Most of my products that include “language/cognitive therapy materials” are pretty basic. One might call them boring.
Many of them outline steps in a therapy protocol so the clinician knows how to move through the activity, and some that include “work sheet” type things kids can interface with directly.
I remember about 5 years ago I felt like I was missing the “everybody’s building an app” boat because I wasn’t turning these “worksheet pdfs” into apps.
Yet whenever I started envisioning a potential app to build from my Essential 5 language therapy framework or my EF Stack for executive functioning…I would think to myself, “This is pointless.”
Why overcomplicate protocols that could be done with a pencil and paper, some dry erase markers, some quality vocabulary words, and basic household materials (like a clock or calendar)?
In truth, my “materials” aren’t even needed to execute any therapy technique I’d teach you.
They’re just a delivery mechanism to deliver the protocols from my brain to yours.
A visual strategy for you to use in your sessions.
Once you have those protocols in your brain, you can implement them with whatever tools you have available.
This way, you’re less reliant on that big bag of therapy materials you’ve been hoarding in your trunk.
I DON’T want to give you more materials to hoard.
But I DO want to give you the skills you need to not need so many materials.
And I can’t do that if I build a app that bypasses the process you’d go through to refine and document a system you’d need to make that happen.
The intricacies you’ll learn as you refine your ability to execute a new therapy strategy won’t get into your brain if you outsource to an app.
Materials aren’t just for doing therapy.
They’re for knowledge transfer:
- From me, to you
- From you, to your students
- From you, to other people who can support your students.
Containers for documenting steps and processes.
Assets that capture what happened in your therapy session, so those strategies can travel outside your sessions.
The “materials” can serve as a communication tool you use alongside your sessions, so you don’t have to explain your process over and over again.
Learning how to implement new therapy techniques, and struggle through the trial and error of developing a new skill is a critical part of documenting what your processes actually
If an app is doing the scaffolding for you with some ambiguous algorithm, you won’t be able to document or explain your strategies to anyone else.
In both Language Therapy Advance Foundations and the School of Clinical Leadership, I leverage this concept of “scalable assets” by teaching a core framework that helps define what those assets are.
Language Therapy Advance Foundations gives SLPs a framework for language therapy using what I refer to as the “Essential 5” linguistic components for building vocabulary. You can learn more about Language Therapy Advance Foundations here.
The School of Clinical Leadership gives school related service providers a framework for executive functioning that helps them get intervention in place in both direct therapy as well as in classrooms. You can learn more about The School of Clinical Leadership here.
