Language Therapy and Leadership for Pediatric Clinicians
You’ve got a backlog of reports to do. Next week there’s a staff in-service day, and you’re hoping to use it to finally make a dent in the paperwork that’s been piling up. And then the email comes. Everyone in the building is required to attend the district professional development in the morning about the…
If you’re working on social skills with students and seeing poor generalization, the solution is not more therapy materials. I’m often asked if I offer social skills activities that can be a quick “print and go” option for school therapists to do with students in a group therapy setting. I’m fully aware that if I…
This past year, I interviewed Brianna Guild from SLP Literacy Corner for the De Facto Leaders podcast. In preparation for our interview, she shared a detailed summary of what she wanted to discuss in our episode, and I decided to publish it as a post because it has a lot of useful information for clinicians…
One of the most common questions I get from clinicians who work with school-age kids is about scope and sequence of therapy. “How do I make time to address all these skills my students need?” “How can I help students generalize skills from one setting to another?” “How can I help the other people on…
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…