-: Welcome back.
Once again I want to take my host,
for offering this two-part lecture series
as part of their tri-state webinar.
This is part two of two.
In last week's lecture I discussed the importance
of considering a developmental framework
for evidence-based practices.
As we discussed,
children with autism mature,
and they progress through a range
of neurodevelopmental stages,
and their needs change over time.
A child who's not yet talking has very different needs
than a child who's conversational
and learning to adapt to the social conventions
of different situations.
The lesson that we learned last week,
is that what we work on, or what we choose to write
as goals for educational programming
is as important as selecting
those evidence-based strategies.
We need to pick research-based goals
that are predictive of developmental shifts in our children.
In today's lecture, which is really part two of two,
I want to help define the term engagement
as it relates to a child's participation
in classroom lessons.
We have learned that children with autism
typically spend less than half of their time
in our classroom settings actively engaged.
This is a problem,
because active engagement is a predictor
of both academic success,
as well as social success for our children with autism.
So we need to understand how to measure this
and how to target more active engagement
in our classroom lessons.
It's just as critical
as anything else we wanna teach them.
So, today's learning objective as a result of this activity,
I hope that participants will be able to identify
the three instructional elements of active engagement
that are so critical to help a child access
the classroom curriculum.
Next, I want to take you to the three domains
of research-based instructional strategies
that will really be helpful for increasing engagement
in our students.
So we need to start off by talking
about what is engagement.
What is the definition of it?
We all have a slightly different version of it.
The simplistic one is that if you have a child
and then you have a contents standard or a learning target
there's a simplest line between that child
and that learning target,
and that's something called engagement.
The child needs to be invested in that,
needs to be initiating about it, needs to be independent,
go exploring that learning target,
in order for them to be successful.
Last week we talked about
crucial neurodevelopmental stages
that all of our children need to go through.
And simply put, that if you want a child
to learn something in your classroom
the first thing they need to do
as you will see here is orient to the social world.
They have to pay attention to their teacher.
They have to pay attention to their peers, social orienting.
Once they're orienting to their people,
they also have to kind of like what they're seeing.
They have to like, like it enough
to sustain their attention to it,
to initiate with the people around them,
to actively seek out information.
So, that liking and relationships that we establish
with our students and the peers with each other
really help drive that learning process.
And beyond that once a child is paying attention
and really liking the social stimuli around them,
so they're attending, engaging, and initiating
with the people around them
they're also gonna shift into
another neurodevelopmental stage
called social maintaining,
which is the idea of something called
reputation management.
Social maintaining means
I want to maintain a relationship with you over time.
So I want to please you, I want to fit in,
I want to learn the social rules,
and I will do what it takes to make sure
that I'm fitting into the social context.
That's when you start to see true learning going on there.
How is that fueled in brain development?
We go back to the infant brain,
who's just learning about social orienting.
What we have found,
is that some children are born with genetic advantages,
orienting toward the social world.
And when they look toward the social world
in the first couple of months of life
they get the benefit of having a release
of neuro endorphins called opioids and dopamine.
And that stimulation makes them want
to look and pay attention to people even more,
but genetics alone don't do the trick.
You also need to be nurtured as we talked about
last week and when you're nurtured,
you get more chemicals a hormone called oxytocin
which actually goes between people,
because it's a phermone.
Oxytocin is nicknamed the cuddle hormone,
because it makes you want to be with people.
You put a little oxytocin on your opiod and your dopamine,
you're not only orienting toward the social world,
you're gonna start really really liking it,
and really compelled to engage with people even more.
That fuels the development
of the social brain
and ultimately the language hemispheres,
because you're gonna wanna initiate
with the people around you
and seek out more information from people
and learn from people.
It's gonna drive your interest in learning in the classroom
and to read, to read books and so forth,
'cause reading is when you're beginning
to discover what other people have to say
and if you're really stimulated by that through
the opioids, the dopamine, and the oxytocin,
your brain connections are really gonna form and develop.
Ultimately, more and more social engagement
comes with the early school age years.
You start to develop something called social maintaining,
which is that reputation management
that I was talking about,
which really relates to executive functioning.
And what is really fueling that all the way along
that neurodevelopmental path
are frequent and positive social emotional connections
with the world around them.
It's those chemicals.
This is essential for every learner in our classroom,
not just children who have
social emotional challenges like autism.
But we need to see frequent
and positive social connections
so that our children can make those neural connections
of liking people, of ultimately maintaining
relationships with people over time.
The why of social emotional engagement is critical here.
We need to measure engagement to show
that we're being successful with our childrens
who have vulnerabilities in these situation.
As we talked about last week,
children with autism tend to show less neural sensitivity
to social stimuli in their early childhood years.
They find people a little bit less stimulating.
There's many different genetic causes of autism,
but what we have seen is the impact is often
in relation to how much stimulation they get
in terms of their opioids and their dopamine.
They may not receive as much oxytocin,
so we might have to work a little bit harder
to make sure we have really strong relationships,
that we're kind of wooing them to orient toward us,
instead of the non-social world,
and that they are liking us and connecting with us.
That's gonna help us help them develop
the desire to please us, to fit in,
to learn social skills, and academic skills, as well.
However, the neurodevelopmental differences
that children with autism are born with
tend to lead to more preferential attention
to things or non-social stimuli
as opposed to orienting in social engagement.
So if we measure how much
that social engagement that we see,
we know we're making a difference here.
The why of social emotional engagement
is really critical when we think about the long-term
for our children who are born with genetic differences
like autism or related social emotional differences.
What tends to happen is if you have
less of those neurochemicals
or less of that oxytocin coming in,
that you might start to develop more expertise
about the physical world around you.
You might think about objects and physical properties
and numbers and academic concepts,
but what you don't develop as robustly
is this expertise about the social world.
So when we look at our educational goals
like we did last week,
we made sure to write goals around people.
The first goals that were gonna write
is gonna be about initiating with people
and connecting with people.
Then it's about learning people's names and verbs.
Then it's about feeling self efficacious
with communicating with people
and developing confidence.
We wanna make sure we're balancing
the learning patterns of children who have
social emotional differences in our classrooms.
So how can we foster this growth?
First and foremost,
we need to think about it developmentally,
which is what we did last week.
We talked about the fact
that if there is a child who is before words,
we need to make sure that, more than anything else,
that this child is orienting toward the social world
and that they're connecting
and finding us really, really interesting
and we can gauge that by how much
spontaneous nonverbal communication they're using,
because high rates in nonverbal communication
predicts the acquisition of emerging language.
Children won't talk if they don't have something to say
and so how do we get them
from that emerging language stage
to the conversational stage?
We're gonna make sure they use
people's names and verbs a lot,
because subject-verb predicts creative language skills,
which fuels into the conversational stage.
How do we get people's names and verbs?
Are we gonna get that by teaching them object labels,
by helping them match objects a lot,
having them focus their energy on these cognitive tasks?
Are we gonna get that by seeing them initiating,
showing emotional investment
and engaging in the social world around them?
Engagement is something that is universal
across all of these different stages here.
If we get children to pay attention to us,
to communicate to us, to initiate with us,
they may develop language.
It may help them through speech, through pictures,
through assistive technology,
and then if we get them to that stage,
then we teach them people's names and verbs,
and they still get fueled up by the social connections.
They may develop the conversational language.
How do we get our conversational level children
to success into their young adulthood,
to be able to succeed in a range of social situations?
One of the key concepts is building self-efficacy.
They need practice and they need lots of it.
They need to initiate a lot.
They need to show emotional investment around people.
They may get frustrated because they don't have
the learning abilities to understand
what people are thinking and feeling,
so we wanna keep that optimism strong
and their mental health strong,
so that they can be successful into adulthood
and learn those social conventions
that will allow them to be successful
in a range of social situations.
What is universal across all three of these stages,
the stages that we talked about last week,
is something called engagement.
If we can measure how much they're initiating,
how much they are independently engaging with us
and how much they are invested in it,
we know we're on the right track
and that's one of the key concepts of today's webinar.
Is there a research basis for this?
In fact, there's more and more of a basis growing
with the current studies
and that basis is really key.
Beginning in the year 2001,
when the National Research Council
did a very systematic and comprehensive review
of educational interventions for children with autism,
they recommended that students with autism
spend a minimum of 25 hours per week
actively engaged in learning activities.
Their definement of active engagement
was not just following instructions and doing as told,
but rather spontaneous communication,
initiating at a high rate,
and then independently engaging in the materials
that they should be in the classroom.
And other studies were coming out
in the mid-2000s, essentially,
looking at active engagement as a key component
for effective programming for students with autism,
is that we wanna make sure that they're not
just passively engaged in classroom activities,
but they are participating
with their peers and their teachers,
showing some degree of initiation and independence.
Finally a more recent study put out
by those involved in the classroom first intervention grant,
Nicole Sparapani, she analyzed the data from that,
that particular intervention
and noticed that higher rates
of initiation and independence
fostered active participation
and better emotional regulation in the classroom,
leading to better self management
and less challenging behavior.
So active engagement is highly correlated in research
with better success in academics,
but also socially, for children with autism.
It's a target we wanna go after.
So how do we measure it?
That's one of the questions that we always ask.
How do we measure active social emotional
engagement in classroom lesson?
And I wanted to just introduce to you
the idea of using an engagement letter.
It's a very simple rubric, essentially,
that shows children climbing up
the active engagement scale.
As you will see on the very last page of your hand out,
if you've downloaded that and printed that.
I've given you a copy of an engagement ladder,
one that was adapted from other researchers
in the United Kingdom that are
referenced on the tool itself.
What is this particular engagement ladder looking for?
We're looking for whether a child
has no focus in a current lesson,
just not responsive to the social stimuli
at all around them.
Maybe they're sitting in the back of the class
with their head down.
Maybe they're under the table hiding under their jacket.
That would be a no focus.
And then as you see, on number one,
emerging fleeting.
That's a child who, if you call on them
every now and then, they'll respond,
but generally speaking, they're difficult to engage with.
A two would be a partially engaged child right in the middle
and that partial engagement would refer to a child
who responds to teacher's instructions,
who follows directions,
who writes their name when you tell them to on the paper,
who does the work as they're told,
but it's really prompt dependent.
and his kind of needing
that kind of encouragement and support.
And the number two for partial engagement
basically relates to a well-behaved child.
That's a child who kind of does what they're told.
But what active engagement is,
is when you start going above the two,
into what we call mostly engaged.
A child is initiating quite a bit in the classroom,
whether it's non-verbally or verbally,
a child who is independently engaging with the materials
as they were intended to be used,
and who is emotionally invested
and showing some degree of vigor and rigor
in what they're doing, and excited about it.
Now the number four,
which would be what we call a fully engaged child,
is a child whose initiating, independently engaging,
and emotionally invested so much,
they kind of forgot they wanna be anywhere else
than learning that lesson with you,
or with the teacher that they're engaged with.
So, what we do is we wanna measure.
We can go into a whole class and tally how many students
are at four, a three, a two, a one, a zero.
And our goal is to start helping those students
climb up that ladder,
finding new ways for them to initiate,
to be more independent,
and to be more emotionally invested in what they're doing.
So what are the essential elements of that engagement?
It's not just being productive to task and doing as told.
That's kind of gonna get you like a two,
but there are three I's in engagement as you see here.
First is we want students to be independently engaging
with the targeted materials as much as possible.
We want them to be emotionally invested.
So we wanna see that they wanna do this,
even if you weren't looking they would be doing this,
that they're invested in the task that you put
in front of them and that they're initiating it
a quite a high degree of frequency.
If you've got all three I's,
you've got an actively engaged child,
and that's what this rubric does indeed measure.
I wanted to show you an example
of different levels of engagement in one student
as you see here.
In the far left of your screen you'll see
this little boy feeling a bit say, so so,
about the particular activity that he was doing.
with his teacher.
The teacher was putting together a matching task for him,
something that he, I don't think,
had a great deal of emotional investment in.
He also wasn't very independent with it,
needed a lot of verbal reminders and prompting,
for him to keep going with the activity.
And his rates of initiation went
lower than you might expect.
So, this is a child who every now and then
will respond and put the ball into the cup
that matches the other ball.
He's actually matching a ball to the photograph of a ball,
but most the time he's spending his time averting his gaze
and looking at the ceiling,
because there's a really interesting pattern of tiles
on the ceiling right there.
We would rank this child as emerging fleeting,
on this ladder because he wasn't completely no-focus.
He didn't cooperate and put the ball
in the proper box on occasion.
So, he was there but not quite holistically there.
And that's unfortunate because for a child with autism
this is a before words child.
We really want him to find people to be amazing.
We want him to orient toward us.
We want him to like us,
and also maintain our relationships with us.
So, the task itself likely didn't have
some degree of engagement
that was gonna kick that relationship off.
If you look in the middle section,
you have a little moment here of partial engagement.
And then is when she asks him to put the ball
on to the photograph of the ball,
and he complies and he does so.
We call that partial engagement
Obviously that's a very common thing
to see that happening.
Finally, when she starts to sing to him,
and she starts engaging with him
in a more hands-on and sensory motor based way,
he's more emotionally invested.
He's actually initiating that she continue the song,
and he's independently completing
the hand movements and so forth along with it.
That's when we see full engagement.
Now this particular measure
that I showed you before with the ladder,
we wouldn't just do it a little bursts or moments.
We tend to use that the data
after about 20 to 30 minutes of the observing a child.
We kind of look at the average,
overall average engagement level.
I will be honest.
I did this in about 18 school districts
this last year in the state of Georgia.
We did it with 45 schools,
and about five classrooms in each of those schools.
We literally had 200-300 classrooms
that we were looking at with nearly a thousand students.
The statistical mode of student engagement
tended to be around a two.
We saw a lot of well behaved kids,
who were doing as they were told,
but these are students that are not initiating,
they're not independent,
and they're not showing a degree of emotional investment,
really confirming that they're accessing
the academic curriculum
and wanting to learn, and actively problem solving.
Those are, that's a challenge that we want to deal with.
So, my question to you as you're listening here,
in today's lecture,
is what does a fully engaged to a child look like
in your classroom, or the classrooms that you support?
And what occurs in our lesson plans to support that?
I think it behooves us to start taking data
and showing that we have our threes and our fours,
they're mostly and fully engage students,
let's totally praise those lesson plans.
What were we doing at that moment
that got all that engagement level?
Was it because it was hands-on?
Was it because it was related to student interest?
Was ir very visual, predictable?
We need to start looking at what we do well
to get that student engagement,
so that when we see a child
who's emerging fleeting or no-focus, we go wait a second,
we need to do more of what we do well,
which is to get those kids up to the fully engaged state,
and when I do this in person,
I often have you break into groups
and kind of think about the last moment
you saw in your classroom
when you had a mostly engaged or fully engaged child.
And what we often come up with
is we had to get the emotional hook.
We had to make sure that the student
was really invested in this contents standard,
that we wanted to make sure,
if we're teaching two digit addition
or if we're teaching the geography of the state of Georgia,
did they care, or did they find it relevant?
Did they find it interesting and meaningful.
So, getting the emotional hook in a lesson is really key.
Next we wanna make sure that we're providing
information in different ways.
Students tend to benefit when they have
more visual support, more structure.
They understand the task a little bit more.
They keep their comprehension.
So, giving them visuals that they can explore
and understand, either symbolic visuals,
like you know, visual support that have images and words,
or we can give hands-on manipulatives,
or giving role play and rehearsal opportunities.
Finally another group of,
another area that comes up quite a bit,
is making sure students have opportunities
to express themselves,
so that they can show what they know.
Children do love to talk and generally speaking,
if they do not, if they're more reticent,
maybe they wanna show what they know
through building something, through drawing,
through role-play.
There's many different ways
that children can show what they know.
These are the elements of a strong lesson plan
that tend to foster more engaged learners.
They get those students up to the threes and the fours
on the engagement ladder.
And so the next question becomes the how.
And I am, been drawn recently to the research
of the universal design for learning framework,
because that particular framework,
which is relevant for a wide range of diverse learners,
basically all of our learners.
What it's designed to do is foster
just what we wanna be targeting: independence,
investment, initiation for all children.
And it's a language that will be helpful
for our special education teachers
but also are general education teachers
that are supporting children with diverse learning needs.
If we can get these three things into place,
we're gonna see children climb higher
on that engagement ladder.
And the universal design for learning framework
has a strong research basis
in a range of different academic settings.
And so that helps us understand that
active engagement is research-based
and now we can use its framework,
that is also research-based
to really foster independence, investment, and initiation.