Dr. Kristi Morin: Helping Teachers Understand Students with Autism

The boy would throw chairs across the classroom. He would cause other disruptions too, yelling inappropriate comments, or threatening to set things on fire. One time, he stabbed another student with a pencil.

Dr. Kristi Morin knew he wasn’t beyond hope. 

“He was very capable of being in a general education classroom,” says Morin. “Intellectually, he was reading above grade level and could do the academic work.”

But the boy, a second grader with autism spectrum disorder, clearly had “some very significant needs,” she says.

It was the question of how she could best address those needs that led Morin – then a classroom teacher, now a professor at the Lehigh College of Education – to pursue her twin interests in teacher development and autism spectrum disorder (ASD).

Morin’s interest in ASD began before she was a classroom teacher, back to when she was studying for her bachelor’s in general education at Louisiana State University at Alexandria. Her program required her to write a paper about a disability of her choosing.