 And now we are recording. So welcome to everyone on this, I don't know, pretend like spring day in Alberta and maybe a little bit springier in Ontario where you are, Erin, I'm not sure. But as I said, it's Kathy Howry and I am thrilled to be your host today again for our webinar supporting kids with complex communication needs. And especially please and thrilled to introduce Aaron Sheldon, who is a colleague and a friend and who is someone that we've had before and to brave reviews and someone who's been in Alberta recently and will be again to brave reviews. So, Aaron's background is, I'll let you talk about this a little bit, but primarily mom to Maggie and Eli, and we were just talking a little bit about Eli as you were there, but Maggie has Indians, and so that I think brought Aaron into the world of trying to figure out how to support Maggie's learning and happily that allowed us to be the recipients of some of her learning and her research and her very practical day to day experiences. This particular talk. And I think Erin will talk about it. What's done at ATIA are close to it. And she'll probably talk about Gail Van Tatenhove, but if you don't know who Gail Van Tatenhove is, well, you should. Anyway, Gail, Gail, she's quite renowned in the field of AAC and after her talk, after Erin's talk, Gail came out and said to me, oh, she's fantastic. That was the best talk I've heard in a long time. There you go. So we're in for a big treat. Thank you, Aaron. I'm going to quit talking and put the floor over to you. The only thing I will say, folks, is I am going to monitor the chat. And so if you have a question for Aaron, pop it in there. And then I will, if it's a question that I think there's answering right at the moment, I'll ask it. Otherwise, we'll hold them for the end. So, anyway, Aaron, take it away. All right, I will. So thank you guys. And like Kathy said, I came into the field only because of my daughter, Maggie, who's almost 15. I come from a long line of teachers and therefore I had absolutely no intention of ever going into education. But here I am. So you really cannot escape teacher DNA if you've got it. So what got me into this was my daughter, Maggie, like Kathy said, has Angelin syndrome. And it becomes very difficult to figure out what is the cognitive or intellectual disability with our complex kids and what is the language disability. In my daughter's case, she has very low vision and has auditory processing impairment as well. And what I noticed was that in the field of special education, we seem to first presume that the delays we see in a child are because of their intellectual capacity. And we make assumptions about the potential for learning based on that. Whereas more in the field of assistive technology and speech-language pathology, we tend to look a little, you know, kind of pull back that lens a little bit and look at what was the effect or what is the effect of other impairments, such as visual impairments, hearing auditory processing, language development in particular. And so this, everything you're going to see today is really my attempt to figure out how are these two links? How is cognition in our complex kids really linked with their language development? And how can we make sure that what we're providing in communication support is also supporting cognitive development? So, and which I think all of you guys know, we organize our thoughts, our memories and our experiences through language is how we organize our thinking. And therefore for our complex kids, we really can't separate language development from cognitive development. What I have come to realize with my own daughter is that when we model her communication system, I'm not just pairing a symbol with a word with a spoken word so that she can match the two. I'm actually modeling for her how to think, how to share ideas, how to make meaning and share that meaning and knowledge with other people. And so I hope that this talk kind of shows you how I've come to that thinking and how we are trying to support it. Because we've all seen this visual before, Coppenhaver and others model of how oral and written language development emerges alongside is part of our literacy development. So learning to listen is intrinsically linked to learning to communicate and speak. So learning to interpret visual symbols such as reading is intrinsically related to learning how to express thoughts with visual symbols such as writing. And overlaying all of it is language development, but really overlaying all of it is also cognition and thinking and concept development and all the rest. And so I think our challenge with our complex kids is to figure out how to use their communication systems in every lesson so that we are really developing their language and their cognition and all the work we're going to do. And I find that I spent a lot of time in classrooms where we've told teachers and aids and speech therapists, you know, make sure you're modeling that age at all times, but we haven't necessarily told them how and we haven't given them enough strategies for how to integrate the communication system into lessons. So that's what I'm hoping you're going to get some more ideas for today. Concept knowledge. All of you with special education background already know this but it's just conceptual understanding of something is what you know about that concept but it's also how you organize and consider what you know about an idea and what you do and don't associate with that concept. And our complex kids have had a different upbringing. They've had a different early childhood. Some of the associations that they may have made with things may not be accurate. And I'll give you some examples of those and they may have not made the associations that we need them to make. So, part of what I want you to get out of today is thinking about how has there other disabilities been a barrier to your students concept development. And how can we make sure that we're really developing their cognition and their thinking along with their language. And what I'm thinking about it was I have two kids. I'm going to science fair right now with the younger one. And my younger girl, because she was verbal, which is very little, she started making mistakes with her language. So, at some point we were playing, she brought me a toy and said dinosaur. And obviously it was a rhino, right? And she was making these kind of mistakes with her language all the time and it made me start thinking, well, okay, why would she mistake this for a dinosaur? And what does that tell me about what she knows about dinosaurs and what does she know about rhinos, right? Can you guys just think in your head for a minute what you see here in that image of a rhino that would make a child think that that could be a dinosaur? What are they associating with that? What I decided she was thinking was that if it had four legs and was gray and rough and scaly and had horns, then it must be a dinosaur. So that's sort of what she knew about this thing, right? This concept. And so she was therefore associating these characteristics with that concept of a dinosaur. So it led to lots of discussion about all of her other animals and what's a rhino and what are mammals and what are dinosaurs and what's alive today and all of that kind of stuff, right? So the mistakes she made in her language allowed us to have this whole conversation and ongoing conversation where I could take that mistake she made in her language. I could understand the mistakes she was making in her thinking, the associations she was making that weren't quite accurate and I could provide better instructions. And the kind of natural thing we do with kids is we start comparing and contrasting, right? So what is a dinosaur and a rhino have in common? They have those four legs, they're gray and scaly, they have a horn and what's different? One's actually a reptile, one's alive today, et cetera. Similarly, our neighbor across the street had a little dog that looked just like this. And every time she saw that dog, she would go, kitty! She's probably two years old. What does she know about cats? What does she know about dogs? And how is that mistake she's making in her expressive language giving me insight about her thinking? So take a look at this little image and what would make a child with early language development think that that is a kitty. Here's some of the things that I think she knew about kitties. They have pointy ears, they have four legs, they have long tails, furry, they have noses, they live with humans, they're kind of small, and they have a certain shape which our neighbors dog shared that shape. So do you see how that mistake she made in her language showed me the things that she was associating together? And I think the characteristic of kitties that she was most noticing was the shape. And therefore when she saw something that size, that shape, she assumed it was a cat. And again, it led to a lot of conversations, well, what's a cat and what's a dog? And what does she know about dogs? We're cat owners, we didn't have a dog, right? So what does she know about dogs? I think she was associating dogs with a much larger size, right? But they also live with humans. There's these similarities, there's these differences. And our early language learners are developing these conceptual understandings. They're figuring out what's a dog and what's a cat. In special education we so often oversimplify these things. We think that we can put a picture in front of a kid and say show me the dog and show me the cat. But in the real world, as we're actually learning how to use our language, it's much more complex than that. And there's so much more overlap even between these things that seem really, really simple, right? So kids have to learn to do it, to do this whole comparative track. They have to learn how to notice the, you know, observe specific characteristics and then start sorting. So our early language learners, any early language learner is figuring out what's the same about kitties and doggies, what's different, and they have to start associating this incredibly diverse field of doggies all with the concept of dog, right? To be able to get to the point of understanding that one of these is a dog and one of these is a cat. And even though they might on the face of it appear really similar, they're actually quite different. So as our kids are developing their concept knowledge, right, they're thinking about what a dog looks like, feels like, smells like, sounds like, where we expect to find them, what we expect to find dogs doing, what dogs don't do. And they're coming up with this concept of the cat, right, and what a cat looks like and feels like and where we find them and what they do. And I think the list of what cats don't do is much longer than the list of what they do. But you can see how it's easy to oversimplify this, but concept knowledge emerges slowly. We learn the concept of dogs and the concept of cats through personal experience and through actually using language. So when I then think back to my older girl, and I think back to something like this, because she was nonverbal all those early years, because she had low vision, how many kitties did she see that were actually dogs? How many mistakes was she making in her thinking that, first of all, she couldn't express the mistakes she was making with her language because she didn't have speech? And she also has low vision, right? So yet what were her personal experiences and how was she developing this conceptual understanding? What were her personal experiences with language that were allowing her cognition to grow? She had food barriers, and because she didn't have an AP at the time, and she would have been a very urgent user and she'd had it, there were all these opportunities that she had to develop conceptual understandings that simply that she couldn't learn from the way that her sister could. And so this is what I'm taking into how we're introducing communication systems, how we're modeling communication systems. This is what I mean by we're modeling how to think, right? We're modeling how to categorize. We're teaching kids these ideas, how to notice different characteristics and start categorizing them and identifying them and labeling them. And this is where we have to be really careful about right and wrong answers because the mistakes that child makes in their thinking as they might associate any one of these with something else, like a kitty gives us so much information about what they actually know and what it is that they're associating with that certain thing such as the kitty. At the same time, what we're doing with our AC systems is we're providing kids a tool to think symbolically about concepts. And this is how we're really developing their cognition, because if you think about all of the dogs in that child's life, if you think about all the dogs that they encounter, they again, they have to pull together all these different individual dogs that they might encounter and somehow bring that together into one cognitive understanding of the concept of dog. And that's where the communication system can help them organize that. And that's why it's so important that they have a communication system and that they have symbols. There are so many of our kids who are emergent AC users, the way our students with Angelman often are, who, if you open their communication system, under dog is their dog or their nana's dog. They don't even have a visual support and a language support within their own communication system to start thinking conceptually about things like dogs as opposed to just individuals. And also to take a look at these pictures of different dogs, there's a lot of visual complexity there. Our complex kids, a lot of them struggle with visual complexity. And part of what they're getting from their AC systems is this much more visually simple, visual, to represent one idea that can then be applied to all of the different dogs in their life. So just be thinking about this sort of thing as you're thinking about modeling AC. Are we helping kids develop these conceptual understandings? And I'll give you some more examples of how we can do this. What it means though is that we have to be providing opportunities for kids to make mistakes in how they're using their language because it's those mistakes that tell us what they know and what they're associating and what they see as being the most salient. So when my little girl saw that little dog across the street and called it a kitty, it was the size and the shape that was the most salient to her. And that was what gave me the opportunity to have a conversation with her about what a dog is, what it isn't, what a kitty is, what a kitty is. I know some of our folks think that, you know, some of the adults I work with think that some of these are even advanced concepts. But even if you think of early baby books, we start introducing kids to the concept of my mom, who she is as an individual, what she looks, what she smells like, what she feels like, where she is, what she does with me, versus the broad concept of a mom and the idea that every creature has a mom and that all moms care for their babies in some way. Go to any library, go to any bookstore, look at the baby books and the toddler books, and we are teaching kids these concepts in simple little books from the time that they're very small, right? We don't wait for kids to be able to accurately identify their mom as opposed to someone else's mom before we teach them these concepts, right? We start using language with kids from the time they're very small to teach this conceptual understanding. We start creating all kinds of experiences with kids and reading them with them and looking at stories. I mean, look at the narrative that we offer small children and there's so much. They're teaching them ideas of, for example, my mom versus the concept of mom. And again, this gets us back to the language that's in our kids' communication systems. If under mom is a picture of my mom as opposed to the concept of a mom, right? If our kids don't even have access to a symbolic representation of the concept of mother or mom, then we don't even have a way to help them model and help them really develop the concept of my mom as opposed to all the others out there. Our understanding of our mom fits into all of our larger kind of cognitive framework, right? To do just really early ideas that my mom is the things I do with my mom, what she looks like, what she is like, how she smells, how I feel when I'm with her, how she feels, the things that we do together, right? And then that concept of mom also then starts to fit into my concept of family, right? So my ideas of who my mom is and what she is begin to emerge along with my concept of my dad and my concept of me and my siblings and all my other relatives and my family and the concept of family being the things that we do and the places we go, how we feel, all of those sorts of things. So all of these individual concepts begin to link together and start forming that whole cognitive framework for how we organize our thoughts so that we can understand ourselves as a member of our family that includes our moms, our dads, and other people just as you could think about the concept of a dog being different from a cat, but they're part of a larger framework of thinking around something called animals, et cetera. And that all plays into schema theory, which will be very familiar to any of you who's studied education. You know, that schema theory is how we organize our networks of information, right? So that concept of family as opposed to mom, that concept of dog as opposed to animals, all of that sort of thing. It's all information that fits into our existing schematic. And what we know with students with complex needs and children with disabilities is that their background knowledge tends to be less developed. We know that their schematic understandings tend to be less developed. It can be a function of their vision. It can be a function of their language. It can be a function of their mobility. Kids who weren't able to independently move around their physical space weren't able to explore the same way. They weren't able to learn and touch things and start to categorize things. Kids who couldn't point weren't able to get that additional information from the adults in their environment to help them label the things around them, right? So we would expect that our kids with complex needs are going to come to school with limited concept knowledge, with much more limited schemas in terms of how they understand different ideas. So think for a moment about an egg. We've got Easter coming up. So just imagine an egg. I'm going to show you an egg and probably what you're thinking of is kind of like this. But if you think about kids who've had different kinds of background knowledge, different kinds of knowledge development, different kinds of personal experiences, what they're thinking about with an egg might be a whole bunch of different things, right? So here's a model of the schematic understanding of an egg. So there's everything from an egg at the very center. You can see egg with its physical properties and the fact that it has a yolk and a white and a shell. What kids then know about eggs? This is all the knowledge that they have to start integrating as they go through school, right? So the fact that the eggs that they might eat comes from a chicken, which is a bird, which is part of that winged, warm-blooded class of animals that are vertebrates. There's also the fact that chickens lay eggs, but so do all kinds of different animals and that there's different sizes, different colors. There's the fact that we eat eggs. There's where we find eggs in the supermarket. The fact that they don't just come from the supermarket, they actually come from a farm and that relates eggs to the whole farm economy. You know, there's all the things that we do with eggs with Easter. There's what kids might know or not know about what happens when eggs spoil as opposed to when they're really fresh and good to eat and the way that they eat them and nutritional content, the concept of nests, where they get laid, all of that kind of stuff, right? So the knowledge that the average elementary school-aged kid has about an egg is actually quite sophisticated, but now take one of our complex kids. Take a kid who's had much more limited personal experiences who maybe they went out to the petting zoo, but they actually never got to get into the hen house. They maybe never actually got to see the nest. Maybe because of their low vision or their mobility, they just haven't had the same experiences. So what they know about an egg might be the scramble that magically appears on their plate at breakfast, but they might not have all the rest of this knowledge yet, right? So when we say show me the egg, so much of what we think about with an egg relates to what it is one individual child actually knows about them. So when we're developing conceptual understanding, even if something as simple as an egg, there's just a lot there, right? And that's really all I'm trying to illustrate in this whole section is there's no, there's nothing we do in early childhood. There's nothing we do in school that's as easy as show me the egg, show me the dog, show me the cat, show me the rhino. It's all actually a lot more complex. And we're going to help our kids access that by how we support them with their AAC. So scheme of development, that whole conceptual understanding, it's part of language. It develops an interaction with language. We use words to give the meaning to experiences such as all the words we use when we visit a farm and learn about hens and nests and eggs and all the like, right? So we, and we continually grow our schematic understandings of things. And when we model our students communication systems, what we're modeling, what we need to think about modeling is where those individual words fit into their schematic understanding. So when you think about an egg, some of the things that we might be thinking about with the child's AAC are things like farms and hens and nests, right? Maybe when we go to study butterfly life cycles or turtle life cycles or butterfly life cycles, guess what? They're the eggs. And they get laid and they grow into caterpillars, right? So we're helping kids develop that conceptual framework. And we're looking for the words that are in their system to help them take individual pieces of knowledge, right? Like what they might learn about butterfly life cycles and fit it into the knowledge they already know so they can start developing a more sophisticated and more helpful kind of conceptual framework in language. When we think about core vocabulary and early concept development, so think about even just pronouns like I, you, me, us and them, right? You seem so self-evident that we would model these words on a kid's communication system so they can match a word like I and a word like you with the visual symbol that's on their system. But if we take it to the next step, we can see that our understandings of these words are not static. They keep growing over time as we use them. So the best example I have for just pronouns and how we use pronouns is the last U.S. presidential election. Think about how words like us and them changed, our understanding of those words changed as a result of some of the political fights that we've seen in the U.S. and across the world right now, right? None of these ideas, none of these ideas, even things as simple as us and them are actually really complicated. And we develop our thinking and our knowledge around them in terms of how we keep using them in a whole bunch of different contexts, right? So what you thought you knew about us and them back when you were five can really be different when you're 45 and you're watching, you know, a national election, that sort of thing. As we think about kids' communication systems, you know, often we get really good at labeling nouns, right? So we're studying eggs. We're going to find words like rhino and kitty and doggie and an egg in their communication systems. But to really be developing their thinking and their concept development, we need to make sure that we're helping kids learn how to categorize and how to observe and how to notice attributes of things. So if you think of the example I gave of the kitty that was actually a dog, right? How can we describe that? You know, the fact that the dog was small, that its ears were pointy, that its tail was long. That's how we help kids start thinking about what something is, being able to observe it, and being able to start sorting kind of where it goes into their existing schematic understandings of all the different things that they have concept knowledge of. As we're modeling kids' core vocabulary, we're teaching them about relationships and actions between things like what you like and want to use. We're giving them the language around ideas of things like measurements, right? Quantity, time, so all, none, some, before, after, you know, long, short, close, far. Every time we model those words, we're adding a little bit to their conceptual understanding, right? So the idea of the future, the idea of yesterday, these are really abstract ideas for early language learners, right? So when is something a long ways away and when is it really close, right? When is something really soon or really, or really close? These are all conceptual understandings that kids and not from the magic can get on their own. The more that we model the words around it, the more we can get them there. And what I'm going to talk about now for the rest of our webinar is just really using that rich descriptive language to help kids compare and contrast in order to develop their conceptual. Something that Murray Nevers, who provides AAC support the complex kids for the state of Vermont, and I did was we thought about the different subjects that kids study in school, especially our kids who are included in regular classes, and what are the big ideas behind those subjects? So if we think, for example, of history or social studies lessons, I can predict without even knowing the curriculum without having any idea what the unit is or what the lesson is, that we are going to talk in some way about who did what when, right? We're going to talk about some actions that those who took, right? What did they make? What did they do? Where did they go? We're going to talk about concepts of time, what came first and then what happened, what came first and what came last. What were people doing or making or wherever they go and then and what are they doing or making now? What were they thinking then? And what's the same from back in history and what's different now, right? So without even seeing the unit, those are the big ideas that our students core vocabulary can help represent without even knowing what the unit is. I already know I can start thinking about how I can model those words. And math, especially in elementary math, we're thinking generally about how many and how much. So a lot of ideas about quantity. So there's some good question words we can use there. We're using lots of action verbs, like I have this many, I'm going to take some, I'm going to get some, I'm going to put some here. I can see that I have this many, now we've taken some away, right? So we've got a lot of verbs that we use in early math. We've got, again, lots of time words like first, then, and last. So first I had this many, then I got some more and then we take, took some away. And I use a lot of adjectives in all elementary math. We talk a lot about more and less and many and few. We can also talk about, because we're learning things like the names of numbers, how are numbers the same and how are they different? How is a quantity the same and how is it different? How is few like some, but different from all, right? So these are all the kind of concepts that we're teaching in those classes. We're looking at elementary science lessons. We're looking a lot at how and why, right? I mean, science, I'm here to science first. Science is a lot of encouraging kids to ask how and why. Think about our complex kids. How many of them have been supported from early childhood to ask questions like how and why, right? So in science, especially in elementary science, we're doing a lot of seeing and looking and observing. We're doing a lot of doing and we're making a lot of change, right? We're going to change a lot of things. So maybe first we have this and then we do this and here's what happens last. A lot of comparisons, same and different. So be thinking about these ideas as you're thinking about supporting the students AAC in a regular classroom, right? I was with a school team where they had exhaustively filled in so many folders in the student's communication system so that when they studied rock types, there was sedimentary and igneous and whatever all the other kinds of rocks are. Under planets, there was every single kind of planet and moon had been put in there. And this went on and on with every unit in science and every unit in social studies. Had all these folders where the students could go and talk about all these different presidents and planets and times in history. But she didn't actually use any of that language. One of the big ideas of what had mattered the most is, you know, how is this president the same as that president and how are they different? How was being a president in 1800 or a prime minister different from how it is today, right? How is an igneous rock the same as other rocks and how is it different? And how can we describe an igneous rock, right? Is it hard? Is it shiny? And how do we, can we think about those words we can use more often to be able to teach kids to make sure that that's what we're modeling for kids? I don't know how many times, how many opportunities an ordinary kid in regular classes ever has a chance to use igneous again after that rock type unit is over. But words like hard, hard and shiny and rough are words that we can use so often. And you'll see that that's how I came to find a real presentation. And last week I was thinking about the language around shared reading. And I realized that when we're doing shared reading with typical kids, we're not really trying to teach them content, right? So think about the book, Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? We have read this book with so many children for so many years. How many of us choose this book because we're trying to teach kids about animals, right? We're not trying to teach content with it. We're trying to teach a whole bunch of other things. And yet, when you look at the way that we often support our AAC users to participate in reading along with a book like this, we tend to give them the animal type. Well, if I really wanted to teach kids about bears versus birds versus horses versus dogs, this probably isn't the book. I would use to teach them about it, right? I'm going to use this book to teach concepts like what's the word, what's a book, what is reading, right? What's the picture and illustration, what is the concept of animals, right? What are all of the different colors and how can we describe these different animals? I'm going to be reading a book like this because I'm talking a lot about looking and seeing because this is Brown Bear, Brown Bear, and what do you see? I see a red bird looking at me. And I'm going to be using a book like this to teach kids that pronouns like I, me, you, and we, right? That's what we're doing with books like this. We miss the boat if we focus on giving them access to, for example, the nouns that are in the book, rather than the ideas that are in the book, right? That's the real language needs of kids as they have to just read a book like this. And one, if you've got early childhood, if you're supporting young children, Carol Zangari, tell me quickly. It's just lovely. It's very inexpensive. And what she does is take all of these different extremely common early childhood books, and she helps you think about how to use those high frequency words that appear in the text, which is what she calls her Bow Wow words, right? So in Brown Bear, Brown Bear, we see a lot of C and U. So she gives you lots of ideas about how to use C and U as you're reading that book together. But then Tiger Talk words are what she calls the big, you know, are really the words that this book gives you an opportunity to use in models. So the word read doesn't appear in Brown Bear, Brown Bear, but it's the Tiger Talk word that she associates with it because it's the idea that she's teaching along with shared reading. And this is the kind of curriculum and these are the kinds of activities that start consciously on our part developing thinking with our teams and with our kids as opposed to just trying to teach words as though words aren't actually ideas, right? And where this all starts comes together for me was discovering Gail Van Tatenhove in her descriptive teaching method. So she teaches a process for how we're going to teach and reinforce the use of that core language, those really high frequency words in the classroom across the whole school day. And once I discovered her, I finally discovered a way to really think about concept development and theme of theory and language development in a really cohesive way across the school day. So that will be the rest of this workshop. And what Gail talked about is having us shift the language we use as teachers from referential teaching to descriptive teaching. So referential teaching is when we introduce many new words. We use really unit specific vocabulary. So if it's a rock type unit, then we're going to use a lot of words with those many new words are going to be things like sandstone and igneous. If it's a planet and solar system unit, we're going to use a lot of, you know, Jupiter and Mars and planets and moon and meteor kind of words. We're going to ask questions where we're eliciting single word responses. Just one quick answer. So which planet is the fourth one from the sun? I actually don't know. Is that Earth? It might be. I am not. I was never the scientist. And there's going to be a correct answer or an incorrect answer, right? So I don't even know if I just got the fourth planet one, right? But I either got it right or I got it wrong. And we're going to shift that, especially for our 8ac users, but we're going to do this for everybody. We're going to shift from that old referential style of teaching to descriptive teaching. And here's what we're going to use really plain language and familiar words to describe new concepts. So if we're teaching planets and solar systems, then what can we say about Jupiter? Well, it was really, really big. What can we say about Saturn? It's really big. And how can we describe those rings? What do they look like, right? If we ask kids, what can you tell me? How can you describe the rings on Saturn? We can get multi-word responses and there will be more than one correct response, right? Six hands might go up in a classroom and they've got six different ways to describe the appearance of Jupiter or Earth or Mars or a meteor. And as opposed to just asking those correct or incorrect kinds of questions. The way that we're going to teach kids with descriptive teaching is we're going to redefine those unit specific words like planet with really critical words, with the words that they already have in their communication systems. So this is an example that Gail shared widely on the web where she's taken the critical words of the unit on matter, words like form and flexible and stiff and curved and textured solid liquid gas evaporate. And she's thought about what are the words, those critical words? Well, what are the words that tend to be in a good communication system, right? We should be able to find these high frequency common words, words that kids now feel flexible, easy to move, stiff, hard to move. If I ask you to tell me something about flexible and you say easy to move and I know that you understand the bigger idea, right? So we're going to learn to redefine the new terminology with critical words. And before I would put a word like igneous in a student's communication system, I'm going to think about what are the critical words that they can use to tell me about igneous. So as much as I know about igneous rocks is that they come from volcanoes and so they're very, they're black and shiny, right? Very hard, very sharp. And I hope I'm getting that right. So if a student, if you asked me and I was an AAC user and you asked me about igneous rocks and I told you black, hard, shiny, see or glass-like, shiny-like, right? See how I can start sharing how much I know as opposed to provide the correct answer, you know, navigate to the word igneous in order to give me the correct answer. Gail and we know just in the field of speech therapy that our big challenge is to use AAC in every lesson. So often I go into a classroom where they're studying solar systems and they have this new vocabulary and they've set the communication system aside because they've developed all these other visual support for the child to use so they can be included in the unit and talk about Jupiter as opposed to Earth and Mars, right? If we do that, if we create alternative visual supports, not only are we putting a lot of time into developing other stuff, but if we have set the communication system aside because the way for the student to participate in the lesson doesn't use AAC, then we're not developing their language. And I believe with our complex kids, if we're not developing the language, we're not developing their cognition, we're not strengthening their cognitive understandings, the whole schematic understandings they have around all these different words that we're asking them to use. So here's one of the kind of classic examples to help us think about descriptive teaching. If I ask, what is the name of the third stage in a butterfly's life cycle, this is referential teaching, right? And I'll ask this in workshops. And no teacher ever throws up their hand right away to give me the answer because everybody's seen their first second thinking, oh, which stage is that? They want to make sure they get the answer right. You know it's referential teaching if you hesitate to answer because you're trying to think of what is the word that the teacher wants me to say, right? If I instead say what happens during the chrysalis stage, think about how many different options we have, right? If we have a communication system in front of us, we can all find words that would tell us about chrysalis. So some of the things that people might say would be change, different, go inside, go to sleep, become new, one of them has become pretty, there's so many different options, right? About what happens during the chrysalis stage for a butterfly and it opens the door. I can ask an entire room of people what happens during the chrysalis stage for a butterfly and get 30 different correct answers. That's how I know I'm doing descriptive teaching. So an example of what this actually looks like. So for my daughter, I think she's grade seven, the kids spent about a week writing an essay on who was their hero. So that was the assignment. They had about a week to work on it. They had a lot of time in class to work on it. And Maggie's team was just learning how to shift from the old referential styles where they would have different photos printed out to be able to show them to her and have her participate. That way, and moving towards a descriptive model. So as this started, at the beginning of the week, they know her very well. They have a long history with her. And so they offer a variety of photos and say, so Maggie, who is your photo or who is your hero? You can see here, she's got some Hermione and Harry from Harry Potter, Ruby Bridges and the two main characters from her favorite TV show, which is most large. So she looks at these different options and she taps and vocalizes Hermione. And she's done. If we use referential teaching, even if we don't know the correct answer and we put four pictures in front of a kid and we say, show me your hero and you show me Hermione. Well, we're done. Right. What else do we do now? Now we need to know why. But so many of our kids can participate. They can participate in something like this. If we ask her who's her hero, she shows me Hermione. I don't actually know that Hermione is her hero. I know that she loves Hermione, but I don't know that Hermione is her hero. So we've given her a way to participate where she can, but we actually can't be sure that she conceptually really understands the concept of hero because of how we've done it this way. So instead, what I encourage school teams to do is take a really simple graphic organizer like a bubble map. Think about what the hero. So if we think that the new terminology for this new unit is hero, then what are those critical words that we can use to describe what a hero is? Right. What are the words the student has in their system? And this is a great opportunity to bring in peers and other classmates, regardless what type of class you're in. If there are other kids who are, have stronger language skills and can sit and go through the system. I think what was so good for Maggie in middle school was we had a lot of Syrian refugees because all of the Syrian refugees that came to our community went to her middle school and our elementary school. So there were a lot of kids who are new, very new to the English language, and the visual supports that were provided to her AAC were fabulous for those kids. But even kids with just really high incidence stuff, you know, kids with language delays, kids with dyslexia and other LBs, often generating language is really hard for them. And I find providing them with a communication system is a, hey, can you help be a peer support to this student over here? Can you help us find all the words in the system that describe a hero? What are the qualities of a hero? What are the words that Maggie has access to to tell us what a hero is? And this is what the kids came up with. So a hero is smart, brave, strong, works hard, does not give up sacrifices, takes risks, and could die. And there was a really interesting questions about a word like sacrifice. That wasn't actually in her AAC vocabulary at the time, right? How do we know if that's a critical word or not? What the kids decided was they could not break it down any further. They just didn't feel like there was plain language that Maggie had that could capture what a sacrifice is. And so they insisted the sacrifice needed to be added to her system, but the rest of the words she already had. So, you know, my daughter's a very emergent user. We're introducing this concept of a hero. It's a word she's used before she's been asked to identify a hero. Now she gets to see more than one person go through her system and really define a hero with words that she has access to, right? And we went through and we described each of them. So if you know Maggie well, then you would think that these four, Harry Potter, Hermione Granger, Ruby Bridges, and the Wolfblood characters, could be her heroes, right? With Maggie, because she's very emergent, we might go through this whole thing of describing those characters, describing, finding all the words we can to describe a hero, describe Hermione, and then at the end ask her, okay, so now with these two students and educational assistance, then we've come up with eight words that describe Hermione. Now Maggie, tell us if we got it right. When you hear what you think is most important about Hermione, tell me that's it. Or tell me different if we need to keep going and generate more words for you to respond to. So Maggie, having watched them all describe Hermione, what's most important about Hermione? Well, what she said was most important was that she likes Ron and has curly hair. Well, that's great, but is that what makes her a hero? The fact that she responded to those two things gives us a way to start having a conversation, right? So we took all the different, the different options that she had for talking about who is a hero. Ruby Bridges has been a fan of hers since she was, or she's been a huge fan of Ruby Bridges since she was very little. I've always found this fascinating. I think it started in grade four, when the first time one of her classes really went into Black History Month and focused on it. Because I always thought we were doing a pretty good job, including Maggie at school. She was the only student with complexity to her school. The fact that when her class studied Black History and she was drawn to Ruby Bridges, right? If you know the story of Ruby Bridges, she desegregated an all-white school in Louisiana. The community was so opposed to desegregation that every white family dropped out of the school and boycotted the school for an entire year, while Ruby, during Ruby's first year there was just one student, Ruby, and her teacher. So the kids had to learn about Ruby Bridges, the aid had to learn about Ruby Bridges to be able to go through her system and generate words that could describe her. So these are the words that I used to describe Ruby Bridges. And then we started doing the comparing and contrasting, right? So just as we did with my younger girl when she thought a rhino was a dinosaur, a kitty was a doggie, we start doing that whole comparison to trust. Yeah, so what does, what are the traits Hermione has, what are the traits a hero has, and what are common and what's specific to Hermione, right? So Hermione is really smart and sacrificed and works really hard. Well, those are great traits for a hero. Hermione is really pretty and likes Ron. Do you have to be a hero to like Ron? No, right? So we can start having that conversation. And the more sophisticated our AC users are, the more active that they can be part of this. But in the beginning, we might just be modeling how to support the two. We might just be saying, okay, so what about work hard? Can you be a hero and not work hard? That's a good question. What do you think? We can give them that pause time. We can model words like work and hard, give them that pause. And if we don't get a response back, then it's okay. We can still, we can still go with that and provide input. And if we do get a response from the students, then that's awesome. We can expand on it, right? But what this does is by giving classroom teams just some really simple tools like bubble maps and Venn diagrams. As long as the teacher helps, for example, an educational assistant think about what's that, what's that, that new terminology that we're going to focus on. So a concept like hero. What's the new word? We can ask educational assistants to hopefully work with some classmates and model eight words about hero or model eight words about Hermione. That is so much more doable than make sure you're modeling the communication system all across the school, right? So we do comparison and contrast. So this starts taking a whole week to do the whole compare and contrast about what do we know about heroes? What do we know about Hermione? And let's talk about who's not your hero, right? So for example, working hard. Can you not be a hero and still work hard? You probably can. Right? So this led to these great conversations with the kids about what exactly is a hero? Let's get to the essence of the concept of hero. Right? And let's compare and contrast each of the characters. So we Hermione, Harry Potter, the wolf blood characters, and then Ruby Bridges. And what came out of it was at the end of the week, as we go back to asking Maggie, Maggie, who's your hero, her answer had changed. And her answer was now Ruby Bridges. And that had partly been visible just by comparing on the vanguard. And you could start seeing when Ruby Bridges had more characteristics of a hero anyway, right? So it just kind of started emerging. So we then asked Maggie, so you tell us why is Ruby Bridges your hero? What's most important about Ruby that makes her your hero? And this is the essay that Maggie turned in on Ruby Bridges. So my hero is Ruby Bridges. Ruby is black, beautiful, and brave. Ruby was young. Ruby was alone. Ruby was brave. Ruby won. So these are all the terms that Maggie responded to, mostly using sort of a partnership scanning approach. She didn't independently go into her communication system, I think, for anything other than black and beautiful. So she didn't independently describe Ruby those legs, but she responded through scanning after the team had brainstormed these words that she had in her system. And so the kids then took it a step further. And you'll see that in just a minute. None of this took a lot of preparation time, right? The amount of assistive technology that went into supporting Maggie around this was her communication system, Google images, right? Google images or any web browser image search is a great way to get the visuals you need. As long as you've got a tablet or Chromebook or a laptop, a computer, something where you can do a search. You can do a search for Ruby Bridges, a search for Hermione. And now we can teach kids how to look and observe and what do you see and what can we describe based on what we see. We don't need to have a whole bunch of things printed out and laminated so that they can select between them. We can just use image searches. You know, it took some bubble maps and some Venn diagrams. And for Maggie, the way that she usually responds in a scanning situation is she has a sticky note on her desk, a bit of flutter in the sticky note. So that's a really easy automatic way for her to be able to respond. So as you're describing Ruby Bridges and offering options of how to describe her, that's it, is a way that she can have a very simple response method and participate in that kind of thing. So the steps for how we did it, we made sure we followed Gail's advice to redefine new words with new terms of critical vocabulary, right? So a word like hero, but also we went back to words like Hermione and Ruby. We used visuals, we used like to go in the search to be able to observe and talk about what we saw to help us generate language. But it was all about looking for things we could then find, looking for what language we could then find as communication systems. And then we're going to reshape what we saw in sentences and you'll see how the kids did that in just a second. Based on the skills of the students, then there's lots of different ways that they can be part of it because all of this, the first three steps can all be receptive. For our most emergent kids, if this is what we are receptively modeling for them, then we're keeping them language and we're keeping them thinking. And now we'll get to things like, for some of our kids, we can do word sorts. So here's a list of words and we're going to sort them between two items. Maybe it's between rock types, right? And we've got, I really shouldn't use science examples, but maybe we've got igneous and sandstone. And now we've got a list of words and we have to figure out which list each one of those words goes into. So a word like shiny, does that describe igneous or does it describe sandstone? So we can then do the assessment part that way. For our most emergent kids, we can use much more of a partner-assisted scanning approach where we'll just slowly go through the word options and invite a response from them. We can have multiple choice options, right, where we provide a kid with multiple words to use to describe anything from igneous and President Hamilton to the Prime Minister. And for our most sophisticated kids, we can just say, so tell me about this. Tell me about your hero. Tell me about Ruby Bridges and they can navigate to those words. So I hope this feels doable. I've got a few more examples and I just want to show you how we turn these into texts that we can keep using. But Kathy, if you have any questions or comments that people have that I should get to first, or can I show the text and just one more example? I think you can do that, but maybe if people are willing, why don't we just pause for a minute and people want to enter in in the chat. Does it feel doable? We'll pause for a little bit of feedback. You can go thumbs up or you can put something in the chat window. We'll do that pause that we're supposed to do is to educate us. My favorite is when we do this live and we can actually take units that folks have and just start, you know, take a communication system and just start working on it. Absolutely. So I'm not seeing anybody answering. Is anybody feeling that it's doable? Absolutely. Thank you, Melissa. There we go. There's nothing like pressure. Absolutely. I like that word. Okay. All right. Very good. That's all I wanted. It's just a few little people to say what I was thinking. So carry on. Sorry. So here's how we can evolve this one step further if we have the time for it, right? So with the hero essay, that was at least a week long assignment. The kids got very into it. Some of the students who at various parts got to help generate languages, Maggie actually changed their own essays and change to their own hero was as a result of some of the conversations they had with Matt. But one of the things that they did was they took the words that Maggie had indicated were most important. So the fact that the fact that she thought that the fact that Ruby Bridges was black, was such a key descriptor for Ruby. That's really right. That tells us right there a lot of what she's noticing. Why does that matter? Well, the students turned that into sentences. So black students were not allowed to go to school with white students. This is where we can one up the language that Maggie had participated in with really expanding it and make a test. So Maggie said that Ruby Bridges was young and that this was important. So why does that matter? Ruby was six years old when she went to an all white school. Ruby Bridges was alone. Ruby Bridges was the only black student who tried to go to the school. None of the white students would go to school if Ruby was there. You could imagine the conversations the kids had as they were looking at the visuals and Google images, right? Ruby Bridges was brave. White people yelled at her. They threw things at her like raw food. They even started a fire in her yard. This is what the kids learned as a result of just the Google image search really on Ruby. But Ruby did not give up. Ruby won. Because of Ruby, all children in America can go to school together. So this then was presented to the whole class. You can see how students who language and intellect were so advanced could still be part of providing peer support to Maggie in this activity. And we're not asking them to do a charitable act by working with Maggie, right? By working with her on something like this, by helping to turn her words, the words that she helped create, that she helped generate into the text. It doesn't dumb down anything, right? It becomes a text we can share with the whole class. And a pretty kick out effect of that. So that's just one example. When in doubt, just make sure your teams have things like a concept map. Make sure that they can just think about words the student has access to. If we just take the attention that we used to put into preparing so many visual and alternate ways for kids to participate and just use those visuals to help us generate language from the student communication system. What we're going to find with some of our kids is they don't have nearly enough language in their system. But with others, making these simple concept maps just to help give us a way of thinking about what we're modeling and how we're building conceptual understanding of these different ideas. That's just enough right there that no matter what the lesson is, we can walk into a history lesson or a science lesson with very little preparation time. But as long as I've got a concept map, and as long as I've got the student's communication system and we have some way to access visuals, then we can start thinking about how to help that student access the big ideas of the lesson. So all it takes is just really simple, very, very simple graphical. As a general rule, we're teaching concepts if they can't just be pointing at, right? So I think that if you can say, show me the dog, the student can point to the dog, but it doesn't mean that we're teaching the concept of dogmas, right? So go slow because if you're developing conceptual understanding, it's too complicated to just point to the correct answer. Ask lots of open-ended questions because if it's descriptive teaching and we're developing concepts and there's many correct answers and ask peers to help because there's always peers in the classroom who can benefit from helping to generate the language. I'm going to skip over these, and I'm just going to give you another example. This was a Canadian government lesson, a middle school, I think Canadian government lesson. It's so easy to reduce things to show me. Show me the leader of Canada, right? All across the world, doesn't matter where you go, people can generally show you the leader of Canada. But if you say instead, tell me about the leader of Canada, that becomes a completely different conversation, right? And so here was the bubble map that came out of this is a middle school classroom looking at the role of the prime minister in Canadian politics and the words that the kids came up with. I think what they had done was just watched a video or a little documentary or something. They just read something maybe about Justin Trudeau. So as they read, the job of the peers around Maggie was to think about what were the key ideas that were coming through, the key ideas that we need to know about Justin Trudeau, right? So we take a look at this. So here's the words that the kids generated. Some of them are their own opinions like hot and some of them are factual based on what they learned. I guess he used to be a teacher, he's a father, he's now the prime minister. And then we think about, so if this is our unit and this is the concept we're trying to teach, the concept of Justin Trudeau, what are the words that need to be redefined with critical words? What are the words we would expect to be able to find in a communication system as opposed to which ones might need to be redefined, right? So Gail teaches us to redefine those new terms with critical words. So as we think that through, here's what the kids came up with, that father, teacher, hot, young, those are already in the communication system, but prime minister, Canadian, French, liberal party. This is where peers, no matter how advanced they might seem compared to our complex student, they actually really have to think this one through. How do I explain a prime minister using just critical words, right? So they came up with most high up person, most important. What's the Canadians? That's not too hard, the person's Canada. What does it mean to be French? How do you explain French, right? They came up with group of people, same culture, same language, different from English. And what the liberal party, they're a group of people, same ideas, same plan. So here's how we can take some really abstract concepts and try to reduce them to those core ideas, those key ideas that are represented in a communication system. Do you think about ways that students can have a really simple response option, the way that Maggie has that sticky note with that bit? Because if we're really engaging our kids and they're thinking hard about this, what's the prime minister and the concept of the most high up person? Or we're trying to describe French. We're going to then ask them to tell us what they've learned and they have to now be able to use their communication system independently to be able to provide independent responses. And that often becomes a big barrier of its own. So I really encourage if your kids are emergent, have a response method for them that's very simple so that we can generate, we can take on a lot of that load. We're modeling. The kids at the modeling stage. We're going to model a bunch of the words and we're going to provide a really rhetorically simple way for them to respond to the words that they feel are most important. So in this case, we asked the student now we're going to go through here's the language we've developed. You tell me what you think is most important about Justin Trudeau in this example. And, you know, not shockingly, Maggie responded hot and young where the two words that she thought mattered most about Justin Trudeau that is entirely a reflection on the giggling 13 year olds who are part of generating language and just the experience that they had as they were doing it. I think we have a lot of work to do teaching her about the role of the prime minister if that's what was the most salient to her but, you know, that's what we learned from that. And we can teach the teenagers more about Canadian politics over time with examples like only Parliament. Tell me about Parliament right so we had a class that was trying to compare it to American government. Well, how do we take these abstract ideas and reduce them to those really critical words that kids have in their system. Well, the fact that the Senate is less important in Canada and more important in the state. The same is that people get to choose their leaders, people directly choose their member of Congress and their member of Parliament but they don't directly choose their president and they don't directly choose their prime minister right so even just trying to sort this out leads to really interesting conversations. And for our emergent kids, if all they do is watch us model this, watch us try to take this complex idea that's being talked about in like a grade seven grade eight social studies lesson. If they don't participate in that if we don't know that they learned something from it, we know at least that they saw a lot of modeling of words like important and that's actually that turned out to be a really important word. I find that anytime I do this example with teachers either in the US or Canada, everybody learned something about the structure of government just because we're comparing Parliament and Congress using really high frequency words. So, I've got more examples but I think we are over time. If anybody has an example that they want to think about we could do that but I think you guys have the big idea of it so far. Lovely Aaron. When I'm sitting here thinking and I'll let people say what they want to do but my, as always, when I listen to you. I think there are very few people who can take research and bring it so directly to practice, and even practice and bring it directly to life. Then, then you do so I always enjoy listening to you. I love the stories that you tell about this because they're rich with information, but they're, they really are practical and they're real because Maggie and her friends are doing it so. I think you're a closet linguist. I have to tell you that, but that's, that's okay. That's good. I like that. Anyway, so I've just enjoyed this so much. I'm going to pause for a little minute to see if anyone does have any questions or comments for Aaron. And I do recognize that we are over time and that I want to honor your time as well, but let's just pause for a minute if there's any questions or comments on what you've heard. And, and whether you to think that this is something that you could practically take into your into your practice, your classroom, and even I think at home when we're talking. Our kids, right? I mean, this just, this just goes everywhere. Okay, well, I'm while we're waiting. Did you have any final thoughts or comments Aaron? No, I'm good. It's um, I'll just just because I showed you this slide with ancient Egypt. I will just show how we redefine so here's ancient civilizations before we're going to show kid visuals and say show me the tomb show me the desert show me the pyramid I know this happens because this is what happens my own kid. Now the gold. Can you describe these things? Right? What can you tell me about a desert? What can you tell me about a tomb? That kind of thing. Beautiful. And, you know, the other piece that keeps I had talked for years about, you know, letting kids do extension activities as peer support, but, you know, we're not this is this is not nearly an extension activity. This is engaging the other kids in learning active learning while they're supporting what Maggie's doing because if you have to think critically, which is what really all has about. We're really really there's no such thing as a kid. Being the mutually supportive supportive of the other child's learning and that's absolutely beautiful. So, yep, and then from so you've got a couple of comments here one was really good with a PowerPoint be available. Yes, I'm happy to send you those slides. Okay, beautiful. So we'll probably post the PowerPoint with the recording. So it'll be on the. PC site and if you can't find it because I know it's kind of tricky sending email and then from river, if nothing else happens at the very least we'll have many peers and educators touching and learning the students language system. Exactly. Exactly. Bravo. Absolutely fabulous. Well, thank you all for those of you who hung in. I know that it was a wonderful hour and a bit and Aaron, as always, thank you. And I think you're going to be in Alberta before too long. Am I right? Yes. Just another week or yeah. Yeah, do you want to talk about that at all. Well, it's not it's not for I'm just attending the inclusion of our conference. Okay. All right. Well, me too. So anyone who wants to come to a great conference come to the inclusion Alberta conference. I'm going to be sending out some information about our February event, which will be actually not myself and Monica as previously advertised. But I've got Lauren Schwartz enters going to talk a little bit about implementation. So to be tuned in and then Monica and I will do the session on. Mental health of kids with complex communication needs in May because that's mental health month. So we thought we'd just there. So, all right. Thank you, my dear. Thank you everybody. That was stellar as always. So, yeah. Thank you so much. All right, we will talk soon and go and give your other little month. Yeah. Okay. Good night all awesome. Bye.