Hey! I’m Jennifer Thomas. I’m a school-based speech speech-language pathologist in Georgia. Over the last 20 years (yikes!), I’ve worked in early intervention, private practice, and schools as an SLP and clinical consultant supporting individuals who need assistive technology to communicate. I LOVE AAC!
Implementing AAC at home, at school, and in the community can get messy. It’s hard because AAC implementation doesn’t happen at a little table in a cute therapy room while playing board games. It happens at home, at school, and in the community…where we never know what might happen next. It happens in the middle of a classroom full of students who all have individual needs. It happens at home, where every day is different, stressful, and full of surprises. It happens in the community, where we can’t control the number of people in line in front of us. And yet, to successfully communicate in all of these places, that’s where implementation and intervention have to happen.
I also have a family, a husband, three girls, and lots of pets. Work and play sort of all go together and get a little (a lot) complicated at times. So, I know that being passionate about work can get hard when managing a fun and active personal and family life. For families with children with disabilities, throw in work, play, and trying to implement therapy strategies in the middle of family routines.
My goal with this website is to help SLPs, special education teachers, and families who are implementing AAC. I hope to offer a framework to simplify AAC intervention to cultivate real, practical, and purposeful communication for people with communication disabilities that require AAC across the lifespan.
I think about a museum curator. The difference in a house in a reality tv show about hoarders and a museum is a CURATOR. A curator carefully selects only the best to keep and display, and in doing so, creates value and an environment that we can admire and learn about collections in museums and galleries. And so, as an SLP, teacher, or family member, there are a million messages that we could teach our AAC user to express using lots of vocabulary, teaching strategies, and data collection techniques. By systematically selecting the most critical messages to focus on, our AAC users can become independent communicators across all settings. By choosing the most effective teaching strategies, we can TEACH MORE by doing less.
Transitions are a given. Over the course of a lifespan of speech therapy that starts with early intervention, an AAC user can easily have 7 or 8 SLPs even if we don’t count SLPs who move, take maternity leave, or have schedule changes. AAC intervention stops and starts over and over again so that one step forward feels like it’s always followed by two steps back. I hope that by using simple forms to track messages and methods, parents will be able to ease the negative impacts of all these transitions by knowing what new providers and teachers need to know about their loved one’s communication and communication system.
So, that’s my mission. To simplify the process of implementing AAC at school, at home, and in the community by curating intervention, planning for transitions, and cultivating a lifetime of communication.