TITLE: Chris Montgomery - Establishing a Bond

CHRIS MONTGOMERY:
Hi my name is Chris Montgomery and I
work at the Texas school for the blind
and visually impaired in Austin Texas
and I work in the outreach department
and I am a deafblind specialist and I've
been doing this job for about seven
years and before that I was a classroom
teacher here and I taught deafblind kids
in a self-contained classroom and I did
that for for a while too it's been
really nice to be able to contribute to
the intervener modules especially with
regards to interaction and bonding
for me this interaction and bonding is a
very important part if not the most
important part of working with deafblind
kids everything else flows from my bond
with my student so it's very important
to me as a teacher to work to establish
that bond or you might say a trusted
relationship when I think about my
moments in life where I really
experienced something that was just
super cool and I felt that kind of
happiness that you feel when something
is so great it was it was almost always
with another person another person who I
had a close relationship with and when I
really think about what made that
experience so awesome it was it was
because it was shared with that other
person so you might say it was a shared
experience and I think it's these
moments in time that are shared with
another person and they're not always
happy moments right but they not only
help us form our relationships but also
help us form our sense of self and if we
think about what allows us to form a
bond with another person one big thing
that always comes up is trust because
without trust there is no bond there's
no positive relationship
so what is it that allows us to develop
a sense of trust is it being predictable
is it being reliable is it being safe
it's probably all those things right and
so looking at interaction or how you
interact with another person and that
might just be a fancy way of saying
having a conversation or building again
that trusted relationship
there are certainly methods that we can
use when talking about interaction as it
pertains to a deafblind kid we will try
to break it down into detail in the
module but for shorthand right now again
for me some of the main words that come
to mind are those of predictability and
reliability and safety I think about an
experience that I had not too long ago
with one of my students named Ray and
Ray was in my classroom years ago and
you'll see some video of us doing some
things together in the modules and we
had a great relationship we had a good
trusted relationship built ray left my
class after a couple years and moved
back home and I didn't see ray for a
number of years and during my job and
outreach then we had a referral for me
to come see ray and when I got there he
was obviously a lot older he was sort of
a big guy now and all of his teachers
and his staff were kind of afraid of Ray
nobody had built that bond with him they
didn't really know how to interact or
how to talk to him and so ray had spent
quite a while just sort of sitting on a
couch in this classroom and he was
self-abusive and and just really not in
a good place one of the things that Ray
and I used to do is one of our little
interactions or conversations that we
used to have was we would say we would
greet each other in the morning and I'd
say
hugg and Ray would sign hug back to me
and then would give each other a big
bear hug well as I as I went into this
classroom and started to try to talk to
Ray a crowd had sort of gathered around
me and you know to kind of see what I
was going to do with this guy you know
because nobody else knew what to do and
as I was talking to Ray obviously he was
deafblind and and so we were talking to
each other
actually signing in each other's hands
and I did my normal greeting that we had
done years ago and I had signed hug to
him and then I had my hands out just
sort of you know waiting for him to say
something and one of the people that
were talking to me it was one of his
teachers I had turned my head to talk to
them and I heard this sort of crowd that
had gathered around us gasp and sort of
weird so I looked back at Ray and he was
signing hug and nobody there knew that
he could sign or really had any
expressive language and I think it was
really through that relationship and
through the bond that we developed that
he remembered that all those years later
and so it's things like this that I
think makes this interaction this bond
so important it's what everything else
works off of