Building rapport with our students is one of the most important things we do as clinicians and educators. I’ve found building rapport to be a vital part of my students’ success, but not all of my neurodivergent students seem to want to connect. Especially at the high school level.
As our students grow older, the less they want to listen to adults and authority figures. The more they tune us out, argue, do the opposite of what we wish they’d do. Middle schoolers, and especially high schoolers, can be stubborn, there’s no way around that. I’ve certainly felt frustrated working with some of those stubborn students I struggled to get through to. And it showed in our progress, leading to stagnation, discontinuing services for lack of participation or motivation.
Although dismissing students and lowering our caseloads is on one hand considered a success, I’d still get that little feeling of failure, wondering “what could have been” had I just gotten through to that student.
These are the types of neurodivergent students I want to talk about today. Your “difficult” older students. Jaded, too cool for school, or deliberately disrespectful of authority. Some students actively resist connecting and building rapport. Their trust has been eroded by another professional before you. Or multiple. You didn’t even stand a chance before you entered the room.
So how do we get through to these students and see them achieve their goals and succeed?
It took me three years working at a school district before I saw a shift in my students. To my surprise, some of my most challenging students started to come around. Keep reading to find out how.
This article goes into the following:
- Intrinsic and extrinsic negative core beliefs that can shape the mindset of our older neurodivergent students and become a barrier for social connection.
- How trauma plays a distinct role in many kids’ behaviors and responses so you can begin to recognize these responses in the neurodivergent students you work with.
- The 4 Cs framework for building rapport with older neurodivergent students so you can break the mold and turn your “difficult” neurodivergent students around.
- Real life examples of how I applied the 4 Cs framework to help me establish rapport with 3 neurodivergent students I struggled to connect with.
Storytime
Student #1: Every day is terrible
Every time I would retrieve one of my high schoolers from class and ask how their day was going, they would answer “terrible.” Every single week. It was a constant I could bet on if I wanted. So I started asking them if their day was regular terrible or if there was something new that happened today. Regardless of the answer, I would ask them if they wanted to talk about it or not, and then when they’d answer no, I’d drop the subject.
I think it was spring semester before they started to take me up on the offer to talk about it. But once we slid that door open the first time, suddenly this student started telling me personal stories and questions they had. One day wasn’t even terrible, they wanted to celebrate a success with me with a small smile I don’t think I’d seen before.
This particular student was autistic and an ADHDer who was working on perspective-taking and social problem-solving skills. Once they began to open up, we started discussing their actual real-life social problems.
Student #2: Stuck at vocalic /r/
Another student I saw was working on articulation, the kind of student only working on vocalic /r/ and was 100% intelligible in conversation with no apparent educational impact. Their progress had stalled and their motivation was practically non-existent. But they were never leaving my caseload. Why? This student had a traumatic history of bullying related to their speech.
By the time we started working together, this student had been in speech therapy forever and was frustrated at their lack of progress. The more they’d try, the less natural their vocalic /r/ would sound.
Three years later, I was able to reduce their sessions to once per month moving toward consult only. Family remarked they hadn’t seen such progress in this student in years. All of a sudden, this student dramatically improved.
And was it the speech therapy? Well…truth be told, although they made some progress during speech therapy sessions, the significant improvement actually happened over the summer. Yep, instead of going back to square one, this student got better. I asked them if they’d been practicing in summer, to which they proudly stated, yes, I have.
It wasn’t the drill and practice of speech sounds that got them there. It was the rapport we eventually built that motivated them to practice on their own and really try. They wanted to improve. To show me how much better they’d gotten. That’s what made all the difference. They were excited and proud to show me their progress.
So how did we get there? Most of our sessions were conversational and driven by the student’s choice; their special interest dominated our sessions. Drill made them not want to speak, but their special interest? They’d talk about it for days.
Diving deeper into neurodivergent perspectives: Core beliefs
The older the student is, the more likely they’re carrying around some kind of limiting belief or trauma that hinders their ability to make social connections. With peers and with you. That’s one of the major reasons that working with older students can be so challenging.
With older students, there are additional barriers based on the student’s life experiences. And more than likely, you don’t know their history, you don’t know what these barriers are and where they come from. You have a much greater wall to tear down to get through to your student. And these barriers often compound over time.
That’s not the student’s fault and there’s nothing you can do about a student’s past. But we inherit the problems of their past and the mistakes of others before us.
Student #3: Abandoned AAC device
I had a student who became visibly upset whenever their AAC device was turned on. They protested even getting it out of their bag. And modeling on it made them lash out, too panicked to function.
It made me wonder, what was going on? What had happened that made this student so triggered by their communication device? A demon of their past? Yes, I later learned.
A previous SLP, in trying to get this student to use their AAC device, required them to request “eat” using the device for every bite of food during lunch. Every bite. If they didn’t hit the specific button, an adult would withhold food until they complied, even if the adult had to force the student’s hands. It sounded like cruel and unusual punishment.
The AAC device was literally traumatizing. There was nothing I could do to convince that student that their AAC device was a positive thing. They wanted absolutely nothing to do with it, the further away the better! So what was the solution?
Well, the student’s AAC device was traumatizing, but mine wasn’t. I let them use my device at their own pace with their own hands and for their own desires. I let my student decide and choose what to say and when, not demand the student to comply with what I thought was best.
Each of these students entered the therapy room with their own expectations of how our sessions would go before we even met. And this took significant time and effort to unlearn. Whatever your students expect to happen will color how they interact with you and can quickly shape the fate of your future sessions. Talk about pressure.
What is a negative core belief?
In clinical psychology, a negative core belief is considered a fundamental belief that a person has gathered related to themself or the world that they continuously reinforce through the events of their daily life.
For example, if a person believes at their core that they are not pretty, they will ignore instances that validate their beauty and hold onto instances that validate their perceived ugliness. Any time they were overlooked or forgotten is used as evidence to support the belief. Or any small criticism they encounter about their body is interpreted as fact. Or another example, if a person fundamentally believes that others only want to deceive them, they will highlight in their memories instances of dishonesty and deemphasize experiences with honest people.
A personal belief becomes a core belief when it is the main underlying belief that drives how a person views and interacts with the world, the belief that colors the way we interpret our experiences in daily life. Our core belief shapes how we perceive and respond to the world around us.
Each of your students will have developed or will be developing their core beliefs. And this will impact your sessions and how your student may respond to you or your approaches and practice.
For simplicity’s sake, I’m going to discuss intrinsic and extrinsic core beliefs more as a monolith. I’m not going to deep dive into specific negative core beliefs – nobody here has time for that! And that’s okay, because I think that a simplified understanding of core beliefs that are common in our neurodivergent students are still useful to know when trying to develop rapport.
Intrinsic negative core beliefs
Intrinsic negative core beliefs for many autistic people and ADHDers often are derived from feeling like a flawed/defective person, struggling to fit in or belong, or ultimately not feeling “good enough” as they are. Feeling like their feelings, how they experience the world, is wrong, bad. They may feel like they shouldn’t exist as themselves. Like they need to be someone else.
Feeling flawed or defective isn’t an uncommon negative core belief in people in general, but it’s even more common in autistic people and ADHDers due to the societal messages they learn from growing up different. Autistic people are often rejected, excluded from social situations, and struggle to build social connections.
When you experience a lot of rejection, It’s easy to conclude that there is something deeply wrong with you. Your mind wants to identify a cause for the rejection. So you conclude that either everyone else is flawed, or the problem is you.
When an autistic student holds this negative core belief that they’re deeply flawed or alien, it is reinforced every time someone points out flaws in the autistic person’s demeanor, tone of voice, facial expressions, eye contact, or body language. The autistic person learns to look for a flaw in themselves that explains the rejection or how they’re treated in social interactions. They decide they must be the reason they’re treated poorly.
An autistic person motivated by this intrinsic belief that they are flawed can manifest as students who are highly anxious and perfectionistic. Students who really want to learn what they can do to “get better.” They may seem like your most motivated students – until they burn through all their energy trying for perfection and reach their breaking point.
Some of your high schoolers may have adopted this mindset when they were younger, before they burned out. They may withdraw from society now because they feel they are too flawed to ever fit in. They may push you away or show no motivation as a form of self-preservation. Because their motivation and effort was what previously led them to mental collapse. And they don’t want to go through that again.
By the time you first meet your neurodivergent student, they may expect you to demand more of them than they can realistically give. They expect to fail you, regardless of how much effort they put in. So why even try if failure is the result either way? It feels easier to conserve energy and expect failure than spend excess energy trying for perfection and always falling short.
Can you really blame them though? The student that can recognize what depletes their social battery and drive them to burnout won’t want to trigger or exacerbate that pain. It just makes sense. Especially when many autistic people experience at least one period of autistic burnout before they even reach high school.
Your student’s attitude or pessimism has nothing to do with you. The problem isn’t you; the problem is society’s expectations and the people that came before you. When you recognize this, you can let go of taking personal offense. They truly anticipate unrealistic expectations and for you to push them past their capacity. They expect you to make them feel inferior if they don’t try endlessly harder and harder.
These students may have been students with good rapport with previous speech therapists. They are more likely to appear well on the outside, for a while. These students become riddled with so much anxiety and self-doubt that they can struggle to function. Until one day they reach their breaking point – and crash.
It’s just as important to get through to these students and address their negative core beliefs before they experience burnout and pay the cost of intense masking. These students need us too. Trust me, because I was one of those students. If you want to read about my personal experiences with masking and burnout in high school, I write about it here.
Extrinsic negative core beliefs
Common extrinsic negative core beliefs of an autistic person often have to do with the feeling of living in a flawed society. The autistic person attributes their difficulty with fitting in or belonging with a problem with society rather than with themself. They may feel anger that the world doesn’t accept them or see them as good enough as they are. Like they deserve.
An autistic person who holds an extrinsic negative core belief may determine that the world needs to be solved, not them. That the world shouldn’t have any right to dictate their thoughts or feelings, how they experience the world, what is considered right or wrong. The world should be different, not reject them because they’re different. So they reject the world.
These extrinsic core beliefs can just as easily develop from societal messages learned from those around them. That same social rejection or exclusion can lead to blaming the world for mistreatment. They may lose trust in the intentions of others. If they can’t imagine a social relationship with you ever being positive, they won’t want to build that connection.
Similarly to the intrinsic core belief mentioned above, pointing out flaws in an autistic person’s demeanor, tone of voice, facial expressions, eye contact, body language also reinforces the negative extrinsic core belief. Your autistic person starts to identify a characteristic in themselves that explains the rejection or how they’re treated in social interactions. But instead of blaming themselves, they blame everyone else, too.
An autistic person motivated by an extrinsic negative belief that society is flawed can manifest as your students who are skeptical or want to argue with you, who do not seem motivated by social attainment. Who purposefully disregard other perspectives, or perceive them not to matter compared to their own.
Some of these students may be your students motivated by rigid following of rules that they feel would better society, or your students who completely disregard rules, because they distrust the intentions of authority figures who determine or enforce those rules.
It’s difficult when your students flat out argue with you that other people’s perspectives don’t matter. But instead of seeing this belief as selfish or entitled, consider how it’s just another coping mechanism brought from repeated traumatic experiences of social rejection and feeling inferior. The brain is protecting their sense of self-worth and trying to help them navigate living in a society that is profoundly different and does not value their perspective. If society doesn’t value your student’s perspective, then your student decides they won’t value society’s perspectives.
Can you blame this student’s response? When they disregard social rejection, they are protecting themselves from that constant anxiety, perfectionism, and shame and disappointment other autistic students experience. They are prioritizing their own well being over the well being of others. The way our society is built forces many autistic people to choose, and I can’t really blame those who choose to prioritize their own well being.
Some of your students may struggle with both extrinsic beliefs of a flawed society, and intrinsic beliefs of a flawed self. Typically a person is influenced more by one belief. But both of these will negatively impact their motivation and willingness to participate in therapy.
Your “difficult” neurodivergent students
Lacking motivation can manifest from feeling defeated by intrinsic or extrinsic beliefs that either the individual (intrinsic) or society (extrinsic) is flawed, so expending effort is believed to be futile. Our “difficult” students may resist working with us out of a distrust for us or our process.
The neurodivergent students you struggle to connect with are most likely carrying a significant amount of trauma. Probably more than you can ever imagine. Forcing them to conform to your expectations isn’t going to help you build positive connections. Instead of focusing on what we think we need from our students, consider what our students need from us.
I’ve found the key to getting through to some of these students is by challenging their negative core beliefs.
By challenging a fundamental negative belief they’ve internalized, you will offer them a different perspective. And in turn, hope, if they allow it. You can’t expect your students to have any motivation if they don’t have hope that things will get better or things can change. But you have to give them a reason to shift their beliefs.
This brings me to the 4 step framework I’ve come up with that describes how I built rapport with some of my challenging neurodivergent students.
Four step framework – 4 Cs for building rapport with traumatized students
(Okay, so it’s not a perfect 4 Cs, but as an SLP, I couldn’t bear to ignore the grammatical structure.)
I believe I’ve connected better with many of my students from openly identifying as an autistic SLP and listening to and relating with many of their experiences. I’ve been lucky to feel like I’ve had that advantage that sped up the rapport-building process with a select few students. But with other students, this connection or relation didn’t seem to have any effect at all. And I’m telling you that you don’t need to be autistic to connect and establish good rapport with your autistic students.
I believe that any SLP can use the following steps to develop deeper connections and better relate with their neurodivergent students. I’m hoping this framework will offer clear steps that help you build that rapport with some of your students who resist connection due to trauma.
Let me explain the process by breaking down these 4 steps.
Step 1. Consider student’s perspective.
The first step to building rapport with a traumatized neurodivergent student has to start with considering our student’s perspective. When we only think about what our student “should” be thinking or feeling, it denies their actual experience. We need to consider how our student actually perceives the world and try to understand their point of view. Consider why your student might resist engagement or why your student might argue their view as superior.
Consider if your student’s perception is fueled by intrinsic or extrinsic negative beliefs.
Just to be clear, we’re not trained psychologists, and I’m not telling you to treat your students like therapy patients. I’m encouraging you to take a trauma-informed approach to your practice and building rapport.
Some things you may want to consider…
- What triggers my student?
- (Intrinsic) Does my student turn their negative thoughts inward upon themselves? Do they perceive themself as flawed or a failure? Have they lost faith in their ability to live up to others’ expectations?
- (Extrinsic) Does my student perceive society as flawed or failing them? Do they distrust society or authority figures? Do they perceive society as not living up to their expectations? Do they reject society because society rejected them?
2. Cultivate safety.
The second step is to establish a safe presence. Show your student that you care about their well being too, not only their speech or language skills.
For your students working on speech, demonstrate interest in your neurodivergent students are saying rather than only focusing on how they said it. Ask your student about their interests, let them lead, and they may soon identify you as someone in their life who will support their intense interest rather than criticize it. Building this trust can allow students to lower their emotional barriers and begin to be more willing to work with you.
When you show your students that you have no desire to punish or control them, they may feel more comfortable lowering the masking or dissociation that keeps you at a distance and start to show you parts of themselves. They can feel more willing to be vulnerable with you when they see the therapy room as a safe space where their perspectives, emotions, and differences are validated too.
You want your student to feel better after talking with you, not worse. Make this your priority even above your therapy goals. Your student will be far more willing to listen to suggestion or strategies when they can count on feeling understood, valued, safe.
Some ways you can develop trust and establish safety:
- Listening to your student’s thoughts, opinions, perceptions without showing judgment
- Being honest and transparent
- Accommodating your student’s needs, lowering demands and expectations
- Following your student’s lead or engaging in their interests
- Showing willingness to discuss uncomfortable or personal topics (while maintaining appropriate boundaries)
3. Challenge negative perception.
The third step is to challenge the student’s negative beliefs. Challenge their perception that they are flawed and deserving of rejection. Or challenge their perception that all of society is flawed and will always reject them due to their difference.
You student may expect that you want to “fix” their “problem behaviors” and train them to fit in better within society. This goes along with cultivating safety as our student isn’t going to feel safe if they think you want to “fix” them.
Our job as SLPs can make this a little difficult, especially when our goals are written to “fix” or “train” a student’s speech or social communication skills. One way to overcome this is by being transparent of your intentions. You can let your student know that although there are still certain expectations required of you as an SLP, such as working toward an on-paper goal, your personal goals aren’t centered around fixing them.
We want to teach our students that it’s okay to be different and that we don’t have an agenda to change them to fit into society’s mold. We care more about their well being and we value accommodating and advocating for their needs.
Taking a more person-centered approach emphasizes helping the person feel more comfortable with their disability and reduce its negative impact. This approach challenges both intrinsic beliefs centered around being flawed and extrinsic beliefs centered around society rejecting them.
Some ways you can challenge negative perceptions:
- Take a person-centered approach to your sessions and IEPs
- Be open about your intentions and goals for them
- Encourage valuing differences and accepting a person’s disability
- Reject training social skills or activities that encourage masking
- Discuss accommodations and advocate for the student if they’re not receiving their accommodations
- Teach self-advocacy skills
4. (be) Consistent.
Unfortunately, this process may take a while before you see any positive effects, especially if your student is older. That’s one of the costs of trauma. After your student is repeatedly invalidated, made to feel bad about themselves, or made out to be an enemy, there’s simply more barriers to overcome. More negative perceptions built on past experiences to counter and unlearn.
It might take months, a year, sometimes even longer before you see any reward from your efforts in establishing rapport.
It’s not easy to do, playing the long game. It’s hard, it’s painful, but let me tell you it is worth it. Kids want to know that you care. They don’t want to invest in you if they feel you are invested in someone else’s agenda, not theirs. And that’s why consistency is so important. Because it’s much easier to write off someone’s effort after one day, but much harder to discredit their intentions the longer they consistently show that effort.
Be a calm, caring, stable figure for your student in sessions, even when your student isn’t engaging or doing what you want them to do. Even if you feel your efforts are fruitless, and you start to question whether you should give up and try being that authority figure who demands more, try to resist. Be patient and persevere. Given enough time and patience, I truly believe you can earn your student’s trust.
Applying the 4 Cs Framework to my students
Student #1
Let’s go back to my student that told me every day was truly terrible. This student carried extrinsic negative core beliefs that society was flawed. They felt they didn’t fit in and that society had no interest in helping them, and instead only created more challenges and problems. Interacting with society, making connections, was considered more trouble than it was worth, and the student didn’t want to risk it since they expected the relationships would turn out poorly.
I had to challenge my student’s extrinsic core beliefs. Teach them that at least with me and in my therapy room, their experience didn’t have to be terrible.
I let them decide when and how much to share with me. So the student could trust me at their own pace when they were ready. Because as much as we’d like to, we can’t force connection. When our student’s brain seeks to reinforce negative beliefs and de-emphasize anything that counters the negative belief, it means we need to be consistent in our efforts. Changing core beliefs aren’t going to happen in one day, one week. Patience is one of the most important parts of this process.
So every week I continued to ask about the student’s day even though I knew the answer. And every week I let them know he could talk about it if they wanted to, even when I knew they’d decline. Still, I gave them the choice. I let them know I’d consistently take interest in them, care about how they were doing, even if I couldn’t change anything.
We talked about various social situations in comic strips and Humans of New York stories. These stories were often specific, personal enough situations that were good for perspective-taking, not so vague to lose meaning and not too close to the student’s own life.
I modeled how I would listen to the student describe a character’s feelings and thoughts without judgment. Just as I would have listened to them if they decided to talk about their own social problems. By the time my student did share, they knew how I’d react. They knew we’d calmly discuss the problem and analyze the perspectives and potential actions and consequences without judgment. They knew I wouldn’t show anger or upset, or shut them down or criticize their thoughts or actions. Over time, they started to understand I wouldn’t make them feel bad about themself like they’d previously expected.
This student started to see the therapy room as a safe place to discuss those kinds of problems. And that’s when I started to see real progress.
Student #2
My student with a history of being bullied felt deeply ashamed of their speech and held negative beliefs about their ability to improve. Their negative intrinsic belief that their speech made them flawed and they wouldn’t be able to speak “right.”
We challenged those negative beliefs by de-emphasizing the articulation in the student’s articulation therapy. We turned the therapy room from feeling stressful, from reinforcing their feeling of failure every week, to becoming a positive place where they had the opportunity to share their special interest.
When the topic was the student’s special interest, they didn’t want to stop talking, and we’d just address the speech in short segments in between active listening about their special interest. Since I was indulging the student’s penchant for talking on and on about the special interest, they would indulge my short practice sessions or brief instruction about articulator placement.
I learned over time that this student held far more negative beliefs about themselves that made them feel flawed than just their speech. This student constantly felt flawed due to struggling with attention, sustaining focus, and finishing their classwork like their peers. The student didn’t know much of anything about ADHD, and so determined they must be lazy, not good enough, that they were a failure as a person for having different struggles than their peers.
So we watched some videos about ADHD brains, how their brain worked differently and they had a distinct profile of not just weaknesses, but also strengths. We watched some videos about strategies for overcoming motivation barriers and help make completing work a little easier. Then I put the student in a small group with a peer who also had an ADHD brain.
I built rapport with this student by first challenging their negative belief that speech therapy was a place they endlessly failed due to their speech. We turned it into a place instead where the student was not defined entirely by their speech, their speech was just one small aspect of them as a person. Then we tackled their feelings of failure in other aspects of their life. When the student changed their perception from feeling constantly like a failure with a lack of control, to feeling understood and with some ability to work with their brain, they built up some confidence in themself.
Over time, the student developed the confidence to practice their articulation a little longer and eventually practice on their own, now equipped with the confidence that they could improve.
Student #3
My student who was traumatized by his AAC device had an expectation that I would force him to use his device and put his device as a barrier preventing him from getting his wants or needs met. He had a core belief that he couldn’t trust authority figures, that they didn’t have his best interest in mind and didn’t actually help him. They merely got in the way.
I challenged his expectation by refusing to use physical prompting to get him to use his device and respecting his choice not to use his device. I modeled using my own device, and he started to see the device for what it was truly meant for. To share thoughts, feelings, make comments.
I let him take my hand to hit the buttons on my device and I let him use my device to communicate with me. And you know what he ended up sharing during our last session? Two buttons: “love” “as”…this high school non-speaking student smiled, navigated to those buttons (even though I’d never modeled or seen him navigate to the conjunctions page that contained “as”). And then proceeded to try reaching to touch my behind. Thankfully I was wearing a wool shawl that day that served as an excellent barrier. But yes. I think this student told me that he loved my ass. And then laughed about it.
Clearly he felt quite comfortable sharing his thoughts with me and was quite adept at navigating an AAC device on a neutral device and on his own terms.
Conclusion
Establishing that therapeutic relationship between SLP and student is invaluable. But often times trauma gets in the way of building rapport, especially with our older neurodivergent students.
My intentions for this article is to offer a guide for any SLP or educator struggling to connect with a neurodivergent student. Alleviate some of those feelings of frustration or perceived failure when working with older neurodivergent students. People are individual and there is no one size fits all, but I hope that this general explanation of negative beliefs can help you better understand your student’s perspective.
I encourage you to think deeply, see if you can identify the belief that’s holding them back and preventing connecting with you. And then challenge it. Keep experimenting with ways to build connection with your autistic and ADHD students.
One of the greatest gifts we can give our students that will stick with them long past their exit from school is the feeling that someone cared about them, that someone believed they were worth investing in. Positive authority figures or role models are hugely influential to kids.
Let me know if you found value in this article or found the framework helpful by commenting below.