 So I will continue from the beginning of this. I don't know what I said last time, but I don't know if you heard it. And it's about when you are communicating with other people and whether you – how much reward that is needed. Of course, we have the very sort of traditional behavioral analytic ways where they give all kinds of reinforcements, edible reinforcement. But I think it is really important that you should not really praise children for communication. When they are communicating, they should be answered. So of course, I don't mind praising children when they are sort of being better than they usually are. They are doing something better. They have improved in something. There are lots of reasons to praise children. But when you communicate, you don't communicate to get a grade. You communicate because you want somebody to react to your communication in an appropriate way, which means telling you something, doing something for you, just answering what you are saying, saying, I'm listening to you. Whatever your communication might be, it's not a reward you are asking for. Or you might say, oh, give me a reward. I did some, well, that could be your communication. Then it would be appropriate if you actually deserve it. And I think the good communication things are really sort of taking the attention away from the communication action, the communicative act. And one of the people who say that is actually Skinder, say that you are stopping the sequence of actions before the communication has registered gold, which would be to get an answer. So we think it is much more important with communicative success than instrumental success. So communicative success is being understood, getting an answer, whatever that answer might be. While instrumental success is only in instrumental communication, and it means obtaining something. And usually this is an important part of the early communication. And some programs are really focusing very much on the instrumental success. And the picture exchange communication system, you know, in a way they say, I'm exchanging my picture. They don't even call it a word. I would call it a word. So you're exchanging this or you're giving some kind of graphic symbol or you could have a manual sign and you get something back. And, you know, this is not what communication is. Communication is somehow relaying a kind of message that, again, need to get an answer. So communication should be network communication. Now, if you work really hard with communication and everything, and at the end of the session you say, oh, you're really working really good today, of course, this is not a problem. Problem is when you are all the time sort of stopping the communication because you want to tell how beautiful that communication is. It's a meta-communication, which is not really what it should be about. So this is one of the, I think, really important things. And I feel, you know, quite strongly about that. And it's not because I don't like, you know, children should be praised because sometimes they need that. There are a lot of other things to say about praise because praise is also something that reflect on how I regard you. So if I praise you for something, it's because you are doing better than you do usually. So if I praise you for something ordinary, it means that I didn't really expect you to be able to do that ordinary. And that may not really be what you want to, you know, relate to the child. And I think when we did this the other day, we talked about, or I talked about the fact that I hear people far too often saying, oh, good talking or, you know, and rat, which breaks down the communication. So I just really am so pleased that you spent so much time on this slide because I think it is a critical understanding. And I think for some people, something that they really need to hear and reflect on. So. Yes, and I think a lot of people do it because they think they are doing nicely. They think they are nice to the person, you know, this. So, you know, and, you know, sometimes we have all the good intentions, but it may not function in that way. Now, some strategies have been suggested for A and C of different kinds. And one of them is modeling. And it's supposed to be an important help, but it's often taken too literally. It is sort of that I show you what you should do. So I think it's important to distinguish between imitation, which may have some kind of meaning and some not. I can copy you. You can do the same as you do. And learning from observation. Observational learning I think is more important in language development than imitation. Of course, there are lots of people who disagree with me. And that I think many people, including Michael Tomasello, is emphasizing too much imitation. Maybe they think about imitation in a broader sense, but if I watch you in a situation communicating with another person, and I say, oh, that was a nice way to do it, or this is what it's called. This is how I should do it, or whatever I might think about that. And then I sort of learned from that, and next time I'm doing something similar, I might try to use the same strategies. I don't call that imitation because we observe a lot of things and we don't really copy it. It's not like, how was that? What kind of movement should I do? So we learn language also by watching other people, of course interacting with other people. So the function of modeling would be to see another person doing something for real. Not so much, you know, that you tell me, you show me what to do. I think this is also possible, but it's sort of a meta-communication again. But it would be much better if we actually interacted and we learned from that interaction I could learn, what do you do if you have my communication board or my manual signs? So if you want to tell something or obtain something or whatever it might be or respond to something. So how would you do that? In the same kind of situation. And that's why I often think it's good to have two teachers, one you communicate with and one which sort of scaffolding you, helping you to do the things not just by being a model. And again, it's not that modeling is always wrong because sometimes, you know, we can just say, oh, you should do it like this or this is how you say it. So, you know, if you tried to speak Norwegian, I could tell you, well, you know, you're almost there. This is how it should sound because you have the problem that you have to adapt it to your own language. So these things can be okay, but this is not what we should do mainly. This is, I don't think it's that important strategy and it's used very much. The other strategy that is much suggested is expansion. And again, expansion is one of the few strategies that have been found to actually improve in child, it's part of child directed speech. And it seems that that is a positive thing to do for speaking children. And of course, it would also be, possibly, a good thing to do with children who are using communication aid or manual science, if the expansion consists of the items that the child is possible can make. And the problem with this is that very often the expansions of children using AC are spoken interpretation of what the child has expressed. And of course, this frame and utterance will be larger than the child. It will have more words and in a way it tells the child something. But if the child cannot use it, you're just having the comprehension of other people, what the other people say and what you yourself can say will be quite different things. So expansion should be real. That you are using the child's communication board or actually you have your own communication board similar to the child's so that you actually each one have yours, but you're communicating with the same. And then you can do what is best expansion is that the child says, ball or something and you say, oh yes, isn't that a nice red ball? And then, of course, you would point to the communication board and at least get more items into the utterance. So you would have red and you would have balls. So you have sort of expanded it in that way. You might have nice. You might have other things. So the expansion should be obtainable for the child. Otherwise, it gives information about how they say the same things in speech and of course it is probably some kind of support comprehension, but the child is listening to a lot of communication and the thing is you're losing the much clearer relationship between the child's utterance. You know, I'm the child. I say something and then my mother or father or another adult, they are expanding on what I am saying. This is very different from, you know, hearing what other people say, which of course is also important. And if you really think that you're going to scaffold or support or help the child's expressive language, then it must be available to the child and very often it isn't. I personally, I like often to have structured conversations and I think structured conversation could be really, you can make them nice because if there's something the child is interested, it might be something you are interested or both of you are interested and it's just sort of you make a conversation but you make it interesting that at the same time you have some ideas about what you would like to be into that. You might want to teach prepositions or special language. By the way, we have discovered that in our study it seems that prepositions are actually difficult for children using communication, it's more difficult than any other terms. We don't know exactly why, it might have to do with a motor impairment, it might have to do with other things but it would certainly be something that would be interesting to communicate about in early play, what I call aided play and also what I talked about earlier about language for action. So in the way you are getting these terminology in at the same time as you are doing some interesting activities. Storybooks are very often popular, the problem with it can become quite repetitive and repetition is alright in a way and we know that children love to hear the same book again and again but the problem is that if you have a limited vocabulary you lose the possibility to be creative, you lose the possibility to do other things and I think also that even when children might do a little sort of re-doing a little with the story, putting in some things that don't belong there to be funny, it may just be looked as an error. If another child is saying the same you might think oh he's very creative but here you think this was not what you were supposed to say, this is not what goes in here. So I'm a little bit afraid that these kind of the storybooks if you're always using the same then they might just become routines and you might enjoy it, it might be nice but it may not really help the child to communicate better, to express himself better, that's the wrong way. But I think that when you have structured communication and you use it as a child's communication form and integrate structured the topic, you do expansions, you do some functional modeling where you actually solve some problems on the way, I think that can be really good. And I don't know, I think I mentioned this also the last time that there was one father with a child who had an early past and the child didn't really get into sentences and the father was wondering why he didn't use sentences but essentially used single word and this was a child who could communicate quite fast. So he wanted to sort of understand his son's communication better. So every day he took 15 minutes without speech for himself and only communicating with the child's communication board. And he got a totally different view on what the child actually was achieving and how well he did communicate but of course there was lots of situations where he was lacking vocabulary and so on. And I think it helped the father's competence a lot, he understood much better what it was about and also he was much more open to see what is he trying to tell me now. I think this is a general thing with disability, we don't expect creativity, we don't need the right or wrong answer. So in a way we should, sometimes children do things at random because they don't know what to do. They don't understand the question, they don't understand what they're supposed to do and they might just look a little around, they're lacking, they don't have the vocabulary. We see that children sometimes they do all their signs after each other sort of saying I want to say something but I don't know which sign I should use. And therefore they, you do the same and I lost my actually where I was, so my point about that. You'll come back to that unless you have a question. Yeah. I was going to say that for my doctoral research I spent a day, not quite because I didn't last a day, using only aided communication with a voice output device because I wanted to get that lived experience and perhaps that was the most telling day of my life. I really do think that that's profound to spend and I like this 15 minutes a day using only the communication aid. And the other thing that I really think about what you just said is that we need to try to presume and to understand all communicative attempts and react to them as though they are, you know, instead of and I think you're right, instead of saying it was a mistake. Well, how do you know it was a mistake? So I just really, I just wanted to say that and maybe give you a little chance if you were thinking about what else you're going to say. But I encourage everyone to spend a little time using only an augmented system to really see what it's like. But I was, it was this sort of point that children don't, when children, and this is also normally speaking children, when they are learning language, they are trying their best to solve the communication problems. My little grandson, when he was about three, he said, and this is different in Norwegian than in English. So he said that his mother would take tartar sauce on his lips when they were driving. And in Norwegian, that would be remoulade. Now there is another thing you put on your lips when they are dry, which is called leptepumade. And as you can hear, they are quite similar. So he, even when I said, oh, you probably mean leptepumade, even then he sort of continued to say that for two or three months before he learned it. And the thing was that he wasn't doing a mistake, that was not the important thing, but he was actually trying to say what he had on his mind. And I think the children using communication ways are also trying to say what is on their minds, that they have a much smaller vocabulary. So we should always try to think that, well, if it didn't mean that literally, could it be something else? And I think that the children are often quite creative, but they are also quite idiosyncratic. One of the tasks we have is to, that the children should communicate something to another person without naming it, but telling about it. And it was interesting that very often they were saying not ordinary things, but things which were actually quite idiosyncratic. So instead of, for Apple, instead of saying it's a fruit, the child, and this was a very high well-functioning child, would say the teacher doesn't like it. Now, the other teacher who was with her then would understand that this was an apple because her teacher didn't like apples. But for me, it would mean absolutely nothing. And we see that they often have sort of using idiosyncratic things when they name things. And I think it's a way of solving. And it's a little bit of what I've talked about before, that if you're not used to your communication having to be successful because the other person know what you're saying, then it doesn't matter so much what kind of cues you might give another person to your meanings, because you will be understood anyway. So I think it's really important to know what could I use, what could I use, and I think that very often they are not using cues to help the other person that might actually be useful and which are within their reach. And sometimes you see they are using more idiosyncratic associations of different kinds. And I think this reflects the language development. Because not everybody, but we see it more in this group than in others. And that's why we should be the ones who are helping them to find good strategies because vocabulary will be small. And even when they learn to read and write fairly all right, it takes a long time before their written language is good enough to sort of cover most of their situations. So this brings me to the next slide which is I think that we can really learn from the children and they use different kinds of strategies. And again, we have to think that language is essentially metaphorical. I'm sure you all are familiar with Lakers and Johnson, metaphors we live by, or the way we think by Fauconier and Turner, which is about the conceptual metaphors. And this is the basics of human communication is that we are able to say not only concrete meanings here and now, but we can surf the Internet, we can use the word for many different things. And we do that quite creatively all the time, and of course in poetry it is very much so. And then some of it will be unusual. And this one is a small example where Sander, who is, as you can see, nearly six years old initiates a conversation and he says, you know, he has a caller, which is bringing the communication board. It's just a sound, little sound generator, which is not so annoying. So he can use it all the time and you can say, wait, you know, without getting too upset about the sound and so on. But anyway, the teacher brings the communication board and he says, talk. And she says, what do you want to talk about? The unit? So you want to talk about something that happened in the unit in the preschool, and he says, yes, there's some mouse and moon, and she says, tell me, oh, lotto. So you played lotto, and he says, yes. And then she says, who did you play with? And he says, kitchen. And it sounds like he answered a different question. So, and she's not sure about this. So she says, did you play in the kitchen? And he says, no. And then she says, can you indicate the name? And then he does, you know, accept what I said, he sort of indicates name without making a choice. This is his way of saying, I don't have it. I think he should have had an expression saying, I need, I don't have this, you know, word or something. And she says, do you have the name on the board? And he says, no. Can you see the person you played with? And then he does something that we call symbolic pointing or looking. So he looks at the kitchen door, indicating someone in the kitchen. And I've seen other children doing that instead of going through their book to say, I, one boy, he just looked at the door to his room. He was sitting in the kitchen. So when he looked at the door to his room, and the father says, oh, you mean you. You know, so he was saying, I and the father understood it. So, and the teacher says, did you play with Marty who worked in the kitchen? And he says, yes. So, you know, this was, the kitchen here is metonymic. It's exactly the same thing as when you say the hamburger on table seven. It's a person who don't know what it is, but he is, you are working in a restaurant, and he's the guy who ordered a hamburger. So you're using that as a characteristic of him. So you can talk about him, even if he doesn't have a name. And you just find something that within the context will make sense. So in this case, the kitchen was enough to sort of help her to find that person. And nobody taught him to do that. He also used combinations. This was a guy who was, he was very religious, and he didn't have the pictograms. And the picture, I think the pictograms are from, from your area, with my ratcham. Yes, yes, yes. They were from Saskatchewan, right? Yeah. He used that first and later he used this, but at this time, and he didn't, and he wanted Bible and praise. So he made the teacher make pictograms for that for him, by pointing to church and book and talk. So this was sort of the, it was his creativity. And sometimes it could take a long time before the teacher understood what he wanted to say. There is another story about him when he was talking with a girl who was using bliss. So it was another aided communicator. And, and he was talking to her and he said, do you pray? You know, as I said, he, he was sort of a little bit strict on this. And she says, partly spelling and, and, and partly using her, her bliss symbols. I want to be a policewoman. And he, he makes his caller, you know, remember the caller, which makes a sound? Yeah. You know, they, they are in interaction. But he's using his caller, which is the one he uses to say, you know, I want to communicate, can you bring my book? Yeah. And it's pragmatic. So it's like saying, you listen to me. I have something to say. And then he says, do you pray? And he repeats this. And she says, no. And then he says, I want to do something else. But it's a real, real conversation. It's fabulous. And they, they communicate with each other and they, and they use their, their stuff to, to do this. Right. He also used part of the pictogram. Of course, many of these things exist as in, in, in bliss symbols. You know, you, you, you have some of these strategies. But this was before he had got into that. He used it for himself. So he would use the cross on the pictogram hospital when he wanted to say with a cross. And, and he had this interesting that when he, when he wanted to tell you when he wanted to tell the teacher that his father had a bad back, he indicated toes. And the reason for that was that when his father had a back, he was lying on the sofa. And the most prominent thing was his toes sticking up from the sofa. So he used that. You know, all this is creative. It's not always successful. Particularly if you, if you are not thinking that, oh, this is a guy who is trying to tell me something. And he is really, there is some sense here. I'm not sure what it is. And then sometimes you will be successful at the times you will not. It's all right. But the thing is that when you have, when you actually think this is a way to learn, then, you know, we can learn from these self-invented strategies. Can I share one with you? I have one of the young ladies in my study. I was watching her in a health class. And the teacher was asking kids about what they might get in their bodies that might make them ill or unwell. And it was high school. And kids, oh, I drank beer last night. I got sick. And she said, and she was using men's speak system. She said, Sam and vanilla. And of course she was trying to say Sam and Ella. So it was brilliant. Yeah. So I, but I don't know that anybody other than me even caught that because they're not expecting her to. Yeah. Yeah. But I think we could, we could should really do. So he used linguistic strategy he used to have for past tense, which in Norwegian is perfectly fine. You know, we say like you do have done and things like that. But it was, it was not something again that he was taught to do. He was more, you know, taught to indicate something else for past tense. And besides, it wasn't so much focus on the past tense. You know, it's like, I think graphic communication sometimes is a little bit like sign language. Sign language doesn't have past tense because it would take so long time if you're on every verb should add something which indicated the tense. So you instead of signing went or something, then you say go. But you indicate that you are talking about last Wednesday, last year or some other time, which would indicate that this was something where action happened in past time. And you know, it's not, it's not only in sign language, but in all sign, there is no past. There's no tense markings in sign languages, except for the artificial ones. But also in Chinese, Burmese and a lot of other, they mark other things than time. So there are no past tense in Chinese or Burmese, but they have other ways of indicating time and the sequence of time, of course. Now, another interesting is also then, you know, when the graphic symbols, when you have a limited number, you have to make them as useful as possible. And again, Sander, he wanted to have gun in his communication board. He asked for that. You know, they, occasionally they would go through the pictograms and they would look at, you know, the words which were there and they would discuss between themselves which one he should have, because if it was too many, it would be difficult, it would take too long time, but if it was too few, it was a problem. But he wanted to have gun, which his teacher thought, you know, was all right, thinking he was about 10, because it was, you know, playing Indians and cowboys and police and robbers and things like that. He thought this was the reason he wanted it. But he used it much more to say that it was dangerous. He used it for dangerous. So when the teacher, he lives on the west coast of Norway and we have some big ocean there, you know, the one which is the Atlantic and it can be wavy. And it might even, not when there's a lot of small waves, you know, when it's sort of rough, but the large one which takes you up and down. And he was, they were out on this nice boat trip and he said, oh, it was been wonderful. And he said, gun, afraid, ill. And he was sitting on the deck and his wheelchair was stuck there and he thought it was dangerous. And he was afraid and he felt ill. He had a different kind of story. But he never used the gun very much as gun. You know, we don't use so many guns in Norway. Because in Canada, you probably only use it for hunting too. But he actually wanted it to say dangerous. This was, you know, the reason he wanted a way to say that. And dangerous wasn't in the vocabulary that was sort of available to him. Now, my last point is, you know, going back to the scaffolding is that it's important that the people who should scaffold very rarely have any background. And they can scaffold ordinarily children learning to speak and developing spoken language. They have all kinds of way of communicating with them, which will function nicely. But for most of the parents and also peers and professionals, they, for them, this is alien. It's very strange. And particularly those who don't know the children well, they often go in a big half circle to avoid, because they don't know how to do it. They feel very clumsy. They're afraid they cannot communicate with the other person. So we should not expect not parents and not others to be able to scaffold without getting some scaffolding. And again, it should not... And the reason I say this is scaffolding is, it's not that we should not necessarily teach them everything. You know, sometimes we give recipes and we tell them how to do. I think it is much more about sort of going into the situations and helping them and see how do you communicate at home. And again, we all know that sometimes the parents don't think they need it so much. They know the child. They know what the child wants to communicate and so on. But it's also that they stay limited. And they make it successful. And they are a little bit afraid that if they go outside what the routine... If they go outside what they do, if they sort of get outside what they think they know about the child and what the child is thinking, then they will have much more communication problems, which they will. But this is the time when we should help them because by solving these communication problems to get to the children, they develop the children and they develop themselves. But they need some help and guidance and they need also somebody to tell them that it is slow. It is not easy. I talked with a teacher not so long time ago and she didn't really know much about AC and she was an audio pedagogue and sort of her background. And she was so glad I came because she said the communication was going so slowly and she wanted to know what she was doing wrong. She expected me just to tell her the right thing and then communication would be very fast. And I said, yes, you can communicate much better and you could give her a communication book and a better vocabulary. It was the same teacher who wanted me later to look at the communication books she made and then I realized there were no verbs. And I said, oh, don't you think she would need some action words? And she said, oh my God, I forgot the verbs. Easily done. But she was in a way alright, somebody had to tell her that it is not fast and then she had to change her mindset and think, okay, if this communication actually is slow, how can we make it efficient? How can we do it in a good way? How can we be sure that there is some communication because when it does take a long time it may just disappear. So they need the scaffolding and they need somebody to help them but not only to teach them and again, very often what we see is that when they have some courses and of course they have many good professionals around, it's very often about the technical side about it and not so much about how they actually do their communication and how they can utilize it in good ways. I think that was about it. I put on some of my own relevant publications that I think are available here and there. Yes. Your semi-auto paper is one of my favorites but I'm not sure that it's for everyone. But thank you. Yes. Thank you, Stephen. Do you have time for a couple of questions? I know that I've got a few that I didn't interject and some that sort of have hit since we finished the last time. So do you have a few minutes? No problem. Here it's in the middle of the night anyway, so it's all right. When it's dark and nice outside, it's okay. Great. First of all, I just want to say thank you. I just so enjoyed this talk and so enjoyed your highlighting some of the critical issues that I think often get passed over or get thought about somehow differently from typical language development when we're dealing with children who need augmented systems and aided systems in particular. But I wonder why if you have... I mean, we talked a little bit about behaviorism and the maybe... I don't know if wrongheadedness is quite too strong but the problems around that. I wonder if you have any thoughts on why when we're dealing with kids that have special education needs or that are not typically developing that we gravitate or we seem... Certainly here in North America that we seem to gravitate to behavioral approaches and when we have not totally but for the most part abandon behavioral approaches especially to language development for talking children. Do you have any theories or ideas or experience why we tend to... Because my experience is that it's just people go there. That's their theoretical model when it comes to kids that have special education needs and it's really hard to shift them out of that theoretical model. I think there are several reasons and of course it's not that... what they do is always wrong. And I think there's a lot of things to say for training from a behavioral point. One of the things is the systematicity. It's the teacher. The behavioral analyst or whatever you would call the person is very predictive. So for some children it might be a good thing that you know what is going to happen and you know how it is going to be. You know what is expected of you. So that can be very good. The problem is that much of that is from children with autism spectrum disorders. Maybe also to some extent for children with intellectual disability but the real need for knowing what will happen and for predictability is I think in the autism spectrum. And if you look for example at Down syndrome you can do sign language in a quite ordinary way. One of the reasons you need to have some kind of teaching intervention or something is that environment is not supporting so much. So you have to be sure that the child gets some experiences that are useful and that you can learn from that. But for children with Down syndrome you don't need so much to think about behaviour. But if I have children who are very low functioning I would certainly, from what I did in the beginning it wouldn't be so very different from PECS. The real difference is that I'm not thinking skill. I'm not thinking reinforcement. I'm thinking learning, yes. And I'm thinking that you learn some consequences, yes. You understand what is going on. And of course I want to do something which is easy for the child to understand. What's the point about these pictures or the manual slides? Why should I do this? And the easiest thing is to be instrumental. So we often start there. But then in a way the picture exchange communication system it continues there. And it's been, and I should also say that Vaughan Frost went up the first one. He started much earlier. Benson Scheffer was one of my early influences. He was, I think, one of the levels as the last students. And he had very early sign language with autism children, with intellectual disabilities. And now we go back to the 70s. So Vaughan Frost came much later. And they just made their recipes. So it's not that all of it is wrong but I'm thinking communication frame. And so when I do something instrumental and I think, okay, I think the child can learn from this. And it's also not always about what the child can learn. It's also what can I possibly teach? How can I possibly make a situation so the child understands that this is something that is useful for something? Then we, but then, of course, I hope to get into other aspects of language. And I'm not so adult oriented. I try to be more child oriented as much as I can. But in the early stages, it may not be so big in what we do, but in how we think about it. Oh, I like that. And I think, and I'm happy you said that because I may do exactly that is to say, all right, we may start here. But the worry that I have is that we never get beyond that instrumental understanding or that instrumental frame and get to thinking about language development. So yeah, beautiful. Thank you. And, you know, this happened to me. I, many years ago, I worked with a little girl who had autism spectrum disorders, severely, no comprehension of spoken language. And she learned to use, and the kindergarten was very used to sign language, but she didn't respond well to that. So we started with graphic symbols, which was sort of new to them. This is quite a long time ago. We're back in the 80s. And this went very well. And she got this and she learned to choose things and so on. And then she went from the kindergarten. She went to a school, to a special school. We don't have many special schools, but she went to a special school, which had a very good start because her teacher had prepared for a session of 45 minutes. But everything went very fast. And after 20, 25 minutes, the teacher had finished all the material she had planned to use. It was a very natural little break while the teacher was thinking, what should I do? So in this natural break, the girl takes up her little pictogram for a biscuit. And asks for a biscuit. And the teacher came and told about this, and she said she was communicating. And it was like she was just doing some kind of educational activity with her. She didn't really realize that she was doing communication. But this opened her eyes. So it was a wonderful situation. And it did really well for the girl in the sense that the teacher were so happy with her, although she had her things. But they were very happy with her because they felt she was a communicating girl, even if she didn't understand what they were saying and so on. Now the time went by, and about eight years later or something, Oslo is not so big. And they came to me and they said, oh, well actually they came to me after about one year or two years, and they were wondering, you know, they think things were going good and they were wondering where they should be going. And they found out she liked to go in the forest and they could maybe start naming some flowers or things like that. And they wanted to give her a communication aid with voice output. Remember, this is free in Norway and they only wanted the best for her. And I said, maybe it's not so good idea when she doesn't understand what you're saying and they still didn't think that she could understand anything. They said she might react to her name, but it might just be the sound that she paid attention to. But they were really happy. Now, so eight years after she finished the preschool, and they asked me again if, you know, I would come and discuss with her. And I looked at what was the aims. And when I looked at the aims, the aims were exactly the same as we had in preschool. That she should be able to choose between different kinds of food, different kinds of activities and things like that. And we also want to, we have some systems that we won't be able to say that she should do something and another person should do something. This was something that she didn't get to, you know, that we did try to change the agent of the action. So she could tell somebody else to do it, or she could tell she wanted to do something. We had other children where this was much better. Well, anyway, so, and I said, but how can these be your goals? You know, we had these goals in preschool and we achieved them. And I can show you, I have it on video. You know, it was all there. And then the very nice teachers, so they got a little upset with themselves and actually looking in a way, feeling a little bit ashamed but also did make some fun of themselves in a nice way. So, you know, we, and we started to say, you know, what would you do? So they made a calendar for her, a very intricate thing, which with the current day, the day before and the day after, and they would move along the weekdays. So, you know, tomorrow never comes because you always move or the tomorrow will be today and so on. And also they said that, you know, she liked to dress up and things. So we started to make some very, very small narratives or rather narrating pictures. So they would have a picture with her with a funny hat and they would make a sentence with a photograph of her, which was her name in her system, and then a graphic symbol for hat. Then they would have another one where the teacher had this funny hat on, like a witch hat and things like that. And she could do that. She could have done that a long time ago. But the thing was that they were quite happy with her. She was, you know, she was a person they liked and they forgot that, you know, it should be the next step. And it was a little bit sad because I think she could have learned much more in these years. You know, even if she was, you know, low functioning and she still had no comprehension of speech, she was very clear in the way that she used her communication. You know, it was very clearly that she had intentions of what she wanted to do. I wish your story didn't resonate so well with experiences that I've had where I certainly have seen and it's interesting because I worked at a rehabilitation hospital here and you would go out and see kids and make recommendations and this and that. And in the last couple of years, I've had the opportunity to go back and see some of these kids and be asked, almost like what you're saying, be asked to make recommendations again and then have gone back through their files and been able to pull up the exact same recommendations but they haven't changed. They don't move forward. And I think, for me, that's part of your approach of scaffolding the scaffolders is making sure that people think about moving on, think about how they can move on in a more developmentally appropriate way. And that's the real critical piece that I think we do not pay nearly enough attention to and maybe why there's instances like that that hopefully don't continue all the time but still do continue. So, yeah, as I say, I wish that story didn't sound so familiar. This is what always happens because when I remember that, when I've been telling some kind of personal horror stories, and I said, oh, you can't believe this. And then people say, oh, and then they have something much worse or at least equally bad. I remember Martin Smith when we talked about this and she said that she had seen a child when the child was six or eight or something and she made a very provisional communication aid for the child just to get them started. And when she came back six years later, this was the communication aid the child had. And I think, again, none of these people mean that in between there might be some stupid ones but there are lots of stupid people in the world so obviously there are some there. But essentially I think there are ordinary people and I think that it just shows that it is not something you're finished with when you have given a good start. It is something you need to continue because in a way there is a new start again and again because there are new issues coming up and you have to help with these issues. And you don't even have to know exactly how to do it. I think the moment you start showing that, oh, here there is a problem or challenge or whatever you like to call it, then people start to become creative and it's perfectly okay to say, I don't have any ready-made solution for it but let's sit down and talk and think about ways of doing it and so on. And suddenly people come up with a lot of things but you need some time. You cannot do this if you only come and you have half an hour because the first half hour you're sort of just small talking, chatting and sort of it takes some time to have a kind of framework so you have to have coffee and some cakes and sit and know that you have lots of time to think about this. Then you are getting up the good stuff. So we cannot do things fast all the time. Some things we can do fast and it's all right. But here I think very many of the things we have to give it the time that it needs and it's well invested time. Oh, oh, oh, oh. Yes, I don't know that I could agree with anything more. Time to build relationship with the people that you're trying to support. Time to think through and have dialogue. I know that that's something that I hear often while we just don't have the time or do we really need to take all of this time at the beginning around this child and this team and I couldn't agree with you more that it's time well spent and the thing that, and this is not me, this is Joyce Abala who said this, if we don't spend that time, it's time the child will never get back. So it's important for us to do that. So yes, thank you again for sharing that. I think that's a critical piece. And yet it's our biggest challenge at the same time to try and get that time. I know here in Alberta we typically or mostly have a consultative model for speech pathologists and why I guess I'm, which is certainly better to have a speech pathology consultant than none in the area of who knows something about AAC. But I know again I try desperately to bring and why again I say that I love your communication environment and the focus on scaffolding and the scaffolders so much because it's really the teachers and the educational assistants and the parents that have to be brought on board and brought along and helped. Having an SLP come to consult once in a while will not serve the child and help them develop language. And you get, when you're only there not very often, you become very general because you don't know the details. You don't know the life of the child. You don't know the life of the parents. So in a way you give sound advice but it becomes very general and floating and difficult for somebody who doesn't know it so well as you to actually translate that into something concrete. So they may be equally floating. Absolutely, absolutely. I couldn't agree more. I know that we are all working really hard to do the best that we can for our augmented speakers in Alberta and beyond. And I am thoroughly convinced that being able to share this wonderful two-part talk that it ended up to be will help many people think deeply about how to do that. And as Amy says, thank you for such detail and not rushing this key topic and I agree. So thank you, Steven, so very much. And I would imagine that there'll be more people from Alberta looking to purchase your new book as well as get many of those research articles. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I am very glad to get this opportunity to be able to preach from my heart. You know, always a little missionary even though I'm not very religious. I do like to talk about this. That's great. We need a few more missionaries on this front. And it definitely comes through that this is not just your work but your passion. And I am sure that the children of Norway and I know beyond that benefit from that.