Figuring out your role on a team with a student with complex needs sometimes is easy and other times it’s not straightforward at all. Working with students with selective mutism can be very challenging. That’s because their anxiety can be so debilitating that it impacts any progress with communication. In fact, it can be impossible to even evaluate their communication skills because it’s variable across settings. At home these students communicate as normal. At school they do not use those skills. Is that a true deficit? I discuss all of this and more: