Thank you for your interest in Coach to Communicate!
The Coach to Communicate program involves two parts:
Step 1: Webinar on Autism and Communication Instruction
Attend a free online webinar on ways to improve the communication skills of children and adolescents on the autism spectrum. Service providers may also attend this webinar.
Steps to complete:
- Register today.
- Parents – choose the PREP Parent course. Educators – Choose the PREP course (on the left)
- Fill out the registration information (enter “n/a” or “none” for fields that don’t apply to parents).
- Confirm your email address (look for an email from Canvas Catalog) and set up your password.
- After logging in, complete the Parent Background Information Survey.
- To continue to the Coach to Communicate webinar, scroll to the bottom of the page, and click next. You will complete the pre-assessment, Multimodal Communication webinar, and post-assessment. This should take less than an hour.
To access the webinar in Spanish, choose the Entrenar para Comunicar link after completing the Parent Background Information.
Step 2: Intensive Parent Coaching
Parents interested in additional training can be paired with an online coach for individual sessions to learn to teach social communication skills to their children – for free!
The steps to complete this are as follows:
- After submitting the webinar post-assessment, you will have access to the parent training consent and application form.
- Once we receive your application, you will receive an email from our assessment coordinator. If you do not receive this email within a few days, please email us.
- She will ask you to complete a couple of assessments, which will give us information about your child and their communication needs, to help us set up the most effective treatment plan for you and your child.
- After receiving your assessments, your parent coach will reach out to you to set up a weekly meeting schedule that best fits your availability.
Our Impact
Based upon our data, our coaching sessions are effective at improving parental knowledge of and skill in implementing behavioral techniques. What’s more, the parents have learned skills that have been effective in improving social communication skills in their children! This increase is indicative of lasting change in parents’ skills after completion of their participation in this project.
This is a project affiliated with the Center on Disability and Development. This work was supported in whole or part by grants from the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board (THECB) Autism Grant Program (Coach to Communicate (C2C): Partnering to Improve Communication for Individuals with Autism. Awards #17108, 20465). The opinions and conclusions expressed in this document are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the opinions or policy of the THECB.