Pittsburgh AAC Language Seminar

Last week I traveled to Pittsburgh to attend a Pittsburgh AAC Language Seminar (PALSS) to learn more about core vocabulary, descriptive teaching, language development and the use of Minspeak language systems. The seminar itself was held in the Semantic Compaction Systems (SCS) office in Pittsburgh and all seminar attendants stayed in SCS guest houses. The days were filled with learning and the evenings with time to process, socialize and connect. It was both an incredibly learning and a wonderful social experience.

As with any learning experience, it will take me some time to piece together what all this new information means when converted in to practice. There was definitely a lot that applied specifically to Minspeak but there was also much that can be applied more generally to thinking about language development for students with complex communication needs.

The Goal is Language Acquisition

The emphasis throughout the seminar was about focusing on language acquistion when working with individuals with complex communication needs. We spent some time looking at Brown's stages of language development. We looked at how we can support students with complex communication needs to go through the same stages of language development as those without... moving from saying single words (juice, mine, again) to combining two words (more juice, that mine, go again) to adding in more clarity through development of syntax and morphology (more juice please, that's mine, let's go again).

We also looked at core language. This was not an new concept to me but it is always good to have it reinforced how important it is to focus in on a limited number of high frequency words that can be used to support communication in all environments.

I walked away from the seminar thinking about how important it is to be aware of language development when working with students who are at various stages of using AAC. A few ideas that I wrote down to explore, think about, revisit or refine include the following. There may be future blog posts on these.

• Communication Circles and Out and About Groups - A couple of years ago I was doing a few communication circles. This year I didn't do any.  After going through the activities we did at this seminar, I'm thinking it's time to start them up again.
• Recasting - We talk about modeling at a lot but in this seminar there was an explanation of both modeling and recasting. Recasting is about taking what the individual has said and saying it back a litter further along the language development continuum.
• Using Icon Family Trees for Interventions - We spent a bit of time with this and I would like to further explore the idea as there are a lot of rich connections that could lend themselves to some fun language intervention activities. 
• Literacy through Unity Curriculum - I want to get my hands on this :).
• Use of materials from the AAC Language Lab based on stage of language development. I need to go back and revisit this. 

Promoting Success in the Classroom

I really appreciated that there was time dedicated in this seminar to what supporting a student who uses AAC looks like in reference to curriculum (program of studies). We spent some time looking at the Descriptive Teaching Model (DMT). With this approach, rather than programming key terms from different curriculum areas, the key terms are used as part of the question and then core vocabulary that is on the device is used to answer the questions. This was not entirely new to me as we have done a bit of it but going through and looking at it again reinforced for me the importance of tapping in the curriculum to support language development.

We also spent some time looking at Blooms Taxonomy and thinking through how we could answer questions or have discussions using core vocabulary at every level of Blooms. This was an important reminder to not limit communication to the  lowest levels of just recall as if you have core words,the vocabulary is there to do it all.

Motor and Cognitive Automaticity

We spent time doing hands on learning with Unity 84. What was most interesting with this is that towards the end of the seminar, we were asked to "sky talk" and say some of the things we had been learning throughout the two days. After only a small amount of time practicing, we were all able to go to the general area that was needed to say a variety of different words. Because we were using the same standard 84 icons that were always in the same spot to say all these words, we had learned the general or specific area of almost all the icons.

Although I understood the premise of having a minimum number of icons that you combine in different ways to make different words, it wasn't until we did the sky writing without the device there that I realized how much I was relying on both the repetitive motor planning and the associations of the symbols to the words to become automatic. It was also interesting to note that some will rely on both the association and the motor plan while others will just rely on the motor plan.

Note: The seminar, lodging and meals are free and there is support for travel as well. They are held monthly. I highly recommend the experience. Click here to find out more.