“My name is Andrea; I am a middle school teacher with a specialisation in special needs.

My class had a school trip to the theatre planned for the end of January 2023. During the previous week I prepared my student for the presence of many children, crowded environments, the sequence of events and observance of the rules inside the theatre.

Every time I talked about the theatre trip, I spoke about it in an enthusiastic and euphoric manner so that he would perceive the event as something nice and pleasant and not something to be afraid of. I also involved the other classmates who were obviously happy to skip a day of school! So, my student also became interested in the event. The enthusiasm in presenting the event calmed him down, made him curious and created anticipation. To present the day, I used the Geco software, which I learnt to use during the course, along with the other strategies to apply in class with my student. I prepared a file with pictures that helped me to present the sequence of actions and the rules to be followed. The printout of the file was then glued into his exercise book. I 'broke up' the day into various moments and together with a classmate I invited him to piece back together the time sequence. This work was proposed over several days to have time for assimilation, and there was always the support of one or two classmates. Every time he gave the right answer, both his classmates and I cheered with a 'very good' or thumbs up. The day at the theatre was a success! He sat for about 60 minutes, watched the actors with interest and applauded together with the other children.

Among the concepts that struck me most in the lessons of the module on strategies to be adopted in the classroom was that of implicit reinforcement and in general, the principle that children's interests can become a starting point for an intervention. I had not yet taken advantage of this opportunity on a regular and systematic basis because it seemed unorthodox to bring themes from television, which my student likes very much, into teaching.

So, I learned how to design an activity that would not only be functional for learning but also stimulating and fun for the student. I created social stories with pictures from a TV series he is passionate about to highlight positive behaviours that I would like him to assimilate. One of these pictures shows one of the characters who, when he is busy on the phone, is unavailable for conversation and anyone who wants to talk to him has to wait. After this work, I noticed that the boy is more likely to wait his turn and knock before entering a room, whereas before he would walk in and poke around wherever it was open, or interrupt people already engaged in conversation. Everybody’s compliance is fundamental for optimal outcomes though; the school staff usually turns a blind eye on his negative behaviours, which slows down his learning process. We also worked on forming sentences from pictures of characters from the show and rewrote them in alphabetical order. My student really enjoyed these activities and completed all of them. I was also able to apply this work on VIPs to geography because we made a map of Italy with the faces of famous people associated with each region; in this way, my student improved his geography skills while having fun. The course was extremely useful because of the techniques and practical insights suggested, also considering that my previous background in autism was quite poor. The work done confirmed for me how important it is to personalize the content. The same activity can be received very differently if instead of generic material taken from books or the Internet (often related to childhood education and therefore perceived as boring and repetitive by older learners), we use material that is meaningful to the student because it is directly related to his or her interests.