Autism and Expressive Communication

It is common for students with Autism to lack the necessary expressive communication skills that facilitate social interactions with others. Communication can be defined as a motivation or desire that needs to be communicated within a social interaction with another person. Therefore, communication skills and social skills are both necessary to express the motivation or desire (Stokes). Unfortunately, students with Autism tend to need help in learning both types of skills. Students with Autism tend to be unable to generalize other people's feelings, thoughts or opinions and don't understand they can be different than their own.

The best strategies for teaching students with Autism to effectively express their thoughts and opinions is through explicit social skills instruction and replacement behavior strategies instruction (Coping skills). Michelle Garcia Winter is the Social Skills queen in the Autistic support field. Her social skills curriculum books are a fantastic resource for any teacher entering the Special Education field.

I have used a lot of Michelle Garcia Winter's Social Thinking curriculum and strategies. One of my favorites is the Superflex curriculum that is geared more for elementary school students. Superflex is a superhero that fights super villians of social behavior (i.e. rock brain, mean jean, glass man etc). The curriculum describes these super villians  and how they relate to anti-social behavior by providing examples and social stories. Another one I have used that is effective, is the Zones of Regulation. This help students to self-identify emotions and self-regulate behavior according to their identified emotions. This curriculum has lots of lessons on how to promote positive strategies when dealing with negative emotions.


References:
Stokes, Susan. (2014) Increasing Expressive Skills for Verbal Children with Autism.
CESA #7. Retrieved from http://www.specialed.us/autism/verbal/verbal11.html