ASD in the college classroom

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Hi All,
I am a Learning Disability Specialist at a community college. I am creating an online presentation designed to educate the faculty about ASD. It will include a section of best practices for working with students with ASD in the classroom. Since I am not ASD, I am soliciting advise from you, the experts. Please answer any of the questions following, or one of your own:
What do you think I should include under this section? What do you wish your instructors knew about ASD? What ways could they accommodate you in the classroom that would be helpful to you? What tips do you have that would make them more effective teachers for you or anyone else in the class?
My intent is to include any of your responses verbatim in my presentation. Please be aware that, by providing a response, you are giving me your consent to do so. Of course, I will not be including any identifying information about you.
On behalf of myself, the faculty, and the students with ASD, I thank you for your time and consideration.

I'm afraid before publishing other people's opinions you need informed consent which is either in the form of a written signature underneath your request OR a webpage where the person logs in and clicks a consent button after having read details of your project.

Erm. It would be better if i talked about an example of my behaviour so you could think of ways to help people for yourself.

The first thing that comes to mind is probably how absent minded i am. I searched in google for other peoples experiences to show its not just me. This i feel is a very good insight into the character of an autistic person.
http://www.wrongplanet.net/postt125168.html

Anyway, I am absolutely and completely single minded.

If im looking for say my trainers, to look for one of the trainers i have to fully and completely devote my mind to my task, to the point where i pretty much exclude everything else from my brain. I search and the only thing on my mind is the trainer and i will not be able to think about anything else at all.

But then i find one trainer, i put it somewhere, then i switch to looking for the other trainer and to do the searching i have to wipe all trace of the first trainer from my mind so i can concentrate on the second.

When i find the second, the first trainer has been so completely obliterated from my memory that i often have no clue at all where i put the first one.

Now consider that when it comes to multitasking. You can see where the feeling of being overwhelmed/ meltdowns comes from.

Juggling multiple subjects when the subjects that are in the air get completely forgotten is ridiculously hard.

If i went shopping with a shopping list i have very little ability to jump to something i need thats half way down the list when my minds on the item at the top. Even if i walk past items that are on the list, if its not the item im on i quite often would not even see what im looking at even if my eyes are looking directly at it.

I am so absent minded. I forget everything all the time. My keys are the bane of my life. I live on a main road and have left my keys in my mailbox twice in the last year and only found out hours later when ive arrived home to find my keys still luckily in the mailbox. I've left keys in my motorbike over night. I've left keys in my door dozens of times. The security guard at my old work would ask me every single night as i left if id got my keys like he was my mother.

The way i deal with things like this is through ROUTINE. When i leave my flat the first thing i do after i lock the door is turn the handle to try and open it. I am hopeless but when i manage to work something into my routine its like it makes up for things that aren't quite working the way they should. I couldnt leave my front door now without that little turn of the handle and push to see if ive locked the door properly.

trainers are things you put on your feet btw

I'm not sure that the principle of 'informed consent' is applicable outside the context of an individual's prospective involvement in clinical/medical research or trials...

But anyway.

OP, all you are likely to receive on this thread is a smattering of personal anecdotes, sometimes with highly subjective conclusions drawn therefrom. This doesn't seem to me to be an at all satisfactory approach to drawing up general guidelines (far less for formal policies!) which would affect your college's provision of the learning experience as it applies to students with ASDs.

Surely your first port of call should be your Local Education Authority, which (one would hope) would have pre-drafted and democratically-approved guidelines, regulations and standards which should be regarded as enforceable across the local learning sector.

If not (and it's not unknown, and has led to LEAs being prosecuted in the past), then the Government Department of Education should be the ultimate authority on the matter, since it is regarded with the nationwide enforcement of statutory requirements applicable across UK educational establishments. They should certainly have pre-prepared policy templates relevant to your needs, and may be able to provide samples of ASD-relevant student comments, gathered during officially-sanctioned research.

Disability awareness training should, furthermore, be considered for all college staff, from tutors and instructors, to all administrative levels, and right down to subcontracted staff (e.g., those operating the college canteen). This is not a legal demand within the text of the Equality Act (2010) but is recommended by such advisory bodies as the Equalities and Human Rights Commission as being one way in which organisations can demonstrate that they uphold the letter of the law and respect its spirit -- with the added bonus that it provides a good and credible 'first defence' if any misguided of malicious discrimination claims are launched at them.

All of the above is only specific to the UK, so if you're in the US ignore everything I've said as I have little to no understanding of US Disability Discrimination legislation.

Good luck with your studies.

^
Gonna be sighing a lot with that one.

Rude and unnecessary.


Its pretty obvious that he's not from the uk. Doubt anybody was interested regardless.

Any use of a person's information (deemed private) that is proposed to be used in a public forum or revealed to a third person is subject to informed consent, Even if the excerpt is de-identified from the WP user.

There are multiple reasons for consent. Apart from privacy, there is also the issue of intellectual property. I could give a very good piece of information that is then used as consultancy material to be given to educational institutions for a fee. Also the possibility information could be misused or re-worded to make it slanderous either to the source or to WP.

1. I don't filter sound well, and therefore I am easily distracted. Please provide written instructions for assignments. It is probably best if I sit in the first row.
2. I can't take notes and listen at the same time. Whatever you want me to learn, please provide it in written format.
3. It would be helpful if you can provide written objectives at the beginning of the course and teach to the objectives. Let me know what is required to get an "A".
4. Don't penalize me for being quiet during discussions.
5. Just because I'm not looking at you doesn't mean I'm not listening to you.
6. If you are teaching abstract concepts, please provide real-world examples of how I might find these useful.
7. Give me something interesting to research or a useful problem to solve. You will be tapping into my ability to hyper-focus with this.
8. If you engage in smalltalk I may find something more interesting to think about.

Sensory issues are real, like the flickering of a fluorescent light, like the buzz on a fluorescent light, like the drone of fan on an overhead projector, like a classroom which has a musty or mildew smell, or the chemical smell of overly strong cleaners.

It takes a lot of effort to maintain concentration in the face of sensory issues, and I can be exhausted afterwards.

I share people's concerns about direct quotes and issues of informed consent.

Which is one reason I stayed general and nondescript in what I said about sensory issues.

I don't think this is what you're really asking for, but my best suggestion is this: if you come across an ASD student who really seems to be struggling with the environment, maybe you could suggest that they try online classes. I personally couldn't be a college student if it weren't for online classes. They are a lot better for me because everything is done through writing and there is no direct interaction.

As far as actual classroom stuff (please remember that we're all different, but this would help me):

I would appreciate written instructions for every assignment, rather than being told about an assignment during a lecture.

I would prefer a quiet classroom. The person who talked about sensory issues is right.

Please keep group work to a minimum, and make it optional if you can. If you are going to make your students work in a group, please assign them so that I don't end up without a group.

I would like for you to tell me directly (but not in front of the class unless it is announced and meant for everyone) that it is okay for me to leave the classroom to use the restroom or just take a moment to myself. A lot of teachers seem to assume that everyone knows this, but I'm never sure how to handle it with a new teacher. I will stay in my seat even if I feel like my bladder might burst unless the teacher has specifically explained how his/her policy works.

Please don't raise your voice at me, or I will very likely cry, which is embarrassing for someone my age. I'm very sensitive to loud noises and people being upset with me, so it's kind of a double whammy.

Please don't call on me if I haven't raised my hand, and don't assume that I'm not paying attention if I'm not looking at you or volunteering to answer any questions.

Okay, those are the only things I can think of right now. I hope it helps. Good luck with your presentation.

One major thing I wish my professors would take into consideration with regard to ASDs is sensory problems: I have a very hard time in my lecture halls because there are so many students all talking at the same time during discussions or at the beginning of class, and before class starts, many of my professors put loud music on in the background, apparently as a way of "livening things up" or something. All that noise is extremely painful, and yet, if I show up right as class is starting, then I get a terrible seat and wind up worse off than if I had just put up with the noise. I know it's hard to prevent 100+ college students from talking all at once, but eliminating the music, or perhaps ensuring that the autistic can step out periodically if things get too loud would be a good start. Lighting is a problem too: most of my classrooms use bright fluorescent lights, and if I'm having a bad sensory day, such lighting can cause headaches, nausea and a feeling of overwhelming suffocation. Turning off the lights in certain parts of the lecture hall, such as near the front where the presumed lecture slides are being shown would help, as would replacing the fluorescent lights with more natural yellow light bulbs.

Something else I wish professors understood is our general aversion to group activities: I have a professor who loves group discussions and projects, and is forever lumping us together to talk over concepts in class. If professors would give the option to write our thoughts down rather than discussing them with a group, it would be infinitely preferable.

It would also be very helpful if professors understood our typical discomfort with close proximity. If I am forced to sit in the middle of the lecture hall surrounded on all sides by other students who are no more than an nudge away, I get very uncomfortable, frustrated and uneasy. If professors can make sure we get a spot ideally in the front row where there is usually more space, or at the very least at the edge of an aisle where there are fewer people, that would make things a lot easier. It may sound like special treatment, but it's really just a matter of ensuring comfortable sensory boundaries.

What's required would vary from one country to another, as laws vary. If this person says "By answering you're giving me permission to use what you say", then that's that. If you don't want to participate, then don't. Others may freely offer answers and be fine with those answers being used.

Why would you be opposed to that? Do you want educators to be in the dark regarding autistic students when they could be enlightened?

If someone wants to answer, knowing how the replies are going to be used, they are informed, and by answering are giving consent.

We don't even know what country the OP is in, so the laws there may be very different from any laws you're claiming to know.

Please don't be so quick to say stuff like this. You need to broaden your horizons.

That was never my intention. The two concerns I have is i) OP explicitly stated he/she is soliciting opinions which for an educator is entirely inappropriate (and I suspect he already knows) given he has not provided his name, college, his position, what exactly the information will be used for, any declaration of conflict of interest relating to any personal interest relating to the information collected ii) that anything we say on this thread indicates consent. This is clearly the wrong way to obtain consent to use people's feedback and finally he does not have the jurisdiction to say this as people may not understand the ramifications of replying to his post on what is a public forum (WP). ,

Even if the OP doesn;t have a budget to survey online ASD there are free online surveys such as Surveymonkey where anyone can setup a consent page which participants can click and then post their comments for the OP to collect.

All he has to do is then post the relevant weblink here on this thread.

It wasn't intended to be rude, and I don't think it could be perceived as such by any objective standards, and nor did I think it was unnecessary (if I had, I wouldn't have bothered posting it). Sorry you felt that reaction to it.



I didn't detect any such 'obvious' clues from his first post when I initially read it, and on subsequently re-reading it, I still don't. I'd be curious therefore about what led you to this conclusion. But I'll admit that this not a subject of over-riding interest to me.

I attempted college 3 separate times. Each time I dropped out within the first semester because I couldn't deal with the volumes of people (I hate crowds), also, the pressures of due dates gave me paralyzing anxiety. I wish I could do college, but the place is far too stressful.

Do college online. I dropped out of college twice because I just couldn't learn in that environment. I enrolled in a reputable online school and graduated with a degree in IT and a 4.0 GPA. I'm currently working on a masters in Information Assurance.