Your colleague teaching an inclusive classroom asks for your suggestions regarding teaching communication. Please provide him/her some useful teaching tips.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Answers may vary, but may include the following tips.
1. Thoroughly understand children’s characteristics, strengths, and deficits.
2. Prompt children to participate in back-and-forth interactions to develop their joint attention skills (i.e., rolling a ball to each other; taking turns putting puzzles together; taking turns in games on the playground; etc.)
3. Include children in picture matching games to develop their ability to make symbolic associations.
4. Teach children how to use PECS to request desired objects and activities.
5. Use picture cues as much as possible.
6. Pair gestures with speech as much as possible.
7. Through modeling of verbal interactions provided by adults, children learn to produce speech sounds, imitate the word productions, and link the spoken words to produce sentences.Be intentional about modeling verbal behaviors and help children participate in verbal interactions to help them develop their speech.
8. Promote social engagement in natural environments: in the classroom, at lunch, and on the playground.
9. Think of prompts you could use to get students to initiate social interactions (i.e., “Ask your friend what she will do tonight when she gets home.” “Ask your friend what he did over the weekend.” “Ask your friend what she had for lunch today.”)When students use the prompts, find and use an appropriate reinforcement.
10. Use prompting and reinforcement to increase communication skills.
11.Try video modeling or script training to increase communication skills.