How it works
A curriculum designed by experts, tested with real children, refined by data, and delivered with human support.
1. An expert-designed, student-tested curriculum system
At Hope In Steps, our learning paths are designed collaboratively by special education educators, BCBAs, and parents who understand the unique needs of autistic children. Every learning path is the result of professional judgement grounded in day-to-day experience with the children it is meant to serve.
Before a learning path is used broadly, it is first evaluated with a panel of autistic students spanning different developmental levels — not neurotypical children, and not just children at one point on the spectrum. We include children with different language abilities, different communication profiles, and different support needs so that we can see how the pathway holds up across the range of learners it is actually meant to serve. Nothing goes into wide use until we have seen how real autistic children, at different levels, respond to it.
For each child, the journey begins with an entry assessment that establishes a clear picture of the child's current abilities and learning needs. Throughout the learning process, we continuously monitor the child's responses and progress. Rather than requiring every child to follow the same fixed sequence, the program adapts the pace, level of difficulty, prompts, repetition, and activities according to the child's demonstrated needs.
At the end of the learning path, an exit assessment provides concrete examples of what the child can now do. We then generate a progress report that documents the child's growth, identifies remaining challenges, and recommends appropriate next steps.
Over time, the results from many children help us understand which learning approaches are most effective for children with similar starting profiles. With appropriate privacy protections, these aggregated outcomes allow us to improve future learning paths and make increasingly informed projections about how a child may progress.
Design. Validate. Assess. Teach. Adapt. Measure. Learn.
Our goal is not to make every autistic child fit the same curriculum, but to build a learning process that responds to each child's capabilities and helps each child move forward.
2. How our volunteer network works
Hope In Steps is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, and the work with children on the ground is carried out by a network of trained volunteers who meet with families in their own communities.
Trained and certified
All of our volunteers have completed at least 40 hours of training and hold Registered Behavior Technician (RBT) certification from the Behavior Analyst Certification Board (BACB). That means every volunteer who works with a child has passed the same foundational training required of paid behavior technicians in clinical settings — and is supervised in the same way.
Where we currently have coverage
Our volunteer network is growing city by city. We currently have active volunteers serving families in:
- Fairfax County, Virginia
- Staten Island, New York City
- Westfield, Ohio
If you are a family in one of these areas, we may be able to match you with a volunteer for in-person sessions. If you are outside these areas, our curriculum and online tools are still fully available to you, and we are actively expanding.
If you want to become a volunteer or request volunteer service for a child, you can contact us at [email protected].
3. Our AI policy
All of our courses are designed by professionals — special education educators, BCBAs, and parents — and every learning path is tested on a panel of autistic children spanning different developmental levels before it is used more broadly. The pedagogy, the teaching technique, and the underlying skill progression all come from human experts. AI does not design our curriculum.
We use AI for a narrow, limited role: to customize the surface of a lesson so it is more acceptable to a specific child — while the underlying learning technique stays the same. For example, if a child is more engaged by trains than by animals, AI can help swap the examples in an existing activity so the practice feels relevant to that child. The skill being taught, the way it is taught, the sequence, and the mastery criteria are unchanged.
Beyond this limited customization, we use AI primarily to make suggestions and help with learning-path selection — helping match a child with the most appropriate expert-designed learning path based on their assessment results and progress. AI does not create the course activities themselves.
In short
- What AI does: lightly customize materials so they are more acceptable to a specific child (interests, examples, wording); suggest which expert-designed learning path fits the child next.
- What AI does not do: design the curriculum, invent the teaching technique, or generate course activities on its own. It does not replace the judgement of educators, clinicians, or parents.
Privacy comes first
We use the smallest amount of information necessary to customize a child's learning, and we do not sell or share that information. Data used to improve our systems is aggregated and stripped of anything that could identify an individual child. More detail is in the Privacy Policy and the Children's Privacy notice.
The curriculum is built by humans. AI helps us deliver it to the right child, in a form that fits them — not the other way around.