How Does Aac Increase Learning Engagement

Augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) devices help to create inclusion within a classroom. Learn how these devices empower users to initiate communication, rather than simply reply to questions.

Stephanie Taymuree has witnessed huge advances in augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) during her well-nigh 40 years as a speech-language pathologist (SLP) and special educator, and her implementation of AAC technology in the classroom is unrivaled. But she yet finds it thrilling when a student embraces AAC to express a novel thought or idea.

"My very best days are those when an AAC user calls my proper noun and is and then able to successfully communicate a bulletin to me about something of which I have no previous knowledge or context," she says. "The happiness and laughter that ensues with those connections is my accented reward!"

Taymuree teaches tertiary-fifth graders at Redwood Heights Uncomplicated School in Oakland, CA. Her students take cerebral palsy, severe verbal apraxia, traumatic brain injury, ASD, and various syndromes that bear on speech and linguistic communication evolution.

"Our Technology & Augmentative Advice for Learning Enhancement (T.A.C.Fifty.Eastward.) programme is a special day class program for students with complex communication needs," she says of the plan she was selected to launch in the early 1990s. "My students require multimodal communication strategies, including the utilise of high-tech speech-generating devices (SGDs), to communicate inside their environs and access the bookish curriculum."

Modifying the Curriculum for Expression and Date

Taymuree works diligently with other school staff members to back up her students' success in school. "Some of the students in my program are included in full general pedagogy classes for academic subjects. Those students generally demand modifications to the fashion curriculum is represented, the fashion they tin can express their knowledge, and options of engagement."

Modifying the curriculum presentation for special needs students could include "using enlarged text, having textbooks and grade-level literature read aloud with text highlighting, symbolated text for students who continue to need graphic back up, instructor-created Smart Board lessons, or teacher-created Classroom Suite lessons to enhance a concept being taught," she says.

To enable a student to express their knowledge, Taymuree might recommend interfacing a educatee's SGD with a estimator for writing activities, programming specific "fringe vocabulary" into the device for classroom "bookish talk," or pedagogy several not-disabled classmates to facilitate a educatee's appointment in cooperative learning tasks. Modification of options to engagement could include programming a "script" into a vox-output communication aid or SGD for participation in a skit, game, or shared reading.

Such modifications are essential to successful inclusion, she says, "and require the collaborative effort and planning of the special education teacher, full general instruction teacher, and supporting paraprofessionals. I afternoon each calendar week, we come across to discuss the demand for upcoming modifications/adaptations, device programming, accessibility and transportation planning for field trips, social-emotional learning, and friendships, etc."

Integrating Students into the Academic Customs

Only for Taymuree, full inclusion goes beyond a classroom'south walls. "Kickoff and foremost, information technology is essential to develop a school-broad climate of inclusion and responsibility for all students, along with skillful working/collaborating relationships with the general education teachers and staff. This requires the special education teacher to be a good 'PR' person!

"My students accept ever been an integral function of the community here at Redwood Heights School," she continues. "I take made sure that their voices are heard in all aspects of our learning environment. My students participate in the Martin Luther King Oratorical each year, delivering speeches at assemblies, participating in plays or in the school music concerts, delivering messages to the role or other classrooms, and so on."

Her biggest challenge in working with young augmented communicators, she says, "is teaching the functional use of their arrangement equally initiators of communication rather than simply as respondents. Many children acquire to access the vocabulary needed to communicate bones thoughts but continue to remain on the sidelines of social conversation."

Improving the pupil'due south "personal narrative skills" is one way she is overcoming that challenge, using an intervention technique she learned years ago when several of her students participated in a report conducted by Dr. Gloria Soto of San Francisco State University.

"The study explored the furnishings of a specific intervention technique in improving personal narrative skills of children who utilize AAC," Taymuree recalls. "Using photographs of memorable family events that were emotionally charged, the students were explicitly taught how to initiate a conversation, vocabulary, techniques of circumlocution when the needed vocabulary was not programmed into the device, sentence construction, elaboration, and attaching emotion to a narrative."

Students would use their devices to talk about the result depicted in the photograph, and their story was programmed into their device. They were then encouraged to initiate a conversation with others and share their personal story.

"This has proven to exist a highly successful technique in improving the personal narrative skills of students who use AAC," Taymuree says. "It has also proven to be a successful way of helping students initiate conversation with others."

Sharing Success Tips with Other Teachers

In addition to encouraging the sharing of personal stories, Taymuree offers boosted suggestions for teachers working with students who use AAC:

Provide a means to communicate, because every child needs some way to collaborate with others in his or her surroundings – eye gaze, gestures, sign language, picture advice systems, voice output aids, or oral communication generation systems. Information technology is important that families and teachers develop vigilance to the subtleties and nuances of emergent communicators.
Facilitate motivation past engineering science the classroom environment with captivating materials, putting some desired objects just out of reach, creating situations of inequity (such as diverse proportions of snack foods), creating choices, and planning for emotionally charged situations.
Always reward the learner past reacting to their communication attempts. Sometimes that requires waiting with anticipation for a response.
Expectations touch the quality of educational activity too as the behavior of students. Always expect that students tin become effective communicators.
Provide back up past assisting families in locating appropriate resources, and eliminate blame (such as "the parents don't follow through!").
Collaborate with the other professionals involved with the kid on instructional goals and education strategies. Creating and building an effective multimodal communication organisation requires understanding of language development, cognitive office, neurological office/dysfunction, etc. It takes a multidisciplinary team to address each outcome to develop an appropriate system.
Reflect and problem-solve. Good teaching is a cogitating process which, when thoughtfully and systematically implemented, leads to growth.

Source

Prentke Romich Company