Embedded Files
At the Florida Center for Students with Unique Abilities, Christian designs for the variability of his learners and works alongside employers to help them see his students' unique strengths.
Overview
Watch how Christian supports his learner with an intellectual disability to show his skills and persist through challenges.
Florida Center for Students with Unique Abilities
The FCSUA increases independent living, inclusive and experiential postsecondary education, and employment opportunities for students with intellectual disabilities through degree, certificate, or nondegree programs. Their goal is that students with intellectual disabilities have access to meaningful postsecondary education credentials and be afforded the opportunity to have a meaningful campus experience.
“When you ask Sebastian a question, his beautiful mind is going to go through a thousand different computations"
Tested strategies that worked
Take a strengths-based approach
Christian deeply understood Sebastian's strengths: his work ethic, attention to detail, and passion for cooking. In doing so, he could better advocate for Sebastian. You can work together with students to help identify strengths.
Develop awareness of self and others (UDL Checkpoint 9.2)
Interview skill is often treated as a fixed trait a young person either has or does not have. However, Christian treated it as a learnable strategy with supports that could be adjusted and gradually removed. Before Sebastian's second interview, Christian worked with him to develop his interview skills and build a working understanding of his own strengths and reactions while also learning to read the perspective of the person interviewing him.
Try this AI prompt in Claude, Gemini, or ChatGPT to help further personalize your instructional design
I am a teacher and I want to run mock interviews with my students myself. You are helping me prepare and facilitate, not playing the interviewer.
Ask me for what you need before you build anything: the job or type of job my students are preparing for, their grade level and work experience, how much class time I have, how many students are involved and whether they will practice in pairs or small groups, and anything specific I want them to work on.
Then build me a facilitation kit with these parts.
A question bank of eight to ten realistic questions for that job and experience level, sorted from warm-up to harder. For each question, tell me in one line what a real employer is trying to find out. I need that so I can help students read the question behind the question rather than just rehearse answers.
A short script for how I open the session, including how I set expectations, how I tell students what will and will not happen, and how a student can pause or pass without it becoming a moment.
Three or four ways a student can take part, so they are not all doing the same thing in the same way. Include at least one option that does not require speaking in front of peers. Options might include answering out loud to a partner, writing answers first and then reading them, recording a voice memo and listening back, or watching one round before taking a turn.
A one-page observer sheet for the student who is watching, with two or three things to look for that are concrete and not evaluative. Write it so a student can actually use it.
Feedback language I can model and hand to students, phrased around behavior rather than the person. Give me five or six sentence stems.
Three debrief questions I ask after each round, including one that asks the student what the interviewer was trying to find out.
Additional Resources
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Case Study B
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Case Study C
Cosmetology | Autism
Case Study D
Criminal Justice | Dyslexia
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