Coaching supports are not methodologies.

The distinction

Teaching methods — Spelling to Communicate (S2C), Rapid Prompting Method (RPM), the Spellers Method, Facilitated Communication (FC) and Supported Typing — are structured approaches to building purposeful motor skills for communication over months and years. These methods each have specific plans or lessons, they all work on fading targets, and all follow an intended trajectory toward independent typing.

Coaching supports are interventions a communication partner provides in the moment to help a learner produce a response right now — a cue, a prompt, a steadying hand. Coaching supports are explicitly transitional. The goal of every legitimate program is to fade them as the learner's motor system can carry more of the load on its own.

Coaching supports in spelling methods

• Auditory cues. Spoken prompts that help a learner orient, initiate, or sustain attention — naming a target letter, counting in, or giving a verbal "go."
• Gestural prompts. A point, a tap, a head nod — non-verbal cues that direct attention without contact.
• Directional prompts. Pointing to a quadrant of the board, indicating the next row, or angling the letterboard so the learner's gaze finds the target.
• Motor coaching. Postural cues, positioning the arm or shoulder, modeling a movement, or shaping a reach gradually over a session.
• Regulation support. Co-regulation between partner and learner — pacing, breath cues, breaks, sensory adjustments — that keep the learner inside the window where purposeful motor planning is possible.

Coaching supports in FC / Supported Typing

FC and Supported Typing use very different coaching supports from the spelling methods. Both are good and both work — they are simply different.

• Backwards pressure / resistance. Proprioceptive feedback to the arm to stabilize it, slow the typist down, prevent impulsive typing, and help regulate their body. The facilitator finds the right amount of resistance for each client depending on muscle tone and movement. Never hand-over-hand — the typist always initiates movement toward the keys.
• Allow a rhythm to develop. Facilitators may create the rhythm initially, then allow the typist to take it over and reset on their own as soon as they can.
• Verbal cues to look at the letters / keyboard. Encourage direct eye contact to the target; avoid relying on peripheral vision.
• Message responsibility. Teach from day one to put a space after a word and a period at the end of a sentence so the typist takes responsibility for when a word or thought is finished.
• Accuracy cues. If typing a known word and the typist hits a wrong letter, coach them to reach for the delete key so they learn to correct errors and edit their comments.
• Speed cues. If the typist is frequently missing their targeted letter, prompt them to slow down — think, look, move.
• Continuation cues. "Keep going," "tell me more," "what's next."
• Sentence extenders. "and / because / so that / then."
• Emotional feedback. "You're doing great," "that's really interesting!" — keep the typist at the center of the conversation and show genuine interest and curiosity.

This list is not a how-to. Doing this work without proper training and coaching can set typists up to fail — please reach out to a trained practitioner or program before attempting these techniques at home.

Why the distinction matters

Critics of Assisted Communication methods routinely conflate methodology and coaching support, then point at the most heavily scaffolded moment in a beginner's session and call the whole field "facilitation" — as if that is a bad word, which it is not. That move makes everything sound like the 1990s caricature and erases the actual trajectory: a learner moving from full physical support to a steadied board to independent typing over months and years.

Drawing the line clearly does the opposite. Explaining what is taking place, and why, lets families, clinicians, and journalists see what is actually happening instead of making the wrong assumptions. People trained to teach these methods to nonspeakers and minimal speakers take the responsibility very seriously and are committed to following the plan and best practices for the method they are teaching: a durable teaching method, layered with transitional supports that are documented, justified, and faded on a plan.

Fading is the rule, not the exception

Every coaching support on this page should have an answer to two questions: why is it being used right now? and what does fading it look like? If a program or practitioner cannot answer both, that is a problem with the program/practitioner — not with the underlying framework. See Motor learning and fading for the longer treatment, and The authorship question for why "fading is a goal, not a gate."