Defining Engagement in Classroom Settings for Students on the Autism Spectrum Part 2

Emily Rubin Author

09/11/2016 Added

1060 Plays

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As a result of this activity, participants will be able to identify: 1) Three critical elements of engagement that ensure a students’ access to the classroom curriculum. 2) Three domains of research-based instructional strategies for increasing engagement in students.

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[00:00:01.953]Welcome back.
[00:00:03.518]Once again I want to take my host,
[00:00:05.022]for offering this two-part lecture series
[00:00:06.857]as part of their tri-state webinar.
[00:00:09.257]This is part two of two.
[00:00:10.910]In last week's lecture I discussed the importance
[00:00:12.993]of considering a developmental framework
[00:00:14.886]for evidence-based practices.
[00:00:16.891]As we discussed,
[00:00:18.106]children with autism mature,
[00:00:19.503]and they progress through a range
[00:00:20.673]of neurodevelopmental stages,
[00:00:22.273]and their needs change over time.
[00:00:24.244]A child who's not yet talking has very different needs
[00:00:26.721]than a child who's conversational
[00:00:28.364]and learning to adapt to the social conventions
[00:00:30.273]of different situations.
[00:00:32.033]The lesson that we learned last week,
[00:00:33.950]is that what we work on, or what we choose to write
[00:00:36.662]as goals for educational programming
[00:00:39.254]is as important as selecting
[00:00:40.725]those evidence-based strategies.
[00:00:42.581]We need to pick research-based goals
[00:00:44.449]that are predictive of developmental shifts in our children.
[00:00:47.724]In today's lecture, which is really part two of two,
[00:00:50.785]I want to help define the term engagement
[00:00:53.185]as it relates to a child's participation
[00:00:55.114]in classroom lessons.
[00:00:57.121]We have learned that children with autism
[00:00:58.550]typically spend less than half of their time
[00:01:00.620]in our classroom settings actively engaged.
[00:01:03.297]This is a problem,
[00:01:04.588]because active engagement is a predictor
[00:01:07.137]of both academic success,
[00:01:08.758]as well as social success for our children with autism.
[00:01:11.318]So we need to understand how to measure this
[00:01:13.222]and how to target more active engagement
[00:01:15.164]in our classroom lessons.
[00:01:16.379]It's just as critical
[00:01:17.734]as anything else we wanna teach them.
[00:01:22.852]So, today's learning objective as a result of this activity,
[00:01:25.730]I hope that participants will be able to identify
[00:01:28.404]the three instructional elements of active engagement
[00:01:31.161]that are so critical to help a child access
[00:01:33.558]the classroom curriculum.
[00:01:35.545]Next, I want to take you to the three domains
[00:01:38.190]of research-based instructional strategies
[00:01:40.174]that will really be helpful for increasing engagement
[00:01:42.756]in our students.
[00:01:46.809]So we need to start off by talking
[00:01:48.280]about what is engagement.
[00:01:50.404]What is the definition of it?
[00:01:51.801]We all have a slightly different version of it.
[00:01:53.977]The simplistic one is that if you have a child
[00:01:56.494]and then you have a contents standard or a learning target
[00:01:59.310]there's a simplest line between that child
[00:02:01.912]and that learning target,
[00:02:02.948]and that's something called engagement.
[00:02:04.697]The child needs to be invested in that,
[00:02:06.532]needs to be initiating about it, needs to be independent,
[00:02:09.006]go exploring that learning target,
[00:02:10.830]in order for them to be successful.
[00:02:13.521]Last week we talked about
[00:02:14.662]crucial neurodevelopmental stages
[00:02:16.348]that all of our children need to go through.
[00:02:18.641]And simply put, that if you want a child
[00:02:20.795]to learn something in your classroom
[00:02:22.876]the first thing they need to do
[00:02:24.454]as you will see here is orient to the social world.
[00:02:27.740]They have to pay attention to their teacher.
[00:02:29.425]They have to pay attention to their peers, social orienting.
[00:02:32.827]Once they're orienting to their people,
[00:02:34.310]they also have to kind of like what they're seeing.
[00:02:36.284]They have to like, like it enough
[00:02:37.649]to sustain their attention to it,
[00:02:39.388]to initiate with the people around them,
[00:02:41.393]to actively seek out information.
[00:02:43.557]So, that liking and relationships that we establish
[00:02:46.127]with our students and the peers with each other
[00:02:48.486]really help drive that learning process.
[00:02:51.324]And beyond that once a child is paying attention
[00:02:54.017]and really liking the social stimuli around them,
[00:02:56.310]so they're attending, engaging, and initiating
[00:02:58.293]with the people around them
[00:02:59.724]they're also gonna shift into
[00:03:00.779]another neurodevelopmental stage
[00:03:02.335]called social maintaining,
[00:03:03.990]which is the idea of something called
[00:03:05.590]reputation management.
[00:03:07.756]Social maintaining means
[00:03:08.895]I want to maintain a relationship with you over time.
[00:03:11.404]So I want to please you, I want to fit in,
[00:03:13.622]I want to learn the social rules,
[00:03:15.689]and I will do what it takes to make sure
[00:03:17.836]that I'm fitting into the social context.
[00:03:20.140]That's when you start to see true learning going on there.
[00:03:23.465]How is that fueled in brain development?
[00:03:25.695]We go back to the infant brain,
[00:03:27.190]who's just learning about social orienting.
[00:03:29.664]What we have found,
[00:03:30.507]is that some children are born with genetic advantages,
[00:03:32.886]orienting toward the social world.
[00:03:35.168]And when they look toward the social world
[00:03:36.843]in the first couple of months of life
[00:03:38.635]they get the benefit of having a release
[00:03:40.800]of neuro endorphins called opioids and dopamine.
[00:03:43.979]And that stimulation makes them want
[00:03:45.536]to look and pay attention to people even more,
[00:03:48.214]but genetics alone don't do the trick.
[00:03:50.528]You also need to be nurtured as we talked about
[00:03:52.302]last week and when you're nurtured,
[00:03:54.044]you get more chemicals a hormone called oxytocin
[00:03:57.013]which actually goes between people,
[00:03:58.447]because it's a phermone.
[00:04:00.125]Oxytocin is nicknamed the cuddle hormone,
[00:04:02.804]because it makes you want to be with people.
[00:04:04.417]You put a little oxytocin on your opiod and your dopamine,
[00:04:06.925]you're not only orienting toward the social world,
[00:04:10.160]you're gonna start really really liking it,
[00:04:12.357]and really compelled to engage with people even more.
[00:04:15.359]That fuels the development
[00:04:16.522]of the social brain
[00:04:17.844]and ultimately the language hemispheres,
[00:04:19.855]because you're gonna wanna initiate
[00:04:21.159]with the people around you
[00:04:22.521]and seek out more information from people
[00:04:24.845]and learn from people.
[00:04:26.212]It's gonna drive your interest in learning in the classroom
[00:04:28.611]and to read, to read books and so forth,
[00:04:31.108]'cause reading is when you're beginning
[00:04:32.589]to discover what other people have to say
[00:04:34.766]and if you're really stimulated by that through
[00:04:36.580]the opioids, the dopamine, and the oxytocin,
[00:04:39.292]your brain connections are really gonna form and develop.
[00:04:42.641]Ultimately, more and more social engagement
[00:04:44.870]comes with the early school age years.
[00:04:46.620]You start to develop something called social maintaining,
[00:04:48.785]which is that reputation management
[00:04:50.214]that I was talking about,
[00:04:51.612]which really relates to executive functioning.
[00:04:54.460]And what is really fueling that all the way along
[00:04:57.103]that neurodevelopmental path
[00:04:58.971]are frequent and positive social emotional connections
[00:05:01.786]with the world around them.
[00:05:03.345]It's those chemicals.
[00:05:04.646]This is essential for every learner in our classroom,
[00:05:07.183]not just children who have
[00:05:08.465]social emotional challenges like autism.
[00:05:10.780]But we need to see frequent
[00:05:12.357]and positive social connections
[00:05:13.882]so that our children can make those neural connections
[00:05:16.636]of liking people, of ultimately maintaining
[00:05:19.142]relationships with people over time.
[00:05:22.780]The why of social emotional engagement is critical here.
[00:05:25.926]We need to measure engagement to show
[00:05:28.062]that we're being successful with our childrens
[00:05:29.790]who have vulnerabilities in these situation.
[00:05:32.201]As we talked about last week,
[00:05:33.908]children with autism tend to show less neural sensitivity
[00:05:36.713]to social stimuli in their early childhood years.
[00:05:39.346]They find people a little bit less stimulating.
[00:05:41.842]There's many different genetic causes of autism,
[00:05:44.180]but what we have seen is the impact is often
[00:05:47.060]in relation to how much stimulation they get
[00:05:49.502]in terms of their opioids and their dopamine.
[00:05:52.670]They may not receive as much oxytocin,
[00:05:54.900]so we might have to work a little bit harder
[00:05:56.798]to make sure we have really strong relationships,
[00:05:58.889]that we're kind of wooing them to orient toward us,
[00:06:01.502]instead of the non-social world,
[00:06:03.198]and that they are liking us and connecting with us.
[00:06:06.836]That's gonna help us help them develop
[00:06:08.340]the desire to please us, to fit in,
[00:06:10.612]to learn social skills, and academic skills, as well.
[00:06:14.345]However, the neurodevelopmental differences
[00:06:16.265]that children with autism are born with
[00:06:18.174]tend to lead to more preferential attention
[00:06:20.297]to things or non-social stimuli
[00:06:22.686]as opposed to orienting in social engagement.
[00:06:25.726]So if we measure how much
[00:06:26.974]that social engagement that we see,
[00:06:29.044]we know we're making a difference here.
[00:06:34.089]The why of social emotional engagement
[00:06:35.945]is really critical when we think about the long-term
[00:06:38.622]for our children who are born with genetic differences
[00:06:41.065]like autism or related social emotional differences.
[00:06:44.776]What tends to happen is if you have
[00:06:46.708]less of those neurochemicals
[00:06:48.478]or less of that oxytocin coming in,
[00:06:50.697]that you might start to develop more expertise
[00:06:52.903]about the physical world around you.
[00:06:55.497]You might think about objects and physical properties
[00:06:58.046]and numbers and academic concepts,
[00:07:00.585]but what you don't develop as robustly
[00:07:02.567]is this expertise about the social world.
[00:07:04.948]So when we look at our educational goals
[00:07:06.750]like we did last week,
[00:07:08.062]we made sure to write goals around people.
[00:07:10.697]The first goals that were gonna write
[00:07:12.402]is gonna be about initiating with people
[00:07:14.397]and connecting with people.
[00:07:15.828]Then it's about learning people's names and verbs.
[00:07:18.196]Then it's about feeling self efficacious
[00:07:20.695]with communicating with people
[00:07:22.059]and developing confidence.
[00:07:23.467]We wanna make sure we're balancing
[00:07:24.887]the learning patterns of children who have
[00:07:27.234]social emotional differences in our classrooms.
[00:07:33.538]So how can we foster this growth?
[00:07:36.866]First and foremost,
[00:07:37.922]we need to think about it developmentally,
[00:07:39.501]which is what we did last week.
[00:07:41.378]We talked about the fact
[00:07:42.551]that if there is a child who is before words,
[00:07:45.250]we need to make sure that, more than anything else,
[00:07:48.247]that this child is orienting toward the social world
[00:07:51.474]and that they're connecting
[00:07:52.733]and finding us really, really interesting
[00:07:54.877]and we can gauge that by how much
[00:07:56.443]spontaneous nonverbal communication they're using,
[00:07:59.367]because high rates in nonverbal communication
[00:08:02.013]predicts the acquisition of emerging language.
[00:08:05.458]Children won't talk if they don't have something to say
[00:08:08.338]and so how do we get them
[00:08:09.298]from that emerging language stage
[00:08:11.005]to the conversational stage?
[00:08:13.159]We're gonna make sure they use
[00:08:14.165]people's names and verbs a lot,
[00:08:16.498]because subject-verb predicts creative language skills,
[00:08:19.463]which fuels into the conversational stage.
[00:08:22.043]How do we get people's names and verbs?
[00:08:24.530]Are we gonna get that by teaching them object labels,
[00:08:27.030]by helping them match objects a lot,
[00:08:28.897]having them focus their energy on these cognitive tasks?
[00:08:32.406]Are we gonna get that by seeing them initiating,
[00:08:34.998]showing emotional investment
[00:08:36.499]and engaging in the social world around them?
[00:08:39.073]Engagement is something that is universal
[00:08:40.971]across all of these different stages here.
[00:08:44.321]If we get children to pay attention to us,
[00:08:46.315]to communicate to us, to initiate with us,
[00:08:48.566]they may develop language.
[00:08:49.771]It may help them through speech, through pictures,
[00:08:51.617]through assistive technology,
[00:08:53.686]and then if we get them to that stage,
[00:08:55.477]then we teach them people's names and verbs,
[00:08:57.471]and they still get fueled up by the social connections.
[00:09:00.331]They may develop the conversational language.
[00:09:02.913]How do we get our conversational level children
[00:09:05.067]to success into their young adulthood,
[00:09:07.441]to be able to succeed in a range of social situations?
[00:09:10.655]One of the key concepts is building self-efficacy.
[00:09:13.894]They need practice and they need lots of it.
[00:09:16.710]They need to initiate a lot.
[00:09:18.011]They need to show emotional investment around people.
[00:09:20.644]They may get frustrated because they don't have
[00:09:22.790]the learning abilities to understand
[00:09:24.728]what people are thinking and feeling,
[00:09:26.042]so we wanna keep that optimism strong
[00:09:28.166]and their mental health strong,
[00:09:29.745]so that they can be successful into adulthood
[00:09:32.294]and learn those social conventions
[00:09:34.001]that will allow them to be successful
[00:09:35.700]in a range of social situations.
[00:09:37.855]What is universal across all three of these stages,
[00:09:40.265]the stages that we talked about last week,
[00:09:42.527]is something called engagement.
[00:09:44.500]If we can measure how much they're initiating,
[00:09:46.844]how much they are independently engaging with us
[00:09:49.599]and how much they are invested in it,
[00:09:51.679]we know we're on the right track
[00:09:53.236]and that's one of the key concepts of today's webinar.
[00:09:58.281]Is there a research basis for this?
[00:10:00.180]In fact, there's more and more of a basis growing
[00:10:02.527]with the current studies
[00:10:04.841]and that basis is really key.
[00:10:07.135]Beginning in the year 2001,
[00:10:09.111]when the National Research Council
[00:10:10.335]did a very systematic and comprehensive review
[00:10:13.054]of educational interventions for children with autism,
[00:10:16.073]they recommended that students with autism
[00:10:18.036]spend a minimum of 25 hours per week
[00:10:20.649]actively engaged in learning activities.
[00:10:23.487]Their definement of active engagement
[00:10:25.055]was not just following instructions and doing as told,
[00:10:28.319]but rather spontaneous communication,
[00:10:30.729]initiating at a high rate,
[00:10:32.489]and then independently engaging in the materials
[00:10:34.804]that they should be in the classroom.
[00:10:37.417]And other studies were coming out
[00:10:39.185]in the mid-2000s, essentially,
[00:10:41.801]looking at active engagement as a key component
[00:10:44.585]for effective programming for students with autism,
[00:10:47.305]is that we wanna make sure that they're not
[00:10:48.925]just passively engaged in classroom activities,
[00:10:50.993]but they are participating
[00:10:52.327]with their peers and their teachers,
[00:10:53.852]showing some degree of initiation and independence.
[00:10:58.227]Finally a more recent study put out
[00:10:59.785]by those involved in the classroom first intervention grant,
[00:11:03.069]Nicole Sparapani, she analyzed the data from that,
[00:11:07.167]that particular intervention
[00:11:09.119]and noticed that higher rates
[00:11:10.388]of initiation and independence
[00:11:13.001]fostered active participation
[00:11:14.900]and better emotional regulation in the classroom,
[00:11:17.394]leading to better self management
[00:11:19.037]and less challenging behavior.
[00:11:20.852]So active engagement is highly correlated in research
[00:11:23.945]with better success in academics,
[00:11:26.664]but also socially, for children with autism.
[00:11:29.631]It's a target we wanna go after.
[00:11:33.887]So how do we measure it?
[00:11:35.516]That's one of the questions that we always ask.
[00:11:37.993]How do we measure active social emotional
[00:11:39.775]engagement in classroom lesson?
[00:11:41.705]And I wanted to just introduce to you
[00:11:43.293]the idea of using an engagement letter.
[00:11:45.748]It's a very simple rubric, essentially,
[00:11:47.591]that shows children climbing up
[00:11:49.087]the active engagement scale.
[00:11:51.252]As you will see on the very last page of your hand out,
[00:11:54.036]if you've downloaded that and printed that.
[00:11:55.604]I've given you a copy of an engagement ladder,
[00:11:58.345]one that was adapted from other researchers
[00:12:00.913]in the United Kingdom that are
[00:12:02.432]referenced on the tool itself.
[00:12:04.972]What is this particular engagement ladder looking for?
[00:12:08.193]We're looking for whether a child
[00:12:09.409]has no focus in a current lesson,
[00:12:11.287]just not responsive to the social stimuli
[00:12:13.457]at all around them.
[00:12:14.439]Maybe they're sitting in the back of the class
[00:12:15.745]with their head down.
[00:12:16.884]Maybe they're under the table hiding under their jacket.
[00:12:19.664]That would be a no focus.
[00:12:21.446]And then as you see, on number one,
[00:12:23.440]emerging fleeting.
[00:12:24.827]That's a child who, if you call on them
[00:12:26.662]every now and then, they'll respond,
[00:12:28.165]but generally speaking, they're difficult to engage with.
[00:12:31.152]A two would be a partially engaged child right in the middle
[00:12:34.350]and that partial engagement would refer to a child
[00:12:36.806]who responds to teacher's instructions,
[00:12:39.216]who follows directions,
[00:12:40.902]who writes their name when you tell them to on the paper,
[00:12:43.038]who does the work as they're told,
[00:12:44.680]but it's really prompt dependent.
[00:12:46.173]and his kind of needing
[00:12:47.282]that kind of encouragement and support.
[00:12:50.003]And the number two for partial engagement
[00:12:52.520]basically relates to a well-behaved child.
[00:12:55.998]That's a child who kind of does what they're told.
[00:12:58.867]But what active engagement is,
[00:13:00.606]is when you start going above the two,
[00:13:02.419]into what we call mostly engaged.
[00:13:04.433]A child is initiating quite a bit in the classroom,
[00:13:06.547]whether it's non-verbally or verbally,
[00:13:08.744]a child who is independently engaging with the materials
[00:13:11.001]as they were intended to be used,
[00:13:13.235]and who is emotionally invested
[00:13:15.570]and showing some degree of vigor and rigor
[00:13:17.960]in what they're doing, and excited about it.
[00:13:21.214]Now the number four,
[00:13:22.387]which would be what we call a fully engaged child,
[00:13:24.819]is a child whose initiating, independently engaging,
[00:13:27.646]and emotionally invested so much,
[00:13:29.288]they kind of forgot they wanna be anywhere else
[00:13:31.026]than learning that lesson with you,
[00:13:32.382]or with the teacher that they're engaged with.
[00:13:34.718]So, what we do is we wanna measure.
[00:13:36.232]We can go into a whole class and tally how many students
[00:13:38.635]are at four, a three, a two, a one, a zero.
[00:13:41.257]And our goal is to start helping those students
[00:13:43.059]climb up that ladder,
[00:13:44.214]finding new ways for them to initiate,
[00:13:45.984]to be more independent,
[00:13:47.179]and to be more emotionally invested in what they're doing.
[00:13:52.479]So what are the essential elements of that engagement?
[00:13:55.552]It's not just being productive to task and doing as told.
[00:13:59.104]That's kind of gonna get you like a two,
[00:14:01.713]but there are three I's in engagement as you see here.
[00:14:04.971]First is we want students to be independently engaging
[00:14:08.213]with the targeted materials as much as possible.
[00:14:10.933]We want them to be emotionally invested.
[00:14:13.095]So we wanna see that they wanna do this,
[00:14:14.719]even if you weren't looking they would be doing this,
[00:14:16.585]that they're invested in the task that you put
[00:14:18.186]in front of them and that they're initiating it
[00:14:20.522]a quite a high degree of frequency.
[00:14:23.480]If you've got all three I's,
[00:14:24.565]you've got an actively engaged child,
[00:14:26.410]and that's what this rubric does indeed measure.
[00:14:31.242]I wanted to show you an example
[00:14:32.670]of different levels of engagement in one student
[00:14:35.274]as you see here.
[00:14:37.130]In the far left of your screen you'll see
[00:14:39.781]this little boy feeling a bit say, so so,
[00:14:44.127]about the particular activity that he was doing.
[00:14:45.951]with his teacher.
[00:14:47.189]The teacher was putting together a matching task for him,
[00:14:49.695]something that he, I don't think,
[00:14:50.815]had a great deal of emotional investment in.
[00:14:53.150]He also wasn't very independent with it,
[00:14:55.071]needed a lot of verbal reminders and prompting,
[00:14:57.621]for him to keep going with the activity.
[00:15:00.095]And his rates of initiation went
[00:15:01.422]lower than you might expect.
[00:15:03.425]So, this is a child who every now and then
[00:15:04.952]will respond and put the ball into the cup
[00:15:07.889]that matches the other ball.
[00:15:08.951]He's actually matching a ball to the photograph of a ball,
[00:15:12.093]but most the time he's spending his time averting his gaze
[00:15:14.826]and looking at the ceiling,
[00:15:16.079]because there's a really interesting pattern of tiles
[00:15:18.023]on the ceiling right there.
[00:15:19.626]We would rank this child as emerging fleeting,
[00:15:21.887]on this ladder because he wasn't completely no-focus.
[00:15:24.586]He didn't cooperate and put the ball
[00:15:26.378]in the proper box on occasion.
[00:15:29.493]So, he was there but not quite holistically there.
[00:15:32.778]And that's unfortunate because for a child with autism
[00:15:35.215]this is a before words child.
[00:15:37.135]We really want him to find people to be amazing.
[00:15:39.653]We want him to orient toward us.
[00:15:41.082]We want him to like us,
[00:15:42.191]and also maintain our relationships with us.
[00:15:44.666]So, the task itself likely didn't have
[00:15:46.927]some degree of engagement
[00:15:48.229]that was gonna kick that relationship off.
[00:15:51.311]If you look in the middle section,
[00:15:53.061]you have a little moment here of partial engagement.
[00:15:55.663]And then is when she asks him to put the ball
[00:15:58.450]on to the photograph of the ball,
[00:15:59.994]and he complies and he does so.
[00:16:01.829]We call that partial engagement
[00:16:03.757]Obviously that's a very common thing
[00:16:05.519]to see that happening.
[00:16:06.938]Finally, when she starts to sing to him,
[00:16:08.954]and she starts engaging with him
[00:16:10.404]in a more hands-on and sensory motor based way,
[00:16:13.221]he's more emotionally invested.
[00:16:14.978]He's actually initiating that she continue the song,
[00:16:17.530]and he's independently completing
[00:16:18.862]the hand movements and so forth along with it.
[00:16:21.474]That's when we see full engagement.
[00:16:23.866]Now this particular measure
[00:16:25.071]that I showed you before with the ladder,
[00:16:27.493]we wouldn't just do it a little bursts or moments.
[00:16:30.132]We tend to use that the data
[00:16:31.930]after about 20 to 30 minutes of the observing a child.
[00:16:34.484]We kind of look at the average,
[00:16:35.806]overall average engagement level.
[00:16:38.807]I will be honest.
[00:16:39.850]I did this in about 18 school districts
[00:16:41.663]this last year in the state of Georgia.
[00:16:43.594]We did it with 45 schools,
[00:16:45.832]and about five classrooms in each of those schools.
[00:16:48.362]We literally had 200-300 classrooms
[00:16:49.978]that we were looking at with nearly a thousand students.
[00:16:53.636]The statistical mode of student engagement
[00:16:57.263]tended to be around a two.
[00:16:59.194]We saw a lot of well behaved kids,
[00:17:01.412]who were doing as they were told,
[00:17:03.098]but these are students that are not initiating,
[00:17:05.178]they're not independent,
[00:17:06.714]and they're not showing a degree of emotional investment,
[00:17:09.346]really confirming that they're accessing
[00:17:10.925]the academic curriculum
[00:17:12.175]and wanting to learn, and actively problem solving.
[00:17:15.556]Those are, that's a challenge that we want to deal with.
[00:17:18.744]So, my question to you as you're listening here,
[00:17:20.335]in today's lecture,
[00:17:22.072]is what does a fully engaged to a child look like
[00:17:25.538]in your classroom, or the classrooms that you support?
[00:17:28.426]And what occurs in our lesson plans to support that?
[00:17:31.820]I think it behooves us to start taking data
[00:17:34.479]and showing that we have our threes and our fours,
[00:17:37.098]they're mostly and fully engage students,
[00:17:38.796]let's totally praise those lesson plans.
[00:17:41.463]What were we doing at that moment
[00:17:43.062]that got all that engagement level?
[00:17:45.056]Was it because it was hands-on?
[00:17:46.519]Was it because it was related to student interest?
[00:17:48.898]Was ir very visual, predictable?
[00:17:50.997]We need to start looking at what we do well
[00:17:53.579]to get that student engagement,
[00:17:55.020]so that when we see a child
[00:17:56.119]who's emerging fleeting or no-focus, we go wait a second,
[00:17:58.975]we need to do more of what we do well,
[00:18:00.879]which is to get those kids up to the fully engaged state,
[00:18:03.724]and when I do this in person,
[00:18:04.951]I often have you break into groups
[00:18:06.018]and kind of think about the last moment
[00:18:08.074]you saw in your classroom
[00:18:09.121]when you had a mostly engaged or fully engaged child.
[00:18:12.108]And what we often come up with
[00:18:13.538]is we had to get the emotional hook.
[00:18:15.799]We had to make sure that the student
[00:18:17.122]was really invested in this contents standard,
[00:18:20.072]that we wanted to make sure,
[00:18:21.388]if we're teaching two digit addition
[00:18:22.764]or if we're teaching the geography of the state of Georgia,
[00:18:26.594]did they care, or did they find it relevant?
[00:18:29.026]Did they find it interesting and meaningful.
[00:18:30.946]So, getting the emotional hook in a lesson is really key.
[00:18:34.416]Next we wanna make sure that we're providing
[00:18:35.788]information in different ways.
[00:18:37.493]Students tend to benefit when they have
[00:18:39.212]more visual support, more structure.
[00:18:40.908]They understand the task a little bit more.
[00:18:42.721]They keep their comprehension.
[00:18:44.364]So, giving them visuals that they can explore
[00:18:46.402]and understand, either symbolic visuals,
[00:18:48.886]like you know, visual support that have images and words,
[00:18:52.966]or we can give hands-on manipulatives,
[00:18:55.911]or giving role play and rehearsal opportunities.
[00:18:59.361]Finally another group of,
[00:19:00.637]another area that comes up quite a bit,
[00:19:02.762]is making sure students have opportunities
[00:19:04.906]to express themselves,
[00:19:06.316]so that they can show what they know.
[00:19:08.193]Children do love to talk and generally speaking,
[00:19:11.695]if they do not, if they're more reticent,
[00:19:13.681]maybe they wanna show what they know
[00:19:15.463]through building something, through drawing,
[00:19:17.340]through role-play.
[00:19:18.704]There's many different ways
[00:19:19.569]that children can show what they know.
[00:19:21.596]These are the elements of a strong lesson plan
[00:19:23.751]that tend to foster more engaged learners.
[00:19:26.513]They get those students up to the threes and the fours
[00:19:28.519]on the engagement ladder.
[00:19:32.616]And so the next question becomes the how.
[00:19:36.716]And I am, been drawn recently to the research
[00:19:40.150]of the universal design for learning framework,
[00:19:42.657]because that particular framework,
[00:19:44.119]which is relevant for a wide range of diverse learners,
[00:19:46.752]basically all of our learners.
[00:19:48.428]What it's designed to do is foster
[00:19:50.368]just what we wanna be targeting: independence,
[00:19:53.537]investment, initiation for all children.
[00:19:56.960]And it's a language that will be helpful
[00:19:58.379]for our special education teachers
[00:20:00.076]but also are general education teachers
[00:20:01.921]that are supporting children with diverse learning needs.
[00:20:04.172]If we can get these three things into place,
[00:20:07.052]we're gonna see children climb higher
[00:20:08.823]on that engagement ladder.
[00:20:10.251]And the universal design for learning framework
[00:20:12.287]has a strong research basis
[00:20:13.687]in a range of different academic settings.
[00:20:16.107]And so that helps us understand that
[00:20:17.771]active engagement is research-based
[00:20:19.393]and now we can use its framework,
[00:20:21.217]that is also research-based
[00:20:22.539]to really foster independence, investment, and initiation.

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Defining Engagement in Classroom Settings for Students on the Autism Spectrum Part 2

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