Language Therapy and Leadership for Pediatric Clinicians
This past year, I had the opportunity to connect with various administrators and Ed Tech leaders who are selling curriculum products to school districts at a large scale. During many of these conversations it became clear that districts are making core, evidence-based reading curriculum a priority. One of the best ways to see what’s important…
Most K-12 teams think they’re working on executive functioning with their students, but they’re still seeing students continue to struggle with: Time-management Self-regulation Social skills Keeping track of work Following directions in class Managing personal belongings That’s because executive functioning support in the school systems often consists of planners and organizers. While organization is one…
Many children continue to experience anxiety about new situations or avoid challenging tasks, despite going to therapy and talking through their feelings. This is often because the intervention is not adequately supporting students’ executive functioning skills. In this video, I explain why anxiety and executive dysfunction go hand-in-hand, and what’s often missing when anxiety persists…
The most common complaint I hear from K-12 therapists relating to social skills is that kids don’t generalize what they learn in therapy to the real world. That’s because most therapy sessions are done in an “academic format”, and social interactions aren’t “academic”. Human interactions in an unstructured environment requires an essential set of cognitive…
Many K-12 professionals see behaviors considered to be defiant or lazy, even though classroom management systems are in place. That’s because behavior charts don’t support students’ executive functioning, and they’re often too abstract to help motivate kids through discomfort or learning curves. They also don’t support important skills such as time-perception, episodic memory, future pacing,…
I often get the question, “How can I be evidence-based AND neurodiversity-affirming?” The two things aren’t opposed to each other if we support the right skills. In this video, I share a clip from my free training and define what it actually means to be neurodiversity-affirming. It does NOT mean that we have to agree…
When kids have a poor sense of time, the common response is to give them a planner or some kind of a timer. While these tools may be a part of your strategy, they don’t address time-blindness. Time-blindness is a hallmark characteristic of executive functioning issues, and external devices (especially if they’re digital) don’t teach…
Some students continue to miss assignments and struggle to keep up with the pace in class despite being given organizing tools. This is because they’re experiencing executive dysfunction. While organizers and planners can help some of us stay on top of our work, they don’t actually teach the internal mental processes needed to complete multi-step…
These days, it’s not JUST about information overload. It’s also about MISinformation overload. Back when I first started practicing, I found language therapy to be super overwhelming. There were so many peer-reviewed articles, books, and seminars. Sifting through that all and trying to apply it to a real-life therapy situation seemed like a daunting task….
I get tons of questions about how to do language therapy evaluations effectively, so I wanted to share this special Q & A session I did for the members of Language Therapy Advance Foundations. Most people want to know what test protocols they should use and how to supplement with non-standardized tools; and it can…