SASS: Update and Insight for May
As you may know, the SASS team is moving forward to develop a classroom program to build Self-Advocacy and Student Success. Below are a few snippets of our progress.
We have been having meetings with researchers from Queen’s, York, and University of Toronto, community partners from Autism Ontario and Inclusion Action in Ontario and LDAO, and educators from ALCSDB and LDSB and Edvance to make plans for research and development of our classroom program. This is about half the group!
Here, to the right, you can see what our partners told us about what it means to be SASSY.
Best learning so far? Probably the insight from Nora Green from Inclusion Action in Ontario. When the design team said they aimed to design activities that would be “accessible to all students,” Nora advocated caution around the use of “all.” If the materials aren’t actually accessible to ALL, those who can’t participate may not just feel excluded but erased. Can you imagine how this would feel? “Hunh. They don’t even know I exist… they said their program is accessible to all.” This was important. We know our program won’t always be accessible to all and that this needs to be acknowledged and accounted for. We are considering adding notes to each activity about the limits to accessibility and suggestions for the additional resources (people, equipment) that would remove barriers.
Below, you can see Kay Liang and Katie Healy, the core program artists/developers. We are working hard to build delightful, accessible, and empowering activities that align with best practice for building student self-advocacy.
We are also working on a scoping review to better understand what is already know about SASSY whole class programs. We have registered it with the Open Science Framework. This lets other scholars know we are working on this project and ensures that, if we don’t find anything useful, we don’t go back and change our methods to suit unexpected results. The plan is to use this knowledge to make adjustments to the draft program before we roll it out in September. Go researchers, go! We’re on a deadline.
Otherwise, we are looking forward to conducting focus groups this summer to further adjust and refine our draft program. Then, we will roll it out in an open trial in 15 classrooms in September. This roll out will last from September to December. Each classroom will be visited (ZOOM) once a week by a researcher, who will talk to either a small group of kids or a large group of teacher implementers about how it is going. We can’t wait to learn more about how this program works, doesn’t work, fits, and doesn’t fit so we can start overhauling it for another roll out in September 2027.
Here is a look a the implementation schedule:
We’re moving at top speed right now to get ready for September. Wish us luck!
Laurie