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Meaningful Inclusion of Students with Significant Support Needs & Complex Communication Needs (CCN)

Date: 09/23/2025 Time: 4:00-5:00 Location: internet Type: Webinar
Price: $200/School Team Make a Payment

Description

This Community of Practice (CoP), facilitated by the Special Education Technology Center (SETC), brings together educators and related service providers committed to creating inclusive, affirming, and accessible learning experiences for students with significant support needs and complex communication needs (CCN). Through collaborative learning, reflection, and real-world application, participants will explore practical strategies, challenge deficit-based thinking, and co-create tools that elevate student voice and foster meaningful participation in general education settings.This series uses a “Road Trip” analogy to guide learning.

September – Understanding Your Road Map: Rooting Our Work in Inclusive Instruction. Focus: Building a shared vision, setting norms for the community of practice, naming beliefs and assumptions about inclusive education, establishing participant goals and values, mapping priority student needs, introducing the process we aim to trial and adapt, and reviewing AAC tools and strategies.

October – Check Point: When the Unexpected Happens (Dead Ends, Detours, and Roundabouts). Focus: Understanding team strengths and needs, recognizing differences in demographics, grade levels, and student complexity, identifying success and breakdown moments in AAC instruction and implementation, and modifying the process based on team needs.

November – How to Change a Flat Tire: Working Within an Imperfect Car. Focus: Addressing systemic barriers, sharing strategies across teams, identifying points of success and breakdown in AAC trials, and adapting implementation based on real challenges.

December – Tune-Up: 10-Point Inspection. Focus: Reviewing exposure and retrieval data, exploring meaningful ways to collect and interpret learning data, reflecting on student AAC trials, and refining team processes to support inclusive communication practices.

January – Centering Student Interests & Strengths: Focus on using student passions and strengths as entry points for engagement. Teams will discuss ways to capture and incorporate student interests into instruction and explore “All About Me” tools and interest inventories.

February – Literacy & Learning: Focus on making reading and writing accessible for students with significant needs. This session will review emergent literacy strategies, writing access tools, and how to support symbol-based learners in literacy tasks.

March – Navigating Challenging Moments Together: Focus on reframing behaviors as communication and learning challenges as access issues. Teams will be introduced to collaborative problem-solving strategies (e.g., using “can’t yet” instead of “won’t”) and explore supportive responses and environmental adjustments.

April – Growing Forward: Sustaining Inclusion: Focus on reflection and future planning. Teams will share a progress snapshot or impact story from the year and identify systems-level takeaways and next steps for sustaining inclusive practices.

Dates: 9/23/2025, 10/28/2025, 11/18/2025, 12/16/2025, 1/20/2026, 2/17/2026, 3/17/2026, 4/21/2026

Learning Objectives

  1. Advance Inclusive Mindsets and Beliefs:  Strengthen participant understanding of explicit instruction using AAC, build implementation skills to challenge assumptions and promote high expectations for all students.
  2. Enhance Instructional and Communication Strategies:  Equip participants with evidence-based tools and practices—including aided language input, universal supports, and collaborative planning models—that make academic content and classroom participation accessible for diverse learners.
  3. Foster Collaboration:  Build a professional learning community where educators, specialists, and paraeducators engage in co-learning, share implementation stories, and collaboratively problem-solve to sustain meaningful inclusion across school contexts.
  4. Capacity Building – Co-design and implement a process for meaningful inclusion for students with significant support needs and CCN.

Presenters

Brenda Del Monte, MA, SLP-CCC
Brenda Del Monte is a speech language pathologist and an assistive technology evaluator and facilitator. She worked as an SLP in Washington State public schools and is currently a private practitioner in Arizona, where she does AAC evaluations and trainings. Brenda has presented her knowledge at Closing the Gap and her collaborative research on accessing AAC at ATIA. Brenda Del Monte is a co-founder of Believe Beyond Ability, a non-profit organization that evaluates, determines, provides and trains those with multiple disabilities on assistive technology to increase independence. Brenda is also an author of the newly published book, “I See You In There,” a collection of stories from her 20+ years of experience working with children and adults with disabilities. She is currently a co-host of the Awe and Wonder Podcast hosted by the Special Ed Tech Center.

Michele Bishop

Michele Bishop, With over 30 years of dedicated experience in education and assistive technology, Michele has built a career and empowering students with complex needs beginning as a special education teacher Michele honed her skill in in creating inclusive learning environments, and adapting curriculum to meet the diverse needs of her students. Her passion for innovation led her to become an assistive technology practitioner where she specialized in augmentative and alternative communication(AAC), assistive technology (AT), power mobility, and curriculum modification.

Michele‘s experience lies in design designing and supporting personalized strategies that unlock potential and foster independence. Her unwavering commitment to collaboration and creativity, has made a profound impact on students, families and educators alike. Through her visionary approach Michele continue to pave the way for greater accessibility and success in education.

Contact

Email Sue Wright at the SETC office

This series has a pre-registration process. Please follow the link below.

Clock hours for this webinar and others in this series are available from ESD105 for a small fee. The following Professional Development Enroller link provides more information about clock hours: pending