How can I motivate my autistic students?

Transcript

 How can I motivate my autistic students? So I can say right off the bat that you're probably going to have a rough time, if you're thinking of motivation as something that you do to students rather than something you help them find. Have you ever been in a situation where you're so stressed out that it's hard to care about anything besides your immediate needs?

Students who seem unmotivated are often struggling just to make it through the day. So there are some quick tricks for drawing out some intrinsic motivation, mainly tied to making the activity itself more rewarding. We have a blog post that gives some detail on tying activities to the students' interests and strengths, but if you want to help them think past immediate gratification, you need to help them get out of survival mode.

A lot of the kids that I work with are using all of their energy just trying to keep up with day-to-day expectations. There's no brain space left for actually making sense of the big picture. Deep thought happens in an environment of trust and safety. And it won't necessarily happen overnight. But when I have adults back off the pressure and focus on helping the kids develop their own goals and values, the adults are often shocked by how thoughtful and responsible the kids can be.

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