The Texas Statewide Leadership for Autism Training (TSLAT), with a grant from the Texas Education Agency (TEA), created this mentoring guide for the specialist or mentor supporting educators and other school district and charter school staff supporting the behavioral needs of students with autism.  

How can this guide help me?

For mentors, finding or creating appropriate training for LEA staff can be time-consuming.  This guide, created to accelerate this process, will help you:

• Select and tailor training assignments based on the individual needs of the educator
• Support the educator through a discussion around the follow-up questions provided in the guide
• Track educator progress through certificates of completion and digital badges.

What's in this guide?

This guide has two tracts, foundational and in-depth application.  Each chapter has two recommended tracks: Foundational and Extended. 

• Foundational: The foundational track is designed for educators needing to know the basics of behavior and autism.  These educators might support elements of the evidence-based practices (EBPs) found in this guide, including generalization across learning environments but are not the primary staff in charge of implementation. Educators for this track might include inclusion teachers, elective teachers, resource teachers, occupational therapists, physical therapists, and speech-language pathologists.
   
• In-Depth Application: The in-depth application track is for educators directly responsible for implementing behavior supports with students with autism. Educators for this rack might include self-contained special education teachers, autism-specific special educators, behavior support teachers, licensed specialists in school psychology (LSSP), speech-language pathologists (SLP), and new behavior or autism specialists.

Each track contains these six chapters.

1. Introduction
2. Functional Behavior Assessment
3. Functional Communiction Training
4. Social Skills Training
5. Peer Mediated Instruction and Intervention
6. Self-Management

Each chapter provides you with the following tools.

• Scope and Sequence: Lays out the recommended training and suggested timing. 
• Key Points: Are taken from the training in each chapter to help you prepare for the follow-up discussion with the educator to check for understanding. 
• Vocabulary: A list of the specialized vocabulary used within the trainings of each chapter.
• Questions:  Questions you can use to help guide the discussion after the educator has completed the training.  These questions serve as a guide to support a robust conversation and allow the educator to plan for individual implementation of the newly learned information.
• For the Mentor: This section was designed to support the discussion by giving you further information and potential responses to the questions should the educator need additional guidance. You can use this information to provide additional information and redirect any misunderstandings.

How can I use this guide?

This guide can be 

• Used with individual educators
• Used in a professional learning community (PLC)