This school year, I have spent a fair amount of intervention time with students who use augmentative and alternative communication (AAC). I have also spent a good amount of time with the communication partners (teachers, parents, paraprofessionals) of those students. Throughout this time, I focused my energy on modeling for the students to learn how to use their AAC system, but also for the communication partners to implement modeling. Now that we're months into the school year, I have noticed the communication partners doing some modeling, but it could be done more frequently and more effectively. My first thought on how to solve this problem was to provide the communication partners with a self-assessment form, which I think is a fairly nonintrusive way for people to make a change. So[...]

For some time I have been thinking about how questions are asked to young children who are talking very little or not at all, as well as individuals with augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) needs. My thoughts have come from observing teachers, instructional aides, parents, and even SLPs who ask a lot, I mean a lot of questions to these populations. It seems like the individuals are continually being tested, whether the adult has that intention or not. I have also recently seen blog posts from David Niemeijer, Maureen Nevers, Carole Zangari and others whose posts inspired me to write about my thoughts. The authors discussed the difference between questions that are closed-ended and open-ended. In this case, closed-ended questions refer to questions in which the answer is alr[...]