A Part Time AAC Using Teacher in an AAC Classroom

I’ve been using AAC a lot at home recently. It feels really good. It feels comfortable in a way that mouth words don’t. Mouth words are stressful even in non-stressful situations. They tend to tumble out of me unbidden and uncontrolled. Ensuring that the correct words come out in the correct order with the correct tone at the correct time.... I can usually manage most of that, but rarely all of it, and it’s a lot of work. And don’t ask me what I said. I rarely have a clue.

Still, although I often text across the classroom or across the building for communication access, I’ve never seen AAC as a viable communication tool in the classroom. What’s frustrating is that it’s not for any practical reason.

It’s feeling like I owe people explanations I don’t want to give for why I’m doing things differently than I used to. I don’t owe anybody any explanation I don’t want to give. “I can communicate clearer this way” is enough. I say that. I’m not sure I believe it.

It’s feeling like I’m sending mixed messages or like I’m not providing a good model for my students and staff of the expectations for language modeling or AAC device use because even when I’m using AAC, I tend to mix it with mouth words. I’m a part time AAC user and that’s hard to explain. (It’s also different from my students who are primary AAC users or my students who use AAC for communication repair.) I understand the difference. I’m still afraid others won’t.

I know the answer, like all the accessibility tools I’ve tried incorporating into my classroom routines this year, is “try it and see how it works for you.” I don’t know why this one feels so different from using mobility aids. Maybe it’s because we teach students to use AAC and we don’t teach students to use canes? Really, that should be all the more reason to do it.

Maybe I’ll try on Monday. Assuming we don’t get snowed out.

Communication Badges: A More Nuanced Approach

I’ve written about Autistic Communication Badges before. My first attempt to implement them in the school environment was a total bust. (I couldn’t find a way to functionally implement it that was both safe and useful.) Quite similar to my first attempt at creating a classroom-wide communication accommodation actually. That one also failed spectacularly.

I’ve also written a lot about trying to teach self advocacy and body autonomy to students with significant needs. I’ve generally been impressed with what my students have been able to learn and demonstrate. But, by a chance of circumstances, I got to see what happened when one of those students left the environment where the staff was trained to respect body autonomy and to support self-advocacy. If those skills remained, they weren’t recognized or respected. I learned that my students did not have the skills to stand up to authority who tried to take away their rights. I also learned that they needed clear, unambiguous tools to use in their own defense.

So, when September starts, I am planning to reintroduce the Communication Badges, with one significant difference. This time, I’m creating a whole class set for teachers and students. For teachers: It will help students understand who is available to ask for help. It will help other teachers/specialists know who is available to talk to (or who needs help). For students: It will help teachers and peers know who is ready and who needs more time. It will let teachers know who needs more support and who needs to be left alone. 

These are skills we need to teach. One of the biggest challenges, especially when working with students who have difficulty with expressive communication and who express emotion in non-standard ways is to find a way to bridge that communication gap so students can find the support they need and reject the support that is unhelpful.

It’s not a cure, but communication badges might just be a start to helping bridge that communication gap in a way that respects all communication.

Autistic Life Skills: Noise Blocking Headphones

Disclaimer: I receive no financial incentive to write this post. I don’t generally post product links because I assume you know how to use google. Sometimes I do, just to make my point clearer. I don’t get any compensation if you make a purchase using those links. The point of this post, as with all of this blog, is simply to share my experience in the hope that it will make education better for the students who come next.

Probably the most common association with autism and sensory challenges are the over-ear noise blocking headphones that many children and adults wear due to extreme sounds sensitivity. I’m not generally sounds sensitive (which is a very good thing since to say my classroom is loud would qualify in the runnings for “understatement of the year.”) However, I do get sound sensitive when I have a migraine or when my anxiety is very triggered. So, after a bit of research on the difference between noise cancelling and noise blocking headphones (I found this article particularly helpful) I decided to invest in a pair of Pro for Sho noise blocking headphones. (Primary positive attributes: under $20 price point and they came in purple!)

They worked exactly as advertised. My husband was able to watch Game of Thrones in the living room while I went about my life in the rest of the house without my being bothered by it in the least. (I may be the only person in the world, but I really don’t like Game of Thrones.) But they also had two other benefits that I didn’t expect, which are the point of this post.

The first was that wearing it seemed to have the effect of dampening all of my senses, not just my hearing. I assume that has to do with the way in which the sensory system is all interconnected. However, I was able to do several cleaning tasks, which are usually very draining due to the onslaught of tactile and olfactory input, and barely notice the effect.

The second, and this was the real surprise, is that I almost immediately started craving the input they gave. (I’m a very strong sensory seeker.) I wore them later in the evening when I was alone in the quiet house just because I liked the way they felt on my head and made the world sound.

I did not anticipate that this type of sensory support would have the same type of psychological benefits as stimming, but it does. I haven’t seen anyone writing or talking about that benefit before, and I think as parents and professional begin to understand the benefits on fidgeting and stimming on the neuro-atypical brain, we need to explain the other use of sensory interventions with that same model. I know it will be part of my explanatory arsenal going forward. (And those purple headphones are going to find a permanent home in my bag!)

But in Purple....

For years now, I have described myself as a “part time AAC user” but beyond my preference for communicating by text and email whenever possible, I’ve never taken any steps to communicate multi-modally outside the home. (At home, I use a combination of gesture, sign, objects, facial expression, and cat sounds in addition to speech. My husband has become an able translator over the years!)

I have the same communication software as my students use downloaded on my phone and tablet. (Ostensibly, I got it for school.) I’ve tried using it, but it’s way too slow to ever be functional for me. Also, I find myself simplifying my language in order to use the vocabulary that is available instead of choosing the exact words and sentence structures I want, which slows me down further and can obfuscate my meaning. And so, I do use it for school, but I don’t use it for me.

This past week, I finally purchased a text-based AAC app. I hadn’t been able to justify the expense to myself. After all, I talk. A lot. And I wasn’t really sure if I would ever use it outside the house. So I found one that had almost all the features I wanted and didn’t cost as much as the ones with all the bell and whistles. The first thing I noticed about it? I liked it a lot better once it was purple. In fact, when I set up my second device, getting the color right was higher priority for me than getting my vocabulary set up. That’s particularly interesting because I’m usually not a visual person at all. I tend to ignore avatars, backgrounds, etc. (My NLD exacerbates this tendency.) Yet, if it made that much difference to me, who usually doesn’t care about such things, how much do our students care? Our students who we bombard with color choices at every corner “to provide language opportunities?” How often do we even pay attention to the cosmetic aspects of their device? We use vocabulary color coding, but what about background colors? Case colors? Fonts? There are a lot of ways to personalize a device beyond content that we often overlook. 

I hear a lot that “we have to motivate the student to use the device/to communicate (or they won’t.)” What difference might it make if the student was able to set up the device to be more visually pleasing (or interesting) to them? I haven’t used mine in the wild yet. I haven’t needed to. (It’s vacation week. I haven’t actually gone out much!) But I’m motivated to. I keep wanting to add vocabulary that might be useful. I haven’t had that before. I never would have thought that being purple would have made so much difference.

Do You Have a Minute?

(Image courtesy of ASAN www.autisticadvocacy.org)

I've wished, pretty much since I learned about them, that the rest of the world would implement Color Communication Badges, especially for events like conferences where so much emphasis of the benefit is placed on the face-to-face connections: in other words, the socializing - that thing I can't do. My dear friend, Nightengale, made a wonderful argument in her most recent post about why we need to introduce the badges into schools. Because what we expect people to want isn't necessarily the same as what they do want, and the first step in advocacy is ask-vocacy: ask the person.


Then I spotted this on the Internet: https://twitter.com/weareteachers/status/771072597962272768

That got me thinking about the benefit of implementing Color Communication Badges in my classroom, not just for my students but for myself as well. There's pretty much nothing a student can do in my classroom that will bother me, or prevent learning from happening, but there are 4 little words that can throw off an entire lesson or even an entire day:

"Do you have a minute?"

The unwritten answer to this question, of course, is "yes." I work very hard to be flexible and accessible for collaboration. It's worked. It's worked a little too well, to the point where people think it's okay to interrupt me in the middle of lessons. But the fact remains that, a lot of the time, I don't have a minute. I'm with a student or group; I'm mentally (sometimes physically) organizing the next lesson; or I'm taking a much needed breather so I can be "on" again in a minute.

The problem is, once I've explained that, no, now is not a good time (because it would be rude to just ignore you) I've already lost that focus so I might as well recoup my losses and go down the rabbit hole on whatever you wanted "a minute" about. Maybe it will be useful. So I have acquired a reputation of being always accessible that is actually counterproductive to the way my brain works.

Therefore, when school starts again tomorrow, I'm going to be rolling out Color Communication Badges for everyone, students and teachers, in my classroom. The original descriptions (edited slightly for brevity) are:

Green: actively seeking communication. May have trouble initiating conversation, but want to be approached by people who are interested in talking

Yellow: only want to talk to people they recognize, not strangers/friends from the Internet.

Red: probably doesn't want to talk to anyone (or only a few people) unless it is an emergency.

(Source: http://autisticadvocacy.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/ColorCommunicationBadges.pdf)

I'm going to have to tweak the definitions for the classroom environment a little bit. (They stand fine as they are for leisure time.) My preliminary classroom definitions:

Green: available to talk on a new topic/with a new person. Ready to try something new.

Yellow: can talk, if it's on the topic at hand/current instructional topic, or getting information I'm waiting for. Probably don't want to try something new/work with a new person.

Red: not available, unless it is an emergency. 

I suspect my card will spend a fair amount of time on "yellow" during the school day. I'll check back in after a couple weeks, and let you know how it goes.

The Tools We Use

This is a follow-up to my last post "What Students Need." The connection may not be readily apparent, but bear with me, and I promise I will connect the dots.

More than most other learners, my students use a lot of technology to access learning. Some of it is obvious: the wheelchairs, the iPads with communication software, the positioning and medical equipment. Some of it may be less obvious until it is pointed out: the keyboards, touchscreen computers, visual supports and schedules, social stories, staffing ratios.

Sometimes, the line between the technology and the pedagogy begins to blur. That's where we talk about things like prompting hierarchies and token economies/reward systems. The tools that teachers use to access student learning. (Not to assess it, but to gain access to the learning student so that teaching can be effective.) It's no wonder, then, that this is where the the controversy lies in so much of special education.

To understand the problem, we have to clearly separate technology from pedagogy. Our goal, always is for our students to be independent learners and citizens. To do that, we have to recognize that the wheelchair, the social story, and the token board can all be viewed as giving the student the same amount of independence or fostering the same amount of staff dependence, depending on how we teach the individual to us them.

Consider the differences:
The student who pushes their own chair (or uses a powerchair) vs. the student who has a manual chair she cannot push.
The student who is able to find or write their own social stories vs the student who depends on a parent/teacher/SLP to write social stories in order to cope with new situations.
The student who creates his schedule and works for a self-created goal vs the student who is only able to participate in class with the carrot of a reward dangled in front of him.

The second student in each example is clearly better off than the student without any of those resources. But the first student has something very important. She has the tools for self-determination. The second student will have to work much harder at self-advocacy to have their independence recognized and honored, simply because they do not have access to (or the skill to use) the technology to seize it themselves. We owe it to all of our students to give them access to, and teach them to use, all of the technologies that they will need for self-determination. We cannot limit them because of our preconceived ideas of what "assistive technology" means or looks like or because we value a certain pedagogical approach that doesn't use that tool. Our job is not to help our students. Our job is to teach them the skills to help themselves. To do that, they need all of the tools we can give them.

Universal Design for Professional Learning

I usually use this space to talk about student learning, but I want to take a moment to talk about an equally important topic: professional learning for teachers.

There is a lot of talk in the twitter chats I frequent about the benefit of the EdCamp philosophy of professional development. I certainly understand where my fellow teachers are coming from: I have sat through my share of speakers talking about the same basic strategies that I have been using for years or about strategies that are not meaningful for my student population without such significant modification that they lose the essence of what the presenter is trying to get at. I love the idea of teachers sharing what really works. That's why I like twitter chats. However, they lose me when they start going on about how the face-to-face interaction is so much more valuable.

The thing is: text is a lot easier for me to navigate than face to face interaction. I'm not convinced I really will get more out of it than a twitter chat. It's quite possible I'll get less. And yet, whenever I say I haven't been to one yet I get multiple replies telling me how it's so wonderful and why I should. I want to ask those teachers to stop for a moment and examine their privilege.


I'm not saying that EdCamps need to change or that they can afford to provide more accommodations (they are free events.) One of the nice things about the current state of professional development is that we have such a diverse menu of options to choose from: I'm not limited to the one speaker my school brings in this year. My point in writing this post is to point out that every teacher makes their own choices of what professional development to pursue and in what format for their own reasons. What works for one person may be very much the wrong answer for another. The beauty of Universal Design is that we can each chose not just the content but the format that works best for us without each person having to request specific accommodations each time.

We need to be flexible enough thinkers to remember that the content and format that works best for us doesn't work best for everyone. We also need to remember to seek out those voices that are not accessing the same formats we are using (for whatever reason) and make sure they are being heard too. We may not agree with what they have to say, but there may be a very good reason their voice isn't being heard in the forums we're standing in. If our mission is really about teaching all students, then we had better make sure that we are reaching all teachers when it comes to professional development and the sharing of ideas.

Rationing Time

In the classroom, time is, always, our most limited resource, and if students are receiving one service or participating in one activity, it means that they are not receiving another service or participating in another activity. That is the same argument used by proponents of full inclusion for why all related services should be push-in, so that students do not lose access to the instruction and peer access available in the general education environment. But that coin has another side, and those students *are* losing access to time spent in direct instruction of specific skills. And I'm worried that's time we can't afford to lose.

This video, of a young lady who has been fully included, was touted as evidence of the benefit of full inclusion for the development of real meaningful social relationships at a webinar I recently attended.

Did you notice what was missing? Jocelyn's mother was interviewed.  Jocelyn's friends were interviewed. Jocelyn was not. Everyone else spoke about what they *thought* Jocelyn wanted/thought/believed. They don't know. Because they can't ask her. Why? As far as we can tell from this video, Jocelyn has no formal communication system (not even a yes/no.) For all we know, Jocelyn wishes these girls would leave her alone and only tolerates them to make her mother happy.  We don't know.  We can't ask Jocelyn.

And that's what worries me about full inclusion for students like Jocelyn - and for the students I teach. I worry that their limited classroom time will be focused on social integration and on access skills that make them part of the classroom instead of on developing meaningful functional communication systems that will help them create independent lives for themselves as adults.

Listen very carefully to the voices of non-speaking self-advocates. Their intelligence was realized by others after someone taught them how to use a communication system and they were able to communicate their desire to learn (or what they had already learned.)  Access to education is nothing without a system to communicate what you know. If we are going to implement full inclusion, we have allocate the time and resources to develop functional communication skills from the very beginning. And for our older students who have not had access to the communication and academic instruction they should have before now, for whatever reason, we have to recognize that our number one priority has to be communication - and that takes time.