DISCLAIMER: Raw, unedited transcript from webinar. No guarantees are made for the accuracy of the content. ---------- Please stand by for realtime transcript. >> [Captioner on Stand By]. >> Thank you all for coming. We will get started in just a few minutes. >> Good morning. It has been a long day already. It is afternoon. >> I will give it just a couple more minutes. Before we get started. >> My official clock says it is the top of the hour. This is Robbin Bull with NCDB. I want to get things started off. I want to begin by welcoming everybody. Thank you for coming today. I am going to just start with a few housekeeping items. As you all have probably realized, the phones are on mute to alleviate background noise. There will be a question-and-answer session at the end of the presentation. However, you are welcome to type questions into the chat pod throughout the presentation. And we will review those at the end of the webinar. This session is going to be recorded. So it will be archived for future viewing. If you want to review that or share the link with other people who are not able to make it to this presentation. And I am going to start the recording now. And when you here -- hear the announcement, I will turn it over to Linda McDowell, who will be doing the introduction to the presenters. Silvia Correa-Torres and Sandy Bowen. >> Good afternoon. This is Linda McDowell with NCDB. And I am very thankful that Sandy and Sylvia are with us today on this webinar. Several months ago, there were faculty members meeting together with some of us on NCDB staff as well as some state projects. We had hoped to put on a series of webinars to the most recent research findings in the field of deaf blindness. Addressing what we know, what we need to know and what we might need to do about more research in are first field. We had two webinars in December. And they are recorded and archived. So if you missed those and would like to go back and see them, one was December 1st and one was December 14th. Today, Sandy and Silvia will be speaking to us again about some current research. They will introduce that to you momentarily. I would like to introduce you to both Sandy and Silvia. They are at the University of Northern Colorado. Silvia is an associate professor. She is originally from Puerto Rico, where she received her undergraduate degree in special education, and provided services to individuals with visual impairment including those with deaf blindness -- deaf blindness. Doctor Silvia Correa-Torres has worked in the field of death and blindness and different capacities for over 20 years. She has taught a variety of cultures around the world. Doctor Sandy Bowen, her area of emphasis is in the education of students that are deaf or hard of hearing. Doctor Sandy Bowen has worked with children and youth who are deaf or hard of hearing and Utah, Texas, Arizona and Colorado for 23 years. Doctor Sandy Bowen received a PhD in language, literacy and culture from the University of Arizona and a Masters degree and bachelors degree in elementary adjust -- education. We welcome both Silvia and Sandy to our technical assistance network. And we hope we have some teachers in the field that have also joined us and other faculty. Welcome to the Adobe webinar. >> Thank you, Linda for that introduction. And Robin, for your help with the technology piece of the webinar. Welcome everybody. I see some of the participants, are some of my former students. That is always exciting to see. Welcome everybody. What we would like to share with you today is a study that Sandy and I conducted -- we wanted to know -- let me backtrack a little bit. Sandy and I are both in special education. I am in Colorado like Melinda mentioned. Sandy is in the area of deafness and hard of hearing. I am in the area of blindness. We both have interest in the deafblind population. As Linda mentioned, I have been working with individuals for a long time. It is part of my research here at the University of Northern Colorado. And part of my dissertation. Sandy and I were talking one day. Coming up with topics, ideas for different research that we would like to do within this area. And it occurred to us that we would really like to have -- a research addendum -- we wanted to have, see what the profile of the educators, presiding -- providing to students -- what that looks like. Who is providing services to students for deafblind. And learn about their needs. And what they feel like they would benefit from, when they went through the personal preparation program. Also, ask them about their suggestions for preparation programs. Many times, from what we know from the literature, many professionals who are with these students face a lot of challenges that they are not prepared for in personal preparation programs. So that was the main reason why we conducted this study appear we wanted to see what their needs were and also, like I said, what the suggestions were for the preparation programs. So that is what we will be presenting to you today. And we are going to be talking more in depth about all the questions we asked. So a couple of things before we start. The room where we are right now, the light is motion sensors. We are not moving and the light will go off. You might see us move to keep the light on. That is one. The second is that we kind of divide of the presentation so we are not taking turns every two seconds. Sandy will start with instructions and participants in all of that. And then I will take over. And then we will do the presentation together. >> Welcome everybody. We are happy to have you here. The one thing that Silvia mentioned is that we are in the same room but the background looks a little different. She is actually sitting to the left of me. I keep wanting to look at her instead of looking at the camera. So if you can forgive us if we make mistakes as we go along today. As Silvia mentioned, we were thinking about this issue and have been thinking about this for quite some time. We share districts in common were our students are housed for student teaching. We started realizing that our students never met or never talked or never knew each other. Never worked with the same students. We started asking them and each other, why is this happening? Why are they not meeting each other? So we started to find out. That is why we chose both groups of people. One of the things we thought about at that time was to look at the university program. At the time we started this, which was about two years ago, we were only able to identify ten programs that offered any coursework in deaf blindness. There might have been others. But this was our only search looking online, trying to find search engines to look for programs where, if there was a potential student, that we could find information and find a program that would prepare us. We were only able to identify ten programs. Since then, as you know, Linda McDowell -- Linda McDowell is -- and Elizabeth Bell are creating a document that outlines all of the University preparation programs. Even if there is not even a group of coursework. Even if it is just constantly in deaf blindness. So please contact them with your university information so we can get this updated. One thing we found is that it was difficult to find information. Even if there are people that are out there wanting to become educators in the field, they might not be able to find a place that adequately fits where they need to be. >> Now let's talk a little bit about this study. I will go through several slides right now but just look at some of the basic information about the study. And we will spend a little bit more time on that. For the participants, we were looking for teachers of the blind or visually impaired. Teachers of the deaf/hard of hearing and special education teachers -- especially those that worked with more specific support needs, working with students that are deafblind are we targeted those specific areas or those specific disciplines to ask the questions we wanted to know. We recruited -- we contacted professors and our field and asked them to send out to the listserv. We asked for a snowball effect where people could contact other people in the hopes of reaching as many people nationwide as we could. >> So we had a window of time. When the window closed, we had 254 responses. Which was excited -- exciting. We were excited about that number. But that number quickly dwindled because there was a lot of missing data. So we would have -- it was a survey online. We would have people that would start the survey and answer 3-number questions and then leave and never come back. Or we would have people answer, the easy questions which were drop-down menus. Then when they got to the more difficult questions were those where they had to think about the answers -- we will show you the rankings. Sometimes then they would leave. Then we had people that would sometimes skip questions, which is totally understandable if you don't want to answer a few questions. So we only ended up with 198. We were hoping for 200. The exciting part is, the data is very well represented. We had 28 states, participants from 28 states that responded to the survey. The survey itself started with demographic information, which we will go through. The second part was questions. The first set of questions -- were questions that identify educational practices. And educational needs for teaching students that are deafblind. This was the ranking system. I will go through that. The third part were open or -- open-ended questions where we asked them to identify issues. Silvia will go through that in a few more moments. >> The data analysis. We used descriptive statistics, means, standard deviations and percentages. And the demographic data, we through frequencies and percentages to give you a detailed description of what we have. We have quantitative and qualitative data we will share with you today. The qualitative data was open ended questions. This was analyzed through coding. It says it was analyzed by two researchers. In all honesty, we had a doctoral student helping us. Everything was coded by at least to -- two people but often three people. Making sure that all phases of the data is similar with what we were doing. And we used the constant comparison method. So through each stage, every time he came up with the category, we would make sure we were all in agreement. We would collapse ideas, expand ideas and look at the data again to compare to see if we were still finding the same ideas. So this is a very long process. We will share some of the very rich ideas that have come out of this part with you in a few minutes. We want you to be thinking about this today as we go through these questions. And thinking yourself about things that might have been important to you and how you might have answered the questions. And some of you may have been part of this. So you can see yourself represented as well. >> The next part I want to share with you is from the first part of the survey which is the demographic. I am sure none of you are surprised by this slide. 182 of the respond -- respondents were female. And only 16 were male. We still believe it is a representative sample because this is true of the field. We know we have many more female teachers than male teachers and all of special education. Even though the numbers seem high, we believe this is a representative sample. >> The second area is an ethnicity. Again, I'm sure none of you are surprised to see a 92% of the respondents were white, non-Hispanic. You can see on the slide, the black Americans is 2%. Hispanic Americans, 1.5%. Now Native Americans. Asian Americans were 2.5%. And others indicated dual ethnicity or something else that was not represented. Again, this is exactly what we would have expected to see based on what we know from the research about teachers and general. Specifically with education -- special education. We believe this is a very representative population of teachers. >> We asked about vision and hearing status. Two and a half% of respondents cited blind or visually impaired. And 6.5% of respondents identified as deaf or hard of hearing. We were pleased with this although it seems to be a small number. We believe we are capturing a wide variety of people that may be working in the field. >> The next slide shows the years of experience that the respondents have. There are a couple of things we want to emphasize on here. First of all, if you look at the first column from 0-5 years, only 11 respondents respondents. Only 198, were brand-new teachers to the field. The rest had been -- teachers of five or more years. Our range was zero years-42 years of experience, working in the field of deaf blindness come with the average teacher as 18.3 years. This is very exciting because we have been reading a lot of literature lately that says teachers are leaving the field and not staying in the field. So we thought about this and talked about this. So that if we looked at the first five years, that would be the critical time. Teachers that stay in the field for five years, have longevity -- it looks like from this data, that they will stay longer and be part of the educational experience. For some of these people, more than 35 years. We were excited to see the number of teachers. The other important part of this slide is that if you look later at the data presented, these are not brand-new teachers fresh out of school thing, I don't know how to do this. These are people that have many years of experience. Telling us what they still need and what they don't know and what they would like to know. What they would like to learn. And how they would like to get that information. >> The other side of that is that these are teachers that were in programs a long time ago. So there might be programs(indiscernible) but so many respondents have been teaching for so long that when they were in the personal preparation programs, the content was not there. The programs were not covering the population. >> The next slide again should not be surprising to most of you. This shows the level of education that the respondent has. As you can see, over 70% of the respondents have a Masters degree in some area. There were a few that were only working on a bachelors degree. A few that had a specialized degree. A few that had a PhD. And we did have a category called, other. And then we would expect that most of the teachers working with the students have a Masters degree in education. So this represents, quite easily, what we would have expected. >> The last area I want to show you is about the teaching environment. We had 28.2% for rural environment. 33.8% from urban environment. And 46.5% from suburban environment. Again, what that tells us is at the survey reached a lot of people out there. That we were able to get information about a large number of different parts of the United States. And still be able to look at the different things. You know sometimes, teachers in urban or suburban areas might have more access to opportunities for technology as opposed to rural areas. For us to have almost 30% of the respondents from rural areas, really helps us think we are capturing what the needs are across the entire country. >> I will take it over from here. Talking about the demographic. We asked participants to tell us the role with working with the students. Most of the participants in the study were teachers of the blind or visually impaired. Only 43% -- followed by teachers of deaf or hard of hearing. We had 7% of the students had both of these. Which is interesting. And we had 5% -- 5.1% of special education teachers. And 2.5% -- and then 19.7% of other. Under that category, we have audiologist, speech language, pathologist, people that had both. Or two or more. Administrators and also I think we had a few participants -- (indiscernible) kind of the profile of the participants. We also asked them to share with us the primary teaching license. Again, we had most of the teachers. It was 40% for blindness or visually impaired. Deaf or hard of hearing, 23.2%. Followed by special education -- we had special education teachers answering, for 26.3%. And then other licenses, we had general educators, duly certified, elementary school. These are some of the teaching licenses. We also asked them to tell us about their job responsibility. And the kind of services they provided to the students. Most of the participants were(indiscernible) teachers. 62.2 presenter followed by case managers. 32.3%. Then we had the other category. Then we had -- many different areas. We decided not to put all of them here. Because it was too long of a list. Many participants had more than one response. So they had more than one. The others that we had -- we had administrators. We had resource room teachers. Preschool teachers, elementary school teachers. We had a long list. I can show you the top two job responsibilities. To test the programs where they work and their area, the highest percentage was -- 50% were District programs followed by schools or centers that are specific for students that are blind or deaf. And then the regional programs. Followed by others -- with private contractors, residential schools, and a co-op. So we are showing the top four. So this one and the next one were very interesting to us. We have participants tell us if they felt that the University preparation program prepared them to work with students that are deaf are blind. The majority was 63.3% and they say no. That they did not feel the personal preparation program prepared them to work with students that are deaf are blind to remember that number. 63.3%. The question that followed this one, we asked them to tell us if those now that they are working, if they feel like the school District or whatever they are providing -- professional development if it is supporting them to meet the needs of students that are deafblind. And there is the numbers that's a yes or no. So professional development. We had 125 respondents or participants say, yes, that they are getting what they need to support these students(indiscernible) We thought that was interesting. >> I just want to make a quick comment. While one of us is speaking. The other one is trying to watch the chat. If you do have questions, we are trying to address those as they come up as well. Thank you for doing that. We will try to have some time at the end. We will have time of the end specifically to talk about questions as well. There are three slides that I'm going to show you that is going to require your participation. We will go through the ranking questions. On this survey, we have the 15 items listed. And relisted them alphabetically by the first word in the sentence. So they -- there is truly no rhyme or reason to how they were put together. Then we asked people to rank them. So they would put what they thought was the most important as number one, down to the least important as number two. I'm going to go through all of those questions with you. We would like you to actually do the same thing. In the chat, if you see something that -- if you were answering this, if you think, what are the most important things that teachers that work with students who are deaf blind, need to know or do you. If you can type in the number, 1-15. Or if you can respond to maybe the first word like accessibility to resources or something like that. I will go ahead and go through all three slides and then I will back up and go slowly through them again so you can think about which one. I will read them to you. Number one, accessibility to resources in the area of -- number two, assessment issues related to students who are deafblind. Number three, creating supportive environments for students who are deafblind. Number four, curriculum modifications that will promote learning for students who are deafblind. Number five, etiology of deafblind. >> The second step, number six. Familiarity with communication methods used by students in your caseload caseload. Number seven, knowledge to enhance communication for students who are deafblind. Number eight, strategies to enhance communication for students who are deafblind. Number nine, strategies to work collaboratively with families of students who are deafblind. Number ten, strategies to work collaboratively with IEP teams of students who are deafblind. Now the final slide. Number 11, teaching techniques effective with students who are deafblind. Number 12, understanding of impact of teacher expectations of students on your caseload. Number 13, understanding the impact of parent slash family expectations of students on your caseload. Number 14, understanding the unique needs of students who are deafblind. And number 15, the use of assistive technology to meet the need of students who are deafblind. Now I will back up and let you take a look slowly at all three slides. And if you will see in the chat does tell us which ones you think are the most important. So here is slide one. Here is slide two. And here is slide three. >> If everybody can put in the chat box which number you think is the most important. . >> So I will give you just another quick minute for those of you that have not yet typed in the number. . >> Summary view -- as some of you are choosing more than one. You can choose the top on and the second one would have to be the second choice. That is okay. We will let you. >> So Silvia is writing down the numbers that you came up with. And we will show you what the respondent came up with. Looking quickly, I think you will be pleasantly surprised that many of you chose the exact same things that respondents chose. The most important areas that they could consider as the most important. We asked them what the program priorities were. And 103, out of 198, so 52% of respondents chose, understanding the unique needs of students, which is number 14. Many of you chose as well. We would agree with that. That this is probably the number one thing that we hear from former students and from current students. That this is just different -- it is not just a hearing loss -- it is the two of them together together, that really is different. Understanding those needs is critical for them to provide the appropriate services. The second one, which I think several of you chose as well, was teaching techniques. We will talk a little bit more about this. Somebody asked a few minutes ago if we would give specific strategies about techniques today. We will not do that in this presentation today. We will talk about what the next steps might be. This is something we need to think about more in-depth -- what are the specific teaching techniques that many students that are deafblind may need or that teachers need, to implement effectively. The third program area, at 31%, was accessibility to resources in the area of deaf blindness. Number four, assessment issues at 21%. And number five is creating supportive environments at -- of this should be flip-flopped. Number four should have been creating supportive environments -- actually, I'm not sure it is. Either my percentage is wrong or my number is wrong. One of those is not right. So I apologize. We will take a closer look at that and see if I can get back to you before the end of the presentation. Then we looked at the bottom half which were non- priorities. We were a little surprised by some of the choices. I didn't ask you today to think about what the non- priorities were. But I'm -- I'm sure you are thinking as you looked through the list, which were the priority areas and which were not as high of a priority. >> We asked them to rank what they thought -- all 15 are important. But maybe they were lower priorities for the participants. >> I should have told you. We got this list from the literature and from other studies that had been done. From work that we did read and other places that were important factors. We did not just come up with this list. We got this list from a wide variety of sources that we put together, research that was already out there. So we just listed everything that we found and listed what were priorities. These are the ones that came up at the bottom when you look at the people that did not choose these as numbers one, two or three. They were chosen as 13, 14 and 15. So when we combined the last three numbers together, we came up with 128, or 64% of respondents said understanding of impact of parent slash family expectations of students was lower on their priority. We were a little surprised by that. Understanding the roles of the family and working together. We will address that later on. The second area, at 61%, was understanding the impact of the teacher expectations of the students. This would have been a general education teacher or another teacher in the classroom. Not necessarily -- but a different teacher they would be working. The second was that etiology at 41.9%. We talked about why people might have chosen this one, or not chosen it. They may be looking at this as -- it might not matter why it happened. But basically, how do we move forward? Sometimes knowing the etiology, helps you to plan not only for immediate instruction but the future. So knowing they would have additional challenges in the future that you would want to address. Loss of vision or hearing. If you did not know that was that etiology, you might not be planning appropriately for the future. Number four was strategy to work collaboratively with the IEP team, with 23%. And at 22.7%, was the use of assistive technology to meet the needs of students. It is not that these were not priorities. They just came out does about things that were not as high as we had them rank. We did for us rank them as they had to choose number one all the way down to number six. >> So that is that component of the survey. I want to talk to you a little bit about what we asked them. We had three open-ended questions at the end of the survey. We asked three different questions. The first one was, what are the three most pressing needs you have in teaching students who are deafblind took the second was described collaborative strategies -- strategy use you used to meat the -- meet the needs of students who are deafblind in your caseload. And the third one was, what suggestions do you have for teacher operation programs to better prepare educators who work with students who are deaf -- deafblind? We will talk about the first one. Instead of three most pressing needs, I would like for you, if you feel like answering, just to tell me those top of your head, working with the students, what would be the most pressing need you would have for students who are deafblind. Just like with the other questions, we want to prepare the answers to what we have from the survey. If you can tell us, what do you think is the most pressing need you have working with students who are deafblind. That would be great. I will give you a couple minutes to do that. While you do that, I will tell you a little bit about what we did with these questions. As we analyze the data, -- and Sandy mentioned earlier. We coded the open-ended questions and also the research -- there were five teams that were the most prevalent. They were pretty much equally exclusive teams -- teens. That is what we did with the open-ended questions that we came up with these five themes. Looking at the communication -- three people have responded so far. Talking about communication. Sandy will keep notes on what these answers are. These are the five themes that emerged from the data. Not that we came up with but that immersed from the data. Number one was training. I will talk about that more in-depth as we go. Then communication issues, which many of you, if not all of you, have addressed communications. Number three, importance of collaboration. Number four, best practices when teaching students who are deafblind. And number five, knowledge of available resources. I think most of you have the response like the communication piece. That is an area with a pressing need. I will go one by one and talk about the five different themes. Later on, we will have a little bit of discussion. I wanted to show you. When we are presenting the data, I think the quotes are very powerful. So we capture the different themes by using quotes from the actual data. These are from the three different questions that we ask. The training -- what most of the participants talked about was the lack of training -- and we talked about this earlier. Training under the personal preparation. Or the need for training. Many talk about understanding the needs of students who are deafblind. Some of them talk about they did not know what the goal was. Or what they were expected to do. I put a quote there. There were a few people that were very unsure about the goals with the students who are deafblind were. This person mentioned that the disability was not even touched upon in the program. And I did not feel I was given any instruction in this area. So many of these comments are showing up. And then, I wanted to also capture what they were recommending for training. They are suggesting to give multiple opportunities to learn practical strategies in addition to theory. Hands-on, hands-on. We saw that a lot. And for do you H H teachers would be beneficial to have a few units dedicated to servicing this unique population. And marred dual certification programs. -- more dual certification programs. And many suggestions were, we need to add more courses. And have hands-on experiences. So we saw this over and over again. >> The communication. Pretty much everybody that answered my question at the beginning -- talked about communication. So the communication issued was very prevalent. Some people talk about not knowing how to communicate. And not able to communicate because they did not have the effective communication system. Many talk about the students having sign language for the communication method. Again, I wanted to capture how powerful this is. Because it seemed like the answer was not having an interpreter when working with the students. Witches imperative. So communication issues was pretty prevalent. This is from the data. And then the importance of collaboration. >> We decided to show these in a couple of ways here. The issues that the participants were experiencing. Also strategies they are using to collaborate, or better collaborate with team members and with family. The issues they are finding are lack of cooperation, lack of collaboration, finding time to collaborate, so time was a big issue. And long-range collaborative planning between service slash education agencies. And some of the strategies they are using to collaborate are regular communication with team members, weekly meetings, in-service trainings, journals, e-mails, phone calls and text messages. >> So the next theme is the best practices. These, if you think back to what Sandy was talking about, these showed up on the slide on the top five. On number two. Techniques, assessments and creating supportive environments. All of those could go under best practices. These kind of reflect what Sandy talked about earlier. What are the best practices for teaching students who are deafblind, understanding different teaching approaches, how to effectively assess students who are deafblind, how to modify the curriculum. There were several responses that talk about this for deafblind. And an age-appropriate strategies. >> And knowledge of available resources. If you think about the ranking, the top five that Sandy talked about. Resources was number three. For most participants. We found this to be -- UNC -- accessibility to materials, what technology to use, and access to technology. Easy to understand resources for administrators, not knowing where to find resources and funding for appropriate materials and finding appropriate materials. We were surprised to find out many participants did not know where to find resources. We will address these a little bit later. So finding these resources came up. And emerged from the data. Funding for appropriate materials and finding the appropriate materials. >> Here is where Sandy and I will have more of a conversation to talk about the things that we were surprised about. Things that we were expecting. Things we were not expecting and things we were surprised about. >> One of the areas that was a little surprising to us was the conflict between the ranking and the open-ended questions. If you recall in the ranking, we forced participants to choose the most important, down to the least important. There were 15 items they are. On the open ended, they could write anything they wanted. So one of the interesting things that there was a conflict about was, what we think is a difference between preservice and in-service training. This goes back to what was said earlier about a lot of the people in the study have been pushing for many years. It could be changes that happened over time with different standards and the way programs offer information about deaf blindness. To make sure participants -- they may not know what preservice opportunities offer. If you look at the two slides that Silvia showed -- how many said they were prepared for the preservice and how many said they got the information from in-service, that is a really big difference. It is probably important for preservice programs to think about. It might not be enough to just have a preservice program. Even a very good program which we have. Even a very good program may not be enough to prepare teachers to actually work in the field with the student with the population of students. >> The resources, it is not so much of a conflict. We talk about the top five ranking. When we were talking about does the conversations we have had about this data, resources, I feel, and my position, that I can find a lot of resources. I know where to find resources. I know there are a lot of resources out there for preservice and in-service. However, that came up as a theme. People don't know where to find the resources. So maybe we are not doing a good job on advertising the resources and letting people know where to find things. I know that trends -- NCDB has many resources for families, and educators. So there are many places where educators could go and find resources. Maybe they don't have the resources in the school District. Maybe they can't find the resources. We found that that was very interesting. Again, it is easy for me to access the resources. My background. What I know. It is easy for me to access the resources. But those resources are not easily accessible for the actual teachers -- (indiscernible) then the communication and collaboration. It is more of a conflict between the ranking and the open-ended questions. That these were low priority. >> We were wondering -- because there were so many other important items on the ranking, like the unique needs and teaching strategies, that were really important to the everyday work. That communication and collaboration got pushed a little further down in the rankings. And when they were riding about what they needed to be successful, it was always about collaboration and working with other people. Making sure that they were communicating in the same way with the students at home. And at schools. And different providers were also working with the families the same way. So we are not sure that it is really a conflict as much as -- to be there were more pressing needs that got pressed down. We wanted to talk a little bit about communication. Silvia and I recently worked on a different manuscript as well where we talked about the importance of communication needs for families, service providers and children that are deaf and blind. And making sure that everyone is in agreement with what this looks like because the families have to use the same communication system. We know students that are deafblind have a variety of different medication strategies they may use depending on the severity of the hearing loss and the ability to use spoken language, sign language or a different communication system. Making sure that everyone is on the same page as far as communication goes, is really critical. To have success in collaborative practices as well. And that goes into the additional needs that we felt like we were missing. And understanding the needs of families, and those we were surprised it was not ranked higher then it was. Working with families -- to prioritize. We were surprised that it did not come off as one of the priorities. Another thing that I told Sandy that I really wanted to address was -- especially from the number one question that we had on open-ended questions. The most pressing needs. A few people talk about the use of interveners and how to effectively work with interveners and everything mentioned about interveners was very positive -- positive. So we didn't see interveners as much on the data that I expected to see. This goes back to those we don't have everything -- every state is different. We are formalizing more and more. The use of interveners, I thought, just because what I know -- what we saw was positive. -- it was not as much as what we thought we would receive. >> So the next steps -- what we have here under next steps -- we are thinking about, what we got from the survey and what we learned. We are pretty much -- with the area blindness and deafness. We strongly believe that we should include more instruction in the other sensory discipline and personal preparation programs. I am aware that many programs are doing this. But clearly, it is not enough. We are not doing enough. >> We usually talk -- we talk about the population and the needs of the population -- students that are deafblind or have additional disabilities. It usually comes down to personal preparation programs with teachers. -- we address the topic of deaf blindness more than the field of deafness and heart of healing. >> That is one of the main things that led us to the survey. We were starting to look at our own graduates and the population of students they were working with. And with whom they had responsibility. The majority of the people that responded to this were itinerant teachers Pierce teachers working with a child in a school. So the teacher -- of the visually impaired might be there and for the deaf might be there. But we found they are not working together. Because they bring different areas of specialization. So they need to work together to support that. So Silvia talked about what she offers in her classes and what I offer in my classes and if there is overlap and how we can make sure students are getting good a similar information. But different information because of areas of expertise. So one of the things we found -- and we have been sharing this information with others is that programs do a lot more typically to talk about the area of deaf blindness -- as opposed to teachers who are for deaf and hard of hearing.(indiscernible) it was surprising to us, if you remember back to the slides -- one of the slideshows were people did not even have interpreters working with students one day. That would be really important for the teacher, to be able to explain to the team and be able to explain how the communication impacts everything. We do believe we need to add more into both of our types of programs. While still maintaining fidelity and what the teachers need to know -- need to know when they get into their special field. >> Along with that, greater focus on the applications of dual vision slash hearing loss. Appropriate assistive technology. Seems to be an area where people don't feel comfortable knowing what to do, how to do it or where to get it. So that would be something that -- personal preparation programs could focus on too. Always remembering that technology changes very quickly quickly. Can change very quickly. Information on statewide agencies and special resources for students with deaf blindness. This goes back to sharing information with teachers. Finding resources. Clearly from what we found -- found that it is not easily accessible for the educators working with the students to find those resources. And a wider range of assessments -- many of the participants talk about the need -- knowing how to conduct an assessment with students who are deafblind. >> Okay, Kathy just tested this in the test box as well. Maybe the things we have to look at are having specific courses in deaf blindness. Kathy's, and was, could they have a course together? And Silvia and I have talked about this. We would love to do this. There are several complications that stand in our way that are outside of our ability to do anything. So one of those things is federal financial assistance. There are a lot of rules and regulations right now around the kinds of programs that can be paid for by financial aid or federal loans. So if it is not specifically listed as a required course on a student's line of study, then they cannot receive financial aid. >> And we have talked about certifications. There are certain -- that offer certifications. >> Postgraduate. >> Postgraduate, yesterday we have talked about this. It goes back to the comment on financial aid. Students don't get financial aid -- I'm not sure about other universities. If you're doing a certificate after your masters you would not be able to get financial aid because it is not a degree. It is a certificate. And we know this from personal experience. From the department experience. We have a certificate that -- we constantly get students enrolling and classes but it is difficult because it is a certificate and not a degree. So many people, that is the issue they have with the coordinator of the certificate. At that they would love to enroll and have the certificate. However, they cannot afford it. And they cannot get financial aid. >> And that is an autism certificate program and not a deaf one. It started out great with a lot of people interested in getting the autism certificate. But without financial federal assistance, many of them are unable to continue. So what would be more possible for us to do would be to have a shared course or unit within a course. So we talked about making sure that -- for example, when I talk about assessment, in my assessment course that I add in assessment with transit students that have additional disabilities so that we are constantly bringing that to the student's attention attention. So we agree that that is critical. And one of the reasons we are wanting to see the document that Linda is looking at now, about how other universities are incorporating deafblind content into the specific courses they have. At our University right now, we don't have a specific program. But we use to. And so even looking at how maybe the street programs can offer some of the same kinds of information. Or practical experiences so people can have the opportunity to learn that information. Not just at the theoretical level but to be able to experience it before they get out into the field. >> Kind of going back to the certification of the courses, I know there are issues that we could run into. We can say, we have five people interested in doing the certificate or the course. But the University will close the course or cancel the course if they don't have more than -- a minimum amount of students. So the University might not allow this. Also, addressing the courses and better explaining of the various roles of teachers, professionals and families in the lives of their students with deaf blindness. It came out over and over in our data -- of what they are expected to do. And the more classroom experience with actual students who are deafblind, hands-on, hands-on. That came up with the data. I think we need to look back at the years of experience of the participants had. So I hope that more and more programs are including these under courses. Maybe that is one of the reasons why so many people felt like the personal preparation programs did not address their needs. Hopefully, now, we are seeing more and more in the courses with deafness and hard of hearing. We would like to open up for questions now. Do we have any questions?. >> We can see people are typing. So we will give you time to do that. We know people need time to type the question. >> Gwen types that she found it beneficial that there was information on the courses and research required to do on specific areas. >> She is one of our prior students. >> Linda just typed, it is helpful information with input from the actual classroom teachers. I'm not exactly sure what that means. -- do you mean the general education classroom teachers? >> These were teachers that we interviewed, that we surveyed. >> Almost all of them. >> There was a question earlier about the percentage of classroom teachers. We had -- the job responsibilities. There were resource option teachers. Almost 9% were self-contained classroom teachers. >> Again, just waiting for one or to more answers that are being typed. Linda says, your survey was responded to by mainly itinerant teachers, and is that not different from classroom teachers who are in the class the complete day. >> Yes. >> Between the two of them, almost 14%. >> That is a lower number. And it would be interesting to see if they had the same kinds of information. We can look at that individually through the survey data. But we haven't done that yet to see if there were any big differences in the way they ranked it. Or the majority of the respondents. >> Linda, when you talk about the teachers, the classroom teachers, do you mean special education teachers? Or students who are in an inclusive setting. >> I like your point. But I'm curious to know if you are talking about one of those or maybe both? >> Linda asked if we can go off mutant. >> We don't have a capability. Does anyone have the capability? >> Can you hear may? >> Yes. >> Awesome. I have been trying to talk. Nobody can hear me. >> We can hear you now. We have 20 minutes. >> I'm out working with different teachers. There are different -- I don't know that the response would be different. But they are dealing with that day-to-day issue of trying to manage the students as well as the classrooms. And the day-to-day implementation of, if it is the device or with the communication system is. And the itinerant, they may visit once a week or twice a week or whatever. So the roll is a little bit different. The itinerant also does not supervise the intervener. The classroom teacher does. So there might be more questions related to that, from that group. That was kind of my interest does knowing specifically what those front-line teachers would say. >> I think that is a really important point. So that we can either look at the data to see if it is similar, before we present it again. Or to see if it is different. Because it might be, like you said, that there are different roles and responsibilities, that look different and what they see as the priority. For example, they might actually have -- for example, they might actually know how to get resources or have more resources. Because they are in a place where they have access to more resources. Versus an itinerant teacher that might work for a large District or where they are working across multiple districts and don't have access to the same kind of support, administered of support and financial support that they need. So I think that is an excellent point. >> We should be able to look at the data. We should be able to. I'm not sure what it will look like. But I see that, Linda McDowell -- I think that would be a great idea. I would also be interested in doing more of a qualitative study with the classroom teachers. I did something similar 14 years ago with my dissertation. I went to the actual classrooms and classroom teachers. And the educators were people providing to students in the classroom all the time. Talking to teachers of the visually impaired. I agree with Linda. I think I would like to go more in depth. More of a qualitative study. To more interviews and maybe observations to see what they are doing in the classroom. Just thinking about the qualitative study and results. >> If anyone else has a question, Robin said you just have to press star six to take your phone off mutant. So if you would rather ask your question on the microphone, that would be great. >> All right. It looks like we have exhausted the questions. And the information. So we will just wrap up quickly. By thanking you for allowing us to present this data for we are really excited about some of the things we have found and the next steps. We recognize that there are different programs all over the country with different strengths and different needs. And sometimes, what we see in our own little department here, may not be exactly what other people see. But we do recognize that there is a need for teachers of the deaf, teachers of the visually impaired and teachers and special education to have more information about how to effectively work with students who are deafblind. >> Thank you. >> This is Linda McDowell. I wanted to thank you out loud, Sandy and Silvia, for starting this conversation with all of us. It has been a pressing conversation. For those of us who are technical assistance and go out to the classroom and go from classroom to classroom. And to know that we need qualified personnel that does know what to do with students who are deaf, blind -- and at this time in our country, we are so hoping to get recognized. The students need a teacher as well as a deaf and hard of hearing teachers. So we are looking for all of the above. Well-qualified people. And we thank you for being able to be with us today and to get this conversation started in our group. >> Thank you for letting us share with you what we have done. Hopefully, we will be publishing soon and have the final results. And you will get to read it sometime in the next few months. So, yes. Thank you very much for being here today. >> Thank you. >> Have a good day. >> Thank you. >> Thank you, Robin. >> [Event Concluded]