Episode #007: Autism Social Skills: Asking and Answering Questions with Lisa Chattler

Lisa Chattler works with middle school and high school students as an SLP. In this podcast, we talk about how to teach conversation-based skills to students who are struggling with asking and answering questions. All of us learn some form of “faking it”, where we pretend to be interested in casual small talk with strangers or acquaintances. 

For children with autism, this back-and-forth can be even harder as they learn to ask and answer questions while actively listening to their conversational partner.

Lisa’s strategies cover different learning styles for students, and include:

• Using videos as prompts to retell a story
• Teaching students to summarize a story
• Having an expository retell
• Modeling a conversation and asking “Did I get that right?”
• Transcribing the conversation

Students who are confident in therapy can sometimes stumble during tests or in classroom discussions. Why do some students avoid asking for help? Lisa shares her thoughts on the self-advocacy piece of asking questions that we may be overlooking as we work with our patients.

What’s Inside:

• The classroom goal structure can affect whether a student learns to ask questions.
• Teaching exactly to the test will completely miss the concept of whether a student can answer questions correctly.
• How to create IEP goals for teaching students how to ask and answer questions.
• The one piece of advice that Lisa, after 42 years as an SLP, would pass on to new speech language pathologists.

Today’s Guest:

Lisa Chattler is passionate about providing dynamic direct clinical services to students with wide ranging communication challenges. She also mentors the next generation of SLPs as a supervisor, modeling leadership as well as clinical skills. Lisa has served as adjunct professor at Cal State Universities Long Beach & Fullerton and Chapman University. She is the immediate past director of California Speech and Language Association (CSHA) district 8 and is currently the associate coordinator for SIG 16 (school-based issues). Lisa co-chaired the ASD topic committees for ASHA conventions in 2019 and 2020, creating diverse, dynamic, and well-rounded educational programs. Lisa mentored the CSHA 2011 Distinguished Consumer – child award recipient. She regularly presents locally and nationally on autism spectrum disorders, social communication, and professional issues, and has published several articles.

Mentioned In This Episode

—Bridge video
—Newsela
—Why Do Some Students Avoid Asking for Help?
—Lisa Chattler on LinkedIn

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