Ruth Jones, our Speech and Language Therapist, has been taking the time to share some of her knowledge with the rest of The Forum School team.
Ruth has been focusing a lot on her professional development and enjoys learning about new interventions and considering how these might be supportive for young people at The Forum School. Ruth’s passion is developing functional communication skills, to enable young people to have their voice, and their choices heard. In response to this, she has recently conducted two beneficial workshops as follows.
Aided Language: The Education team attended a workshop to introduce a method to teaching language and symbols called ‘aided language stimulation’. This introduced why aided language is an approach that young people at The Forum will benefit from. The team had chance to explore how it feels to use the approach, and explore how we move forward as a team to introduce this at a universal level across the site.
The Forum School, 2018 and Beyond: This day offered the Education team time to stop and think, implementing reflective practice tools, such as a ‘SWOT analysis’, and ‘stop/start/keep doing’ to consider where each team succeeds with supporting good autism practice in relation to communication, and areas to improve on.
The day introduced the RCSLT 5 Good Communication Standards, and each team had chance to understand the standards and what ‘good communication support’ looks like in their settings.
Each class team and the equine team reviewed how they are currently meeting the standards, and made a pledge in relation to communication of something they are going to stop doing, keep doing and start doing. The team all agreed that communication is underpinning to everything that is done to support young people to succeed in learning and developing skills at The Forum School.
Feedback from each session suggests the training provided was both insightful and fun. The staff team cannot wait to put what they have learnt into best Autism practice.