Millie, what are three things parents should know about communication skills for students with visual and multiple disabilities?
I think the most important thing for parents to understand is that there’s a big difference between communicating and using language. That the best definition of communication I think I ever heard was that communication is the sending and receiving of messages. And there are always two people involved, it’s a social interaction in which one of the partners sends a message and the other partner receives the message. So, the foundation of communication is having two people who are communication partners, and that one of those people can send a message in such a way that the other one can receive it and understand it. Now we in schools have a tendency to put a huge amount of emphasis on speech, and of course that’s an incredibly valuable way to send and receive messages, but what parents need to understand is there’s a whole continuum of ways to send and receive messages. At the high end of the continuum would be reading and writing, and we think of those as being academic skills, but the
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