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TRANSCRIPT
ROUGH EDITED COPY
EHDI CONFERENCE
Supporting Early Linguistic Competence: Evidence to Practice
11:00 A.M. - 12:00 P.M. (ET) FEBRUARY 28, 2017
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* * * * * This is being provided in a rough-draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings.
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>>SPEAKER: Okay. I'm going to try this lapel mic. Can everyone hear
me okay? Not too noisy? Background noise? Clothing? It's messing up the
aesthetics of my nice new shirt.
All right. We're going to get started.
>>MS. NUSSBAUM: Good morning, everyone, close to lunch. Thank
you for coming. My name is Debbie Nussbaum. I'm a project manager at
the Laurent Clerc National Deaf Education Center. I know many of you, if not
by face, I know many of you by name. How many of you do I -- do I know
from different contacts I've had through the clears at the Laurent Clerc
Center? Good. Quite a lot. Thank you for coming and Supporting Early
Linguistic Competence: Evidence to Practice. I know that's something we all
do.
So I wanted us to start from the beginning. We're going to kind of go
on a little journey today, and we have programs from all throughout the
United States I'm going to explain a little bit.
But first I wanted us to think a little bit about all the different
presentations we've heard and all the biases we might come with, all the
information we might come with and try to disband it for a minute and let's
think about we all just landed here, let's, say from Mars, and we're at this
early intervention conference, and we're trying to figure out, what do we do?
We really don't know anything about working with deaf and hard of hearing
children, and now we have to figure it out. We don't have our biases. We
just know that this child can't hear.
So let's try to come from that, and we don't know anything, so we have
to look at what the evidence is telling us. So this presentation is going to
help us look at the evidence and -- what we're going to talk about today is a
resource that is available through the Laurent Clerc center. We launched it
last year. It's called Early Intervention Network, Supporting Early Linguistic
Competence. Has anyone had an opportunity to see this resource?
I see a few head nods, but that's one of the things is we're so -- is
we're busy doing what we're doing that we don't have time to stop and look
at the resources that are available. So what we're going to do today with
this resource is kind of unpack it for you so that if you look closely, and you
hear about, oh, that's -- that's what I can find there, then you'll go back and
look for it yourself.
So what you're going to do is in this resource -- and I'll show you where
you can find it, it talks about the work of a strategic planning group at the
Center that came together, parents, professionals from all different
backgrounds, and we spent the time that many of you don't have to do is
looking through a pile of evidence. Everything that was out there at the
time. And since then we tried to keep up with the evidence, of course. We
know it's coming faster which is a great thing but it's also harder to keep up
with.
So we're going to say, okay, let's look at the evidence. Here it is, and
I'm going to show you where you can find it so when you have to go back
and show the evidence to families you're working with and professionals
you're working with and trying to help them understand what linguistic
competence is, you'll know where to find it.
Okay. We have all this evidence. That's great. Now, what do we do?
So we spent a lot of time saying if the evidence says this, then the
recommended practices are that.
Which makes sense. That's what the evidence says, that's what we
should be doing. So we did that.
And then next we said, okay, who is doing that? And then we sent out
a survey to 250 or so programs throughout the United States and said, who
is doing -- and we got all the information, and we compiled it and that's who
we have with us here today. We have programs who are actually supporting
the evidence. We ended up with 5 factors that impact linguistic competence.
I know we all know, that there are many different things that we're talking
about other than linguistic competence for children who are deaf and hard of
hearing -- excuse me.
But it's the foundation of everything else to come. So that's what
we're focusing on for this website, not that we're ignoring the other areas,
but we really focused on linguistic competence for this.
We're from Mars, and here are our wings that we got from the plane so
we can fly all over the country and meet ear intervention providers. This
isn't a chance to get together this is a one time a year opportunity but I'm
going to show you through the network one part of the network is having
online discussion groups, so maybe we can keep in contact and talk about
topics that are of interest to all of us as well.
When you come to the Laurent Clerc Center website you're going to
get a few of how you can subscribe and get more resources and if you're not
familiar with the center, wear federally funded. We're guided by the
Education of the Deaf Act. On Gallaudet's campus we have Laurent Clerc
National Deaf Education Center which is birth through high school. As part of
that we have national services, and technical assistance, and resources and
we also have two demonstration schools, so it's all available to you, but you
have to know where to find it. Hopefully you'll have an opportunity -- I know
we're close up to take advantage of our exhibit booth but if you come here
and take the time to explore, like I said, free. Free resources. You can see
the resources section. We have a part called info to go where you can find
many resources, learning, on line learning, web cast. So just take the time to
look.
So exploring this early intervention network. You always have to keep
in mind the cute kids that we're looking at because we all get caught up in
what we're doing but I do have to say I really do love that picture.
And I keep using the word linguistic competence, and I think it's a word
that we had to define as a group when we were talking about it. It wasn't
just being able to say the word. It was able to use our words and language
for learning, problem solving, reading and writing, and I'm not sure how
many of you were able to attend the plenary last night but it hit me with the
words "language nutrition." Was that the word that was being used? And we
talked about feeding ourselves and our nutrition but the language nutrition
and how do we start off so that we don't have language delay? And I think
that's something we -- our goal is the same but, you know, what is the
evidence to show how we reach that point?
So once you get into this website, not only from the Laurent Clerc
Center website we have all this information about the evidence and the
factors, a whole list of additional resources on this topic, references that are
linked to other places. We tried to make sure that you could get to the
references, and I'm going to tell you a little bit about the discussion theories,
too.
I know you can't read these here but the five factors we're going to go
into in a minute.
The resource library are on all of these different topics. The
references, like I said, you can link to. And we held our first discussion
group, I think it was last May, and I'm confused because we've had a few
discussion topics.
So we took one of the factors. We had other people who were involved
in working with this factor and then we had an online discussion. And it
brought up a lot of good points, and you can go to -- when you go to our
resources go to our online learning, and you'll see the online learning
community, and go to the discussion group, and you can see what your
colleagues were saying on this topic.
The first topic was on factor 1 which we're going to talk about in a
minute, and here is the -- we're at factor 1.
So we looked at all the evidence and then some of this you might say,
this is common sense. Okay. So direct and daily access to language and
communication is essential to facilitating each child's language and
communication development. And that was another thing that I pulled from
the plenary yesterday about every child having communication partners
from the start. Someone who can provide accessible language to the child.
We have a child who can't hear. How that accessible language? What is it
going to look like? So what did the evidence show?
When you go to the website you're going to get these little sections.
One shows you the evidence. One shows you the associated recommended
practices, and one shows you the programs that we have represented here
today.
So factor 1. And, again, it might seem common sense but we have to,
like, have it in front of us and be able to tell parents, this is what the
evidence is showing. Makes sense, language happening early in a child's life
and parent-child communication. Regardless, you want to get the early
bonds set up.
So if that's the case, our programs need to be collaborative in
providing family education to understand about this direct access and daily
and accessible to communication.
So if that means visual language, that means we have to provide the
supports to help the language learn that visual language so they can
facilitate their child's visual language.
And family services and supports to spoken language as well. We want
to see how the child is doing with both. We're not -- the evidence is showing
stimulate both, both modalities, and both languages.
The first program that's going to come up with our program at the
Kendall Demonstration Elementary school our parent infant program. We
have three of our teachers today and head of our childhood education.
Debra Kushner, Brenda Perrodin.
First of all, is communication accessible to everyone? Is everyone
okay? I'm going to move out of the way.
I got a helper here. Thank you.
>>SPEAKER: Hi, everyone I'm Debra Cushner from Kendall School.
Sorry.
Technical difficulties.
We're good. We're good.
>>SPEAKER: I'm Debbie Cushner from Kendall School. It's nice to see
all of you. I'm here with part of our early intervention team. We're thrilled to
be here and we've a lot of information to go through so I'm going to move
pretty quickly. The Kendall School, what I wanted to share with you was
some of our programming strengths and why we're part of this factor in
particular for factor 1.
And one is the importance of systematic language planning, and
system language planning is what we do for all of our children in the early
childhood education program, and I'm going to focus on the birth to 3 group.
Yes, there's intentional language planning with the students from birth
through 3. We do it twice a year, fall and spring, and we assess each
language independent of the other language.
We work as a team to do these assessments so in regard to looking at
American Sign Language, we use the BCSL that's developed by VL2. Looking
at spoken language, the speech and language therapists have the tools that
they use for that. And we as a team come together to look at both
languages. We look at this in relation to what we planned for in the spring,
and progress being documented again -- looking at it in the fall and progress
being documented into the spring, and of course, parents are included as
part of this process and documentation.
We've gotten a lot of positive feedback from everyone about how
much this process has helped in looking at languages separately and what
we provide in the program.
Of course, we want to support each language, so in looking at the
support of ASL, we have fluent ASL users in the classroom and environment
at all times, and wonderful deaf role models available to everyone and to
families.
Provide free sign language classes Wednesday evenings and Saturday
mornings for all families and for the greater D.C. area. We're proud of that,
and I'm sure you're familiar with the shared reading program. That's another
program we access.
In addition our parents are participants in the classes on Wednesday
and -- and join in our two-year-old class, and through that are guided through
activities that pertain to development of ASL. Storytelling, surprise boxes
and those kinds of things.
In relation to English we also have to support that, we have a staff
audiologist in and out of classroom, checking things and working with
families independently and with the classroom. We have SLP's that join our
Monday, Wednesday/Tuesday, Thursday, and 2-year-old class and integrate
into the classroom to provide services that are documented all on their ISSP.
And, again, there's the opportunity for guided activities and coaching
for families when they're participating.
Challenge. I'm sure we all share the same channel. If your child signs
he won't speak. We need to share the evidence that's available to everyone
that that's not true. Families, teachers, schools, medical people. Share the
evidence.
And also one thing that really has been helpful for us is to have
families meeting other families, seeing that how children progress over time,
building relationships, and that, I think, is one of the key, and best things we
can do for our families in regard to supporting language development, and
I'm going to pass it over to Brenda.
>>SPEAKER: Also talking about how using natural ASL in the
classroom. We all come together and there's a wide variety of parents,
hearing and deaf. It's a natural environment. And it's also includes a lot of
fun activities. During home visits, again, we use a natural environment and
the main challenge is, you know, parents often are concerned about how
they will learn ASL. When we're in the home, we're there interacting with
them in a variety of ways. Communicating with them in whatever way
possible.
And we don't focus on one language. We incorporate, you know, as
was -- during the talk yesterday, a dad talked about giving opportunities for
sign language, English, spoken language, a variety of different exposures.
We challenge our parents not to just pick one thing, to just use natural
communication, and that will -- that will come. The ASL will come. We want
to develop confidence in them. They will know before we do what they need,
and we will communicate through expression, through body language, and
we are there to reinforce and support the parents in that journey, and hope
them feel okay in their learning of ASL.
>>SPEAKER: Hi there. I'm Senoa Goehring.
And these are awesome teachers. I'm not really able to sign because
of my hand injury. So we're the team. All three of us together.
>>SPEAKER: Thank you, guys.
>>MS. NUSSBAUM: The second factor you can find in the network
talks about a collaborative, ongoing process. It should be used to explore
modalities, technologies, and strategy.
>>SPEAKER: To support the development of linguistic competence.
Okay. Again, it seems common sense, but in the plenary this morning,
Dr. Knutt talked about no more one golden provider who happens to be the
first person that the child came in contact with, child and family, and that
person is responsible for the child's whole early intervention process. We
still see -- I work as a coordinator of cochlear implant education center and
get calls all the time about families waiting to get the cochlear implant, and
it's a whole year until maybe they're getting the implant, and how many
months? And we all know what the process is, and we're holding up
language. So this talks about having people who can collaborate to get
families the information they need.
So the evidence, again, the recommended practices and the two
programs that we're going to be talking about who are going to come up
with the m center, Karen Hopkins, and Dinah Beams from Colorado CHIP
about how the collaborative process that they use.
So what is the evidence -- just hold on one second.
Karen, you were right, I said when you see your name I said come up.
But I want to go through the evidence really fast. Sorry about that.
I say this about children with cochlear implants but if you've seen one
child with a cochlear implant you've seen one child with a cochlear implant,
and I say that about all of our children that we're serving. So we don't know
what the outcomes are going to be. Even with certain characteristics in
place, they can hear, they're wearing their hearing aids, and cochlear
implants. Spoken language? We don't know. We don't know. If we don't
know if we're fitting these children. If they're visual learners or if they're
going to have additional learning disabilities so it's important that we have a
collaborative process, and with distance education, and Internet. If we don't
have someone in our neighborhood we need to find someone we can
collaborate with.
And having a collaborative, dynamic family-centered
assessment-driven process that's not just based on one service provider's
idea of what they think should be happening.
So you can read more about it in the evidence but I want to get the
opportunity first now, Karen, and then we'll have Dinah.
>>SPEAKER: It takes me longer to get where I was going so I was
trying to get ahead of things. I'm Karen Hopkins the director of Early
Childhood and Family Services in Maine which is a birth to 5 program but
we're going to talk about birth to 3 program right now.
So what we've done in Maine is we've developed one process for all
children birth to age 3 no matter where they live. We had a single point of
entries with our child development services which is our Part C agency in
Maine, and we're developed a memorandum of understanding where we go
in together. So the service coordinator works with the early interventionist
and deaf educators to support families.
We have a six-visit process that happens with families and in had that
six visits all communication options and approaches are explained. Deaf
adults are brought in, hard of hearing adults are brought in, parents and
specialists from all brought in so parents get a lot of perspective, and
support in a family-centered way.
One thing we've spent time doing is slowing the process down while
hurrying it up and getting it done in six visits. What we didn't want is
families on a first visit to check the box, and say I want signing or cued
speech or listening and spoken language. We wanted it to be more of a
process of mindful of where families are in their journey. Some of our
strengths are strong ties with the medical community. We talk to
audiologists and physicians to spread our message, and communities
agencies, and I would add Hands & Voices we've had a lot of cooperation
with the Guide by Your Side Program. Our MOU with the Part C program.
The one state system has been amazing to have families in northern Maine
and southern Maine get the same process, and service provision and
monitoring is amazing to watch these families go through the process and
own it themselves. We have six months process monitoring that happens, so
we really stress with families that what they start with on the very first ISSP
is not necessarily what they have to keep doing.
So with progress monitoring, and observations and input from other
professionals and families and deaf adults, families have the right and
flexibility to change their minds, and I think in years past it wasn't the way.
Families started with one thing, and kind of felt they had to stick with it,
working or not, so we're really trying to make sure families understand it's a
journey, and it's their journey -- journey and their right to change it the way
they want to change it.
We have a what we call a community of practice in Maine where all
providers that work with deaf and hard of hearing children birth to age 3
work in collaboration with and contract with the Maine Educational Center for
the Deaf regardless if they're ASL specialists, cued speech specialists,
listening and spoken language specialists and we all work on one team and
support this model. Our families transitioning and doing what is right for
their children. We meet, and have a wonderful discussions, and we have
deaf and hard of hearing members in this practice, and we're adding family
members, and I looked around the table, and said we don't have parents.
We wrote our states MRSA grant, and put a funding for parent, and
deaf and hard of hearing involvement, so fingers crossed that that comes
through so we can expand it. Flexibility is the key to our model. We do
tele-intervention more and more because we are a big state, 7 hours from
one end to the other. So trying to support families in the far northern
regions of Maine through consultation models. They have a provider up
there that works for us, but being able to bring in a variety of families and
deaf adults and different perspectives to that family through
tele-intervention -- tele-intervention, and our challenge has been doing this
in a timely and family-centered way. Being able to take a step back and look
at where that family is in the process and not rush them through it but trying
to do it in six or seven visits to get all of this in.
What we didn't want is families to do it in one visit. We wanted to give
them a little bit more time, and how we've done this is providing neutral
responses, listening to the family, and their needs and what they're saying,
guiding and not telling families what to do, providing services and support
without a rigid agenda, following their agenda, even if it slows down our
process.
And the communication approach is making sure they're neutral and
balanced and unbiased. We have protocol developed so the script is the
same no matter where they are in the state and the process of bringing
people in is the same, and connecting other families to families has been
fabulous.
It's all fabulous, and it's all challenging but it's our process and where
it's where we are, and I think you're on to Colorado. Whew that was fast.
>>SPEAKER: Thank you, Karen. I just wanted to mention that the
six-point protocol that Karen mentioned is --
I just wanted to mention that your six-point protocol is if people are
interested, it is a handout that's attached to the intervention work if you
want to learn more about that. And the other group from Kendall, if you go
to their part there have numerous video clips showing how to facilitate direct
access to both ASL, and spoken language in captions so you can use that for
captioning families as well.
Next this is Dinah Beams, program coordinator from CHIP, and if
there's more you want to add, please go ahead.
>>MS. BEAMS: Yes, I'm the program coordinator for the Colorado
Home Intervention Program, fondly known as CHIP. We are housed at the
Colorado School for the Deaf and the Blind as part of their outreach program.
We are a family-centered service providing in-home early intervention
services to children birth to 3. So in any given month we're going to be
serving between 325 and 340 children in the state of Colorado.
Like -- and that's birth to 3. Like most states, we have challenges with
the more rural populations which we will talk about in a moment. I don't
think there are many states that don't have some of those challenges. It just
may be the difference between when I lived in North Carolina, the challenges
were the islands and so I would go over a bridge, and then drive, and then
take a ferry, and then drive, but in Colorado it's over the mountains and
through the woods. So a little bit different challenge but still some of the
same components to that.
So what are some of the strengths I see in our program? And I really
want to kind of dovetail on what Karen just shared because we have a lot of
the same strengths that I'm going to be mentioning very quickly, but our
implementation may look a little bit different. So as I said, it's a
family-centered model that has a strong emphasis on parent education, so
that includes the parent coaching, model that a lot of you are very familiar
with, the primary service provider model that a lot of our states are using
through their Part C system.
One of the bigs things we have is a single point of entry. To me this is
critical, and I know this is something that a lot of states don't have in their
system. The start in of average time for start is 2 months of age, and it's
been that for a long period of time. Somewhere between 7 weeks of age,
and 10 weeks of age, so right around that 2-month period.
We have a system of nine CO-Hear coordinators around the state.
Each one lives and works within a region of the state, so the referrals come
directly to them from that audiologist. So that's our single point of entry. So
as Karen was sharing how their process gets started, in our state this
information, this technical support is provided to the parents right after
diagnosis, and we typically get the referral the same day the child is
diagnosed from that audiologist.
The CO-Hear coordinator goes in multiple times before we are a part of
that IFSP team. Because of the way the funding is it up, the services are set
up, we actually have an opportunity to have a number of conversations with
the family prior to that IFSP being written.
One of our other strengths is that we're a data driven intervention
system. We have had a comprehensive family assessment that we have
utilized for about 25 years now with our children who are deaf and hard of
hearing in our state.
We firmly believe in a assessing all children. We do it every six
months. We have assessment packages that we use in our Spanish speaking
population as well as our English speaking population. We have a video
language sample that we take and we are able to analyze that for the
families that are using ASL, for the families that are speaking Spanish for the
families speaking English.
We cannot analyze the video for Mandarin or some of the other
languages so I'll just -- I'll hasten to add that.
We also have an assessment packet for our children that are really
impacted, those children with significant support needs because we found
our traditional assessments weren't really appropriate for them.
All of our intervention is delivered by highly qualified professionals, so
our intervention services are with someone with a CHIP program, master's
degree, teacher of the deaf, SLP, and experience working with kids who are
deaf and hard of hearing. We have a curriculum that we use throughout the
state. So a lot of what we're trying to do is make thing as much alike around
the state as possible while still honoring those individual differences of
children and family and local control.
And fostering connections with parents. We want to connect the
parents with deaf and hard of hearing adults. We want to connect them with
Colorado Families for Hands & Voices so that's another thing that we try to
do.
Challenges: Things we've learned.
Identifying and involving stakeholders was trying to establish and
implement collaborative programs. I feel like all of us talk a lot about
collaboration, philosophically we believe in collaboration, but my picture is a
lot of times no one says I'll be the person who is going to step out and get it
started. Somebody has to say, I'm going to be that person.
And so in our state I have told the CO-Hear coordinators, myself, we're
going to be that person. We're going to be the one to reach out to our child,
to our pediatric audiologist. We're independent going to wait until people
come to us. And I still believe in relationships and not just paper
collaboration but real relationships getting to know people and developing
that trust. Sometimes it takes awhile. Sometimes we're coming from really
different places. I feel that's a big challenge.
Another thing is identifying leadership team of stakeholders, to really
involve that community. How services look in Gunnison, Colorado is not the
same as they look in Denver or Steamboat Springs, and you can identify your
own communities that are like that.
So really making sure we have the buy in from the people in that
community I think is really important.
Incorporating distant learning which Karen talked about, establishing a
single point of entry which I've already talked about.
>>MS. NUSSBAUM: Thank you, Dinah. Moving on to factor 3, which
addresses early exposure to accessible language through sign is beneficial to
language acquisition. And we've had discussion about using the word sign,
whether it's American Sign Language, why doesn't it say American Sign
Language? We want to talk now just about -- we know that ASL might not be
become the child's language but we want to know that some sign is used
preferably American Sign Language, but some sign. That's what the
evidence is showing. Some visual access to language.
The evidence, again, if the evidence is saying what, what are the
recommended practices? And we'll have two programs that I won't introduce
yet. I'll tell you in a minute.
So what does the evidence say? These children are deaf so it is of
benefit to use visual language to establish early, timely language
foundations. Don't wait.
The evidence is showing that use of the visual language sets up a
symbolic language system that can be transitioned or supported by the
visual language.
The evidence also shows if you don't use the spoken language if you're
only using visual language, of course, that's not going to be developed. That
makes sense but you also have to use spoken language but the visual can be
a support and bridge in developing spoken language.
And for the naysayers who say hearing families cannot learn American
Sign Language, they can. They have to be given the supports and that might
become a challenge for some programs and some jurisdictions, but with
distance education, and with tele-intervention, we have greater avenues to
facilitate that than we did before.
What's most important is to develop a program philosophy that reflects
what this evidence says, documenting the benefits of early visual language.
That's what the evidence is saying we need to make sure children have the
access. We don't know what their spoken language outcomes will be.
And then we have to provide supports for facilitating visual language
development. So first, we have two programs first I'm going to have Kathy
Vesey from Massachusetts come and talk about their sign language program,
and Emily Wielding coming from New Mexico, and she's going the talk about
their program.
>>SPEAKER: Hello. Hello. Thank you. I'm from Massachusetts, and I
work at Gallaudet University Regional Center. I used to. And this program is
specific to Massachusetts, but we're also provide sign language classes for
the families in Rhode Island. And I left some brochures on the back table for
anyone if you would like to take them.
Basically we have deaf professionals who go into the home and work
with the families. The first class always has an interpreter and they sign
English, but we have spoken language interpreters for families that use
spoken language other than English. And I can't say enough about the
impact on the families when they have deaf adults going into the home on a
regular basis, weekly for awhile. So they are able to see the nice relationship
that's established between the family, the panic the first class when they
don't know what to do when they don't have an interpreter, let's say, to
when they start picking up sign language.
And then we practice with different families. Our practice is to be able
to match with them as much as possible what it is they may need. We do --
they do great with a bag of tricks. We also work a lot with families who are
children who have medical needs involved. If their medically fragile, we're
able to assist them as well.
We have our own curriculum that we use, but all of the teachers use
what happens in the home, what naturally happens in the home in that
environment with the family to help model for the children language. And
then we model for the families how to work with their kids in a home
environment. And then they will -- and then if the -- if the families head out
to the zoo, let's say, we can provide them language that they may need to
expose the children to that language before the zoo event or maybe if they
have a medical appointment or a dental appointment, then we can help
prepare the families with the language that happens in those contexts.
We encourage families to include other people as well, not just the
parents or whoever the baby-sitter is or the neighbor or folks that are close
to the children, grandparents, extended families. And few of the classes
we've had as large a number as 22 people in the home taking class. So
there may be 6 to 8 people more likely but we have had as much as 22.
And sometimes we have to find another location for the class because
the home is too small to accommodate everyone that wishes to be included.
We're working with the families where they are. And we are flexible.
Sometimes we provide class in the library or we've even worked in shelters.
Sometimes we are challenged with a large group. Some people take
off right away and they're able to pick up language quickly, sign language,
and other folks struggle. So we developed strategies to be able to keep
everyone engaged at the level they are.
We provide most of the materials accessible in Spanish, and we're
finding a lot more families that are speaking Arabic now, and that's another
challenge for us is to be able to develop and deliver materials accessible to
them. So we're having to work with translation agencies and work with
interpreters from other spoken languages. Because it's critical for us to be
culturally sensitive to where the family is.
For example, maybe we wouldn't send a man to all particular home,
but we need to know what's going on in that home, and what their cultural
values are.
We have an advisory board that meets periodically, and it's important
to include the consumers, EI professionals, the teachers, and we're able to
address different situations that come up and find solutions. And I think
that's it.
>>MS. NUSSBAUM: Great. We have 15 minutes left, so I'm going to
go have Emily come up and share, and I'm just going to briefly talk about the
evidence so I can have our other programs share their information.
>>SPEAKER: Hello. Hello, everyone.
I'm Emily. Sorry, the interpreters can't see me.
I began my career as an early intervention specialist 17 years ago, and
then I got into teaching and now I'm the new deaf mentor coordinator at the
School for the Deaf, and it's very nice to have that experience from where I
started my career and then come back to early intervention and really look
at how we can support that through early intervention, early childhood
education, and that whole system.
I work with the deaf mentoring program, and it's located through the
School for the Deaf. We are an early support system. There are two sister
programs, the Deaf Mentor Program and parent infant program, and they
really work together, and they work early childhood education and so forth
but we start together as partners in that journey.
We work statewide. We have certified specialists. Our deaf mentors
are developmental specialists. They are considered developmental
specialists within the system. And that's critical because on the IFSP, we can
be identified as providing services. You're all familiar with IEP's, the IEP
follows the child, and similar with the IFSP. We follow the child. We have
SLP's, OT's, PT's, teachers of the deaf, deaf mentors are all part of that IFSP
team, so that gives you an idea of how it works.
We have a memorandum of understanding with the Department of
Health so that our deaf mentors can provide these specialist services that
are designated in the IFSP.
And as I mentioned before, we are there to provide that foundation in
partner in the parent and the parent Parent-Infant Program so we work with
changes throughout the state.
And we are a free service. Going to home visits welcomely -- weekly.
Some of the families ask for four times, maybe six times a month. We go
anywhere. Home based visits. Center based visits. Day cares. Some
families, as we said earlier, are visited in shelters, and I'm aware -- that's
where some of them have been screened as well.
To give you the idea of what a deaf mentor's role is, we follow the sky
high mentoring curriculum, and we partner with the IFSP, and follow the
family's desires, whatever those might be.
For example, if a child has a goal for feeding, for example, might have
a feeding tube, then the role is to give that family visual language on how
the feeding take place, give them tips on how they can help thrive and strife
in that situation and they can develop the ASL needed to communicate
around those -- those issues. And then we'll let you refer to the website for
more information.
>>SPEAKER: Ongoing monitoring of its effectiveness. And how
integral that is to choosing the communication strategies, and how you affect
your services. I'm going to let you have an opportunity at a later point to
look at the evidence, and I'm going to have Amy from Hear Wisconsin talk
about how they do that within their program.
I'm from a nonprofit private nonprofit organization, and we are unique
in that we are not centered necessarily around a communication choice. We
work only with individuals that are deaf and hard of hearing, and we offer
services through the life span. However, we're very proud that we have a
full team that has specialists that are able and capable to coach and guide
families in a visual language as well as coach and guide families in a spoken
language.
I'm here today to talk a little bit about the evidence and some advice
for amplification and technology. We really stress the importance of early
use of technology. If a family is wanting their child to develop auditory skills
and some spoken language.
So we really understand and try to impart the importance of that early
fitting and then the next step which is appropriate monitoring and
assessment of the use and functioning of that technology.
One of the things that we -- I'm just going to kind of --
>>MS. NUSSBAUM: I'm sorry, I'm --
>>SPEAKER: It's all right. I'm going to talk a little bit -- okay. Yeah.
That's all right.
So, like I said, we have a comprehensive team, and we are very
fortunate that we can use a coaching model within our EI program, and we
have a high level of family involvement that is required, much like the other
presenters have been talking about today, and really the families are the
key. The families are our guide to telling us how we need to make our plans
for the family, the language plans, and the use of all the resources that may
be available, so we do a lot of talking, discussion the families and we have a
process that is similar to what Maine does in terms of some of those first
visits are just education-based with the families having the opportunity to
explore different opportunities, and meet with additional individuals.
Our services are diagnostic in nature so we're always looking at how
are thing going? What is happening? Like I said, we use a coaching model.
And in that we are also not only assessing the development of language,
we're assessing the development of functional auditory skills, and how that
may relate to their technology, and the need for any kinds of adjustment or
changes in the current technology or to a different type of technology. So in
addition to our language and communication assessments we also have
some tools that we use for following and tracking auditory skill development.
Some of those tools are available commercially, and through different --
different companies, and manufacturers of hearing aids or cochlear implants
such as the little ears program.
We also use the IT-MAS which is available commercially and we also
use an auditory skills checklist that is available.
So one of the things, too, that we do, too is focus on the use of that
technology within meaningful interactions and having opportunities for that
child to use and integrate listening into their communication and their
learning. Much like anything else, language needs to be relevant, and it
needs to happen for a reason. So we go beyond just the audiogram, the
audiograms give us just the beginning piece of the information in terms of
what a child is able to access, but then it's up to us to help the families
understand how their child is functioning and using that sound that the
technology is able to access and what kind of adjustments may need to be
needed and made then.
We also have a tele-intervention program that is very beneficial for
helping those families that are not geographically close to us, and we follow
the exact same kinds of protocols and expectations for our tele-intervention
families as we do for our families that we see in person. All right. I'm
going -- we are -- our contact is on the website. Please feel free to contact us
at any time should anyone have questions or want more information.
Thank you.
>>MS. NUSSBAUM: Thank you, Amy. Now we've talked about and you
heard various times about planning, language and communication planning.
Now Janet Digeorge is going to talk to you that's available to you different
than the school programs. It's a tool you can use for language planning.
>>SPEAKER: If half the people used half the resources half the time
that have already been created, our kids would be doing twice as good. I'm
still waiting for somebody to quote me on that. There are so many good
resources out there. Hands & Voices. I'm so pleased in the -- that we're
going to be partnering with the Laurent Clerc Center in our cooperative
agreement. There's so many good resources in the Laurent Clerc Center so
we're so pleased to be doing that.
In 1997 for the first time in the Individual Disabilities Education Act,
special considerations for deaf and hard of hearing students was added to
the law. That requires IEP teams to look at those specific needs of deaf and
hard of hearing students which included the language and modality used by
the children. Access to peers and role models, conversations about
appropriate school placement. Proficiency of staff, and extracurricular
activities. This is the life blood that we as parents go into the educational
services to ensure the integrity of. A group at CDC of parents, professionals
and collaborators got together and had a discussion about creating a plan
that could be utilized by families in the ISSP process, and based on those five
characteristics of the communication plan that some states have adopted
and by law are required and others use the clause out of the IDA ensures
that the communication plan is a tool families can use to process with their
IFSP teams to mic sure that the considerations of deafness are considered.
I know in this group it's sort of a duh. But we know that families are
often going through this process of creating resources and their intervention
without expertise in the room. So we know for the IFSP communication plan
that it had to integrate the idea that where families are at in this process
may not be set in stone. There are still -- they're still exploring so the
communication plan is really a two fold plan, to make sure these
conversations happen, and also to help families with the professionals that
they're working with to make decisions about the needs of their children. It's
also available in Spanish, and I think someone of the interesting things, like,
so many resources that have been developed, unless you have a system to
ensure it's use it sometimes just sit on the shelf. So the way we're
suggesting its use is through legislative mandate, similar to some of the Deaf
Child's Bill of Rights, voluntary use. I hope that you will go and look at this --
the development of this plan. It can really help to ensure that the things that
we talk about that are important for families by law are actually happening in
their services, and that we're also disseminating this to parents to be able to
use at their IFSP meetings, really, to follow the IDEA regulations.
So thank you. Is that good?
>>MS. NUSSBAUM: Perfect.
I'm so impressed that we were able to hear from all the experience
that's in this room that are supporting this project, and I'm excited. If you
want to find out more about the work that these programs are doing to
support the evidence, you can go to the network, and they will also lead to
where you can participate in our future on line discussions.
If you've not subscribed to getting Laurent Clerc Center newsletters
and alerts you can do that on the front page so you can find out about these
discussions when they pop up. I want to thank everyone who participated. I
know it was hard. A lot of you were giving other presentations and we had
just a lot to learn from each other, and networking and keeping in touch is
what we need to do. Thank you.
(APPLAUSE)
(END OF MEETING)