Everything is Language

I walked into Rosemary Kennedy School with ideas in my mind.  It was my first job out of school, I was blessed that my supervisor agreed to be my CFY mentor.  I had a caseload of 11 children and was ready to stand on my head to get the job done.  Floortime/DIR approaches were going to be used, AAC technologies were going to be expanded, and I was going to help all of my students. Then I realized I was going to have to test some of my students. The days of a clinical evaluation in grad school went dancing through my head.  Articulation, voice, fluency, hearing, multi-faceted language evaluation, conversational speech sample, language sample...you get the idea. I quickly learned through observation that a school triennial evaluation for CSE and a clinical evaluation are 2 different animals.  Completely. Clinical evaluations require time you don't have in school. Clinical evaluations look at the whole picture while a school evaluation is really looking at academic ...

“Use your words.” To me, the most ineffective teaching method is telling a child to “use their words.” No one is innocent, and I will admit that first. I have used that prompt in the past. There are a number of reasons I feel we should be cueing our students in different ways. Students with Autism, emotional challenges, and developmental disabilities often hear these words- “use your words.” As educators, family members, and people… we can do better. For students with Autism, I see “use your words” as a problem because we are assuming something; that the student has the capability of “using their words” but isn’t. For students with emotional challenges, we are figuring that there is something that we will unlock for the child when they “use their words.” For students with developmental disabilities, we are guessing that there are words in there and that there is hope they will use them. This is not even to consider the prompt dependence that we might foster by giving...