Helping Children Recover from Brain Injury
One aspect we needed to solve early on in our ALPS adventure was the physical setup.
In transitioning from working one on one to working in a group with Joey, I was surprised at how Joey’s physical device itself interfered with connecting him with the whole group lessons.
Although we had a great first two weeks in our inclusive Augmentative Learning Study Program (ALPS), we have been able to use those initial weeks to identify areas of our program that need some problem solving. One aspect of our inclusive group that we are going to take awhile to figure out is our timing. How do we both engage all the students while also giving Joey and others who use AAC devices time to find their words?
One aspect of our Inclusive Program that makes it so strong is our collaborative approach. Although so far you are only hearing about it from my perspective on this blog, I am only one piece of this program. This multi-perspective planning is by design so that both the speech pathologist and the special education teacher’s knowledge and insights are able to work together to determine the best way to increase language and academic success.
Collaboration to any project is key, but that does not make it easy. With any new collaborative team there is the dance of figuring out how to work best with one another, how to plan, how to ask questions in the moment, how to interrupt with questions and how to share ideas. The process takes time, and yet that time benefits students so much in the end.
On our second day of our inclusive pod I found myself sitting on the floor between two third grade students. I was scribing their ideas for writing our own version of The Lit
tle Red Hen. Both of them took the project seriously, analyzing what type of characters we should have, where the play should take place, and what Little Red should cook. I looked across the room to watch the speech pathologist work with Joey and another first grader to use Bitmojis. Joey used his device to describe what should go into the Bitmoji for his friend.
It was only the second day and I was a bit surprised at everyone’s body language. Everyone – each student and us teachers – were leaning in, with big eyes sticking out over our masks. As a special education teacher I suppose one of my skills is scanning a room for unengaged students so I can proactively re-direct or engage them before there is a problem. As I took a moment to step away from the third grade group I couldn’t believe just how engaged everyone was.
Our Inclusive AAC Learning Group officially began September 14, 2020. After what somehow felt both like months of planning and yet still not enough time to be ready, we opened our group to a small but eager group of first through third grade students on Monday afternoon. We are looking forward to welcoming more students, but are taking advantage of the small group to find our sea legs and develop our rhythm.
When we first started dreaming about this group our main vision was to provide students who use AAC devices a community, increase their AAC skills, as well as giving them opportunities for more direct learning in math and reading alongside their peers. From that large vision the group felt like a blank slate, with the opportunity to do pretty much anything that we think would benefit the academic and ccommunication of the students in the group.
So where to start?
