Are visual prompts for the children or are they really for the teachers?

[StarlightMcKenzie]

I'm not against visual prompts, not at all, but I do wonder if a good amount of their effectiveness is simply down to the fact that if a 1:1 or teacher takes the time to print out and laminate a sequence in order to help a child then they will make sure they go practise the sequence over and over.

Is it the practising that makes a difference or the visuals?

I mean, if you didn't have the visuals, but talked through the sequence/story board/visual timetable etc regularly instead, would it have the same effect. Is the visual prompt really just to prompt the teacher?

Not to interrupt the debate over semantics but returning to your earlier question:

"Is it the practising that makes a difference or the visuals?"

I'd say for DS2 it's a combination. The visuals themselves assist DS2 in understanding what it is they are working on - it helps with his comprehension. He simply cannot process things as well by hearing them as he can with visuals, especially when tired or upset. And the repetition helps it stick in his memory so he can learn.

I'm not worried too much that repetition or practise is a problem - lots of learning is that way. Whatever helps them access the information is, in my book, worthwhile for anyone that it helps.

This is interesting star, as I've spent a lot of the day sorting out visuals for ds2.

I used a few in the past when he was younger, now he want to be more independant from me, we are using them more, at his request.
( he's 12).
But here it's more little visual prompts that he can independantly use, until he remembers the way to do something without them.

Ds has a very low working memory, but once something has been done enough and it moves to long term we are on a winner.

Okay, so it looks like school visuals are generic and of variable use, but parent visuals are more tailored to the individual and of use?

As I said, I would not be without the Lingle clock or Moondog Calendar. Amazing.

Starlight, I still wonder whether those people teaching your son need to have the Linda Hodgson introduction rammed down their throat till they understand the principles (as opposed to just getting busy with the laminator). Or perhaps get them stuck in a Katmandu lift with moondog for a few hours while she trains them?

Hey Guess what? I am teaching a bullied child at our school to play piano as he can't go out to play at lunchtime. His mother feeling isolated and low because her son is the "naughty boy" and she has to run the gauntlet at school every day. She knows my story, so she realised that I'm not being lady bountiful, but rather I'm "Paying it forward", IYKWIM. DS2 shows no signs of being bullied yet but I figure that if I stick my neck out for child A, then it helps create a culture where maybe someone else will stick their neck out for DS2 if he ever becomes "Child B". Funny where SN life can take you isn't it?

School visuals are, I suppose, generic to some extent. However, our school also takes pictures of different activities/items/places, then prints them and laminates them (in small card form) to use for DS2 as well. So they are also tailored to DS2 somewhat. The cards they made for us at home are much more specific to what we use or need.

I also think that the use of visuals between school and home can be effective if they mirror each other, particularly for end goals.

We have had visuals in old school that just didn't work and were just a laminator task. In new school we are working together to build independance for ds, through mutual goals and mirroring school and home ways of doing things tailored for ds. Prompted by ds's needs and with a lot of imput from home.

If your school is using them properly, they should be useful for your child. Many other children in my DS's reception year were observed using my DS's specific and personal visual timetable, so the teacher started using a generic class one which was useful for all the children, including my DS. He needed extra symbols to timetable the minutiae of the day, like 'snack time' (on class timetable) had to include toilet, wash hands, line up, get snack, sit on carpet for him, at least initially.

He didn't need his worksheets converted into widget symbols because his reading was strong, but many children with reading and language problems could find them very useful and inclusive.

Re 'stimulus control' Star, it's a technical ABA term.
My kids do karate (fantastic, one of the best ways to keep them on track, working as a group, responding to instruction and so on. I'd recommend it highly to any child having difficulties following instruction) and each kid sits on a coloured dot on the floor.
Genius.

Yes indeed Lingle (nice to see you). Pay it forward. Quite a few people stuck their neck out for my child and i want to do the smae, which is why I post here, in the hope that some of what I learnt and the absolute nightmare I went through to get things right, will be of use to someone else.

(By the way, my dd's last words as I tucked her in tonight were 'Don't forget to pack the calendar')

Ooh, what are the Lingle Clock and Moondog Calendar? Any links please? Or could I find them by searching?

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/special_needs/895654-the-famous-Moondog-quot-calendar-quot-post-re-teaching-time

I had namechanged so became "backtolingle" for a while.

get the timetimer if you haven't already - just watch out for what the SALT said to me about not introducing visuals in relation to situations that are already stressful - do it for neutral situations.

the clock descriptions start at 17th Jan 2010.

wow, how time flies (except when you are trying to teach it to your child...)_

have nominated the thread for mumsnet classics so future generations can find the calendar stuff - that will confuse those looking for bumsex threads!

StarlightMcKenzie

My stress levels have abated, sometimes it can take days for this to happen.

Those who have Auditory Processing Disorder (APD) are not slow at processing auditory information they have a medical disability which prevents them from processing auditory information.
APD is about having problems processing all that you hear which includes speech. So those who have APD have problems following conversations, following verbal instructions, and can not use phonics.

APD is one of the many cognitive causes of the dyslexia symptom, and one of the many cognitive disorders that can contribute to the many issues on the autistic spectrum. The real issue is to ask what causes the dyslexic symptom, and what causes the issues on the wide autistic spectrum, which where international medical research has been for the last decade, having moved on from the remedial program based research of the 1990s.

So those who have APD need an alternative to auditory based information input, which includes both speech and its visual notation which we call text. Those who have APD have to develop alternative cognitive skills to compensate for our auditory disability, most prefer to develop their visual cognitive abilities and therefore think in pictures, and not words. So we need to have pictures of timetables, pictures to help us process all forms of information, as a substitute for words, and the visual notation of words.

zzzzz this is a public forum, so by implication comments made will supposedly apply to all unless a specific group or specific disability is defined at the start of a thread. So there are many on this forum whose children can benefit from a visual timetable, but you would appear top be advocating that no child should be able to access a visual timetable just because you feel your child does not benefit from its use. (rather self-centred)

lingle if I were trapped in a lift with moondog , i very much doubt she would come out alive going by her comments on this thread, acute stress can lead to extreme reactions to others.

zzzzz

Those who share my disability require visual aide of any sort to help overcome their disability, so any suggestion that anyone is wasting their time preparing , making or using visual aides comes across as discriminating against our disability.
The only people who can not benefit from visual aides are the blind, and some who have visual processing disabilities. Visual learning is part of how we all learn, and visual memory is a key part of our comprehension abilities.

I am, not looking for a fight, but only that all understand that for some, especially those who have APD, visual learning is sometimes the only way we can learn, so we need as many visual prompts as possible. Especially as those who have APD are not always able to process what has been said, and are not able to use a phonics or sound out words phonetically, even as adults.

sounds like things have been hard dolfrog. you sound as if you are being forced to fight a lot at the moment.

maybe start a new thread? everyone here is on your side, really they are.

Dolfrog I really don't think anyone was being discriminatory. I took the OP to mean that in the case of her own ds (who has ASD) visual prompts were effective as much because of the time spent slowly going through the sequence and repeating it verbally as the visual aid itself. I am certain it was not meant as a sweeping discarding of visual aids in general.

Lingle thank you for coming back and giving the link. Will definitely be giving the clock a go.

I think a great many of us use visual supports in every day life. Calendars, diaries, to-do lists, post-it notes etc, sticky labels on cupboards, colour-coded files, flashcards, reminders on PDA's etc.

Long before I ever became a Speech therapist, I always found organising and reorganising information in interesting visual ways (colour coding/different fonts etc/importing pics) was a good way of revising information I was trying to learn. I was very good at it - and excelled at remembering things academically. On the other hand, I was rubbish at using systems and visuals etc for organising and prioritising work. I never really did any of this, I relied on just memorising and remembering what needed to be done. Unfortunately, this never worked so well as a strategy for me and often led to me forgetting to do very important things, and suffering negative consequences for this.

I don't fully understand the resistance to using visuals in learning and even less so as an "aide de memoire" for organising oneself/structuring tasks. I still make the mistake of thinking I will remember things I have heard because of my good auditory memory, and don't write them down or use a visual system to back it up. This still causes problems for me. When it comes to using visuals to organise yourself or remember things that you are otherwise likely to forget, if it helps and you can use it independently, then it helps. I don't see it as "second best". If an NT adult can use all of these supports without stigma, then it concerns me when it is discounted out of hand because it's seen as lowering standards for kids with SN.

There are certain visual supports, like reminders of ways to do things, that may not be faded but it doesn't do much harm e.g think of the 6 steps of effective handwashing that you see in toilets - these are an ongoing reminder of steps that people tend to forget. A child's visual steps of handwashing could evolve, over time, to these more adult steps.
Would a behavioural programme be more effective in this instance? Well, yes, probably.. but it doesn't mean that following a visual schedule isn't going to get your hands clean iyswim. It also doesn't mean that your mind is going to waste away because you haven't learned this in a different way. I am not going to fade my diary or my Blackberry from my life, yet this isn't much of a problem.

My students with HFA are very capable of talking about which strategies help them remember and some students do tell us they favour visual formats of learning. Adding visual support to primarily auditory lesson content supports them in learning and remembering - they tell us this, they say it is easier to remember. I personally suspect that actually, adding visuals helps most students. School is a weird place to be. You have to spend five full hours a day just listening to people talking to you in a way in which, as an adult, you would have more ability to interact and take part. Sometimes a bit of visual input just varies things a bit, breaks it down into chunks, gives you something to hang on to. In and of itself, it may not be The Answer, but it is a support for people who are struggling in a wholly verbal environment.

I wasn't saying that supports shouldn't be faded if that's a feasible thing to do.

However, there are areas where we accept as adults that visuals are necessary - timetables, calendars etc -and we don't fade them. Some people can (and quickly don't refer to their timetable, say, or can remember an entire bus timetable so always know when the next bus is going) whereas other people need to check their diary before committing to anything. This is individual difference but we accept it without stigmatising people and saying that the person who has to look in their diary has "issues" or needs "support".

In terms of fading visual supports in SEN, the baby can be thrown out with the bathwater in this regard. It is not desirable to have visual supports that interfere with what you do and/or are not independent and I agree with moondog that they can be introduced in haphazard and erratic ways, however given that the range of what is meant by "visual supports" is so VAST, it seems unrealistic to me to say that all visual supports should be faded. Dolfrog's point is that we are all visual learners to an extent and if someone who has a condition finds that doing something in a particular way is helpful for them (and can tell you that and it doesn't interfere with the task they are carrying out), then there has to be care taken not to categorise that style of learning as somehow deficient because it is not the "majority way".

The problem I have with seeing visuals as "mere prompts" always is that it is an area of strength for many students and a massive aid to their learning. Generally, in good teaching, relying on an auditory mode alone is not fantastic anyway. I go into secondary classes where 90% of an hour's teaching consists of teacher talk. The reality of what that is like for a student who finds listening to teacher talk hard is depressing. I watch kids in lessons and I think that their opportunity for learning and language is literally wasting like muscles might if you were bedridden. The skills I want them to have are skills that enable them to find a way into the lesson and engage with it. If that involves them actively engaging in their lesson and planning it so that they have mindmapped the key concepts ahead of time or made themselves visual supports, I just can't see that as something that is anything other than active involvement in learning. Learning how to support your own learning is, in itself, a sophisticated skill that I want students to carry with them. What needs to be faded is adult involvement in suggesting and creating visuals with the young person taking over control of this process as they develop. Fading the visual itself is not something I see as a priority if the student doesn't.

working9while5

Well said

You haven't said anything wrong, and I hope you didn't feel I was saying you said anything wrong. I'm off work this week with acute tonsilitis so may also be misreading .

I suppose I'm just trying to highlight the differences I see between

a) visuals used as a prompt to behaviour/self regulation/activities of daily living (as in your toilet example) which are good to fade

b) visuals used to support organisation (calendars, to do lists etc) that are routine and necessary for most adults due to the memory load of the task etc and good to get into the habit and practice of using and maybe shouldn't be faded

and

c) visuals used as a support to deep learning because the visual route is easier for that specific person than the auditory (but where we still want the end goal to be independence in using that strategy for learning vs an adult doing it for them).

Definitely not saying anyone is wrong though!