Important Concepts for Students with Unique Needs

[MUSIC PLAYING] I think that there's this-- I think it's really important for us as a field, as is kind of a special ed culture, to come around a dialogue around non-negotiables. And I think that we often have competing priorities in special education. We all come from different training backgrounds. But I think if we have consensus around some almost baseline, or quality, not even quality indicators, but these things, these universals that should be there across all programs. So that teachers have that expectation that these things need to be in place, that interventionists, even from different teams, related service, behavioral interventionists, teacher educators, we can all drive these core elements home. And I think some of those are fairly obvious. But they've been overlooked. I think that number one, for me, not that these are necessarily ranked in order, but for me personally, I think communication structure is important. I think that there shouldn't be a program in which there are students without a functional communication system. And unfortunately, in my experience, that's too often the case. We have some data that was collected by folks at the University of Kentucky showing that a large number of kids are graduating from high school without a functional communication system. So essentially we're kicking them, without a way to advocate for themselves, without a way to access to their wants and needs, out of their strongest support system into that very scary adult world. And it's horrible. I think that it's often-- I know you didn't ask this question, but I think it's because we often don't really accept the responsibility of teaching communication across all educational team members. I think that too long we have said it's just the speech pathologist. But really, it's the teachers should be that kind of a foundational, the driver of communication instruction. Whereas our speech pathologist are experts that can help us in certain areas of communication instruction. Another non-negotiable that's really important to me is that intensity of instruction. I think that there's still a wide range of variability in the quality but also in the intensity of instruction within classroom.