#192: Autism IEP Goals – For Students Not Yet Speaking

Marisha (00:01)

Hey there and welcome to the SLP Now podcast. I'm really excited to have Rose Griffin with us here today. We are going to be chatting about writing goals for older students who are not yet speaking. And Rose has been on the podcast at least once or twice already, but she is a speech behavior analyst.

She has a really interesting perspective and I'm really excited to chat with her about older students who are not yet speaking.

Rose (00:36)

Thanks so much for having me. It's great to see you. It's great to be back on the podcast.

Marisha (00:41)

Yeah, and I cannot wait for this conversation. I like, I know you have so many great resources. But before we dive into all of the tips and resources, I'm curious if you could, because I did a super, super short bio for you. But I'm curious, how did you end up learning so much about working with this population? And can you tell us a little bit of your story?

Rose (01:05)

Yeah, absolutely. I became a speech therapist. My first year I worked just in a school and I worked with general education students who working on speech sounds funny enough because now I specialize in autism. In my second year, I started working in a non -public program for autistic learners who typically had behavioral barriers to their learning and a lot of the students were older. And so that's really where my passion started in helping students who are traditionally harder to reach and are

older in their chronological age, but still don't have a way to communicate with the world. And that just started my whole, I say mission in life now with my platform at ABA Speech, but I have worked in public schools and non -public programs and my platform here at ABA Speech allows me to really specialize in helping all autistic learners find their voice, but especially those who, regardless of age, are still having a hard time finding a robust way to.

to start communicating. And so that's really what I have specialized in clinically and doing trainings. And so that is why I really love speaking about this topic and because I feel like there's not a lot of information out there. So I like to be somebody who is a source of support while there's.

Marisha (02:19)

That's amazing, I love it. And the topic for our podcast today is writing goals, but writing goals is obviously a very tiny part of the puzzle. And we want to make sure that we're doing a high quality assessment before we dive into writing goals. We don't just wanna take a list and be like, that looks good. So we wanna have a good rationale. And we also want to make sure that we're implementing evidence -based practice and

evidence -backed strategies and all of that when we're planning our treatment based on those goals. And that's a lot to tackle. And since you are a phenomenal resource, I thought I would just ask, if there's an SLP who's newer to working with this population, we're going to share some quick tips for goals, but what other resources would you recommend to help get them kind of up to speed?

Rose (03:14)

I think the assessment process is so important and what can be hard for students who are not yet speaking is it can be hard to give a standardized test and get a true snapshot of a learner's communication baseline. So the functional communication profile revised is a nice resource to get more of that data on how the student is communicating across a lot of different domains. I've also used the communication matrix.

which is a free or very affordable online option that allows you to get a better idea of conveying how the student is currently communicating. And I think that if you give assessments like that, and then also, just like Asha says in the practice portal, is observe, do an observation. Go into the classroom, go into gym or recess or lunch. Some of those unstructured times is where you can really see those nuggets of how is the student really communicating.

How are they applying their skills across the day? And then all of that information together is going to give you a really nice baseline of, okay, here is how the student's currently communicating and what is going to be most important so that student can communicate more effectively, can have a way to communicate with the world across environments. And that's gonna be so important as a student gets older with vocational opportunities and social opportunities and things like that. So that's kind of how I approach the assessment piece.

Marisha (04:37)

That's amazing. I love that as a quick overview. And the communication matrix is especially cool. For those of you who haven't used it, it's an online tool and it makes like a really nice visual. And it's really nice to kind of show parents our rationale and all of that. Yeah, so I love all of those. So functional communication profile revised and the communication matrix as to assessment.

options and then also observing throughout the students school day to get a better picture. And then so in terms of intervention and I think we did we actually chatted about this on our previous podcast. I'll have to link to it in the show notes but I'm curious like what resources would you recommend for an SLP who's

kind of wondering, like looking for ideas on where, like how to structure therapy or how to start approaching things.

Rose (05:40)

Yeah, I mean, we talk about that a lot in our courses of ABA Speech Connection, our CEU membership, or ASHA approved CE providers. And I try to always incorporate older students because once again, there's not a lot of great information. There's actually a really good Facebook group for middle school and high school speech therapists on, it's just on Facebook and there's, it's a really nice group of people. But I try to answer a lot of the questions in there and provide courses. And I really think that for students who are not yet speaking, who are middle school, high school and beyond,

a focus on how is a student communicating for functional communication, how are they communicating within a vocational setting because that becomes something with the transition piece that we need to think about. And the way that I frame social language skills, because that can be a touchy subject with people too, we want to make sure that we have a sense and it's not compliance -based by any stretch, but social skills can be really important in the workplace. And so the way that I kind of work on that, which we might've talked about last time a little bit,

is through leisure skills. So adapted and modified leisure skills. How can this person have work in their life that they enjoy and when they have a break time or when they go home, how can we help them have this larger life? Because what I've seen doing this 20 plus years and just having a lot of friends who have autistic kids of their own is that when somebody gets out of school and they're no longer receiving school services,

that person's life can get really small. And the families too, if they don't have access to the community, if they're not in a day program that they really enjoy, if they don't have employment, whether independent or with a job coach, a person's life can get really small. And so as a speech language pathologist, I'm always thinking, why is this important? Why am I working on this? I'm not saying get rid of the prepositions and things like that, but I kind of am. We have to really get serious about.

Why are we working on this? Why is this important for this person when they're 30, when they're 40, when they're 50? And that's how I really kind of have that two pronged approach of, okay, we're gonna work on things that are important functionally, important for leisure skills, and then also thinking about that vocation piece as well.

Marisha (07:47)

Yeah, I love that. So just to recap, focusing on functional, vocational, and then leisure skills. And then I'll link to your membership sounds amazing. Those courses, I think would be super helpful for someone navigating this world. And then I'll also link to our old podcast episode just for a little bit more context in terms of that. But that was super helpful.

So now we get to start chatting about the goal side of things. And I feel like you gave us a little bit of a preview when you were talking about treatment. But what are the most important considerations when writing goals for those older students who are not yet speaking?

Rose (08:36)

I think something that's really important, if you're providing any type of individual instruction, which some people may be getting individual instruction is thinking that I always like to use this line that the student will complete targeted skill, whatever it is in the larger school environment. I definitely think that we have to get out of the therapy room. There's still some clients I would see in the therapy room in middle school, high school, maybe a student who has selective mutism, but we're eventually going to generalize those skills to the larger.

School environment maybe a student who stutters but we're also going to practice strategies and then generalize it to the real world because We have to get really functional and there's a lot of research that says that if our treatment Looks closer to what the natural environment is then we're going to have a better chance that those skills are going to generalize Which at this age, it's very important I'll never forget I went to a talk once and the lady said she saw a student and the shirt said on the front I have autism and on the back it said don't waste my time

which I thought was really, really funny. But that's kind of how I think of things. I want to be really comfortable saying like, this is why this is important for this student. This is the scope and sequence of why this is important. And I had a group of students that I started working with in third grade and.

It was a small district. I actually worked with those students until they were about in 11th grade and I had other students on my caseload, but it was kind of nice. They were really differentiated group just to kind of see what is the scope and sequence. Why am I working on this now and how's that going to be helpful for when the student is in high school and goes to job supported employment? How is that going to be helpful when the students really just did a supported employment with a district job coach and things like that? So I think getting really firm on why these things are important is going to.

really set you up for your goal setting to be functional.

Marisha (10:22)

Yeah, I think that's really important. And I love how you said that, like highlighting the research that shows that if treatment looks more like the real world, then we're more likely to generalize, which is.

ultimately what we want. Like who it doesn't matter. I always talk about this when it comes to like following directions types of goals. Like it doesn't matter if they can follow five million step directions in the therapy room. Like what will they, what are they looking like on the playground or at work or any of that. So I love that. and then,

So do you think we could dive into like maybe an example or two for the different areas that you mentioned? So you talked about functional communication, vocational goals, leisure skills. Could we maybe just chat through what that might look like a little bit more specifically?

Rose (11:07)

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So I had one student who was working on a vocational skill of going down to after lunch, him and appear. It was myself and a parapro. We would walk down to the cafeteria and the students would push in the chairs. They each had kind of different jobs in the cafeteria. And this was just kind of getting them ready for, it's like pre -vocational for when they're going to go to a vocational site, which is what they did at the high school that I worked in.

And so what I did for those students is I came up with a task analysis, which is just breaking down the skill of pushing in the chairs at lunch. And so it just was a step by step. I'd say, okay, we're going to go do our job now. We're going to go push in the chairs, potentially show a visual on the students visual schedule. And then just circling, like, did the student walk down the hall nicely? You know, did they start pushing in a chair and then look to the other one and orient to it? There's actually a lot of different steps.

And so then I would write down how many steps were included in that whole protocol and then what level of prompting we were hoping to get to. So it wasn't going to be completely independent, but probably maybe with no more than two prompts or something like that. So I'd have the steps listed, I'd break them down. And then you can just Google task analysis and you just write down every little step. And then you can just circle a plus or a minus, a plus or a minus.

And then that way, I feel like that's really nice real world data that is going to translate to more of a vocational setting. So that was an example of one vocational skill that we had addressed at the high school setting.

Marisha (12:48)

Yeah, I love that. And then, so with the task analysis, do you notate like the level of prompting for each of the steps or is that more general?

Rose (12:59)

That's a good question. Yes. Yeah, I would. And it depends on who, you know, because you want these things to be worked on, not just by the speech language pathologists, right? I always say my most important job is not the actual therapy. It's building rapport with the entire team so that I'm really just kind of helping to support communication that happens when I'm nowhere in sight. That's really where the magic happens on school -based teams.

And so yeah, you could definitely put the level of prompting and that gets into a whole, probably a whole other show, but we don't want to verbally prompt something because we want to verbal prompting is really hard to take that prompt away. We don't want our students to be prompt dependent. And that's something that really happens a lot with all students who are receiving services. And so for that specific example of pushing in the chairs, I might do a gestural prompt and then just pointing to the chair that needs to be pushed in next and then try to fade.

And just to piggyback on that, something I'm doing with my podcast, Autism Outreach, is like a little summer series where I'm doing shorter solo shows. And one that I talk about is making friends with the school administrative assistant or secretary, whatever your district calls them, and head custodian. And that is how we became up with that vocational activity. It's just trying to be friendly with people in the building and be a detective for what vocational opportunities.

might exist for your students in your buildings. And that's a nice way to, too, advocate for what a speech -language pathologist does, because most people don't really know what our scope and practice is.

Marisha (14:28)

Yeah, I love that. And that's so just functional and applicable. Yeah, that's really awesome. And I feel like if they, so if we're writing the goal in the IEP, we would just reference the kind of like task analysis kind of rubric that you created and use that to score.

Rose (14:51)

Yeah, you can definitely use the word rubric, whatever makes sense for you. Task analysis might be a jargon type term, but just gives you a framework. And I wouldn't just put the one vocational task in there. I would probably leave it open ended and maybe put a total of five vocational tasks or whatever it is with the criterion being whatever you set for the student. And then over two or three consecutive sessions, whatever makes sense for you in your clinical or school based setting.

Marisha (15:18)

Yeah, I love that example. I think that'll be really helpful. And you gave, because some of these things can feel really challenging to measure, but I think using the task analysis and having kind of like a checklist that you're using that you can quantify, you can quantify like the level of prompts needed or whatever makes sense. I think that would be, that's really cool.

Rose (15:27)

Mm -hmm.

Marisha (15:41)

I love it. Okay. And then what about leisure skills? What could that?

Rose (15:46)

Yeah, so for leisure, I might go into the classroom and do a group, like a leisure group. And so we might start with a question of the day that has visuals, or maybe when I had a smart board, they had smart board markers. I used to love that. It's such a nice thing when you have that in a school. Question of the day, everybody comes up and answers. Then we do an adapted book with real life pictures about something the students are doing. Usually it was about a vocational unit. I have this whole vocational book that I've created, and I have one for unit.

housekeeping unit because I knew what my kids are going to be job sampling as they got older and then we would end the game or end the session with a modified leisure activity. And so the way that I typically write those goals and that's included in this goal bank that I think we're going to put in show notes is just to put a duration of time that the student is going to engage in a group and then I might just put how many times they're going to participate and that might just be examples of like.

comes to the board, answers the question. It might be more open -ended. It really depends on your district and how specific you need to get. But I might say within a 25 -minute group session, Quinn will participate 10 times with no more than one prompt over three consecutive sessions. So participate could mean a lot of things. It could mean coming to the board with a smart board marker and voting. It might mean raising their hand. If I say who's excited to...

I don't know, take a walk on the track today. It's just kind of that. I hate goals that get us into specific ways to communicate. I really hate when an advocate would want me to write a goal for commenting because some of my kids didn't care. They didn't want to comment. They didn't care about that. And I think the neurodiversity movement really makes you think, with the neurodiversity lens, why are we working on this? Why is this important?

And everybody that's listening is going to have a different idea about that. And people that are on the other side of the IP table are going to sway you and want you to work on things. And that's the hard part about being a public school employee is that you can urge advocate, share research, but ultimately it's a team decision. So that can be hard. So that's why I got into writing those goals like that, to demonstrate that progress of like, wow, the student number one is staying in the group for 25 minutes. Look, they never used to do that. Number two.

We've done all these modified leisure activities, which I have a lot of free video models on my YouTube, ABA speech, so modified UNO, modified Scrabble, all those different modified Connect4, all those different games that you can then, when you report on progress, be really specific with those activities and how many times the student is participating.

Marisha (18:23)

Yeah, I love that. And that it gives that flexibility for the student to participate in ways that feel authentic to them versus like, you must comment or you must ask this many questions. It's like, what if they don't have it?

Rose (18:33)

Yes.

I know. And I just hate contriving those really awkward and strange social situations. And those are sometimes I just have always worked in really affluent districts. So there's always lawyers involved and advocates. And sometimes you just, you know, get in these heated discussions about goals and, you know, where you talk for hours about one goal and their objectives. But I mean, sometimes it's hard because when you're school based, you can't always say, I don't want to do that. I don't believe in that goal that takes away from the students in the event as well.

and promotes masking. But you can definitely try to be professional and try to advocate for evidence -based practice.

Marisha (19:17)

Yeah, and I'm sure there are ways to kind of compromise along with that too.

Rose (19:23)

Yeah, I have your director present. Yeah, I think those are important.

Marisha (19:25)

Okay, awesome. And then should we do one more example?

Rose (19:33)

Sure, yeah.

Marisha (19:34)

to do a functional worm.

Rose (19:37)

Yeah, functional communication. You know, for functional communication, middle school, high school, it might be asking for help with the task. So I had students who were more in general classes, maybe supported, where I would go into, they have a study period and I would, in the session, we would work on saying like, I need help with this. And then I would go into their supported kind of study hall to see if they would ask the teacher for help because they needed help on an assignment. And so that was nice.

Or students who are using an AAC device, who are maybe completing a vocational task at a work setting and they don't understand how to do it, or maybe they need more work. These are things that we look at in vocational situations. And so seeing if a student could use those different phrases, how can we teach them in the session? But then also, I think our service delivery too for middle school, high school students, if you can, with your caseload, I know there's always environmental barriers, but.

That's why I really love being a high school therapist because I would go out to the local hospital and see the student working at the snack bar. I would go out to the supported floor at the Cleveland Clinic and see the students doing corporate work. And I really love seeing my clients in those real world situations. Because then when we would go to the meetings and we would talk with all the adult service providers, the meetings get very, very large when the students get older.

I had real world information to share about how the student was doing. And so that service delivery piece might look different too. You know, I had some students I would see twice a week. I had some students I would see quarterly at their job setting just to still be that communication support on the team. It really varied.

Marisha (21:16)

That's amazing. This makes me want to go work in a high school. Yeah, I've always loved that because it's so functional and real, like you're preparing them for where and I mean, like when we're working with school or like elementary students, we're still working on very functional skills that will allow them to participate in the classroom and with their peers. But there's just something really cool about.

Rose (21:19)

It's fine.

Marisha (21:44)

like preparing for a job and I love that. So this was so fun getting to chat. I always leave our conversations feeling really inspired. Do you have any last kind of tips or anything that you wanted to share that we didn't get to yet?

Rose (21:47)

Yeah.

Yeah, I would just say if you're transitioning to middle school and high school, I think it's really important to just try to build rapport with each teacher and try to build rapport with each student, potentially observe them first. I think that's really important. I always just put that as a data point on my data sheet that I've observed them because it's all about that ongoing communication. And I did work in a district where I had a really reasonable caseload, which I was always really lucky to have that. But I always did try to email each parent.

even though that about did me in, but I thought it was important because just the nature of where I worked parents were hyper involved. And I wanted to make sure that I was a source of support to say, hey, if you're not happy with something, if you are happy with something, if you have a question or if you just want to say hi, let me know. And I always tried to do that at the very start of the school year because when we work with humans, there's always going to be some problem that comes up. And so if you in the beginning of the school year, just reach out and extend that olive branch.

that is going to be very, very important and show that you're there to support the students.

Marisha (23:06)

Yeah, I totally agree. Well, this was so incredibly helpful. And I'll in the show notes, which will be linked to the episode. I'll share Rosa's Instagram, I'll share her course, like her membership, which includes lots of really epic courses that will go into even more detail, as well as some other resources that we mentioned during this episode.

and then yeah I think that's a wrap.

Rose (23:39)

Well, thanks for having me.

Marisha (23:41)

Thanks for joining us, Rose, and I hope everyone has a fabulous rest of their day.