Educating Students With Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Model for High-Quality Coaching offers a unique coaching model with a practical approach for special education teachers and related service providers who face the challenge of providing effective support to students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). By empowering special education and speech-language pathologists to participate as coaches, they can go beyond simple accommodations to actively promote a less restrictive setting, dynamically assess skills, deliver effective instructional and behavioral programming, and effectively build a coaching network to engage students throughout the school day.

Provided in this text are vignettes that illustrate the reality of special education. Additionally, approaches for addressing the real-word needs of students with ASD are provided, along with evidence-based support that describes the positive results of the strategies described. This text also introduces coaching methods that will guide teachers and instructional staff to create and maintain a "solutions-focused" coaching community.

The first section of the book presents a multi-tiered model for providing coaching at varying levels of support intensity, along with the numerous important considerations involved in implementing effective coaching supports. The second section presents an outline of effective practices in utilizing coaching strategies to support teachers in planning for the instruction of meaningful skills to students with ASD utilizing a team-based, collaborative coaching model. The third section provides numerous practical, evidence-based strategies to be used by coaches and teachers in teaching meaningful skills to students with ASD. The final chapter addresses critical issues involved in building the capacity of districts to evaluate, oversee and support the effective coaching of teachers in providing evidence-based practices to students with ASD.

Educating Students With Autism Spectrum Disorder serves as a clinical guide and delivers a practical discussion of high-quality coaching as an emerging best practice for supporting special educators (teachers and paraprofessionals) as well as school-based service providers (speech-language pathologists and occupational therapists). It is a valuable primary text for special education teachers in training, a resource for professional development personnel, and a tool for researchers and graduate students in education and teaching programs.

Key features include:

Chapter objectivesReal-life vignettesReproducible formsSummary questions