In the teaching profession, I am always working with different types of learners of different ages, and strengths. One day when I walked into work I encountered a new student for me. They had been there for a while but the program was not working for them. So, a new program was developed and I became the lead teacher to work with this new student. They were kind, funny and a lot of fun to work with. However, they needed a lot of support. Some with their short memory, visual cues, some scaffolding of one skill to the next, and communication skills. They had learned that just saying “yes” would satisfy whomever they were talking to so they stopped being bothered and frustrated with not being able to communicate.
With this new program, we had a good start with visual and scaffolding supports for the content. However, it was up to me to get him to communicate beyond just “Yes” to everything. So I started by asking them what they did that morning (every time). They did not know how to respond so they would say “I don’t know” and try to move on. This kept happening every time. I tried many different ways to ask them what they had done before coming to our sessions. They did not know. Until one day I said ” hey so you woke up (I made a motion of a waking up stretch while I asked) and you….? And they said, “Played hockey.”
All it took was that one visual gesture of waking up for this student to have the question click. From then on whenever they were stuck on a question or in a conversation we did an action to help connect the dots for him. Now, they are communicating more and more every day. This is because we always challenged them to answer the why behind the question. They are not longer just “yes” man.