What I Need to Know:
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Everyone communicates differently. When I think about communication, the easiest form that comes to mind is talking. Talking is how we interact with our peers, and it is one of the methods we’re taught in early childhood to help us form relationships with people in society. What would happen if you woke up one day and could not talk? Scary, right? Well, I imagine this would be how an autism patient feels. With autism patients, the world seems to turn away from these children, adolescents, or adults because they simply cannot form the sounds of the alphabet. In the most basic sense, twenty-six little sounds determine if these people are included with their peers or whether they’re ignored and made fun of for the rest of their lives. The real issue in understanding autism is not its definition, but the effects it has on the individual's life. Each patient is like a puzzle. Every student has their own way of telling their teacher that they are hungry, or need to go to the bathroom, or are having a really bad day. It is my job to bridge the communication gap.
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My essential question for my capstone project is “How can therapists adapt different SLP methods to the various degrees of autism.” I have already learned that each an autistic child with whom I interact has a certain pattern of communication. For example, one little boy likes to grab my hand and drag me to the cabinet where he knows the fruit snacks are found, and he claps and claps until he knows that I know he is either hungry or wants to enjoy this little treat. Simple patterns like this can sometimes be easy to recognize, but not every autism student is the same. Another one of the students will run around screaming until we get him what he wants. He sometimes pinches us or punches us to let us know that he is trying to express his anger. He cannot express his emotion by using his voice, so expresses them through physical actions.
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Understanding how these individuals communicate will enable me to apply my knowledge to other autism patients in the ways they may react to certain activities. For example, by knowing which methods work for each individual or if there is a particular pattern found in certain autism students that also appears in others with learning new material, I can then apply this to my teaching approach. My main goal starting out in this program was to gain experience and a basic understanding of the field before studying this more formally in college as a communicative disorder major. This internship has changed my view of the world, and has really helped me think outside of the box to get the autism students involved with the classroom life, even if it means an extra set of fruit snacks at the end for them!
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What I Know Or Assume:
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When I first started my internship at Sharon Elementary, the understanding that I would be working with the two autism classes was very unnerving. I was not sure that I would meet the therapist’s expectations as a helpful “teacher,” and I was also not sure if the students would like me. The first piece of advice that I received from one of the teachers was to be natural around them because they sense when you are uncomfortable. I wanted to make sure the students knew that I was there to help them, not hurt them. At first, I had no idea how to interact with them, but at the same I did not want to baby them. I knew nothing about how autism students interacted or how to interpret their emotions. I stood in the classroom with my mentor feeling completely helpless and lost.
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Before I walked into the autism classes for the first time, I had a general idea about the obsessive actions of these children – but I was completely wrong. I assumed that these children would be “touchier” and make weird noises or have particular actions they would repeat over and over again – this was not really the case. Looking back, the one detail I wish I knew before stepping into the room was the background of each of the children. I learned that, because each child has been raised differently, they have developed their own way to interpret their surroundings. Each child may respond to yelling in a certain way, where one boy will tense up and run away, while another will sit down and cry. I also learned that autism patients sometimes obsess or “stem” off of things like a certain movement of their hand or how a ray of sunshine that is scattered from the window on the floor in the room. And most importantly, I learned that if you really try to help them, they will love you back!
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The Search:
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Speech Pathology is a growing profession that is needed in almost every type of setting. Speech Therapists help teach the proper social cues to “communicatively challenged” students and most importantly teach them the sounds they fail to pronounce properly. The most common issue I began to notice while shadowing several speech classes was the “R” sound. Because the “R” sound has several different levels, it is the Speech Therapist’s job to distinguish which area of the “R” category the student needs help with. This can be very challenging since everyone learns differently. When I first began my internship, I was very overwhelmed with the paper work involved with the profession and the difficulties the speech teachers experienced while trying to make a connection with the student. Although a child may start out very shy and embarrassed about the way they talk, in just a couple of weeks, they begin interacting with the other students in their class and the child begins to enjoy speech class. Hearing students say that speech is the best class of the day inspires me to want to become a Speech Pathologist. Although it took me a while to figure out the topic for my capstone project, the one that stood out to me the most was How to interact with an autism class.
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Initially, my research was dedicated to the methods other speech pathologists used in the past to help understand their autistic students. One of the articles was titled, “Teaching of Speech, Language, and Communication Skills for Young Children with Severe Autism Spectrum Disorders” by Hui Min Low . This paper started out with a scary fact: there was an increase of preschool and school-age children that have been diagnosed with Spectrum Disorders. This means that schools will need to increase the amount of speech pathologists, and right now, there just aren’t enough. The article went on to talk about how teaching severe autistic children how to speak allows teachers to better understand these children’s behavioral patterns and learning styles. Methods like pushing a button that shouted “More!” and receiving an award was especially common for these students.
Really understanding how these children communicated was one of the most frustrating parts of my experience. Just like anyone else, these kids had their off days, as well. Some days, if we worked them too intensely, they may scream for hours on end until they finally began to cope with the classroom. It was particularly hard for me to understand what was happening in the minds of these children. I would constantly ask myself questions like, “Were they not feeling good?”, “Did their stomach hurt?”, “Were they hungry?” or “Did they want a toy?”. The questions for me just kept coming. I also researched several articles that were written about experiments with learning methods and how severe autistic students responded to these methods. Some of the results were astonishing where the students were able to mimic the teacher, and they would begin to understand the bridge of communication that was attempting to be built. Article like these helped me to understand what I wanted to research, and that the results that I wanted from the question were not impossible after all. Because all data points collected from each of the experiments in both papers were from unbiased experiments, I believe the results are more unbiased, as well. Also, each website was followed by a .gov which means that the information is protected and cannot be changed by people who are not authorized.
Another significant part of my research was my interview with my mentor. She told me about her experiences starting out as a first-year speech pathologist and what exactly I needed to expect, when I reached that point. I asked her about the challenges she faced in college and graduate school in the communicative disorders program and how she overcame them. She mentioned that the most difficult part of the entire program was making sure you had all your clinical hours. Clinical hours are the time spend in a lab setting observing another speech intern interacting with a patient. As we got further into the interview, I began to ask her questions relating to autism and how she planned on changing the way these students learned certain communication skills. She enlightened me that when she first started working with the autism students she learned almost immediately the lesson of “going with the flow” and not letting feelings get in the way of the minimal progress that might be made each and every day. She absolutely loves working with the autism classes because she believes that “they show her a glimmer of their personality”. Her job has taught her patience and acceptance of others and their struggles they might face.
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What I Discovered:
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After weeks of research, I began to realize the mass effect these kids had on my life. My amount of patience increased, and I began to look forward to hearing their giggles and seeing their beaming smiles every day. There was so much kindness in these eight children’s hearts. They will continue to inspire every day. I am forever thankful for them and my experiences. These children taught me the importance of individuality. Since each student learned differently, it almost seemed impossible to teach them all the same speech methods and know they are truly understanding it. I went in the classroom thinking that what I wanted to research was impossible, but later came out knowing there is a pattern of emotions. Even though it may seem like each autism student has their own way of getting what they want, they all begin to learn each other’s methods and branch off from there. Finding out that they learn from each other allowed us to create activities like story time or calendar time to really get the class involved. Having all this experience under my belt will help me throughout my college career to figure out where and what I want to do when I graduate and move on to find a job.
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My essential question was finally answered with the help of hours of observation. A therapist can simply adapt methods of speech pathology through an item like a core word board that displays key words like "I want", "I do", I need", "I like", etc. We guide the child's hand over the square with the simple phrase in hopes that they are able to remember the sequence of the squares and use the board as their communication in the near future. Another method mentioned earlier in my research was the "I want" button. This was the most popular method for the kids because they received a reward each time they reached out and hit the red button. The reward included anything from fruit snacks to the truck they were rolling across the counter. Autism children are very sensory oriented so using this button to one satisfy their need of sensory and satisfy the need of communication worked like a charm.