Advocating for your own needs is a skill that all students need to learn. There are times when the parent or the teacher will not always be there…and isn’t that goal anyway…to raise responsible children who then become responsible adults?

Let’s take a look at a few ideas for promoting self-advocacy about their devices for children and students with hearing loss.

Birth – 4yrs

• Practice letting your child put on their own devices
• Teach your child change their own batteries in their devices (yes, 3yr olds can do this)
• Teach your child the names of the parts of their equipment. Start with one or two parts and add more as they learn more (hearing aid, ear mold, cochlear implant, coil, processor, battery pack, battery door, ear hook, microphone, etc…)

PreK/Kinder

• Create bio sheet about your child for NEW TEACHERS. Here is a great example of one from AGBell.  You can download and modify to fit your child.
• Teach your child to answer questions about their equipment –
  • I need my hearing aids to hear soft sounds
  • I use my cochlear implants to hear others talking
  • These are my power ears. They help me hear soft sounds
  • My hearing aids make it easier to understand what people are saying
  • Some people use glasses to see better, I use hearing aids to hear better
  • My hearing aids help me hear loud sounds

Kinder – 3^rd Grade

• Help your student make a video/slide show/poster about themselves to share with their classmates. (This is great for the whole class to do…) Include things like:
  • My favorite foods are…
  • My favorite things to do at home are…
  • I have # of people in my family
  • Something special about me… (I wear hearing aids/cochlear implants)
• Have students draw pictures of the parts of their devices and label them. Labels can be pre-made by a parent/teacher, copied from a list, or written from memory as they are learned.

3^rd – 5^th Grade

• Role Play hard situations – “what do you do if…” games help students build a library of phrases and “what to say when…” in their memory bank.
  • Super Duper Inc. has THESE resources to help. Check out the Difficult Situations card deck and Difficult Situations App.
• Have the student show the teacher how to troubleshoot their own device. The parents and teachers are always still ultimately responsible for the equipment, but the allowing the student to take ownership of their device, will help them better advocate for their own learning needs

For more ideas about promoting self-advocacy in students with hearing loss check out these great resources:

• Success for Kids with Hearing Loss has a printable Guide to Self-Advocacy Skill Development created by Karen Anderson

• Hands and Voices suggests to teach students these phrases:
  • “I ‘hear’ better when I can see you talking.”
  • “I can explain to you what my hearing aid does for me.”

            As a child’s cognitive abilities mature, this changes to:

• “I need to sit closer if I want to get the most out of this.”
• “It helps me to tell the substitute that I need directions in writing.”
• “My cochlear implant processor isn’t working correctly. I need to get an appointment and let the interpreters know before 1st period.”
• “I really get the best scores in classes with CART (computer assisted Real Time Captioning); that’s what I want for my college lectures.”

• Audiology Online posted Fostering Self-Advocacy in Elementary-Aged Students with Hearing Loss

• A Day in Our Shoes posted 35 Measureable Self Advocacy and Self Determination goals for an IEP

Do you have a favorite “go to” resource for building self-advocacy skills for your student(s)? Please share your ideas with us…We’d love to hear from you!

About the Author

Carrie Norman

Facebook

Carrie is a licensed Speech-Language Pathologist and Listening and Spoken Language Specialist, Certified Auditory-Verbal Educator. Her experience spans infancy through high school in both clinical and educational settings.