working with a non-verbal student

Now that I've had time to collect my head and figure out which end is up, I figured I'd talk a little bit about exactly what it is that I'm doing this year. I'm not subbing...I managed to ease out of that into a full-time gig.

This year, I'm working in a high school life skills classroom (our particular school has two life skills classrooms, and I'm in the more academic of the two). I mainly work one-on-one with a non-verbal student (on the Autism spectrum). In honor of three of my favorite musicians (Bob Marley, Bob Dylan, and Robert Johnson), we'll call him "Bob".

Non-verbal students tend to be rather interesting (and challenging) to work with, and Bob is no exception. Amazingly, Bob doesn't have any "difficult" behaviors (no hitting or grabbing), and is amazingly easy-going (not usually the case with kids who are non-verbal). For about the first week of school, I spent a lot of time just trying to assess where he was at (skills, interests, abilities), and learning how to "read" him. Now we're getting the hang of the new school schedule, and working with each other, we're starting to make some definitely progress.

Bob is by no means the first non-verbal student I've worked with, but he's one of the few that I've encountered who hasn't been successfully taught how to use any of the commonly used communication systems (ASL, AAC devices, communication boards, or PECs). This makes communication a challenge, and currently it's very one-sided. Because he's completely non-verbal, and doesn't use any gestures, increasing his communication options is one of my big goals for him this year.

In my zeal to educate myself (in order to be more effective when working with Bob), I discovered that there's not a whole lot of freely available information out there about working with non-verbal (autistic) students, especially older students. Because I'll be learning this as I go, I'm going to make an effort to write about what I'm learning here in this blog, so that maybe someone else who's in the same boat can make use of my insights.