Teaching Practices
...Individuals with Autism, Their Parents, and siblings”
1) Educators are important in the assessment process because they are on the ‘front lines’, monitoring their students. As a classroom teacher, what clues would you look for if you suspected a co-morbid disorder in an autistic child?
The text recommends that in assessing or evaluating a student for a co-morbid disorder, the teacher needs to look for signs or clues that are obvious and apparent, pointing towards a psychiatric disorder, and it must be seen separate and unrelated to the disability. “ The starting point for making a decision in diagnosis must be the assumption that psychiatric disorders in developmentally disabled individuals are conceptually the SAME as in non-developmentally disabled individuals ( Lainhart, 21). Therefore, teachers must be able to see warning signs of an impending mental illness and keep those baseline recordings of mood separate from the child’s disability.
After a suspicion has surfaced, a certified psychologist must evaluate the child for the characters needed to make a correct diagnosis. For instance, for a child to be diagnosed with depression, the child must have noticeable changes in either appetite, sleep patterns, bodily change, loss of interest, loss of motivation, and neuro-vegetative functioning. Otherwise, other ideas that teachers should keep in mind during psychiatric assessment (informal), is any noticeable changes in a student that 1) lasts long in duration 2) is a novel behavior for the child 3) is accompanied by other indicative behaviors, and 4) seems to fit the description of a psychiatric disorder. I believe that these concepts will come naturally to any teacher that is responsible and responsive to the individual needs of his or her students.
2) Lainhart lists a variety of cognitive deficits associated with autism. What educational...
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