Back to School: Setting Up Classrooms for Students with Autism–Let's Begin

Christine Reeve

Christine Reeve, PhD, BCBA-D, has spent more than 30 years in and around special education classrooms — as a teacher, a consultant, and a behavior analyst. She directed autism and ABA graduate programs at Nova Southeastern University for 14 years and has written books on classroom setup, data collection, and independent work systems. She founded Autism Classroom Resources and the Special Educator Academy.

Wow, it’s time for back to school already! I can hardly believe it. And I’m sure that you can’t either. Recently I have had a number of requests for posts about organizing the classroom environment and particularly for setting up the schedule. So, for the next couple of weeks, I am going to do a series on the process of setting up a classroom for students with autism and related disabilities. I will do my best to point out things that are useful for both students in self-contained classrooms and students in general education classrooms, but the process of deciding their schedule is really the same. So to kick it off today, I want to start with just an overview of the process for beginning the year in a classroom.

Many of you may not know this, but sometimes I think I make my living setting up classrooms. For 15 years I have worked with my colleague and co-author Susan Kabot in one form or another consulting to school systems. As part of that work, we completely set up at least 100 classrooms and partially set up many hundreds more. I spend most of the beginning of the school year making classroom schedules. We have a training model that we refer to as a demonstration classroom in which we literally walk into someone’s classroom for a week and either redo it or set it up from scratch. As a result, we’ve developed a specific process that includes the essential steps of classroom setup and that is the format I will follow with this series.