Because You Love Me…

For those of you who don’t know, I am a big fan of Albert Einstein. He said two things (among many others) that I take to heart in my chosen vocation:  “Love is a better teacher than duty,” and “It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.”  This comes home to me in a little event that nevertheless made my day last Wednesday.

Logan, who works very hard in his Visualizing and Verbalizing (V&V) class wanted to show me something on the web.  He has been very interested in sharing his joy of My Little Pony, a show that frankly, I have little interest in. But this was about him – not me – his interests – not mine.  So I let him “talk me into it” and when I agreed I asked him why I said yes.
“Because you love me,” he said.  And although I wasn’t expecting that answer, in actuality, it was exactly right.  And we had a great time!

Maybe I am still not a huge fan, but I get it:  it is a fun show, and it is sweet, like Logan.  (Now if I can just get that theme song out of my head!)

~Beverly

Community Forum

Every Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, we get together with all of the young adults and have a class called Community Forum.  We enjoy a good bit of banter about various, pre-planned topics related to life, relationships, current local and international happenings in the news.  

Community Forum is a rich opportunity for the young adults to work as a group on variety of skills including problem solving, perspective taking, maintaining mutual respect and fair rules of disagreement, and higher order thinking issues.  It is a fantastic way for the guys to work on emotional regulation, communication skills, interpersonal relationship building, empathy, listening and attention skills.

We have a predictable structure to each meeting.  First, we do a brief check-in to get the group aligned and settled.  We then move on to current events sourced from community, city, state, national and international news.  If the guys feel particularly compelled by a story, we may follow its progress over time, as we did when Libya overthrew its dictator or when Jerry Sandusky was arrested.  The bulk of the meeting is then devoted to a variety of topics that relate to transition, adulthood, or other important issues.  For material we use a wide range of sources, such as essays, articles, documentaries, media, scientific studies, Internet research, and books.

At the moment, we are watching a documentary about the food industry in America entitled Food, Inc.  It is approximately an hour and half long, so we are watching it in about three segments.  As a result, many of the young adults are starting to engage in dialog with the staff and their peers about information from the film and how it connects with the foods they eat on a daily basis.  We also have a basic nutrition segment in the curriculum to demystify food as it relates to health, which will add a practical side and augment the information provided in Food, Inc.        

The other running topic right now is 50 things everyone needs to know.  We are taking one item from the list at a time and expanding on it practically, such as how to change a tire and be prepared if your car breaks down.  We will periodically have guest speakers come in and share about their lives and work.  Last semester, we had a prison minister discuss his groundbreaking peace initiative work in maximum-security prisons.  The guys were very engaged and asked many poignant questions to further understand the lives of those in prison.  We also had a stock broker visit and discuss what the stock market is and how it works.  We have since begun a mock stock market game where we are investing fake money into companies and following our “investments” for the rest of the semester.  

Community Forum is both challenging and very helpful to each one of the young adults.

~Chrissy

Friday!

The Community School is thrilled about its upcoming event at the Old Decatur Courthouse on Friday, February 3, from 7-10:30.  The event will feature live, local music from The Brotherland, food from the fantastic Sun In My Belly, an open bar, and an auction with a diverse set of prizes, from vacation homes to golf outings to a 3.6ct ruby.

TCS runs a model program; we are beginning to serve as a model to other programs and to train other professionals in our approach. We are changing the face of adolescent and young adult education in the world of autism. We are also working hard every day to meet the needs of about 25 individuals and their families. As you can imagine, this is expensive work. We ask our families to pay a lot, but the reality is that we spend far more on each student than the tuition we collect. That’s why we raise money; we need to raise over $175,000 each year to support a program this size.

This event is a major part of our fundraising strategy. We will ask people there to support us in every way that we can. We believe our cause is a noble and necessary one. I have personally invested much of my professional career in this project—financially, emotionally, and physically—and I feel comfortable asking people to help because I know how valuable our work is, and how unheralded it still remains in the larger world.

This event also serves as a giant Thank You to all the organizations and individuals who have supported us already. The TCS community has always loved a good party, and we believe this one will be no exception. We want all of you to know how much we appreciate what you do to keep us running! 

P.S. There will be dancing, so get ready!

~Dave

 

 

Community

While I have been very excited about the upcoming TCS fundraiser, I have also done my fair share of worrying. My main concern has been increasing attendance. I know how amazing TCS is, as do many of you, but I was having trouble figuring out how to share this with others. While the fundraiser is about raising money, it’s also about raising awareness about this unique, passionate, and invaluable community we’ve created.

I received the following email last week. It was a forward from Jess Davis, the newest member on the TCS board.  Jess is an attorney at Davis Adams, LLC and has generously reached out to his contacts to invite them to our fundraiser. I thought it did a wonderful job letting people know about the school and why attendance at the event is so imperative.

This email also made me so thankful for our local connections and support. We are The Community School, and we do incredible work that serves the community surrounding our program. We are located in a community full of generous and supportive individuals and organizations, several of which will be a part of the event.  In my moments of stress and worry, I find comfort knowing that we are growing, and that people like Jess have our back. Please take a moment to read his email. It may help you in reaching out to those around you!  ~Whitney

________________________________________________________________________________________

Friends,

I suspect that most of you don’t know that at the corner of Commerce and Clairemont in Decatur, there’s a school—The Community School—doing revolutionary and cutting-edge work in the area of educating kids and young adults who deal with autism.  The program is so pioneering that the New York Times profiled The Community School and the amazing work the folks there are doing.  And it’s happening right here, in our own backyard.

I suspect you’ve all seen or heard the statistics regarding the increase in autism diagnoses in recent years.  It’s alarming, to say the least.  Whatever the cause of this sharp uptick, the bottom line is that there are too many kids and young adults who don’t have access the type of specialized educational setting they need to fully realize their potential (and trust me, when you meet the students at The Community School, you’ll see their potential is huge).  Walk down the hall on any given day, and you’ll be inspired by what you see.

 The challenge, however, is probably obvious . . . The Community School is an expensive proposition to operate.  There’s just no way around it.  And that’s where community comes in.  Whether or not autism has touched your life in some direct way, it’s time for Decatur to rally around The Community School and support the amazing work that’s happening right here.  And here’s how:

 The Southern Soiree & Auction, in support of The Community School, will take place Feb. 3 at 7 p.m. at the Old Decatur Courthouse (on Ponce in downtown Decatur).  The $35 per person, or $60 per couple, is less than you’d spend doing whatever else you’d otherwise do that night, and you’ll see plenty of old friends, make some new friends, and know that you’re making a REAL and IMPORTANT difference for kids and young adults who need and deserve our support.

 I’ve attached an invitation to the event, as well as the New York Times article referenced above.

If you’re receiving this e-mail, it’s because I scrolled through my contacts and thought you might be someone who just might want to show up.  I hope that’s a compliment to you.

Thanks for your time.  I know we’re all busy and overcommitted and running 1000 miles an hour just to stay afloat, but I hope you’ll consider stopping by to support The Community School.

If you think you might be able to make it, just reply to this message and let me know.

 Jess

 

 

Change is a Crazy Thing…

Change is a crazy thing.  An inexorable force.  Something we often avoid.  Something we try to embrace.  We fear it, we love it, we prepare for it, we deny it.  We even mock it (Tina Fey comes to mind, lampooning the notion of change when her 30 Rock character Jack Donaghy attends a corporate “retreat to move forward”).  Change is a force we should all try to understand, coexist, and collaborate with.

In the context of TCS, change is a monster, a tool, and a celebration.  As a monster, it scares our students and participants.  Change is the unpredictability of a loud noise, or a disagreeing friend, or a forgotten lunchbox.  For people whose sensory systems are uneven or over-reactive, these “little” changes can be catastrophic, leading to paranoia, extreme withdrawal, and fight-or-flight reactions.  Time and again have I seen students go to great lengths to make things stay the same.  I remember one student denying the reality of chance, insisting that dice should be made to roll in a pattern.  I have seen students engage in elaborate rituals, insisting on telling the same story over and over, or washing their hands in a certain specific way, or only engaging in certain activities with “that” teacher, and not any other.  For individuals with weak visual-spatial thinking, or challenged motor planning, or sensory integration difficulties, change can rip them apart, devouring their self-confidence and preventing them from developing any sense of grounded stability.

As a tool, change is an excellent way to help individuals to grow.  Properly managed and sensitively introduced, change helps us all to stretch our capacity for thinking and problem-solving.  Unexpected occurrences lead us to tolerate an ever wider range of emotions: frustration, anticipation, excitement, disappointment.  With the right amount of scaffolding and within the context of nurturing, playful relationships, change pushes us ahead.  This is one of the pillars of Floortime, that within the context of an accepting, affectively warm relationship, we can help people to handle surprises, or negotiations, or emotional reactions from others.  We do it a little at a time, with lots of warmth and playfulness sandwiched around the challenge; but we always think about introducing change and more change.

As a celebration, change is the best.  A new book!  A field trip!  An unexpected movie during lunch!  As our social-emotional systems develop, most of us love the unexpected, and it is a pleasure to experience the thrill of wondering what’s around the corner, or what might happen next.  For some of our students, the celebration of change must be small—a single new food, or a few minutes trying a new game before returning to the old, or meeting one new person, but only briefly.

Change as celebration can trigger all kinds of emotions.  I just got invited out to dinner, and I get to choose the place.  Do I pick old and familiar?  Or new and untried?  Or something in between?  How much change can I tolerate and still enjoy it?  We shall see, we shall see…

~Dave

Essential Questions

Teachers at TCS have unusual flexibility in creating their classes. Lately some of us have been working with a curriculum design program that works nicely with Stanley Greenspan’s developmental model. Called Understanding by Design, by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe, the program provides teachers with a practical template for pulling students into grey area thinking and taking multiple perspectives.

In this post, I’ll focus on one aspect of their template: essential questions.

Essential questions are the fundamental, but often unspoken questions that lie at the heart of a discipline. I’ll share some of the virtues of essential questions for curriculum planning, and some examples of essential questions from TCS curricula.

Essential questions spark our thinking about things that matter.

“How do you create community?”

This question animates all of us at TCS. (It kept Plato and John Dewey busy, too.)  It is front and center in Rebecca’s Lunch Bunch class. She places the recurring activities of Lunch Bunch – how the guys agree on a restaurant and even how they decide who gets to ride shotgun – in this larger context. What makes a good group member? What is fairness? In a class like history, a focus on essential questions can help us resist the siren call of superficial coverage in favor of going deeper in a topic. 

Essential questions are accessible to a wide range of students.

What is an ideal society? What does it mean to be healthy? What is a portrait? Can heroes have flaws?  These questions are from our Western Civilization, PE, Art and Literature classes respectively. Essential questions are equal-opportunity-engagers; they are inviting to novices and experts alike. Also, by inviting a student to entertain the questions at the heart of a discipline we get a little window into his thinking. We learn not only how much background information he has, but how relatively concrete or abstract his ideas are. Vygotsky might say we get a sense of his “zone of proximal development.” Academic content can be built from there.

Essential questions elude easy answers.

An essential question has many possible answers and invite back-and-forth. Ask our guys, “Why do you think video games have ratings? If you were a parent, how would you use ratings?” You might get a recitation on the difference between American and Japanese rating systems. You also might wind up in a discussion about the role of parents and the vulnerability of childhood. The point is that whether the topic is video games, or the causes of the Civil War, or personal identity, essential questions can lead us (teachers and students) beyond fact-based, rote learning to the construction of meaning from multiple perspectives.

Essential questions can build rapport.

Exploring an essential question with someone – a student, a fellow teacher, a child or a friend – is delightful. Just be curious.

 

~Josephine

For fun, watch art experts tackle the question: “What is a portrait?” 

http://www.nationalgalleries.org/play/play-menu/what-is-a-portrait

The Importance of Creativity

During both PE and Thursday activities, we continually find creative and intriguing ways to challenge the boys physically and socially.  We have seen some positive progress this year, partly due to the increased “tweaking” of games.  For example, regular dodgeball became:

• Regular rules dodgeball
• Lee’s Dodgeball
• Dodgeball with points
• Dodgeball where different colors mean different things
• Dodgeball with a Frisbee
• bug out
• bug out baseball

Ultimate Frisbee became:

• Goaltimite
• gym version
• youth room version
• touchdown
• goal/ball-timate
• Gaelic soccer
• team handball

In the end, the purpose of so much tweaking is to have the interest levels and participation high within the group.  When both of these factors are present, the staff can shift their focus onto supporting the development of team thinking and team work skills.

Based on the progress we have seen and written in the Google docs, this formula is working very well. The staff is excited to see what other games are developed and how the guys grow from their participation in these creative games.

~Armann

What Yoga Can Do for You…

In case you do not know who I am, let me introduce myself. My name is Heidi Schaffner and I am a new teacher at The Community School this year. I am also a Yoga instructor who specializes in working with children and adults with special needs and their families. It is with great joy that I am able to bring my passion for Yoga to this wonderful group of individuals and combine it with another passion of mine: Floortime. Using the Floortime approach in my private yoga sessions and classes allows me to keep an open, creative and flexible mind to follow the lead and needs of my students. By bringing together the sound benefits of Yoga and the wonderful therapeutic approach of Floortime, I strive to help our population of students stretch, strengthen, focus and engage while creating a calmer, focused and regulated mind and body in hopes to build greater self awareness and engagement with the world around them.

I was first introduced to Yoga by a friend in 1999, right after college. It was during a stressful time in my life while I was entering the ‘real world.’ I took many things away from that first experience, like you should always start with a beginner’s class in Yoga (ouch!). Second, and most important in my journey, I learned that whatever Yoga was and whatever it did for me felt really good, and I wanted more. Since that first class, I came to understand what it was that my body and disposition were so drawn to and relieved by the practice of Yoga. Yoga is researched and has been proven to be great for anxiety and stress reduction, among many other benefits. I am a sensitive soul with a very sensitive nervous system. I struggle with anxiety. Do you know of anyone like this?

Yoga can help all kinds of people on many levels. It does not discriminate. And the good news is that one does not have to follow a strict traditional Yoga philosophy or change their whole lifestyle in order to experience the wonderful physical and mental health benefits it offers. This is especially good news for our students and children with special needs. Yoga works with the body on a structural level to help align the vertebrae, increase flexibility, and strengthen muscles and tendons. Research also shows that yoga may help with weight loss, increased fitness, stress reduction and the management of chronic health conditions. In addition, it has been shown to rejuvenate and tone internal organs; purify the epidermal, digestive, lymphatic, cardiovascular, and pulmonary systems of toxins and waste matter; balance and tone the nervous systems and endocrine systems; and nourish and stimulate the brain cells. The end result can be increased emotional stability, mental clarity, and a greater sense of overall well-being. Individuals with special needs who practice Yoga have shown improvement in their motor functioning, cognitive and communication skills.

I came into Yoga for a good stretch and workout but I received so much more. I deeply appreciate feeling more centered and peaceful in my daily life and sharing this with others. If you are considering trying it out for yourself, your student or child, I encourage you to stay open and curious as to what Yoga can do for you.

 

 

 

 

Life is What Happens…

Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans. John Lennon wrote that. I thought of this line today while talking with George (not his real name). George is a young adult and has been a participant at TCS for a pretty long time. George is one of the most amazing individuals that I know. Inside a package of sensory-regulatory confusion and language challenges is a human soul that seeks beauty and connection. George loves the finer things in life: a luxury hotel (with his favorite fast food nearby), a night (imagined) at a Parisian nightclub, or a trip to Hollywood to explore a career in show business. You might say that George struggles to communicate, though I believe he almost always gets his ideas across, and they are often majestic in scope. (He recently wrote up a plan for a wonderful themed amusement park to replace one of Atlanta’s defunct museums. The ideas are fantastical, and just reading them produces immense pleasure.)

Anyway, I had a conversation, or rather series of conversations, with George today. He is just finishing up a stint as a member of the chorus in a high school musical production. It has been an incredible growth experience for him, and today it aroused in George a desire to talk about what comes next. We discussed various internship possibilities he might have, his preferences for how he spends his day at TCS, and his desire to get a new girlfriend. These conversations were, at times, difficult, since George sometimes struggles to pick the right words and phrasing. I used a storyboarding technique (drawing cartoon versions of actual events to help an individual organize thoughts and describe what was said and what was thought); we generated lists and wrote things on the board so we could refer back to them; I rephrased sentences and asked clarifying questions and went slowly. At times, I felt like we weren’t getting anywhere. But over the course of these conversations (about three, lasting a total of 90 minutes or so), we covered a lot of ground. I came to really understand what George was thinking about. I suspect that George picked up a few ideas about what was in my head. And for at least some of our time together, we were definitely having a dialogue around a shared idea (what some might call “being on the same page”).

At the end of our conversations, I wondered what we had accomplished. We hadn’t picked a new internship; we hadn’t changed his program very much; we didn’t figure out how to get a new girlfriend. We didn’t really get much of “life” done.

Or did we? Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans. George and I were busy today. We discussed things, and we worked hard to understand each other. Those moments of connectedness, those “circles of communication”, those times when we both knew that we understood each other and could laugh together—I think those moments really do constitute life. George and I made plans. And we lived.

Shred Day!

 

Community Shred Day!

November 5th from 10am-1pm…come have your confidential documents shredded and recycled on-site by Atlanta’s premiere shredding company, Eagle Secure Shredding!

 Event to be held in the parking lot of the First Baptist Church of Decatur located at 308 Clairemont Ave. Decatur, GA 30030. Paper shredding only.

Rain or shine, we’ll see you there!