A boy and his AAC team: building instructional competence across team members

Abstract

Families and education professionals face unique challenges when working together to support augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) for a child who does not use speech and has only prelinguistic forms of communication. For this study, a family-school team was provided with a specially designed support package comprising training and one-on-one coaching in evidence-based instructional strategies. As part of a larger mixed methods investigation, a single-case experimental design was conducted to explore the effectiveness of the support package on facilitating team members’ competence in AAC instruction and communication. In the case reported here, the support package improved instructional competence across all team members, which led to small, positive changes in the child’s communication using AAC. However, it was not sufficient for overcoming contextual barriers and supporting adults’ ongoing instructional adjustment to the level necessary to promote the child’s independent communication via AAC. Implications of these findings for both practice and research are discussed.

Keywords:

• Augmentative and alternative communication
• team functioning
• instruction
• communicative competence
• family-school partnerships

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Paraeducators are teachers’ assistant with responsibilities for providing support and supervised instruction to students in the United States education system.

2 Compass (2015) speech-generating software is a product of the Tobii Group, Pittsburgh, PA, www.tobii.com/group

3 iPad mini (2014) is a product of Apple Computers (2014). Cupertino, CA: www.apple.com

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported in part by grant funding from the US Department of Education, #H325D100062 (Project LEAD, University of Illinois). However, these contents do not necessarily represent the policy of the US Department of Education, and you should not assume endorsement by the Federal Government. This work was also supported by a Hardie Dissertation Award and a Special Education Department Research Award from the University of Illinois.