Autism thinking styles - A practical overview

So my team are all here today and they said to me, how are you going to follow that? So this is how. Hopefully at the end of this session, you'll have more understanding about autistic thinking styles and how to respond to those effectively. So I guess one of the key important things in this talk is that I am autistic. So this is from both professional experience and personal lived experience. So we have what's colloquially known as black and white thinking styles, which psychologists and psychiatrists like to talk about as concrete or fixed or rigid thinking styles. And I always think that's really interesting because as we know in South Australia, concrete falls apart when it rains. We do tend to over-generalize and under-generalize, which is a big problem. So as you can see up here, we're going to cut the bread in the sandwich before we put the things on it. That's a problem. We also only take off our top if we go in the shower in this instruction. So when we're thinking about how we address concrete thinking, we have to teach context and meaning. Do you really chop the bread first? Does it matter what order you put the ingredients into the sandwich? So I carefully took my sandwich apart at lunch because it had raw onion in and sandwiches shouldn't have raw onions in. No food should have raw onions in. But we also need to scaffold how to generalize and the exceptions to the rule. So I was out at a school yesterday with my colleagues and we were talking about the no hands in pants. I said this is such a stupid rule because how do you get your pants down to go to the toilet unless you put your hands in your pants? I know it's only your thumbs, but it's still hands in pants. So that's not really what we mean either when we're talking about that. So we then got on to, well, who's allowed to touch the areas under your pants because we teach that nobody should touch you in that area except for the doctor and possibly a nurse and possibly a teacher. And there's so many exceptions. And I said yes, but you have to tell autistic people these things. We can't just generalize that ourselves. We also have an interesting thinking style which relates to what you can't see doesn't exist. Typical people have good object permanence and they would know that chair is there even though they can't see it. And what we see in schools is often perceived as separation anxiety. But when you get to school and mum drops you off, mum says bye. And as soon as mum isn't there, she doesn't exist for many of us on the spectrum. Can you imagine how anxiety provoking it is that they might never exist again? Now I leave home and I say to the dog, bye, see you later. I know my dog can't speak English, but if my dog is autistic, I'm telling my dog I'm coming back. So we need to be telling children that people are coming back, that places still exist. A really good strategy around poor object permanence is to have a photograph of the parent and or the house at the end of the day. You know those kids that keep saying is it home time from five past nine until three o'clock? They're panicking that home or the family might not exist. You could have a video recording of mum saying have a nice day or enjoy day service if you're an adult service provider. Enjoy your day, enjoy your learning. See you later. I'll pick you up at and whatever time, but don't be late. You can also give opportunities, particularly for adult and young adult services, to text during the day to reconnect, to forge that connection that a person still exists. We're also quite literal. Literalness is really funny in the movies. It's not so funny in real life. Zip it up really does sound quite painful. It doesn't mean be quiet. There's a lovely story that you hear in positive partnerships if you do the positive partnerships training about a young autistic boy that at a petrol station of Servo jumped out, ran in and said my mum's drinking and driving and repeated the whole drink drive advert and they came and they breathalysed her and she'd been drinking water. But technically she was drinking and driving because the advert doesn't talk about alcohol. So we need to be really careful the way that we address literalness because literalness is quite a good thing but it can also be quite a bad thing. So when we talk about students and we say they're naughty, when my teacher said I was naughty I became really naughty. I'm very good at being naughty. If they'd have told me I was good perhaps I would have been very good at being good. We need to teach what those metaphors and idioms mean. I've been in Australia five and a half years now. It took me three years to understand what a Servo was and an Ambo. And how do you have a Smoko with the Ambo at the Servo? Like what? So it's not just about an idiom or a metaphor it's about the colloquial language that you use. And we need to teach those implicit meanings. Imagine all those young autistic people who won't drink in the car and drive. I have a water bottle in my car because I'm obsessed with hydration which we'll get to later. And I drink at traffic lights. But actually it took me a long time to be able to drink in a car because the rule is don't drink and drive. We need to be talking about do not drink alcohol and then drive. But it's also do not drink alcohol before you drive. And we don't talk about that. We talk about drunk driving. But I don't feel drunk so therefore I'm not drunk driving. We have an interesting thinking style that isn't in the diagnostic descriptions of autism. But it's that now is forever. Otherwise known as broken record thinking and many of you are too young to know what a broken record is. So it's kind of like buffering. Only worse because it doesn't end. And this is really problematic in many contexts. The most well known for many of you is when you try and get them off the computer or the game. Because for us when we stop gaming or whatever it is, we can never do it again. Do you remember that if it's not there, it doesn't exist? It's a very similar thing. Turn taking is really problematic because when it's my turn, it's my turn forever. When it's your turn, that means it's never ever going to be my turn again. And that's really quite distressing. Playing games is therefore just so problematic. It's not as simple as my turn, your turn because you have to teach it coming back again. You lose your phone. You know teenagers when they lose their phone and they get all melodramatic? Autism's like that on steroids. My phone got broken and I was very melodramatic and that was only last year. How do we address that now as forever thinking? Because it has a massive impact on teaching and learning. It has a massive impact of being able to work in the workplace. We have to be really explicit about the impermanence of everything. Jill talked about broken expectations. And I really like that as an explanation to change. But actually everything changes. I'm a second older than I was a second ago. In a year, I'm not going to have exactly the same characteristics I have now. And if we can help children and young people and adults really understand life cycles, weather changes, everything. We can help them to understand that everything changes so now cannot possibly be forever. If we can develop mindfulness there are heaps of benefits to that. But it can really help us to address that being present in the moment we can actually feel and hear and see those changes. And then when we can understand that change happens all the time being really explicit about what is going to happen. For example, in turn taking, it's not just your turn, my turn. It's your turn, my turn, and you're waiting for your turn. This is my favorite thinking style. This is why I think autistics might one day rescue the world. Social justice seems to be born with us as we are born. We come out kicking and screaming. And this young lady, Greta Thunberg, who some of you might have heard of, is a next generation leader on the cover of Time. She's autistic. If you haven't heard of her, go and Google her. And if you have autistic students that you support, share her story. We will stand up for things at enormous cost because we don't have that peer pressure in the same way. We don't understand it. So we can use this sense of social justice in a way that benefits everybody. If I can be a volunteer, I'm putting my social justice into practice in a socially acceptable manner because wearing my CND symbol at school and carrying around my little piece of paper from the UN declaration that said I had the right to wear it was not popular. When we develop advocacy and self-advocacy skills, we can create a whole generation of politicians and social and community leaders that are doing things for the right reason. We heard a number of times today about teaching young people who to seek help from and how to seek help. For autistics, we also need to teach them what to report because sometimes we are little police people and we'll report every broken rule except the one we broke. And set aside time for problem solving. I'm privileged to have a number of neurodiverse people work with me. And one of the things we're great at is seeing problems and then finding creative solutions to them. Use that creative material to fix what we know. Quite logical. If this happens, then that happens. But we don't always see the bigger picture. So our logic doesn't match your logic and that's a problem. But you can use that if and then logic to help us generalize and apply new skills and knowledge. Maybe about, I don't know, eight years ago, my wife asked me to go out for breakfast. And this is a problem because I can't leave the house without having breakfast. So I learned that it's actually okay to leave the house without having breakfast. And now I know that it's always okay. So if I go somewhere and I don't like the breakfast, it's okay to not eat it and I can go somewhere else to have breakfast. So one small conversation has helped me generalize something that I didn't have for 30 odd years. Doesn't have to just be around education. One of the things that autistics tend not to do is use emotion as a decision-making tool. So when you go and buy a new car, how many of you buy the car that feels right? I buy the car with the best fuel efficiency and the best safety record because I want it to get me from A to B cheaply. Feel an emotion. And if we don't understand how and why other people make emotional decisions, that's where there are problems in interpersonal skills. And if you can understand that autistics make decisions based on logic, that helps you. And if you can't see our logic, why did you think that was a good idea? What led you to that? The only thing you take away today from this talk is to mean what you say and say what you mean. I will be a happier autistic and an even happier teacher. Because when you have a conversation with an autistic, it is very rare for us to do anything other than say exactly what we mean and mean exactly what we say. We were on a road trip to Keith yesterday and I asked one of my team, are you glad you came along? And there was an intake of breath and I thought, you're worried that this was a hidden agenda question. And I said, there's no hidden agenda. I never have a hidden agenda when I ask a question. And that's quite different, isn't it, to how we normally interact with people if you're not autistic. You can also use our logic to teach new skills really much more quickly and efficiently through forwards and backwards chaining. So this is an example of a skill broken down into lots of steps. And if you go one way, you start and they do the first step and you do all the rest. And the other way, you do all of the steps up to the end and you build up one more the other way. So you're always setting up for success. I can't speak Russian. I've never tried. But if I was taught to do that step by step and I felt successful, I would probably keep going. But if I'm not successful, how many of you want to keep trying if you're not successful? And I know as educators, we keep saying try, try again, try again. We don't. Because I've never seen anybody doing that.