Early Childhood education and the use of assistive technology are crucial to helping young students with disabilities succeed and gain skills at a very young age. Throughout my training as an educator, I have gained knowledge and experimented with different ways to use all types of assistive technology with the youngest population of students with special needs. I have also worked with students who have moderate to severe disabilities at the middle school age. Out of all the assistive technology I have used in my classroom, I have found the picture exchange communication system (PECS) to be the most successful program available for teaching students as young as two years old how to communicate, respond to, and request his or her wants and needs.
Using pictures to communicate does fall under the assistive technology category. There are six phases within the PECS program. Each phase is highly structured, and has to be taught a certain way in order for the child to graduate to the next phase. Phase one conditions a child to initiate handing an adult a picture in order to receive a preferred item. Phase two involves traveling with the picture to a person across a room to request an item. Phase three involves making a reliable choice between two to five pictures. In Phase four, the student creates sentences by placing the picture “I want” and a preferred item on a sentence strip to exchange. Phase five teaches a child how to respond to a question, and phase six teaches a child how to comment (i.e. “I see…”). The protocols and procedures for teaching PECS are crucial to eliciting child initiated and independent communication and picture discrimination without adult prompting.
In order to fully understand how the program works, I had to attend a three day training. I felt overwhelmed by the amount of information presented in the training , but very excited to begin using PECS in my classroom because I saw how the program benefits students through examples at the training. Incorporating PECS into my classroom has been quite a challenge. It is challenging to always have two people available for prompting and following the protocols for PECS. Having the exact pictures ready for each activity is also challenging, and PECS does take time to compile.
The most challenging part of using the PECS program in the classroom is the teacher cannot be completely ready for the students on day one of the school year. The first step to incorporating the program into the classroom is to learn each students likes and dislikes and behavior patterns. This can be very frustrating as a teacher. After learning about the students, planning, preparation, and collaboration need to take place. In many cases, collaboration is not necessarily needed to incorporate the PECS program, but is highly recommended. I am fortunate to have a great speech therapist working with my students who is an expert with on PECS. As a team, we created a PECS book for each student which stores the pictures he or she may need to communicate with adults and other children in the classroom.
Most of my students began in August on phase one of the PECS program, and the program was instantly rewarding. Many of the training sessions with the students are during snack since food is a highly preferred item. It was easy to teach the student to hand me a picture to receive an item without reaching for items or tantruming. My student who is non-verbal retrieved a picture of cereal from his communication book and brought the picture to me while I was sitting at my desk which gave me the chills. Within a few weeks, my students were making sentences with the picture for “I want” and the item he or she wanted for snack such as “pretzel.” At this time, my students have been using PECS for 6 months, and have made remarkable progress in using verbal words, increased articulation, and communicative intent. The PECS program has also helped lower problem behaviors in the classroom as students have a way to request an item without becoming frustrated and resorting to problem behaviors.
As the year continues, I continue to collaborate with my team and brainstorm on how to use PECS in all activities in the classroom. My students are beginning to create two picture sentences to comment or answer questions about the weather, calendar, and other circle time routines. For example, when I asked my student “What day is it today?” he created a sentence and exchanged the sentence strip to tell me “Today is Monday.” Every time my students communicate with me using picture exchange, I have chills and I am reminded how rewarding it is to use PECS in my classroom. The progress I have seen this year with my students is remarkable. I challenge you to try using PECS and see firsthand the magic of picture exchange. For more information on PECS, go to www.pecs.com.
