Spelling to Communicate: What Educators Need to Know

For many nonverbal and minimally verbal students, speech is not the most reliable way to communicate. This does not mean these students lack understanding, ideas, or language. Spelling-based communication, using letter boards, keyboards, or AAC devices, offers a powerful and meaningful way for students to express themselves and fully participate in learning. As special educators, our job is to create an inclusive learning environment that meets the needs of our students. So how do we provide an accessible, enriching, and dignified environment for our nonverbal and unreliable speaking students? I had the opportunity to speak with Maggie from 615 Spellers, to give us educators a few tips to get us started on the right path.

The Discovery: A Book That Opened My Eyes

Before I dig in to Maggie's professional tips, I want to take the opportunity to tell you how I found myself diving into the world of spelling. As an educator, I try to keep up-to-date on current research and practices that pertain to my profession. One day I found myself tearfully turning the pages of the book The Reason I Jump: The Inner Voice of a Thirteen-Year-Old Boy with Autism. Its a quick but powerful read to get anyone started on the journey to a new and enlightened perspective. This was the beginning of my understanding of apraxia, spelling as a communication method, and a refreshed sense of purpose as an educator - one that not only challenged the way I teach nonverbal students, but how I support all of my students.

The Basics: Spelling as a Communication Method

Spelling to communicate is a method that allows nonverbal or minimally verbal individuals to express their thoughts by selecting letters to form words using letter boards. This approach recognizes that some people understand language and have ideas to share but experience motor planning or sensory challenges that make speech difficult. By providing an alternative pathway to language, spelling enables individuals to communicate complex ideas, participate in learning and social interactions, and advocate for themselves.

Speech Requires Complex Motor Planning: The Impact of Apraxia

Speech requires complex motor planning and coordination. For some students, apraxia makes spoken language difficult or inconsistent. Spelling allows students to bypass these challenges and access language through an alternative motor pathway. When students are given the opportunity to spell, educators often discover strong comprehension, thoughtful insights, and age-appropriate knowledge that may not be evident through speech alone.

I asked Maggie to explain this further: Can you explain apraxia to us and how it impacts non-speakers and unreliable speakers?

Maggie: "Difficulty with apraxia comes in the initiation of starting a motor process. It’s not that they don’t want to do something or that they can’t do it - they can’t INITIATE the action to get their body moving to do it. Praxis is our ability to learn a new movement. Apraxia is the breakdown of that process. The brain and body don’t always match. For autistic non-speakers, apraxia often affects the whole body, making purposeful movement very difficult. This isn’t always formally diagnosed, but it’s essential to understand when supporting communication. The brain knows what it wants to say, but the body doesn’t always follow, especially when someone is dysregulated, overwhelmed, or impulsive. This can block communication on tools like letterboards. The role of the communication partner is to help the body find rhythm so the brain’s message can come through. Non-speakers are intelligent and fully aware; the challenge lies in movement execution, not understanding. Because controlling the body takes immense practice, outsiders often misinterpret apraxia as lack of comprehension. In reality, it’s a motor control difficulty, not a cognitive one."

The Starting Point: Presuming Competence

We've all had those moments - the ones where we feel stuck and unsure of the next steps in supporting a student. So I asked Maggie: Can you list a few ways educators and service providers can better support non-speakers in their classrooms?

"Start with PRESUMING COMPETENCE! Speak to them with age-appropriate conversation and respect! Learn about and understand apraxia. Presuming competence involves choosing to adopt a specific belief about someone. It is the belief that a person has the capacity to think, learn, and understand even in the absence of tangible evidence that such is the case. It means assuming that they are capable of and want to learn and engage; they just need the right supports and coaching to help them succeed. “Infantilization harms the disabled by denying their dignity, intelligence, and adulthood; perpetuating inequality and devaluing their worth.” Hari Srinivason https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/giving-voice/202307/dignity-remains-elusive-for-many-disabled-people. If in doubt, teach them age and grade appropriate material. Let them listen to books on audible or educational podcasts - feed their brain with rich content. Even if you are in a SPED classroom, working on IEP goals that are well below the cognitive capabilities of these students, put on podcasts/audiobooks that will feed their brains and can oftentimes be regulating."

Updating our Understanding: Nonspeaking Doesn't Mean Non-Thinking

With an updated lens of presuming competence, I asked Maggie to give us a little more insight into the basic understanding of our non-speaking students. I asked her: What is something you wish educators better understood about non-speakers and unreliable speakers?

"Nonspeaking (or minimal speaking) does not mean non-thinking! All tests of intelligence, language, and cognitive ability are based on motor tasks (being able to speak, write, type, use a computer, point, etc) even for those with motor disorders (whole body apraxia) who cannot get their bodies to perform these motor tasks. Just because a person does not speak or scripts/loops does not mean they don’t understand what is being said or taught. Understanding whole body apraxia is KEY! ADOS Autism diagnosis is strictly based on observing the body - but when we are asking someone to do something on demand (move their bodies intentionally on demand) and they have a neuro-motor disability, you are setting them up for failure."

The Challenge of Assessment: Broadening Our Approach

Maggie's insight into the potential lack of tangible evidence of what our students are actually capable of had me thinking about the role of assessment in the classroom. Assessment provides information about what students know, understand, and are able to do. It helps us identify students’ strengths and learning needs, guide instructional planning, and monitor progress over time. It is a valuable tool. But, supporting our nonverbal and minimally speaking students may require us to be flexible in how much we rely on the data collected from such assessments. I asked Maggie: What should an educator do if they cannot assess if their student understands a concept that has been taught?

"When educators lack definitive data about a student's abilities, they should base decisions on assumptions that minimize harm to the student's potential for independent functioning as an adult. This principle is known as the Least Dangerous Assumption, which suggests that “in the absence of conclusive data, academic decisions should be based on assumptions that, if incorrect, would have the least dangerous effect on the student.” (Donnellan, 1984). The least dangerous assumption in the case of non/minimal/unreliable speakers is to PRESUME COMPETENCE because:

• Human intelligence is multi-faceted

• The way we measure intelligence is flawed

• Access to communication and high quality instruction is needed before we make conclusions on capability

• Presuming incompetence could be harmful

• If we are wrong, the consequences are not as harmful as the alternative"

The Nature of Apraxia: Consistently Inconsistent

Speaking of assessments and our challenges to determine what our non-verbal and minimally speaking students are capable of, a common phrase I keep running into while researching apraxia and spelling as a method of communication is "consistently inconsistent". This is an important concept to understand as we strive to support our nonverbal students. I asked Maggie: Can you explain the “consistently inconsistent” nature of apraxia, and how educators can use this understanding while working with non-speakers?

"The intensity of apraxia varies from person to person and often results in students having splintered skills. Oftentimes a student/speller can master a specific motor skill because it’s highly motivating to them or they have spent years in therapy practicing this skill. But then they can’t perform the same motor skills “on demand” to achieve another (less motivating) goal. A good example is when parents say “but my child can type on an iPad or navigate YouTube/Safari etc”... or they can utilize an AAC program to communicate. This is an automatic, memorized, muscle sequence that they have learned and myelinated over time that is also highly rewarding. But if you asked them to type an answer to a question or have a conversation they would not be able to type a response. Or a perfect example for my own son (who loves to eat and never skips a meal) is that one day he can independently get his lunch out of his backpack at lunchtime, open it up, eat it all, and put it away, without any prompting or coaching. Other days, even though he’s hungry, he may have trouble initiating his body to go get it out of his backpack and might need prompting or “motor coaching” to get his body moving and get his lunch out of his backpack to eat. It’s not that he wasn’t hungry that day, because once he got it out, he ate the whole thing. It was that his body wasn’t registering what his brain wanted or was telling him to do at that moment, on that day, so he didn’t get his lunch to eat. Apraxia is consistently inconsistent!"

Understanding Motor Loops: Intentional & Unintentional

Learning about apraxia and its inconsistent nature, I've been working on shifting my perspective to accept that what you see isn't always aligned with "a truth". When a student is unable to point to the color blue when asked to do so, it doesn't necessarily mean they do not know the color blue. Likewise, when we hear them repeat a phrase or see repetitive movements, we may be left with trying to decipher the intention behind it. So Maggie helped explain another area of potential confusion for us educators: Motor Loops

"Motor loops are repetitive movements (or words/sentences) that may or may not be intentional. It is something that has been practiced over and over resulting in a well-myelinated neural pathway between the brain and the body. It often starts with a feeling or an emotion, but can also (and is oftentimes) things that have been learned and practiced in other traditional therapies. An example of a motor loop for a non apraxic person would be if you are walking down the street and pass another person and you make eye contact and say “Hey, how are you?” then the other person typically responds with “Good, thanks!” and you keep on going. For an unreliable speaker, who’s often been taught “first, then” or rote phrases in other traditional therapies or at school, they may repeat phrases like “first spelling, then cake pop” or “white car, time for school” or “all done spelling” and often needs another person to close their loop (acknowledge what they are saying - confirming yes or no) before they can move on. Sometimes ignoring these loops can cause dysregulation for the person and be extremely frustrating, but other times loops can also be a strategy for regulation. It depends on the situation and closely observing what is going on with the student when these loops happen to determine which is the case. With Spellers method we never practice spelling the same words each session and use new lessons each time because we want to present novel words and work on purposeful movement to spell those words, not create loops spelling the same words over and over. The motion of pointing to the letters becomes automatic, but not the sequence of the letters being spelled."

Guiding Educators: Final Thoughts From Maggie

In speaking with Maggie and gaining insight into her professional understanding working as a spelling facilitator, I asked her: Is there anything else you would like to add to help guide educators when working with non-speakers or unreliable speakers?

"Beliefs are:

• Conclusions we form (or are taught) about ourselves, others, events or objects in the world

• They fuel feelings and actions

• We use our beliefs to make sense of the world around us and to keep us safe

• We often “canonize” many beliefs as truths, indisputable facts, and therefore just stop questioning them

• We collect evidence that supports our beliefs (self-fulfilling prophecy) = we see what we believe

• We choose, create, and discard beliefs however we see fit - beliefs are; therefore, make-beliefs - they are NOT facts

https://spellingthetea.substack.com/p/breaking-through-the-silence-a-practical "

Summing it Up: What I've Learned

Spelling-based communication is a process that requires repetitive practice and involves a multitude of exercises beyond pointing to a letter board. It requires professional guidance. I am not suggesting educators attempt to practice this with their students in the classroom. What I am recommending is for us to learn about apraxia, spelling, motor loops, and presuming competence. It expands our understanding of what is possible for our nonverbal and minimally speaking students. It shifts us away from always requiring assessment data to drive instruction and instead adopt a bit more of an exposure method. I understand there are constraints placed on educators - test scores, IEP goals, etc. I'm not saying we should throw it all out. But I am saying there is space to always believe in our students beyond what they might be able to perform. This helps encourage us to speak to our students in a dignified and age appropriate manner. It pushes us to create an environment where we are showing our students we see them and we know they are capable. As Maggie said, its the least harmful path forward. Shifting our perspective, even just a little, allows small changes to take place in the classroom - changes that not only support our students academically, but mentally and emotionally as well.