Hi folks. It is Thursday, it is right on 12 o’clock. I am here doing my fourth live q and a session of the week. The question that I’ve got in front of me today, I’m just gonna dive straight into it, is about, it’s from a speech therapist saying that she works in a school. She has just started working with a young autistic boy. He’s really quiet. He barely spoke at all in the first session, and she used a standardized assessment, wasn’t sure what else to do, but didn’t feel like it told her much.

Good. So like, yeah, you’re on the right track. Um. Yeah, to reflect that the standardized assessment didn’t quite do the whole thing. He didn’t really engage. It didn’t feel like getting an accurate picture. She’s got parent and teacher reports that he talks a lot, especially about animals and Minecraft who doesn’t, they’re awesome topics.

Um, and so yeah, that’s very different to what she was seeing in that first session. Yeah, none of this is completely surprising. If you are autistic or if you have an autistic client, student, if you’ve met an autistic person, you might recognize this. This idea that. Who we see in the very first meeting might be very, very different to, uh, you know, who that child actually is, what they can actually do, or who we are and all of our actual capacities.

When it’s an unfamiliar person, an unfamiliar setting, perhaps an unmotivating situation like. For many kids doing a standardized assessment is just not very interesting or motivating or exciting as well. You know, like why? What’s the why? And for us autistic folks understanding why we should be doing anything can be even more important.

Um, otherwise. Yeah. Like what, what, what are we doing here? Um, so what I wanted to share is in my affirming communication for Autistic Children course, I have a whole module where we talk about what affirming, uh, communication assessment is for autistic kids. Just to be clear, I’m not talking about doing an assessment to determine whether a child is autistic or not.

That’s outside the scope of this course. This module specifically is about when you know, or you think that a child might be autistic. Often the ways we work with kids who are or may be, um, a certain neurotype, it doesn’t make a big difference. We’re still seeing them for who they are, supporting them for who they are.

But in this case, we’re gonna say for a child who is autistic, how do you do an affirming communication assessment? And I think the hunch of this particular speech therapist is really spot on. It’s the fact that sometimes we might go to the standardized assessments. Because either we have to, if we’re working within really rigid funding or education systems where we actually unfortunately have to provide results of a certain assessment, I acknowledge this happens.

It’s a really like ecologically invalid way of doing any kind of support for people. But that’s the, that’s the truth. And so maybe you just have to do it. Go through the motions. That’s one piece. If you have. All the ability to choose what kind of assessment you’re doing with an autistic child. I would almost never do a standardized assessment in this case.

Um, you’ve already got it started, so you might wanna continue as long as it wasn’t causing the child actual distress. But what’s super, super important is that you’re thinking about how you report on this. Make sure that you are really contextualizing that, uh, the results of the standardized assessment as just a small piece of all the information about that child.

It is so far from the full picture, you already know that. Um. So what else do you do? Uh, look, first of all, I think it’s really important to build relationship first and then assess and report if possible, if you can take time to do it. It sounds like already you’ve had your first session and you didn’t have to have that whole assessment complete then.

So that’s good news. Some services. You are bound to this. DO assessment in that first session, complete report, and then get on with therapy. And that doesn’t always work. In fact, it rarely works to get a real, genuine, good assessment of an autistic child’s communication capability if they are. Um, if we have to, if we feel like we have to do all the assessment and then reporting after just that very first meeting, it’s just not gonna be very representative of the child.

So if you can build relationship first and then return to more formal assessment, great. You may not even need to return to more formal assessment, building connection, even within that session. So finding space, you know, in your second session to connect with that child, have some engagement. And if you do feel like.

Or you know, that you need to do some formal, uh, like assessment activities still within that session. Build a relationship. First, have connection, do something much more child led, engaging, and that is still part of your assessment. So having this ongoing, dynamic, real life, observational, rational way to understand how a child communicates and interacts.

Is it’s essential, absolutely essential. It can’t be missing from any of our assessments for any of the kids that we’re supporting. Even more important for the autistic kids that we’re working with, because, well, many reasons. One of them standardize assessments, leave out so many people in their standardizing uh, populations.

So very often neurodivergent kids are excluded from. Who is in that representative sample. In that assessment, very often there’s under significant underrepresentation for people who are not white, not of the mainstream dominant culture, for people who are disabled in any way. Uh, it, it’s just, I don’t know.

Maybe this is my rebel autistic brain. I, I kind of hate standardized assessments. Okay. They have a place. They have a place, but. Too often in our industry, standardized assessments are prized as some gold standard concrete thing to hold onto and, and often at the expense of clinical judgment. Anyway. As always, I could talk on and on and on about this.

Um, I do, I do in my course affirming communication for Autistic Children. The whole of module one is all about affirming assessments. Now, this is such a crucial part of how we proceed with supporting autistic kids. You need to understand who is this whole child in front of you? How do they communicate and interact, not.

As a benchmark against a bunch of other kids who are not like them because something we know about autistic communication, we communicate in a different way. It is not wrong. The standardized assessments will likely have us feel that it is wrong. Um. It’s a different culture, it’s a different communication.

I’m not gonna lump us all into one bucket and say, we all communicate in this way. There are tendencies. There are, you know, commonalities between many of us autistic folks, and they’re often very different to how neurotypical people communicate. So you might get pragmatic communication checklists that will punish someone for info dumping, but.

I mean, what am I doing here? I’ve made a career out of info dumping, info dumping, if that’s not familiar term, is basically just, you know, sharing a whole lot of stuff on one topic. Uh, I ps I appreciate you being here, allowing me to info dump with you or at you. Um, and. Sorry, I just had a little sidebar of, I’m interrupting myself also.

Not very, um Okay. In neurotypical circles, but in neurodivergent communication it can go all over the shop, so, yeah. I’m just checking. I haven’t missed any messages. Anyway, hello to those of you who are here live by, live by the way. Um, I’m just gonna have a little think if I’ve missed, oh, yeah. I have missed talking about something, a whole aspect of talking about this communication.

This child’s communication, you’ve met them once. You’re seeing them in this strange context, strange to them, context. And you’re not getting a representative view of their communication. The other thing you absolutely need to do is be taking into account things like parent report, teacher report, um, even getting videos like getting parents, teachers, if possible, trickier for teachers.

Uh, getting parents at least to send videos of that child communicating and interacting in their more. Familiar place with their more familiar communication partners about their more familiar topics. That is going to tell you a whole lot about the range of their communication abilities and the impact of the environment and the communication partner, and the interaction between the child and the communication partner.

That’s the information that really leads us to get a genuine, deep understanding of what’s going on for the child. And what’s tricky or even what’s tricky for the grownups around them to understand how to best support the child in their communication. All of that to say, I have a framework that I teach, which I’ve covered actually all bits of it here.

I call it C pie, as in the letter CI dunno which way the video is going. Um, and pie as in pie that you eat. Uh, so CPIE, which is basically four domains for areas that you must include when you’re assessing, should be any child. An absolutely an autistic child. C is for the child. So make sure that you are, um oh.

Look, I got a little thumbs up. Um, a you’re doing an assessment of the child’s communication style, their interests, uh, quite a descriptive view, ideally, um, of their, you know, the routines. What gives them joy, what frustrates them? What are their goals for themselves for, well, P in CPA is for partner, so.

Factors around their main communication partners skills, abilities, goals, beliefs, expectations. So it could be parents, could be teacher, could be you as well. Um, you may not document that for yourself in the report, but you might, I hope you do reflect on your own impact on that interaction as well. Um, I is interaction.

So we’ve got the child and we’ve got the parent or the partner, or the teacher or the therapist as two people. And the interaction is what connects us is what connects the two people. So there’s always a dynamic there, and if there’s something you can report on, what helps to strengthen that interaction?

Where is it aligned? Like where does the child have a communication style that really matches or mismatches with a communication partner, for example? Uh, and then an E is the environment. So that is what encompasses everything else. So the environment is something we have to be thinking about and noting in our reports.

Things like what is the impact of the physical environment? Um, changes of routine, uh, sensory impacts as well. So if there’s, you know, if the child’s very sensitive to sound, what’s the impact of having, uh, being in the classroom that’s next to the road? There’s a lot of sound going on. I say that as an example ’cause I can hear some street noise over here.

Slightly distracting, but that’s okay. Um. Uh, yeah. Anyway, so all of that, I go through this in so much depth with cases, with examples, templates, and I even provide you with a custom chat GPT tool that I’ve created, um, which helps you figure out what exact kind of language you could use that turns your.

Report language into more neurodiversity affirming language. Uh, now I have this as a PDF. Some of you may have, uh, like got that and read that, but A PDF, it’s just a PDF when you actually, you know, you’re in the middle of writing a report for a client and you think, okay, I wanna write something. Um, I’m just gonna give an example here of like non non affirming language.

Sorry about my hand there. Uh, just gotta move that like you might, let’s say, typically have written, um, we’ll go with Billy. So we’re gonna de-identify. It’s not really Billy. Billy presents with significant deficits in pragmatic language, including poor eye contact, difficulty initiating conversations, and a lack of understanding and non-verbal cues.

So I’m literally gonna put this into my, um, custom nd affirming report language bot. So it’s a custom chat GPT bot, basically that I’ve created and trained to. You literally can paste in your report language, but don’t, um. Yeah, it, it, it cautions you. Don’t share identifying information. Um, it doesn’t go through to me or anything.

We just don’t know a hundred percent where it goes next. So as long as you just write like child or, uh, an initial, that’s all good anyway. Um, so let’s see what it does with that little piece of, uh, non affirming report language. Also, the other caution is it does remind you that you are the clinician, you are the professional.

So you do need to ensure that what it suggests to you actually is true and comprehensive and useful in describing that child. Uh, so here’s another, uh, like an affirming reframe. It suggests. Billy communicates in ways that may differ from neurotypical expectations. He tends to use limited eye contact and often requires support to initiate conversations and interpret nonverbal cues.

These differences are consistent with communication styles commonly ever, uh, observed in autistic individuals. Not bad. I’d probably do some tweaking. Um, I say not bad. I created this, I trained it. So yeah, look, it’s never gonna be perfect. It’s ai, but this is like, if you can’t, um. You know, you’re figuring it out in the moment.

You’re sitting there writing your report and you think, okay, I know this isn’t quite it. How else could I write it? I hope that this could be a bit of a thinking partner to spark you, uh, kind of creating your reports in a way. And it’s not just about what you’re writing. It’s really gonna help you reframe your thinking about how you approach supporting a child, how you approach a child’s communication.

So this tool, I’ve had great feedback from the speeches that have let me know so far how helpful it. Speed for them. This is one of the three AI tools in my affirming communication for autistic children course. Can you hear that noise? There’s a plane going over that’s very distracting. Environmental noise for me.

I’m okay. I hope you are too. Um, so in my course there’s so much, but yeah, I provide three tools and there might be more in the future if you let me know that an AI version of something will help you, um, you know, really take what I teach and put it into action in your daily life. Let me know ’cause I can create it.

I want to make your life easy. I wanna make it, um, really straightforward for you to go from this, the, the theory, the understanding, learning about neurodiversity affirming approaches with autistic kids and go straight into, and now I know how to apply it, and now I’ve got the tools and support to apply it.

And in the application you’ll continue to learn as well. So that is all I wanted to share for today. Thank you so much for being here. I will say in. One day and 45 minutes from this moment as I’m recording at 1:00 PM Friday, the 4th of April, Sydney time, doors close for my affirming communication for Autistic children course.

My course for speech therapists, there are over 300 by now. I probably need to update it. I think we’re at about 350. Speech therapists have already joined and participated in the course and I’ve had such amazing feedback. I’m so grateful. And, uh, on average there’s been. 4.7 star feedback out of five possible stars, um, over a hundred people who’ve rated it.

So I, uh, think I, you know, like to share that. Like, it’s, it’s not perfect and I’m always learning and improving and you can see I’m so, so proud of it. It’s an amazing course, amazing practical, um, way to help you take these great intentions. You want to support your autistic clients in affirming ways. You have that in you and what you may not have is so much time to, to sit and do the learning, or time to process the changes that you need to make in your report, templates in your business and clinical structures.

All of these things, they take time and effort. And my hope is to help you shortcut that with all the tools and support that I provide. So anyway, if you have more questions, I’ll be popping back up on Instagram for a quick live on Friday, tomorrow at 12:00 PM Sydney time. And uh, yeah, I’ll be able to answer any questions.

So send me a message, send me an email, and I will chat to you tomorrow. Have a great day.