragraphs as a way to like make that information more like stand out to you um or yeah I think unfortunately this is one of right the pieces about education and working within a larger system is that we might want to um the things that we want to change to make it more accessible the institution has not always caught up to that yet um and also like depending on how many classes somebody's taking you know when you get four 30 page syllabi um that becomes additionally overwhelming especially when there's a lot of the same information in every single one um Catherine do you mind if I just make a really quick plug um our one of our sessions today has uh disability services providers from higher ed coming so I think we should also bring this up during that group too because that we could talk about that over there as well might be good absolutely yeah and one of the I would be curious what the those folks think about this one of my sort of comically favorite parts of reading a syllabus is how buried the disability services information often is it's like towards the end and again like often because that's where it needs to be but I'm like well I'm never going to make it to this part of the syllabus to get this information so uh right um looks like we've got some other ideas in here around like putting information in several places posting announcements yes thank you um often when we get our big list of assignments at the beginning of the quarter we feel like we can do it all and then kind of lose track as we go so as we think about these strategies some that we're going to talk about in a minute it also can be overwhelming to think about like I could change this I could change that I could redo my whole class before I offer it again um and so you know as a universal design for learning reminds us and tells us we want to try to be realistic as we go and think about you know continuing to use this plus one approach so sometimes there are specific ways that we can like take a lecture and we can break it into smaller parts we can also think about if we're going to offer more modes of communication if that's a personal goal or institutional goal that could look like just adding one additional layer it doesn't mean now I have to have email phone slack texting canvas messaging you know um zoom messaging so we can think about like not making it so that it is successful and that it's realistic for us as well because I think the idea right is that we want to have these like quality changes versus quantity changes and I certainly am an an excitable person so when I learn lots of new information like I'm going to do it all and I'm going to do it tomorrow but often that is not as successful as picking one piece and then also building on our own strengths so we want to do that with our students we also want to do that with ourselves so if there's an area that you feel like this is an area where I can I'm really strong and I can make these quality changes that might be a place to start also so that you feel successful because experiencing success for all of us is a big piece of keeping this process going all righty we are going to go now into our last area that we plan to talk about which is a little bit about managing disruptions and so there are disruptions that come in all sizes shapes and forms in a group setting of any kind we are going to talk about some whole group strategies and then some individual strategies so in this context where we are talking about neurodiverse learners there are disruptions that occur that may be a manifestation of somebody's difference or disability and so we go back to our communication of the iceberg that we use with communication and we think about what might we see continuing to talk until a thought is complete so likely in a group setting we've all had the experience of you know you ask a question and then somebody starts to talk and then you want them to stop because it's been enough time or we are they're getting off topic and so we're trying to get that to wrap up like playing them off at the Oscars but they keep talking and maybe even talk over you to complete their thought we might also see things like people being frequently in and out of their seats which may or may not be disruptive depending on a variety of things we might see and hear repetitive behavior something like loud tapping humming vocalizations or flapping clapping all kinds of different repetitive behaviors we also may see things that are a little bit unexpected or maybe becoming more common now things like folks wanting to wear sunglasses inside or wanting to wear a hat to block out the light or somebody bringing in different sort of sensory items that will make them feel more comfortable in a different environment and so when we see these things we can ask ourselves like what does this indicate what does this mean is this a disruption that needs to be addressed or is this something that a person needs in order to access this environment and so again when we think about what is under the surface here we think about in this case maybe some symptoms or manifestations of autism so when we think about something like an intense interest if we are talking about my area of special interest and I have a thought that I want to complete I may be essentially unable to stop myself from finishing this thought and this is not just for autistic folks this can happen like for anxious folks people with other needs but it's like for me the consequence of not finishing this thought is so distressing that I'm going to do whatever I can to finish it and maybe and sometimes the more you try to stop me from finishing it the more distressed I become so the more dysregulated I become and so that often can end up in if I had just let you finish this thought we would probably have moved past this by now but because I've tried to interrupt or stop it's become a much larger issue not to say that we have to let everybody say whatever they want for as long as they want but it's something to be cognizant of we also see a lot of sensory sensitivities and differences so this is commonly associated with autism but I think a lot of us have different sensory sensitivities or differences and so what I'm going to ask you guys to do now and we can do it in the chat is to think about the environment either that you're in right now or maybe the environment that you teach in what kind of sensory input do you notice in those environments so thinking about the site sound maybe the taste depending on what environment you're in touch smell you know I always forget one so you can either use the environment that you teach in or the environment that you're in now if you're still in remote learning or remote teaching yes fluorescent lighting that is like always number one um oh we got yep I will say I uh oh the ticking clock um Patty will know this in our clinic we have a couple of clocks that I swear they get louder the quieter it is um gum chewers oh my mom my mom she bands gum in her presence um foot or pen tappers a video playing whoops too loud or too soft cars going by um yep ice cold air oh I hate being cold um loud instrument noises like an ice machine a freezer absolutely um humming electronics yep sometimes too cold sometimes too hot depending on the season and the sun yes the HVAC lab hoods I'm assuming that those are like above the not like an actual hood you wear um side conversations while someone else is talking um environmental noises dogs barking yes so yeah tons of different types of sensory input and some of us are going to be more successful in blocking those things out than others so I typically like don't really notice like the hum of electronics like I'm in my office there's an ice maker on the other side I hear it when it drops ice but it doesn't distract me um but if somebody is talking around me like if my husband gets up and he's on the phone or I'm in the office and other people are talking forget it I need to know what they're talking about I need to listen I probably want to participate um even when it's not appropriate um and so that's something that for me I really can't block out um and then there are other people with different sensory sensitivities like if you have very very sensitive smell there may be a smell in an environment that nobody else can smell but you can smell and it is so overwhelming that it makes it difficult for me to think about anything else um or like for folks with ADHD especially the hyperactive presentation uh when we ask them to sit still at their desk and I think this is more common in younger uh education but I think it does still happen where we say this is your seat and you need to sit here and listen and be quiet that is essentially the same as if I asked all of you to do jumping jacks throughout this entire presentation right you likely wouldn't be able to listen as effectively you might be tired you might not want to stay probably um and so these are also sensory needs like the need to move or if I like with the fluorescent lights that's why we see a lot of people wearing glasses so when we think about disruptions in the classroom for everyone um but especially for people that have known sensory sensitivities one of the first things we want to think about is is this a sensory experience let me take inventory of this environment and see is there something that's different maybe there's construction today and that's different or maybe like somebody burned popcorn in the faculty lounge upstairs and the whole building smells like burned popcorn um or um you know we've got new lights all of those things um and so thinking about different sensory experiences especially if somebody has like a behavior that you feel like quote-unquote comes out of nowhere oftentimes the first thing we look at is the sensory input we don't always know what it is the person doesn't always know what it is but those types of changes can be really um jarring and really difficult and then we also want to think about like what behavior the person is engaging in and if this stems from some area of difference or disability we want to know that so we kind of know how to help address it versus again like assuming that somebody is just being disruptive because they would like to be disruptive or for the person who engages in the foot tapping that is a sensory need um we might want to figure out how can we work with you so that you can get your sensory need met but also that I can teach this class because if the foot tapping is my sensory sensitivity that really bothers me as the teacher we're going to have to compromise here because I have to teach the class and you have to listen to the class so what can we do to meet in the middle here so when we think about whole group strategies because a lot of these strategies apply to everybody for managing disruptions we want to think about establishing class norms and I think the older like when we're in community college college post-secondary we might have more luck in talking with our students as a whole about what they need in their learning environment and so if there are things like you know you're receiving a student who engages is in a lot of movement a lot of pacing for example you might say and establish that as a class norm that anybody who needs to pace should pace in the back of the room and that's okay with me or if that's going to be really distracting or maybe if you're in a lab environment that's unsafe we might say anybody who needs to move during class can stand in this part of the hallway and if I see you out there I'll make sure to talk loud so that you can hear me so you can both access this environment and get what you need we also want to think about being direct again with what we can and cannot tolerate and then also in the moment when if there is a disruption giving that direct but kind feedback so if you are trying to interrupt somebody who is maybe engaging in some significant monologuing saying patty we need to move on I need you to stop talking um it can feel like even just doing it and pretend felt a little uncomfortable to me um so to be very direct can be hard but if I say something like okay patty like you know we're we're getting ready to move on that might not be clear enough the person might not understand what you're asking of them and then that confusion is additionally dysregulating and then also if there's something um that you need somebody to do if we need everybody to be quiet and re-engage to say that as opposed to something like I'll get started when everyone's ready um because that might I might not be ready or I might not know how to show you I'm ready think and then now this is sort of like something you would set up with your students ahead of time but if you expect that there will be disruptions or if this is something that is just part of what you do with your students being upfront with what you will do in the moment of a disruption so um in the class that I was last in it was a social work program so there were going to be some pretty intense conversations that were around like race and economic disparities different areas where people might have had different opinions or thoughts or things they wanted to communicate and so the professor told us basically her list of non-negotiables of things that she did not tolerate in the class and so she said if I hear blah you know x y and z I will interrupt you and ask you to stop talking if you do not stop talking I will remove you from because this was on zoom I will remove you from the zoom room and we'll meet later and so there was no surprise over what would happen and in this case it did not happen for the whole quarter but everybody knew what to expect and what the professor would be doing in those moments of anticipated disruption um and then you also want to tell your students what do you expect them to do in the moment of a disruption so if you have a student in your class who maybe has experienced or has engaged in disruptive behaviors in the past or who is part of sort of a cohort model where other students know them if they become dysregulated other students may try to help they may try to engage with that person they may try to like hey calm down man it's okay something like that um and maybe that's okay and maybe it's not and so you can let the rest of the class know what would you like them to do in these moments so in the example I just gave one of the things the professor said is if this happens I don't want other students to get involved like I will handle this so if we have a comment that meets this criteria everybody else is to stay silent and we will debrief later but I don't want arguing to occur and that was really important because I think there were times when other people really myself included wanted to say something but maybe it wasn't the right time so letting people know um and making sure that we then follow through on what we've said we're going to do like that we mean what we say and we do what we are going to say so people both know what to expect and know that they can trust us um and then so we can utilize these strategies with everyone and then there are some more individualized strategies that we can use with specific students and so this may be students that come to us they self identify it may be students who you identify after spending some time with them so we want to ask them what do you want me to do but maybe also what do you want me to not do so if I work with somebody who I know um gets sort of physically escalated um where maybe they engage in like high levels of like self-stimulatory behavior like jumping flapping pacing um I might ask them in those moments when it's disruptive what do you want me to do and then what is important that I don't do and sometimes people will say like don't touch me don't put a hand on my shoulder don't you know repeat my name several times but that's again part of that like compassionate humility I think is asking the person how they like to be treated and addressed and what doesn't work for them we can also think about and really actively engaging and sharing I kind of hate to call it a burden but that's the language that's often used but share this process of creating solutions so as much as we want to ask the person what do you need from me we also want to come to the table prepared with like these are the things I'm thinking and we're open to whether that's going to work or not but we also don't want to put everything back on the student to tell us all about what they need what they want what works what doesn't work it's our goal is to have this be collaborative um we want to be honest and realistic so if somebody asks for something that you can't do whether it's a systemic reason a personal reason a space reason to say that and to be realistic and so if you um if somebody says what I really need to do is like scream at the top of my lungs every 30 minutes in this classroom like that's probably no and so or if somebody says I need to um or I can't let's say wear an eye protection in the lab um is that really something we can accommodate if it's a sensory sensitivity we want to be sent like understanding of that but I'm pretty sure in most lab settings there's required materials that you wear and it's not really optional so we want to be realistic about those things and then we want to consider what is in our control so like we talked about with the syllabus there's going to be things that we want to do for folks that we're not able to for whatever reason there's also going to be for our students like they may have internal triggers or we call them antecedents that are not in our control and so there's only so much we can do but also understanding from your student what else may be at play in these situations that is you wouldn't be aware of or in control of so at UWT we have lots of students who are experiencing homelessness that are enrolled in programs as well this is an area where we want our professors and staff to know this but we can't necessarily do anything about it but this does play into possibly the number or amount of disruptive behaviors you may see so somebody who is neurodiverse that is also experiencing homelessness may be prone to have more disruptive behaviors for reasons that there's really not much you can do about but when we know that it gives us perspective and how we respond and then the last piece and this is assuming good intentions and so I will be honest this can be hard for me but essentially we want to go into instances of disruptive behaviors with assuming the person is not desiring to disrupt the class or to upset me personally or to derail my lesson and so while they may not be engaging in disruptive behaviors to like make this a better learning environment we also don't want to assume that they are sabotaging or that they are doing this sort of for some nefarious reason and so like with disruptive behaviors like self-stimulatory behaviors we that is often a need for that person and so we want to view it through that lens when we think about how we're going to handle it versus assuming that this person is chewing gum in my ear just to bother me which sometimes it feels like that because they like I did have a client who would always come in chewing like I don't even know is like hubba bubba gum it was enormous and blowing bubbles and they knew that it drove me a little bit crazy but they kept doing it but it was really because it was a sensory need to keep that mouth moving and so we had to kind of work together on that but it did for a while feel like I was like this is just happening because I said I didn't like it and then in the moment when we are experiencing maybe a disruption that feels larger than typical or we don't know what to do here are some things we can do in those moments use a visual support so if you are working with especially a person an autistic person or other neurodiverse students write it down for them put it up on the board a lots and lots of verbal redirection is likely not going to be successful it will likely escalate the situation and so I really advocate for any type of visual support that we can utilize sometimes that also means like showing somebody what we're talking about and so I'm not sure I have like a super great example at the college level but often with younger kids we might say something like if you know if we can go out into the hall to take a break then you can watch a video on your phone and then we'll actually show the phone as opposed to just talking about it but so you might finding ways to show people what we're talking about or writing it down so that they can have more time to process because that's the other thing is that the more dysregulated we are the more impacted our processing is and that's why we often make not our best decisions when we're agitated we often make impulsive decisions and then as best we can to model calmness so we want to try the more escalated other people are we want to try to be even calmer even calmer than we originally were this is definitely one of those easier said than done but over time you know we practice that want to try to keep the class calm keep ourselves calm and try to keep our rate of speech at least at baseline if not slower we don't want to raise our voices we want to just really try to model that calmness and then acknowledge and redirect so if somebody is very agitated I might say I can see you're very upset I need you to go into the hall and I'll meet you there or I can see that you're not ready to move on so I'm going to let you continue to work on this and I'm going to come back later so ignoring is typically not the best response to disruptive behavior because that behavior is serving some kind of need for that person so we want to acknowledge that it's happening and see if we can sort of like use that compassion like I see this is really hard for you or I see that you're very upset and then couple it with what is the alternative what do I need you to do to kind of like return to some semblance of like baseline or safety and then this is like the mantra at the autism center that we live by every day which is that at the end of the day we want to survive with dignity and that is for us and that is for our students and our clients and depending on the level of disruptive behavior it is that may seem like really like whoa like what are you guys thinking about but really we want to preserve our dignity we don't want to lose our cool and then we also want to make sure that we are doing everything we can to preserve the dignity of our students and so if we have a student that has different learning needs and they are getting escalated we want to think about how we treat them and interact with them to ensure that we are not sort of treating them like a child or infantilizing them or talking to them like a baby and often times you know we think like okay processing speed is going to be different it's going to be harder the more dysregulated you are I need to talk to you in like short sentences clear and concise but that also doesn't mean we're going to say things like sit stand quiet because that's not preserving somebody's dignity so considering that and then also like how we deal as a whole class and sort of debrief when there are incidences or when something kind of out of the norm has happened because if it's something that you notice right likely your students are noticing it too and depending on the everyone's level of comfort sometimes just talking about it and sort of acknowledging it can help us to all understand what's going on for this person. Neurodiversity as a whole but certainly in my experience autism is widely misunderstood and so part of making our spaces safe for neurodiverse students and making them welcoming and supportive is being able to spread awareness and knowledge about these different types of neurodiversity and these different individual differences and to help kind of normalize them and explain them so that people have a better understanding of why somebody may do what they do because if you live it every day you probably have a lot of understanding and tolerance for individual differences if it isn't something you've really been exposed to it can be very like jarring and off-putting and so part of that preserving of dignity is like in a an appropriate way is sort of increasing awareness and education about individual differences and look at that right up to 10 39. So I think there will be a chance for questions maybe after the break but I will maybe hit it over to Eric or someone. Perfect. Thank you. Thank you so much Catherine. I want to just acknowledge you before we take a break. Catherine and Patty from the UW Autism Center. Thanks so much for that. We are going to take a comfort break. We've had a 90-minute session here so we'll take a 10-minute comfort break. See you all back at 10.50. Thanks. Thank you.