The program was originally aired as part of the “Partner Instruction in AAC: Strategies for Building Circles of Support” online conference (June 13-25, 2012).

Partner support is crucial for optimizing a child's communication growth, which is directly linked to the amount of communication input a child receives. A child will have better long-term outcomes when a caregiver scaffolds communication and talks more to the child. For a child with severe disabilities, it's important that these partner behaviors continue over many years. In this presentation, we'll focus on teaching strategies to promote a partner's scaffolding of nonsymbolic and early symbolic behaviors while increasing communication input to children with severe disabilities. We'll discuss evidence-based strategies as well as new technologies useful in monitoring partner communication.

Learning Outcomes
You will be able to:

• assess nonsymbolic communication acts used by children and their caregivers in real contexts
• identify teaching goals for caregivers based on these assessments
• create programming goals that promote current use of nonsymbolic communication along with new forms such as AAC
• monitor partner progress in using the targeted communication goals
• monitor communication input by caregivers across environments

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