Episode 274: Coaching Call with Sarah Seiger: AAC at a Nonpublic/Nonprofit School

This week, we share Chris’s coaching call with Sarah Seiger! Sarah is an SLP at a nonpublic/nonprofit school in Cleveland, OH that supports students with complex needs from multiple local school districts. Sarah is trying to develop more processes for her school’s efforts to get more students AAC, including questions about trialing, collaboration with teachers, modeling, and more!

Before the interview, Rachel and Chris have a lively chat about Rachel’s social media following, and why Rachel’s analytics indicate that posts  supporting literacy for AAC users often do not get as much engagement as posts that don’t talk about literacy. Chris notes that literacy may be something that not every SLP thinks of as “their job”, and maybe Rachel should consider combining literacy with other concepts to bring more people in.

Key ideas this week:

🔑 During AAC selection, we want to consider motor planning for every student we are assessing. There is no AAC user, regardless of their familiarity with AAC, that is going to perform better with the same word in different locations all across the device. 

🔑 Selecting an AAC device for a student that matches what their peers are using in the same classroom/school is not something that should be avoided as a general rule - it’s OK to consider the environment that a device will be used in.  That shouldn’t be the only consideration, but it can be an important one. 

🔑 While it may feel respectful to put different AAC devices in front of a potential user to finding out what they “gravitate” toward when we are “trialing” AAC systems. However, it is difficult to know why an AAC user appears more interested in one app than the others - it may be the first one they saw, might have a picture that caught their eye, might be impacted by how tired the student is, etc. Instead, we can figure out what system we believe will work, based on the available factors, and choose that to start implementing right away.

🔑 If you are trying to advocate for a position related to AAC within your organization, consider highlighting something measurable, like modeling, and advocating for an AAC coaching role to make those improvements. You can also look at descriptive teaching and least-to-most prompting for other measurables.