Ice breakers for in-person autism workshop

[DiddlyKnot]

Hello!

Does anyone have any fun games/ ice breakers for an in-person workshop about autism?

They should be engaging and informative but light hearted too!

I would pick the most uncomfortably embarrassing thing you can find and run with that.

Then ask people how they think someone with autism would be able to cope with any icebreaker, let alone the awful one they just had to do.

Erm.

Yes. What she said.

Is the workshop aimed at autistic adults? Or adults who support autistic children?

Sorry, the workshop is aimed at line managers.

I am autistic, so I've been asked to deliver the session.

I hate icebreakers and think they should be abolished. I'm not autistic but I am introverted and generally just unsociable. Ice breakers are a special kind of torture that seem to exist purely to make everyone feel consistently uncomfortable.

@DiddlyKnot do you like ice breakers? I have a colleague with autism who really likes them. I don't like them but maybe I've never heard one that I like, but nothing will suit everyone.

The ice breaker is just to get people thinking about autism. For example, what is it? What can it look like? How can it feel?

Otherwise, the session will just be me reading from slides! No fun!

I hope you are getting credit somehow, whether that's being paid for your time, being given time away from your usual work duties, or it reflecting positively on your next performance review, for the time you're putting into this. Your company could have got a paid trainer from an autism charity to deliver expert content on managing people with autism rather than ask you to deliver it.

Please don't, they are the most excruciating part of training courses and for busy professionals, 10-15 minutes you could have been doing something more productive.

They will all appreciate you treating them like busy professionals and kick straight in with whatever information you have been asked to impart in a prompt and timely manner, releasing them back to their day jobs. A mandated training course isn't a fun day/morning out, it's taking up time so I always appreciate it being as short as possible

@DiddlyKnot have you been told to do an ice breaker? If not, I'd avoid using it.

I agree with pp that it's a bit strange to ask you, unless you really wanted to or offered.

people will be fine with a factual presentation.

Perhaps have a load of postits or cards with specific Autistic difficulties and issues, and get them to sort each into these sections (from autism.org.uk).
It might spark discussion about the overlap between categories for many autistic traits and help colleagues better understand autistic struggles.

They've come along to hear you talk though, listening to you reading off slides is what they're interested in. I would avoid the ice breaker personally, I hate them. But I did actually see a good one at an autism training session I went to when I was a care worker. They had a jug of water and a cup upside down on the table and asked people to call out step by step instructions for pouring a cup of water to someone with autism. No-one said 'turn the cup over' before pouring the water so the speaker poured it over the cup and floor to much laughter. She said no-one ever remembers to say turn it over because that step is assumed/implicit for NT people. It was a great visual metaphor for not making assumptions that everyone can read between the lines of your instructions.

Thanks! This is the kind of thing I was after!

Brilliant! Very educational too!

Ice breakers should be binned. It's painful for everyone ND or not. I am autistic and it makes every fibre of me itch inside. I'm just back from a course and I don't think anyone found it comfortable.

You could ask attendees to talk to one or two people next to them and perhaps write on a post it what they’d like from the session? And collect?

Personally, I don't like to just lecture for an hour. I'd rather do something more interactive to get people really thinking about the subject.

I mean, if you wanted to know what autism is, you could just go read the Wikipedia page on it, right? I want people to actually understand and experience it.

Understanding it is not doing an ice breaker!

@DiddlyKnot I think we have different definitions of ice breaker! Hope it goes well.

Could you ask them to give their pre conditioned thoughts about what they think autism is ? And take the discussion and teaching from there ? At the end you could go back to the initial things they said in the ' icebreaker '

Get them to watch this video, (it's about autism and the experience of walking through a shopping centre) then talk about how it might feel to be experiencing all of those sensory inputs whilst living their life every day...

That's a brilliant video. Thanks for sharing.

First, privately give an opportunity for any neurodiverse people to disclose this in advance so you can make sure that they are aware you will be doing things specifically to make neurotypical participants uncomfortable and confused that may include...... They can then be absent from this part or observe.

Have assorted tasks on cards for each participant. Things like 'tap dance for 37 seconds', 'sing a song using only words of seven letters or more', 'describe the causes of the latest argument between Jane Smith and Elizabeth Jackson and how it can be solved' (or pick the names of two obscure musicians that only an expert in two entirely separate but particular genres would know). Mime a film title. Play an excerpt of music suddenly and then turn it off without telling them why you did it.

Suddenly tell people that they're supposed to be facing the opposite direction and they're doing it wrong. Then when they turn, say 'Why are you doing that? You're weird'. If somebody says No, completely ignore them or ask them 'Everybody else is managing fine - what's stopping you from doing it?' Randomly turn lights on and off or the volume up and down or turn away, saying 'Boring' or interrupt them with an order to name seven things that have three consonants, four vowels and five syllables immediately or describe the concept of the heat death of the universe and how it relates to popular music of the 1990s. Three people are handed marker pens and told to write a haiku, a simultaneous equation and draw a picture of a cat (at least one will be able to focus on that whilst the weirdness is going on around them). Oh, and you're not going to give them any paper to do it. They'll have to work out what to do for themselves.

At some point, somebody is likely to say 'Why are we doing this?' and people will look uncomfortable and unhappy or you ask them if anybody knows why. Your answer is 'Don't you know? Isn't it obvious? Everybody else gets it'.

Ah OK like an intro task to get people talking.

When I did ESL classes, one way we would start out would be to mix everyone up by handing out cards which were shuffled and they would have to walk around and find the person (or small group) with their matching card. You wouldn't need the speaking practice as such, but it is beneficial IME to divide people into small groups or pairs, unless the session is very small (under 6 participants). This is because if you want people to speak up and contribute to the discussion and everyone feels self-conscious and doesn't want to be seen to say the wrong thing, it is much less vulnerable for everyone to only speak to their individual neighbour or a small group (max 3-4), and then the pair/group will usually feel more confident to speak up to the group and say "We thought of...." This also works best if they aren't with their best friend they always sit with, and are with a stranger.

So once you've got people in small groups, the most valuable thing to do IME is to try and find out what they already know, as it helps to tailor the content of the rest of the session. A group who knows very little about autism (thinking of rainman, "all on the spectrum" etc) will be mystified if you start going into more complicated things without starting with some basic mythbusting, stats, common difficulties, why it's important to know about autism etc.

OTOH if you happen to have a group who already know a bit about autism and would find the basics or the mythbusting a waste of time, or they all have a lot of experience managing autistic employees and they have really specific questions they want the answers to, then you're going to need much more in depth content than just the basics.

For your slides, then, you could have a sort of planned overlap bit. So for example, start the slides with section A, big basic stuff like myth busting and what autism is/isn't, and a few stats e.g. estimated numbers in the population, plus prevalence in certain industries. Then work through to section B, some common difficulties relating to the workplace specifically, probably the double empathy problem because I think this is so helpful to understand, and ideas for strategies/how to support these difficulties. Then finally section C would be some examples or further detail on any of the strategies or difficulties.

If your group you're teaching have nothing and need to start from scratch, you would cover section A and the easiest, most actionable parts of section B, for the most value, and then run some practice activities where they can try to use the skills they have just learnt about in B and get them to feed back on each other.

If your group don't need the basics then you can skip section A and move straight to section B and C, and run the practice activities and a Q&A session.

If your group already know a lot (I think this is quite rare but it can happen) then run through section B and invite the group to reflect on their experiences or try the practice if any strategies are new. Then have it more as a peer-to-peer support or Q&A.

Love the jug of water example. Brilliant. Something like that is very memorable because of how surprising it is. If you can make people laugh or surprise them, that is going to stick with them much more than a dreary list of numbers. I know I said do stats and that's boring - have you seen the Gapminder quizzes? It might be interesting to do something like that, ask a deliberately tricky question and then surprise them by showing them their assumption is wrong.

So I occasionally do training in ASD and like this activity as a talking point.

Split the group into 3 and say it's a competition, each group in turn has to see how many balls (little coloured pom-poms) they can transfer from one end of the the table to the other in 30 seconds. There are an assortment of objects such as tweezers, blind fold, chopsticks on the table.

Group one goes: I say vaguely "there are rules but you'll pick it up as you go along" then spend their time shouting "no, stop, disqualified" at them.

Group two: ok you can have the rules, hand them a sheet of written instructions then immediately shout go and start the timer.

Group 3: each have an individual sheet of rules, clearly typed with pictures. They are given a few minutes to read and discuss the rules before they start.

(Rules can be EG can't touch the balls with your hands, only one person can touch the balls at any one time etc)

Then discuss which group did best, found it easier, how did it feel etc.