The Student Communication Passport is a tool that serves multiple functions in our project.

The first job your passport may do for you is provide a place for you to pull together the results of an individual student’s Classroom Communication Goals Grid. As you complete the Goals Grid, you’ll use the Passport to summarize the findings of the Classroom Communication Goals Grid. In each block you’ll write your student’s current skill in meeting that particular goal, his “present level of performance.” How does your student greet others? “Jackson greets by making eye contact, vocalizing and inconsistently raising a hand to wave.” “Tyvion greets by going to the greetings page on his AAC app and selecting a series of statements to say, ‘Hi,’ ‘How are you,’ and ‘I’m fine.’” This can be used to explain the student communication to the IEP team, the family, outside professionals or, to send with the student as they move to a new teacher.

Some of our very clever teachers have made use of the Passport as a place to summarize the communication skills of all the students in the classroom. They print the Passport as a POSTER, with a writable surface, then hang it on the wall as a reminder of how each student communicates, so no communication attempt, however subtle, is missed by the team!

Finally, other teachers use the passport as a lesson planning tool. As they are developing a lesson, they consider what opportunities exist during the lesson to practice the different communication goals. For example, during an art activity, students can greet each other and the teacher as they sit down (Greetings), request needed art supplies (wants & needs), comment on their artwork or the activity (Opinions), practice communicating in short sentences, such as "I like purple." or "I want a marker." (Language Development) or discuss concepts around their artwork, such as shading light and dark (Academics).