Rolling out the ROCC in your setting.

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To make the most of your ROCC subscription, you will need to consider the most efficient way to collect assessments from your team. No one solution suits all, and will be dependent on:

  • the structure of your team, 
  • the number of participants to assess,
  • other data collection requirements for your team
  • and the culture and priorities of your site.

You may need to experiment with different options at first to see which best suits your needs. 

To get you started, we’ve listed a few options.  You and your team can decide which best suits, or maybe you’ll come up with your own!

Option 1: All staff to complete the training and enter their own assessments.

This is great for increasing the knowledge base of your staff but can get expensive if you have a large setting. 

It is also reliant on all staff learning and understanding the key principles of ROCC and how to score each domain to ensure you have consistent data. 

This method is probably most useful for:

  • Smaller schools
  • Speech pathology practices
  • Schools who would like to combine professional development and ROCC assessments. 

The ROCC Basic training is designed to familiarise users with the ROCC scoring in a way that gives them a greater understanding of the varied components required for communicative competence and the importance of autonomous communication.  Not only will your team learn to score the ROCC, but will also gain some core knowledge of communication in general. 

If you want to choose this option, you can receive discounts  for a group training purchase (and select ‘Bulk Buy’) or contact us to organise a training session tailored specifically to your school or organisation, either face to face or via Zoom.

As a combination approach, you may choose to have everyone complete the training for general professional development, but allocate key people to approve assessments as in option 2 below.

Option 2: One Assessment Approver

In this option, you can choose to have only 1 person as a trained user.  Realistically, you need at least 2 trained users in your organisation for sustainability in the event that one leaves, but this option is quite suitable to smaller settings. 

The trained users become the Assessment Approvers, and could  support the rest of the team to complete their assessments. This can be as an interview, or by reviewing all assessments for approval. 

The interview process often helps when the Assessment Approver is able to talk through the assessments with others, not only to score, but also to discuss strategies and follow up actions in more detail. We’ve seen this work well in smaller special education settings where the Assessment Approver and a teacher can review and discuss all of the students in their class during the interview. The interviewer can discuss one domain at a time and help the teacher to rate each of their students on that domain before moving on to the next. 

This method is great for consistency of data, and works well if there is an allocated Communication Coordinator role within the site to act as the Assessment Approver. There is a time commitment to do this however, so it won’t work well in larger settings. 

Option 3: A team of  Assessment Approvers.

This is a great option to ensure that you have consistent data but also so that your Assessment Approvers have support from their peers. It is also a much more viable solution for larger settings. 

For this option:

  1. Assign a team of trained ROCC users as ‘Assessment Approvers’. The number will depend on how many participants will be scored and groupings within your site (e.g., Junior, senior, etc). 
  2. All team members enter their assessment using their best knowledge. (Team members don’t need to have completed the ROCC training but it is helpful).  Once they are done, they select Complete Assessment and advise the Assessment Approver.
  1. The trained Assessment Approvers can the review and approve those assessments, and add any suggested strategies or follow up actions during the process.

If you prefer, steps 2&3 can be replaced with the interview method discussed in Option 2 above. 

In particular, the interview approach works well for:

  • staff members who are new to the ROCC, 
  • staff members who are new to supporting individuals with communication challenges, or
  • assessments for complex individuals where a significant amount of discussion may be needed.

It may be tempting to have all assessments completed only by the Assessment Approvers. However, by doing this, you miss key information from those who spend the most time with them. Those people will also miss the learning and direction that comes through the process of observing, discussing and scoring the ROCC.  

Some settings have managed this by scoring ROCC during group planning days where teams (eg. classroom groups including teachers, teaching assistants, and therapists) collectively score all of the individuals in a group/class, to ensure the perspectives of all staff involved are captured. 

If you are a therapy practice, you may choose to score your ROCC assessment during parent consultation or during a  whole team meeting to ensure that the information you collect is not just specific to the person’s communication within a therapy session. 

In summary…

The ROCC is not just an assessment, but a roadmap to guide goals and strategies. 

Whichever method you choose to implement ROCC across your setting, remember that it’s not just the score that is important but the observations and discussions you have to decide on the score that make the difference. 

If you can better understand what facilitates or hinders communication for your individual participant, then it will be much easier for you to set goals and develop strategies that will really make a difference. 

So start rolling the ROCC out across your setting today, and if you come up with new ideas, please let us know. We always love to hear what works best for you. 

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