RPM, in one page: the encyclopedic overview
Most arguments about RPM happen between people who have read very different things about it. The Wikipedia article is a shared baseline worth establishing first.
RPM, the Rapid Prompting Method, was developed by Soma Mukhopadhyay and is taught primarily through the HALO clinic in Austin and a network of practitioners she has trained. A student is presented with a stencil board of letters and prompted — often with verbal cues, motor prompts, and a held-up letterboard — to point and spell.
Practitioners frame it as a teaching method, not a communication system per se: the goal is to build the motor and attentional skills that eventually allow independent typing.
The skeptical case
The Wikipedia entry lays out the skeptical position fairly: position statements from major speech-language professional bodies opposing RPM, concerns that the held letterboard makes it impossible to rule out facilitator cueing, and the absence of large blinded efficacy trials demonstrating independent authorship under controlled conditions.
It also notes the response from practitioners and proponents: that the method is designed to fade prompts toward independence, that many students do transition to independent typing, and that the population being served is one for which standard AAC alone has often not worked.
How to read the page
Treat the article as an orientation, not a verdict. The actual disagreements — about what counts as evidence, what the population's communication profile actually is, and what the responsibility of clinicians is under uncertainty — are not going to be settled by an encyclopedia.
But you cannot have a useful argument about RPM without first agreeing on what it is. This page is one fair way to get there.