PrAACtical Resources: Partner Strategies Handout

It is exciting to hear about the many AAC trainings offered by schools, clinics, and other organizations. Whether it is through small group consultations, inservice trainings, workshops, or conference presentations, more and more of our colleagues are helping others gain an understanding of AAC issues and practices. We’d love to support those efforts, and appreciate the opportunity to share information, handouts, and materials that can be useful in that work.

Today, we are pleased to share a wonderful handout by Alicia Garcia, a lead SLP at the AAC Clinic at One Kids Place, a children’s treatment centre in northern Ontario. Alicia has more than two decades of clinical experience in a variety of settings and locales. You can see a guest post Alicia did on avoiding pitfalls in aided language input here. The handout she is sharing today is used primarily for providing initial training to people who live, work with, or teach children who are at the earliest stages of communication learning.  

A key to success in helping communication partners improve their ability to facilitate AAC growth is to provide a clear focus on supportive strategies. Want others to support AAC outside of therapy? Teach them a specific strategy or concept, demonstrate it, have them try it, give feedback, provide practice opportunities, and repeat. Having a written summary of the strategy is enormously helpful, both as a reminder once they leave the training but also to share with others who touch the AAC learner every day.

If you are supporting early symbolic communicators, you know how important it is to help their communication partners learn to recognize and respond to interaction attempts in a way that facilitates communication and sets the stage for further language growth. Geared mostly to preschoolers and primary elementary school children who are who are just learning to use pictures as communication tools, these strategies can easily be adapted for older learners. You can download the handout by clicking on the image or visiting the AAC eToolbox and exploring the Downloads section. Enjoy!

If you provide similar supports to families and colleagues in the course of your AAC work and would be willing to share them with our community, please reach out to us. We would love to facilitate sharing among colleagues so that we can learn and benefit from one another’s efforts.

https://praacticalaac.org/?wpfb_dl=242 and image in March