Reflection: Neurodivergent Teacher Trauma

I know I’m a good teacher. I know I don’t have to control everything. Yet, I always feel a need to prove myself. I see every disagreement as a challenge to my knowledge and skill. (And that fear, which is what it is, is exacerbated when I know I have current research on my side.) I know full well that, to my frustration, I do not have the social skill to make people see my way of interpreting the evidence. Trauma and fear means I often give in to avoid the situation when the other person presents a reasoned argument. For years, I have marveled at the people who are able to say exactly the same thing I just said and get people to agree with them. It’s a skill I don’t have. Body language? Tone of voice? Social rapport building? Probably a combination. Whatever it is; I don’t know how to do it. That’s a problem when you have a social communication disability and you’re being evaluated on your ability to coordinate a cohesive team unit. The problem is even worse when not everyone is coming from the same background/approach. (And the problem is only exacerbated by the experience of administrators who invalidated my voice in the process, or who flat out told me they didn’t believe I could do it. I haven’t learned better strategies, only more fear.)

I feel safest in a very silo-ed approach. I feel most comfortable if there is allowance for disagreement in approach among team members, but we all can do what we believe is best. I believe students benefit from multiple approaches, and that’s part of it. The other part is that because I don’t feel threatened, I’m able to work more cooperatively/productively with everyone on the team. But that model is not acceptable in modern special education. Consistency is the name of the game. We all must be on the same page, defined as taking the same approach to everything: lock stock and barrel. That makes me very uncomfortable. I’m neurodivergent; I simply don’t think the same way as everyone else. 

I tried working in an ultra-“consistency-is-everything” environment back at the beginning of my career. That experience marks clearly the start my education-system related trauma. Back then I totally drank the kool-aid. I believed in the system completely. Unfortunately, that school quickly and explicitly showed me that my brain didn’t respond to stimulus the same way. Purely by virtue of being neurodivergent, I was physically unable to live up to their standard of consistency. That experience has colored my feelings and approach to the whole concept ever since. (I’m not sure I was explicitly aware of it until I just typed that sentence. I knew the trauma was effecting me emotionally, but I’m not sure I understood how it was effecting my work until now.)

I’ve known for several years know that my trauma and my neurodivergence were causing most of my stress at work. I knew I was part of the problem (everyone has a role in a social interaction problem.) I knew my trauma stemmed from the reactions I’ve received over the years to my neurodivergence, but I always focused on the ableism in special education as the root cause. Special Education is incredibly ableist, but in reality I’m quite good at navigating that aspect of my chosen field. This trauma is pedagological. That’s why I have never been able to figure out how I could be successfully accommodated. I still don’t have an answer for how that can work in the future, but now at least I’ve started asking the right question.

Autistic Life Skills: Toothbrushing

Full Disclosure: I don’t get any money for telling you what products I use, like, or don’t like. My opinions are just that, my opinions. There are no product links on this page. I assume you know how to use google.

My goal, in this “Autistic Life Skills” series is simple. To, hopefully, provide a more comprehensive understanding of the complexities of developing skills that incorporate sensory challenges, so that other teachers and parents (and other autistics who struggle with those same skills) might find some guidance to approach the teaching of these skills with less frustration on everyone’s part. Hopefully, a way to end the episodes of “wrestling a crocodile” (as the parent of one of my students describes their nightly toothbrushing routine.)

As a child, I was lucky that toothbrushing was never a battle my mother chose to pick. I thought I was very clever in the ways I hid the fact that I wouldn’t do it from her. I wasn’t; she just chose not to fight me about it. Through the luck of good genetics and floride in the water, I never got a cavity, but that luck certainly had nothing to do with my (lack of) toothbrushing.

I was in my 30s when I stopped getting nauseous and sometimes physically sick at the dentist, because I was able to advocate for myself to not get any flavored pastes (they make me sick) and to skip the floride treatment (the texture and taste - yes I can taste it!) makes me gag.

I was nearly 40 when I finally developed a tolerance for the electric toothbrushes that the dentist recommended. I still hate the Sonicare ones and won’t use them. But I worked my way up with the pulsar ones (the vibrating ones that look like manual toothbrushes) and now can use the Oral-B electric toothbrush (well, the CVS generic version!) They have a smaller brush head that means the vibrational input in my mouth is more localized, and the handle doesn’t vibrate as dramatically, so I get the input (and cleaning power) without my whole face, hand, and arm vibrating, which I never could stand. I’m still waiting for the dentist to tell me that my toothbrushing has gotten good enough that I can stop going every three months. Maybe next time?

Why do I tell that story? Because most of my students do not have the language to explain things as clearly as I just did. And yet, as verbal and generally self-aware as I am, look at how long it took for me to figure it out and find relief. I’m not saying that everyone with sensory challenges experiences dental hygiene the same way I did. I’m saying these are the places to start looking when a student struggles.

Especially when working with an older student, it’s important to recognize that there is likely a trauma component to the resistance to learning this skill. Do your research: what’s been tried in the past? How does the routine go at home? What are dental visits like? For many of our students, it’s a battle of wills with the parent at home, and either restraint or sedation at the dentist office. This is a breeding ground for trauma. You can’t start with sensory desensitization, or do sensory desensitization alone, and expect it to be effective. It might be effective in the classroom if they have a positive relationship with you, but it won’t transfer to the home environment. You have to work with the student and the parent to build trust around the routine and more positive associations.

What does that look like in practice?

We start by getting the student to hold the toothbrush.

Then we work on bringing to their face (any part accepted)

Slowly we work toward bringing to the lips.

Next is getting them to open their mouth.

Once they will hold it in their mouth for a count of 10 we can start putting it in each section of the mouth.

Then work toward top and bottom of each section.

Only after that do I introduce the “brushing” motion.

Some students can and will skip steps.

Some students do better starting with the vibration on.

The vibration scares some students away (like it did me.)

For some students we alternate: do each step without and then with vibration before moving on to the next step.

That’s going to depend on their sensory profile, and also where their sensory regulation is that day. (I know I’m more sensory defensive when I’m anxious or tired.)

Toothbrushing is a challenge, but it shouldn’t be a battle. Take on the challenge, work with your student, but know when to pick your battles and don’t make it a battle you choose to pick. 

When We Were Alone: Teaching our (Current) History with Residential Schools

The picture book study for this year’s Global Read Aloud was a pair of indigenous authors and illustrators. The use of language in the books was rich, and gave us ample opportunities to make connections to our own use of multiple communication strategies, as all of my students this year are multimodal AAC communicators. The themes fit beautifully into our social-emotional instruction, as we have been focusing on working together and what it means to be a community.

Then we reached the last book in the book study, “When We Were Alone” by Richard Anderson, illustrated by Julie Flett. The book makes great use of repetitive language that helps make the complex topic of indigenous residential schools more cognitively accessible. I have a student in my classroom who was previously placed at a residential school “far away from home” (as the story says) and who has a trauma history from that placement. I was initially a little apprehensive about reading this story with him. Would he understand it? Would he make the connection? From the first read-through, this student, who usually has difficulty sitting for lessons, sat with rapt attention for this story. His eyes were glued to every page as I read. It was clear the story had his interest. 

I did not draw, or ask him to draw, explicit connections to his own residential school experience. What we did was make explicit comparisons between the meaning behind the rules in the story “to make everyone the same” and the rules in our classroom “to be safe” “to get our work done” and “so everyone can participate.” My students’ active participation in these activities reinforced our classroom values more than any explicit teaching could have done.

I will say it explicitly here: My student’s former placement was a residential ABA program. While the stories are different, at far too many programs the strategies and intentions are the same as the story we read. ABA-based strategies, applied to appropriate skills, are not, by themselves, the problem. It’s the values and intentions that drive them that are deeply problematic and lead to student trauma. For teachers looking to broach this controversial topic with their class, this book may be a great place to start.

Emotions in the Autism Classroom

I teach a social skills curriculum with a focus on recognizing and labeling emotions in self and others. We do a lot of work in that class around matching emotions to their associated behaviors, both the classic NT expressions, and students personal expressions of those emotions. 

A number of years ago, I was teaching in a very bad situation involving bulling and emotional abuse. I was too naive and oblivious at the time to be aware of much of what was happening until the situation got really bad, which is a familiar refrain for anyone who is or loves someone with significant social communication challenges. I thought I was handling it. I thought I had someone in my classroom I could trust. I was very wrong on both counts.

The instructional data from the class I was teaching at the time was very clear: the students could match feelings to behaviors given pictures, but when using video, or during role-play, they were unable to even identify how someone was feeling. Even when the actions were labeled for them (the same actions as the pictures they had memorized) they were unable to connect it to the feelings.

Yet, toward the end of my experience there, when things got really bad, my students made it very clear that they were very aware (more aware than I, myself, was) of the emotional situation in the room. One student, every time both staff were in the room, came up to me asking “Sad? Cry?” Long before I knew what was going on, another student, who had no history of aggression, began attacking the staff member who was the primary source of the abuse.

The instructional data is clear, these students did not understand emotions and their connections to behavior. But the evidence of what they did proves the data to be wrong, or at least incomplete. They couldn’t show their understanding in an academic or assessment context, but they did one better. They demonstrated them in real-world context with the people that mattered to them and had influence over their lives. Isn’t that the whole point of teaching the academic skills in the first place?

Starting to Explore Together

It’s way too easy to fall into a rut of un-reflective discrete trial training (DTT) use. The data is hard to argue with: students work their way methodically to mastery of each item, and when you’re talking about basic identification skills they do master item after item. For many students, they fall into the same rut. It’s comfortably predictable: “I point to this, I get what I want.” Is it any wonder that so many students (and their teachers) have trouble “going beyond” DTT practices? It’s a monster of their own creation.

And so, the question remains: how can we give students that predictable instructional environment without feeding that monster? How can we encourage them to grow as learners while supporting their need for security and sameness in a world that, often, doesn’t make any sense to them? 

The first answer is easy: let students stim. That’s a no-brainer. But the second isn’t that far behind: Build on the objects and properties that interest the student. Our students tend to notice and focus on properties no one else is paying attention to. It’s one of their strengths and it’s one of the reasons neurotypical teachers find them hard to reach. They’re busy focusing on how the object tastes or if it flies when the teacher wants them to count! Let students get to know all the properties of the objects you’re working on. (Yes, explore the textures, tastes, how far they fly, if they bounce, etc.) It might take longer to learn to count, but if you step into the learning, use your language learning strategies (e.g. aided language modeling), the student will actually come out ahead on the other side. More importantly, they will come out with their sense of self intact and validated. They will be ready to take on bigger and more complex learning challenges because they have the foundational skills and because they have the belief in themselves as learners. Even the best intended teacher-driven task memorization cannot accomplish that.

Building Learning Habits

One of the earliest ways we build positive learning habits is by pairing learning with the activities the student would prefer to be doing. For some students, that’s a first/then activity board, for others, that’s using high interest manipulatives. For students with significant anxiety or trauma around learning, that means pairing instructional demands with preferred activities (non-contingent reinforcement). In my current classroom, I have students using all three strategies. 

Using edibles for reinforcement, even non-continently, isn’t my preferred instructional strategy. But it’s a stepping stone to building learning habits. I have a student who, when school started less than a month ago, would tantrum every time we said it was time to do anything he perceived as “work.” He spent much of the day trying to get snacks out of his snack bag. We began pairing snacks from his snack bag with actively participating in academic work. Multiple times this week, I observed him to come independently to the table when told it was time for an academic task and sit with his snack bag expectantly waiting for the task. He is beginning to develop a new mental model and expectation of what school means. He is developing learning habits.

The next step has traditionally been hard for many of my students. These are students who are able to join learning activities, but do not persist in task completion. If the task becomes challenging (or boring) these students will mentally (or physically) “check out.” They do not (yet) have the learning habit of “seeing it through” probably because nobody has ever explained to them what the goal is that they are trying to accomplish. Unfortunately though perhaps unsurprisingly, most interventions (that should be a red flag right there!) for students who struggle with this learning behavior is compliance-based. The answer to “why should I have to do/finish this should never be “because I said so.” Targeted instruction in my classroom is focusing on teaching students about their goals and how to measure their own progress (short and long term). Creating progress monitoring habits will help students to persist in task completion without relying on compliance or building staff dependency.

More than content, teachers strive to instill a love of learning in students, especially those who do not see themselves as learners or who have not had positive experiences with school in the past. We do that by building relationships with our students and creating a culture of trust and risk-taking. We do that by teaching and fostering positive learning habits. Learning is about much more than ABC and 123.