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.
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?
When I coach other professionals, I tell them to work smarter, not harder! I like to pick just one book and make it work for ALL of the children I see in a week. My schedule is filled with listeners of all different ages, developmental levels, and needs, but with some creative thinking, you can take a classic story like Goldilocks and the Three Bears and find a gold mine of goals inside. Here are THIRTY ways to make the Three Bears work for (nearly) everyone on your caseload.
Nutritionists advise diners to think about building a “balanced plate” of proteins, carbohydrates, fruits, and vegetables for every meal. Eating too much of one thing isn’t good for your health! An Auditory Verbal session can be imagined in the same way. Too much focus on one type of goal or activity doesn’t help children achieve the well-rounded communicative competence that we want them to have. So, how do you build a balanced plate in an AV session?
Acoustic highlighting is a key strategy in Auditory Verbal Therapy. By changing the way that we present verbal information (for example, adding emphasis, repetition, or intonation), we can help children tune in to specific aspects of the signal, such as a new word or missed speech sound. There are many different ways to acoustically highlight, but don’t fall into the trap of thinking they’re all equally good in every situation. Just as you carefully choose colors to fill in a coloring page, be careful to choose the right highlighter for the job. Learning that acoustic highlighting exists is just step one. Here are some thoughts on how to take your highlighting skills to the next level!
In Auditory Verbal Therapy, we want children to learn to listen all the time, but we don’t want them to focus just on listening. We focus on audition, but we don’t focus only on audition. Listening is an important factor, but it’s not the only factor. So which is it — is AVT all about listening, or not?
See below for a recording of my May 2016 presentation for Cochlear and the Royal Institute for Deaf and Blind Children/Renwick Centre “Complex and Challenging Cases” [CC]
When I help children learn language, I want them to fall into a really deep hole. It’s not as mean as it sounds! By thinking about learning new skills as “falling into a hole” vs. “climbing into a mountain,” we, parents and professionals, can structure our play with children to help them learn more while struggling less. Here’s how it works.
In my completely unbiased opinion, I work with some of the best children, families, and Listening and Spoken Language Specialist candidates in the world. But this year, I’ve decided to stop telling them that they’re doing a good job. Here’s why…
Forget the flashcards, ditch the drills. You can help children with hearing loss develop beautiful, natural speech skills through listening and play! This webinar will cover the essentials behind the theory of speech acoustics and how parents and professionals can use this information to use listening to develop speech. Best of all, there are no flashcards involved! You’ll learn fun, easy activities that you can use at home or in therapy to help children learn to speak clearly.
