Autism-Friendly Teaching with Katharine Beals

In this episode, we hear from Katharine Beals, author of Students with Autism: How to Improve Language, Literacy, and Academic Success, published by John Catt Educational. In this conversation, we hear about Katharine’s experience and research in educating students on the autism spectrum, particularly what educators should be doing to best support these students. 

“I think that there are some gaps that can be filled. In order to prepare someone for an autism-specific classroom, you would need to go into a great deal of depth. Particularly because what we know about autism implies teaching considerations that may be counterintuitive to some people. Autistic children need a degree of structure and direct instruction that many classroom teachers are not prepared or encouraged to provide.” 

The goal of Students with Autism is to give teachers the support they need and some research-based practices to include in the classroom. The book takes a particular linguistic approach to educating students on the spectrum that can be implemented into whole-class instruction. This work goes hand-in-hand with her work with SentenceWeaver, a comprehensive linguistic software curriculum for language-impaired students with autism. 

Listen to more episodes of Author Chats.