Controversial Spelling2Communicate teaching methoed

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At a school in middle-class Riverhead, Long Island, I sat surrounded by a small class of teens — all with autism, with little or no ability to speak.

For most of their lives, their thoughts have been locked inside, as many onlookers (but not their families) regarded them as strange, simple kids who flapped their arms, grunted or hissed, seemingly detached from everyday life.

Only, they weren’t. They were detached from a way of communicating. And a miracle is happening at this school and a few others across the country, which could give hope to the hundreds of thousands of parents with children who suffer from severe autism.

Acton schools are dedicated to the idea that each child has a hero’s journey ahead of them — a unique path to education and impact.

About 30 kids attend the Acton Academy of Eastern Long Island. Six of the students here, including Jack Libutti, the son of the school’s founder, Andrea Libutti, are in the “Autism Studio.” That’s a small classroom where they communicate with their teachers by pointing to letters on what is basically a laminated placemat of the alphabet.

“Name one of the states that became an independent country upon the dissolution of the Federal Republic of Central America,” teacher Megan Rabba read aloud from a history quiz.

Then she held up the laminated “letter board,” and Jack, 18, quickly pointed to one letter after the next as I watched: N-I-C-A-R-A-G-U-A.

The teacher wrote down his answer as if this was nothing less than she expected and moved on to the next question: “What European country was founded in 1830?”

B-E-L-G-I-U-M.

There was simply no question that Jack understood everything she was asking and knew the answers. The teacher did not hold his hand as he pointed to the letters. And it wasn’t a one-in-a-million case. Because after Jack was done with his lesson, Rabba moved on to a girl named Lina H. Lyons, 19.

Lina has one word she keeps repeating — “Yeah. Yeah.” This is called looping. But that doesn’t mean her brain is stuck, too.

“What is the process in which bacteria obtain energy by converting nitrates into nitrogen gas which is released into the atmosphere?” the teacher asked.

“D-E-N-I-T-R-I-F-I-C-A-T-I-O-N,” Lina spelled. She got every answer right on a quiz about the weather cycles.

The students didn’t respond correctly to just factual questions, which require one answer and can be easily memorized.

After a wide-ranging lesson on everything from urban renewal to women’s history, Rabba asked Joey, a big, affectionate 17-year-old, “What do you think the greatest scientific breakthrough has been?”

There’s no one right answer to that.

Joey spelled out, on his own, no one touching him: “Germ theory, because it has prevented so much disease.”

This amazing — and controversial — teaching technique just starting to gain some acceptance is called Spelling2Communicate or “S2C.” It isn’t easy. Learning it can take anywhere from a few weeks to over a year. But basically, what happens is this:

The approximately 30% of people with autism who can’t speak usually have trouble with their fine motor skills. Speaking requires the fine motor skills of the mouth, and writing requires them of the hand. But pointing to something with your whole arm — that’s a gross motor skill.

When someone starts learning S2C, the teacher – called a communication partner – uses a hard plastic board the size of a piece of paper with just a few giant letters on it – A B C D E F G H – cut out, like a stencil. She teaches the child (or adult, even) to hold a pencil and stick it through the stenciled letters. That gives the kid a big target to hit — much bigger than a keyboard, for instance. And the pencil going through the stenciled letter gives a little extra hit of tactile feedback.

“What is the bottom of the river called?” the teacher might ask, after a lesson on waterways. With practice and a lot of help at first, because their muscle tone is low and focus is hard, a student will painstakingly poke their pencil through B-E-D.

The students at this Acton Academy, all high school-age, already knew how to spell, thanks to some earlier education — either at school or with a tutor. But until they learned S2C, they hadn’t had a chance to show that those spelling lessons had done their job and they could actually write.

As students get good at pointing to the board that has just a few big letters on it, the teacher presents them with a board with smaller letters, until finally, they are using a board with all 26 letters on it that looks like a laminated placemat. The questions graduate, too, from simple facts to open-ended queries.

The first iteration of this communication technique was the Rapid Prompting Method created by Indian educator Soma Mukhopadhyay in the 1990s to use with her autistic son. Mukhopadhyay moved to the US in 2001, and her method began to spread. In 2015 Elizabeth Vosseller created Spelling to Communicate. Now her nonprofit, the International Association for Spelling as Communication, has 350 registered practitioners in 35 states and 15 countries.

Beyond the fact that Spelling to Communicate starts out using the gross motor skill of arm moving rather than the fine movement of finger flexing, school founder Libutti said she thinks it’s because the thought patterns are different, too. Instead of being told to perform a mindless task like nose-touching, the students are being asked to tell the teacher what they are actually thinking. “It’s a different pathway to the brain,” Libutti believes. “Just like listening to music is different from listening to a lecture.”

But as amazing as this breakthrough seems, many critics see something else. Spelling to Communicate and the Rapid Prompting Method are not considered legitimate by much of the therapeutic world. In part, that’s because a generation ago another assisted method of communication, where a facilitator held a kid’s arm while they typed on a keyboard, looked too easy to fake, like a Ouija board.

The American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, which has more than 200,000 members, published a statement declaring that any words that autistic people seem to be spelling using S2C “should not be assumed to be the communication of the person with a disability.” (I.e., assume they are actually the words of the teacher.)

And because the association believes the technique has not been adequately studied — and sounds too good to be true — teaching kids S2C is “not recommended.”

“We are concerned about who is actually communicating,” Diane Paul, Senior Director for Clinical Issues in Speech Language Pathology at the Association, told me in a phone call. Why can’t the kids just point at letters on a table, she wondered. Why do they need a person holding up the letter board in front of them? Isn’t this a ripe opportunity for the teacher to influence the student’s letter choices?

From what I saw at the Acton school, the teacher is indeed not just holding up the board. She provides encouragement and focus. “Come on – you’ve got this! You can finish the word!” When Rabba saw a kid flagging, she’d sometimes take the board away for a second, which seemed to help the student press an internal “reset” button. And after that, they’d continue.

All of which feels like a coach. Not a cheater. She does not touch the student’s arm. She does not bring the letters to the kids’ fingers — the kids do the pointing.

In the meantime, it’s true that S2C absolutely does need more scientific testing. Until there is robust research by independent scientists (beyond one impressive study published in Nature magazine), it will always seem suspect.

Libutti was an emergency room doctor for 20 years before switching careers. She said she always knew her son Jack was intelligent. Whenever he’s bored, for instance, he’ll scramble and re-assemble a Rubik’s Cube, or even create a new pattern. But once he started communicating with the letter board two years ago, at age 16, she was stunned to hear his sense of humor, and learn that he loves history. He has since mastered typing unassisted on a computer keyboard, though he sometimes still prefers pointing to a letter board. Either way, one myth she’d like to dispel about people with autism is the idea that they have no empathy.

For instance, she said, the school’s chicken coop was raided by a fox. All the chickens were killed. Hearing this, Jack spelled out: “I am so sad for the chickens. They must have been so scared.” That’s empathy in abundance.