This week, Chris interviews Samantha Hagness and Becky Woolley, two AT/AAC Specialists from the Mesa Public Schools. They chat about some of their successes and setbacks with using TouchChat as their Tier 1 approach under the Specific Language System First approach and some ideas they had to integrate Grid 3 into their classrooms along with TouchChat.

Before the interview, Chris and Rachel chat - in person again - about some recent webinars they did with school districts to help them improve their AAC implementation. They discuss some of the highlights, including helping staff change their mindset about how much they know about AAC and some of the second-guessing that people do when they are being coached - there may be some level of worry that they will be judged harshly by the coach or other staff. Rachel and Chris encourage coaches to reassure communication partners that they have the knowledge and skills they need to be successful!

Key ideas this week:

🔑 Samantha and Becky believe that implementation is falling apart when teachers need to go to an extra step to add to what the teacher is doing, rather than having AAC already incorporated into a teacher’s instructional flow. 

🔑 With Grid 3/Grid for Education, you can display Internet information on the main screen 2/3 of the screen while having core words surround the main screen everyone is looking at. Samantha and Becky want to give teachers the ability to project this int he classroom to make AAC modeling easier and more streamlined.

🔑 Chris likes coming up with new ways to model AAC in classrooms, but he suggests doing a pilot with a few schools rather than rolling it out to everyone right away. This allows time to build “champions” who can tell or show others about some of the successes in the classroom.

🔑 Chris wants to make sure that the motor plan that is on the AAC user’s device is supported - if the teacher can’t always model on the AAC user’s specific device during instruction, that is OK, but you might consider having paraprofessionals simultaneously modeling on that AAC user’s device within the classroom environment.

Links from this Week’s Episode:

Up Goer Six - free web tool where you an type in a sentence, it provides the sentence in color codes based on the frequency of the word. https://splasho.com/upgoer6/ 

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