Therapists (hopefully!) spend a lot of time carefully planning goals and activities for each Auditory Verbal Therapy session, but professional planning is not enough. Parent coaching is the heart of AVT. It is not enough for you, the professional, to know what’s going on. Parents deserve this information, too! Below, I’ll detail a strategy I came up with called “PAW” that can help you structure your sessions for maximum engagement.
This summer I had the opportunity to present with some incredible friends and colleagues at the 2018 AG Bell Convention in Scottsdale, Arizona. Below are PDFs of the slides from our presentations. Enjoy!
When I began studying auditory verbal therapy, one concept I learned was the “equal time pie” or “equal talk time,” — the idea that all three participants in an AVT session (child, parent, and therapist), should each be doing roughly 1/3 of the talking during the session. For years, I tried to self-monitor during my intervention to make sure this was happening. But then I started teaching students about AVT at the university level. After weeks of hearing me drive home the point that families are their children’s first and best teachers, one student raised her hand and asked a question that revolutionized the way I think about sharing talk time in sessions…
As Auditory Verbal Therapists, our job is not to evaluate or judge parents, but rather to guide and coach. How can we best offer feedback that validates families’ effectiveness at helping their children grow?
When you have a child with hearing loss (or any disability), you are instantly thrown into the deep end of new jargon, appointments, professionals, and more. When a therapy or early intervention provider is assigned to your family, how do you know if who you’re getting is any good? They’re supposed to be the expert in this, so how are parents who are new to this whole world supposed to know if they and their child are getting what they deserve?
This time of year, I see many parents asking on social media, “What is the best gift for my child’s teachers/audiologist/speech-language pathologist/auditory verbal therapist? While there are many wonderful gifts out there, I’m going to rock the boat a bit.
“Shut the door,” “Sit down,” “Go to sleep.” We write them as multiple words, but do young children view them that way? How do we know if a child has learned a “chunk” versus really putting together a multi-word utterance? Continue reading →
Young children love to be in control (who doesn’t?). Think about it: so many aspects of their lives are decided for them — what and when they’ll eat, where they go each day, when they take a bath, etc. For children with hearing loss, parents may tend to be even more directive, giving short, simple commands to head off any misunderstandings by a child with limited language. But challenge yourself! Giving choices can help meet an important developmental need while growing language skills as well!
Figurative language: idioms, metaphors, similes, and the like, can be one of the most difficult aspects of language for English language learners, and children with hearing loss, to master. How can we help children learn, understand, and use nonliteral language in a way that is natural?
If you provide services to families in the home or via teletherapy, you have the advantage of helping them apply AV techniques to their natural environments in real time. But that’s not always possible. How can center-based clinicians or teachers make what they do with families “translate” once the families leave their clinic or school? How can we make center-based services realistic for parents?
