Practical Proficiency Podcast

Tools for Teaching Autistic Learners and Managing Absences in ASL Classes: Listener Question Series

• Devon Gunning | La Libre Language Learning • Season 3 • Episode 40

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We answer Sherry’s two-part question on engaging autistic learners in an ASL classroom and creating a sane, effective plan for frequent absences. We share concrete, low-lift strategies that center detail-focused questioning, visual supports, and input-replacement systems that actually work.

• Detail-first prompts and either-or questions for autistic learners
• Visual status cards and icon-based sentence frames
• Predictable routines for partner work and turn-taking
• Comparison tasks anchored in daily routines
• Input-replacement hours instead of one-off makeup packets
• Duolingo and curated media lists as low-friction tools
• Clear policies and gentle boundaries for chronic absences
• Resources and training recommendations including Linda Hodgdon
• Practical systems to reduce teacher workload

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SPEAKER_00:

What's up? Kelly looked world language teachers. Welcome to the practical proficiency pop on the campus, where we make the transition to proficiency-oriented instruction in your world language class. In a way that works for you, your unique context and teaching style. And doesn't sacrifice your well-being along the way. I'm your host, Devin Gunning, the teacher, author, conference host, curriculum creator, and consultant becoming Lamba Language Team. This podcast is for the creative world language teacher like you, who's ready to touch the overwhelming pressure of switching to acquisition-driven instruction and CI overnight. You're ready to discover how using more target language in class can actually bring you and your students more joy instead of having to leave with practical, defensive, and down early strategies that don't require reinventing wheels or more training. We all work together towards the magic of a community-based target language-rich classroom, rooted in the power of community and comprehensible in public levels. Hey y'all, happy October! Welcome back to the Practical Proficiency Podcast. It's a nice day out today, but it is the first chilly day in Charleston. We're in a it's a lovely area to live in. We're in a subtropical climate, so this is my first day wearing a sweater all day, and I'm kind of excited about it. Public service announcement. If you are a Bobsburgers fan, please let me know. This is my Bob's Burgers sweater. I'm gonna show you real quick how awesome this is if you're watching this. And if you're not, if you're on the podcast, fam, just get really excited and just imagine how great this is that I've got my Louise ears on. It's so cool. It's my favorite show. So let me know if it's yours too. Today we have a really special episode. Let me move the mic a little closer because this is awesome. So we have a really great submission from a fellow teacher like you. Cheers to Sherry for submitting a question for us to answer today. So it's a two-parter, so we're gonna talk about that. Now, Sherry is asking about what to do with students with learning disabilities in her classroom and how to better serve them and engage them specifically with autism. And the second question that we're going to be talking about here that she asked has to do with, uh let me oh yeah, how to deal with frequent absences. So we're working with disabilities, learning differences, as well as frequent absences today in a world language classroom. What can that look like? So, Sherry, first of all, thank you very much for submitting your question. I'm really excited to address this here. So, this is what Sherry has asked us. When I asked her, this is by the way, from the podcast question submission form, which is I would love to answer your question on air as well. Just look below if you're watching this, or most of you are probably listening as you're going about your teacher biz. Um, you can find this link to the forum to also ask your own question and right at the bottom in the show notes here for the podcast. And your question will be answered on air. So Sherry did that. We got a great question. I'm excited to dive in. Sherry says, when I asked what is feeling hard for you about CI or proficiency, Sherry says, nothing really that confusing. Great, good for you. Everything you cover is 100% engaging and relevant. Oh, thanks, Sherry. Thanks for your feedback. To be honest, I'm an outlier. I teach high school American Sign Language in an all-learning disabilities school. And I'm really glad that you mentioned that because honestly, every school context that we work with is very unique and very different. And this certainly is. So let's get into your question here for things that you are working with. Sherry, also to share some of the tips and things that she's doing is I asked her, what are some strategies that you're using right now to move towards proficiency and how is it going? So she says circling back and targeted questions really help student attention. Partner practice and brain breaks every 15 minutes, they help engagement, but not necessarily retention. So that's something that you can keep in your back pocket. And for what would you like help in your classroom with right now? Sherry says, my students with autism are reluctant to ask questions, in addition to not exhibiting facial expressions. This makes it hard to hone in on those not comprehending the target language. Very true. So, what techniques do you use to elicit student questions in the moment? So, this is a really great one to start with. And I would like to start off with the base statement that although I tried to find good research for you and find answers that would work for a certain type of student with autism, or who in the community preferred to say is autistic, every autistic individual is so outrageously different. Autism is in my family. My son has autism or is autistic, and his presentation of autistic traits are different than what we see with other families and children with autism. So I'm gonna give you some perspectives on just this, what our family life has been like in ways that we have found have really helped because we have the same thing going on with my son in class, is that he doesn't ask questions either. And a huge facet that's common for autistics is that they have difficulties more than a neurotypical individual advocating for themselves or asking questions when they are not sure of something. Or they also there are some autistics who present a, I don't want to say lack of curiosity, but the things that they're curious about are not in the same continuum as those who are neurotypical or have a different type of neurodivergence. So one of the ways that we see this presented often is that autistic students do not feel very concerned with the question of why. And they're not really concerned with as many of the like describing an overall main idea or getting to the bottom of the main idea. They're more concerned with usually they like to focus in on, and this may have you may help you elicit more questions from them, is that they're not going to show interest in their face as often. That's not true of every autistic, but it can be that their facial expressions are a little bit more, what's a good word for it? They they just don't present emotions as much or often in the same way. So what you can do to elicit questions from them is understand that questions are really not their preferred mode of communication for most autistic students. They prefer to give you specific details and recall the things that they are so excellent at memorizing. Now, that's not true of every autistic. Some autistic students have uh difficulty with working memory, but there are lots of autistic students who actually have an excellent working memory and will remember different things than your other students will. Here are some examples. Uh, I took my son, uh, my son loves to travel, actually, but as long as he knows exactly where we're going, what time we're leaving, what the what things will look like when he gets there, and things like that. Um, and he loves airplanes. And one of his favorite things about riding on an airplane is that the surroundings for him are, even though they're different, they're always predictable. Like airports always look similar, they always have similar things going on, and airplanes almost always look similar. So he, his favorite way of describing an airplane is talking about how the seat is oriented to the window and where it feels like your feet are, even though you're it's a different chair than what you're used to. So these are details that I've never noticed before, but that he finds really interesting. Whenever he tells me about going to the airport, which is like one of his favorite experiences, he does not remember at all the destination or where we went often. Like, oh, we went to New York to go visit some family. He doesn't really care that much about that part of, like, oh yeah, we went to New York, we went to this new place. His favorite thing to tell me about that trip is always we had a delayed flight. So we went to this special food court that was to the right down the hallway. And in that hallway, they served these three things. And he would describe to me in detail the menu at the restaurant that we ate at in the airport and exactly where it is spatially, orientally to the what the airport location was. And he also remembers every advertisement that he saw in the airport on the way home. Like those are, this is not something that you might expect from a student, but it's often something that happens with different versions. Again, everybody's different, just giving you my experience of what my son is like. But the way that autism likes to show up for him is that he remembers really interesting, different details about the ways that things are spatially oriented and different experiences and sensations, but not in the way that you would expect. Like he didn't feel, as far as I know, he didn't feel like, whoa, we're traveling, we're going to a new place. This is so exciting. It's more like we get to eat in a new restaurant in the airport lobby, and we get to sit in this special seat that's one seat away from the window. And then the last time that we traveled, it was three seats away from the window. Like those are the things that he really likes and are and is interesting to him. So when you're asking questions about your story, you might want to ask your students, what did they find interesting about the story? Because it's not going to be oftentimes with your autistic students the things that you're used to talking about being interesting about the story. Like, for example, if you're reading a story about a student who is doing an exchange program, they go to a new place, they land in China and they're going to their first outdoor market in China and they're exploring everything. They're going to remember interesting details that are very, very detail-oriented rather than like, where were you? What was the sights and the sounds of the market? Like, if you let them go into that like specific space that they like of the details and the things that are interesting to them, you may have an easier time asking them about those things. So you're not going to get a lot of responses for things like why or how or what did you feel in this moment? But if you ask specific questions about where was this? What did it look like? What did this person say in this moment? Um, what time did they leave? Like those questions might actually get you some more answers. And if you can, in English, it's not a bad idea to beforehand, or I know you're saying you're working with ASL students. So maybe however this works best in an ASL classroom, if maybe you could write out the answers or just talk about the pictures first and ask not an open-ended question, but uh a question with a few concrete, finite answers that allows you to explore and see what your student remember about these things and what do they find interesting about it? Because again, just like you said, relying on facial expressions or relying on the typical questions for things that you might find interesting is not gonna apply in the same way. So if you are reading a story about somebody who went to a new place and is exploring an outdoor market, I would ask them how this is different from their regular routine, like compare and contrast between like when you go to the market with your family members and you go shopping, what are the things that you do and what are the things that this person did that's different? The autistic folks in my family absolutely love talking about the differences in routines. So it's just a suggestion and an idea for maybe thinking about how could this be a way that you could interact with them. Also, part of the deal with autistic students is that verbalization in any form is different for them. The way that they prefer to communicate is definitely different. So can you formulate questions that are more along the lines of getting a yes or no answer from them or an either-or? Because a one-word answer is much more comfortable for all of your students, regardless of neurodivergence or not. One-word answers are way more comfortable for students. So I'm thinking things like instead of saying, what did you notice at the market? What do you see in this picture at the market? You should give them a menu of options and a menu of choices. Like this is really the best way or the only way that I can get good, accurate information from my son about anything that he's doing that day. When you ask him, like, how was school? He just says good every single time. What did you do at recess? Played every single time because there's too many options for him to choose from. And he would much prefer choose from a menu of options that you gave him. He really loves either or questions. And honestly, your language learners love this too. So try this out. When you're working with students that are autistic, they appreciate often, again, everybody's different, but try giving them a menu of options. Things like does the market have food or does it have movies? Does the market usually have sellers or does it have hotel workers, like vendors, I guess you would say, vendors or hotel workers? Does the market usually have fresh fruit and veggies or things in a freezer? And you can use whatever words that you want to, whatever choices you want to about this location that you're trying to explore and experience. But those types of questions, when they're either or and you're giving them a quick menu of options, will get you better responses. And I would also encourage, on top of that, that you give students the option to choose a yes or no deal or to show you that they understand rather than asking for a verbal presentation, even though you're doing ASL, it's still a verbal presentation of their responses. You can also do, if this works with the lesson that you're doing, autistics are often extremely visual and appreciate having visual cues of some kind. So that could be something as simple as giving them a large printed list of what the five to ten main vocabulary words are in large text, where they could point to the choice or the option. And for you with ASL, that can also be a picture or symbol or clip art version of the responses that you're looking for that day. So if it's a common phrase like like or dislike, that could be a gif or a graphic or a clip art presentation of that phrase so that maybe they can select it and point to it instead of actually using the sign for that. So those are some options that I have for you. Um, and I would say if they're not exhibiting facial expressions, that one of the many things that you can do for this as well, because like there's nothing wrong with not having facial expressions by any means. It just means that we as educators have to be a little bit more creative about how we're evaluating how our students are doing and how they're feeling about what's going on in class and whether they understand or not. Try having some printed manipulatives on their desk that have that allow them to express, again, without saying anything or without showing uh their own facial expressions, pictures of expressions that they'll be able to select between and with a label, I would say, if you can in the target language, but something like understanding, mostly understanding, confusion. I don't understand. Like having those phrases available on their desk is a big, big game changer. And it's something that many autistic students would appreciate instead of having to verbalize how they are feeling, which is something that is stressful often for them. Now, that again is what I have for you. To get more information about how to better serve your autistic students, I would highly recommend the author Linda Hodgton. I'm gonna put her name in the notes below. This is an expert on autism who knows far more than I do about it because my experience as a parent is, of course, going to be limited to my own family experience, but I'm sure that you're working with a myriad in your school that serves students with varying neurodivergence and disabilities. So I would love to direct you in that um frame of reference so that you have some more to work with from there. I would also hope that since you work in that kind of school environment that they're providing training for you. If you know that that's not the case, then reach out. Let's talk about it. Now, here's your next, here's the next question that Sherry has here. And that is how to deal with frequent absences or students out ill for extended times. Ooh, that's a good one, Sherry, for sure. Now, I would like to preface this with saying that there is, I have a full YouTube video for you on this that will have even more ideas for this. And we also have some trainings in the Practical Proficiency Network that directly address this issue in ways that you can make it easier for teachers. But the and I will leave some of those links in the show notes below if you want to dive more into this topic, if this also applies to you. But I would say one of the number one things for this for frequent absences is first take a deep breath. This is out of your control. That's why we needed to take a deep breath beforehand, because it's hard to get down with that, is that this is out of your control. That you cannot control or influence how often students show up to class and recognizing that this is a much larger systemic issue that comes from all kinds of places. It might be coming from, if we're honest with ourselves as North Americans, that there are many demographics that school is not currently serving well and generationally has not been serving well. So they might be growing up in an environment where absenteeism is just not a big deal because of the fact that attending school hasn't actually been a positive influence in their family history. So let's recognize and acknowledge that. That is very, very real and very true for some of our students. It's also very real and very true that absenteeism is currently affecting their ability to perform academically and to adjust socially and for all kinds of things. And it's gonna set them up for a much more difficult work-life experience, no matter what profession they're in, because chronic absenteeism is, of course, going to affect any type of work that you have. But know that this is leading to a and really signaling some deeper things at work here that a classroom instructor is not gonna have as much influence as is necessary to change this behavior. So we need to come at this from the perspective of a little bit of damage control and triage for chronic absenteeism. And that is okay. So, especially if you're running a proficiency-oriented classroom, it's extremely difficult to hand students work that corresponds with what they missed in school that day. That's a good thing. It doesn't sound like a good thing because it can really feel like it's more work for you, but think about it. If it was easy for you to just hand out makeup work from your class because your student wasn't there, then couldn't they technically do a lot of this stuff at home on their own? If you're running the type of classroom where it's easy for you to say, it's okay, hon, you missed three days in a row, but you can just go to page 21 through 24 of the textbook. That's what we covered here, or the practice things that we did. Then what are you really doing? I mean, is that really a language classroom? If you're they can follow the textbook on their own easily and it doesn't take any work for you to give them any makeup or absentee work. That is how I would like to reframe this very difficult problem that we have is that, yeah, it's a lot of work and I feel you. I have been there. I have been dealing, I'm no longer in the classroom, but my entire career, I dealt with truancy, long extensive absences from lots of students. Like that was always a reality for my teaching climate as well. But I took a little bit of solace in knowing that when students missed my class, they really missed a lot because we do things in my class that you absolutely cannot replicate at home. We do things like lots of interpersonal interactions, we do a lot of speaking practice, we do a lot of listening practice, and we do a lot of games and special person interviews, and we did a lot of things that, like, if you weren't there, you're just straight up missing out. So, one of the things that I used to do with my students was I would, of course, we also did lots of note-taking and notes and things like that. And mainly that was because, well, as much as I wanted to run a 100% proficiency classroom, when you have chronic absenteeism as a part of your teaching experience, it's very difficult to do that and not have a lot of work be placed on the teacher to try and recreate or replicate the things that students are missing in class. So, depending on your school's policies, what I would do is we would have deliberate note-taking moments in class and handouts in class so that students could at least replace the input time that we had in class with something that's not nearly as good, but at least something that they could do outside of class so that they could get some grades for things that they were missing. And it would be stuff like, hey, here's a list of vocabulary terms, here's this authentic reading that we did, go read this at home, answer the questions, things like that. Um, I also, though, the number one thing that I used to do with students that were out more than 10 times in two quarters. So, like if they were, you know, missing on average, like five classes every um three months or so, which for a block class is like deadly. You're really, really missing a lot of time. So for my high school block classes, I would simply assign them a book to read at home. I would let them take home one of my classroom libraries, um, one of my classroom libraries' books of comprehensible novels. I didn't have a lot, so I would just assign them one that, you know, of the um depending on which classroom I was in, I had access to like 30. And one year I had 10, just total, just 10 books. And I would give them one to either take home or I would make a quick photocopy for just that one student. The other thing that I would do is I would have a whole library of authentic videos and authentic podcast episodes and readings that I would just pull from and I would give them different videos and readings and things for all of the days that they miss, to be like, hey, my goal for you is you need to make you miss three hours of class, so you need three hours of input. So I need you to watch this video, this video, and this video. And instead of doing all that work of making up different questions for each video that was specific to each video, I would ask them things like, hey, write two sentences in English describing what the person in this video was like personality-wise, and what you noticed they were talking about the most, and some things that you found either funny, surprising, silly, annoying, or boring about this video. And then I would also ask them things like, where is this video? What is this video about? Give me 10 vocabulary words that you notice from listening to this video. And it's, you know, just those simple checkup things that you can literally give them a blank slate for each day that and each hour that you want them to knock out of input. I would also, like crazy, assign a lot of Duolingo. Duolingo is an easy thing that your students can do at home. It's still completely free for teachers. It's also really easy for you to check up on and PS, they can Google translate any of that. Like it's in the moment, it's quick. They have to be able to use the tools within Duolingo to do that. Like there's a lot of pronunciation checks and there's a lot of stories and listening challenges and things. Like it's Duolingo has really impressed me in the past three years with all the improvements that they've made. So I would use those tools. Now, if you're looking for more tools on this, we have a lot of materials to support this in the Practical Proficiency Network. That exact tool of having a giant list of videos and podcast episodes to assign students for them to do their absentee work at home. I give that to each Practical Proficiency Network member. For Spanish teachers, it's 20 pages long. For French teachers, it's like 13 pages long of just video after video after video after video of things that they can you can give to students and just say, hey, pick five, and these are the questions that I want you to use with each of them. So in conclusion, recognize that when it comes to absentee work, this is not something that we have that much control over. And a huge thing that we can do to make these expectations clear is just to say, hey, if you're missing more than three seat time hours of class per quarter, you're really gonna fall behind. And there it's not really easy for you to get students caught up on exactly what they missed the day before. So I would suggest if you could give them more generic assignments that allow them to make up some input time. I get this idea from this one time, I forget what happened when I was in high school. I think I was like had the flu or something. I was sick for a week. And it was that one quarter that I had gym class. And you can't make up gym class. Like, what are you supposed to do? Like go back and like relearn the rules of dodgeball? No. I had a really smart gym teacher in high school who said, Hey, the whole point of gym class is physical activity. So here's what I want you to do. You need to come in during your lunch periods, which at that time was, I think it was 30 minutes or an hour or something like that. Um, or maybe my study hall. You need to come in during whatever free period you have for high schoolers. And I need you to get 30 minutes a day for a week on the elliptical and just get some cardio work in. So sweet, that's easy for me. And I'm still meeting the main objective of your course, which is to be physically active and to sweat, right? That's the whole point. So she didn't waste her time like giving me some complicated, hey, go out and go play tennis on your own and like here are the things I want you to answer for me about tennis or anything like that. Cause I think it was a tennis, I don't even remember. It was a long time ago. But this is such a great principle that we can all enact as well. Is that she gave me, she made replacement grades for all of those things that I missed that week that I was sick by just saying, Oh, you know, you did your 30 minutes of activity time, and she asked me to just um instead of you know sitting there watching me sweat on the elliptical, she said, just take a picture of your elliptical after you're done and show it to me the next time that you're in class and I'll give you the logged hours for it. It was great. It was easy for me, easy for her, and still getting the same objective. When you think about it, if you forget about all of the trappings of being a school teacher, of like, well, they're not gonna remember all the words and the things that we learned the day before. Yeah, that's true, but isn't it a nice reminder of a little bit of the discomfort that, and it's not like we don't want to set them up for success, but like if your student isn't feeling the discomfort of like, crap, I'm missing things in here, then it's gonna be really easy for them to say, like, oh, I don't need to come to class today. Um, so I would keep in mind that a little bit of discomfort when your students come back from class is not really your responsibility to fix. Like, that's part of life when you miss class. You're going to miss things and you're going to be behind. And I would talk to them about advocating for themselves by like, can you get some notes from a friend? As we're doing the activity, I would be happy to fill you in on like this, that, or the other of the things that you weren't here to remember. And of course, like if there's a quiz that day and they missed all the review for the quiz, like, give them an extra day to review for the quiz. Like, we're not going to be unreasonable, but that we're going to find a way that your absentee solution should be easy for you and easy for them and still get to that main goal of like burning calories, like in that gym class. For us, it's language input. If they're getting input in a different way, that's fine. And just know that they can't really replicate what's going on outside of your class. And that's a good thing. It means that you're moving in the right direction. So I hope that gives you some ideas to help. If you know that you are already too busy. With a too long to-do list, there are direct things that I have for you already in the Practical Proficiency Network to help make your absentee life a lot easier that are very much in this frame and in this style. We, one of the big processes that we do in the first milestone stages of the PPN is talking about getting yourself an emergency subbinder set up and a bank of ready-to-use absentee-friendly activities so that you don't have to be thinking about that on the fly during the year. So, Sherry, thank you so much for your question. We talked a lot today about different ways that we can help with autistic students in your class, as well as anybody in your class who's not presenting as much desire to be verbal. You have a lot of options for that and different ways to elicit student questions in the moment. And I hope that we're also addressing your frequent absences question to get that moving in a way that makes a little bit more sense for you because based on the prep schedule that you have, which is ASL one, two, and three, you already have too much on your plate to be doing additional, like, oh, here's the absentee work and things. So thank you so much for this question. And I'm really excited to dive into some more questions with from listeners. We have a few more that I will be answering over the air as well. If you have a question, yo, hit me up. It would be so great to answer your question because I'm sure a lot of other people are working with that same question or idea too. So again, check below this. If you're listening, check the show notes to see where you can submit that question so that we can answer it on the air. Thank you so, so, so much for spending time with me today to improve your practice and make your whole proficiency journey a little bit more practical. Leave a review if this helped you so that we can reach more educators and let them know that like this is a cool place to hang out on the interwebs. Okay, y'all. Thank you so much, and I will see you in the next episode. Bye for now.