A safe classroom for everyone!

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Hello! I am a teacher in an inner-city, urban high school. I am a special education teacher of students with autism, learning disabilities, and emotional/behavioral disabilities. I am looking for ways to help all my students understand that each person in the class has talents, abilities, and characteristics that make them special and unique. Specifically, I'm looking for ways to help my non-autistic students learn how to have patience, understanding, and a welcoming attitude toward the students with autism. How can I help my non-autistic students understand, and ensure that everyone feels welcome and accepted in my class? Thanks!!

I don't think you can ensure that everyone feels welcome and accepted by every student, but it is YOUR classroom. By accepting and welcoming every student, and being a strong presence who is in charge, you can create a welcoming environment in which students feel able, to the extent their abilities allow, to use their voices. Encourage this, listen, you will be helping your students have a voice by doing so. And showing your students that you accept and welcome everyone's efforts to learn and to communicate their needs is much more potful than anything you could tell them to do.

It also helps if you can create opportunities for students to see one another's abilities, maybe through showing something that they are especially interested in, to help build respect.

But if you are saying you have a mixed class ranging from students with severe communication and social challenges to severe emotional/behavioral problems....Wow! That's got to be extremely challenging. The only thing I can think to say is if there is some way to help the ED kids understand that the autistic kids are truly bothered by noise and chaos, and that they can help create safety for the autistic kids by developing that self control, if you could help them want to do that, it avoids the power struggle thing because then they are choosing to work to develop self control they need in order to help, rather than once again being forced to comply with rules they want nothing to do with. I don't know if high school is too old to have them help develop classroom rules, but if not that might be good to discuss. Because I'd imagine the ED kids will set off the autistic kids otherwise, and the autistic kids will set off the ED kids, and everyone setting off each other isn't any good for anyone. I'm not a teacher though, so don't really know. Just seems like if you can empower the ED kids that way, everyone would benefit and learn more of what they need to learn.