transcribe the consumer’s comments

Don’t "tune out" when the consumer comments or asks a question!!

You should always capture the supported student's comments and include them in your transcript, whether the comments were voiced by you OR by the consumer.  That goes for discussion comments as well as comments in a regular class. 

There are two reasons for this.  The first reason is to make the flow of information in the transcript make sense when it is read after class, for study and review purposes.  If you omit what the student has said, he or she may not remember the specific question/comment when he or she is studying later, and therefore, he or she would not be able to correctly interpret the following answer/comments. 

The second reason to include the supported student’s comments is to confirm for the student (and also for his/her parents or tutor, if it’s a younger student) that what they said, as understood by you, is what they intended to say.  That may seem odd, but a student might ask a question in such a way that is not understood as intended.  Seeing the question in the transcript will allow the student to realize that he or she needed to clarify the question. 

For younger students:  Another reason to include the comments/questions of young students is so the person using the notes to tutor the student will know how the student participated in the class, and what was not clear to the student during the class. 

An interesting related reason is to document the student's participation in a class.  Some teachers/IEP teams will identify a goal for a student related to class participation.  (See this Kyp’s Tip about IEPs.)  For example, the goal might be that he or she speak out more often in class.  The teacher/IEP team can use the real-time transcript as the quantitative measurement of how often the student participates.  Knowing that their name would appear in the transcript can actually motivate young students to participate more!