TSBVI Coffee Hour: General Considerations for Supporting Students who are Deafblind and Proficient Communicators Ð 9-20-21


>>Deanna: To start out we're going to talk about who this group is. Right now we're calling them proficient communicators and in a slide or two we'll kind of get into the elements of this population that we're talking about. But we are not tied to this name and we fully expect that as we identify more and more of these students and talk with families and you all that this name might change.  So for decades the needs of emerging communicators have driven the information, strategies, and resources developed for use with congenitally Deafblind students and that is who we're talking about today. Proficient communicators have some similarities with students who have usher's syndrome who are also proficient communicators. But as Kaycee is going to get into in a little bit, looking at our Deafblind child count, we'll see that the majority of the students we're talking about have ideologies that are different than Usher Syndrome.  So currently we're seeing an increase in the students that we are calling proficient communicators.
So who are these students? A team of professionals from around the country have been working on putting together an identification tool that will help flag these students so that their teams can gather more information. And right now these are some of the elements that they're looking at. Primarily, these students are using conventional
language like English, ASL, Spanish, other sign systems. Their intellectual functioning and cognitive abilities indicate functioning within the typical range as opposed to students who have an intellectual disability. Learners use the state-adopted general education curriculum, taking the state testing with or without accommodations. The students are working towards a high school diploma that meets the state requirements for graduation with or without accommodations. And the social piece, these students have a good understanding of social dynamics. They're keenly aware of their peers and able to compare themselves to their peers but still need support and interacting with their friends and making new friends. We're going to stop here and ask you a poll question and we're going to hope that this goes smoothly but by asking you this question -- and the question is going to be do you work with students who are proficient communicators? This is how we're going to continue to build our knowledge and a community around these students. We don't know what we don't know and that's why we want to get this information from you guys. So, here we go. This is a tool called Menti Meter. It's a live online poll so if you use the QR code or go to menti.com and enter that code. 50416874 and then we'll see, do you work with students who you would describe as proficient communicators? Yes, no, maybe. Maybe is a good answer. It means you're asking the question and we want to connect with you. All right, Kaycee, you can kick me out.

>>Kaycee: Okay. Are all the boxes gone again?

>>Deanna: Yes.

>>Kaycee: Okay. Perfect. So now we're going to talk about the Texas Deafblind child count for a minute and if you're familiar with that, it's a census that's done annually in January. So these are the 2021 numbers. So this past January, this is the information that we gathered from the local education agencies around all our state. And what
we found is overall total there were 804 students who were Deafblind on our child count for the State of Texas. Now Deanna briefly mentioned that STAAR testing with or without accommodations is one of the ways that we can find these proficient communicators and, you know, a downfall to using that is only 423 of those 804 students took STAAR
in general. So we're looking at just over half of the population took a form of STAAR. And of those 130 took the regular STAAR test with or without accommodations.  So we know that of the -- just over half of the students that took STAAR, we had 130 that did take that regular test. So that shows us that there are at least 130 proficient communicators
in Texas and likely that it's close to double that. But, you know, we can't know for sure. So that's our estimated number of students that we can count on as proficient communicators for Texas. So the numbers following this and on the next slide are looking at out of that 130. So of the 130 that we know are proficient communicators, 7
of those are at either the School for the Deaf or School for the Blind. 63 of them were served by a regional based program for the Deaf. It asked the question of how much time they spent in the regular education classroom and it gives choices. In the regular education classroom, at least 80% of the day and that was 81 of the students.
And in the regular education classroom, 40% to 79% of the day, and that was 22 of those students. So of those 130, again, 23 of them have cochlear implants. 15 have an intervener. None of those interveners are certified or credentialed as of January but there are 15 of them across the state. And then 11 of those students have charge syndrome
and 18 have Usher Syndrome. So like Deanna said, we often think of our students with Usher Syndrome as the students who are proficient communicators, and many of them are very proficient communicators, however we're looking at 18 of our 130 are the ones with Usher Syndrome. So just great information to be thinking about as we go forward, who
exactly this population is and what they look like.

>>Deanna: And just to tag on what Kaycee said, we're really lucky that we have this way of tracking our students in Texas with our Deafblind child count and one of the interesting things to note is that in Texas students don't start taking state testing until third grade, so we know that we're missing tons of students who are under the age of
testing.  But although we're seeing the numbers increase, we still know that we are underidentifying. And so we're looking to find them.
Proficient communicators are faced with some of the same underlying problems as emerging communicators.  That is that incomplete and missing information can cause difficulty with developing full concepts, complete concepts, that additional time is required to gather information, to process and respond. Next slide.
Our project with -- thanks to Robbie Blaha who started this work, has gathered some common needs and compiled a list of 12 specific reoccurring needs. We're going to do our very best to quickly go through those and just put them on your radar.  But they are posted on the Texas Deafblind Project website and Kaycee and I hope to have a series
of Coffee Hours related to proficient communicators and, specifically, these 12 items.
So, like I said, this is going to be a very brief overview. This is one of the documents that you will see on our website and it has a brief description of each of the 12 items -- I'm not going to read them right now because we're going to go through them one by one, but also on the website there is a companion document that gives more information
on each of these 12 items.

>>Kaycee: Perfect. Like Deanna said, we'll go into those 12 items in just a moment but first we wanted to talk for just a moment about how these proficient communicators fit into the federal definition. The federal definition is on the screen here. It says Deafblindness means concomitant hearing and visual impairments, the combination of which
causes such severe communication and other developmental and educational needs that they, the children, cannot be accommodated in special education programs designed solely for children with deafness or children with blindness. Now the reason I want to talk about this today is it's something we're asked about quite a bit. A lot of times people
get really hung on that word "severe" and, you know, are worried that it means that the student is unable to proficiently communicate. And that is not the case. What we're trying to make clear here is that there's a need for specialized instruction. So just like we can have students that have straight As that are Deaf and are receiving services
from a teacher of the Deaf, we can have students with visual impairments that make straight As that still need support from a teacher. We can absolutely have students who are Deafblind that need specific instruction to their combined hearing and vision impairments. So if you have questions like that we would love to talk more about that but
like Deanna said we have a lot of content today but please let us know if you have questions about that eligibility piece.
All right. So we're going to talk about the 12 considerations and we'll just move right in here to the first one. The first one is talking about concepts. And the reason we're going to talk about concepts is that for students who are Deafblind, oftentimes they have gaps in that foundational information that's essential for concept development.
So identifying and remediating these gaps is necessary for them to be able to make progress in the curriculum. The requisite content development is an area that needs direct instruction and needs to be systematically evaluated. As we know we get into content and then we find these gaps in students and we don't want it to just be things that
pop up as we go. We need to consider this and evaluate it and make sure that we're supporting the students, filling in those gaps so that they can move forward through the content.
We do have a quick video clip of my friend Rachel, who is here today, and her student. And so I'm going to go ahead and play this. And it is captioned.

[ Captioned video]

>>Kaycee: All right. So as you can see, this student is very academic and is an older student, high school here, and there were some gaps that Rachel found in knowing where the water and where the land is for the continent. And so Rachel took that time to have that direct instruction and teach her in a way that was meaningful to her and accessible
to her about those concepts that she was missing.

>>Deanna: Kaycee, Rachel posted in the chat, she said just to put that into context, the lines are time zones and the students was very interested in that and she said it just blew up from there, which, you know, reminds us all that taking the student's interests into -- factoring into our instruction is really going to help cement some of
these concepts for them. So thank you, Rachel.

>>Kaycee: Thank you. Thanks for letting us use the video. All right. So the second of the 12 considerations we're going to talk about today is modify. Modifying curricular content and focusing on what is the most important pieces of the curriculum. So for students who are Deafblind, gathering information can take a lot longer for them than
it might be for their sighted or hearing peers.  So therefore the pace of instruction may be a lot slower. So if they are having limited incidental learning throughout their life, they are having significantly less of that essential background information which, as we know, takes time to teach.  And the scope of the information in a general education
classroom, as we know, can be very overwhelming and that leads to the need for that modification of the content and prioritizing the curriculum so that it's manageable and instructive.  You know, if the pace is much slower for our students, it's going to be impossible to get through the same amount of content. And so looking through that as
a team and determining which pieces are the most important pieces for our students and the most relevant for them.

>>Deanna: Number three, comprehension checks.  Defining comprehension checks and including them in individualized description in the student's accommodations is really important for the team and the student. Without knowing what the student's existing level of conceptual understanding is, we're unable to help them understand that next more complex
bit of information. We can gain insight into their understanding through effective comprehension checks. And oftentimes with students we might ask them do you understand? And they might say yes. And so we take them for face value. And, really, the way to get at whether or not they understand the content is by asking open-ended questions
that allow for the student to explain what the information means to them. Or how it relates to other information that they're learning. So a more effective comprehension check than do you understand might be can you explain that to me? Or what does it mean to you?
Number four is time, build time into the day to intervene, add an elective, or time in a resource classroom. Some state boards of education allow students -- I'm sorry, school districts to create courses designed to provide for students opportunities to master knowledge, skills, and  competencies that fall outside of the normal
scope of the required curriculum. That's a long way of saying that creating an elective can give that time that the student needs to have information pretaught and retaught. This better prepares our students to be active and successful participants during the realtime instruction.

>>Kaycee: The fifth thing that we're going to talk about today is adapt. And you'll notice this one is pretty similar to the modify that I was talking about a moment ago. But applying adaptations and modifications to not only the work in the classroom, like we were just talking about, but also the homework assignment. If they are going
to be responsible for the same amount of homework as their sighted or hearing peers, they may be up all night doing that. And, of course, it's different for every single student and knowing the student is going to be super important in determining what needs to be adapted or modified for each student.  But considering assigning alternate projects,
reducing or even eliminating the homework are all options. We know our students who are Deafblind are working very, very hard to gather information and that fatigue is a very real thing for our students.  And so taking that into consideration when assigning things for them to do outside of the already long school day where they are working
so hard to gather information is something for the team to consider, think about, and prioritize of what is the most important.

>>Deanna: Kaycee, Patty said in the chat preteaching and reteaching is so important and also a great time to include those No. 3 comprehension checks. Patti knows this just as well as anyone with her son having gone through school needing these kind of supports. And back to the school day and the amount of instruction that's happening there,
without that extra time students aren't given that opportunity for discussion and inquiry that, you know, where they can ask of us the questions that they need information about. And, if they don't, then we can be the ones to try to get at that.

>>Kaycee: Absolutely. I served as a TDB in a school district and I had a student who had an elective that we did that preteaching and reteaching. It was really a game changer for her and I think it is for a lot of our students and it can certainly be difficult logistically but I think it's a very important piece for our students.
Thanks, Patti for being here. We appreciate your input.
All right. Technology. Another big piece and another big piece that Patti has helped us with over the years. Consider student's technology needs and developing a plan. I think developing a plan often gets overlooked. Students who are Deafblind often have way more technology than their peers and they need that technology, it's important,
but they have to have a plan for being responsible for the technology, troubleshooting it, knowing where it goes and transporting it between classes, which ones go home, which ones don't go home. All of those crazy details that go with each piece of technology.  And having our students try to figure all that out on their own is not going to
be the best option.  There needs to be a plan in place and not only the student but the staff working with the student need to be aware of the plan and know which pieces of technology are for which things and how they're going to get around and get fixed and get everything. And so that plan is super important and can be part of your
IEP.

>>Deanna: And just to tag on what Kaycee said there, the team also needs to think realistically about what the student is responsible for and can be responsible for. Not because they're not a responsible person who could do these things but when they have to get from class to class. When, you know, they're trying to get set up. They
need a little bit of extra time. Sometimes we need to lighten the load a little bit, you know, and it might be that a certain teacher is going to -- or an intervener is going to help transport technology or be the one responsible for helping that student troubleshoot. But, yeah, the team -- and future webinars or if you reach out to us, Patti
has shared some examples of what this plan could look like.  And we're happy to share them with you.
Stress. We need to monitor the indications of stress for these students. These students are perfectionists and if you have them, you know that.  And this causes anxiety. These students are working harder than their peers to keep up with realtime instruction and when they don't have the kind of modifications to the content and the time and all
of those supports, then they are being asked to keep up with the same amount of information at the same time as their peers. And that can cause overload and, you know, and these students to be overwhelmed during the school day, let alone that they're coming home from school and they're having hours of homework. If we haven't reduced
the amount of homework that they're given. You know, if their peers have to do 40 math problems, can this student do 10 to prove that they know the content? Because the last thing we want to be doing is wasting their time. Time is a precious thing for all of us but these students, in particular, we need to find times for them to rest.
Stress for these students can also result in extremely high levels of anxiety as well as feelings of inadequacy. They're comparing themselves to their peers. They don't want to stand out. They want to look just like everybody else. Which leads right into distress. So here we have to consider the impact of being Deafblind on behavioral issues. High levels of stress over time will lead to distress. Students who are Deafblind pose unique challenges to the educators who are working with them. These students are traveling from class to class. You know, they have different teachers on the hour who may or may
not have knowledge and experience working with students who are Deafblind. And we know that they have a very unique learning style resulting from reduced or missing access to information through their vision and hearing. Frequently these students behave in response to this lack of information and that's interpreted as bad behavior. Robbie once gave an example of a student who missed the instructions for an assignment and so looked over to a peer to see what were they doing and how to get back on track. But that was interpreted as cheating when actually it was a really good strategy that that student had used to keep up, to know what was happening in the classrooms.
Science is just beginning to show us the impact of stress on all human development and functioning and what we would like to do is to ask educators working with these students to reframe their thinking about behavior that they may see their students exhibiting and see a child in distress rather than a student who is willfully acting out. Fostering
feelings of safety, independence, success, and connectedness, which are feelings that we all need in order to lead happy and productive lives can lower the stress and the moments of distress these students are experiencing.

>>Kaycee: The next topic we're going to talk about is social skills. And considering the unique social skills that our students may need to have directly taught to them. Being Deafblind can impact the ability to form relationships and respond to interactions with others in typical ways. For example, lack of environmental information makes
it difficult to identify people, to locate them, to know what they're doing, understanding what they want. And many ordinary interactions may seem threatening or negative or confusing to the student.  The student needs to gather information by close viewing or touch can offend others especially if they are not used to that type of interaction.
It's not unusual to see withdraw and problems with bonding with these students. It is important to consider that social problems for a student who is Deafblind is often is result of a lack of ongoing essential information, and that's where we come in to provide that essential information directly and give opportunities to practice that social
skills for the rest of their lives. It's a really important piece of our jobs in supporting these proficient communicators.
Self-advocacy. Again, this is another area that is going to impact them for the rest of their lives.  They're always going to need to be advocating for themselves and it's another thing that often needs to be taught directly. This will be essential in their success in higher education, in employment, in community settings, in essentially all
settings.  And so this is a piece that we need to be evaluating and that we need to be providing that direct instruction in. And the time piece -- I think it was number four that we talked about, that elective period is a really great time to work on these types of things in addition to that pre-teaching and reteaching that we talked about
earlier. I've got a little video I'm going to show you of a former student of mine talking about a few of the topics we talked about so far with self-advocacy being one of them and a funny story she's going to share.

>>Deanna: That was a really great video and it really speaks to that self-advocacy piece and I think also to stress and distress. She had a smile on her face, you know, and she's laughing about the mistakes that are made. And these are -- this is not anyone's fault. These are things that just happen. But, you know, those kinds of things
can, you know, add to the stress that students are feeling. And she seemed to take it in stride and be able to say, hey, can you turn off that mic?  Remember to turn off that mic? But another student might get really angry and then we'd be looking at, you know, this student is causing a problem, is misbehaving is, you know, sometimes it's
the last thing on the list to really think about, what are all of the stressors and how are they altogether factoring on how that student is able to deal with all the stress that they have in their life.
So number 11 is transition. Considering the unique transitions of a student who is Deafblind and including these in the IEP. When students get into their teen years and near graduation, there are considerations for educational programming and services out there in the community that they will need to access. So are they planning to go to college?
Are they going to community college? Are they planning to go out and get a job? Are they going to live independently? Are they going to have roommates? What skills do they need to help better equip them to meet their goals? And do they understand how to access community supports, especially those supports for people who are Deafblind. Like
finding and hiring interveners and co-navigators and job coaches who have Deafblind experience and caseworkers to help them get out there and find the jobs that they want and learn the skills that make them successful.

>>Kaycee: Can I add on to that really quickly?

>>Deanna: Yes

>>Kaycee: I want to add for those of you here in Texas, we do have a transition specialist on our Deafblind team named David. He's phenomenal. And one of the things that I always love that he talks about is -- he often gets asked what jobs can a Deafblind person do? And he always reminds people that that's not the way to think about it. That
we're looking at what does the student want to do?  What are their interests and how can we help them reach those goals, which I think is a really great mindset to go into transition with. And if you're in Texas, you should definitely reach out and connect with David as you do your transition plan.

>>Deanna: Yes. Absolutely. David Wiley, probably many of you know him and he's been around a long time and we are always learning from David about how to support students who are transition age and not just transition age but thinking when they are in first grade, in third grade, in fifth grade, you know. Because when we wait until a student
is 17 or 18 or 20 to really start thinking about what is going to make this student happy, how are we going to help them build, you know, the daily life that is going to make them happy, then we can really be crunched for time. But when we start young, then we can really kind of backwards chain that in terms of how can we start small and then
expand that so that the student is going to be really well prepared to do what they want to do and get where they want to go.
Number 12, supplemental services. The discussion for supplemental needs and services considers the need for additional resources, training, and/or staff to provide in-class support. Certain related services and supports are design for students with sensory losses and should be considered for all students who are Deafblind. For example, an intervener
is a paraprofessional with special skills and training. Oftentimes we think that interveners are best served with students who are emerging communicators. Those are the friends who need that support. But proficient communicators who are out there, you know, in general education classrooms, they often rely on their interveners to be that homebase, that person that they can come back to and check in, you know, and those interveners, thinking back to Rachel and Natalie, who you saw a video of, I remember that her intervener was always keeping mental notes and I think sometimes actually writing down, oh, I can see this is something that we need to come back to. I know my student.
I can read their body language. Even if they're not telling me, I can see that we're going to use that elective, that time to pre teach and reteach to come back and hit those topics. Sign language interpreting and O&M are also examples of specialized services. And, additionally, the effects of being Deafblind should be taken into account in assessments, evaluation and delivery of all related service provided to the student.
We are zipping through the content that we have here, which is great because I think we're going to make it to the end, which never happens to me. I don't know about you, Kaycee.

[Laughter]

But we want to know what are we missing. And going back to that child count data that we have, for those 130 students Kaycee and I are going to be looking to find who are they, where are they? Who's serving them and how can we connect with them to really use them as supports for us in terms of gathering strategies and disseminating, you know,
that information to others who need it. But we have a minute here so if there is -- if you have comments or if you want to mention something that comes to mind, feel free to put it in the chat and we'll just spend a couple of minutes looking at that.

>>Kaycee: We shared these 12 considerations but we are positive that list is not inclusive of everything that our students need and so we would love to know what pieces that you think were not covered in those 12 items that your students are needing support in. And I'm going to stop sharing so that I can see the chat.

>>Deanna: And while people are thinking, pondering, and putting stuff in there, as I mentioned Kaycee and I hope to really build on this as a starting place for, you know, talking about this population and their needs. And we do have -- we did a Coffee Hour on -- using the intervener model for students who are proficient communicators, so
that we have archived and this will go along with that and then as an overview and hopefully we will just kind of go down that checklist as we get information from you guys. Getting some comments in there.

>>Kaycee: I'm going to share in the chat. We do have a ListServ for those of you who are serving proficient communicators, and we would love to have you join our community. It's a place where we'll share information that we have but we also hope it will be a place for you to come and ask questions and share triumphs and, you know, ask for help
and anything else that you may need. So that link is in the chat so please, please join that. And we have just a few minutes left. I want to show you where to find all these things, Lyn just asked, on our website.
So I am going to share my screen again and navigate over to our website, which is TXdeafblindproject.org. Oh, and I'm in editor mode.  And there's a couple things that I want to show you, specifically under "resources." We have a section called topical resources. That goes into lots of different topics and one of those
topics, they're in alphabetical order, one of the topics listed is proficient communicators. So the first thing you will see is the checklist, those are the 12 things that we just talked about and it does have the notes attached to that to give you a little bit more information than just the checklist itself. That is there for you. There's
also a wonderful article called minimal losses, major implications by Jenny Lace. There is another article that was in SenseAbilities and that's called understanding content development and related challenges for academic students with Deafblindness. There's a great video, I know Alex mentioned one of her students is in here. The intervener
as instructional coach for students who are Deafblind in general education setting. It's a video and it's really great and I really suggest that you go and check that out. And then we have our let's talk about eligibility, which helps answer those questions that I touched on in the beginning about where do these students fit into
eligibility and hopefully that will be helpful for you. And I encourage you to just browse around in here.  There's transition planning resources, there's stuff on qualified personnel. There's so many pieces in here, family engagement, which of course is so important. So, you know, definitely check it out.  Our products are also here so you
can go in under "products." Everything here is stuff that our team has put out. And you will find all kind of things that might be helpful to you like the assessment of Deafblind access to manual language systems. So for your students who are manual communicators, that will be a very helpful tool for you. Determining the need for an intervener
in educational settings, which actually was just updated over the summer, so that's the newest version. We've got some new things coming out. The checklist is also here. We have quality indicators for students with Deafblindness here. We have so many things that can be helpful for this population and we hope you'll spend some time browsing
our new website, which again is Txdeafblindproject.org.

>>Deanna: We soon, very soon we will have another tool up there on the website. The national center on Deafblindness has given us a forum -- not just us but people around the country -- a forum to come together in work groups and that's -- I mentioned this identification tool, which is really, like I said, just a way to flag students. It's not
that a student has to meet every one of those criteria that I mentioned. But that will soon be there as another resource for teens to look at when they are thinking about who are these students. We don't want them to get missed because, you know, sometimes people think he has enough vision and hearing, you know. He's doing okay. Because we
think of Deafblind students in a different way. But students who are out there in general education classes, they need so many similar types of supports just presented in a different way than we might be used to presenting them. I would definitely encourage people to look back at that article that Chris Montgomery wrote about how students qualify.
Because back to identification. We know that we are underidentifying this group because they're holding their own. We want to help them.

>>Kaycee: Yes, and Rachel Collins asked a great question in the chat about the requisite concept evaluation. It has not yet been published but that will be another thing to look for soon. And that will be an evaluation tool to help teams determine where those concept gaps are and what needs to be filled in so that -- I can't think of the word.

>>Deanna: Yeah, so we know where their concepts are and we don't build on concepts that are incomplete.

>>Kaycee: Systematically is the word I was looking for. Systematically evaluate.

[Laughter]

Those concepts and concept gaps. And we have another tool that is in the works right now. We've got lots of things in the works. We have -- some of you are familiar with the essential tools of the trade publication from TSBVI's curriculum. We will have a Deafblind version coming out soon-ish. Stay tuned on that. But that will hopefully help
your teams thoroughly evaluate your students who are Deafblind and guide you all to looking at not only the vision and hearing but the tactile piece in communication and all of the pieces that go with that. Another thing to stay tuned on. As these things come out we will blast them through every one of our channels, if you follow us on social
media.  We will also let you know, for those of you who are joining our ListServ, and that link is in the chat.  So please do.