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For families and educators, understanding and working with children who experience a combination of deafness and autism spectrum disorder (ASD) can be challenging. Yet both understanding and work are crucial. For children with ASD to succeed, parents and educators need to understand them and to be able to work together to implement successful educational strategies. These strategies fall into two categories: 1) strategies for improving social interaction, primarily focusing on communication; and 2) strategies for incorporating the students' interests, which may be intense but restricted (American Psychiatric Association, 2013). What this means is that some children can be very focused on a few specific interests so educators can modify strategies to use each child's interests to introduce new knowledge and teach various skills. Educators, must develop a "toolbox" of strategies and frameworks of practice to help students develop supportive relationships and ensure they have a sense of belonging and being a part of an inclusive community. The information in this toolbox will help teachers who have deaf or hard of hearing children with ASD in their classrooms. This article describes four strategies that are inclusive; they work for most children. They include: (1) routine explanation; (2) video modeling; (3) peer-to-peer social interaction; and (4) differentiated instruction.

It is widely accepted that assessment plays a role in monitoring the development of young children with special needs in early intervention/early childhood settings. The process of assessing young children's language skills often looks for delays within a solid language foundation. However, many children who are deaf or hard of hearing (DHH) may not have a solid language foundation to assess, leading to inaccurate assessment. When we reframe how we assess language skills in children who are DHH, we ensure the assessment provides a comprehensive picture of the child's language development. It is important to modify language assessment tools where necessary while ensuring the assessment stays reliable and valid. It is critical to use multiple assessment tools to monitor the child's progress, including standardized assessments and assessment tools normed for DHH populations. Finally, it is crucial to monitor the child's skills in each language that they are using, regardless of which language is used most often. We explain why each of these factors needs to be considered in the assessment of young children who are DHH, will discuss the challenges of assessing this population, and will provide solutions to some of the challenges of assessing language skills in of young children who are DHH.

Determined parents are powerful advocates at all levels of our society. Parents can move mountains for their child, and they often do. State teams that actively collaborate with parents gain new perspectives, ideas, and energy. Statewide transition planning teams welcomed the authors--three parents who are also professionals active in the deaf educational community--into their discussion and planning. These teams--part of pepnet 2, the federally funded project with the mission to increase the education, career, and lifetime choices available to individuals who are deaf or hard of hearing--are located in the states of Oregon, Colorado, and North Carolina. An ideal team is one in which parents collaborate freely with professionals with no question off limits; it has clear objectives, norms, standards of practice, and history available to all. These ideal teams include stakeholders mirroring the community's wide continuum of language, cultural diversity, and experience. Representatives come from state education agencies; vocational rehabilitation; local districts; and public, charter, and schools for the deaf. Parents of current or recent students from a variety of backgrounds and geographical areas and the students themselves also participate, adding immeasurably to the 360° view of transition planning. This article discusses barriers to parental engagement in meaningful collaboration, and provides examples of how various teams are working to gain momentum in accomplishing their team goals.