More Thoughts about Reinforcement in AAC Therapy
When we’re teaching AAC, our preferred means of responding to learners is with natural consequences, expansions, extensions, and verbal encouragement. Here are some of our prAACtical thoughts. Natural Consequences Nothing says ‘power’ like having someone respond based on what you just said. SLPs are quite familiar with this concept and use this regularly to provide ‘more’ tickles, crackers, and music. When we work with beginning communicators, we’re all about providing quick access to whatever the AAC learner requests. But we tend to lose sight of the need for natural consequences when working with learners on higher level language skills. True, it is more difficult to think of the natural consequence when we’re working on morphology, syntax, and semantics, but the principle is the same: Learning is enhanced when our responses are driven by the message that our client just produced. We’re working with Antonio to reduce ambiguity in his messages.... [Read More...]
Filed under: Strategy of the Month
Tagged With: encouragement, expansions, extensions, natural consequence, reinforcement, token board