TITLE: Mary Tellefson - Teaching Cane Process


MARY TELLEFSON:
I was working with a classroom, an intervener, and the teacher in the classroom
to start using a teaching cane process with two boys that were deafblind.
And so I worked with the intervener on using a cane herself so that she could model the use
of the cane, and have the student coactively participate at first
and then eventually role release the movement of the cane to the child.
So they were practicing this down a hallway, and so imagine there's the intervener who is--
looks like she is teaching the child how to use a cane, and down the hallway
from the direction comes another orientation mobility specialist
who wasn't aware of what we were doing or why.
And proceeds to grill the intervener about what does she think she's doing teaching cane skills
to a student when you have to be a certified orientation mobility specialist to teach that,
that she has really crossed the line.
And what I realized when that was reported to me was
that I did not give the intervener enough information that she could express
to somebody else what she was doing.
Now, she knew it internally, but she had never had to justify it or explain
to anybody else what she was doing and so in that moment she was totally caught off guard
and felt uncomfortable, and kind of babbled,
and just felt like she had been doing something wrong.
What that caused me to do is make sure that there was a better communication
about using strategies such as that where there's coactive participation with a cane,
so that prompted me to develop a guide that could be filled out that would explain the role
that the intervener was playing so that everybody would be aware of it.
In the case that an intervener still might not really be able to explain on the spot,
there would be a document that could be checked,
you know the second mobility instructor could have gone to a file and said, "Oh.
That's what this is all about."