Communicating Partners: Community Education

Community Education

A major mission of the Communicating Partners Center is to disseminate the programs into a national network of parents and professionals. To do this, we have developed and tested a series of training sessions directed to the following topics:

Before Speech: practical approaches to preparing nonverbal children for social language
First words and conversations: practical approaches to social uses of language
Parent-child Communication: training in a developmentally effective model for communicating with preverbal and early verbal children
Communication programs in group and classroom settings
Parent communication
Down Syndrome: building communicative relationships
Autism and PDD: recovery through building communicative relationships
Communicating during behavior problem: the key to more civil and appropriate behavior
Parent group communication programs: a new culture for late talking children
Late talking children: a growing problem and homebound solutions
Communicative approaches to early literacy: a mutually productive approach

PROFESSIONAL WORKSHOPS:

The purpose of our training workshops is to help you establish and continue relationship based communication programs. Consequently, we prefer to include the following in each workshop of two or more days:

Lectures on over 25 years of clinical research findings
Live demonstration and coaching with a sample of children and adult partners
Practical training in use of assessment tools
Video demonstrations of the clinical model
Planning sessions with parents, teachers and therapists in adopting the program into their system
Demonstration of a series of manuals for implementing the program

COURSES AVAILABLE:

Beyond the workshop model, we have developed three course curricula for extensive training and for continuing education credits. Each course runs from 16-30 contact hours, and is designed to satisfy continuing education needs of teachers, therapists, daycare providers and others responsible for children learning to communicate.

Communication development for preverbal children.
Social and conversational development for early verbal children.
Parent Child communication with language learning children.

PARENT-TO-PARENT GROUPS

Another particular interest of ours is to assist parents in establishing parent-to-parent training and support groups. We believe that parents have much to offer each other in their task of helping children communicate. We have available a series of video training tapes and practical manuals that parents can use together to build relationships with their children. An added benefit has been to create a community of friends for children who are often more isolated than they need to be.

Upon request, we will provide you references of parents who have managed such groups.

ON-LINE DISCUSSION

We also encourage you to take part in our On-Line discussion group on the internet. Using your email program you will receive and can respond to messages from other parents and from Dr. MacDonald. Its free and its easy to sign up.

SCHOOL WIDE ADOPTION

Given the traditionally academic orientation of many education programs, we have developed programs for schools to adopt the Communicating Partners social and communicative curriculum as a necessary supplement to cognitive and academic programs. The CP curriculum has the following purposes:

to focus on training children to be social partners before they are students
to ensure that children can communicate the academic goals of the school
to provide practical tools for parents and teachers to share in a coordinated effort to socialize the children
to increase the interactive frequency, duration and variety of children who lack habitual social skills
to provide a social environment in the classroom that prepares children for social life in the world

For more information about training in your location or training sessions in Columbus, Ohio, please contact Dr. MacDonald

Information on the Website

More Materials Available from Communicating Partners

Workshops