Team Collaboration to Support Individuals with Autism who use AAC
Date/Location:
January 11, 2022
Description:
Autism is a complex form of neurodiversity that impacts a learner’s social and communication skills as well as behavior. About 30% of children with autism have complex communication needs past age 5 (Tager-Flusberg, & Kasari, 2013). These learners present with such unique strengths and challenges that a team of professionals is needed to help them meet their potential. Teamwork is required to meet the challenge of helping learners experiencing Autism to generalize skills across environments. Collaboration between speech-language pathologists, occupational therapists, and ABA professionals will be discussed. The strengths of each discipline will be compared along with difficulties faced when professionals “don’t get along. .” Finally, ideas will be shared to promote collaboration including establishing a shared framework, learning each field’s professional jargon and moving towards common terminology, and focusing on the data to ensure efficacy of treatment and generalization of language skills. The unique benefits of Minspeak® for this population will be outlined along with challenges in teaching learners experiencing Autism with little or no functional speech. Successful case studies will be shared in which an occupational therapist, ABA therapists, and SLPs collaborate to teach school-aged learners Minspeak®.
Speakers:
Kim Ho, PhD, CCC-SLP RBT
Learning Outcomes:
Discuss ways that collaboration across professionals can help promote generalization of language skills by learners with Autism and CCN.
Apply principles of learning in planning for language instruction of Minspeak® for a learner with Autism and CCN.
Discuss how Minspeak® as a language representation method is uniquely suited to learners with Autism.
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CEUs This activity is offered for up to 0.2 CEUs (2.0 hours of instruction). To register for CEUs:
Download and complete the following forms.
Save the files names: 220111_SCS_Lastname_Firstname
Send both files to ceus@aacinstitute.org
Upon completion of the two forms and passing the quiz, a CEU certificate will be sent
Note: If any difficulty is encountered in using this form, write to ceus@aacinstitute.org to request an alternative file format.