Participate and share: Poster 
Education challenge/situation: Students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and learning disabilities (LD) often display social skill deficits that interfere with relationship development, negatively influence academic performance, and increase depression, anxiety, and loneliness (Ke et al., 2018). If not addressed, social skill deficits continue into adulthood and are linked to unemployment and limited independence (Tobin et al., 2014). It is imperative to identify the primary social skills needed for instruction as well as the possible interventions available to teach these skills. Advisor serves as the mechanism to guide teacher instruction as they facilitate student learning and application of social skills within the social demands of the middle school classroom across a variety of settings. The developers of VOISS Advisor took on the challenge of asynchronous educator learning through an interactive website with evidence-based practices, lesson plans, video models and implementation guides for practice and generalization strategies and tactics. Advisor also has a web-based inventory tool and an associated virtual reality environment that teaches students about social skills and gives them a safe space to play. Through usability testing, educator interviews and focus groups, VOISS Advisor is a model for supporting asynchronous educator learning, online.
Technology Interventions: Advisor is an interactive website with the ability to provide information on generalization of skills and potential lesson plans. It can stand-alone as a professional development tool for educators and it also helps educators integrate VOISS, a VR system. The virtual reality system can be used on an iPad or Chromebook as an app or on a VR headset such as Facebook's Oculus Quest 2. VOISS provides an immersive and interactive virtual environment where students can experience authentic social skill learning scenarios. This provides a safe and replicable environment for users to practice skills that typically are difficult to reproduce organically. Advisor was developed to support teacher implementation of VOISS, but more importantly, to help teachers understand and learn why generalization of learned skills is critical, post VR usage. Advisor was developed with multiple means of engagement, representation, and action and expression. Attendees will be provided access, training, and implementation guides for utilizing Advisor (and VOISS, if they choose) in the classroom.
Model & Strategies Employed: The design of this presentation is both scripted and self-driven through demonstrations. Attendees will be encouraged to experience the technology and explore the provided resources but will have the freedom to choose the content and products to be explored during individual work time, tailored to their individual needs and wants. Researchers have shown that autonomy and choice play a big role in motivation. By authenticating the content and differentiating the tasks, participants will walk away with meaningful resources.
Evidence of Success: Advisor has been iteratively developed over the course of the last four years through an Office of Special Education and Programs, Stepping Up grant. Through educator focus groups and an advisory board made up of experts in Autism, Learning Disabilities and social skills from across the nation, the design and content of Advisor was developed and has been tested with over 120 educators. Through web analytics, focus group transcripts, survey results and expert recommendations, Advisor has moved from a repository of lesson plans and how-to videos on evidence-based practice, to a more robust, comprehensive tool for educators. We have added a standards page with a crosswalk between CASEL and state social emotional standards. We have added an interactive tool for educators to select their role in education and receive a guided tour of how other job-alike educators used VOISS. We have also added crosswalk maps to show how the Advisor resources are interrelated and how they connect back to VOISS, an associated student social skill virtual reality environment. Advisor is undergoing two studies in the 2022-23 school year to determine how it supports educator learning of and self-efficacy with teaching social skills. We will have results to share at ISTE.
1. Introduction and Session Format Description (5 minutes)
Participants will be encouraged to open the online handout and will be introduced to the format of our session, as well as the presenters. We will use Padlet to poll the group for demographics and interest, which will help guide our emphasis and focus. The cyclical format of the presentation will also be explained.
2. Introduction to Advisor (5 minutes)
We will introduce the federally funded, open-education resources found in the Advisor website and the research guiding our efforts.
3. Guided Tour of sitemaps for big picture (2 minutes)
We have found that the easiest way to understand the breadth and depth of Advisor is to allow users to navigate our crosswalk maps. Educators love to start here because they immediately see how Advisor ties back to state and national standards, evidence-based practice, and practical solutions that they can turn around and use in their classrooms immediately.
4. Exploration of interactive sitemaps (3 minutes)
Users will be given time to independently explore the site map and linked resources and presenters will be on hand to answer questions and provide guidance during explorations.
5. Introduction of the Social Skill Inventory (2 minutes)
A big teacher favorite, the social skill inventory is a easy-to-use screener tool to help educators determine what social skills students need and how best the educator can utilize Advisor.
6. Introduction to a Classroom Story #1 (2 minutes)
We will introduce the highlighted classroom story, that student’s inventory results, and show a quick video of the teacher introducing the student. We will share what ISTE Standards and specific challenges are being addressed by this classroom story.
7. Demonstration of Specific Strategy and Associated Resource (2 minutes)
The presenter will do a brief demonstration of the VOISS scenario utilized by the student and show the lesson plan outlined the teacher used to support practice and generalization of learned social skills from the VR environment into the physical classroom. For example, Marcus, is a sixth grader who struggles to understand body language and nonverbal communication of others. His teacher, Mrs. Jones has him complete the VR scenario that focuses on understanding and participating in joking. She then uses the VOISS Advisor website to learn what instructional strategies, instructional settings, generalization tactics and support strategies are needed to help Marcus take the skills that he learned in the VR scenario and practice and generalize them into the classroom. She then used the Advisor Lesson Plan Builder to construct a personalized lesson for Marcus. We will use video and live demonstration to walk participants through the model.
8. Exploration of Specific Resource (2 minutes)
Participants will be given time to explore Marcus’ classroom story on VOISS Advisor. We will field individual concerns and questions during this brief exploration time.
9. Reflection (2 minutes)
Attendees will be encouraged to crowd-source, swapping additional ideas and resources with other attendees using a provided Padlet. Reflection prompts in the board will sharing implementation ideas and how they contextualize the new learning into their own educational settings.
6.-9. Repeat Phase Cycle (8 minutes)
Repeat steps six through nine, so that a total of three classroom stories will be explored:
Jolene – she struggles to communicate with respect to her teachers and is often inappropriately casual with peers. Jolene learns and practices the use of slang and idioms in an appropriate setting within VOISS and then her teacher uses video modeling, small group instruction and peer coaching to practice and generalized those learned skills within the classroom.
Jackson – he struggles with understanding personal space and boundaries. He practices interacting with the avatars in VOISS and they react according to his behaviors while the system redirects any behaviors that might make people uncomfortable. His teacher then uses role play and prompting to support classroom practice and use of the newly learned skills
10. Combination of partner and whole group discussion (7 minutes)
11. Summary of Session and Ensure Participant Access to Resources (2 minutes)
12. Participant Questions (10 minutes) Questions and whole group discussion.
Advisor is built upon well tested Implementation Science (Dunst, et. al., 2013). Researchers in special education have made strides in identifying EBPs for students with disabilities over the past two decades. Cook, Cook, and Landrum (2013) describe how empirical and theoretical literature outside of our field may offer the insight needed in how to facilitate the ideas taking hold in classroom practice, particularly Heath and Heath’s (2007) model of characteristics that are likely to “stick.” Advisor can increase the direct instruction and support teachers are provided for social skill interventions making the initial instruction more effective and allowing the student application of the learned skill to be consistent and impactful within the demands of the school setting (McCurdy, et. al., 2014). Advisor purposefully empowers teachers to effectively and efficiently support the implementation of social skill evidence-based practice and generalization.
Return
Trips and Tours