When I tell related service providers that they should be coaching and training other members of their school teams, the most common objection I get is that they don’t have time.
However, most of them ALSO feel like they have too many skills to work on in therapy.
They ask, “How can I possibly get to all these skills in my sessions.”
My answer: You can’t.
But what you CAN do is leverage other people. Your therapy sessions can’t be done in a silo.
Taking the time to build relationships and enlist support from others on your team will save you time in the long run.
Take this example:
I had an autistic student on my caseload. We’ll call him “Greg”. Greg was coming back to class extremely dysregulated after recess. On Mondays, he happened to come to therapy with me right after recess, so I asked him what was going on.
“Everyone’s breaking the rules during kickball and it’s not fair”.
After having some conversations with the teaching assistant who was monitoring recess, I found out that this student’s peer group had decided on an alternative set of rules since they realized they couldn’t finish a whole game before recess was finished.
The other kids in the group had a read on the situation and were okay with it; but my student wasn’t there yet.
Seeing as how I could not find a “how to show your students how to bend the rules of kickball” social narrative in any of my social skills flashcards or lesson plans, I had to use some cognitive flexibility myself.
I worked with this student on perspective taking in my sessions.
But I MOSTLY made sure that the teaching assistant knew how to have a quick check-in with my student on the way to recess. I also made sure I had a few other staff members serve as the eyes and ears on the situation.
Not only did this help my student with this particular situation; it gave the teaching assistant the tools to address future things that came up. This freed up my therapy sessions to focus on other things.
I call this way of thinking “planning for service delivery” instead of “planning for therapy”.
It means thinking bigger about how you fit in on your team as a leader; so you can make an impact with both your direct therapy and other models of serving students.
I share another success story from my time in the schools after making this shift in my conversation with Barb Flowers on the Principal’s Handbook podcast, episode 18.
We discuss how school leaders and related service providers can work together to ensure teachers have what they need to support kids:
In this interview I share:
✅What do school therapists and teachers need from their school administrators when it comes to supporting for students with disabilities?
✅Where are common points of tension that happen between teachers and therapists, and administrators?
✅Planning for service delivery: How to plan an ecosystem of support for students instead of planning siloed lesson plans.
✅How I delegated language facilitation strategies to a 1:1 para and freed up therapy time to focus on other skills with an autistic student.
You can listen to the episode here.
