Online Workshop: Adaptations for People With Little or No Reliable Speech
Workshop Summary
People who don’t speak are not excluded from sexuality education because their educators don’t care. They are excluded because their educators do not have the tools to include them. This workshop helps to change that.
Note: This is a pre-recorded, 90-minute, online workshop. You’ll receive Instant access upon purchase — including three downloadable resource packs.
Why This Workshop Exists
For most of her career as an educator, Molly Rearick believed what most educators believe: that people who do not speak do not understand. She had been trained that way. She taught that way.
Then she met Dan, who has autism and no reliable speech. Molly knew him for years and made the same assumption she had always made. Then, about five years ago, a speech therapist taught him how to type. Molly was skeptical. She visited the therapist and challenged her directly. The therapist responded with kindness, shared research on autism as a movement disorder, and asked Molly to try something different.
What Molly found changed everything she had ever practiced:
“It absolutely blew my mind — changed everything that I’d ever practiced — to learn that people like Dan are completely cognitively intact inside and are stuck in there because they don’t have a way to communicate.”
— Molly Rearick, EdD, workshop presenter
Dan had understood everything, all along. He simply had no way to show it. When he finally had a way to communicate, he shared that he wanted to become a physicist and work at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He took a tour of JPL. He advocated for leaving his special education classroom. He is now in college.
That shift — from assumption to inclusion — is the foundation of this workshop.
The stakes are higher than most people realize. When people with little or no reliable speech are excluded from sexuality education, they miss more than information. They lose the language and the tools to speak up about what happens to them. If we do not give someone a way to talk about it, they cannot talk about it.
The Principle Behind the Tools
This workshop is organized around a single idea: speech does not equal intelligence. That idea is grounded in two frameworks that every educator working with this population needs to know.
Presuming Competence. As researcher Doug Biklen writes: “Assume that a person has intellectual ability, provide opportunities to be exposed to learning, assume the person wants to learn and assert him or herself in the world… By presuming competence, educators place the burden on themselves to come up with ever more creative, innovative ways for individuals to learn.”
The Least Dangerous Assumption. As researcher Cheryl Jorgensen defines it: “The least dangerous assumption when working with students with significant disabilities is to assume that they are competent and able to learn, because to do otherwise would result in harm such as fewer educational opportunities, inferior literacy instruction, a segregated education, and fewer choices as an adult.”
We can include people with little or no reliable speech in sexuality education, or we can exclude them. If we exclude them, we know for certain they are not learning. The least dangerous assumption is to include them. This workshop shows you how.
That is not a small ask. It means questioning something that was built into many educators’ training, as it was built into Molly’s. This workshop gives you the research and the tools to make that shift.
Who This Workshop Is For
This workshop is for anyone who supports people with intellectual and developmental disabilities and has encountered — or expects to encounter — people with little or no reliable speech in a learning or support context: educators, direct support professionals, therapists, agency trainers, school staff, self-advocates, and family members. The tools and frameworks work with any sexuality education curriculum, not only Elevatus Training’s.
What You Will Learn
This workshop focuses on practical, low-tech tools you can use immediately — with any curriculum, with any population. By the end of this workshop, you will be able to:
Apply the frameworks of Presuming Competence and the Least Dangerous Assumption when planning and delivering sexuality education to people with little or no reliable speech
Use whiteboard choices to give people a structured, reliable way to participate, respond, and be heard — including strategies for distinguishing intention from impulse
Build communication boards with course-specific vocabulary, speaking-up options, and check-in tools that work across an entire class, not just one lesson
Create communication card rings: portable, low-cost supports that travel with the person and can be adapted for any setting — classroom, community, or role play
Problem-solve for reliability challenges including visual patterns, midline differences, and scanning support
The workshop also covers teaching people to type — the communication support that removes all limits. As Molly puts it: “Once you give someone access to an entire keyboard, the sky’s the limit. They have the same amount of communication as the rest of us.”
Workshop Price
$45/one-time
Purchase once — watch as many times as you like.
What is Included?
Your purchase includes immediate access to the 90-minute video recording, plus downloadable resources:
Workshop Slides — The full presentation slide deck, including examples of communication boards, card rings, and whiteboard setups — available for reference as you build your own tools.
Autism: The Movement Perspective — Supporting reading on autism as a movement and motor disorder, providing the research foundation behind the workshop’s approach to communication support.
The Least Dangerous Assumption — The Jorgensen framework document, suitable for sharing with colleagues or teams as you introduce this approach.
AAC Language Ladder — A progression resource from Reid’s Gift on augmentative and alternative communication, from low-tech to high-tech supports.
Molly K. Rearick, EdD, is the Founder and Executive Director of Reid’s Gift, Inc., a nonprofit supporting teens and adults in California. She also teaches part-time at California State University, Northridge, and provides consulting and evaluation services to students, families, and school districts. Molly’s background in education led her to found Reid’s Gift in 2013, and she and her staff are dedicated to providing support that meets the unique goals of each person. In particular, Molly is passionate about helping people communicate.
Katherine McLaughlin, M.Ed., AASECT Certified Sexuality Educator, is the Founder, CEO, and Lead Trainer for Elevatus Training. She has been a sexuality educator and trainer for over 30 years. As a national expert on sexuality and intellectual and developmental disabilities, she trains professionals and parents, as well as people with I/DD, to become sexual self-advocates and peer sexuality educators.
