Welcome back to our Travel Training series where we are taking a closer look at Travel Training as an educational concept and the role it might play in your classroom or with an Autistic person you are supporting. 

In Part 1 we covered what travel training is and when might be best to use it in an educational setting. In Part 2 we will cover some broad ways we can apply the teaching of travel training to meet the individual needs of your student and your constraints as a teacher. 

Each of these categories might prove to be suitable on their own in some cases and in others it might make sense to have them all together. You and your students can be the judges of what makes the most sense. So let’s dive in!

One of the most basic forms of teaching travel training is discussing who we can talk to if things go wrong. 

It is important to establish an emergency contact, and it is also important to establish when it might be necessary to reach out to an emergency contact and how to do so. 

Lessons might include building and practicing scripts on what to say in different situations, making note cards to carry around, or chatting with the emergency contact about what to do. There are lots of different options depending on your resources and student’s needs!

One of the most bare-bones components of any transportation system is the basic protocol of how it operates and what rules you need to follow if you want to access the resource in question at the preferred time. 

Establishing a travel protocol for reaching certain destinations or using certain transportation systems can be a hugely valuable resource to many Autistic students, both for getting on the same page about why we take certain steps and to play a shared role in navigating that situation in a way that is most comfortable to them. 

Once we establish our protocol, we can develop that protocol into a small visual guide or practice remembering the steps as part of building our working memory skills!

A slightly more committed version of establishing a protocol, a travel guide is great both for the important information it can have readily available for a student who needs it and the way we can build up familiarity with a particular transportation system by learning more about it and spending more time thinking about how we will navigate it. 

While not every student might require a hugely involved travel guide, others might feel more comfortable having a tool that covers a variety of situations and potential needs.

For some forms of transportation, there’s no replacing real-world experience, and the main limiting factor to that real-world experience is what is achievable in the context of your classroom. 

Real-world practice is also a great way to build on some of the tools discussed in other sections, and students can practice using them while still having supervisory help ready at a moment’s notice. Likewise, a protocol is much easier to remember the more often we do it! 

While real-world practice is not always practical in a school setting, it is definitely an option worth considering if it is safe and practical to do so!

We hope these broad guidelines around travel training have inspired some ways of approaching the unique travel needs of each of your students, clients or people you are supporting. 

If you would like to share your own experience with travel training then we would love to hear from you! Just drop us a line at hello@autismgrownup.com and we will be back next week to talk about travel training best practices.