It’s no secret that I adore life skills classrooms and work with a fair number of them in my job, so 10 Tips for a Well Run Life Skills Special Education Classroom was a no brainer guest blog post for me. I thought this guest blog post would be fitting because I know I have handful of special education life skills who follow along here, and a lot of SLPs who work with life skills teachers… the ultimate collab! So without further ado, am going to hand it over to Audra from ABA in school with some great tips for a well run life skills classroom!
Audra Jensen comes to use as a guest blogger, hailing from the beautiful Pacific Northwest. She is mom to an adult son with autism and has been in the education and clinic field for over 20 years. Audra is a special education teacher and BCBA and has worked in the school settings as well as ran her own ABA clinic for 12 years before semi-retiring (to have more fun!). She is the author of two books (I Get It! and When Babies Read) and trains school districts and clinics on implementing behavioral principles for their students. She likes dogs, hot chocolate, and science fiction!
Looking for a good life skills classroom set up? Here 10 Tips for a well run life skills special education classroom
Teachers are truly amazing. I don’t know of any other career that involves so much unpaid, off-work enrichment, buying own work supplies, or going above and beyond to learn more about their current assignment. Always. Doing. More!
Being a parent of a now-adult autistic young man, a special education teacher, and a BCBA, I’ve had a lot of years to observe some fantastic life skills and autism/ABA classrooms at all grade levels. Maybe you already got it down! But in case you want to do a quick check, here are my 10 quick tips!
1. Keep your environment clean and organized
You know it’s coming, the grade finale of a crisis! Or maybe the start. 😊 Poor kiddo is full of anxiety or anger or just looking for a reaction, and you have your cute build-a-snowman materials on the table or your desk full of the upcoming IEP notes or the students’ leftover snack on the desks. And… there they go! Flying across the room or onto the floor. Now, you not only have to handle the challenging behavior, but you have to get your room set up again.
It’s going to happen. If you have a life skills room, you are going to have students in crisis from time to time. One thing you can do to help prevent and respond to such a moment is to have as much put away, out of reach, as possible. It doesn’t mean you have to teach in a blank room, ugh, but do this. Stand at your door and look into your room. Think about that one student you know is most likely to hit this level of crisis. What can she reach? What will he do if he gets his hands on that? Will she be able to be safe while she works through it? Does he know what he CAN do and where he CAN go to decompress?
Do this exercise weekly! Maybe daily! Look through your students’ eyes. If it’s something that can put up or out of sight, do it! Keep the room clean and organized and built with the students in mind, what is best for them.
2. Schedule for Students
Do the students know what is on the agenda for the day? For the class AND for themselves? Is the schedule set up with the students in mind? Meaning, if they aren’t fluent readers, is it visually appealing and clearly representative of the activities? Do the students know how the class moves through the schedule? If students have different schedules during the day, do they have their own schedules? Do they know how to reference and use them?
Just plopping a pretty schedule up on the board isn’t enough! Using a schedule involves teaching and training and practice and reinforcement! Make it fun and interactive. Give someone a job of changing the daily schedule. Do a silly dance when something is done. Put something ridiculous on the schedule like “going to the moon” and see if they notice. Make it engaging and fun! It will help your day flow.
There are some free examples in the Itty Bitty Speech Freebie Library HERE
3. Schedule for Staff
Don’t forget your staff! They need to know what they are doing, and it won’t necessarily line up with the class schedule. Put it on paper and stick to it! Make sure they know when they can take a break and take lunch, if they are picking certain students up from classes or taking kiddos to the bathroom.
Yes, I know schedules change. Like a ridiculous number of times in a year. Just do your best to keep something updated. Believe me, your staff will kiss the ground you walk on if you do this!
4. Reinforcement System
Whether you are using a school-wide system like PBIS or your own classroom system, a well-designed and implemented positive reinforcement system can make ALL the difference. Yeah, I know that we hope that students will find internal motivation and all that, but c’mon. We ALL are motivated and appreciate a system of rewards. Whether it’s your paycheck or a bag of M&M’s, you like positive perks, too.
The best reinforcement systems have 4 components: 1) individualized (not a catch-all system but really designed with your little people in mind), 2) visually appealing (posted in the room and regularly referenced), 3) used! Yes, actually used every day!, and 4) updated regularly (new rewards, new expectations, new highlights).
5. Separated areas in the room
Clearly defined spaces will help your students navigate when they need to be somewhere and to also help keep students occupied in the event of a crisis in another part of the room. Great areas to consider: carpet/group learning space, small group space, individual or dyad working areas that are blocked off with dividers whenever possible, reading area, calm down space, the coming/going area (cubbies or counters, most likely to be the “messy” area of the room), and if you have life skills areas (e.g., laundry, cooking), FANTASTIC!
6. Transition Warnings
Not only a posted or individual schedule, but, especially if you have students with autism, help your friends know when a transition is coming. My favorite one to use: have a student given the daily job of being the “transition” monitor. When it’s almost time to make a change, that person takes a “1 more minute” visual to each area of the room and tells the friends, “1 more minute.” Once that student gets to everyone, THEN we do the transition song. We teach that student when doing the alert, to go to the friends in each area, get their attention (tap shoulder or arm and say their name), make sure they are looking at the helper OR the visual, give them the warning, then WAIT for a response, verbal or thumbs up. So many good skills rolled into that little exercise! And it happens many times a day!
7. Crisis prevent training.
Even if you don’t have students with highly challenging behavior right at this moment, you will! It’s the nature of our population. Whether it comes from trauma or emotional strain or sensory overload or just having a bad day, you’re going to have to handle students in crisis. If you do not feel that the training you have from your district is sufficient to keep your student safe and you and your staff safe, speak up!
A good crisis prevention training will includes LOTS of preventative and proactive strategies and will be trauma-informed, and it will also have de-escalation techniques and some amount of physical protection training (always only used as a last resort). While we HATE to have to put hands on a student, we know that there are situations that require it to keep a student safe. So make sure your training makes you feel confident that you know and can implement all those preventative strategies and also that you know what to do if you need to keep your student or yourself safe.
8. Pre-teaching expectations.
This is pretty much all you could be doing for the first three months of the year, am I right?!? Or longer. But how important is it?!? Teaching student expectations and hidden rules BEFORE the situations arise…. Priceless.
Great ways I’ve found to do this:
Boom™ Cards. Oh my gosh, so awesome. Kids LOVE Boom Cards. Engaging and fun, and if you know how to create them, you can cater them exactly to what your classroom needs. If you don’t, there are a TON out there; you’ll find something that works!
Social narratives! Digital and print, especially if they can be sent home. Parents love these. Itty Bitty Speech has some great ones HERE
Practicing in the classroom. Yup, we can create a whole cafeteria in the classroom! Practice walking in a line, getting food, paying for food, finding a table, eating in a group. And it’s fun! Then when the time comes… so much smoother.
Practicing in the real setting but not during a real situation. Assembly is great for this! Check with your admin and get permission to go into the gym and pretend to go to an assembly. This is really fun if you can get some students to do a little “show” at the front.
And always recap what you learned during your practice! Reinforce the principles so that they are ready for real time!
9. Staff training, debrief opportunities, collaboration time.
I can’t stress enough how important it is to have this.
Staff in your room: Advocate to your admin that you need time to connect with your paras regularly without students there. Many districts have weekly late starts or early releases, and while meetings get plugged into these times, see what you can do to create and protect some of this time with your team. Create relationship with them, bond, discuss difficult situations, debrief scenarios that have occurred, train them on data collection or trouble shoot. If you get time to do this, protect it with your life! I know how hard that is, I do, but you will have a team that works so much better together if you do this.
Other members of your IEP team: I can’t speak highly enough of having a cohesive and bonded group of professionals working together for the betterment of a student. Get your speech therapists’ input on what visuals work for what students, how to implement core boards during snack time or task analyses in the bathroom. Talk to your OT about what sensory breaks should look like for certain students (it’s not the same for everyone!), or your PT about how to help a particular student navigate the ramp up to the art room. You get what I mean.
10. Data collection system
I left this for last because, alas, I am a behavior analyst. It can be a pain in the butt, but I can tell you that having a clear and clean system of collecting information on difficult (and awesome!) behaviors in your classroom can be gold, especially if you do have to call in the big guns (aka the district behavior specialist). I promise, the first thing they’ll want you to do is start collecting data. Good data will save you SO much time going forward. There doesn’t need to be any guessing as to what is trigger the behavior, when it’s happening, how big or how often it’s happening, or even what works and doesn’t work to curb it. If you have a good system in place, it will talk to you! And when it does, listen!
Data is also a great way to measure change! How do you know if a certain strategy really is working? Yeah, maybe you can tell in your gut, but having that confirmed by a pretty little graph that has a downward trendline is so nice!
Data is not perfect, and it’s not everything, but it will help you make objective decisions that are not just based in the emotions of the moment. And the students deserve that level of consideration, eh right?
So there ya go. My 10 tips for an awesome life skills or autism program. I feel like I also need to have 10 tips for getting through this year (I know it’s been hard!). Top three would be chocolate, hot baths, and puppies!
Hang in there, teachers. You are the rescuer and protector of many of these rug rats. They need you. They love you.
10 Tips for a well run life skills classroom
10 Tips for a well run life skills classroom
10 Tips for a well run life skills classroom
Related resources:
Find me at:
ABA in School | Teachers pay Teachers | Boom | Etsy | Facebook | Instagram | Pinterest | Email
