It's no secret that our students with social learning challenges (Autism Spectrum Disorders; ADHD, NVLD, undiagnosed murky kid...) struggle through various aspects of their education. Whether their struggles are due to difficulties establishing peer based social relationships, completing academic assignments or both, our kids have not had it easy. Given a lack of development in the pathways to participating in related aspects of a school day that most of us develop intuitively (e.g., social thinking and related social skills, organizational skills, inferencing and synthesizing information, etc.), all persons who have come in direct contact with our students have had to think out of the box to develop more lessons and opportunities for learning explicitly what neurotypical students learn mostly implicitly. It's not this "easy" for our kids with social learning challenges, nor is it easy for their parents or their teachers.

I have seen too many "bright" kids with Asperger Syndrome, high functioning autism and ADHD march off to college programs only to fall apart and drop out. Stewing in anxiety and depression a number of our students don't take steps to progress in their learning and independence, they instead slip into dysfunction with few safety nets to catch them.

I think a lot about how to avoid this descent for those who experience it.

After years of working with teens who are transitioning to adulthood and with adults who are trying to increase their social and executive functioning abilities to maintain employment or make friends, here is what I have learned: many of our "bright" folks with social learning challenges need to work at developing motivation to want to learn to help themselves while they are in the K-12 school years and certainly into their adult years. By accident, the IEP process often makes it appear it is the teachers problem and a parents problem that a student was not able to learn a set of skills, in that we expect so many adults to adapt a curriculum to meet a student's learning abilities, but this is far from the "real world" of what awaits our students once they step a foot outside of high school and into college or work environments. To truly help our students to learn they need to find the motivation to take "ownership" of what they have to do to help themselves succeed as early as upper elementary school, certainly by middle school and at the latest by high school. This entire process of shifting from dependency to independence has to begin much earlier than high school graduation day. Some of the most important people to help make this shift happen are the parents. They have to move from depending on a team of adults to figure out how to help an adult to succeed to having the student learn how he can help him or herself to succeed. However, this is all but impossible when we load our students up with so many assignments, honors, AP classes that they can't see straight. Of course, to help our students find their motivation we also have to talk to them about what they want for themselves in the future. Some of our kids have never enjoyed the school process but they are being sent straight into college/university programs because they are "smart". Does this make sense? Recently I read an excellent book written for professionals who work with our students at the college level, Students with Asperger Syndrome: A Guide for College Personnel, (2009) by, Wolf, L., Thierfeld Brown, J. & Kukiela Bork, G.R. and published by Autism Asperger Publishing. We now have it available for sale on our website.

I highly recommend it as a book to read not only for persons working in higher education but also for parents and counselors of middle and high school students who are exploring sending students into the junior college, college-university learning experience (although I hear an edition of this book is being written specifically for parents and teachers of secondary aged students). Many aspects of what is expected from our students in the college learning environments is reviewed in this book and are critical to our students' success at this level of education that go far beyond a student's natural intelligence. Some of the aspects they review include executive functioning, written expression, reading comprehension and social relationship challenges for actively participating in their own academic accomplishments. Furthermore, they review aspects our students need to work on to also succeed in the "co-curricular" elements of a college campus some of which include living with roommates, eating soundly, managing ones free time/leisure time, developing healthy relationships and managing anxiety. Throughout their book they discuss concepts and skills our students need to work on at the college level, but the reality is that the majority of the concepts they discuss in this book we need to actively teach our students in middle and high school, if not before. If we wait until college to teach students to be responsible for their own workloads and managing their organizational skills, learning to establish social relatedness, we have waited too long. Neurotypical students are able to establish some mastery of most of these skills while in a highly supportive environment and then could generalize and refine these concepts when faced with living with less structure/more independence. To teach all these concepts while a student is facing the least amount of direct support in his life can be truly overwhelming. This blog is written to encourage us to think about ways we can try and put our students into situations where they can succeed post high school, rather than default to the "norm" that all bright students or those who were "fully mainstreamed" should find their way onto a college campus as the next step in their lives. Quite frankly, I observe way too many smart and talented kids, as well as students with serious cognitive learning challenges being sent off to these environments only to fail, given that it was falsely believed by the IEP team or family that being smart, or talented in one particular area or being fully mainstreamed was all one needs to succeed in a college environment.

It is critical that we recognize collectively that being intellectually smart does not mean a person has the skills or motivation to succeed at the level of higher education. In fact, a student who has high skills but weak motivation to learn new social and organizational adaptations, will likely fair far worse that a student with weak skills but high motivation! Motivation to keep learning and problem solving is a key component to success. I have in fact worked with students who had serious social thinking learning challenges but their motivation to help themselves was so high, they did succeed with graduating from college. I have also worked with many, many students with some very high academic skills with very poor motivation and they tend not to succeed. For these students we need to provide choices to help them better navigate what they want to do for themselves as they go out into the larger world.

Here are some of my thoughts on how to get closer to addressing these concepts prior to graduation:

1. The IEP team needs to realize, that when the "entitlements" of public law are carried too far, we then teach our students to become further disabled rather than moving towards independence. While we can easily insist on providing full-time paraprofessional assistance and close teacher/parent monitoring of our students' until the day they graduate, this in no way encourages a student to learn to "own" his own decision making and problem solving. To allow our students to learn responsibility before they graduate from high school, we have to create IEPs that encourage students to accept responsibility for their education and apply the lessons they are learning as part of developing social relationships and self-advocating. This means that both parents and professionals need to allow students to experience their own outcomes for their decision-making. If a student is a junior in high school and he/she is planning on going onto college but is not turning in his homework assignments, it needs to become the student's responsibility by teaching him or her how this is related to problem solving their own dilemmas. If we continue to have teachers make accommodations for a student by having the teacher ask him for his assignment rather than have the student develop a strategy for remembering to turn it in, then how are we preparing this student for increasing independence? How do we teach him to "own" his own decisions and realize the natural consequences? How will this student know how to turn in an assignment in college if he never had to turn one in on his own in high school? If we have a student supported by a 1:1 aide through his senior year and then send that student to a college program the next year, we have almost completely guaranteed his failure once out of our structured environment. Even if the student doesn't have a 1:1 aide but still has mom, dad and his resource teacher monitoring his every assignment and providing close assistance any time he/she experiences anxiety, we once again are not preparing this student for the huge leap he will have to take post graduation. To summarize, just because a student of 16, 17 or 18 may be legally entitled to continued intensive monitoring until he graduates, is it really in his best interest?

2. To allow for these shifts from adult-centered responsibility for a student's education and social accomplishments to student centered responsibility for their own accomplishments, parents of special needs children have to learn to adjust that "less can be more". At times "less is more" means being able to remove some of the direct monitoring systems we have in place as discussed above. At other times "less is more" means we have to put less on their plates to allow the students to feel the accomplishment of doing the work for themselves. A negative side effect I have witnessed from No Child Left Behind is the heavy push we established for all students to remain age based learners. Our students are born to serious learning disabilities; they can't all keep pace with academic and social learning of their peers. We then artificially try to keep our students afloat. They know they are not keeping up but they don't have the words to say it. We then try and keep them on pace with sending them into college programs. When they fail or drop out one of their first lessons of their young adulthood is that they have failed. When they feel they have failed, they now have compounded mental health problems related to anxiety and/or depression. It is important to keep in mind that our students' failures don't look like an "Asperger melt-down"; they look like they are mentally ill. They stop functioning. They become more dependent on adult support rather than more independent.

3. In the literature, having a student to help make decisions about his own life in high school is called "person centered planning" and "self-determination". However, how can students plan for their own lives if they don't know what they can personally, realistically accomplish given how much "under the table" assistance they receive in the name of IEP services or 504 plans? How can they decide what is realistic if they have no understanding of the real options available to them? Keep in mind many of our students are not abstract learners. They only know what they experience and all they have ever experienced is a fully structured school day. Like it or not, this is the routine they are used to; upon high school graduation the only thing they know is to continue to seek the routine of attending classes. This means we have to provide our students when they are in high school, with options. We need to try and set aside our own family values for a college education and look at the person for who they are in their Sophomore, Junior years to evaluate if they are demonstrating the self-learning and self-motivation to actively engage in a college curriculum - meaning they will still have to take many classes that are not geared towards their strengths. While ultimately, a college education allows a student to get a degree in an area they want to pursue, to arrive at that point they also have to take the general education classes which may be of no interest. To get through these classes requires grit and resilience; something many of our students lack at 15 or even 23 years old.

Two options that need to be considered in addition to college include vocational training and getting a basic paying, entry-level non-skilled job:

Vocational programs. Many high schools have an affiliation with a vocational technical program. Explore this option with students who are not succeeding with the academic learning environment, even if they are measured to be "bright". Most students can take advantage of vocational training programs by their junior year of high school. Help students explore what type of learning captures their attention best. Not all of our students enjoy book learning, many are hands-on learners and will be far more successful with a tool in their hand and a physical mission to accomplish than applying themselves into the more cognitively based learning provided through our academic classrooms. Vocational options should be considered for our "bright" kids, too often this option is dismissed and only offered the "sluggish" learner.

* Job opportunities: many of our students are loathe to listen to professionals about why they should shower, acknowledge others, take the time to consider someone else's needs until these skills are required for them to keep receiving a paycheck. Some of our students may be eventually destined for college, but need to take a pit-stop in exploring real world experiences of holding a job and being accountable to someone other than a parent, teacher or counseling professionals. Other students may feel successful simply holding a job and feeling they are doing something for themselves for the first time in their life. They may have no desire to continue with college in the immediate future. This means parents need to adjust their own cultural expectations just as much as they expected their students to adapt to the social communication expectations over the years. It is difficult to keep in mind, at times, that the real goal for our students/children is to have them feel good about themselves and to work towards goals establishing and maintaining as much independence as they can handle. If our students end up with mental-health breakdowns given the fact they ended up post-high school in an environment they could not handle, they have taken major step backwards in the development of their independence.

Some high schools have grant monies to provide "workability" type training to students with Imps, and other times family members have connections with friends in the community who can offer students internships to help them experience job skills prior to help them land a paid job

4. A parent's ability to provide a college education for their child should not mean that is a good choice for a student. Often I see adults apply ideas of what we want a student to do to demonstrate he/she is succeeding by pushing students endlessly when they are sending every message that they are not able to deal with the academic or social burdens placed upon them. All this being said, there are students who "make it". But these are typically the students we accurately predict have the motivation and skills to work through the personal challenges of increased independence awarded them simply by graduating from high school.

In part two of this blog I will pose 13 questions to explore to consider for the student you are thinking about.

While maturity certainly can be our students' friend as they age; from my experience they need a stable emotional base from which they can use their maturity to tackle the increased load of adult responsibility. We hope to have the 2nd part of this blog posted in a couple of weeks.

© Michelle Garcia Winner 2011
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Go to Part 2 - questions for your student/s to think about

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