Ep. 14: How to Gather Neurodiversity Affirming Observation Data
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What is the purpose of the episode and who are the hosts?
What's up, everyone? Welcome to Making the Shift.
Where we listen to autistic voices.
Explore new therapy ideas.
And share neurodiversity-affirming methods and strengths-based approaches to support autistic kids.
Because we're not here to try and, quote, fix kids.
We are here to love them, embrace them, and celebrate them for who they are. I'm Jessi Ginsberg, sensory integration trained SLP, founder of a top-rated speech therapy clinic in Los Angeles, and creator of the Inside Out Sensory Certificate for SLPs.
And I'm Chris Winger, also known as Speech Dude, high school SLP, and creator of the Dynamic Assessment for Social Emotional Learning. Are you ready to make the shift?
Let's do it.
Hi everyone. Sorry for, we had a little tech issue. We thought we were streaming to you and we were streaming elsewhere. So good times.
We've had to bounce around. We've had to try to figure out our background and that didn't work either. So bear with us as we have this professionalism here going with our, with our background. We're fine with that. But what we're going to do is we're going to jump right into the topic that we were talking about.
Yes. To ourselves.
To ourselves.
On a dead live stream.
We were
like, there's not really many people here. What's going on?
What happened?
Good times. Anyway, yes, tonight we wanted to talk all about how to gather data when we observe kids. That is neurodiversity affirming. And I think This topic is not only important for therapists, but for parents to understand as well, right?
Right. Absolutely. This is like an extremely important topic. This is actually the topic where sometimes if we base information on what we knew in the past, we might be observing the wrong things. And that's what we wanted to talk about tonight is what are some of the things that we should be observing?
Yeah, because right now, basically, like any checklist when we're assessing kids is all based on neurotypical norms.
Yeah, absolutely.
So it's just this idea that it is really not fair to judge our autistic students based off of norms of a different neurotype.
Right, absolutely. But unfortunately... Unfortunately, I'm going to say unfortunately, unfortunately. Unfortunately, the forms that were given as professionals, sometimes parents are given these forms as well. The language and the things that we're supposed to be observing are not the right things because it comes from a deficit-based model. It comes from historically what students can't do. And it doesn't take into consideration that students autism is a different neurotype. It doesn't take into consideration neurodivergent minds.
Yeah. And look, Lucy just wrote in the chat, parents get very sad after these assessments. Yeah, of course. It's like I were to test you. I don't know. We'll see where I'm going with this analogy. But it's like if I were to say, okay, now I'm going to have you do pole vaulting. Let's see how high you can jump. And you're like, but I am not a pole vaulter and I've never trained for this in my life.
Right. I like that. Or how about this? How about saying, you know what? We know that you're left-handed, but what we're going to do is we're going to give you a test. And everything that you do with your agility, your physical movements, your writing has to be with your right hand. And then we're going to compare how you did. And then we're going to force you to become right-handed because, hey, you're left-handed. That's not okay. So it's kind of like that concept, that analogy. We got to get away from the thinking of, we're turning autistic students into neurotypical students, because that's just not an okay model.
Why do traditional observation checklists for autistic children need to change?
But that's how the language is written. So let me give you some examples of very common or very common questions that are asked in some of these forms, some for parents, but a lot of them for the professionals as well. So if I am doing an assessment, at school on the campus oftentimes the therapist would go out and observe the student maybe in an unstructured setting or the school psychologist would observe the student in the classroom and the forms that we get the language that's in them are things that will say things like this is the student making eye contact with the others in the group right
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the purpose of the episode and who are the hosts?
0:08–4:04
2
Why do traditional observation checklists for autistic children need to change?
4:04–19:11
3
Which common assessment items (eye‑contact, humor, stimming) are harmful to record?
19:11–27:36
4
What neurodiversity‑affirming data should we collect instead of deficit‑based metrics?
27:36–29:02
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from The NeuroAffirm Podcast
Ep. 125 How to Run Successful Social Groups
Ep. 124 Building Rapport Isn’t Enough...How Therapists Become Part of the Intervention
Ep. 123 Not Seeing Progress in Speech Therapy? Start Here.
Ep. 122 Screen Time Considerations for Autistic Kids
Ep. 121 The Biggest Sensory Mistakes SLPs Make
Ep. 120 Why Anxiety is So Common in Autism (And What Actually Helps)