Looking for advice on an ASD classroom

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Hi, my father has Asperger's. I have traits, but not enough to be classed as having Asperger's. I work in a special needs college supporting students with various injuries and conditions. A year and a half ago the college opened an ASD classroom and at the start of the college year I started working in it. I am finding some of the methods odd and I want to question them, but the classroom is very much what the teacher says goes, and I am out of my depth when talking about the Autistic Spectrum when it isn’t high functioning. So I am just looking for some opinions and hoping for some advice.


The first situation I find questionable is the classroom layout on the day I work in the room (large cuboid with hard flat floors, walls and ceiling).


The students. Apologies if I appear overly blunt or rude about the students. I am just trying to make my post as concise as possible.

1) Heavy eater. Very anxious when he started. Very anxious to changes in routines at first. Quickly picks up routines, peoples names. where people are from, timetables, knows chart positions and release years of vast number of music tracks and movies. Plays with blu-tac all the time. Access to blu-tac is important. Once settled changes to routines and unknown lesson plans became more of a dominant talking point than a source of clear anxiety. He struggles to explain his needs or wants clearly, but it is able to bring up the topics of his needs. Reads clearly and spells well. Blurts out incomprehensible information at times like a quick radio DJ.

2) Doesn’t use words but giggles and whines. Hides face with cushions or his hood towards multiple people. Follows accepted instructions well and looks between people who interest him with intelligence when they chat but not very accepting of lessons.

3) 2’s brother, similar behaviour to 2. Less giggling and whining. More accepting of activities. Less face hiding. This gives the impression of being the more mature one.

4) Reads and answers questions clearly. Quiet and cooperative. Gets stuck on small things and can’t move on from them. It can be difficult to work out what he is stuck on. He can be very slow to eat. Doesn’t verbalise thoughts or feelings. Can get very wound up but calms himself well playing puzzles in a quiet empty room.

5) Lots of finger movement. Holds fingers to the bump bellow the ear allot. Can speak very clearly but often speaks with lots of high unclear noises. When moving around he tends to be all shins and forearms. Tends to make repetitive noises.

6) Makes repetitive noises often. Picks up books and stares at them rather than looking around the room. Difficult to tell acceptance or understanding of activities.

7) Lots of head and hand movements, and repeated noises. Repeats single words staff request. Follows instructions for activities.

8 ) Verbal. Talks about wants all the time. Not interested in other students. Can throw things or punch out. Likes staff interaction when it is about his wants.

1 teacher with 5 support staff.


Lesson 1 would start at 10 o’clock. Students and staff sit in chairs in one large circle. The teacher would use a stool on wheels and move around the middle to each student with a small table of student pictures. Each student would be encouraged to pick a picture and get up and give it to the students whose picture it was. Each student would then be encouraged to makaton the first letter of the pictured students name. Everyone (mostly just staff really) would sing a good morning song to that student. Clapping as well as other forms of positive reinforcement would be used. If there is time a sensory item box would go around the room with the teacher and each student would pick an item (and then put it straight back as there was never enough time).

Break would start at 10:30. Pecs pictures would be brought around the circle one by one so students could choose a drink and a snack. With about ten minutes to go (after the drinks and snacks) the students who don’t require so much support would disappear to either outside, the toilet, or the quiet room of their own accord. The others would stay were they were.

Lesson 2 would start at 11 o’clock. Students and staff sit in chairs in one large circle. A parachute covered with musical instruments was laid out in the middle. The music teacher went around the circle encouraging each student to pick an instrument in turn. The student would be encouraged to play the instrument and the music teacher would sing and play the guitar with them. Clapping as well as other forms of positive reinforcement would be used. It would end with a goodbye song.

Lunch would start at 12 o’clock. Students and staff sit in chairs in one large circle in the quiet dining room around 1 large table.

Between 12:30 and 1 when students finished lunch they would go back to the classroom. The students would then disappear to either outside, the toilet, or the quiet room of their own accord. Three 1 to 1 students went back to residences.

Between 1:30 and 1:45 there was a weird limbo period where everyone sat in the classroom waiting for lesson 3 to start.

Lesson 3 started at 1:45 and was next door. The room was dimly lit. Music played softly during activities, it usually involved 2 activities from 4. Activity 1. Students and staff sit on bean bags in a large circle. Sea themed music and video projection. Played with sand and water and teacher talking. Activity 2. Students and staff sit on bean bags in a large circle. They take turns picking and playing music instruments. Activity 3. Students walk around the room swinging ribbons to “let’s go fly a kite”. Activity 4. The students lie under a parachute as staff wave it making a breeze. The students lie there close to motionless.

2:45 end. The day students go down to a main area full of other students to get picked up. The residential students go back to their residences.


To me the setup is wrong:
13 other faces in view for the majority of the day.
Large amounts of waiting. Each students participation can be as low as a couple of minutes every half an hour.
The teachers face is only visible to the person she is interacting with even though the other students are meant to stay engaged and listen.
Constant noise.
Audibly at its worst it turns into several students making loud sounds and staff talking and instruments.
Mostly verbal information with the support of an object and rarely pecs.
I cannot see how any of the day supports any of the students strengths.

I thought a day in an ASD classroom would consist of:
1:1 activities.
Small group activities such as 1:3 of matched or mixed ability.
Written stepped instructions or pictorial stepped instructions.
A small amount of full group work.
Visual activities.
Clear quiet time.

Around the college I do not see other students working in a large circle group, with nearly 100% verbal instruction, to activities with lots of waiting, for the majority of the day. I didn’t think an ASD classroom would step towards that.

I am having trouble finding information on this subject though.

Any thoughts, opinions, and pointers to relevant information would be much appreciated.

Besides musical instruments, does this class for autistic students teach other things? The description reads like a babysitting service. The environment doesn't seem suited to autistic students.

At an autism/education nonprofit where I worked, each student had one-on-one instruction with a teacher for as long as the student attended to the lessons. Thirty minutes for younger kids not used to having lessons, an hour or more for teenagers who were good at paying attention and liked the lessons. There were no group activities.

The lessons were school subjects like english and math modified to fit the learning styles of the students. A lot of learning and cognitive development occurred, and the students gained social, communication, attention, and regulation skills as they used their brains. This is the model that I like for autistic students, but it is not the one in use at your college.

I think you're right, that sounds like a most chaotic, unpleasant learning environment. The only thing it would have done for me as a child would have been to make me hate school. All the singing and clapping and marching around with ribbons - one day of that and you'd have never gotten me back in that classroom again.

When I was in Middle and High School, I took a lot of grief from teachers for drawing in class, because they assumed that if I was engaged in doing something, that I couldn't possibly be paying attention to their lectures. In fact, the opposite was true - while my eyes were focused on a specific creative task, my ears and critical brain were free to listen intently and absorb every word. If I were forced to sit up and look alert, I was distracted by every sound and movement in the room (and out the window and through the door into the hall, etc.) and absorbed nothing. Point being, hypersensitivity to sensory stimuli makes for an unending supply of DISTRACTION. Learning requires FOCUS. Better to have your brain's attention split two ways and focus on both, than have it split a thousand ways and retain nothing.

I don't know if that's particularly relevant or helpful, but it seems important.



Amusing to me, because I was a radio DJ for many years and still prattle on about release dates and chart positions. I'm not sure what you mean by "incomprehensible information," though. I always rather liked the description Kate Bush used in The Ninth Wave: "Friendly voices, talkin' 'bout stupid things."

Thanks for your reply. I have only described one day out of five. Other activities include swimming (standing in a pool splashing), clay, large group in a circle board game (count the number on the dice), making a baked potato (really the teacher makes it), water world (board game/fishing magnet type game/spelling sea creatures), playing with a parachute/so called dance. Mostly it doesn't feel far from a nursery except that it is heavily routine and the students are meant to sit in groups for longer periods of time). Dramatherapy/dance/music/good morning lesson appear to closely overlap with parachutes and instruments.

"he students gained social, communication, attention, and regulation skills as they used their brains." I would love more detail on this.

2 of the students get to go to none ASD lessons and if anything they always seem more suitable.


I have a long list of things I don't like about the setup but I thought I would start with how almost everything seems to involve sitting in a large circle as the teacher moves around one by one expecting everyone to listen.

Yeah for me it would have felt the same. It is kind of routine in the order we do things but sensory wise; all the faces, and moods, and vocalisations, and clapping, and noise, and hard flat floors and walls, and sometimes the teacher using a hard loud authoritative voice to get her way, is just sensory chaos.

The guy who plays with his blu-tac (he moulds it into a T shape and then spins the top ends till they are thread thin leaving the middle piece spinning, amazing). Isn't allowed to do it during lesson time, (unless he is anxious, after I complained) but he chooses to do it and still takes his go when required. To me he seems more at ease with his environment when he can use it.

I don't like it but I really enjoy working with the students.



Again any more opinions would be gratefully received.

This seems all sorts of wrong. Wrong environment, wrong teaching style, what are they learning?

Speaks very quickly with lots of change in tone like a radio DJ who announces the next track. It all feels familiar, like I should understand what has been said, but as the voice sinks into my brain I release more often than not, I have no idea what was said.

A vocal tick???

The first time I brought up the group situation I was told that they were learning from each other by sitting in a group.

They learn to (from what I've been told):
Recognise the face on a photo and match it to the student.
Appropriately interact when giving the photo to the student.
Self awareness when sung to????
A few makaton (sign) letters for the first letter in a students name.

To make a snack choice using a small set of photo's.

Bang a drum maybe in cooperation with the music teacher.

Play with sand and water/ therapy/relax.


...or in my view sit quietly like an obedient dog and bark at the right moment, whilst not visibly showing any personal dislikes as this is classed as poor behaviour. This is one of the other problems I have. There is clear intelligence with the students but they are all low verbal, and they are all to some degree (and in my view rightly) not accepting the lesson.

All I keep thinking is the quote "the problem with trying to force a square peg in a round hole is that you end up damaging the peg"

Doing the same things over and over again (such as handing pictures to each other, pointing out snacks using cards) is useful to maintain a sense of routine, but at some point different examples of the same skills must be used; you don't just teach a child that 2+3=5 over and over again, you have to give them more variety than that. It may be more useful for example, if you could find periods of free time among the other classes and have your students go and meet (exchange photographs with, whatever they are capable of) other students, thereby learning to interact with people they don't see every day, and remembering more than just the other seven faces in the room. That's just one example, really the whole curriculum sounds stagnant; after a while, even the most low functioning of individuals will have mastered a skill, or a specific part of a skill, and will need to broaden his repertoire, stretch his skill by practising it on different people, different materials, in different places. Autistics, especially lower functioning ones, are typically not very good at generalization, or putting a skill learned in one area to use in a new situation (like the child who can count coins in the classroom but who can't do it to pay for things, for example) meaning that if you don't provide the students with a wide array of opportunities to see all the variations in situations and people surrounding a skill they're using, they will never learn that they can identify more than just food on a card, or their friends in a photograph, they can do it with lots and lots of other items and people too.

Reading and typing are the first things to learn for communication and comprehension.

Are reading and typing being taught in this classroom?

Not on that day. I have heard rumours that some students can type. Not sure if they get the chance over the week I'll check. 1 lesson a week is a sensory story that 2 of the students read to others. The water world board game includes animal names to read. They read dice numbers and count the number of board moved forwards. There is very little else.

Do you have any opportunity to talk to the students' parents?

I find talking to parents very useful in understanding kids with poor communication skills, because they see their kid all the time in many different situations. You could maybe check with them whether they have any concerns about how their children are being taught, and if they have ideas how to improve things.

It may sound better, if you raise concerns with supervisors, if you can point to parents who are unsatisfied with the set-up and would prefer things change.

Although I didn't like some things about the ABA program I was involved in, this list is basically all the things I thought they did well.

Now, with 6 staff members there, obviously you can't give every 1:1 instruction at once. But you could have a couple small groups while others are getting 1:1 instruction. Or you might be able to find two volunteers who could come do 1:1 work - maybe parents?

How much space are you able to use? Doing a bunch of separate activities in a small space where you can all hear each other would be even more overloading than doing a common activity, so you'd need to be able to split the group apart. Is there an unused space near the classroom that could work to bring some kids into?

In terms of convincing your higher-ups, I already mentioned talking to parents, but you may also want to look for research to back up the elements you want to have in the class. Look at the TEACCH model - it sounds most similar to what you've described. ABA can also have similar elements, but they tend to put less emphasis on visual instruction.

I talk to one of the parents as I am their key worker. Lovely people. Parents don't really get to see the lessons. Either residential or Taxi'd in. They rely on feedback from people like me. Except most people like me have no understanding of the autistic spectrum and sat things like "Jonny had a good day. He did blah blah"

It's become a pretty self contained unit which does little to accommodate parents wishes unlike the rest of the college. Thanks for the other info I will look into it.

The room could fit twice the people in. There is a smaller room that could fit 3 in comfortably. There are other rooms in college. Using both rooms and creating 3 groups should be fine. As long as they weren't all smashing drums.

For sensory activities, not everyone likes the stimulation, and some people like low sensory environment.
For the person who plays with blue tac, let him/her. I play with silly putty all the time, in class and out, with out it I do not pay attention as well. Personal stimming objects are good for the students.
Makton, really? That is a very low expression not even a full language signing form. Teach ESL if you are teaching signing. Several of your students are verbal, encourage their knowledge of language.
I also agree with btbnnyr about this seeming like a day care rather than a school. How much reading is done, typing, living skills?
How much of the lessons are geared to how much the students already know? Are students who are further along given different tasks. Not everyone with ASDs work in groups well, yes that is a skill that needs to be taught to some extent, but you need to work with them one on one too.