 Hi everybody. Yes, we are filming. We are recording the ECT part three, the environmental communication teaching part three, because we had some technical snafus in the location that I was in two weeks ago when we were supposed to do it. Thanks for joining us or thanks for watching the recording. And we will plan for some stops to ask some questions along the way. And sometimes we know that we have people that are watching for the first time. And so I want to do a little bit, just a tiny bit of review here of where we've been in this three part series. My name is Kelly Bonner. I do training and consulting and educational and assistive technologies. And one of the things that I've always been involved with in many years of being involved in assistive technologies is with students who have complex communication needs. And environmental communication teaching is an implementation strategy series that looks at for students that have augmentative and alternative communication systems, or just learning to use their communication systems, whether that is a communication board, whether it's a communication device, whether that is an AAC app, or a device itself, whether it's a low tech device, or a high tech device, and how we get that implemented during the day in the classroom. These strategies have been used in early intervention classrooms, preschool classrooms, kindergarten, grades one, the hallway through the high school classrooms. We've also used the same strategies and adapted them for students or young adults who have been in vocational training programs, as well as parents that have wanted to use these same strategies in their home. And these strategies come to us from a training that was started in the late 1980s and early 90s as a part of a research grant out of Purdue University in Indiana. So with that, the big part about and the big purpose for ECT was that it places an emphasis on staff really understanding that students need to communicate and we need to set that purpose from these three main components. That is what people are talking about, what our students need to talk about, how we set up our environments in the classroom, and what we, the adults and their peers use as our partner strategies as we talk with them. That it's not just that all of the communication purpose is set on the communication system. Too often we think that it's just, oh, if we get the right device or if I get the right communication vocabulary set, that's going to change everything for the child. But it is set by these components that we have more control over what we are doing, how we are interacting and how we set up the environment to be more communicative for students. If we have an environment where children aren't asked to communicate or it's set up for them to communicate, if we take all the communicative turns, if we don't expect for them to communicate, then they have no need to. If we shut them down, whether we do that on purpose or we don't realize that we're doing that, if we have no expectations, if we don't realize that they can be more communicative than what they are, there's no purpose. So all of the purposes set by the activity and then within that activity, how we take turns in communicating and then making sure that the environment is conducive to being a communication rich environment. On the five steps that we've gone over in the first two parts of the ECT process, look at how do you set this up? What are the kinds of activities that are a part of our school day? And we looked at that systematically by having you fill out a day mat that looks at from arrival at school to departure from school. What kinds of activities are more dyadic in nature where more than one person is interacting socially? What activities are more joint action routines where, again, more than one person is accomplishing an action together? What kinds of activities are more behavior regulation where the kinds of messages that a student has regulate the behaviors of others to get them to do things for them? Those are those basic needs and wants that a child has to communicate. And then the instructional activities of the day. What are those things that they need to communicate in school, to answer questions, ask questions, be a part of discussion? So we have these different communication contexts. And throughout the day, you can figure out which parts of the day have lean more towards one side of communication for another. And we look at choosing activities in the scripting out process to help students and looking at supporting different kinds of communicative functions. And that's what we look at in part two is, how do we choose the activity based upon the kinds of communication functions we're trying to support for different kids? Not that we're not giving them access to their communication system throughout the day. You are. But this is when you're really honing in and deciding upon an activity for this ECT process. Are you trying to expand somebody's vocabulary? Are you trying to develop the language within the vocabulary set that they already have, but possibly they're not using it? Are you trying to look at their multimodal communication? Maybe they are using one word verbally and you're trying to support their use of more words based upon a communication system. Maybe you're trying to use a communication system so that some of the behaviors that they are doing and communicating more in a behavioral way and supporting a more socially appropriate use of a communication system rather than behaviorally showing what it is that they don't like in kinds of more destructive ways. In step three, we've looked at different kinds of environmental strategies that support. And these are all strategies that you've probably picked up on in other kinds of training. They aren't all brand new things just because this is ECT. But we often look at ECT as being the umbrella that brings everything together that people have learned in a variety of trainings from a variety of different places. But this gives you a way of bringing all of these strategies together. In step four, as we're starting to put together the script, we talked about prompting strategies, the idea of using modeling. Again, these are not brand new things to hear about for many people, but that in the environment itself, we use the communication strategies that our students are using so that they see other people using communication boards. They see other people using communication apps so that they see people talking with symbols, just like those students who we are teaching sign language to, we use sign language with them. So our students that we're teaching symbols to, we use symbols to talk with them. So we model with them as they are making attempts, then we, you know, have a particular prompting hierarchy, something that is the least to most invasive strategies. So that we aren't immediately doing things like taking their hands and banging them, you know, putting them right on to their messages, but that we're guiding them, giving them suggestions. You know, we don't know what's in somebody's head about what it is that they want to say. So we can be an accomplice. We can make suggestions. We can give them some open questions. You know, what do you want to say? Somebody's just greeted you. What do you want to say to them? Somebody's asked this kind of a question. I might say this. So you might make those kinds of suggestions, give some partial prompts for people, model what it is that you might say before giving them some kind of a full model that they might want to follow up. In the end, if they choose not to say something, then they've chosen not to say something with their communication device. The other thing is that not for all students, and we mentioned this when we talked about the idea of prompting last time, not all students respond well with a verbal kind of prompting hierarchy. And so we also look in ECT at the idea of using non spoken prompts. So the idea of using gestures, the idea of pointing or even using flashlights to queue. Sometimes you'll hear that referred to as shadow queuing here in augmentative and alternative communication systems. So again, doing that in a least to most specific so that you might gesture or use the flashlight over the entire communication system, and then narrowing it down to a section. You know, it might be that you're looking for a verb they might say something in the verb column, maybe then down to two of the verbs, you wouldn't just be pointing to one specific thing for them to say. So that idea of how do we become a more efficient partner is a big piece of our ECT strategies that you're more thoughtful and plan fall about how you interact with your augmentative and alternative communication device users. Then putting all that together in a script, writing it down, one so that you know the process I mean you a lot of times I think oh I've got this I I know what it is that I'm going to say, and then everything starts happening. And there's more than one person involved in the activity, or something doesn't happen that you expected it to having that written down in a script really helps you in a way that you've got something to refer to. And on a day that you're not there. This is the lesson plan for other people to follow. This is also the way that everybody knows what's expected. Everybody can follow along with what to do, if somebody doesn't say what might be possible to say, and that other people aren't prompting in a different way than what you might be looking for. You don't have one person prompting that too high of a level and another person prompting that too low of a level, but that you can all follow through still expressing your individuality with a student. But everybody's on the same game plan with a student. And once you have a script that leads to today's topic where you can do your data collection. The other thing too, it's one thing to watch a webinar to go to a training, you know, to hear all of this information. But unless you really turn around and try it out yourself, it's not going to do you any good. And you can hear it and hear it, but to really go in and put it into practice to, you know, put your toes in the water and give it a try. I mean, it doesn't really take a lot if you were asked, you know, you're asked to take a look at your day. What are the kinds of things that you already do the most successful ECP teams have not rearranged their school day. They've all they've looked at what already exists in their school day. They've used that day map. They've mapped out their day as it exists. They've looked at the kind of communication skills that their student, you know, is successful with. And they've looked at the kinds of things that their students are struggling with. And they've targeted the kinds of the parts of the day that their child is struggling with. And then they've mapped out one activity to start with, you know, map out the whole day. Nobody can do that. We're not asking you to do that. But this is to take one activity and lay out what are the kinds of messages that are a part of that activity. And that's how a script gets started. Even though we're coming to the, you know, the end of this series, you still, you still are offered that opportunity to write out that script. Email it to me. My email is going to be at the end of this webinar. Email it to me so I can send you feedback. And this is an ongoing thing. It's not just a matter of, you know, this series that we're doing in this particular school year, but email it to me so I can give you feedback on it. And then you just follow through with that process because again, you can hear it, but unless you try it out, it's not going to become a reality in your situation. So I'm going to just pause to see if there's been any questions put into the list because Ross can see that and I can't. Nothing posted so far, but if anybody wants to jump in, feel free. Sometimes people will ask, does this only work at school? We've had vocational training teams use these same strategies. We've had early intervention strategy teams use these strategies at home. We've had teams use these strategies out in the community. So it really is just about trying to pick an activity and being planful with it. I even, I had a mom two weeks ago, who was a part of ECT in another province. And we had done ECT when her daughter was in elementary and her daughter is now in a secondary program. And she sent her scripts and we're looking at them now for when her daughter hasn't been a formal part of ECT training for five years. And it's something that her team is still carrying through with and still looking at and still following through with the process. And so it was gratifying for me to know that that was something that her school board and people in her school board were still working through those strategies. And her mother was still following through to see, is this something that was we were still looking at still on the right path for her daughter and what she should be communicating at the age that she was at and integrating her AC system in the context of the school day. Get data, some of the things that happen, there's a multiple things that happen in environmental communication teaching for data collection. One of the most valuable things is video. And so a lot of teams will video just, you know, right on the phone, on that's on right on their camera that's on their phone, they might do it on their iPad. They might have some other kind of way that they take video. But what we have people do is once they've selected an activity is to video that activity, the way it is, and how it occurs right now within the classroom. And then try and do an intervention segment, at least once a month. I have some teams that video once every week of that activity. So you're trying to get, you know, whether it's a short activity, it's really easy if it's a long activity, you're trying video about five minutes segment of it. So that you're trying to get this monthly sampling for the speech language pathologist. You can do some of your sampling from that you can get some of your information on communication functions. It's good for her during that time. It's good because it's a regulated amount of time. It's the same activity that's occurring. So we can do a lot of tracking that way because it is the same activity that's occurring and we can track data that way without a lot of variance. That because it's not a different activity on a different time, that kind of a thing. We will then go through a couple next couple slides are going to take you through how you can track more hard data through the prompting hierarchy charting forms. Because you have a script of the activity, we can use that activity to collect information on the prompting hierarchy. And so this is why it's important to spend time going through your script. So we had, I think in ECT webinar one, we had looked at a student that during the leisure activity had done the go fish activity. So with Emma, she had gone through the different there were different parts of go fish getting it started. Certainly these things don't have to go in a particular order. And they don't have to be said each game because these things might not occur every time you play go fish. But when you have your script written out, one of the things that you can have is that, you know, when you've got your activities, you know the things that the student is supposed to say. And then you have your prompts, and your prompting hierarchy for the staff. One of the things that you'll be tracking is how far down the prompting hierarchy that the staff needed to go in order to support the student in saying a message. Again, if a student chooses not to say a message, we'll have a way to mark that, but we'll also have a way to mark, you know, how far the student went. How far the staff went in order for the student to say the original message. So for example, so in the materials and I'm going to show this to you if you do it on paper, as well as you wanted to collect your data in an Excel spreadsheet. So on the paper form, you would just recreate your activity. Sometimes people will just put kind of Q word down the first column. And then the prompt level would be if it, you know, the plus is usually, you know, they do it right at the environmental queue. What they do is if they do it at the open question, the partial prompt, the command level, or the full model. And then we also try and track information on the adults. Did the adult provide some descriptive feedback after the student said something. What we have found is that when adults start following a script. They're so regimented, and they get a little stiff in their interactions with the student, and they just start reading right off this script. And they forget that after a child has said something, you need to talk back to them, you know, if a child has asked you for something. Well, you know, here it is. If you're in your snack activity, and a child has asked you for some juice, you know, you don't just like, give them the juice and wait for the next part of the script to happen. You know, say to them, you know, Oliver, here's your juice, you know, or thanks for asking for the juice. Here it is. You have to have some natural form to what it is, and how you talk to kids. People get really, you know, honed in on the script, and if it's not written down for them to say, they are just waiting for Oliver to say the next thing. And so it gets a little too mechanical. So one of the things then what will happen with data collection if you're trying to do it all on paper is that and this looks very busy. But what will happen is that we'll look for the dates. And we've tried because we're going to try and graph this then. And so you would put the dates that you collected your data and each one of these, you know, circle filled in or square not filled in is going to represent a different date on your paper chart. Then you have your steps of the activity. What you're going to do is put in how far down the prompting hierarchy you had to go. So you would put in that you did it, did they do it at the open question level. So I'm going to go back a slide. These things like OQ, partial prompt, man, these kinds of shortened versions. And where did I get these from? I got these from up here on the script. Environmental Q, open question, partial prompt. So a lot of times people data collect, collect right on the script. So if they'll have the script there with them, they'll put a little check mark at where they needed to go. Like, you know, the student said, go fish, not at the environmental Q. What do you need to ask to, oh, set it here. And so they'll put a little check mark at open question. So then when they go fill out their data sheet, the little check mark is here or a little plus sign. Here's where they communicated. So when they go fill out this sheet, it'll say, you know, open question or OQ so that they know what to fill in here. This then once they have this all filled in with different dates, and they know what happened at every step, they can then transfer this to a graph at the bottom. I'll show you an easier way to do this in Excel. And to do that, it's going to be best if we kind of watch, watch a real kid. And we're going to watch Dylan in an activity, and we'll watch him three different times. So you can follow along and kind of see where the data collection came from. So Dylan is going to be going through a lunch line. And here are the different parts where he can, he has opportunities to communicate. He comes into the lunch line with his grade one classroom. They choose a milk on their own. It's kind of right there at the door. Then there is a station where they interact with the lunch people to choose their main course. This is the part where Dylan had the most difficult time, which is why the team chose this activity. In that Dylan, if pizza is not a choice that day, Dylan has a bit of a communication meltdown. He has been known to yell. He's been known to throw things, fall on the ground and basically behaviorally interact with the staff in the lunch room. And this is cause of great amount of stress. So much so that it's been discussed that Dylan's not to be going through the lunch line with anybody else, with any of the other children. And so they create, you'll see then in the second video, there's an intervention of exchanging a communication symbol so that first he always has choices of whatever the main courses are. However, if his favorite things aren't there, there is always a backup of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Now peanut butter and jelly is not just a backup for Dylan. It's not something special just for this boy. It's always a backup for every child in this school. So it's always kind of like the third choice. There are always two choices. And then there's peanut butter and jelly. So he has a symbol to exchange for Peter a butter and jelly if he doesn't like the two choices. So you'll see that happen. So you're going to see a baseline video. Then we're going to watch a second video with that intervention. You'll also see that the staff in the lunchroom, you know, learning him and learning his patterns over time, you know, are learning better better ways of interacting and giving him some other choices. You'll also see days when he chooses not to pick a second drink, not to pick a dessert. And for health reasons, that's no big deal to his family. The biggest deals are you must choose from the first milk, you must choose from the main course. And then the last communication interaction is that you have to interact with the cashier and tell the cashier your student number. So in the first video, I believe he just walks right past the cashier. In the next video, they have made two interventions. One is the is that the typical cashier has been swapped out with a staff member who he's familiar with. And they do this for a period of time, just to get him so that he doesn't walk past somebody that he doesn't know so that he starts to learn how to interact with the cashier. And they also have an intervention where the note his student number is on a card that he can show. He does know the number and he can say the numbers. However, they do have a card backup system so that he can show the numbers to the person. So you're going to see that happen in two different occasions and how that works out for Dylan. And then we're going to see the data collection. So I'm going to show you three different a baseline and two interventions. Don't pay attention to the dates because the dates are all kind of wacky because it was off on their video, their electronic video camera. But then I'll pause as well in case you have any questions. And then we'll go and see the data sample, the data that they collected, and I'll explain it and how it's put into an Excel spreadsheet. First video is going to be the baseline. Again, the timeline is wrong on this from their camera. The choice of the hamburger, they just offer him that peanut butter and jelly sandwich while he's saying offer him something different. Like people just kind of offering him things not supposed to be taking him with their baseline video. So now let's take a look at once they do an intervention, the peanut butter and jelly sandwich. He will hand them the card of I want peanut butter and jelly. Three choices out and name them for him. Anything else, you know, just like every other kid, you're not kind of forced to take a second milk. You're not forced to take other things. But the person at the end of the line cafeteria or right beside the cashier are where his number. So this is now a stem, which is actually a very big deal for them. Kind of a little bit concerned about what might though it's not that they're just doing it for videos. They're they're doing this, you know, they've moved through different parts of the activity. So they think you didn't see one of you didn't see the February video, but you saw the January, you know, did he choose you didn't see him until he was out his main choice. But the first videos weren't given at all count against the kid given we put an X you a way of marking a data sheet. So a minus if a prompt was given wasn't given where the child did communicate. So for Dylan and that in the video where the intervention got started at the environmental queue he didn't take it. Nobody listed the names of the items. They just kind of gave him a partial or they didn't say to him what do you want. They just listed the names which is a partial prompt. They didn't give him kind of the command step. They just basically the peanut butter, you know, peanut butter. And so that's what at which he gave he and he took the peanut butter so that's where the plus is choosing a side item. It was there and he didn't take curly fries. Do you want, you know, what do you want. No. And then nobody gave him any other prompts. The second drink was there he chose not to take it and nobody gave him any other prompts to take it. Choosing a dessert. The dessert was there and he chose it for telling the cashier. It was there, you know, right to the cashier. She stopped him and brought him back and asked him what's your number and he told of the number column. You do it tallying wise as you tally the columns based upon where the pluses are. Follow along with your data sheet. That's what you're looking for. Where do you get the pluses and do those pluses change start to change over time. And then let me I'll show you these numbers take us to to the graph to put it into Excel to put it into Excel because something that Excel can work with. Like doing miniature golf. Environmental Q level is a one. The open question is it to the command level is a full. So kind of what you do is you find number next to the plus. Out your data sheet. That's the number that you put the column. So for this first for January 21. Step one. Dylan communicated down at the partial crop level. So that's a three. Step two. He communicated at the full model level. That's a five to make any selections. So they are left blank. They're not put at zero. Because the zero line in Excel chose a dessert. The environmental Q level. That's a one. He told the cashier at the open question level. That's a two. And then we did the same thing for January. I mean, for February 11. Environmental step one was at the environmental Q. That's a one. Step two was at the full model. Step three was at the open question. Step four, he didn't choose to pick anything. Step five. At the environmental Q. Step six. Was at the full model. The last activity you saw was on April 5. Step one was at the environmental Q. Step two was at the environmental Q. Step three was down at the full model. Step four at the environmental Q. Step five. He didn't choose to say anything. Step six. He did at the environmental Q. Does that make sense? Are there. Questions before we go on to making the graph. I'm watching Kelly and none have been posted. All right. So I mean, it gets thinking about it as miniature golf is the easiest way that we've been able to do that. Bill Ziegler, one of our ECT trainers in Bucks County, Pennsylvania is the one that equated it to miniature golf. And we've used that ever since Bill has done that. And so when you have it figured out this way, here's the chart in Excel, same chart I just showed you, but now it's on the Excel spreadsheet. Then what it does is it will, you know, put each line. It'll give you a different color. It'll give you different shape. And you can change all of that in Excel. You know, you can make it whatever color and shapes you want it to be. And of course, then you put it into PowerPoint PowerPoint changes. But, but then you can see and track it. And what you want things to look at is over time. And so green is our last line here is that you want things to come down so that more and more, they're at this number one that at the environmental Q. They're communicating, but when you see spikes like this, things that are up at the number five, you can go back and you can look and you'll see, well, what happened? What happened that day? And, you know, for Dylan in the lunch line that could have been, Oh, what was the item? You know, it's the lunch line that day or here in this case, we were able to go back to here. I mean, this is a really, this really shows out here on April 5th, everything he did was at the natural environmental Q, except for step three. And when we went back and we looked at step three, well, guess what? That's the step where the support staff person just went and grabbed something in the lunch line and put it on the tray for him. And so he it's not even that he got a chance. He didn't ask him, did he want that dessert? I think it was a second drink item. She didn't ask him if he wanted it. She just chose it for him and put it there. So that's, that gives you that teachable moment to the staff person to say, you know, look here, this guy was something that got put on his tray. You didn't ask him if he wanted it. We don't know if we wanted it. We didn't ask him if he wanted it. We didn't ask him if he wanted it. We didn't ask him if he wanted it. And if we're a student for like Dylan, we're kind of lucky that that didn't trigger a meltdown moment. And so again, teachable moments. And it can really, you know, when you're looking to track a kid over time, this can really show a staff person and say, look, he would have had a completely successful lunch day. I'm going to show you a video that was taken by Dylan. That really wasn't his fault at all. You know, so, you know, following any kind of data sheet that you might be using, you're going to see the next student. I'm not going to show you video, but the next student, just this idea of marking codes. A prompt is given, but a student doesn't communicate, might be a minus. Plus is a prompt is given, but then the student does communicate. And then an X is that the staff forgot to give the prompt and skipped on to something that was a higher level prompt. So we have, you know, students, you'll see some EPP if you want to watch anything else to add to this. There's some EPP training materials in the AbleNet University series. They've got some of these for free that I've done also for students that might just be doing one step activities. They've got for AbleNet has some training videos that are for students with severe communication impairments in classrooms. And we've got a training series in there called CEP, Communication Enhancement Process. And so we have these same thing, activities that you choose purposefully. They've got prompting hierarchies. But we track their data collection very much the same way. So it might just be on a one step activity. But also we look at what were their AAC modalities. So they might have been a child that started out using picture exchange. As they moved on, maybe they moved on to using maybe a one step product like a Big Mac. And then they moved on to using something like an iPad with, for this little girl Ruby used iCommunicator. And so they were using the same kind of prompting hierarchy. And they looked at, well, how did this change? It was the same kind of activity. But as products were introduced, yes, it might have taken further down the prompting hierarchy. But look how much more progress she made from with using the Big Mac. They were able to get her back to just a verbal cue and to a natural cue, which they weren't able to make that kind of a progress. When she was on picture exchange, we're starting to see that same kind of progress when they introduced an iPad app like the iCommunicate app. So it's, you know, using and knowing what you're doing with partner strategies is really important. And knowing how to do data collection. So even if you're doing one step, things like more and tracking a student using a reading activity where they might be doing more to turn the page on these same kinds of things, following what you're doing. How, you know, if you get someplace where you're still having to go to a full physical, you need to make some changes. That's what you make those changes purposefully, like not, you know, putting the device not on right away, or moving the assistant out of the way, you know, where, what's the child doing, you know, while making some notes. What's happening. Yes, they might be getting some things, but maybe it's because they're repeatedly activating a switch. So changing things up and making some differences so that you can see why you're getting some activations. So those kinds of notations on on your data collection forms can be very informing. And then you can look at it over time and can see even tracking, you know, a core word like more used in different activities, you know, in this case, a literacy activity moving more from an eating activity and a toy choice making activity to a reading activity. And they were able to track that over time. So with the CT and looking at it as we kind of, you know, wrap up here our series. And maybe I should pause just to see if there was a question about data collection. All clear. Okay. Just, you know, as what we've gone through is that, you know, environmental communication teaching is a process. You know, it's something that we look at building skills of a student and team members through the whole school year. You know, we look at targeting students who are learning new communication systems. They might be learning new communicative functions with their system. They might be learning to communicate in new environments. But we're also looking at staff. And I think the data collection part really shows that in that sometimes we're looking at teaching staff to implement new prompting strategies. I'm having them pull back on maybe being too aggressive with prompting kids and saying, you know, there's a process to that. We it's not meant. ECT is not meant that every student should be scripted through the entire day. We often start in the beginning of the school year and then we often see by midpoint we're able to pull back on scripts because people have an idea of, you know, what are they supposed to say a student is getting the idea of generalizing some of those core messages through the different environment. We often might do two scripts, maybe a third script, and then we're seeing generalization happen, and you can really pull back. We're also looking at generalization on prompting strategies and staff start to understand how to follow along how to support a student. So we're really, you know, seeing that kind of carry over. And then, you know, if we follow through with one student, sometimes we don't need to do a second student unless there are other types of communication behaviors that need to be scripted out so that staff can learn a new kind of prompting procedure for either for a new communication system, or for a new type of student that's entered their environment. And with that, I'm going to turn this back to Ross. Perfect. I know that you can follow through with us at any point. Perfect. And then I'll maybe follow up with you Kelly and maybe we can get a copy of the PowerPoint again, and I'll just make sure I get it sent out to everybody because it'll have all this information. We will wait a second or two in case anybody has a question. I think that's a long enough awkward pause. Very good. So Kelly, thank you ever so much. Really appreciate it. And then let everybody know that remember that the videos, all three of them are stored on the ERLC website. And so the first two are already there. This always takes me a few days to get these converted to a more usable format and then I will get it popped up. So just nothing but a bunch of thank you's Kelly are coming in on the box. So you're welcome very much. Really appreciate it. I hope you enjoy your time in Texas. And hopefully as Kathy has said, at some point here in the not too distant future, maybe we can get you here until bird again. That would be wonderful. Looking forward to it. All right, perfect. Thanks Kelly and thank you everybody. We'll talk soon. Thanks everyone. Bye bye.