European Journal of Special Education Research
ISSN: 2501 - 2428
ISSN-L: 2501 - 2428
Available on-line at: www.oapub.org/edu
10.5281/zenodo.58874
Volume 1│Issue 2│2016
USING QUESTION-AND-ANSWER SCAFFOLDING STRUCTURE
(QASS) TO TEACH STUDENTS WITH AUTISM TO
COMPOSE FREE VERSES
Chia Kok Hwee, EdD
Special Needs Consultant, Singapore
Abstract:
High functioning students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) manifest rigidity in
their thought and behavioural patterns, which are often regarded as negative and
challenging trait that disadvantage them in their learning. As a result, their teachers
often dismiss them as incapable of literary appreciation and so exclude them from rich
and meaningful literary experiences which include reading classics and creative
writing. However, the author, a former mainstream school teacher and university
academic, of this paper firmly believes that literary appreciation and creative writing
could still be taught to such students by tapping on their thought and behavioural
rigidity and utilise it as a teaching tool to teach them how to create free verses. In this
paper, the author has created a scaffolding strategy – Question-and-Answer Scaffolding
Structure (QASS) – and also illustrated how he has used it to teach his students with
ASD to create free verses.
Keywords: autism spectrum disorder, free verses, QASS, scaffolding strategy
1.
Introduction
In recent years, teachers in mainstream schools are beginning to see more students with
autism or autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in their classes. More often than not, these
students, who have been diagnosed with high-functioning autistic disorder (HFAD),
display rigidity in their thought and behavioural patterns and they prefer to stick to
their own familiar routine than trying something novel. As a result, they are often
mistaken by teachers to be difficult students with a stubborn streak to work with and, at
the same time, they are misperceived as intellectually challenged and socially inept.
Copyright © The Author(s). All Rights Reserved
Published by Open Access Publishing Group ©2015.
41
Chia Kok Hwee –
USING QUESTION-AND-ANSWER SCAFFOLDING STRUCTURE (QASS) TO TEACH STUDENTS WITH
AUTISM TO COMPOSE FREE VERSES
Being a former teacher (taught in both mainstream school and special needs
school) myself, I used to think like most regular school teachers that students with ASD
could never understand literary appreciation or learn to appreciate literature (e.g.,
through poetry recitation or composing a poem or verse). If these students do, we often
regard them as a rare savant like Raymond Babbit in the movie Rainman – a common
misperception of general public about autism.
Briefly described, ASD is a pervasive developmental disorder as a result of
abnormal development and function of the brain (e.g., de Fosse et al., 2004; Paul et al.,
2014; Vidal et al., 2006) but research on its causes is still inconclusive. For the latest
definition of ASD, readers can refer to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental
Disorders-5th Edition (DSM-5) (American Psychiatric Association, 2014) for more detail
as it is not within the scope of this paper to discuss about its symptomatological criteria,
causes or prevalence. In this paper, my goal is to share how I have tapped these traits of
rigidity and routine observed in autism and utilize them to teach these students to
compose their own free verses.
Pedagogy to be adapted for Teaching Students with ASD
“ccording to Lim and Chia in press , students with “SD are often excluded by their
teachers from the rich and meaningful literary experiences like literary appreciation,
reading and writing stories, book clubs, acting and performing and list can go on
because many ill-informed educators often think that students with autism are
incapable of literary appreciation
p.xx words in italic are additional). If teachers are
to provide literary opportunities for students with ASD, it is time for them to
reconceptualise what a literate community ought to be, reject wrong assumptions about
ASD, and prepare to take a bold perspective that students with ASD are complex
literacy learners (Kluth, 2007). In other words, back in a typical mainstream classroom,
teachers should be prepared to challenge and question the current pedagogy that has
often marginalised students with ASD or other disabilities and create communities that
promote all students to teach each other, to showcase talents, take risks, to create, to
collaborate and to see themselves as readers, writers, and thinkers
Kluth,
, para.
words in italic are additional).
In a recent report from Health e-News (2013), Dr Marc Tasse, director of
Nisonger Centre at the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Centre, led a research
team to conduct a 42-week study on using a specific therapy known as the Hunter
Heartbeat Method to teach Shakespeare texts to twenty students with ASD from school
in the Columbus area to improve their communication skills. For instance,
European Journal of Special Education Research - Volume 1 │ Issue 2 │ 2016
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Chia Kok Hwee –
USING QUESTION-AND-ANSWER SCAFFOLDING STRUCTURE (QASS) TO TEACH STUDENTS WITH
AUTISM TO COMPOSE FREE VERSES
Shakespeare’s play The Tempest was used in conjunction with a role-play to encourage
these students to communicate and express themselves. The study also explored the use
of the mind’s eye of students with “SD to allow them to explore imaginative worlds,
which may otherwise be locked away
Health e-News, 2013, para.8).
For teachers who are already working with students with ASD, many, if not all
of them, are quite aware that the current pedagogy does not meet the learning
(cognitive) and behavioural (conative and affective) needs of such students. Although
the principles of regular teaching can remain the same, the approach has to be adapted
in order to make learning meaningful, comprehensible and manageable for students
with ASD. This is a form of assisted teaching known as heilpadagogy, which is also
known as educational therapy in the West. In this paper, I have loosely adapted from
the concept of salutogenesis – i.e., the deliberate attitude and process that focuses on
active participation in positive health – postulated by Antonovsky (1987) to define this
assisted teaching approach. The aim is to establish ease and order in both teaching and
learning for the students with ASD. There has to be an eventual sense of coherence in
the process of learning that begins with dis-ease (or dys-ease) and dis-order (or dysorder) for both the students with ASD and their teachers as it moves gradually through
the process of un-ease and un-orderly development by the way of scaffolding towards
ease and order, which should be the ultimate goal for teachers working with such
students:
Beginning -------------------------------------------------------- Target Goal
Dis-Ease ---------- Phase of Un-Ease in development ------- Ease
Dis-Order -------- Phase of Un-Orderly development ------- Order
In field of heilpadagogy or educational therapy, several scaffolding strategies have been
already developed for use in teaching students with ASD. In education, the term
scaffolding refers to a wide range of instructional techniques that serve to guide
students in progressive learning through successive levels of transition support from
easy and simple to difficult and hard concepts towards a better understanding of what
they are learning. It is a form of assisted teaching whose goal is to assist students to
attain higher levels of comprehension and skill acquisition that otherwise they would
have been unable to attain without assistance. Hence, scaffolding is regarded as an
essential component in effective teaching, and teachers use many different forms of
instructional scaffolding to help their academically weak students, slow learners as well
as those with learning disabilities. Moreover, scaffolding is used to bridge or close
learning gaps, that is, what I would term as knowledge loophole between what the
European Journal of Special Education Research - Volume 1 │ Issue 2 │ 2016
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Chia Kok Hwee –
USING QUESTION-AND-ANSWER SCAFFOLDING STRUCTURE (QASS) TO TEACH STUDENTS WITH
AUTISM TO COMPOSE FREE VERSES
students have learned or known and what they are expected to know from learning to
be able to perform a certain taught task. It also means that a student must possess a
certain level of capacity (innate) to understand and an acquired level of ability to learn
and do a given task that is appropriate for his/her age or maturity. The student’s level of
performance to do the task successfully is his/her capability, which is the intersection
between capacity (nature) and ability (nurture). It is important to note that one key goal
of scaffolding is to reduce negative attitude towards learning especially when a student
gets discouraged or frustrated when trying to perform a difficult task without help,
guidance or comprehension.
One example of a scaffolding strategy is the Scaffolding Interrogatives Method or
SIM for short – an intervention developed by Chia (2002) to scaffold important
information using the schemata of wh-questions such as what person for who; what thing
and what happened for the generic what; what place for where; what time, what day and what
year for the generic when; what reason for why … and so on; hence the name for the
strategy which has been used with students with ASD and hyperlexia (see Ng, 2013,
2014; Ng & Chia, 2013, for more detail). It has been used to teach and guide students
with ASD to learn how to answer reading comprehension questions appropriately
basing on the information derived from the given passage rather than basing on their
background knowledge or previous experience.
Another scaffolding strategy is the Autistic Logic System or ALS for short (see
Chia, 2015, for more detail), a form of syllogistic reasoning or rational thinking that
appeals to the way a student with ASD thinks, i.e., autistic thinking. The ALS consists of
two steps – analysis and synthesis. According to Chia (2015), this scaffolding strategy is
a form of categorical syllogism consisting of the major premise, the minor premise, and
the conclusion or learning point. Each of the three parts is known as a categorical
proposition consisting of two categorical terms – the subject and the predicate – and it
affirms or denies the latter of the former. Both the major and minor premises have one
term (any word or group of words considered as a member of a construction or
utterance) each in common with the conclusion: in a major premise, this is the major
term (i.e., the predicate of the conclusion); in a minor premise, it is the minor term (the
subject of the conclusion
Chia,
, p.
8-269).
In teaching my students with ASD how to compose free verses, I developed a
scaffolding strategy which I have called it Question-and-Answer Scaffolding Structure
(QASS). I shall describe it in more detail in the next section.
European Journal of Special Education Research - Volume 1 │ Issue 2 │ 2016
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Chia Kok Hwee –
USING QUESTION-AND-ANSWER SCAFFOLDING STRUCTURE (QASS) TO TEACH STUDENTS WITH
AUTISM TO COMPOSE FREE VERSES
Question-and-Answer Scaffolding Structure
Before I delve on the scaffolding strategy that used in teaching my students with ASD
how to compose their poems (free verses), it is important for the readers to know what
a free verse is.
Free verse, also known as vers libre in French, is just one of the literary devices. It
can also be considered as poetry – a kind of poem that allows one to express freely
without literary restrictions, e.g., regular meter, rhythm or rhyme scheme, and it does
not rhyme with any fixed forms. Free verse has been popularised by Walt Whitman.
There are three key features of free verse (Chia, 1988) and they are stated as
follows:
Absence or no regular meter and rhythm;
No proper rhyme scheme or set rules to adhere;
Normal pauses and natural rhythmical phrases.
As a result, I have found free verses easy to use in teaching my students with
ASD to create their own poems in a controlled and/or structured way. Of course, there
are always critics who will dismiss this way of creating a free verse or poem to be
considered a real verse or poem.
In the QA Scaffolding Structure (Q=Questions; A=Answers), or QASS for short, it
consists of three inter-connected parts:
First, it starts with some idea coming from the student;
together; and
Next, the student will go through the process of putting his/her thoughts
Finally, a free verse is composed by the student.
The steps to be taken in the QASS approach is that each question asked becomes
a line in the yet-to-exist verse that is still undergoing the process of being composed. The
answer to the first question provides title for the verse. The answer to the second
question introduces the first line by relating to the title. The subsequent questions will
also contribute their respective parts in developing the idea for the composition of the
verse. There is no fixed number of questions (for developer lines) to be asked or
provided to the students. The answer to the last question will constitute the concluding
line that sums up the feeling or reaction of a student about the verse that he/she has
composed.
Table 1 shows an example of the QASS chart that I have designed to help my
students with ASD to create their own free verses without fear or tears. It has two
columns:
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Chia Kok Hwee –
USING QUESTION-AND-ANSWER SCAFFOLDING STRUCTURE (QASS) TO TEACH STUDENTS WITH
AUTISM TO COMPOSE FREE VERSES
The column on the left is a list of prepared questions to ask a student; and
The other column on the right is for his/her respective answer to each of the
questions.
Table 1: QASS Chart
Student’s Responses
Scaffolding questions
Answers
What thing?
Introducer line
Like what?
Developer line
What colour?
Developer line
Can do what?
Developer line
What place?
Concluding line
What it feels?
Act of Creation
Title
Questions
The Free Verse
Once all the questions have been answered, the student has to re-copy his/her answers
without the QASS chart on a clean sheet of paper. That product is a free verse that the
student has just composed with the help of a set of pre-planned questions to scaffold
his/her responses that are eventually transformed into lines of a free verse.
Here is one example of how QASS (the act of creation) was used by TL (the
creator), a student with autism currently attending a mainstream school, to create his
free verse (the created).
Questions
Answers
What thing?
Tiger
Introducer line
Like what?
Like a big cat
1st Developer line
What colour?
Orange coat with black stripes
2nd Developer line
Can do what?
Move without noise, stalk, leap and pounce on its prey
3 Developer line
What place?
Live in swamps, grasslands and forests
Concluding line
What it feels?
Awesome
Title
rd
The final product (the created) is as follows:
European Journal of Special Education Research - Volume 1 │ Issue 2 │ 2016
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Chia Kok Hwee –
USING QUESTION-AND-ANSWER SCAFFOLDING STRUCTURE (QASS) TO TEACH STUDENTS WITH
AUTISM TO COMPOSE FREE VERSES
Tiger
Like a big cat
Orange coat with black stripes
Moves without noise
Stalks
Leaps and pounces on its prey
Lives in swamps, grasslands and forests
Awesome!
OH (2005)
Another way of applying the QA Scaffolding Structure is to allow my students with
ASD to set their own questions on a blank QASS table and let them ask their peers to
answer the questions. In this way everyone in class can be involved in composing their
free verses and also be given time to share them with the rest of the class.
Here are some other free verses that I have selected from my students with ASD.
Rain
My Best Friend
Singapore
Rain drops
My best friend is Peter.
Singapore is my country.
Pitter patter pitter patter
He is in my class.
There are many people.
Sudden pour of water
He likes to play soccer.
Chinese, Malay, Indians and
From the sky above
We
I am drenched
together.
A
So wet
We go to school together.
society
study
and
play others
I need to change into my dry We go home together.
clothes
multi-racial,
multi-cultural
I like Singapore.
We travel in same school
bus.
SG (2005)
JA (2004)
AU (2006)
The main advantage of QASS is that it is easy to use and teachers and para-educators
can come up with new questions depending on the theme (e.g., birthday party, pet, my
hobby) or topic of interest to their students with autism. In fact, it can be used as a tool
for creating differentiated worksheets.
Finally, here is one of my favourite free verse created by AS, a teenage boy with
Asperger syndrome.
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Chia Kok Hwee –
USING QUESTION-AND-ANSWER SCAFFOLDING STRUCTURE (QASS) TO TEACH STUDENTS WITH
AUTISM TO COMPOSE FREE VERSES
My Pet
Lives in water
Orangy red like gold
Caudal tail blossoms like a
flower
Bubble eyes, gentle and cute
Goldie is her name
My pet goldfish
AS (2003)
Acknowledgement
The author wishes to take this opportunity here to thank his former students and their
supportive parents for their past involvement in the Free Verse Writing Project (20032006) that took place so long ago and to contact them has been quite impossible.
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USING QUESTION-AND-ANSWER SCAFFOLDING STRUCTURE (QASS) TO TEACH STUDENTS WITH
AUTISM TO COMPOSE FREE VERSES
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