Along with new smiling faces, a new school year brings our special education teams new co-teaching arrangements, new assessments to give, and more. In order to help you be as effective as you can with your new students, we’ve put together a list of back-to-school tips that we hope will make managing your caseload a little easier.

When you talk to someone, are you aware of their facial expression? Do you pay attention to their body language and/or try to empathize with the person to understand his or her perspective? Unfortunately, school age students and adults with autism spectrum disorder have difficulty understanding the subtle expressions and slang that we normally take for granted. For example, perspective taking calls on many of the executive functions of the brain. It requires control of our own thoughts and feeling in order to consider the perspective of others, cognitive flexibility to see a situation in different ways and the ability to consider someone else’s thinking in conjunction with our own. That’s a lot to do at once and can be challenging to make a fun activity to get students interested in learning how to take a person’s perspective. Social/pragmatic language skills may be challenging to teach and yet more children are experiencing difficulty learning and carrying over these skills into day to day life.

School drop off can be difficult for children and their parents, but it may also create a challenge for child care teachers. As the teacher, it is your responsibility to make sure every child you are caring for feels safe and comfortable in the classroom. This can be difficult when dealing with a child who is experiencing separation anxiety. If you work together with the child’s parents, however, you can quickly establish a secure routine for drop off that works for everyone.

As a speech pathologist working in an elementary school, don’t you feel like sometimes you can barely keep your head above water? Like some days you are literally “flying by the seat of your pants”, having had absolutely no time to prepare for students because you were busy writing IEP’s? And then you keep finding notes from teachers in your mailbox, asking could you check on this student, could you listen to this student, I can’t understand this student at all, etc. Right---“I’ll fit that in during my spare time!” Well, when I started last year at a K-5 school, I was finding some note (or a filled out form called, “Request for Assistance” that the district uses) on almost a daily basis. It was crazy! The majority of these referrals were from the kindergarten teachers. I had to somehow stem the tides!