TRANSCRIPT Ð Who Are Proficient Communicators and How Can We Support Them? Ð 3/25/26 

>>Rachel: Today we're going to be talking about proficient communicators. And just a little bit of background about myself. I started off as a Deaf Ed teacher in the local school district and then I actually came here to the School for the Blind and I started teaching in a Deafblind classroom at the School for the Blind. So here for a little bit and then I left and then I came back a little bit. And then I spent the majority of my time in Round Rock ISD, another local district, and I was a Deafblind specialist there. And I realize now, and I didn't really realize back then that I had the majority of students who we are going to be talking about today, which are proficient communicators. So who are these proficient communicators? The name proficient communicators can be kind of confusing because we want all of our Deafblind friends to be able to communicate their needs and their wants proficiently or effectively and we're really hoping that eventually we can come up with a more appropriate name. We as professionals won't be coming up with a name or the Deafblind individuals themselves or maybe in conjunction with their families can create something that is more appropriate. So who we're talking about today are students who may be underidentified and perhaps maybe not even reported because these are kids that maybe you thought to yourself they're not really blind. They can see really well and they can hear really well. Like, they function really well in class. They're not really Deafblind. But, you know, but this is something that we need to look at because over the last few decades there has been an increase in congenitally-Deafblind students. And up until now we developed resources and information and strategies for those emergent communicators but not so much for these proficient communicators. And we're not talking about Usher Syndrome or syndromes like that but we're talking about more about the students who are born Deafblind with a congenital syndrome or a congenital etiology that made them become Deafblind. And so why are we seeing these increases in numbers? Perhaps it's medical advancements. Maybe we have a better understanding of identification. But when I first started in Deafblind education, a long, long time ago, the numbers were 90% emergent communicators, 10% proficient communicators. And we're seeing a difference in that. And so we have all these resources, strategies, tools for those emergent communicators, how are we supporting our students who are proficient communicators. So who are these kids? There are a few Deafblind Projects that got together to collaborate on creating an identification tool to try and identify who these students might be and to try and figure out how to test further and to see like where these students are. But the tool is called the PC identification tool. It's still in the works and it's still something that has led to some confusion. I think it's the name, proficient communicators, that I think confuses, you know, people across the board. But here are six different characteristics that were identified as characteristics that were proficient communicators. The first of which is language/communication. A proficient communicator uses ASL, English, Spanish, other sign systems. And they use those as opposed to the methods that are typically used with our emergent communicators like object symbols. The second characteristic is intellectual ability. Now this is a really big, you know, "but" kind of category. When we're thinking about our proficient communicators, we typically say, okay, they're functioning within the normal cognitive range. However, because we know that our students who are Deafblind, there aren't any tests that are normed for them, there may be some misidentification of intellectual disability so we have to take that one with a really big grain of salt. The next characteristic is the curriculum. These students are on the state-adopted general education curriculum. Now, all students, all Deafblind students, all students are working towards that general education curriculum. However, some are working more on prerequisite skills or maybe several years below their actual grade level. However, these students are on or near their age range and they're in gen ed classroom, maybe some resource classes every once in a while but they are accessing that gen ed along with their same-age peers. The next area is state testing on state-adopted curriculum. So here in Texas it's called the STAAR and so we're talking about taking the STAAR test with or without accommodations. These students are taking not an alternative STAAR but the regular STAAR with or without accommodations. These students are on a diploma track. They're not graduating with an IEP. Not with a foundational. They're graduating with a high school diploma along with their peers. And the last area is social. The student may have a good understanding of social dynamics. They are aware of their peers and they're able to compare themselves to others. But they still may need support with interaction and just making friends in general. I just want to ask if there's any questions right now. 

>>Kaycee: There hasn't been any in the chat yet. 

>>Rachel: Awesome. Moving on. I want to take a poll really quickly and we want -- we need to find these students in order to collaborate with you. And we want to be able to provide those supports and those strategies and help create, you know, more tools to help identify and support these students. I want to take a poll and see what you guys think. All right. So this is a Slido poll. You can either scan the code or you can join at Slido.com with the access code of 157-4309. And that will be put in the chat. So if you guys can go ahead and respond to the poll. Wow! Okay. Yes. No. Okay. So yes and no and nobody's sure about whether or not they have one or not. Maybe you're not sure and you might need more direction? We'll see. Okay. I'm going to keep on going. 

>>Kaycee: Rachel, there was another no in the chat. They couldn't get Slido to work but they're not working with any proficient communicators. And then a second no came in. And somebody shared that they currently serve three students in their district that are proficient communicators. 

>>Rachel: Oh, wow! Okay. Awesome. That's really exciting. Okay. All right. So you guys are going to have to get in touch with me afterwards so that we can talk about these proficient communicators. So we're going to keep going. So I want to talk about numbers and data. The majority of these numbers are from last year's count. Last year we identified 846 Deafblind students on the child count. This year the numbers just came in so I haven't broken down or filtered through all the information but this year that number is up to 873. So we're moving in that positive direction in identification. And back to last year's numbers, out of that 846, 448 students took the STAAR. That's regular STAAR, STAAR alt, that's all the STAAR. But out of that 448 number, 161 took the star without accommodations. So that's 36%. And that's more than a third of our Deafblind population. So before I was talking about, you know, way back when. We were talking about the percentages were 90/10. 90% emergent communicators, 10% proficient communicators. That number now from last year's numbers is 36%. That's a third. We've got to figure out what we can do so that these students are not falling through the cracks. All right. Out of that 161 students, 39 had cochlear implants, 10 had CHARGE, 17 had Usher Syndrome and there were 22 interveners and four were certified. The year prior to that there were 11 interveners and none of them were certified, so we are moving in some positive directions and I think that with identification, with information about the needs that our -- the unique needs that our students have, we're getting some traction on making sure that we're providing that support. All right. Proficient communicators have some of the same problems that emergent communicators experience. And that's they are going to have issues gathering information from incidental learning because they are missing or they are getting incomplete information through their vision. And also they're going to need additional time to gather that information. To process it and then to respond. Those are some similarities between our emergent communicators and our proficient communicators. And so how do proficient communicators fit into the federal definition? This is a question that we get often. And it's not about the student not being able to communicate. It's about the student getting specialized instruction and in those areas of combined vision and hearing, like varying degrees of vision and hearing. And so they could be a straight-A student but they still need specialized instruction outside of just typical DHH or VI services and so they need that support, that extra support to support their communication, development, and their educational needs. So they could be straight-A students and still need that specialized instruction. So what does that look like? So over the years Robbie Blaha noticed that there were some recurring themes that kept popping up whenever she was going out on on-site. And then she took all of those recurring themes and compiled them into 12 specific areas. We're going to go through those now. These are 12 considerations, that specialized instruction and these are specific to proficient communicators. Now, I'm not saying that these 12 can't be applied to emergent communicators but we're already addressing those needs for our emergent communicators because that's where all of the supports and that's where all of the tools and strategies have kind of stemmed from. This is in regards to the needs for our proficient communicators and how important it is to not allow them to fall through the cracks. So here is a checklist. It's called the IEP checklist for the proficient communicator. This is found on the website. I'm going to -- later on I'm going to show you how to navigate towards it. But you can download this from the website. This is something that you can keep with you to kind of just keep in mind to make sure that you're addressing these. So the first area is concepts. Address the requisite concept or the foundational concept development through assessment and instruction. So many years ago there have been a team of Deafblind education consultants here on the Project that have compiled different IEPs -- or they're TEKS that are targeted in the science and social areas. The reason why only science and social studies were targeted was those were the areas that helps the student interact with the world -- with people and the world and with their environment around them. Typically our students are going to be getting like intense literacy instruction and math instruction. However, science and social studies, that kind of gets, you know, kind of blended in with the wash. This is where we're looking at these specific concepts in these areas to see where those gaps and where those feelings are in understanding. And what was developed was called a requisite concept evaluation tool. And what we were talking about just now with listing the TEKS in those different areas. We've been talking about it for many, many years, maybe many of you have heard about this tool. The requisite concept evaluation tool for many years but it has never been set out. I will show you a snippet of it. So it is covering the TEKS. This is just starting in third grade but we go from pre-K all the way up to eighth grade. And then again we're covering social studies and science. And how this tool is designed to be used, it is not a standalone tool at all. It is to be used with a classroom teacher or the grade level teacher because they're the ones who are experts in which TEKS need to be covered in that grade level. And then the Deaf Ed teacher or VI teacher to help determine where the student is in that essential understanding. If you guys are interested, please contact me afterwards and I can show it to you. But it is like 133 pages of TEKS and evaluations. So this absolutely is not a standalone tool and it is something that the more people you can gather together to look at this question and to evaluate the students, the better. And so it helps determine where the student's gaps are in understanding and it gives you a direction in what to address. So maybe there are some classroom teachers that aren't sure. Like what do I even target or what do I even focus in on. And this is a tool to kind of help with that, with that direction. Okay. The second characteristic is modify. So we talked about how the students are accessing that grade level curriculum. However, gathering information is going to take a lot longer for our students, for our Deafblind proficient communicators than it is for typical learners. And so we want to try and modify that curricular content and develop strategies to specifically target what would be the core areas that we want to address. The pace of instruction has to be a little bit slower because they are working so much harder to try and gather that information. That pace has to slow down. And, you know, with varying degrees of hearing and vision, it limits or prohibits some incidental learning that's going on throughout the student's life. This will result in having less -- significantly less essential background knowledge in comparison to their peers. So this whole scope of the general education curriculum is going to be overwhelming. We've got to prioritize what are the main pieces where we're still accessing all of that information on grade level but we're just pinpointing what specific areas are the most crucial to be able to carry on the next. All right. The next area is comprehension checks. So we want to be able to define what that looks like and include a description in the student's accommodation. So in that accommodation list in the IEP, we want to spell out what a comprehension check looks like. And we really can gain a lot of information about how much a student is understanding if we ask open-ended questions instead of saying: Do you understand? In which the answer will most likely be "yes." A more effective way would be can you explain that word or concept to me. Or what does that mean to you? To make sure they are gaining that information. Or to make sure they understand the information. And then you, as the instructor or perhaps as an intervener, can catch where those gaps are and where some reteaching needs to occur. All right. The next area is time. So build time into the day to intervene or to provide extra instruction. Perhaps adding an elective or spending some time in the resource class. Kind of slow things down and kind of recheck and recalibrate where we are in understanding. Do we need more clarification? Do we need more instruction? Do we need some more background information? But all of that kind of reteach or preteach can't happen within that classroom time. There needs to be some extra time built into the day to be able to cover the additional information that is so desperately needed. And we can't really expect our students to learn that same scope at the same rate without there being some serious repercussions. Some things are going to get dropped or missed and our students are working really, really hard to try and capture all of that information. And so it becomes quite overwhelming. And we're going to see like some other areas where that plays into some potential issues that could arise later. And so this is a video that was taken. And this is -- that extra time we're talking about, there are some classes that are called innovative courses. It's an elective and so in the elementary school area, it can be very easily built into resource time. In the middle school area, that's when we're starting to want to really hit when that pace is going so fast. And building in that time is going to be really helpful and really crucial. So building in time for that elective and creating that extra innovative time to be able to cover this. So this is a student that I worked with in the high school. And this is Natalie. And she was really interested in learning about time zones. So you will see on the video that she is -- we divided up. I blew up a piece of butcher paper and I drew the entire world on it and I outlined the entire world in hot glue so she could feel it raised. We divided up all the time zones in string. And it snowballed. You are building in that time to cover some information but then to also go deeper and to fill in some other background information that other students can, like, gain at a glance but that our students really need that direct teach. [ Video ] 

>>Rachel: So Natalie, after we did this lesson, we labeled all the waters and then she said, okay, she wanted to know what the names were. We looked them all up. I never learned so much about geography in my whole life. And it was so interesting. But then, after we labeled the seas, then she asked, well, are there sharks in there? Is it safe to swim in there? Is it -- what are some other things? She just kept going further and further in her knowledge. And this kind of thing could never have happened in a regular classroom. So it's really important to build in that time. [ Video ] 

>>Rachel: Does anybody have any questions about that? 

>>Kaycee: There weren't questions, just people sharing some love about how helpful it was that you showed this. Quilley from outside of Seattle said you were integrating protactile ASL before it was even a thing. 

>>Rachel: And here I didn't do protactile because I don't even know if -- I had never even heard of it at the time. So this is tactile ASL. So she has to sign holding on to my hand, just because she had prosthetic eyes. The other video, I was acknowledging what she was saying by tapping her arm. Here, I never even let go of her hand because I was kind of like teaching -- we were just in the middle of teaching. I didn't get an opportunity. But I'm glad you brought it up. All right. So the fifth area is to adapt. So we're going to want to apply adaptations or modifications to homework assignments. Remember, we are not changing the scope because these proficient communicators are accessing the general ed curriculum. Maybe shortening homework assignments. Maybe just making sure that assignments are done within the classroom time or maybe providing additional time, allowing oral answers. Maybe they can create alternative projects or, you know, something like that. What we were noticing is that our proficient communicators are like working so hard all day long to get all the information visually or auditorily or tactilely and they're trying to keep up with everything that's getting thrown at them. And then they've got homework so they're trying really hard to do their homework and finish. Like the 50 problems. And what this is suggesting is maybe they do 10. If they can demonstrate the knowledge, then doing 50 is not beneficial. And so what we were noticing is that these students were working hard all day long and then they're staying up -- like after school coming home and staying up all night trying to do their homework. That is so unsustainable and so these are the dangers that we have to make sure that we are aware of and that we are noticing. Like those students, remember at the very beginning when I said, oh, they're doing fine. They're doing great. They're acing all their stuff? Well, that student is probably stressed out to the max trying to make sure that that's happening. And I think that we can provide more supports so they're not having to work harder than they need to. The next area is technology. We need to consider student's technology needs and develop a plan in the ARD minutes or deliberations. If we were able to attend my tech tea time last Thursday, this is Natalie and this is where we discovered how to get her connected with her focus forward team and her iPhone. She was about to graduate and one of the biggest repercussions of being Deafblind is that isolation. If you don't have somebody who's right there with you talking, how are you going to have a conversation with Natalie if you are not right next to her tactilely signing. We had to incorporate technology into her plan so that way it would expand her community and it would expand her ability to be able to stay in contact with a friend that she had made or the people that she had met. So we discovered the focus forward team, because it was readily available, and then made a plan to learn it and teach it to Natalie so she could start texting her friend and her family. If you were able to attend the Deafblind symposium, you saw that it exploded into this whole thing and now this girl is quadra lingual. She knows English, ASL, Spanish, and Mexican sign language. This girl is brilliant but you would never have known without that digging, that digging for more information and allowing that time for her to show what her interests and her curiosities were. All right. Here we are with stress. This is a major one. So we've been talking all the time about how hard our students are working and how much harder that they are working just to try to keep up with realtime instruction with the same pace as their peers. You know, they are working throughout the school day into the night. And it is resulting in some extremely high levels of stress. They're thinking maybe there's something wrong with them. Why aren't they able to keep up. Well, they are putting on a whole lot of burden on to themselves to try and keep up with that pace. This is where it becomes really, really difficult and important for us as educators and for the people who work with our students that we develop strategies to be able to manage these things. And so hand in hand, you know, when we are experiencing high levels of stress, this is going to lead to distress. And so, you know, we know that students who are Deafblind have unique challenges and their unique learning style is resulting from that reduced or missing access to information because of their hearing and their vision. And we see these students act out or behave in such a way that because of this lack of information could be seen as bad behavior. What we are wanting to do is to kind of understand that these behaviors are only natural responses to stress and that the stress is better caused by fear, anxiety, and confusion, of not knowing what's going on in the environment. And so we're wanting to ask you guys, as educators, for all of us working with students who are Deafblind, to think about, to reframe our thinking about behavior and to see that the child is in distress. Instead of seeing a child that's just acting out for no reason. There has got to be a reason that something's going on, either inside or externally that is causing the student to be super scared and acting out and distressed. We want to really look at that. All right. The ninth checklist item is social skills. Being Deafblind really does impact the ability to form relationships and respond to interactions with others in several ways. Because with a lot of lack of environmental information, it makes it really difficult to identify people, to locate them, to know what they're doing. You know, what's going on around them or to understand what they're wanting. You know, when you are with your student who is Deafblind, you know a lot of communication is relying on very, very close communication. Tactile sign or maybe close visual space to be able to communicate. When they're not able to see what's going on with what their peers are doing, it makes it really difficult to know how to interject or to step into a conversation or to step into, you know, meeting new people. Because you're not seeing what other people are doing. We, as sighted and hearing individuals, we're able to kind of like take the pulse of what's going on around us. We're able to know when it's appropriate to step in or when you're like, oh, this is not a good thing. We're able to see that at a glance. Our students who are Deafblind are not able to do that or they're going to have a lot more difficulty being able to do that. So we need to be able to help, like set up situations or scenarios to be able to learn how to engage with peers and to learn how to kind of take the pulse of, you know, what's going on so that way they can develop meaningful friendship. The tenth item on the list is self-advocacy. We want to look at the unique skills needed in self-advocacy for a student who is Deafblind and include those in the IEP. Being an effective self-advocate is not just about communication -- sorry. Let me backtrack. Being an effective self-advocate is about learning how to communicate and know about how to -- 

>>Kaycee: Rachel, your sound went away. 

>>Rachel: Oh, gosh. How about now? 

>>Kaycee: All good. 

>>Rachel: Oh, my goodness. Oh, technology. Hold on a second. Let me just make sure. We'll see. Can you hear me now? 

>>Kaycee: Yes. 

>>Rachel: Okay. All right. So self-advocacy. So being an effective self-advocate with communication and access to information, these things are essential for success in higher education, employment, and other settings. We want to consider advocacy fatigue. It's important for our students to know how to communicate their needs and to advocate for themselves and to speak up and say I'm not -- I don't understand what's going on. And be able to effectively communicate that. But we want to look at advocacy fatigue or keep that in mind. Because it's really important to acknowledge each child is going to differ in their ability to be a self-advocate. And that sometimes that demand of constantly having to advocate for just basic needs and like related to accessing information becomes really fatiguing. If that student has to keep asking, you know, I need to sit up in the front. Or could we use this color or could I have the material ahead of time. Sometimes, you know, if they're constantly having to advocate every single time, what do you think is going to happen? What do you think might be a risk of potentially happening if they have to keep doing that every single time. What do you think? Yes. Absolutely, Amy. They will shut down. They're going to be like, do you know what? Forget it. Never mind. I'm so tired of having to ask for the same thing over and over again. Yes. Why bother? Yes. Absolutely. They just get tired of asking. And so we don't want this to happen. You know, we want to set up these supports. This is why it's so important to look at these different areas and say who on my caseload have I just relied on their amazingness and their ability to do all these things on their own. They got it. They got it. But do they? And how stressed are they? How stressed are they becoming? How soon are they -- like, how close are they to be, forget it. I can't do this anymore. I'm too tired. We don't want them to get to that point. All right. So here is a short clip of a young lady named Greshma. She is amazing. [ Video ] 

>>Rachel: Okay. Okay. So with Greeshma, she was taking all these super hard classes. She has to navigate her phone, her iPhone, her laptop, her FM system. Then she has to remind the teacher to please put on the captions. Then she has to remind the teacher to please, you know, turn off the FM system whenever they're having a private conversation with another student. There's all these things that she's having to keep up with. But there are so many things that we as professionals who are supporting our students like Greeshma can do to make it something that is not solely her responsibility to take care of and to help alleviate some of that stress. Kaycee, Greeshma was yours, correct? Do you want to add anything? 

>>Kaycee: She was mine. She was so, so fun to work with. I worked with her for many years. And, yeah, so she's in all these really hard classes., like she shared. She manages her technology really well and is a phenomenal advocate for herself. And she is one who benefited from a class period. So she's one when you went through the checklist and talked about time, she had a class period with me, her itinerant teacher for students who are Deafblind, every morning. And on days I couldn't get there, the speech pathologist went. And we did a lot of pre-teaching of vocabulary and content. I knew her so well. I could tell by looking at the lesson plans what concepts she's not going to have. Was able to fill those gaps in. We did a lot of hands-on learning. She's an oral communicator, as you can see, but English is not her first language either. And so there was a lot, especially in the younger years, that she was missing. And so we did a lot of that time. And she doesn't need that anymore. She's a senior right now. And she doesn't need that anymore in high school because we were able to fill in so many gaps and give her the tools she needed to take care of her own needs. And I really feel like that advocacy work of having that class period for her was well worth it and that it's one of the reasons that she's so successful now. She's brilliant. She's about to go off to a four-year university to study computer science. And she's going to do great things. It's not that she was ever not capable of keeping up those classes on her own but she was one of those kids who was staying up all night working on her homework and trying to catch up and learn the concepts she was missing on her own and all of that. It's way too much and it's not sustainable. So she was one that benefited greatly from that class period. And, you know, we see that a lot. We see that a lot in these kiddos. I think she's just such a great example of that. 

>>Rachel: You know, you had your separate class period like to pre-teach and do all that stuff and she still stayed after. Or she would go to tutorials before school and after school and have like a dedicated class period to kind of review and to kind of break things down a little bit more. She utilized all of that. She's working like triple time, compared to her peers. These are the students that we're looking at, like super bright. Super duper bright. But there are some areas that need to get targeted. All right. All right. So the eleventh area is supplemental services. So this is talking about, you know, these are specific services that are designed for students with sensory needs. And that we need to consider for our students who are Deafblind. So an example of the supplemental services would be a paraprofessional who could be considered an intervener. Somebody who has those special skills and training designed to work individually and specifically with students who are Deafblind. And, you know, students who are in general education classrooms, who would benefit from having an intervener to go deeper into a concept that we're not able to, you know, during the school day. And so this would be something that would be considered. Sign language interpretation as well as O&M are also examples of specialized services. So on the Texas Deafblind Project website we do have a determining the need for an educational intervener, if that is something your team is questioning or wondering about. And we would be more than happy to go through it with you guys to check to see if that's something that you might need. Last of the checklist items is transition. This is a huge piece and one that needs a lot of attention. And so we need to really consider like what is life going to look like after they leave public education. What is that going to look like? What do the families think it's going to look like? What does the individual think it's going to look like? This is something that requires a lot of planning and a lot of attention to make sure that there is a set plan or a set idea of a plan in place and that we are incorporating as many supports in the community and in the home as we possibly can. And to help with that. And I am going to share in the handout, I'm going to share there's a link called transition resources. These are a whole list of state, national, local resources that our transition team has compiled. I keep going back to that because it will change as things get added and some things taken away as those things change. All right. So what are we missing? Is there anything out of those 12, is there something else that we may not have covered that you may have seen out in the school districts that we need to address, that we need to add to that checklist. Is there any other areas that you see as a need? We only have a few more minutes so you guys keep thinking about it and if you think about something later, feel free to contact me and let me know. All right. And so I wanted to show on the Deafblind website, you'll go to the "resource," topical resources. There is a section specifically on proficient communicators. We're hoping to create a micro site for our proficient communicators to give them that dedication that they're needing as well. And so check back at another time and hopefully we can compile that together. And the last slide is, please, join our ListServ. You may have joined before for proficient communicators but since COVID there have been so many changes in the project and we would love to hear from you again. So please definitely, you know, go to that ListServ and sign up. The link will be on the handout as well.