 Okay thanks to everybody for logging in today for our April PLC and we're really really pleased to have Courtney Tabor Abbott with us today and she's a transition specialist rehab counselor and she's going to be focusing on concept development for living skills with an emphasis on the development of essential skills that are important for a successful transition process and this is the perfect time of year for us to have a presentation like this Courtney because we're all starting to look at transition planning for many of our students. So I'm going to let you take over. Courtney is or you were a transition coach at Birkins and I don't know if you want to introduce yourself in terms of where you're presently working or maybe you're just being a mom. Courtney take it over. Thank you. Hi everyone. Yes so I'm Courtney Tabor Abbott and I can just give you guys a little bit of a background on who I am to start. I have I graduated from Middlebury College and I have a a master's in social work from University of New England and after that I became a vocational rehab counselor at the main division for the blind and visually impaired. I did that for a few years and then went to Perkins school for the blind where I was a transition specialist for a few years and so I did a lot of transition work and consulting with students who were in high school all around the state of Massachusetts. I recently moved back up to Maine and I love it up here and where I am now I do several different things. I am a mom yes of two little boys but I also work at the iris network which is Maine's nonprofit for individual supervision impairments and I'm a vocational development counselor there and I also do some web content writing for Perkins. I still write for Perkins through their path to transition blog so I write some blog posts for parents and teachers helping them prepare students for their transitions out of high school and I also do some private transition services consulting work with some students so I do kind of a bunch of different things that keeps me quite busy. So today I wanted to talk a little bit about something that I'm actually pretty passionate about concept development. Oh actually I wanted to tell you also I am coming from this with with the perspective of someone who's taught with students with vision impairments but I also have a vision impairment. I have I was being born with Libers congenital amaurosis so I have only light perception in one eye at this point so I am doing this presentation using a actually I have a Mac in front of me as well as a PC with JAWS on it so I'm doing a couple different things as we talk so feel free to ask me questions throughout and I will also give time for questions at the end hopefully we'll have time. So I'm going to start with the Rashi can look to the slide the next slide sorry I'm not giving you good feedback on that. So no problem I've been gashing and I think I'm caught off. Awesome thank you. So let's just start with with what is transition planning. So transition planning is really designed to help students with a disability transition to a young adulthood and that can be anything from independent living to college to work or some combination of those things it could be planning for a person to enter a residential program it really can be anything that meets that student's needs and the point is transition planning is that it's individualized and it really has to specifically meet that student's needs and ideally transition planning is a team approach and really involves the parents the teachers and anyone else that's really involved in that student's education. So moving on to when should transition services begin. Although I did some research I had a little trouble finding is there a law regarding how when transition services should start in Canada because there is one here in the US but I wasn't sure if there's an age that is required for students where you guys are. There is not one Courtney it's Roy here. Okay okay good to know. So in the US the individuals with disabilities education act requires that transition services start at age 16 for all students with disabilities but a lot of schools and start earlier and actually several states mandate that they start at age 14 especially the students with vision impairments that seems to be the more of the norm just because as you probably all know transition services for vision for students with vision impairments is pretty complex just making that plan. Although my point here is really that even though there's you know there may or may not be requirements for when you're supposed to start I really think that transition planning starts really really early like that anything we're doing with with children with vision impairments even at you know ages three four five are you know that's preparing for transition so you know we're teaching this child to tie her shoes that's that's helping her with independent living skills we're teaching you know we're teaching a couple little kids to play a game that's teaching them turn taking which is the social skill which is really important for adult life so anything really can be transitioned planning as long as it's going to help the student become you know a more competent and and confident adult. So I'm moving on to concept development which is kind of the main focus of our our talk today. So a lot of times in education we really focus on skill development we talk a lot about how is the student going to build this skill how are they going to learn braille or how are they going to learn how to you know use this piece of technology or or you know learn the curriculum and we think about those little details of everyday life of how the student's just going to get through the day and we also think about those big questions like well what are they going to do for the rest of their life and we often get caught up in those things I think and when we get caught up in those I mean those are all important but we tend to forget about the fact that there's a lot of concepts behind those skills and it's really essential that students build those concepts in order to really build the skills that go along with those so just as a very basic explanation you know so you can't learn to tie your shoe unless you understand what a shoe is right so that's a pretty basic example but you know we can kind of take that as our you know as our idea moving forward and concept development really helps students to build the skills they need but it also just helps them to have a general awareness of the world around them so students with vision impairments as they build concepts of you know what this object is or what this activity is they're they're becoming more able to interact with the world around them so okay so concept development versus skill development so a concept is a mental representation of something that's either tangible or something that's intangible so tangible and concrete things that's basic stuff like a tree an apple a dog you know understanding what those things are and something that's intangible and that's referring to things like emotions like the color purple or you know feeling happy or that something is easy or difficult those are all kind of intangible concepts or intangible ideas so and the skill is really the ability to perform the task so we need the concepts behind those things in order to build on the skills there's a few different kinds of concepts right so we have the concrete concepts like things that you can touch right like a bus or grass or a shoe then there are things that are you know less concrete things that you can observe but you can't actually physically touch so things like jump or run or even like directional words like behind or over or you know soft or purple I think I said purple earlier I guess I really like purple but so you know those are kinds of the things that are a little bit less concrete but still able to kind of be be observed in some way in the environment and the last kind of concept is the abstract concepts and those are the you know more intangible things like I mentioned earlier the feelings or ideas so maybe like love or difficult or understand or you know sad so that's just to kind of give an overview of what concepts are and as we move forward um so that we kind of all are on the same page about what we're discussing next for concept development okay so what I want to talk about now is why concept development is important so first let's think about concept development and excited individual um so I want to kind of give an example here um if you think about let's say um let's say you are talking to someone about a hockey um it's a sport most people even if they don't watch hockey have a concept of what hockey is right like they might understand you know because they've seen it on television or they've been to a game or someone's talked about it or they've seen the hockey stick so even if you're not you know someone who plays the game you can kind of understand it and even if you've never really seen it before a person who is sighted could kind of go into um could go to a hockey game and kind of walk in and get a sense of what's happening right so you might not totally understand every rule of the game but you can you can sit down and you can watch and you can see that there's an ice rink and that there's lions on the ice I think and that there's you know there's the hockey stick and the puck and all the players and so you're really as a sighted individual a person is really picking up all of that information with their vision and what their other sense is to it's not to kind of say that they're not using those but vision is it tends to be the most used sense by someone with with full vision um and they're also able to incorporate those concepts into their into the schemas that they already have so um so you know if you let's say you go into a restaurant as another example you've never been to this restaurant before but you can look at the inside of the restaurant when you walk in you can say oh this is just like the other restaurant that I was at last week you know it has tables and chairs and you can really easily process that concept into the schemas that you already have um so that's kind of what it's like for someone with vision um now for someone without vision um it's a little bit different so a person with a vision impairment still picks up concepts through their senses right um and and that can be you know their hearing their sense of touch it can also be through any residual vision that they do have um I will say that I think sometimes that vision is reliable um sometimes it's not though sometimes so for me as I lost vision over the course of my life I um I often felt that my like I thought I understood what I was seeing and didn't necessarily you know because I was trying to fit it into what I remembered visually so sometimes the concepts you pick up through residual vision are are reliable and sometimes they're you know they're not full because you can't get a full picture of what's actually going on um so just um let's bring up the restaurant example again so um let's say a student has only a child who's young has only ever been to one kind of restaurant um do you guys have like an olive garden do they have that in Canada yes we do all right okay it's trying to think of something that might be all over the place so um um part of my ignorance there um but so let's say a child's only been to an olive garden right they they know what it's like they've been there they've gone in they sit at the table they they know someone comes and takes their order and at the end you know somebody pays for the meal and they leave um and then you know one day they go to um somewhere more like a Chipotle do you guys have Chipotle not sure about that one okay all right have to help me on that one okay so let's say we go to a restaurant where there's um a different style instead of going and sitting down you actually go up to the counter and you have to walk along the counter to order your food um it's also like a like a subway type of style so you walk up you say whether you want you know this kind of bread and then you say what you want on your bread and then you walk down and you have to tell the the person making your food um what kind of vegetables you want and so and the students never been to a place like that so for a sighted person you can walk in and even if you've never been there you can easily understand okay I'm not actually going to sit down and give my order to to someone um I'm actually going to order it right here at the counter and I'm going to get my food and and pay for it and then I'm going to sit down or I'm going to take it out with me um but a person with a vision impairment is is likely going to be pretty overwhelmed with that unless someone's explained it to them in advance or or is explaining it to them when they come in right so they're going to walk in and it's probably going to be louder than another kind of restaurant where they where it's sit down because people are yelling out their orders and it's going to be you know um probably a little bit stressful and and confusing the first time I ever went to a restaurant like that I was just uh I was totally confused and it took me a while to figure it out um now once someone has been exposed to that and once someone's been explained you know once it's been explained what that is it's it's a lot less confusing but but there is some intentional teaching that's involved in helping that person to understand the concept of that kind of restaurant right so um and a lot of students don't um a lot of students with vision impairments miss out on on concept development because of a couple things right so one is that they just don't have the visual observation that a sighted person might have the other is that they're a little you know oftentimes they're just not exposed to the same experiences right so so um sometimes um you might experience that parents tend to maybe shelter a child a little bit um and they you know they might not maybe a child gets invited to a pool party and the parent feels a little nervous so doesn't send them for example so they're missing out on like on the experience and understanding what is a pool party or what is what does it mean when you know what is this game that my friends are playing I don't understand it um or it's even less intentional right maybe it's something like for me when I was growing up my my parents my mom always was the one who cooked and she never wanted anyone else to help her in the kitchen that was kind of her like leave me alone I'm making dinner um and that's fine except the problem was that because I couldn't see her cooking and and she didn't really want help I never really learned how to cook I couldn't really watch her um and so I you know I had to learn it all later because I hadn't understood you know I hadn't just kind of watched her pour the spaghetti into the pot or you know be able to observe those things so that's just a little example um of you know how concept development is a little bit different for someone with with a vision impairment um okay so um what can concept development teach students with vision impairments um students can learn about what objects are like they can learn about what their environments are like um they can learn about even just how different how objects or environments are different from each other so like the two different kinds of restaurants that I explained um and they can also learn about you know functions and activities so um a person with a vision impairment might touch an object and and really have no idea what it's for um and so concept development and intentional teaching around that can help the student understand this is how this is used or um this is what you do when you go to a place like this um this is what people are doing around you um and that can be extremely helpful um for a student so um okay um okay sorry my computer just did a funky little thing all right um so concept development for transition skills I want to focus on a few different things here um the first is concept development for independent living skills um and then we're also going to talk about work skills and college readiness um so um the first is independent living skills um and I broke it down into several different categories um but um so the first one that I um it was hard because concept development is a really big big broad subject um and so please feel free to ask any questions here or to um add anything that you think that I've missed because this is not an exhaustive list by any means um one of the things I want to talk about is is um concepts around groceries and food um so it's really interesting to me when I've worked with students um how little many students have um a concept of things like food um so many students I've worked with have kind of just been fed by their families um and don't necessarily have much participation in in preparing that food um I have one student that had her favorite food was mashed potatoes um but she had never actually seen a potato before and she had never touched a potato so she didn't know that potatoes are actually not soft and squishy and in a big pile but that they're in fact you know a quite a hard vegetable that you get from the ground um another student of mine never understood that spaghetti came from a box so again spaghetti was always served in a bowl with sauce and meatballs on top um rather than you know um and you know them seeing it in a box in the grocery store um you know these hard pieces of spaghetti so I think it's really important that we teach students what food is like before it's prepared or also students not going to understand how to prepare it they're not going to even understand that it takes preparation necessarily um and part of that is teaching about grocery stores right so um if a student has a vision impairment especially if they have no vision at all um maybe they don't go to the grocery store but if they do if they go with their families um they could easily go through and have no idea what their parents are getting um I always was a kid that would kind of like I was kind of nosy and I just like wanted to feel around and touch everything in the car all fine um but you know and so I learned that way about you know the fruits and vegetables that my my mom would buy but I never understood I never knew anything about the fruits and vegetables that my parents wouldn't buy so a student might you know if the family is kind of accustomed to buying apples and bananas and oranges they might have no idea that there are peaches next to the apples um they might have no idea that there's um you know that there's broccoli there um and that's that's a big deal especially if students you know are trying to you know they're accustomed to eating a certain way and they want to eat a different way and they don't know what their options are um they don't even maybe know that there's a fish counter at the grocery store because they've never eaten fish with their family or they've never bought fish at the grocery store um so um I think that that's that's a really big deal we it's really important that students know what's available to them and what's out there so um what I often suggest to parents is like take your kids to the grocery store and talk about everything you're doing talk about you know I'm going to buy some cereal now and actually there's a lot of options for cereal even though like when I go to the store with my kids I only buy them one kind of cereal because all the other kinds are so full of sugar but um but they they're sighted children and they understand that there's all these other options available to them and that's good I'm glad that they know that um even if it makes my life a little more difficult when they ask me for things I don't want to give them um but um I think that um what I often say is you know take the kid to the store explain that there's a deli counter explain where the bakery is you know so that you understand what's in the grocery store and you also understand the setup right so um where is the milk usually kept in the store because if we're looking for our students to grow up into independent adults there's going to be a time where they're going to the grocery store themselves um and ideally I mean even as teenagers they could technically do that um so um if you know where to find the milk that's helpful right so you might still have someone assisting you in your grocery shopping but it's helpful to know where things are um it's helpful also to know how things are packaged right like sauce comes in a jar maybe or unless it's homemade of course but you know um or like pasta comes in a box or you know these beans come in a can how do I even open a can you know some students haven't experienced any of that and the other thing is um I could go on and on about food because I like food but but is the kitchen component of it right so beyond the grocery store there's how do you actually prepare the food so um a lot of students haven't had a lot of experience with kitchen appliances right and that's everything from you know the toaster to um just like you know knowing what the knives look like and as dangerous as that might sound to parents who don't want their students you know their their children who can't see touching a sharp knife it's actually really important for a student to understand you know that's what this is for and this is how it's used properly um so I really encourage teachers or parents um to to let the child spend some time in the kitchen and and learning about what's there um I mean we many of us I'm sure have those drawers in our kitchen where we have all of our like little appliances right like we have our garlic press or our can opener and just all of those things thrown in a big drawer unless you're more organized than me but um that's where you know those are really cool things for a person without vision to explore because if you touch for example like um if you touch a can opener and you've never opened a can before you're gonna have no idea what that's actually for um so it's really you know it's a fun and exciting experience to to learn about those things um as simple and mundane as they may seem to someone who who's you know who's seeing them every day um and also involved in that is kind of just learning about um how to take care of food right so how to store it um I I knew um an individual um who and and she had some some cognitive um impairments as well um but she went grocery shopping on her own one time and and came back and um when she's an adult um but she had never learned where food should be stored um so when I went into her kitchen um her all of her things that should be refrigerated like all of her dairy and her vegetables and things were all just shoved into her cabinets and her freezer was she was using her freezer but not for freezing she just really put put everything that she could put in the freezer she was just kind of using it as a storage space um so a lot of her food had gone bad and she just didn't know that you know cheese belongs in the refrigerator um or that you know like cans of corn don't belong in the refrigerator you know so um and that's that's actually it's not just important for you know helping them to helping people to become independent but it's it's kind of a it's a sanitation and health issue so that's a really important one um okay I've spent a lot of time on food um so let's move on to the next one um let's see here okay so cleaning and home maintenance um one of the things that I I I I knew a group of teachers of tvis here in Maine um who worked with some orientation and mobility instructors to plan some field trips for kids um and one of the things that I thought was really awesome that they did was they took them to uh like a home like a home depot like a home good store and they let the kids spend some time just feeling around the aisles and learning about the different tools and the different um things that were there so the kids got to feel all of the different toilets that the store was selling and all of the different light bulbs that the store was selling and someone spent time just showing them how to screw in a light bulb which again something that sounds so simple I mean we make jokes about how many people it takes to screw in a light bulb but for someone with a vision impairment first of all they might not even think they need to learn it because if you have no vision whatsoever why do I need to learn about a light bulb but it's important um it's important you know to maintain the house where you can have other people come in your home and see where they're going right so and it's something that they may never have learned if someone didn't intentionally teach that um and and that's even even as simple as like feeling um like a toilet plunger and understanding how to use it um so the other thing is you know is cleaning so learning about cleaning supplies and there's there's ways that you know students can identify what's what um and kind of understanding like how to identify things by by feel of the bottle or by odor or that you can't just smell every cleaning supply because it's not safe um those are really important skills um and also just knowing when something is is dirty um so um like I walked into my house this afternoon with my children after work today and noticed that my counter was you know I could feel on my counter that there were crumbs and I was like okay I need to clean my counter but that's not always simple and and you know sometimes there's there's things that we can't necessarily feel so how do you ensure that something is clean um and again all of these things will eventually lead to learning skills but learning the concepts behind them and learning kind of just knowing okay I know this is dirty will help someone learn okay I know this is clean I know that I did a good job cleaning this um cleaning this counter um and that goes to to things like washing clothes as well right like how do you know when you have a stain on your shirt um and sometimes you just don't right like I think sometimes any of us even those of us with full vision don't realize we have a stain on our shirt um my husband does it all the time um so but um you know learning about those things and and how to how to even understand what to do about that um those are all important things and and stuff like that like stain care and clothing care is not just important for independent living but it's also important for for work readiness so you can't I mean you can't show up to you know an interview with like stained clothes and you know wrinkled pants um much as many of us might hate ironing you know so you need to learn like students need to understand what feel you know what kind of clothing is clean and what's appropriate and what should your clothes smell like how do you know they're clean can they do they smell good do they do they feel smooth you know stuff like that um how am I doing on time here um okay 403 card thank you um okay so the other thing that I want to kind of talk about with independent living is stuff that we don't this is stuff that I think really gets forgotten is um housing and and financial stuff so um and this is this is stuff that any any teenager you know going into adulthood needs to learn um but I think it's especially pertinent for students with vision impairments who just don't pick up on these things naturally um so that's anything from like different kinds of housing available so um I recently bought a house with my husband um several months ago when we moved to Maine and when we were looking at houses you know we were talking about this is a colonial and this is a cape and it's I had to like spend some time getting some pretty thorough descriptions from people of what that means because I just I had no concept of it I did not understand it um but even more basic than that um like what is a house versus an apartment versus a condo uh you know versus you know um I don't know um but the you know those are important things and I think the other thing is utilities this is a huge one I've met a lot of students that have no idea how their house gets warm um they just kind of assume that it naturally gets warm or cold um and I've I've thought about this a lot like why does that happen you know it's how is that different for a student with a vision impairment than not um and I think you know part of it is like they're not looking at the pipes they're not seeing the oil truck come to deliver their oil for heat um maybe it's things like that um but um they're not seeing their parents write a bill you know write a check to the to the water district you know um all of those things I think play into it so people students really need to start understanding you know they don't need to understand every little thing about how their their heating system works in their home but it's important to understand that you know you don't just walk into a um you don't just move into an apartment and it automatically gets warm for you um you have to buy your oil or your gas or however you heat your home um and you know the same with electricity what do you do when the power goes out and this is kind of a hard one because if you don't see let's say you're completely blind you're not going to notice if the lights are out but there are other things that will happen when you have no electricity um so learning what to do and how to know when you've lost power is important and how to how to have precautions for that too um I used to love when the power went out when I was a kid because I thought it was fun that everyone else had to like use candles and I could just kind of walk around and totally know what I was doing but as an adult uh I do not like losing power because now I have you know kids and you know kids in diapers and and things like that that you know electricity is extremely helpful and important for me so um and financial concepts are are a big one as well so again this is something that you know a lot of parents of teenagers might say my kid doesn't know how to do this either and that's that's okay um I'm not necessarily advocating that every student with a vision impairment know this at age 12 or anything like that but but if there's a chance that that student's going to want to live on their own at some point um it's important to kind of have a basic understanding of you know what's a mortgage what's rent oh you have to pay rent to live in a house you know if you don't you lose your house um and again that comes from not necessarily seeing someone writing a rent check every month um or you know um just not necessarily having to think about that stuff as a kid um um okay so if anyone um if there does anyone have questions so far I can move on to employment if not but if anyone has questions please let me know okay well feel free to interrupt me if you do court me folks folks will either uh just uh unmute and start talking or they'll uh they'll uh type in a question in the uh in the chat if stuff comes up in the chat I will let you know absolutely great thank you okay so the next section is concept development for employment skills um one of the really big ones that we need to think about is professionalism right so um and this is a pretty complex one uh it involves professional dress um and just professional behavior um one of the big ones I think about a lot with this one is a student I used to work with um um who had um cerebral palsy and um and a vision impairment um she had CVI um and she she would talk to me a lot about what professional dress was she was doing a work placement at the time um while I was working with her and and she she would she was able to verbalize um professional dress and you know how to she would say well I have to make sure my clothes look nice but when it came down to it she really didn't quite have a concept of what clothes looking nice meant um and the way I kind of finally learned that um was that you know um her job coach told me she went to work with um you know she was clean but that she had pink sparkly shoes on and like a hello kitty backpack and um you know um and in a place that is supposed to be very professional and very um you know where you don't wear a hello kitty backpack you know a pretty serious office setting um and for that student she was pretty upset about the fact that she couldn't take her you know her hello kitty purse with her or her backpack with her um to work and so we really had to have a conversation about you know um about what professional means and what excessive you know what accessories are considered professional and not um and that like I wasn't trying to squash her individuality um but there's certain times where that's okay and certain times where that you know it's not really okay or where it doesn't give off the right impression um the other thing is um just what is professional clothing so um some students and I've noticed this especially with students who are totally blind um there's there might be kind of an understanding of like I wear um you know I I understand the difference between sneakers and dress shoes um but beyond that it's hard and so especially for women um where there's about eight eight million different kinds of shoes to wear it's really hard for a student to understand what a dress shoe is that she can wear to work um and so um I've often times um done this with my students or I've had other teachers or parents do it with their with their children um it's just brought a bunch of different kinds of shoes in for students to feel um so you know kind of understanding okay this is a sneaker where do you wear a sneaker you can wear it when you're hanging out with your friends you can wear it if you're going on a walk or going for a run um now there's this kind of shoe and you can wear this to work it's a low heel or it's a flat and this kind of shoe is you know this really high heel boot and this might be something you would only wear when you go out um like out dancing or out I don't know I'm really not a fashion person and I don't wear fancy shoes but but that's an important one because you know using high heels as an example right not all high heels are created equal there's some you might wear to work and there's some you definitely wouldn't wear to work um and and that's the case with a lot of different kinds of clothing right and and um I'm working with a student right now who just started an internship at the YMCA which was a tricky place because he's doing work you know kind of in a fitness center um so he was trying to figure out you know do I wear a polo shirt do I wear a workout clothes do I wear a dress shirt and I had to kind of bring in all different kinds of clothes for him to feel and to learn about um this is what this you know this kind of shirt is and this is what this kind of shirt is and this is the setting you might use this you know these kinds of clothing and um and professionalism on a you know more behavioral level um one of the things that I think is a big one that I notice with students a lot is posture um I have gotten lectured about my posture by my mother for for 20 years probably and you know I think it's a lot better now but I didn't understand for a long time you know why is posture important and what does it even mean to have good posture um that's something that's really hard to to understand if you're not not seeing others do it and you're not being able to kind of model that behavior um so being able to conceptualize those things is is challenging without someone really intentionally teaching you how to do it um hygiene is another one again I think some people can understand what good hygiene is but there are certain things that they might wear you know like certain ways that they might present themselves like at home that they might not do at work and kind of understanding those boundaries is hard for someone who can't see the way others are carrying themselves and presenting themselves around them okay um okay so next one is job application and work concepts um so if you have a vision impairment um you may have no idea what a job application even looks like now a lot of applications are online so nowadays like there's a lot of like paper applications that you fill out um and if you can't see them you really don't know what they even involve right um so that's that's a big one um and also a resume format so if you've never seen a resume and you can't just kind of pull one up on the computer and glance at it it's really hard to understand what that even looks like so even for me and I've written so many resumes over the course of my you know adult life um I still don't really have a great concept of the visual format of a resume um because I can't see it and so every single time that I write a resume I still send it to someone who has full vision just to look at it and help me like make the lines look pretty because otherwise for me it would just be a big block of text um or you know just lines of of texts that don't necessarily look nice um so um let's see um the other thing I think about is is concepts you know at the workplace um so these are things like okay what's a time clock um how do you use it what is it for um and how would you recognize one by by touch if you can't see it um things like that someone may never have experienced before especially someone's who's never been employed um that might be a totally new idea um and a badge and all of those kind of little things you get on the first day of work that you learn about right like an employee handbook um this is your access key to get into this building um all of those things are new excuse me um and you know and new concepts for someone who can't who can't see um excuse me got a little tickle um okay um the other thing that's that's really big I think for for students with vision impairments is the concept of of work culture um I think this is and the reason it's difficult is because this is something that's that's hard to explain verbally um we pick up on things on visual cues in our workplace that we don't even realize we're picking up on right so any job that you've had in the past you can think back and you can kind of get a general sense of what that culture was like at that job right like you know oh that job that I had when I was a teenager you know when I was working at that burger place that was a really fun job it was just it was fun everyone kind of you know we worked but we played and we had it and it was really laid back um but that job I worked at you know in my 20s where I was um you know uh like sitting at a computer screen all day and and getting yelled at all the time by my my boss it was horrible and it wasn't it was not a relaxed atmosphere we were never allowed to no one ate lunch with each other we sat at our desks and like you know that was you know that's a totally different kind of culture right so those are just examples but um we pick up a lot of information about the culture of our workplace by visual observation and and other ways but visual observation is a big one so um whenever I start a new job I always kind of ask my coworkers um what's the dress code here um and what is oh how do people eat lunch here do we eat at our desks or should I you know should I go sit somewhere else where should I go what do people do do we eat out do people bring their food um what do people do during break time is their break time or do we just say there is and we actually do work the whole time um you know and and all of that is culture um and if you can't see it you don't necessarily pick up on it immediately um and culture is kind of a small thing in some ways right you know and you do the job and you get the job done and you don't necessarily have to understand the culture completely but for a student with a vision impairment social skills are often really um something that they that a lot of students with vision impairments really need to work on and so those social interactions and that kind of cultural understanding is really really important and really big for for students to kind of build on those skills um so I think sometimes those are more important than than we might think um okay um so now the next thing is worksite specific concepts so um I just gave a few examples here um but honestly it's it's a lot bigger than I than I put on this slide but every worksite that you go to is going to have things that you do that you might not do at another worksite right and so in this slide here I pulled up just some examples of um typical entry-level job sites um so I thought about the kitchen as a job site right so like people who might go and work as a dishwasher for example as their first job um because I'm really thinking about you know teenage students that we might be working with who who are doing their very first job um so in a kitchen right if you're working if you're working in a kitchen setting you've maybe probably never seen an industrial dishwasher before um I know the first time I saw one I had no clue how it worked or what to do with it I was like this is nothing like my dishwasher at home um and I really had to ask someone to teach me how to use it um and there's other you know probably more industrial appliances in the kitchen that that are quite different in their setup um so for a student with a vision impairment that's going to take some teaching um the other thing is you know sanitation right like how do how do people who work in the kitchen keep their keep their um keep their kitchens clean things like that um and I just want to throw in here too as I'm as I'm saying this I'm remembering something I missed earlier that I think is really important um that as students are developing concepts one of the things that we can kind of start to under to do um is understand generalized concepts that we you know or concepts that we can generalize to larger situations and I'm thinking about it with the kitchen because a kitchen is something that typically has all of the same things in it no matter what kitchen you go to some kitchens will have more things than others right some kitchens will have fancy things and some will have dishwashers and some won't but we kind of all understand that a kitchen has some kind of cooking like a stove or an oven and a refrigerator um um I always think about the um the biggest one for me is always the um a bathroom because our like our bathrooms that we use at home are so different from a public restroom and public restrooms are really hard for someone with a vision impairment because they are different no matter where you go and you have to search around for everything um but when we can help a student develop a concept that they can generalize um then that's at least helpful so if I went into a bathroom at you know a restaurant and I you know didn't really understand the general concept of the bathroom I would have trouble finding even knowing what to look for right but at least when I go in even though it might be confusing and stressful because I'm having to search around to find the toilet and to find the sink and to know where the soap is and how high up the soap dispenser is on the wall at least I know that I need to find a soap dispenser and I need to find either some paper towels or something that's going to blow on my hands to dry them off right so um I know I just diverged a little bit from from the slides here but I wanted to throw that out there because I think as we as we can help our students with general concepts that really helps them to to be able to apply them in multiple situations um so other worksite specific things you know an office has like a copy machine and a fax machine things that we don't usually spend time learning about unless we're in an office um and um the same goes for stores like how does how does merchandise arrive like how does how do clothes get put on the shelves and are they organized in a certain way um so those are all things students need to learn as they um you know as they get their first job and I just realized I'm getting pretty short on time so I'm going to speed through the college one here um okay so for college um readiness we have um concepts for academic life so with this I'm thinking about college classroom setup um you know a school classroom in an elementary school or a high school is going to be a pretty standard but when you get into college you've got seminar rooms and you've got lecture halls um and they're all quite different from one another and and the other thing is like a course syllabus right so that's also quite different right we don't we don't that's not necessarily how things are done in in high school maybe it is in some classrooms but it can be quite different um and understanding you know what a typical reading assignment is like in college um I for one was pretty overwhelmed by the amount of reading I had to do when I went to college um compared to high school so um now for residential oh uh yep for residential life this is a big one I think dorm rooms for example so if a kid's never gone away to camp before um they probably have no idea what a dorm looks like so what's in a dorm room and and how can you store things in your dorm room um when I went to college my mom took me to target and let me just feel around all of the different storage options that they sold for college kids it was really fun and it was just kind of a cool way for me to learn about what was out there and what my options were um and how my you know my classmates and and roommates and stuff might be doing doing their own dorm room decoration um public restrooms is a big one because um kids are used to having their own bathrooms with that they share only with their family members and aren't really understanding like what a public shower means and how you deal with that and you know that you need to wear sandals um when you go to take a shower things like that um intentional teaching around that's important um and then the last one is campus life um in this I'm thinking about things like um extracurriculars right so how do you learn about what events are on campus um how do you if you can't see those posters that are hanging up saying that there's a concert on Friday night how are you going to learn about that um and how do people find out that information um the biggest one for me is dining halls I stress this to my students over and over and over again I had a horrible experience in college with dining halls because I was so shy and so um such a poor self-advocate in college that I just was terrified of dining halls because they're very confusing if you can't see them on their loud and echoey and so and I didn't take the time before college to learn about how they were set up and where the different food you know options were and who was available in a dining hall to to provide assistance um and so I often just would skip meals because I was so uncomfortable um so I make sure that my students don't do that because it was not fun um that's I think one of the biggest ones it can be one of the biggest accessibility challenges for kids um and the last one is safety it's really important and I'm not just thinking about safety like walking across campus late at night but also um going to parties right so much as we don't like to think about it our kids will go to parties someday when they get to college and how do you keep safe in a situation where you can't see where you're going and you also probably can't hear that well because it's loud and there's dancing and music and um maybe not everyone around you is in the best state of mind to help you out so understanding what those situations will be like before you actually enter into those kinds of situations and having a concept of that can be extremely helpful so um I didn't put a slide about this but you know I think my recommendations are really just to to do as much exposure as possible and as much intentional explanation and teaching as possible and that's not just for teachers but for parents as well so really encourage your parents the parents of your students to to to do a lot of that teaching and it can just be you know taking them to the taking your child to um a post office or taking your child to um two different places with you so that you can explain to them what's going on in the world around them I think that's extremely important so um a lot of information but do you have any questions before we finish well that was really good timing uh Courtney we're uh we're just about right on our end time and I'm wondering as well if anyone has any questions or comments