I was pretty shy as a child and one of the banes of my existence (if a child can have a bane) was selling Girl Scout cookies…really selling anything door-to-door…even trick-or-treating was hard for me.  I guess my bane extended to any situation in which I had to meet and talk to people I didn’t know.  My brother was the same way as a little boy.  I remember my mom having to force him to order food for himself at fast food restaurants and ask questions of adults at events.  She forced us to do these things because she knew that these were skills we needed to have to be independent. These types of interactions would be part of our adult lives and we needed to have both the confidence and the skills to carry them out.

Guess what?!  We failed sometimes.  We stumbled over our words, said the wrong thing, forgot to say, “thank you” and got so flustered that we forgot what we had to do in the first place.  It was part of the learning experience and, so as not to keep you in suspense, we are both now quite capable in these types of situations.

When individuals have communication impairments, we sometimes hold off on introducing them to experiences such as these because we feel they don’t have the skills or will fail.  Then, the student is about to enter junior high, high school or even a transition program and we suddenly realize that these are skills they need.   Not only that but we also need to instill the confidence needed for these interactions.

Building confidence and skills in communication abilities are, more often than not, like charging a battery…better done by with a trickle charge that slowly builds the charge so that it is maintained over time rather than a jump start whose energy quickly fades.

Let us begin to build student’s skills and confidence in interacting with less familiar people early.

• Use opportunities in daily environments.  There are opportunities in school when there are visitors or even venturing into different parts of the school.  In the community, opportunities are all around – reception desks in offices, workers in restaurants, stores or clubs, less familiar people at social or religious gatherings.
• Don’t wait for a certain language level; use what the student has.  If they can touch one button to produce a message, program the whole message in.
• Use these types of interactions to teach communication strategies (e.g., judging when it is best to use a preprogrammed message because of time and when to produce a novel message, assessing how much information you must give to get your point across).

Take a “trickle charge” approach to building confidence and skills for life-long success.