Staying Curious and Presuming Competence With Non-Speaking Learners

Gillian offers a version of the stance of curiosity that will guide our approaches with students who are non-speaking.  Our culture is so reliant on spoken communication that we can have implicit bias that influences our social behavior to under-estimate the capacity of those who communicate via different channels.  How can we change our mindset to presume the competence of non-speaking learners, while taking responsibility to adjust the pace, volume, and language that we use in our conversations without talking down?  Joelle adds ideas related to problem solving including attunement, educated guesses, and modeling.  Visual tools are brought up as a trusted go-to to augment communication.  As always an open, curious, and flexible approach always serves us well.  

Check out this amazing video on using Collaborative and Proactive Solutions with non-speaking learners!

Strategies for Autistic Students: CPS for Nonspeaking & Echolalic Communicators Stephanie & Sarah

Alliance against seclusion and restraint youtube channel 8/24/23https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sDOq2JPyb8E

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Gillian: https://www.instagram.com/clearconnectionpsychology/

Joelle: https://www.instagram.com/joelle.vanlent/

Transcript

Welcome back to Stance of Curiosity. I'm Gillian Boudreau. I'm Joelle vanLent. Hi, everyone. It's so nice to be back today. So today I have brought a topic, Joelle, that I wanted to run by you. So I have the privilege, as you do too, of doing a lot of consulting and presenting with schools all over. And the model that I tend to present is very similar to that presented by this podcast, Surprise Surprise, which is basically about How do we as adults keep our survival brain in check so that we can maintain a stance of curiosity and collaboration when we're working with kids? I also am a pretty like chatty gal. And so a lot of my go-to strategies are verbal in nature, right? Might involve like speaking or reading or writing.

And especially when I talk about things like Ross Green's Collaborative and Proactive Solutions, right? Where it's sort of like, what if we sit down with a kid and you as an adult sort of, you know, offer empathy to where the kid's coming from and sort of share your adult concerns and then invite, you know, student concerns and we can figure this out together, right? All that is so, so wordy. And so over the last, particularly over the past year of presenting, I've been really inspired by some groups I've worked with who have said, 'Wow, how though can we apply any of this with non-speaking kids, right? So maybe kids who are using assistive tech or kids who just may have different types of multimodal communication.

And it's been an interesting challenge for me to think about because while I have worked with many non-speaking kids in my travels, the majority have actually been speaking kids. And, and I wonder if a little bit, those kids in those cases gravitate to me because I actually do rely a lot on sort of spoken word and words in general and how I get through stuff. So it's been actually, it's felt like a very helpful, like check a little bit on my typical style and a reminder that this is a way that I could really work to make the model a lot broader and a lot more inclusive. So over the past few months, I've been trying to think more deeply about what is it that I do do when I'm with a non-speaking kid?

And also, what do our many brilliant colleagues have to say about this? So I thought I would share a little bit about what I've been thinking about here, but also really, I'm so curious your thoughts on this as well. And if it's kind of a new realm for you too, or something that you've been thinking about already. Yeah, that's so cool. I think the same thing. I think I often am working with people who are verbal to whatever degree their developmental level is. And when asked to think about the nonverbal strategies, it always seems to me like a healthy challenge because generally speaking, we talk too much. To people who are stressed or disengaged or overwhelmed. And we can use all of the strategies that we have around attunement and nonverbal language.

We should be using those more anyway. Ooh, yes. Because even the most verbally articulate person loses that capacity when they are overwhelmed. Yes. Yeah. And also it becomes impossible to take in a lot of verbal information, you know, when anyone, but especially a kid is, you know, flooded or overwhelmed. So yeah, it actually is a really good, it's been really helpful to get me to walk or I guess walk my own talk because I do so much of coaching other adults to limit. kind of their verbal material when they can tell that the person in front of them is stressed, but it's actually not something I'm super good at because I am, I talk way too much and I'm super verbose person. So yeah. Yeah. Okay.

So my first thought, you know, if I think about just experientially, right, what do I try to do when I'm in front of you know, a non-speaking person or, you know, somebody who's using assistive technology or something like that, is I really try to focus on presuming competence. One thing that I think can happen a lot is that in our society, if someone is not speaking in a way that we would expect them to, we tend to assume that they are not smart, or that the level of production of spoken material is a direct reflection of the level of production of like thoughts and ideas. So one thing that I have noticed and I have coached adults through in my travels is that if we're dealing with a person who doesn't feel to us like,

let's say, you know, like a, an, you know, I guess who doesn't feel who might feel to us like a baby, for example, if their level of verbal production is low, I think it can be easy to, for one, go into a higher kind of baby talk register. Right. I've, I've heard people get a little bit louder and a little bit more sing-song when they're communicating with non-speaking individuals. That can pretty quickly read kind of patronizing, even if that's not the intention. Right. And then I have also noticed how easy it can be for adults to, you know, sort of gloss over important information, perhaps even talk about the person in front of them as if they can't hear. Right. Generally miss opportunities to include.

this person in the experience right just like any other competent peer because it can be so easy easy to get tricked by a lack of verbal production again into thinking that into basically thinking that oh am i dealing with sort of a baby right who who doesn't have verbal processing or like spoken word processing and that's you know i think a really dangerous game yeah i have I've watched speech language pathologists in my career who are one of the many brilliant people that we get to collaborate with as psychologists. SLPs are just so great. And I think they are probably the profession that gets, maybe, I'm assuming they might get. actual coaching teaching in this in SLP school because I got nothing about this in psychology school.

But I consistently see them model for me something like I ask them a question when the student is in the room and they will say, 'I'm going to talk to Joelle about you for a minute and I'm going to answer some questions that she has' and then just turn and talk to me. And it's just such a remarkable thing. moment of respect and I know that you're here, um, and I'm, and this is what we're doing, yeah. And then absolutely what you're saying, the pace of your speech, the volume of your speech, the tone, it's like rate, rhythm, you know, all all of those basic speech things like that should remain consistent to what it typically would be, yes. And we should be trying to think about less is more with all the people that we're working with.

I when you were talking, I was thinking about how in the absolute flip of this doing cognitive testing for so many years, like 30 years, I've been doing cognitive testing. One of the things I've learned just from experience is that we seem to have a bias in our culture at whatever your verbal ability is, your capacity in all other realms. We just generalize it out. Oh, yeah. So it's like there are people who are their verbal abilities are average or above, but maybe they have a real struggle with processing or, you know, working memory, different things like that. And then we assume like, well, they're capable. So they're just refusing tasks that they're capable of because we have just taken their verbal abilities, which is the most obvious to us.

And our culture is so language-based and you just generalize that out. And so as much as I have an ambivalent relationship with IQ scores. And the whole idea of the social construct of intelligence. I do think that having those four indices and showing varied abilities on one measure in one moment in time shows you that, yes, the verbal abilities are as we measured them strong, but other abilities don't match that. And it can be really helpful in terms of thinking about accommodations. Now you're talking about the reverse, which is where. Or the same situation I guess where like somebody does not have verbal language ability and so we just assume everything else is like that is equally low oh yes okay so it makes me think about the whole premise of this podcast right which I guess a stance of curiosity is a step away from assumption right and so yeah it's like how easily does our culture make assumptions how how easily right is it to take a person's verbal ability

and use that as a shorthand for what you think their sort of global ability is. So the risk, for example, with, I see this with a lot of neurodivergent kids who I work with. So what you're describing is, what if there is a super verbose and eloquent kid who based on their verbal production we would assume that they should actually skip 15 grades and go to college. And we would expect them to have also that level of, you know, emotion regulation, processing speed, all those things. We're then going to experience that kid as really withholding or defiant when, in fact, they may take a long time to process something or they may indeed, you know, have emotion regulation that is at, let's say, a younger.

You know, that seems to be younger than their verbal production would identify, right? So if we assume that somebody is, you know, again, ready for college, even though they're eight, just because they're super eloquent, right? That's going to cause problems based on expecting an unreasonable amount of that kid. On the other hand, right? If somebody is non-speaking, the tendency is going to be to assume that it's because they are not having or producing any thoughts. So when I am working with a non-speaking person, I sort of try to get into a mental set. And yeah, I'm not an SLP, right? So I wasn't trained in this. This is sort of a workaround that I use. And I'm going to share the workaround because I think it may be useful, but I'm a little bit worried that it also may be wrong in some way.

So you can let me know if there's a problem with this, which there might be. If I'm working with a non-speaking person, I try to imagine that this is the smartest person I know and they have laryngitis. And I try to adopt sort of the vocal tone, right? Or the non-hierarchical conversation or just the level of easy respect that would come naturally to me if it was like, let's say, I know this is a peer. I know that this person is creating a lot of thoughts. And I know that, you know, I understand what's behind the lack of vocal production today. And I find that that stance can put me in a frame sort of not to go into that more shrill patronizing tone, right?

Not to assume that this person is, you know, lacking in thoughts, feelings, or ideation and sort of go from there. It sounds great. I mean, I think the, so the risk of that is that you might say something that the person doesn't quite understand, but they will feel as though you were respecting their intelligence, potential chronological age, you know, whatever it may be. Yeah. The risk in the other way is that they feel patronized by you. And so I would rather risk. Because we're obviously going to rely less on verbal language in this scenario anyway. Yeah. But when we are speaking, you're talking about speaking in a way where we are recognizing our implicit bias and having a clear strategy to override that. Yes. So that our interaction, it doesn't risk patronizing. Yeah. And maybe starting from a position of curiosity only. Hi, listeners. We have a visitor from my kiddo. Yeah. I'm in the middle of recording. Can I come see in a little bit? Okay. Now I'm going to stand up and close the door.

Okay. Listeners, so adorable that he wanted to share his exciting accomplishment with you. He did. That was so sweet. Listeners, we've had a kiddo home for quite a little bit here. We had a flu and then some secondary infections. Oh, you and everybody else in Vermont. That's for sure. I think everyone else in the nation. This has been a really rough winter for that so far. Okay. All right. So yes. Oh, I guess. Yeah. I guess the other piece too is maybe airing on this, you know, certainly using the vocal tone and starting from a place of like, you know, this is somebody who is likely going to understand way more than they can produce. And then also, you know, keeping our eyes and ears open, right?

Staying attuned so that we can see those moments where it might seem as though we need to change, you know, our level or type of language, right? Or, you know, maybe move to, you know, a picture-based form of communication. Just staying curious, I guess. And also, you don't want to lose your, you don't want to leave your personality or your like style of social interaction at the door. Right. So it's like, I'm going to bring that into the interaction. So if something funny happens, I always laugh when something funny happens and I love to joke around. So a lot of the time when I'm interviewing kids or doing assessments with kids, I am laughing they're so funny, and um, so if something funny happens, I'm gonna laugh and and I'm gonna remain open and curious about what's gonna happen, and um, if I'm awkward then I'm gonna I usually laugh at myself a lot too.

So like, I want to be a human in the room who doesn't become sterile, right? Yes, yes. Right. I mean, some of the time, you know, some of the stance on curiosity and authentic connection and respect is staying loose to some degree. And I think for non-speakers, sometimes people can probably get so unfairly stressed out by that. Right. Oh, what am I going to do with this non-speaking kid? Right. That I imagine non-speaking kids do experience a lot of adults who have gone into maybe a bit more of a rigid or a formal framework, just probably out of trying to do the right thing, right? But the more we kind of can stay loose and human, I think the more that can really communicate genuine respect and connection too.

And like Gillian, if you and I, who are clinical psychologists that have dedicated a good amount of our professional time to working with people who are neurodivergent and autistic, if we feel a little bit insecure, interacting with someone who is nonverbal, because that is not something that we've had a lot of experience with or as much experience with or as much formal training. If we feel that way, imagine if you are that person, how many people do you interact with that feel confident in their ability to interact with you? Not many. So few. I think we just really need to be like aware of like, which is such good practice anyway, right? It's like, relax your body, be open. If you don't know how to do something, I'm just going to say, I'm going to do what I would always do.

I don't know how to do this. You know, I don't know, show me how this works, or I don't think I did that right. Or just be willing to be, to learn and be in the interaction. And I know I have skills that I can bring, but I'm not as clear what they are. As I might be in another situation. I was like, I think I can be, I think this can go well and I could be helpful, but I'm not actually sure what I'm going to be able to offer because I don't feel like I have a lot of foundational clinical background in this, but I'm very willing to be here. And, and I might learn more than I offer, which happens a lot. Me too. All the time.

But I'm, yeah, I just think like that would be a real, that would be. A real bummer if most of the people that you interact with didn't feel confident interacting with you. Yeah. You might feel like you were scaring everyone or you might feel like a burden or you might just feel kind of like, if I were to go super shrinky, you might start to feel kind of hard to love if just every person you interact with seems like very stilted and like effortful in their interactions with you. Right. And so much of our communication is nonverbal anyway. Right. That's the thing. Like this obsession, this obsession with words in our culture is like, you know, I mean, we're at the end of the day, we're all really just mammals.

I mean, so much of what we're getting from each other is nonverbal and through the magic of like emotion contagion, whether we realize it or not, like we're, we're reading each other and attuning with each other far beyond the verbal realm. So maybe some of it is also just trusting that more when we're in the presence of a non-speaker. Right. So like, you know, like when you're going through a time that feels a little bit overwhelming and you're supposed to like remind yourself what's your core value. Yeah. So the, you know, it's, it's still January. It feels like it's been January 2025 forever. It has been January 2025 since last April. Yeah. So we're still in January, and I am not enjoying this month at all. No, me neither.

And, um, I'm just every day like, what is my core value? And it's just that people would feel heard or that they would feel like I connected with them. And so I might not be able to offer the answer. But, you know, saying a core value is that someone would feel heard. Interacting with someone who does not use verbal language means that they will feel like I paid attention and that I noticed subtleties that I that I. tried with openness to learn their communication system and fumbled my way through it. And that I showed up and that, so like having the answer or knowing being a master in something before we do it, like, that's just not, I don't think that's what that person expects or wants or needs. Yeah.

I bet you're right. Yeah. I wanted to talk a little bit about sort of collaborating on problem solving with kids, especially because I think that's really, it's when I teach about that, that that's when this question about, you know, working with non-speaking kids comes up the most saliently. So I also maybe wanted to just kind of talk us through the nuts and bolts of some of that. So, you know, what we're really talking about here is, you know, let's say that You know, for example, let's say that a younger child is having a really big emotional outburst and is struggling to follow directions when they transition into the classroom in the morning, right? So, you know, whether we are in, whether we're able to get verbal confirmation back from this kid about what's going on for them or not, you know, already in the stance that we are putting forth.

the adult is trying to make some respectful guesses, right? So we're not saying, oh, this kid is just trying to get their way or, oh, this kid just wants to be disruptive, right? Of course, we're already thinking, this kid wouldn't be acting this way for no reason, right? What are some things that might be hard about transitioning into the classroom that might be bringing about these behaviors? So one thing we can do, whether or not we're in the presence of somebody who's using spoken verbal language, is to continue to make our guesses really respectful, assuming positive intent, and assuming that everybody is doing their best. And so if behavior is outside of what we would hope for, there must be a reason for that.

If a kid were able to confirm back with verbal language, we might say to them, 'Hey, it seems like the transition into the classroom is really hard for you. I wonder if you could tell me more about that so I can better help you here.' But I'm thinking that if a kid does not have access to verbal language, we can still use our verbal language in many cases and make just make those start making risks, start making guesses, but naming that they are guesses so that we are not taking away that person's autonomy. Right. So instead I might say, you know, let's say somebody has an assistive tech device where maybe they have access to, you know, yeses and nos, or maybe even more than that.

You know, I might say, oh my gosh, mornings have been really hard. Can I tell you some guesses I've thought of about what might be hard for you, but I could be wrong, right? And then I might wait for consent, whether it's a nod or whether it's a yes on the device or something like that. And then I might sort of come up with three. And so I might be like, okay, I have one guess that. it's really, really hard to say goodbye to your parents and that you're feeling worried about being away from them or you're, or you're missing them. Right. We could see about, you know, a yes or no, you know, if it is, if it is a no, right. I could go to something else.

Like, I'm also wondering if I noticed this started happening about a week ago. I'm, I'm wondering if maybe there's something new about the classroom that we haven't realized. But I wonder if something new is bothering you about the classroom. Maybe something looks different or smells different, right? Maybe we could get a yes or no on that. If it's still no, my third guess might be, I'm also wondering if maybe something isn't quite feeling right with somebody in the classroom, whether it's a teacher or a friend. And maybe something went on that we haven't fixed yet. That it feels hard to be here, right? So those would be my like three classic guesses for why a kid would struggle to transition in. If they can say yes or no, right?

Then just in the moment, we're already following a protocol pretty similar to the collaborative approach we would usually do, right? We're just sort of using our spoken language to do a lot of it, right? Providing a menu of guesses for what might be on the other person's mind. And as long as we're confident that they do have a way to really tell us whether we're off and making it very clear verbally that we certainly may indeed be off because these are just guesses, and the other person is still an expert on their experience. If that kind of communication won't work, I think there could also be a way to sort of use multimodal communication or kind of watch how a person quote unquote votes with their feet. Right.

So in this same example, if we may not be able to get into a back and forth with someone about what the concern might be, you know, we could try, we could assume that let's say it is about separation from the parent. And we could try having the parent come in to the classroom, right, for a few minutes. And we could just see if the kid still seems to be having a hard time. If not. Then, okay, it seems like now we know what the problem is and let's try to figure out some solutions for it. But let's say parent is still there. And let's say kid is still having a really hard time. Then we might go to hypothesis too, right?

We might try to be good detectives and, you know, try to think to ourselves, is there anything new in the environment? Like what might've changed from a week ago? I was watching a video on this. That we can actually link in the show notes, strategies for autistic students, CPS for non-speaking and echolalic communicators. That's a YouTube video we'll link. And this was sort of a situation that they were talking about. And they said that, you know, they tried the parent thing. Kids still had a really hard time. The next thing they noticed was that there was a vacuum that was a new addition to the space. And it turned out that if they took the vacuum out of there, that did solve the transition issue problem, right? Because the vacuum was scary.

I would say if, okay, let's say we removed the vacuum and we still had the issue, right? Then we might go to questions about something kind of social and relational going on in the classroom. And perhaps we could try something like just a whole group lesson on, you know, making sure we're all, you know, connected, you know, like, you know, talking through if there's anything challenging that's happened in our class recently that we need to work through. Right? Kids are often beautifully forthcoming about that kind of thing. What do you think of those kinds of ideas? Yeah, I think it's great. I think basically we're being very transparent about our problem-solving path and we're not really expecting anything. But if we do get some confirmation or information back then that's sort of bonus it's like I notice it's hard the problem is that it's hard to come in and so I'm guessing three things it would to whatever degree would be appropriate I would love to make this visual like I might take a dry erase board and like I might write at the top it's hard to come in or I might draw a picture of a stick figure coming in and then I might say like number one I wonder if it's hard to say goodbye I might like picture of like two people waving goodbye. Number two, there might be something new in the room, question mark new. And number three, there might be a problem with a friend. So then you wait.

And like, if they could, if there's a way that they can communicate, if they have feedback about that, great. If not, and you say, great, I'm going to, I'm going to try number one. So then the next day, mom came in. That seemed better, worse, the same, right? Like you're going to do the optometrist approach. Better, worse, the same. That seemed better. Okay, we're going to do that again. That seemed the same. So we're moving on to number two. I'm going to look around the room and be a detective. See if I can see anything new. I'm going to ask other students if they see anything new. We're going to pull that out. Did that, was that better, worse, the same? So basically you're, you're making the whole thing very outwardly transparent visual and you're tracking.

And even if you do things that are annoying, because maybe you took something out that they liked, or maybe they didn't want their mom to come in the classroom, then they understand your intention and what you're trying to do and that you're going to move through this. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, I really liked that adage, you know, nothing about me without me. As far as, you know, including all kids as much as possible in their programming. And this is a way to do that, right? Just because we're not receiving spoken verbal material from a kid, it doesn't mean that we can't really keep them looped in and let them know each step of the way what we're doing and why we're doing it. Right.

And there's a lot of times where maybe you have a three-year-old or maybe you have a older child who just becomes non-communicative. Like, what do you need right now? How can I help? And there's nothing. So I get a lot of questions around, what do you do if the child just doesn't respond? Even if they at other times have verbal language ability, then I just say like, for some reason, we feel like the child has to learn how to directly express what they need. And of course, eventually that's the goal. But what you're doing right now is you're modeling. So it's like, what do you need? How can I help? No response. Okay, I'm going to guess. It looks to me like you need more time because you're lying on the floor.

So your body is telling me that you didn't want to move. So you were standing, now you're lying on the floor. So I think that you need more time. So I'm going to set a timer and I'm going to wait by the door and do some deep breaths. And then we'll. go together. We'll see if that works. So you're just talking out loud, broadcasting your thoughts. You know, you're doing that sort of like attunement, educated guess, and let's try it out. Oh, you did not meet me at the door. Attunement educated guess, let's try it out. I think that's really key. Yeah. And you're not letting, you're not letting the whole problem-solving process derail just because the student won't identify or can't identify.

What's wrong, yes, that's right, so we actually do it's funny, I have been feeling a lot of insecurity in this episode because I don't feel like this is an area where I'm super confident, but this helps me remember that we're practicing this all the time, because anyone of us can lose you know, lose access to verbal production when we're upset enough, and you and I work with extremely upset people all of the time. And the answer is attunement, educated guests. Try it out. Worst thing that's going to happen is you're going to get somebody water that wasn't thirsty. Right. Or you're going to give somebody more time when they didn't really need more time. Like all the things that we're offering are supportive. Right. And have few side effects, really. Right.

Right. I love that. Yeah. Yeah. So also, yeah, stay loose, believe in yourself and believe in the brilliance and humanity of the person in front of you, even if they're not deluging you with spoken words. Yeah. And I think your key points at the beginning, I would love to think about like, as you're going into that situation, it's almost like you want to shift your body posture, you know, think about how you're going to speak and, and what you're going to pay attention to. Like you, you want to make those shifts before you walk in. Yeah. You want to recognize that implicit bias is going to make you start acting as if you're speaking to an eight month, 18 month old and do everything in your power, um, to not do that.

Right. Great. All right. Well, awesome. We, I learned something today. This was great. I hope that the listeners did as well. I feel more confident next time I am asked to, or have the opportunity to have such an interaction. Yeah. I have tricks now. You know, I'm excited. I think listeners, this might be the season where we start having some guests and maybe a good guest for us one day would be an SLP who can apply their clinical training to this in a way that we don't have. Yeah. That's a great idea. Cool. For sure. Awesome. Great chatting with you as always, Joelle. You too. Hang in there, everybody. Hang in there, everybody. We'll chat with you next time on Stance of Curiosity.

Thank you for listening to another episode of Stance of Curiosity.

Listeners should always consult with a qualified mental health professional whenever needed for specific concerns or questions related to their personal situation. Stance of Curiosity is produced by Gillian Boudreau and Joelle vanLent. Our cover art is by Aaron Lanou, and our music is upbeat indie folk by Twin Music. See you next time.