Marisha

Marisha: Hi there and welcome to The SLP Now Podcast. I am incredibly excited to bring Rosemary Griffin back onto the podcast. If that name sounds familiar, she joined us on episode 13 and shared tons of tips for success with high school life skills. It was one of my favorite episodes. I was just telling Rose that I walked away wanting to work in a high school because she just shared so many amazing tips and made it feel so incredibly doable. I'm incredibly excited to have her on today to share that same caliber of tips and tricks, except focusing on early learners with autism.
And just a little bit about Rose. If you haven't met her, she is a little bit of a unicorn. She is at CCC-SLP, BCBA. She's ASTRA certified and also a Board Certified Behavior Analyst. She's also the founder of ABA Speech and is also an ASHA approved provider. And she's just an amazing resource Rose has presented at the national state and local level about helping students with autism develop a way to communicate with the world. And she also created some amazing products like the Action Builder Cards, the double up game all geared at helping students with autism increase their language skills. So without further ado, hello Rose.

Rose: Hi, glad to be back. Nice chatting with you today.

Marisha: I am very excited. And before we dive into all of your tips and tricks, because we have quite the agenda. I'm curious if you could just share a little bit about your experience. Last time you told us about working with older students. But I'm curious kind of what your path was and how you kind of built your expertise and all of that with the younger population, the early autism learners.

Rose: Yeah, absolutely. I've always had a passion for working with any age student with autism. That's kind of been always my life mission ever since I learned about what a speech therapist was and does. So I remember working even in my student teaching, that's what we call it here in Ohio with students with autism. And I remember we were working at the lower elementary grades and the speech therapist that I was working with was very seasoned and she had a lot of really great visuals we use with the students. And I just remember having some breakthrough moments, working with those students and thinking, Oh my gosh, this is really amazing. This student wasn't talking before and now they are. And it's just such a great experience to meet students who don't have any way to communicate and to see that growth.
I had one year early in my career. I'm reaching not at the 20 year Mark, but I'm kind of getting there. So one year I just did preschool. It was all preschool. And I really loved that age group as well because it's such a dynamic time for students. I remember meeting students and them not having any way to communicate. And then us working together as a team, myself, the special education teacher at that level, you really have a lot of access to parents. Parents are usually dropping off. And so you see the parents and I had one student in particular who had all these different medical complications from birth and we were working together at the preschool level. And I subsequently have seen this mom in the community. And now this student, many years after all this structured therapy is no longer on an IEP and doesn't even need speech therapy services.
And so that kind of joy of seeing a student who has no way to communicate and maybe is feeling frustrated and then working together collaboratively with a team and definitely keeping the parents in the loop. That is really what has sparked my desire to want to work with students who have autism. Just that kind of growth that you can have when you're working together as a team is really, as corny as it sounds it is why I wake up every single day excited to be a speech therapist. I really love what we do. And I say that we're always in, we're helping people increase their quality of life and being able to do that every day really means a lot to me.

Marisha: That's amazing. And your enthusiasm and excitement and all of those qualities definitely shine through and I've definitely been transferred some of those because you're just so awesome in what you do. Let's get into the good stuff then. A lot of us have these students coming up on our case load and we're just like, where in the world do we start? So what would you suggest, how do we know where to start in therapy for a student who's not yet communicating?

Rose: I think what's so very important. I really have these kind of different strategies that I try to use when I'm working with any type of student. But I think the first thing that's so very important when working with students with autism is that we take time to build rapport. I call it a therapeutic rapport. That's really just a term that I've kind of come up with over the years of doing presentations and talking to groups of staff. But I think that we have to take that time to really build rapport with our kids. And I think that, as speech therapists, we're very data driven and we want to make sure that we're getting data on different objectives and things like that.
And what I say when we first meet a new student, even if it's the start of the school year and the student is new to you, or maybe the student is completely new to the therapeutic setting is just taking, at least one session, but it may take a lot more for students who have autism and, or some behavioral problems and just kind of playing with the student and being in their space and sharing things with them and making sure that we don't always have to make every situation a very language enrich time. I think that's something that is hard to not do, but we don't want to bombard the student with a lot of different questions.
When I'm meeting a student who has autism and their younger and really across the board, I may just be talking about some of the things that I have. So if I have a farm toy, I may just say, Oh, I have the cow. And now the cow says moo. I want to try to be really excited and playful and I want to make sure that I'm not asking a whole lot of questions. I think that we tend to have a tendency to do that because we want to make sure that we have some social reciprocity where we talk and the student talks. But I think just being with the student and building rapport with the student is a really good place to start.
And so sometimes, in the behavioral world, we may call that pairing. You may hear that term. So the idea is that we're just pairing ourselves, the materials and the environment with good things. So we want to be the giver of good things. Because even if you're meeting a student and they're preschool age, that might be if they didn't have Help Me Grow or they didn't have home based services, that might be the first time that they're ever really meeting somebody. And that might be a really type of different dynamic for them. And so it's important that we are seen as the person who is the giver of good things and the person who is excited and has all the fun toys.
I have this funny story, I was an autism facilitator down in Austin, Texas, and I love that job so much. It really kind of foreshadowed what I do now with ABA Speech. We're talking on talking to groups of professionals, but I would work with the speech therapist there, they're a group of about 35 amazing speech therapists. And so once a month I would give a talk about a certain topic that they wanted to hear about and it always pertained to autism. And then I would go in to their different classes and campuses throughout the week. And I would help with students that were new or students that were not communicating. And I really love doing that. And so the one student that I met I had brought some toys because he was preschool. So you always have to have, no matter what the age, you have to have a lot of fun things. And so I had this little cat toy, I don't even know where I got this thing and it just, you press the top of it and it would move and it would make little noises.
And this student was essentially nonverbal at the time. And so he really didn't say much that day, but we interacted just what I'm telling you, you know what, I'm talking about, things that are going on, but not asking a lot of questions, kind of just in his space. And then I go back to my main office and I come out maybe a week or two later. And when he saw me, he didn't say hi and that's okay because I don't always work on greetings first, but he looked at me and he said cat. And so I thought, Oh wow, that's so exciting. He had this learning history of me being somebody who had something he loved and enjoyed. And that's really where it has to start. You have to build that rapport and you have to find out what your student really loves and enjoys. That's where you need to start.

Marisha: Oh, that is such a cool story. I love that.

Rose: Yeah. Definitely.

Marisha: It's definitely great illustration of that concept too. Awesome. We spend some time establishing rapport, we're really focusing on finding what the student is interested in doing and what they'll enjoy, kind of just pairing in that way. Do you have any suggestions, especially as a newer clinician, I would be preparing for these sessions, I'd be like, what in the world do I prepare? So do you have a strategy? Do you have a ton of different toys? How do you organize the room and kind of select things to set yourself up for success to establish that rapport and do that pairing?

Rose: Yeah, that's a great question. I think the one of the first things too, and after we kind of build rapport, we definitely need to discuss assessment. I know that assessment is something that's very, very important. And usually if you're a school based therapist, the kids might be coming in from a home program or they might already be, they may be coming in from home for an evaluation. And so it is a really delicate balance when you're first meeting students of wanting to be this person who has all the really wonderful things, but you also need to probably do an assessment. Especially when students are younger, you may be part of an assessment team and you may be looking at, does this student really qualify for services? And so oftentimes it can be really difficult to test students with autism or more complex needs because they may not get a standard score on the PLS or they may not be able to sit through the testing.
And so I think it's good to have some things that are readily available, just like you would with younger students, maybe you have different play sets like a kitchen set up and some of those more traditional type things. But you also want to make sure that you have some reinforcers that might be really special that you kind of keep in your own possession as the speech therapist, because you can kind of use those things if the student like bubbles. Let's just say, because I don't know if I've met a child even with severe autism that did not like bubbles and it's kind of a fun toy. So making sure that you kind of have those in your possession. Maybe if you're doing an assessment you're able to have the student do some of the different test items, and then you're able to do some type of reinforcement that you have in your possession so that you could do a little bit of play. And then you could try to go back to testing.
And that's kind of a delicate balance. It's going to be hard for kids. And a lot of times when you're working with somebody who's really little, it really depends on your kind of methodology and also where you're working, but you may have the parent come back. If the student isn't able to answer all the questions, you're going to get a lot of good talk time with the parent, with the family. And you really want to know how the student is talking right then or communicating right then, is that really across the board? How they're communicating in the home environment. I think that's important too. That assessment piece is really important. So obviously if you have students who are younger, you may be able to use the PLS, which is a really, really nice assessment because it looks at all the different pieces and parts, is the student able to request things they want, can they receptively Id things? Are they able to label, what types of words can they say? Those are all really important.
Also, the functional communication profile, is really nice for assessment as well, because it's more open ended. And so it looks at different pieces and parts as far as can they take turns? That social kind of pragmatic pieces on there as well. And so I think those are the types of things that when we're first meeting a student, we want to make sure that we're building that rapport, that therapeutic rapport, and then really the next step is to really get a good assessment because that assessment is really going to help us have a scope and sequence of what we should work on an intervention. And I think when I was starting to work with students with autism, it was hard for me because I was working with younger students in a more year-round kind of ABA type school. And I just remember thinking these students are not getting a standardized score on the tests that I'm giving them.
There's just so many things that these learners could not do. That was really hard for me to know, what are my next steps? And so another test that I've talked a little bit about probably before too it's called the VB-MAPP. And so that test is really nice if you have access to it, if you're working in more of a specialized program, if you're not working a specialized programming, you've never heard of it. It's good just to kind of hear a little bit about it, because you might be getting outside evaluations where somebody has given the VB-MAPP. And so really what that looks at is different parts of communication. It looks at why is a student communicating? It looks at, is the student requesting, are they able to do that independently? Is the student labeling? What can they label, is the student playing with others? Is the student able to be in a group setting which is really, really important information at that age as well, because oftentimes when a student, every student is different.
I've had worked with students before who were essentially nonverbal, but I would tell the parent, your child is very social. They want to be around other people. But it's really good for us to get that complete snapshot of a learner because then we can say, okay, these are the exact goals that really need to be addressed for your student. And I'm a big proponent of making sure that communication is embedded across a student's day two. So rarely am I working on something that the team is not working on as well. I definitely take time to train everybody on how to embed communication opportunities during the day that are meaningful because we can't do it alone. You know what I mean? It's really important for these students that they have that type of intervention across their entire day.

Marisha: Yeah, that's perfect. I actually got to use the VB-MAPP a little bit. I worked in an autism program for a couple of years and it was super helpful.

Rose: Oh, that's great. I think it really breaks things down. Don't you think that we wouldn't necessarily be able to do on a standardized speech therapy test, so that's great.

Marisha: Yeah. And it was a nice way because the special education teacher used it too. And so it helped us have a common language and a common lens around what we were looking at, which is super interesting. I'm curious, we're pulling these pieces from the different assessments that you mentioned, we're observing, the students were getting feedback from the parents and the teachers, we're putting that all together. When we're piecing all of these things together and we have our whole list of things that we could focus on, do you have any strategies for navigating through that or do you have some kind of insight on maybe the most important areas to focus on in therapy? How do you know how do that?

Rose: That's a really good question. I actually have this gosh, it's been so popular. It has been downloaded by just thousands of people. It's called an autism IEP goal bank, which you can find at abcspeech.org, but what I've tried to do with that goal bank, and really what I try to do with any student who's not communicating. I'll have some main skills and really these main skills, you would obviously base them on each individual student in your assessment. But they're kind of, when I first started working with students I used to work at the Cleveland Clinic Center for Autism. And we were a separate program for students that was their least restrictive environment. So it was oftentimes students who had problem behavior that was a barrier to their learning. And I just remember working with these students and thinking just like you said, where do I even begin?
Sometimes it's hard to see that path that we need to take to help the student, have a response form, have a way to communicate. It's hard to know how do I help this student have spontaneous communication? I think that's just really hard sometimes when you're first working with these students. And there's a lot of noise out there too, everyone's going to have a different way that they approach this type of learner. Right. Some people may say, well, I always work on these types of words and I always work on these types of words and what I would say to you. If you're just beginning or there's a lot of noise out there on what you should do is whatever approach you end up taking. And however you're going to set your goals is that you take data and you analyze that data. Because oftentimes we might be on a team where, you said you worked in autism program, you may not always have the same philosophical idea about what you should work on with students.
And so I say, we don't always have to agree on everything, but I'll tell you what, when we take data and we analyze data on our goals and how we're doing things, that really takes a lot of the anxand the kind of upset that we may have when we kind of disagree with people. I would just let you know that going ahead. But there are absolutely different skills that I always try to make sure that we're incorporating and they really come from things like the PLS, from the VB-MAPP. And it's just kind of a culmination of what is appropriate for your learner. But I always kind of talk about these skills as learning readiness skills.
I don't know if you've worked with students in preschool, I'm sure that you have, but oftentimes it's hard for them to sit at a table or it's hard for them to attend so we might use more play-based therapy, which is definitely fine if we're able to teach things directly. But some of the things that I think are so very important for students are gross motor imitation skills. Gross motor imitation skills are going to teach the students. An example of that would be if I said, okay, do this one and I clap, and then I have the student clap after me. So we're teaching them how to learn. We're teaching them how to attend. So there's so many different pieces and parts just in that one little exercise that we're doing with gross motor imitation. Gross motor imitation too, can also be generalized to things like GoNoodle. I love GoNoodle, actually Koo Koo Kangaroo, which is one of my favorite groups from GoNoodle, which gonoodle.com is a free website.
If you've never been to it, it's absolutely amazing. And there's lots of different songs and dances. And what's really cool at that age is you can show students those videos and they have a lot of different imitation skills. So they may have people that are doing dances and the students can try to do the dances too. And so it's really working on that student's ability to attend. If they're with a group, it's working on their ability to engage with others. And it's a really nice kind of play-based way, maybe you're working on that gross motor imitation with the student directly and the teacher's also working on it, but then maybe you do a circle time. And part of it is to watch a song from GoNoodle. And so then you're embedding that ability to generalize into a classroom setting with other peers and things like that. I'd say gross motor imitation is definitely one of those.
Another thing that's really, really important for students is to work on matching. So matching picture to picture or object to object, we have that whole hierarchy that we learn about in graduate school. And so wherever the learner is at with that, I think that's really important. And really that matching is so very key to also work on engaging. You can definitely work on... I had a student who, Oh gosh, they were just not attending. They were at the picture level, okay. We were not using objects. They were able to do pictures, but they really were not having consistent success with some of the pictures that we were using. I was kind of using what I had in my therapy room as far as some picture cards and kind of repurposing some artic cards for that purpose. And the student really was not loving it.
I knew the student really loved and enjoyed watching Daniel the tiger. And so what I did is, we have a copy center. I work three days a week at a public school. And so we can get color copies, but we have to send away for them, which is fine. I'm just happy to get them. And so what I did is I sent a copy center. I went on Google images and I created these picture cards. They were all the same size. So the student wasn't matching based on size. And they were all of Daniel the tiger. Daniel the tiger birthday cake, Daniel the tiger with friends, Daniel the tiger on the show, Daniel the tiger by himself.
And so we worked on matching and something I think so important about that is that, if you're working in something that's more of a structured program, we might put out three different pictures. And so two of those pictures might be distractor pictures, not the targeted picture that we're working on. And one might be that picture we want them to match. We give the student the picture we want them to match. And then we say, match Daniel or match Daniel and his friends. And then the student has to scan, which is such a great skill to work on. And then they have to place it down on the correct picture. And so you're teaching the student, okay, these are the things, these are the foundational skills that are going to help you learn more in a least restrictive environment. If you have some direct instruction and then we go to morning circle, you will be able to attend better in that setting. We're trying to set that student to have a learning history of attending, working on academic tasks for a little bit longer and things like that.
And then the other one that I always like to start with is following one step directions. And I can tell you as a mom of three, my kids have trouble with one step directions on the daily. But that is really important for parents who are autism parents who are affected as a family by autism, just the things that we take for granted, for our kids. I may tell my kids, okay, get your shoes on or get your shoes. My kids may just be delaying because they're watching the iPad or doing whatever and not attending. But for our learners who have autism and are iddy biddies, those types of things are going to be really important because I always talk about the fact that our therapy, it's not just us and the student. We can get really kind of in this almost like, some days I feel like I'm really helping other people. And then other days you might have a therapy session and feel like, what am I even doing here?
But knowing that the work that you do every single day with that student, you might be working on a one step direction, like get your shoes right before they got out to play or whatever. And you may think like, Oh my gosh, this is so hard, or this is so repetitive. But you have to think about the big picture, how it's a ripple effect. So it's like, okay, I'm going to work on these early learning skills like this one step direction, get your shoes. And that, maybe it's going to take this student who has severe needs three or four weeks to learn that one step direction without any prompting, but me I'm when they learn it and you can share that with the parent and they can then embed that into their home environment.
You have to think about what effect that's going to have on that family. That family could say, okay Tom, get your shoes. And he gets his shoes and he's ready to go out for the day. And I just know that when we're working day to day, we can kind of get in this. You know, it's hard to see really what the big picture is, but it's always really important to know that you can embed those things into the home environment and how much our therapy, our daily therapy and what we do everyday for our kids is going to have an effect on their home life and how they're communicating in the home environment. Those are definitely some things I love to start with.

Marisha: Perfect. That's super helpful. And then, so let's say we've established the rapport, we have our assessment. We figured out which areas we want to focus on in therapy. So what would the actual session look like once we dive into therapy?

Rose: Oh yeah. Okay. That's a great question too. I think that's really important. I definitely always love to start working on requesting. I think that's just so very important oftentimes when we're working with students who are younger, they may not have any way to tell us that they want the things that they love and enjoy. I always start my sessions with requesting. In the behavioral world, you might hear that term as manding. And so that's kind of a jargon type term, but a lot of people oftentimes a speech therapist, myself included as a school based therapist, even though I'm a BCBA, when I'm working in a school, I'm employed as the speech therapist I'm definitely doing speech therapy kind of through a behavioral lens, but I'm absolutely 100% collaborating with other BCBAs.
And so even if we're never going to use those terms, I think it's really important to understand what they mean so that... you talked about Marisha, how you used the VB-MAPP and you felt you were able to get on kind of the same working level with the teacher. And I think sometimes those words that we kind of talk about when we don't understand a term, I know that sometimes I get defensive. I've been with other people before, and they've said a term and I act like I'd completely understand that term. And then after I leave the meeting or sign off the Zoom call I'm googling it and whatever. I always start with manding or requesting, I kind of use those interchangeably because that's kind of telling the student, these are the things you love and enjoy, and this is what we're going to start with today. And so that's really, what's going to help our students find a way to communicate with the world.
And something that I think is so important is, oftentimes our students might have really limited things they love and enjoy. So as part of that assessment, or when we start kind of getting in the groove of therapy is doing a preference assessment. And so a preference assessment is something that, I don't like to send them home. I know sometimes teachers do that kind of at the start of the school year. And I think that's fine, but you can just Google preference assessment. I definitely have one at ABA Speech. And so it's really just a list of potential reinforcers. And so that's going to be really powerful information because we want to make sure that our sessions are embedded with things that our student really loves and enjoys.
So no matter the age of the student, but especially for our little ones, we want to make sure that we're starting our sessions with them requesting their very favorite things. I went back to the cat story, the kid who really loved the cat. So when we worked with him, we made sure that we had the cat toy. And we made sure that we had all those really fun toys because we want to spend, let's say that we have a 30 minute session and that's the thing to talk about too, is that the things I'm talking about today might be the very gold standard. I absolutely understand that a lot of speech therapists are not able to see kids individually. I don't want people to think, Oh my gosh, everything she's saying is only if you're working with students individually. I realized that that is not always the case.
Just know that the things I'm talking about, if you're not able to see students individually, things to kind of think about can you have a paraprofessional come to offer some help? Because students may leave the teaching area, get into something different, have trouble attending. And it's really important to kind of have that support when you're doing your sessions. And what's really amazing about building a rapport with paraprofessionals as well, or one on one assistance or whatever you're calling them in your workplace is that when you're working with a student with more complex needs or autism and you have team members present you're really modeling. You're really modeling like this is how we embed communication. This is how we should respond to maybe a behavior that kind of gets in the way of instruction.
And so I think that's important to talk about because sometimes when I'm talking, I do talk about seeing students kind of individually. And I know that that's really not always the case. So just know that there are ways to get around that creative scheduling. Sometimes I've seen students where I'll see them for 15 minutes on one day and 15 minutes on another day, or maybe I'll see students in a dyad, meaning it's just me and I have two students or it's just me and I have two students, but there's one assistant. And then when I'm working with the one student on a skill than the other student, maybe he's engaged in a puzzle or some type of task that the student can do with minimal prompts.
I just want to talk about that because I realized that we don't always have the luxury to be able to see the students in a one on one setting before I get too entrenched here. Okay. So requesting, I think requesting is super important because that's how our student's going to find their voice. I often say that's kind of my personal mission is to make sure that every single student that I come into contact with and hopefully every single student that anybody who kind of listens to ABA Speech will come into contact, we'll have a way to communicate with the world. And so I think that is really, really important. And so during that manding time or that requesting time, you're going to have things that the student really loves and enjoys. And you're going to work on them requesting those things.
I think what's so important about that too, is to remember that we want to work on them requesting very specific things. Let's say that your student really loves puzzles and really loves bubbles and really loves Pete the cat. You're going to have those things present and then you're going to help the student. And if they need help, I'm requesting those things. You're going to help them request those things. And once they do, then you're going to give them that item and they're going to play with it. And then we don't take that item away because we don't want to take things away. That can cause problem behavior, because I don't know about you, but I don't like when people touch my things. And then I'm going to show them something else they might really love and enjoy. I'm going to show them the Pete the cat book, and maybe they see the book and they say, Pete, and then I read the book to them or however we interact with the book.
I call it a rotating array of reinforcement. So that's really how I like to start the session because I'm starting with this things that the student really loves and enjoys. I'm making sure that I have those really amazing things in my possession. And I'm helping the student when needed if they need help requesting those things. And then I'm taking data on that. I want to know, it's kind of like this idea of what are you into today? I'm a creature of habit. I just recently changed my Starbucks order. For the past year, I've had this crazy order. I got a mocha, but it was more complicated than that. I'm not going to get into it because I'm kind of a coffee nerd. And then one day I tried something new.
I go back the next day and the lady goes, Oh, so you liked that drink. I'm like, Oh my gosh, is this good? This lady knows my drink. I think I have a Starbucks problem, but it's kind of like, that's what we're saying to our kids. We're not really saying, what are you into today? What do you want to play with today? You might say that because they're little, but we're kind of analyzing and we're kind of the behavioral detectives. We're thinking like, Oh, when I saw him last week, he really loved that puzzle. I'm going to make sure I have that zoo puzzle that makes the sounds. Or maybe you see him the next week and he really doesn't love that anymore. So you have to have a lot of different things ready to go.
And so I think that working on requesting is the most important thing. And then that's going to kind of give us that behavioral momentum, where the student sees that you have the things they love and enjoy. They're working on requesting them with whatever response form they use. If they're using pictures or their voice. And so that's going to build this history of, Oh, I love going to Miss Rose's room because she has, the bubbles and the cat toy and all the things I really love and enjoy. Sure, it's speech time. I'm ready. And so that's really what we want to start with. And then we want to have a running list. I kind of every year kind of change and modify the way I'm taking data a little bit here and there. And so I always have for each of my students a data sheet that would have, in essence, it's kind of my therapy plan. I'd have the different things we were going to work on.
And so then let's say we do requesting, and I write down the student really wanted to request puzzles and bubbles. They did that on their own, maybe 10 times, and then they wanted the iPad, but I had to prompt them to request that. I make sure that I note all of that information on my data sheet and then I might move into something like working on the gross motor imitation. So I might say, okay, do this one. And maybe I jump. And I think that's important too. You don't have to just work on one target within these different skill areas, but it is important to note exactly what target you're working on.
Let's say that we're working on gross motor imitation and I'm going to do a jump and I want the student to do that after me. I definitely want to make sure that I write that down on my data sheet. And then I know, did the student need prompting to do the skill? Did the student do the skill on their own? And then we obviously want to make sure, especially with our little guys that we're taking time to do play-based things. So maybe we do work for five minutes and then the student takes a little break. Maybe we do some part of our session at the table and some part of the session is maybe in their classroom or it's in a play area, in your clinic, wherever you're servicing the child. I think that's very important because we want to make sure that we're kind of analyzing too, especially with really little kids.
Number one, is it appropriate for them to even come to the table? That's important to think about is the student going to work better on the floor? Where is the student going to work best that's important. And I think too, especially when I'm working with little students gosh, and even my students who are older, I get bored sitting in the same place for 30 minutes. I always try to kind of vary, like okay, first we're going to work at the table and we're going to do requesting and then we're going to do a little labeling and then maybe we're going to go for a walk. And maybe when I was doing just preschool, we had a little gym right across the hall from the therapy room. So we would go over there and shoot a couple of baskets and then we would come back. We had a kitchen area right in our little therapy room, so we would work at the table and then we would go in the kitchen.
And make sure it's kind of this fluid kind of dance that I feel like once you get more accustomed to working with students with more complex needs, it just kind of becomes easier as time goes. And so those are some important things. I might also work on the one step directions like we talked about, intersperse some work on matching. One skill that we haven't talked about yet is labeling. I think labeling for students, if that's what your assessment says to work on is very important. And I think what's so important when we work on labeling. I had a student who I met him in, was he, he was preschool. I met him, I was working in a specialized program with housed within a public school. And I met this little guy who came to us and they said, he's not talking, he has a device. But it was the cutest thing.
I would work really closely with the teacher and I worked on his goals and we would use his device. He didn't really like to use his device and he was trying to talk and he would say little things. And then when he started talking, we just worked really collaboratively. Me and the teacher on all these early learner things, he started talking and you could understand everything he said. And that's one of the things that's so amazing about working with younger students is that level of growth in such a short time which you don't always get that kind of success with older students. It was amazing. He started talking.
For that student, he was requesting, he was talking and one of the things we worked on him with is labeling. And so it was really important that we started work on labeling things that were preferred. So basically just working on things that the student loves and enjoys. If the student really loves the iPad, we're going to work on iPad. Oftentimes that's one of the first labeling targets I work on because a lot of kids love their iPad. Or maybe it's a movie, maybe they really love that, or maybe they really love going to grandma's house. And so we label grandma. So making sure that we're going to start work on labeling things thing that are preferred. Because labeling can be so very hard for our students with more complex needs. We want to make sure that it's not a program or it's not a skill that they don't like working on. And so I always make sure that I'm picking targets that the student really loves and enjoys.
And then I always tend to start working with some nouns, start working on labeling some nouns and then phasing in some preferred actions as well. And then another thing to really think about is making sure that we're showing the student multiple pictures of whatever it is that we're labeling. Let's say that we're labeling horse, and so we have maybe a real life picture of a horse. Maybe we have the object of a horse and maybe we have a picture book that has the horse. Or maybe we just have three pictures of horse. Whatever's going to work for your setup, for your student. And that really, when we show a student three different examples, we're helping plan for that generalization piece, which I've talked about before. And we have to make sure that we're thinking about that when we're planning our intervention. That's so very important for our scope and sequence.
Another thing that's super important is play, which obviously for our little ones, but even for older students, play is so very important. A skill that I really love to use and strategy that has so much research behind it is video modeling. And so I had a student, this is actually the coolest thing. So when I was down in Austin, I heard this lady talk about this language program she kind of had developed. And so loosely based on this talk I heard, I wrote a grant for our teachers and speech therapists and we got all this money, which was awesome. And so what it bought us were some toys and it bought us color copiers. And it was a really cool program, we had it a little, one of the kids, they were in kindergarten and so it was a gas station toy. And so you get the gas, the car pulls up, there's so much language that goes into that.
So what the speech therapist and I was kind of supporting as an administrator, I would go, she would take this toy to a regular kindergarten classroom with typical peers and she would take a very loose kind of language sample about how the kids were, what were they saying when they played with the toy. Then our speech therapist would create a story with real pictures about the toy and the words that the kids were using. And then she would read this story with her kids with autism, pretty severe autism. And then she would also show them a video model of typical peers playing with the toy. And then she would have all kids with more complex needs play with the toy as well.
And we took data on it, we presented about it in the district, but it was really amazing to see when we have that direct instruction with play. A lot of times our students may just have really limited play skills because, maybe number one, they don't really love and enjoy a whole lot of things. Or number two, maybe they would love and enjoy things, but they're just not sure how to interact with them. These video models really show them like, okay, the one we did for the car, it was like, Oh, here comes the car and the car goes vroom and now I'm going to put gas in the car. It was really cool to be able to show them that video, then have them play with it and then reinforce them for using those different types of words. Obviously play is so important.
And then, cooperative play with others. I do a lot of talk about modified leisure skills. And so something that I love, love, love for students at that age is to do modified. Simon says. It's just always, Simon says, so it's kind of like we're working on engagement, we're working on gross motor imitation, we're working on attending. Simon says touch your head, Simon says touch your knees, Simon says do a twist. And those types of things can be really, really fun for the students. So making sure to embed those opportunities. What's so cool about something like Simon says or another game I've done with my students is modified musical chairs, really iddy-biddy.
What's fun about that is you put the chairs out. Let's say we have three students, we put out three chairs and then the only rules are when the music's on you walk and when the music is done, you sit down and that's how you modify it. You don't ever take a chair away because I don't know who came up with that anyway. It's kind of torturous. And so that's how you modify it. You can use whatever songs the kids love and enjoy. You can use whatever is like the hot movie at the time. And then what's nice is if you do have a para pro or two to help you with that, that's cool because then they can help generalize that potentially to the classroom. So let's say here in Ohio, we might have indoor recess more than maybe where you guys live in Arizona. And so during that time the kids may play games in the classroom and so it gives them a time to kind of practice those skills outside of the speech session.
Then the only other thing that I try to think about, especially at this age range too, is we call them intraverbals in the behavioral world, but it would just be kind of like filling in the blank. Filling in the blank for common phrases, is often a kind of a prerequisite to being able to answer some more complex WH- questions. And so I might say ready, set and the student says go. Or one, two, and the student says three. And it's really working on social reciprocity. I say something, you say something and we're engaging together. So that kind of in a nutshell, if you were to kind of take a camera crew and kind of come and see how I do therapy, that would be what you would kind of see.

Marisha: That's amazing. I love all of the examples and ideas and just a really nice overview of all the things. That's awesome. Just a couple of followup questions. In terms of managing the materials, especially with more of the initial phases where we're really working on what the students are interested in, because I know I definitely had pretty poor management of that in the beginning. I would just try and have all of these things ready to go and I don't know. I'm curious what you agree with them. Do you leave your materials all around the therapy room so the student can move around? Or do you kind of put them in the cabinet and grab them as you need them? How do you maintain control of the session and manage those pieces while still kind of keeping the student engaged? Because sometimes they'll have such short attention spans where they quickly go off from one thing to the other. I'm just super curious.

Rose: Yeah, that's a great question. I always kind of talk about that too is that, these aren't the type of students that I'm kind of talking about today where you can just say, Oh, hold on one second, I have to grab that particular flashcard it's in my cabinet because we might just lose that student. And then we might spend the rest of the session trying to get behaviorally back on track to a level of engagement. So that's a great question. I definitely, when I was working in more of an ABA type program that was a year round program for students with most moderate to severe autism, every single student. And it kind of varied by the year, as the program progressed. That clinic has been around for about 12 years now. But we would just start out where the students would have their own organizers, their own kind of like tub of materials, if you will. And so in there would be like their specific picture cards that they're working on, their specific toys that they like to use for requesting.
And that kind of gets hard because sometimes you might have another student who really loves and enjoys that and that's okay too. I don't think you have to have everything together, but you are absolutely right in the fact that you need to be on your A+ game with organization when you're working with students who have trouble engaging because we know what it's like to have good working rapport with a student. And then if you have to grab something or somebody comes into your therapy room to talk to you or something, that you could just lose them. And then you feel like the session is kind of, then you're just kind of getting back to a level of engagement. So really what I would suggest just as a starter is if you could just have a bin for that student and maybe in that bin you would put the different cards they're working on, different maybe you just have like a data sheet in there too that's kind of like that all in one place.
Every place is going to kind of have their own way that they're taking data and things like that. And oftentimes I actually really take data in the classroom binders because the classroom staff is really working on communication goals when I'm not present or when I don't see the kids for therapy. But I think it's a really nice way to start. I would just say one little bin. And then you would put in exactly what you need for that student in their data sheets. So it's all right there and it's ready to go.

Marisha: I love that idea. And I think that even if we don't have the ability to create a tub or a bin for each student, there's going to be a lot of overlap in the types of materials and in between sessions we could switch things out or whatever. That makes a lot of sense. I love that. And then it's kind of nice too, because a tub is something that typically only we can open. So it still gives us that control. And if it's like kind of, I don't know we could see, what students respond best to, whether it's transparent or not. But if it is, that could be a good opportunity to work on some requesting in.

Rose: True. They might see something that they really like in that bin and they might say open or they might say the name of the toy, that's a good way to work on student motivation. We kind of talk about those communicative temptations and that would just be one that inherently, if the student cared enough, to look and see what's in there. And if you're picking out things they might love and enjoy, that would absolutely be another way to kind of incidentally work on communication, which is great.

Marisha: Awesome. And then another followup question. We don't have time to dive into a ton of detail, but any quick tips on data collection because this type of therapy looks very different than our articulation therapy or just anything. I don't know, in the beginning it can feel less structured I think. So do you have any tips on kind of wrapping our heads around that and coming up with a good strategy for data?

Rose: I think data is very important. I think that on abaspeech.org if you just put data sheets in, I think last school year I put together the data sheets that I used for my binder. And really what I like to do is just list each skill that we're working on for the student. And then I list the specific target. So if it's gross motor imitation and we're working on jumping, I list that if it's a one-step direction and it's get shoes, I list that whatever we're working on labeling, I have all that there. And then really what I've been doing is more sometimes we call it cold probe or first trial data.
I just take and I circle a plus or a minus for the first time that we work on that skill. And so that gives me a running record of how the student is doing. And I try to always make my data functional so it gives me good information, but I try to make it really, really easy for me because I'm a school based therapist, I see a lot of different kids. So I want to make sure that it's a system that's going to work for me, that's easy, that isn't taxing. And I'm always kind of refining. I definitely have some free data sheets on that @abaspeech.org as well.

Marisha: That is super helpful and I love just your quick practical tips on that one and that was brilliant. I think this'll be the last question that we dive into. But I think that, because you mentioned the team being so incredibly important and especially when it comes to parents when we're working with the early learners, this is all very new to them and I bet that it's pretty scary and overwhelming for a lot of them. What advice do you give to your parents and how can SLPs effectively communicate in this particular stage of things?

Rose: Yeah, I just try to let parents know that I'm there to support them. I think ongoing communication for all parents is very, very important. Parents want to know what's going on. Parents usually want to know what can they do at home to help supplement what's going on in therapy. I try to be very specific on progress reports and if I'm working in a place where I can talk to parents when they pick up their child, I try to always be really specific about what we worked on. And I try to just not overwhelm parents. I am a parent of three and so I know what it's like to be completely overwhelmed and to feel you're not doing enough ever for any child, especially a child who has significant needs. And I think it's just important for them to know, Hey, I really love working with your child. I'm here to support them.
Because a lot of the times parents who have kids with autism, they may not have those warm fuzzy feelings from being in IEP meetings. That's scary. I've definitely seen parents at the preschool level cry when their child is diagnosed with a disability. It's hard for everybody. And just knowing that you can be there to support them, you can be a sounding board and just trying to be really positive. And to relay really specific information so that they know exactly what's going on in therapy, I think is key.

Marisha: That's perfect. Because I feel like especially in the IEP meetings, there's so much information being shared and do you ever have any handouts or visuals or anything that you like to share? Do you have any go tos for that or do you find that just like the specific progress reports and little verbal communication here and there?

Rose: Yeah, I think that that ongoing communication is really what's so important. And definitely just with our IEPs, we meet together as a team. We send a draft home. I think sending a draft home with ample time so that parents can ask questions, get feedback. Oftentimes with your students with autism, they might already have a whole team of people working with the student in the home environment. If you're a school based therapist, they might want to show it to their home team and get input. And I think I try to really take all that in. And then I just try to always kind of think about the parent's perspective. And sometimes it's hard. We might have parents that might seem difficult to work with. But I think those parents really challenge us and I always just think they want what's best for their child. I think that's what's important to remember too, because sometimes we can get into these meetings that are contentious and that's just kind of the nature of special education, unfortunately.
But I just always want parents to know that I'm here to support your child's communication. This is my main focus and my professional career. And that I think when you kind of show that kind of positivity and optimism even if you kind of have those trials and tribulations with advocates and 20 people in IEP meeting we always just have to be really focused and this is their baby. We need to do what's best for the child because sometimes we have those meetings that they make everybody a little nervous. So just kind of remembering where this parents is coming from I think is really, really important.

Marisha: Yeah, that was definitely a huge takeaway for me after my first couple challenging meetings because ultimately, everyone just wants what they think is best for the child. If we can communicate with that as the focus, I feel it becomes much less contentious and we can just really focus on the child, which is the goal. And I think the tips that you gave and I love some of the phrases you use, like I'm here to support your child. And I think backing that up by sharing when you do see the parent, giving them updates and just being present in whichever way we can, even if it's just in the IEP meeting. Sharing specific examples or specific stories I think just really helps illustrate that point. I'm supporting your child, I am here for them, I'm showing up. And all of that I think is huge. And I loved your other phrases of I'm here to support, I'm a sounding board. Those are all really great. Yeah, really great tips. Okay, awesome. So any closing words of advice or just maybe your biggest takeaway. If you could take one thing from the top what do you think would help the most.

Rose: Yes. I would just say when you're working with students with autism, try to find out what they really love and enjoy. When you first meet them, just be in their space and find out what they love if they're not able to communicate on their own to make sure that you do work on direct instruction with requesting that that's a goal on the IEP and that the things that you're working on are very specific to what they love. Bubbles, puzzle, jump run, things like that. That's really what's going to help our students understand that their communication is powerful and it's going to help really strengthen their overall communication skills.

Marisha: Okay. That's perfect. If we can take away one thing, just really focusing on our students' interests and what they love and leveraging that for some awesome therapy sessions.

Rose: Sounds great.

Marisha: Love it. Well, thank you again for sharing your amazing experience and I just loved your stories and really specific tips and strategies. Thank you again. I super appreciate it.

Rose: Yeah, great to be here.

Marisha: And then you also shared a bunch of different links. For the listeners, if you want to go to slpnow.com/52, I'll share the links to all of the autism goal bank and the data sheets and all of that good stuff so you can easily access that as well.

Rose: Great. Perfect.

Marisha: Thank you.

Marisha: Hi there and welcome to the SLP Now Podcast. I am extremely honored and excited to have Kristin Bowers back on the podcast today. And if you're not familiar with her, she is an ASHA-Certified Speech Language Pathologist who graduated from the University of Pittsburgh in 2007, with her B.A. in Communication Science and Disorders and then in 2010, with her master's in Speech Language Pathology.
She has experience in early intervention as well as private practice and she currently works in the school setting servicing children from kindergarten through fifth grade. She's also the owner of Kiwi Speech, and she creates amazing and absolutely beautiful therapy materials for speech and language services. Most of which are available on Teachers Pay Teachers and I brought her on the podcast today because she is passionate about finding effective ways to have kids practice their sounds, and also supporting other skills like problem solving and growth mindset. And I've been getting a lot of questions about growth mindset, and I think this is something that I've been able to incorporate into my therapy. But I'm super excited to learn even more about it from Kristin today.

Kristin: Hi, how are you?

Marisha: Awesome. So, thank you so much for joining the podcast today. I am really excited to learn from you, and I'm curious, how did you first start learning about growth mindset?

Kristin: I'm a pretty avid reader, and I usually try to read in addition to one fiction book. I'm usually reading a nonfiction book, and I think one of the first times I really came across growth mindset was in the book Grit by Angela Duckworth and although she doesn't directly talk about growth mindset, she talks a lot about grit and how successful people one, may not be more intelligent than the other or more successful people rather and almost no matter how you're going to measure that success, it's not that they're necessarily more intelligent, it's that they have this thing called grit, which she, excuse me, what she sort of defines is this ability to stick through something, stick to something over a longer period of time or to stick with something when it gets hard and that's really closely related to growth mindset.
And then I think the term growth mindset is coming up just so much more in the educational world. Just as philosophies on education change over time, it's just something I started really seeing in the general education world and I really loved that book, Grit, and so just seeing how they fit together and how they could really apply to some of our students, as much as or almost more than just your average kid, right?
So some of our kids are coming to us for the sole purpose of something is hard for them, right? That's why they're in speech. So having an approach to that not just targets their sound or the vocabulary they're using, but also just the way they think about learning in their ability to improve was really important. So I think they just kind of really settled with me, and it was just something I gave a lot of thought to, and started really kind of developing ways to support my students not just in their speech and language skills, but also just the way they thought about learning and their ability to grow.

Marisha: Yeah, I couldn't agree more, and I feel like I had a similar experience around that as well. It just started with a different book for me. I read The Growth Mindset book, I believe it was Carol Dweck.

Kristin: Yeah, exactly.

Marisha: But it really resonated with me because a lot of the students on my caseload, they had obviously multiple disabilities, and they were being seen by resource room, or other special education services, and they were really struggling in the classroom. And I just noticed that some of my students just kept persevering. They kept working towards it, even though I knew it was so incredibly hard for them. Whereas other students, especially as they got older, more and more of them started to shut down, and so I really wanted a way to continue supporting them and making sure that they, just trying to prevent that shut down.
But Kristin, you and I have talked about this before, because you see a slightly different caseload.

Kristin: Yeah, it's funny. I think I know what you're getting at, and I was just going to add that. So yeah, I mean, I think in the nature of our role, we have a lot of kids who really struggle, maybe globally with lots of stuff. But I also have found this to be so applicable to the other end of the spectrum, which is some of the kids I see are actually in gifted programs. And I have a pretty large portion of my caseload that are really high achievers in many areas, and in some ways, I find that they are the ideal candidate for this growth mindset approach, and that's because they're good at everything they do, or they always have been, right?
They're perhaps really good at math, and they were early readers and they just in general have experience in school thus far being really successful with everything and then all of a sudden, they're not that great at speech, right? It maybe for some of the kids I see. I think speech may be the first thing that they've ever come across that has been difficult for them, and they don't know how to look around a classroom and see themselves as maybe the one person struggling. They're used to being successful and they're used to seeing themselves in that light, and I find that sometimes those kids are the ones that struggle the most to hear feedback and speech, right?
They don't like being told that they're not doing something right. Sometimes they're the ones that I say, oh, I heard you say, sue, can you fix that and say, shoe, and they'll say, that's what I said the first time. They kind of sometimes they argue with me a little bit, and I think they just are really having a hard time accepting or knowing what to do with this newfound knowledge that they have something that's a little tricky for them. So yeah, I mean, definitely the kids who have a lot going on, can benefit from this. But I think it's also too important to remember that some of these highly intelligent kids that are successful in other areas can really benefit from it just as much, if not more.
So yeah, I think, it's helpful for everyone, and I've also seen it be really helpful for some of my kids that struggle with a little anxiety. I don't know if you have kids, they're really afraid of making mistakes, and they often won't try, they won't push themselves because they're afraid of that and it's been really helpful for some of those kids who may also be seeing a school counselor for some anxiety issues or kind of perfectionism sort of tendencies, so yeah.

Marisha: Yeah, absolutely. And yeah, I think that's just a good like a nice little summary that it can benefit of a wide range of students, if not all students, because we're all going to be, or they all will face adversity throughout their academic careers, and then I think it's helpful for us too. Especially given recent circumstances, we all get to implement some growth mindset but we'll definitely talk about that a little bit more further into the interview. But I'm curious, can you just give us a breakdown of what growth mindset is?

Kristin: Yeah, of course. So, growth mindset is typically talked about sort of in this dichotomy between a fixed mindset versus a growth mindset, for example. So in a growth mindset, we know that we are capable of change and we're capable of growing. So this can be, I think, when it comes to speech, we talk about it a lot in relation to specific skills. But it can also be things that you might consider personality traits. So someone with a strong growth mindset knows that with work, they can become maybe a different type of person.
Someone with a growth mindset likes a challenge, right? They like to see what they are capable of doing, and they don't really get stuck in this. Well, I'm not a math person, right? That's not something you would hear from someone with a growth mindset or you would hear things like well, if I work at this, I can learn this new skill. So yeah, they have a really strong sense of effort, being a way to change something about yourself and they know that putting an effort and putting in work, that those things are possible.
In contrast, as someone with a fixed mindset, might be more likely to say, oh, I'm not a math person. I'll never be good at that. Just if you could do that for me, that would be great or getting a little bit more frustrated or bogged down in the mistakes. Those things are really negative to someone with a fixed mindset whereas someone with a growth mindset knows that, we only make mistakes when we're challenging ourselves, and we challenge ourselves as a way to learn new things. So mistakes are a good thing, right? It means we're at that level where we're learning, and I think that point of the growth mindset in particular is just so relevant to speech therapy, and what we're doing in our role in that.
So yeah, so a growth mindset is the belief that we can grow and we can change if we put in effort and work, to put really simply.

Marisha: That is perfect, and I love what you said about mistakes helping us grow because if we have a fixed mindset, and our belief is that, I am a math person, but if we for some reason fail some tests, then suddenly that belief is just shattered. But if we have that growth mindset of I'm capable of change, of growing. So like, yeah, I think I like math and just those challenges that come up don't break us quite as much as they would if that was our identity, and it's just evidence for against that.

Kristin: Absolutely. I think that's the trait I see a lot in some of my gifted students, right? Is they hold their identity so strongly in being the best or being the brightest. And yeah, when that one thing that comes along, that kind of breaks that, they really struggle, and they do, they can take it really personally. I don't want to generalize, obviously, but yeah, I see some students take it really personally when they're corrected, right? Or when they make a mistake, and yeah, having a growth mindset or starting to nurture our growth mindset in them is sort of a way to help that.

Marisha: Yeah, and I think we started talking about this a little bit already. But why do you think it's important, and why did you spend so much time learning about it and creating resources? Yeah.

Kristin: Yeah, I don't know, I think for me, it was just really applicable to my caseload. I think it's also really applicable as a parent, you think about the things that we say as parents and maybe the things we don't. And I have a daughter who has very, she has many strengths, obviously, but she really struggles with her speech, and I think my biggest concern for her is more when we thought about kindergarten, right? She's a June birthday. So she was kind of in that age where we thought, she's going to kindergarten, right? Or should we keep her back and we had this conversation, but my biggest concern was less the academics and more of the confidence, right?
I was really concerned that she would go to kindergarten and she would get kind of beaten down with the things that she couldn't do or maybe her lack of ability to communicate effectively, and I was really worried about her confidence and at the end of day, that's all a growth mindset issue, right? That's not an academic thing, that's not going to come from me drilling her with her sight words. That's all about just nurturing an approach to learning, and just yeah, I think as a parent, it became really relevant to me. And again, it was applicable to just so many of my students.
I thought, man, if they just had a more open approach to learning or they were more willing to make mistakes, I knew we could make more progress.

Marisha: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And then for me, it was interesting too, because I kind of talked about this already, but I was seeing a lot of students who were struggling globally. Every part of school was hard for them and their peers and sometimes even teachers were placing fixed mindset beliefs on them. Like you're not smart, you're not good enough, you're slow, you're I don't know, all of these different things, whether it was said explicitly or more implied. So that's what got me super interested in figuring it out because I saw what happens over time as the students get older, they just shut down more and more. And of course, that's not always the case but after I learned about this, I thought it could be a really cool way to give these students some extra skills to kind of combat that a little bit and to celebrate their mistakes and celebrate the effort because they likely put in more effort than anyone in the class-

Kristin: Absolutely.

Marisha: ... Even if they don't get the same results but, yeah, it was really cool to see how that could impact students.

Kristin: I agree and I think you mentioned something else too, is kind of it's not just about the single child you're working with, but also kind of the system around them, whether it's the teachers or the students, but even when it comes to, whoa, why do they go to speech? Sometimes you've got that question, and I think sometimes equipping the students with an answer to that, why do you come to speech? Well, some people might need a little bit of help with reading, some people might need a little bit of help with this, and you need a little bit of help with speech. It's not a bad thing.
We all have these things we may have to work a little bit harder at but that's not a problem. We've got this. Equipping them and just again, using it in your language with the other people you're around, the other students. They get to come to see me to work on something extra, how great is that, right? They have this opportunity to work extra hard at something and phrasing that as a positive, not a negative.

Marisha: Yes, I love that frame, or just how you framed that. That was perfect. So, now let's get to some of the good stuff. So how do you incorporate? Because I think before we, I don't know, this is kind of my approach, but before I incorporate something with my students, especially when it comes to this kind of thing, how do you feel like you're able to incorporate my growth mindset in navigating your own job as an adult or a professional? Do you feel growth mindset plays a role there?

Kristin: Oh, absolutely. I mean, I think the more you learn about it, and the more you read about it. So you're right. I mean, circling back to the books we we're talking about. I mean, I think my interest first got piqued by Grit but I've read the mindset book by Carol Dweck, and there's also one called The Growth Mindset Coach, it's by Annie Brock and Heather Handley. But I think the more you learn about it, and the more you sort of learn these phrases and you hear them whether it's words you say out loud, or you hear them in your mind, and you think, man, that's not a good way to look at this and just changing the way you approach.
I mean, we're all going through right now learning teletherapy at a faster rate than we ever thought we would need to, and just being like, okay, you know what? I can do this. For some people, maybe they didn't think they were technology people and are now being forced into this. So just having that open mind about I can learn this. It might take a little bit of work but the more effort, the more time I put into it, I am able to achieve the outcomes I want. For me personally, I have been working a lot on just developing more creativity in myself, and I think that that's something people consider a more fixed personality trait, right?
You're either creative or you're not, more so than maybe learning to read but I just have been trying to get myself the time especially now that we have a little bit more of it, of practicing creativity, and knowing that if I practice creativity, I can become a more creative person. So I know that doesn't directly relate to speech, but just thinking about things in those terms.
I also think the more you adopt a growth mindset, you can kind of use it, looking at yourself, but the way you think about your students and their growth is really important. There was a study by Rosenthal and Jacobson in the 1960s, and forgive me for not having the specific citation. But basically, they told teachers that a specific subset of students in their class was bright and was really likely to succeed, and then when they looked back at those students later, that specific subset of students had increased even their IQ points. And of course, those students originally had been completely randomly assigned.
So the whole point was that the teachers perceptions of the child's quote unquote, their ability, so to speak, impacted the way those students were nurtured by teachers and then impacted their outcomes. So making sure that we are maybe not applying these thoughts like, oh, this student is likely to succeed. Let me make sure that I challenge them and bring that out in them, and on the flip side, oh, the student probably doesn't have the capability to grow. So I'm not really going to challenge them too much.
So yeah, I mean, that's a really applicable, I think, example for us about why it's important to incorporate a growth mindset, not just in looking inwardly, but in how we approach our students and their goals.

Marisha: Yeah, that is so fascinating. I remember seeing that study, and that was just, that's incredible, and so even just the things that we say to our students, it can change their IQ. That's just mind boggling.

Kristin: Right. I mean, right, which is something... I totally agree. My whole family knows now. I hear when they say something to my daughter, she does something, and they're, oh, you're so smart and they know immediately because I don't want to say don't allow that but they know that that's not a phrase I want to hear because that's not really a growth mindset phrase. I'd rather than say, wow, I loved how hard you worked on that or I like that you sat there and worked on that for a long time. That must have been hard, rather than just you're so smart. But they know now. They know they're going to get some side eye from me for phrases like that.

Marisha: Oh, that's amazing. But it'll benefit them too. If you're modeling that.

Kristin: Yeah, exactly.

Marisha: It'll trickle down to your dad or and other people.

Kristin: I have faith that they too can improve their ability to use a growth mindset.

Marisha: I love it. Yeah, and I was thinking about this question a little bit too. I think it's, especially us, whenever we're navigating a lot of change, I think growth mindset really helps kind of decrease the stress because we're expected to make mistakes as we're figuring this out. We're not identifying as like, I'm amazing at tech. I'm going to rock this teletherapy. We just look at it as another hurdle that we're going to overcome. We put on our problem solving pants, and we expect some of those mistakes and look at those as evidence that we're growing, and I think that applies to this situation now as we're moving into a more digital therapy, as we, for new therapists who are just starting out, it feels like an insurmountable, we have so many seemingly insurmountable obstacles when we're first starting.
Like your first IEP, writing it, having that first meeting, the first therapy session, the first new type of client. I feel like we're constantly encountering things, and if we have that growth mindset, it just makes it that much easier to tackle.

Kristin: Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, I feel like this is turning into just a list of book reviews.

Marisha: Let's do it.

Kristin: But I'm currently reading a book called Range by David Epstein, and it's about how having kind of skill. So the subtitle of the book is how generalists triumph in a specialized world, and I actually kind of I don't love the subtitle for what the book ends up being about, but it just talks about how having a really varied range of skills and interests can benefit you in the job market, but just in general it talks about someone, not sure she's the absolute CEO or the highest up in the girl scouts. But she basically got there because she was this person who had this very broad range of experience.
It wasn't a person that was on the direct track to that position but I guess it reinforces this idea that right? Trying new things, even if in the beginning, you may fail, or even if they're hard or even if when you start, you're not the best, that being free and feeling open to try new things is a huge aspect of growth mindset, a huge aspect of growth mindset. And as you know, that's a huge aspect of speech, I think but it's talking about it kind of outside of the education world and just having that broad set of skills and interests and things that you've tried really can help you in the long run in many ways.

Marisha: Yeah, and I'm absolutely loving all of the book recommendations too. I haven't read Range...

Kristin: I have a long list of nonfiction book recommendation.

Marisha: Oh, me too. Okay, awesome. So now let's get into the super good stuff about how we can incorporate this with our students and in our therapy sessions, and you have a little bit of a framework that you use in terms of how much you incorporate this, can you give us a little breakdown of what that looks like?

Kristin: Yeah, definitely. So we sort of talked about it, I would say almost the first two ways when we think about applying this to our students, right? A lot of us are like, wait a second, I only have 30 minutes with these kids. How am I going to take time out to work on growth mindset, and I don't think it needs to be quite that concrete.
So first of all, just having a growth mindset yourself, even if you apply this to a specific child, not at all, right? And you just adopt it in your own mindset. I mean, that can be really valuable right there, and it's like we talk about that research or that experiment they did. But when it comes to more a child facing stuff, you can really just change the language you use with students. So this doesn't mean teaching them, oh, let me tell you what a growth mindset is, and I want you to do this and do that. But just the way you deliver therapy, there are ways you can deliver it that are more of growth mindset friendly. So we talked a little bit about being afraid to make mistakes, right?
Maybe I'll circle back to that. So I'll go through these first. So the first one is, yeah, just in the language you were using with your students. So I would consider this pretty passive, right? You're not teaching the students about a growth mindset directly, but you were just using that language, and then the second would be maybe encouraging a little bit more of the language in students. So if you hear them say something like, oh, I can't say my R sound, you might say, oh, you know what? You can't say you're our sound yet. I have a growth mindset bulletin board that I have up in my speech room and it has a whole bunch of different phrases that are specific to speech. So it'll say something like, I know I'm learning my S sound because it feels hard right now, and it's sort of just flipping some of those phrases we often hear on their head and putting them in more of a growth mindset friendly kind of statement. And then the third would be, yeah, taking a few minutes to sit down and directly teach them.
This is what a growth mindset is, this is what a growth mindset sounds like. This is what a fixed mindset is, and this is what a fixed mindset sounds like, and trying to help them monitor themselves for those things and change the way they think about learning. So yeah, you can just use it in your own language, you can sort of more passively encourage your students to use it or then you can directly sit down and teach them what it is.
So I think finding a sweet spot for you and to me, it's very student dependent. I have a few groups that tend to get a little competitive. They're all working on the S sound, but two do lateral and two have frontal lisps but they just tend to go like, oh, I think I did it the best that time or in that group, I've done explicit growth mindset work and I've talked to the teachers about it. It's a struggle they see in their classrooms too with them, kind of maybe arguing with the teachers about what they did or didn't get right and just really not taking to feedback or correction all that well. So, they're ones that I've pulled out growth mindset, actual work for them to do while we're practicing speech, and then others I just try to use it in the way I speak with them.

Marisha: Oh, that's perfect, and then should we dive into some more specific examples for each of the types?

Kristin: Yeah. Here's the thing when we're giving speech, and I'm apologizing in advance for making this very articulation specific, but I always want to have students at this sort of sweet spot, right? And we talked about this a little bit when we talked about data collection, right? I don't necessarily want a child practicing in speech, something they can do 100% of the time, that's not going to help them move to the next level. But on the flip side of that, I don't want them practicing something they can't do at all, and I'm always going to try to scaffold that and give them support.
The by definition, we want those kids making mistakes, and if they're not what we're having them practice is probably too easy. So teaching them that mistakes are fine, and mistakes are okay is a good thing. I sort of joke with them sometimes when they say oh, but this sound is really hard for me, and I say, well, yeah, you know what? Can you say the B sound. Now, first of all, these would be kids that are maybe working on R, T and H, and I'll say, okay, I want you to say these words, ball, bat, whatever, and they're looking at me like okay, ball, bat, and then I give them a big round of applause, and make a great big deal out of it and I say, oh my gosh, you did so wonderful at that. I'm so proud of you and they're just kind of sitting there staring at me because of course, they could say those sounds. They're below where they're working on now, and I sort of say, well, that's the point, right?
You're not here to practice things you already know how to do, you're here to practice something that is hard. That's literally the point of you coming to see me. So no matter what happens, you're always going to come here, and I'm always going to make you do something that's hard for you and once you meet this goal, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to make it harder again, and I think just laying that out to them so they can see that is always going to be hard and that's not a bad thing is really helpful.
I find very few kids come back after that and kind of complain that it's hard because it's literally the point of our job is to find that thing that's hard and to challenge them. So, yeah, first of all starting to frame things that mistakes are not bad. They're the point of coming to speech. We're going to make mistakes, and that's how we know what we have to fix, and then the other major, major thing, I think, is in how we deliver feedback. So in the same way I don't love when my family tells my daughter, you're so smart, right? I'd much rather them say, wow, you worked for a long time on that, or that must have been really hard for you, and that's the positive statement, right? It must have been hard should be the positive statement not that looked really easy, which I think is what we often sort of try to say as praise, right?
Oh, that was so easy for you. You did that so quickly. Good job. But all we're really telling them is that by continuing to show us something they're already good at, that's a good thing and I don't think that that in a growth mindset, that's not necessarily true, right? The good thing you should be finding something you're not good at and working on that. So giving feedback that is more about their action or their process. So instead of saying, wow, that was a perfect R sound, you might say, wow, I really saw how you bunched that tongue up. That was a great work or the other thing, this is I've seen this a few times in the general education is talking about a good mistake, a great mistake.
Jillian Starr talks about how she takes a group of student maybe math problems that they did and she pulls out one that's wrong, and she praises that as a great mistake and they talk about okay, so yeah, the final answer wasn't right but let's talk about all the things the students showed us they knew. So maybe they added, one plus one is three, just as a really simple example, and they'll say, oh, well, they knew to add, not subtract. So that was some knowledge that that student was showing. So she talks about her favorite mistake or her great mistake, and I do something similar in speech.
When you have a child who's gliding R for example, right? And they're saying wabbit for rabbit I often find that somewhere in the middle of shaping that to the R, it ends up being this really distorted L sound, right? If you're doing maybe retroflex. So they don't say wabbit and they don't say rabbit. It sounds something more labbit, and often they hear that L, and they go, oh, sorry. That was an L sound, and I say, oh my gosh, no, that was such an awesome mistake. It showed me that you were moving your tongue. It showed me that you got your tongue up. That was awesome. So to me, I mean, that is a good mistake, right? It wasn't a W, it's a step in the right direction, and the fact that they made an L shows me that they're learning so much.
So praising that mistake is another really growth mindset way to approach their learning and the scaffolding we do to get them from point A to point B.

Marisha: Yeah, I love those specific examples, and yeah, so just to recap. We want to set up our session so that we are giving students that, they're not perfect all the time, they're not always at 100% but that we're also not making it so hard that they can't even tackle it. Teaching them that mistakes are hard. No, that mistakes are okay and even celebrating them. This was a couple podcast episodes ago, but I actually interviewed a special education teacher on mindfulness and growth mindset kind of came up there and she says that she uses glitter washi tape to celebrate her students if they're doing writing or whatever, they'll put the glitter washi tape over a mistake and I thought that was a really cool visual.

Kristin: Oh I love that. It's such a sweet idea.

Marisha: And it's a little harder to do that with articulation but maybe we could just have it on a piece of paper or something. And yeah, and then I love your suggestions on thinking about how we deliver feedback and really focusing on the actions instead of the traits or qualities, like you're smart and things like that or you're good at this and all of that and focusing on them working hard. Awesome.

Kristin: And then the last thing I'm able to add is, is just yeah, making sure that you've set your sessions up as a really safe space to make mistakes, obviously, but also to look silly. You know how often we look ridiculous. I mean, we know as SLPs we look ridiculous sometimes when we're showing them how to make these sounds, right? Or I have a particular student right now who's working so hard on that R sound and it's hard to watch him, right? Because he's contorting his face so, so much to get this R and just making sure that comments, I mean, obvious things like laughing at people is never okay, but making sure that that is absolutely never okay, and being afraid to kind of laugh at yourself and look silly and make mistakes and if that includes you kind of doing these things too then so be it.
But it absolutely has to be a safe space for them to make mistakes and be wrong and to fail. I mean, that's the only way it can work. And again, by the nature of what we do, kids are going to fail from time to time in our room. I mean, they wouldn't be there if they were doing everything perfectly. So yeah, it's essential to make sure that your sessions are a safe space with you and with all the other students.

Marisha: Perfect, and then what about, what does it look like when you're doing that direct teaching? Do you have a hierarchy of activities that you go through? Or how do you set that up for students?

Kristin: Yeah, so I actually, I have sort of over time I've sort of developed a bit of a curriculum for it which is in my Teachers Pay Teachers store, and it's just a culmination of all the different aspects of the growth mindset that I learned about through all that reading that I felt were really applicable to speech. So each sort of lesson has something I would teach the students and again, depending on how much time you want to spend with the kids, you can pick and choose how you're doing it. So typically I say, hey, I want to talk about whatever the lesson so to speak is today. And in the beginning that might be, I want to talk about what a growth mindset is, but then later we might talk about things like neuroplasticity, and of course, I don't necessarily call it neuroplasticity, but I talk to them about how our brains can grow, and the more we practice something, the more connections our brain makes, and the quicker we can do it. And we use lots of examples of things that they've learned and got better at in other aspects like maybe music lessons.
So typically there's, I talked to them about it in this particular curriculum, there's almost like note taking pages that are scaled for their ages. So there's like a smaller one that's pretty much like a coloring page that has the main keywords that we talked about, and then there's a slightly older one. And then I have an activity that we do in speech. And again, I don't do this with all of my groups, they don't all need this really specific direct instruction but some do, and then there's also a homework activity to send home. Because of course, if they're not getting a growth mindset message at home then it's the same with our speech practice, it can be a little lost so that the homework is interesting, I sort of tried to design it that yes, the child is practicing it, but I also wanted to make it very educational for the parents.
So there's kind of an intro sentence on each one that might kind of summarize what we talked about. Hint, hint, use this language at home is kind of the point. So just as an example, and in the first one, in speech, I have them think about at school, at home, activities and forth in speech, they're going to write down something that feels easy for them in each of those settings and something that feels hard for them in each of those settings. And the point of this is just understand that no matter what, we all have things in any setting that feel easy and things that feel hard, and they're so different by child and then the homework activity is I have a list of R, sorry, a list of speech specific things like using the right words and sentences or speaking all day without my voice getting tired.
Saying the S sound. Understanding what I read and hear. Those kinds of things, and it's like a sorting table, like a T-Chart, feels easy for me or feels hard for me, and the idea is for them to just be honest with themselves and sort those into a chart and see, which of these things are easy and which are hard. I've tried to make a really good mix of articulation, voice, fluency and language to see that they all have kind of strengths and weaknesses, and then of course you're framing this entire thing and it's okay that things feel hard. That's cool. That's interesting, right? Not that's bad.
So that's just kind of an example of how I would do a really introductory lesson in a speech but we also talk about making mistakes, we talk about supporting others, we talk about perseverance and then there's a power of yet which is discussed pretty commonly, which is kind of adding the word, yet, onto a negative statement to change it. So I can't say my R sound yet or I'm not good at math yet which of course just reframes it that with work and effort you can be good at math and you can be good at your R sound, you just haven't got there yet.

Marisha: Oh, you've really thought of everything with the students.

Kristin: It was a long, long process.

Marisha: Yeah, but I love that you have, because I think and this could still be a language activity if the students are working on comprehension or whatever it may be, there could be ways to incorporate their goals into this type of activity potentially.

Kristin: Oh, absolutely, absolutely. In articulation, I mean, you can incorporate articulation into anything. I mean, it's got S blends and that kind of thing. So yeah, I mean, it definitely does not need to be something that is separate from therapy, they can definitely be done at the same time. And I tried to take real care when I created the curriculum to make sure that it was friendly for that.
If you spent your entire 30 minute session doing this, you wouldn't be losing a session if you were smart about it and you used all your good SLP skills which is, right? Making a session out of anything, or you could just spend a few minutes on it, you know?

Marisha: Yeah, and I love all of the different facials that helps break it down for students and just the different interactive activities and then also, the parent piece is huge and I feel like some teachers could use that too.

Kristin: Totally agree. It has, I had written a parent letter in there, and I've thought, oh, I probably need to go back and add a teacher letter as well, yeah.

Marisha: Yeah, and have you ever done because I feel like this is something that could be a nice activity to coordinate with the counselor, potentially, but maybe that would be I got along really well with the counselor at my last school. So we did a bunch of stuff together just because we wanted to, I guess and we had a lot of shared kids. But that could be an option too, if you're not feeling like it's something that is easily incorporated into your session just given the nature of your group. That could be a cool opportunity too.

Kristin: I totally agree. In the setting I'm at, my schools don't all have full time counselors. So I don't have, we're often there on opposing days or whatever. So we don't have that continuity of care so to speak in my settings, but I thousand percent agree that would be a great person to get on your team for implementing this and working with the teachers.

Marisha: Yeah, and have you had conversations with teachers about this too, or do you feel like it's just something that you inaudible?

Kristin: Oh, no, I definitely have and I don't know if it's just the schools I work in, but honestly, I feel like in a lot of situations, I don't know, maybe it's just the schools. I feel a lot of my schools have had, so growth mindset originally came from the book called Mindset by Carol Dweck, which I know you know because you had read it. In a lot of my schools that has been school wide required reading for the teachers. So I think for sure growth mindset is already being implemented in a lot of the schools I work in, which is three currently. And my schools tend to be pretty up-to-date with new philosophies and approaches, and that kind of stuff.
So in a lot of ways, I feel like speeches are behind on this because it's all the stuff you read out there is kind of how it relates to teaching and education but then there's this gap, okay, so I get how it relates to education but how do I incorporate this into speech, right? Because we have such a different service delivery model. We can't obviously be doing lessons in explicitly growth mindset for 30 minutes once a week when that's our only time for speech. So yeah, I actually felt like in my world, at least speech was behind the rest of the curriculum or the schools. It was nice to have a way to catch up and support them.

Marisha: Yeah, and I know there are some schools that incorporate this heavily. So being familiar, it might be that your general education teachers are teaching this to students, and just being aware of it is using all of the different strategies you shared, is a great way to support what they're doing there.

Kristin: Absolutely, absolutely. If you want, I think, if I could recommend one book, I mean, it's hard to not recommend the mindset book by Carol Dweck, because of that's the original one. But The Growth Mindset Coach by Annie Brock and Heather Handley, that one is geared specifically to teachers. And while it's obvious, it's geared to teachers and not SLPs, it is just very applicable to education and I found that one to be the most maybe meaningful to me as far as implementation was concerned.

Marisha: Okay, awesome, and then I'll link to all of the books that we've been talking about, all of your materials and everything in the show notes at slpnow.com/50. But I'm curious before we start wrapping up, do you have any other examples or things that you wanted to share for the different levels of your framework in terms of changing the language we use, flipping student's language and then direct teaching? Are there any other favorite or must have activities or strategy?

Kristin: I don't think so. Yeah, I mean, and it is that's how I think about it from a standpoint of I had a lot of people ask, well, I get what growth mindset is, but I don't at how to incorporate it into speech. I don't have time for it. So I think that that was how I mentally broke it up. There's so many different levels, you can spend your time directly teaching it or you can just use it passively. You can be using a growth mindset with them without them even knowing it, and then again, it's important to not ignore the fact that even if you're not using a growth mindset with them, if you're not thinking in a growth mindset about them, then that can have really big impacts on them as well.
Yeah, I don't know. I think that's probably, yeah, the simplest way I can think of to break it down about the different levels, the different intensity levels, so to speak, that you can implement it.

Marisha: Yeah, that's perfect, and I think that makes it a lot more doable because I read that book, and then they have one about Mindset in the Classroom too, and there's the whole mind up curriculum, and they have these beautiful things. And it's like, I wish I had all the time to implement this. But you're so bright there are, starting with us and that research study is just, yeah, that's amazing how big of an impact. Just how we think about our students can be. So that's a huge step in the right direction and then just kind of modeling that and incorporating that language into our sessions and giving students a little bit of feedback. That doesn't take much time. So, that those are worth totally doable.

Kristin: No, but you're already giving it but if you're just changing, like I said, I mean with my daughter, it doesn't take me any more time to say, wow, that looked really hard, good job than it does, wow, that looks really easy, good job. Just switching what it is your praising. There was another, I tried to look it up, I believe it was discussed in the Grit book, and I tried to look it up before I came on here and I wasn't going to mention it because I can't cite it. But in this study, they looked at kindergarten students, and I believe it was in California where there was a large Asian American population, and they gave kindergarten students some sort of assessment, and then they randomized which ones they told did a good job on it, and which ones, so they split the classic 50/50.
But what they found is that many more of the Asian American students were likely to say that they succeeded because they worked hard or they were told they didn't do all they were likely to say, well, the people who did well must have worked harder than me. Whereas the non Asian American students were more likely, and this is in kindergarten, they were more likely to say, oh, well, that person did well because they're smarter or I did well, because I was smarter. And so there's obviously, there's a big cultural component to it, too.
I mean, that kind of goes back to the family piece. I mean, what we're saying in school, and it's just the way we support students, and it doesn't have to do with intelligence necessarily. It's just the way we support students and the language we use to support them. Anyway, so I need to find the citation for that, obviously, but I just thought that that was worth mentioning too.

Marisha: Yeah, no, and it's just amazing to see how big of an impact, just like what we say to ourselves can have. Yeah, it's so cool. Okay, so let's do a recap of some of the different resources that have come up throughout the podcast. So you mentioned your curriculum, which includes all of the visuals and different materials, like the parent letters and things that we can use if we're wanting to implement the center therapy session, but I also feel like it would be, if you don't have the time to read a whole book, that would be a good kind of crash course-

Kristin: Oh, absolutely.

Marisha: ... In different strategies that you can use. So if you're like, I'm not going to use the worksheets, but I want to learn more from Kristin, I feel like that could be a good option. And then we also mentioned your posters, which that would take a little bit of time to set up, but we decorate our rooms anyway. So might as well get some growth mindset in there, and then...

Kristin: Exactly, and there is actually I have a freebie. I can shoot you the link to it, but I have a freebie too, which is just one, one page poster, and it's just 10 growth mindset statements as well. So, I wouldn't say it's a bulletin board in itself, but it is just kind of a freebie poster that you could hang up to remind yourself and your students. Again, they're speech specific growth mindset phrases.

Marisha: Ooh, that's perfect. Yeah, we will definitely add that into the show notes as well, and then the books that we mentioned were Grit by Angela Duckworth, and then Mindset by Carol Dweck, Mindsets in the Classroom by Mary Cay Ricci, The Growth Mindset Coach by Annie Brock and Heather Handley, and then Range by David Epstein. And do you have any other resources or tools, anything else that helped you or do you feel like inaudible?

Kristin: No, I think when I know about it now has come from such a conglomeration of sources and nonfiction books and that kind of thing. But I think if you read most, or some of all those you'd be pretty set.

Marisha: Yeah, and is there, because I think you mentioned this but if you had one recommendation, if they could only read one book, which one would you choose?

Kristin: It might be The Growth Mindset Coach.

Marisha: Okay.

Kristin: Yeah.

Marisha: Cool.

Kristin: I think I read that before I read Mindset. I mean, I knew I had to read Mindset. I think I was waiting for it from the library to be honest, and I knew I had to read it, especially because I was developing this curriculum, and I obviously didn't feel comfortable doing that unless I had really done my research in my background work, and as we mentioned, that was pretty much the original book on the topic.
It's from, I don't know, the 80s maybe it's not new. But if you were just looking for really practical tips about implementation, and you just wanted to take away from Growth Mindset, what's applicable to you, as an educator, I think The Growth Mindset Coach would be a great place to start. Plus, you can honestly skip through a little bit of it because a lot of it has specific lesson plans for teachers which is geared toward the general curriculum. So I did gloss over some of that because I just knew it wasn't relevant to how I was going to implement it.

Marisha: Okay, perfect, and did we miss anything or do you feel like we covered all the good stuff?

Kristin: I don't think so. Yeah, I think we covered the good stuff. If we did, I have like all my Instagram. I noticed going into this, I was just reviewing a few things. I had a few things that weren't loaded, but I have a highlight on Instagram, they've got those, the circles where you can see things grouped by topics. They're usually old Instagram stories, but I have a highlight specifically on growth mindset there in my story. So if you are on social media, and that is somewhere where you hang out that might be another light resource for you, just little tidbits as I think of them.

Marisha: Oh, that's perfect, and then where can speech therapists find out more about what you do other than that amazing story highlight?

Kristin: Yeah, so social media wise, I'm on Instagram more than anything else. So that's just @kiwispeech, and then my website where my blog and stuff lives is kiwispeech.com.

Marisha: Okay, perfect. Kristin, thank you so much for sharing your time with us today. This was incredibly helpful, and I hope that SLPs walk away with tons of tips to implement this in their therapy sessions, and the cool thing is, it doesn't have to take a ton of time.

Kristin: Not at all.

Marisha: It's just like maybe just download that poster and have a challenge to use some of those words, or some of those phrases in your session. It could really be just as simple as that.

Kristin: Absolutely, and you're right. I mean, sometimes it is. Just the change of a single word. So I agree.

Marisha: Awesome. Well, thank you again.

Kristin: Thank you for having me.

Marisha: And yeah, we'll see you next time.

Kristin: Bye.

Marisha: Hi there. Welcome to the SLP Now Podcast. I am so excited to have a returning podcast guest today. Lauren LaCour Haines is going to be talking about all things prompt and cueing, all the scaffolding. I get quite a few questions about this topic. I saw that Lauren presented at her school and her district on this topic. I reached out to her and she said yes. We're going to be diving into all the things scaffolding.

Marisha: Before we do that, I just want to re-introduce Lauren. She is a graduate of Louisiana State University and has been as school-based speech language pathologist in the Baton Rouge area for over 12 years. She serves as an SLP and lead special education teacher at a local primary school. She is also the author of the website, busybeespeech.com. She sells speech therapy-related resources on Teachers Pay Teachers.

Marisha: Today, like I said, we're going to be focusing on prompts and cues. I'm just super excited to dive into this with you.

Lauren: Yeah. I'm so excited too. Thanks for having me.

Marisha: Yeah. The last episode was episode 14 if any of you are listening and are curious. We talked about fluency. That one was definitely a crowd favorite. Extra, extra excited about this one. Before we dive into prompts and cues, I was really curious about ... because I found out about this when you were sharing about your presentation. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think this was related to, you were giving this presentation because of your role at your school, right?

Lauren: Yes. I am a lead teacher at my school, so I am over all of the special education teachers and the paraprofessionals. Then, twice a year, we have staff development day. On this particular staff development day, I was in-charge of presenting to the paraprofessionals just at my school level. We talked about prompting and we talked about behavior. It was fun.

Marisha: Yeah, that's awesome. I just love hearing what other SLPs do and the different roles that they end up taking on. Thank you for sharing a little bit about that. I know that it sounds like that role includes a lot more than presenting twice a year though, right?

Lauren: For sure. Okay. As lead teacher, I'm responsible for checking all of my special education teacher's paperwork. I have to make sure their IEPs are good to go before we hold the meetings. If they have any kind of procedural questions, I'm the one they go to. I help them write behavior plans for kids. I step in and model different techniques and different ways to handle those challenging behaviors. I'm extremely busy with that all day long. It's almost like two full time jobs in one.

Lauren: The good thing is I do have only half of a regular SLP caseload. I only have about 20 speech kids that I work with. Then, the rest of my time is helping the teachers and the paras and basically putting out a lot of fires.

Marisha: Wow. That's super interesting. I didn't realize that it was, because at first I was wondering like, how does she do all of that? I still wonder because you have a lot of different things on your plate. That's helpful that at least your time is split a little bit so it's not completely impossible.

Lauren: Right. It's a lot easier to write 20 progress reports than 50 so it does help.

Marisha: Yeah, for sure. That is amazing. Because you said that part of the role includes doing some presentations and teaching and really working on that collaboration. This definitely won't be the focus of our chat today, but I know that a lot of SLPs reach out to me about that too in terms of stepping outside of their comfort zones and giving a presentation to a group of teachers or paraeducators or anything like that. I'm curious if you have any quick tips or things that worked for you the first couple times you did that.

Marisha: I mean, it sounds like you've been at this for over 12 years now, so you're definitely further down the road. Any tips for those starting out?

Lauren: Sure. As a lead teacher, I've only been for three years. This is my third year, so I haven't done that role as long. As an SLP, at first, I mean by nature I'm more introverted, more quiet, which is different for SLP. I think a lot of SLPs are very bubbly and try to talk a lot but not me. It took a while for me to gain that confidence, I guess, in myself and in my skills.

Lauren: I had to get to a point to where I was ready to be able to present to a lot of people. You'd have to push yourself. That's one thing I would say. I didn't just want to do it all the time or anything like that, but whenever I stepped into this lead teacher role, I just had to become this other version of myself because I had to do all the things that I wasn't used to doing.

Lauren: For this position, I was basically voluntold, I guess, to be put into this position because our other lead teacher had moved on to a different role and they have asked me to do it. I also have a hard time saying no. I said yes. When I did that, I had to just I guess, put on my big girl pants and just be brave and tried new things. I think it really benefited me in the long run because it made me a lot more confident because other people were depending on me.

Lauren: I guess to a new person I would just say, just find that confidence in yourself and in your abilities and don't be afraid to ask questions and do your research because you do know more than you think you know.

Marisha: Yeah. That was one of my takeaways too when I was navigating talking to teachers in the beginning. Because I really wanted to do, like I always talk about curriculum based therapy and stuff like that. You really need the teacher buy in to optimize what you're doing with that. I was so scared the first time that I talked to the group.

Marisha: Yeah, you put on those big girl pants and make it happen. What came out of it was amazing in terms of the actual results of having that conversation with all of the teachers. It was also really good for me to continue growing as a professional because I definitely ... you prepare for what you're going to share, which solidifies your knowledge. Then just, yeah, putting yourself out there and showing up as the expert and knowledgeable person that you are is pretty amazing. Highly recommended to all the listeners.

Lauren: Yeah. If you step into that role in small ways first, it builds your credibility too. You can offer a lot of suggestions, just one on one with teachers and then maybe join your leadership team, which is what I did before I became lead teacher, they asked me to be on leadership team. So I did. I could give suggestions there which benefited multiple grade levels. Gradually, I built that credibility.

Lauren: People learned to respect my ideas and my opinions because the things that I would share would definitely benefit the kids because we have that expertise in that language.

Marisha: Yeah. Because we're going to be talking about scaffolding so we can scaffold ourselves and maybe first talk about, like teach something or share a strategy with one teacher. Then, as needed, like share it with the whole group and all that. I like it, step by step. Individual small groups, all the good stuff. All right. Perfect.

Marisha: Thank you for taking that little digression there. Let's get into the topic for today, which is prompting and cueing. Can we start out just by defining both of those?

Lauren: Yes. Prompts and cues are strategies that can help the student, but it still increases their learning. A lot of educators, a lot of teachers in SLPs, they'll do this naturally. We automatically will just ask questions and try to help students come up with the answer or learn a task in basically any way we know how.

Lauren: It does help to define what we're doing and to be more purposeful with our interaction. If we know those terms and the differences, I think it helps us as well as the kids in the long run. There's prompting and then there's cueing. They can be different from each other. Though, sometimes, it might depend on who you ask because those terms can be a little bit interchangeable.

Lauren: From my research, prompting is said to be the little more invasive of the two. Prompts are the ones that lead the student to the correct answer more directly. Then, if you're talking about cueing, that's more like a hint or a clue and that typically doesn't give them the answer directly. It's more indirect. Cueing is the one that's more indirect and prompting is the one that's more direct.

Lauren: If it's okay with you today, I might just use the term prompting as the broader term to refer to just any type of assistance because I don't want to keep saying prompt slash cue.

Marisha: That is okay.

Lauren: I know it might bother a lot of people, no, that's a cue, no, that's a prompt. It's just assistance right now. If we're purposeful in the way that we help students and we prompt when necessary and then we prompt as soon as we can. I mean it can really help. That's why I did want to teach the paras at my school about those different ways to prompt as well as the importance of backing off on the prompts.

Lauren: Because we want our students to be as independent as possible and we don't want to overly assist them. That's why you'd rather give them more indirect cues so they can come up with the answer on their own. In general, prompts themselves are not a bad thing. If you do them right, it will not only help them learn but it will aid them in that learning and it won't give them any kind of a crutch.

Marisha: Yeah. I love that distinction. They're definitely helpful. We want to be careful to not over prompt or over cue because that can also hurt in the long run.

Lauren: Yes.

Marisha: Yeah, super helpful. Then, anything else that you want to talk about in terms of why we want to prompt and cue? Or, are we good to start diving into the different types?

Lauren: Yeah, we can talk about why they're beneficial. Sometimes, it's really the only way that a student can learn a skill. You can't expect a student just to know what to do without some kind of assistance. Honestly, we use prompts ourselves whether we realize it or not. When we're in Target, we look up at the aisle signs to help point us to what we're looking for. Then, if we still can't find the item, we ask someone who works there. Then, we even need them to put the item out to us.

Lauren: Then after that, the next time we go into Target, we probably won't need any prompts to find the item because we already know exactly where it is. We'll just go straight there and find it independently. It helps our kids also when they're learning a new skill. If you do want the student to become fully independent, you have to be able to decrease those prompts. You don't want them to become prompt dependent.

Lauren: I wanted to say that on the front side so that you know that's our goal is for them to be independent. Because if they become dependent on those prompts, that could hinder their progress. Fading those prompts is almost as important as giving the prompts. Things that you can do to prevent prompt dependency might be things like rewarding or reinforcing with the prompts first. Then, as they progress, you only reward when they respond correctly without those prompts.

Lauren: This could help the student learn the skills more quickly as well as prevent them from depending on the prompts. That fading is really important. Then what's really essential though is just to make sure that the whole team is on the same page about the prompt fading schedule and the reinforcement schedule.

Lauren: That's one of the main reasons that I wanted to talk to my SPED staff about it because I wanted everyone to know the prompting hierarchy and the importance of trying to say the prompts quickly. Because I have some paras that love to help the students and they mean well but sometimes it can be a little too much. I want them to know how to back off the assistance appropriately. Then, how to reinforce them correctly, the correct way.

Lauren: The only other hand I have like some of my new paras, they still aren't really sure what to do in how to help. They need some general guidance on the different ways that are available to support the students in the classroom they might not know about. Whenever I met with them, we talked about those things a lot. Then, we also discussed IEP accommodations and different types of support we could give during tests and in the classroom and then learning new skills and all that because it's a lot to remember.

Lauren: Especially even to the most veteran teachers and paras, refreshers are important. We had a really good meeting and I'm really happy that we got a chance to talk about all of it.

Marisha: Yeah, that's super helpful. Then, I'm curious too, because I think for SLPs who ... because this is kind of like a dual presentation, I think it's a good overview for us just to take an inventory of the strategies that we're using in therapy. I think, a lot of us, or pretty much all of us do a lot of this automatically. I think it's really helpful to have the terminology when it comes to writing about what we do. I think, what you're sharing today will be incredibly helpful just to have more of a stronger set of vocabulary around describing all the different things that we do.

Marisha: Because there are some pretty nifty terms that you're going to be sharing. Then, I think it's also helpful because you presented this to your parent educators, so I think it'll be helpful because I'm sure you'll present it in a very similar way. SLPs can use this when they are presenting to their teachers or paraeducators to just to help with that conversation as well. I'm really excited about the dual purpose of this.

Lauren: Yeah. It's important for you to have that good framework in your mind so when you share it with others, you're clear. Your whole team can be on the same page and the kids are ultimately the ones that benefit from it the most.

Marisha: Yeah. I love that. I'm really curious too, because we know that you gave a presentation to the paraeducators, but what is the best way or do you have any tips when it comes to communicating the appropriate level of prompting? Once we have that shared vocabulary, what would you do? How would you communicate that? The level of support that Johnny needs with certain tasks, for example?

Lauren: A lot of things will depend on the student and with the skill that we're working on or whatever. I gave them a hierarchy of the different levels of prompting that we use. Then, we talk about like, okay, what have you tried so far? To try to see what level that they're at. Then, we'll go more in depth, in detail of this a little bit later. Since we've already talked about it, I can reference that visual, that hierarchy that I gave them and say, okay, let's talk about the prompts that you're already giving them. How are you helping?

Lauren: I guess that's one thing that I would do. I would use the terminology that we already went over. If they needed more help with that, like if they weren't sure, I would model for them or explain to them or scaffold for them how I would do it.

Marisha: Yeah. I think if we have the opportunity to go into the classroom that could be a good follow up step. Maybe I might model something and tell them, okay, so this is the level that I'm going for. See what you can identify in me. Then, maybe observing them in an activity and be like, where did you think you were at? It's hard to talk about if we're just hypothetical. I think getting super specific could be helpful too.

Lauren: Yes. Okay. Maybe I didn't understand your question. During my presentation, I had YouTube videos.

Marisha: I love it.

Lauren: Yeah. I showed them the different examples of the prompts. I had videos. There's tons on YouTube by the way. If you all ever do any kind of presentation, there's examples of all the different types of prompts. I showed them an example of each one and then after we went over all of them, I had them practice with each other and divide into groups and did groups of two. Then, they had to come up with a scenario and do their type of prompt that they were supposed to be practicing and then they show the group.

Marisha: So smart. I love those ideas. Yeah. There's definitely like, we can use scaffolding here. We can give them the definition first, like explain what we're doing. Then, we can show a video of it. We can have them practice it with a partner and then we could reinforce it in the classroom then.

Marisha: We're being very strategic with our own prompting and cueing with our colleagues. I love that. Because I think we can apply this to any type of skill that we're trying to share with teachers or paraeducators. I'm really happy with this discussion so far. Okay. Are we ready to start talking about the hierarchy and the different types of prompts and cues?

Lauren: Yes. Okay. The prompting hierarchy I use was from The Autism Helper. I think her name is Sasha and she's at autismhelper.com. She has a really nice visual of the hierarchy that they use. There are a lot of hierarchies out there, especially related to ADA and programs like that. I just thought that this lent itself best to a variety of disorders, not just autism that really, because I had paras teachers from that worked with all levels of students.

Lauren: She has that great visual for the most intrusive prompts, which are like the ones that the student would be the most dependent, all the way to the least intrusive, which would be for the student to be the most independent. Obviously, our goal is for the students to be completely independent, but depending on the student and the skills that we might need to teach, we may have to give a lot of support, especially at first. I wanted them to know the different levels and just depending on the kid where they might need to start.

Lauren: I'm going to go over the different types of prompts and I'm going to start with the least invasive or the most independent level, if that makes sense. That most independent level would be the visual prompt. That is a prompt that is a support in the form of pictures or text, photos or even videos. This one is a great way to give support in a way that's natural and it's really easy to say.

Lauren: Examples can be anything from like a sign on the door to a visual schedule. I've also made visuals for the steps of going to the bathroom or completing morning routines for my students. Then, that's for the classroom. Then in speech, of course I use this one like nobody's interest, like visuals are for everything. I have sentence strips for expanding utterances and using correct grammar. I have pictures for WH questions. I made a product on TPC that's like an influencing product that's leveled. It's scaffolded and leveled based on the visual supports.

Lauren: Pretty much, I use visuals for a lot of language skills. It's my go-to way that I level that support. Then, it's super easy to fade because you can just take away that visual. That is visual prompting.

Lauren: Then, the next level would be verbal prompts. That is spoken instructions or questions that provide the student with direction on completing the task. This one can look a lot of different ways and it's probably the most commonly used. I feel like there's a mini hierarchy within verbal prompting because there's a direct verbal prompt, which is when you plainly give them the answer.

Lauren: Then, there's more indirect, which is just giving them more like a subtle hint, not the exact answer. If you want me to, I can dive a little bit deeper into the verbal cues and talk a little bit about that hierarchy with in them.

Marisha: Let's do it. I love it.

Lauren: Okay, good. I did a little bit of research and I saw a study that showed that kids improve their literacy skills when you follow the hierarchy to where you would comment would be like the least invasive, like using a comment. That would be like when you verbally provide that information about the topic or like you model your thinking. You might just say like, "I think frogs like to swim in ponds."

Lauren: You're just kind of giving them a comment when you're reading a book or whatever. Then, the comment would be that first one and then the question. Then, questions would be like, you could ask a open ended question that might give a variety of possible responses. Then, there'd be a closed question, which is like you want them to say a specific response and then like a yes, no question.

Lauren: Then, there'd be like a direction. Like, tell me this, tell me the frog lives in the pond. That was a little hierarchy in itself. It goes from comment to question to direction. Then, there are lots more other indirect prompts that I use, which is like close procedures. That's when you fill in the blank. The SLP might say the first part of an utterance and the child would finish it.

Lauren: You might say, like if we're, I don't know if we're looking at a picture and I want them to label, I could say, "She's putting on her," and they would say shoes or whatever. That would be close. Then, expansions is whenever the student gives a response and then the SLP would expand upon that response using an appropriate grammar and vocabulary. If the student would say something that might be grammatically incorrect, you would just say it in the correct way.

Lauren: If he said, "Him dirty," you might say, "Yeah, he was very dirty." You would just say it correctly expand it to where it was a little bit of a longer utterance. Then, giving choices is also considered a verbal prompt, binary choice. You would give a child a choice between two responses. Where's the dog? Was he in the yard or in the house? Then, there's also modeling and imitation, which as SLPs, we do all the time. We use that strategy for expanding language utterances as well.

Lauren: You would say, "The dog was in the yard, where's the dog?" Then, they would say, okay, yeah, in the yard because you just modeled the correct response. If you recommended sequencing, you could say, what did the boy do next? That might kind of be a little bit more indirect. Then, you could just make your way and get more direction or direct which where you're just saying, okay, what is this? This is a book. What is this? They would have to say book because you told them exactly.

Lauren: A lot of times, I'll use those more direct prompts when teaching WH question to a student who might be really echolalic because they need a lot more direction. I would say, what is this book? Because I want them to say book and not just repeat my question, which is what happens a lot of times when you're working with kids with echolalia. Honestly, verbal prompts can be done a lot of different ways and the possibilities for that one are as endless as languages. That's probably one that's most commonly used I would say.

Marisha: Yeah. I love that breakdown of the different types of verbal prompts and cues that we can give students. I think it can be just having that menu of options I think can be really helpful if a student isn't quite giving it. We can use this information just to help us problem solve a little bit of like, okay, here's what I did. Here's an inventory of the things I did. Then, here's what else I can try. I appreciate that overview.

Lauren: Yeah, you're welcome. We did visual prompt and then right below that one is verbal prompt. Then, the next one is gesture prompt. Honestly, and this is just Lauren talking, but I think that gesture prompting and verbal prompting can sometimes be interchangeable with the level of support, depending on the type of gesture and the type of verbal prompt.

Lauren: They're equally invasive in my opinion, but with her hierarchy that she has, she has the gesture prompt as underneath the verbal prompt. A gesture is when you just give a gesture like you point or you nod or you move to indicate the correct response as you're giving the instruction. This can even be looking at the student expectedly or looking in the direction of the correct answer as a gesture. I do feel like this one's pretty easy to say it as well since you just kind of gradually back off the gesturing.

Lauren: Of course, as SLPs, we will look at students expectantly a lot, especially with our minimally verbal students to give them that hint that we're waiting for them to respond. Another way that I gesture a lot in therapy is by pointing when I'm teaching WH questions. If there's a picture of a mouse driving a car, I might say, who's driving the car? I'm rippling that question. Who's driving the car while I'm pointing to the mouse over and over again. That's one way that I scaffold that.

Lauren: Gesturing can even be as simple as if it's a student's turn to participate, you might make eye contact and nod in their direction for them to take their turn. I feel like I do this one, I use more of that point prompt in therapy when I'm trying to get that direct response from them. Then, just eye contact and nods are more indirect with the gestures.

Marisha: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Are we ready for the next one?

Lauren: Yeah. We have visual and then verbal and then gesture. Then, the fourth one is modeling. That is when you show the student what they are supposed to do before they do it. This is the one that we use a ton as SLPs, right? It's when we just show them what to do. If you tell a student to touch their nose, you would touch your nose. Or, if you are teaching a student a new skill, like sweeping the floor and they watch you do it first and then they would try it.

Lauren: I think a lot of classroom teachers I work with use this in writing. They provide the students with a strong model or an example of what strong writing is supposed to look like so that it gives the kids something to go off of. It better prepares them to what's expected of them. That's what they do in the classroom. In speech, we do this all the time with articulation, right? We model the correct productions of sounds mirror. We even pull out a mirror so they can copy our mouth, copy what our mouths are doing.

Lauren: Then, we use that modeling and imitation when we're doing artic therapy a lot. That's when we use. Then, we also encourage paras to use that modeling as well when kids are learning those new articulation skills. That one is modeling. Then, the next invasive one would be a partial physical prompt. This is when you're going in and you're physically guiding the student through the response with a partial physical gesture like a tap or a nudge.

Lauren: In this one, you're still touching the child, but you are giving them minimal physical guidance. If you want the student to touch a certain object, you might move their elbow in the direction of that object. You aren't completely hand over hand helping them at this point. It's a little more subtle. I use this one when I'm teaching simple signs. If I'm prompting the child to sign more and I've already modeled or I know the child knows it, I might tap under their hands to help them initiate the sign to try to get them to sign more.

Lauren: That was that partial physical. Then our last one, the last one on the hierarchy, the most dependent prompt would be the full physical prompt. That is when you go in and you're physically guiding the student through the response of that full physical gesture. You're completely hand over hand basically doing it for them.

Lauren: It might be doing the hand motions to a song within or getting the student to make a sign or maybe even helping the student do a new action. You're trying to teach them. For example, like if you tell the student to clap his hands, you would then take his hands and make them clap. Yeah, this one's the most invasive. You want to fade this one as soon as you can because you don't want them to be dependent on that because they are not mastering the skill at all if you're completing the task for them.

Lauren: Those are all the different types of prompts. We went over from the least invasive to the most. I'm going to go over them again, it's visual then verbal then gesture then modeling then partial physical prompt and then full physical prompt.

Marisha: Perfect. I love that just short and sweet. Lots of examples and just reminding of that hierarchy. I think just having that model to think about is super helpful. Now, let's talk about application a little bit. How do we know when to use which type? Especially, how do we communicate those to paraeducators who don't have ... I feel like it's like a sixth sense of how we do the prompting and cueing. It just automatically happens. How do we communicate that?

Lauren: Yeah. Okay. There are a couple of different ways that you can approach this when you're teaching a student with a skill. A lot of it will depend on the student as well as the skill you're trying to teach. You and your team might have to make some judgment calls and use your knowledge of the student. I'm going to give you a few rules of thumb that you can use to know when to use which type of prompt.

Lauren: Speaking of you and your team, I think, that's part of the way we can communicate this to our staff. It needs to be like they are part of our team. If we go about it as a team approach, like okay, let's talk to the SLP, the special ed teacher and the paraprofessional who are going to be working with this student day in and day out.

Lauren: If you're all on the same patient, you go into it saying, okay, let's talk about how we're going to address this. You come up with a plan together. They feel like they're more involved and then you can also lend your expertise in that area. It does both. It keeps you on the same page as well as the teachers. Then, the strategies they may have forgotten or might not be familiar with.

Lauren: The first approach is when you would go from the least invasive prompt to the most invasive prompt. You use the least intrusive prompt first, which according to our hierarchy would be the visuals. Then, you would go down the hierarchy, adding more prompts only if you need to. If you go back to our target example, that I gave earlier, like I couldn't find my item by using the store signs, so I asked the store clerk to help me and he gave me the directions to find it, which is a verbal prompt.

Lauren: Then, if I still can't find it, he could walk me over and point to the item on the shelf, which would be the gesture. Hopefully, I don't need him to model taking the item from the shelf. I might need him to physically help me if it's out of reach or something. When it comes to our students, it's really the same way. We try visuals and then we give clues with our words and then we might point or gesture.

Lauren: Then, if they still don't get it, we'll model and then partially prompt them physically and then hand over hand if we need to. This is a good approach if you're trying to assess how much of the skill the child can do independently. You might start off using that if you want to see what the kid can do. Then, another benefit to this one is that if the student gets repeated time to respond to the request and more practice time with that skill since you're asking him to do the same thing over and over again.

Lauren: That's going from the least restrictive to the most restrictive. Then, the second approach would be to do the opposite. In this case, you start with the most invasive and work your way up to the least invasive. Depending on the skill, you might start with the full physical prompt and then continually fade the prompts as they learn that skill. If it's a skill that doesn't require physical prompting, like if you're working on answering questions, for example, you can't physically prompt that.

Lauren: You might start with modeling and then work your way back from there. I'll model the example or the answer and then I'll use the gesture and then I'll use verbal cues and I'll use visuals, so you would go back. If you're teaching a student to sign, like if they're trying to teach them to sign more, you might hand over hand the sign when you're first teaching it. Then, you may tap their hands to remind them to sign.

Lauren: Then, soon you might just model the sign when you expect them to use it. Then, they'll imitate you. Then after that, maybe you don't need to do that anymore. You just need to point to their hands or look at them expectantly. Then, you might just even be able to say, "Hey, what do you want?" Or, "Do you need more?" Then, they'll be able to make that sign on their own.

Lauren: This approach is good to use whenever a student is first learning something new. You just want to make sure that you're fading those prompts when you can. Then, I was reading some research and I think it said that this approach resulted in fewer errors and quicker skill acquisition than the other way. I'm guessing it's probably because as long as you're fading those posts quickly, then that one would work better for those fewer errors.

Lauren: Because you're starting off helping them and then you're backing off, backing off, backing off. They know what to do after you show them.

Marisha: Yeah. How did you explain that fading to your paraeducators too? Because I feel like it's just something that I was just trying to think about, like how would I explain that? Because I feel like it's something that we just naturally do to figure out. Did you come up with kind of more of a systematic way to explain that to them or what did that look like?

Lauren: I use with that visual hierarchy sheet from The Autism Helper and then I show them the different levels. If we're fading then we have to back up. If you're physically prompting them, you have be more hands off like on the next try. Then, we have to constantly assess and see where we're at. If they're hand over hand getting a student to try to cut with scissors, you have to eventually try to see what they can do without that.

Lauren: I gave them that hierarchy but then at the same time, I encourage them to back off a little bit. Then, there are some other tips for using these prompts more effectively that I went over with him as well. That was like the first one would be delay your prompting by decreasing that amount of time before you offer assistance.

Lauren: Basically, you would wait a bit before going to that next level of prompting. If you're going the first way, like you might give them a verbal prompt and then wait three seconds before you give them the gesture prompt. They have that hierarchy sheet, but they know you want to give them a chance between those before you go to the next one. You don't want to just automatically assume that they can't do it. You want to give them some good wait time.

Lauren: Then, if they're getting frustrated or whatever then you would step in. If you can constantly decrease and back off and lengthen the amount of time you wait before giving the next prompt just to give them that more independence or try to get them to respond appropriately, then you would do that.

Lauren: You would decrease the amount of time before you offer assistance. Then, you also want to gradually decrease the intensity of the type of prompt you're getting. Within each of those areas, within each of those types of prompts, there's many degrees of intensity that those prompts can be. It's hard to explain or our show unless you're in the moment and you need to see what a kid needs.

Lauren: For example, like if you're doing the partial physical prompt, you want to fade from the wrist and then maybe to the elbow and then to the shoulder, then maybe stand behind them. Then, you can back away entirely. Just that constant trying to back off as much as possible. Or, in the case of verbal prompts, you could start by giving them direct prompt and then on the next target try close or try an indirect prompt. They are constantly learning how to do those things in. It's going to take time, it's going to be trial and error, especially for the newer ones, the newer paraprofessionals.

Lauren: I feel like the ones that have been doing it for a while, they get to see the special education teacher and the classroom teacher and the SLPs modeling these types of prompts all the time. A lot of it might come with experience, but the more you can show them in, the more you can teach them, the easier it will get.

Lauren: Another tip I tell them is to know how to reinforce appropriately to prevent that prompt dependence. Like I mentioned before, you want to praise a child or give rewards that will help the student become more independent. If they are first learning, reward them for completing that task prompted. Then, after you have backed away from that type of prompt, only reward the student, if you're using a star chart or whatever, you would only give them a star for the level of prompting that they're on currently

Lauren: Then, that will motivate them to become more independent and try harder because you don't want them to depend on that assistance. I tell them that. Then lastly, we talked about it's always important to evaluate the effectiveness of the prompt that you're using. You want to use your observations and any data to make sure that the prompts being used are effective for that student. It will also help you determine when you can fade the prompts. It'll help you in a lot of different ways.

Lauren: You want to remember that each child is, and each new skill even, is different. You want to make sure that you're taking really good data and you want to use that specific data to help you make those decisions. You don't want to only rely on your previous experiences with that child or with that prompt with other children beforehand. You want to maybe even do trial runs with levels of prompting and create a plan of action with your team. It's important to take note in your data or tally sheets on what prompts you use and how invasive they were. I feel like if you're teaching your paras to take that data and then to mark that, then they're identifying the level of the promptings that are used.

Lauren: Even if like you are modeling, they could take the data for you and then they could write the prompts that you were using to get more familiar with those types of prompts. Just talking as a team to make sure that you're all on the same page when it just comes to all this prompting techniques is super important. Our teams aren't perfect but we try. I felt like the little presentation that I gave helped them and they had some good things to say about it afterwards too. I felt like empowered them a little bit more to help the kids in new ways.

Marisha: Yeah. I love those tips. I think those are really helpful. I'm curious too, because I feel like every SLP has a slightly different strategy. In terms of how I approached this, like in my therapy sessions and I think it could be helpful depending on what we're working on with the paraeducators. I like to collect just like a quick, like if I'm working on WH questions, the student walks into the session, I like to collect just like a quick little probe with maybe like five, usually five maybe 10 questions just to see where they're at. Then, their level of accuracy independently helps me determine how much support I'm going to give.

Marisha: Because I feel like I was constantly documenting the level of support. I felt like it wasn't totally consistent. This can maybe be like another thing that we talk about. I use that data to decide what types of support I want to give the student and how many of the supports I want to give. Because I think we would respond a lot differently if they're at 20% accuracy versus 70% accuracy.

Marisha: I think that's a strategy that worked really well for me. I love that you mentioned the data part too.

Lauren: Yes. I do the same thing, especially for non artic kids. I kind of like beginning of the session do 10 trials and see where they're at before we start drilling, drilling to see how much modeling or do I need to get up my tongue depressor or whatever had they might need. I do, I love that. Yes, take that initial data. Then, figure out what supports will work for them and where might they be at.

Lauren: If you work from inferences, when you ask them some inferencing questions, what could they do? Then, if you gave them that visual, could they do it? Then, so on and so on. If you took them away or add anything they need to add. Did you need to add more prompting to that?

Marisha: Yeah, no, that's super helpful. Then, yeah, I'm sure that could generalize to the paraeducators too. Or, maybe we could even, if they're helping us, generalize skills that we're targeting, we can let them know how the student did on the probe with us and have that indicate the level of support that they use.

Lauren: Yeah. I do a lot of my therapy pushed in in the classrooms. A lot of times, the paraprofessional is in the room when I'm doing therapy. It's easy to grab, as long as they're not working specifically with another kid or whatever. I can easily grab them and model something for them or show them a new way to support the student. Or, hey, he's been responding really well when I'm giving him these visuals. Next time, can you give him these visuals and see if he can respond a little bit better?

Lauren: That's one thing that's good about pushing.

Marisha: Yeah, that's amazing. Such a good strategy. Then, I'm curious too, because I started to touch on this, but in terms of the documentation, especially if you're working with the team, do you use any kind of template or anything to help document the level of support? Or, have you found any helpful tips there and just making it, I think, teaching and making sure everyone has the same vocabulary to start is super helpful. Do you have any kind of, I don't know, template or anything that you use?

Lauren: I have tally sheets that I use. I use SLP toolkit. On there, there's a little data section. There's a dropdown of the type of prompts that you can use or you can type in notes. That's how I do my speech tallies. Then for the team, like for the SPED staff, everyone, they're allowed to take data how they see fit. I don't want to step on the special education teacher's toes too much with the way that she takes data. I do encourage them to make a note of that support.

Lauren: In the data sheets that I had, I would always put the type of prompt and then the level of prompts. Was it low, medium or high intensity or like a direct verbal prompt or indirect, that kind of thing. I try to be a little bit more specific and so I would encourage them, the paras and the teacher to jot down the type of support that they were using so that whenever another person is working with them, then they would be able to know where to start.

Marisha: Yeah. Perfect. That's awesome. I'm always looking for different ways to document that consistently because I feel like if I say minimal cueing, that's probably something different than ... everyone would interpret that a little differently. I think that's super helpful. I think the shared vocabulary is a huge start. If we can describe what we did using that vocabulary, then I think that's much easier to understand. Just being able to be a little more specific. You would definitely give us the tools to make that more doable.

Marisha: Then, I'm curious too, could we walk through just one more example, because you mentioned your inference as resource, so maybe we could just run through an example there. Maybe like a sample session. Like a student walks in and we're going to work on and for instance today, and so we do a quick probe. Let's say, they're at 20% accuracy. What would we do? What could we do after?

Lauren: Okay, so it depends on the type of inferencing skill. With my students, a lot of times, they have to, in class, they have to answer inferencing questions and then they have to find text evidence. A lot of those inferences, making inferences tasks are text-based. If I'm using a text and I go through my level three or my least invasive, so like just a text and I want you to answer the inferencing question and they're at 20%. Then, I would pull a task that has visuals and the text.

Lauren: For example, the resource that I have, it's three levels. Then, the third level is just text and the second level is text and a picture. I would use that one. Then, we would see where they were at. With that one, if they got a higher percentage or if they were still pretty low, I might back up to just the picture prompt. Because my first level is like just a picture, no text. Can they answer inferencing questions? Because that would tell me, if they still can't answer interesting questions based on just a picture, then it doesn't matter.

Lauren: It's not the texts that's hindering them. It's not the language and the grammar and the syntax and all that that's getting in their way. It's the skill of inferencing in general. You understand? I would have to back up to that level and start there. If they performed a little bit better on the text with the visual, that might just tell, okay, well, they just need some more experience with interacting with the text. They had this visual that support it, so they could use those picture clues. They just need a little bit more experience using text to find, to make that inference or whatever.

Lauren: Then, that would tell me I could stop that that level too and work on that at a little bit higher percentage and then go on to the one without the visuals where they're just using the text. That's how I use that resource and how I would target that, just backing up. Because like inferences, there's no physical prompting but if they could not do it at that level, they would back up to this level and then they would use that visual prompting. Then, I would be using my verbal prompts.

Lauren: If that's not the case, then I will be using my gestures. Then, I would even go down to modeling. This is how we'd make inferences. You would constantly back up and back up until you exhausted all your efforts basically. That's how I would do that.

Marisha: Yeah, that's perfect. I think it's super cool and interesting just to hear how different SLPs approach it. I think it's cool too because we can use our clinical judgment. Starting with the probe, I guess, we can decide if we want to use the least to most or most to least type of approach. If it's the first time we're introducing the skill, maybe we want to start with the most and do a lot of that modeling and all of those pieces.

Marisha: These hypothetical examples are so hard because we're missing like all of the contexts that we use. Yeah, I think, that was a super cool way to put these things together. I think that resource is genius because it makes it so much easier to scaffold a skill that could be tricky to break down like if we just had a text to look at. I love using that in therapy and I super appreciate it.

Marisha: Okay, awesome. Is there anything else that you think is super important to address or any last remarks or things you want to share?

Lauren: I guess we definitely, as SLPs, we don't want to keep these tragedies ourselves. If you have this type of this knowledge and you've gotten some good practice with it, definitely, I would encourage you to share those with your teachers and other educators so that you can provide that, a good support system for your students. I guess that would be my final thoughts.

Lauren: I would just encourage you just to keep at it and talk to your team.

Marisha: Yeah. We just spent almost an entire hour talking about prompts and cues. Because I have been getting some questions about it, but I think if you had asked me a couple of years ago, it's like, yeah, that's just something we do. There's not a talk about it.

Marisha: It's definitely something that we have. I mean we went through a lot at school and we spent a lot of time building that knowledge and building those skills. They're incredibly powerful for our students. Yeah, I completely agree that this is something. Yeah, I think we just take for granted the knowledge and skills that we have. This is definitely a skillset that can really benefit our students.

Lauren: For sure. For sure.

Marisha: Yeah. Thank you for breaking it down in such an easy to understand way. I'll be linking to, you have a blog post about it and then I'll link you to The Autism Helper so that other SLPs or other listeners can find that visual. I'll also link to the inference resource that you mentioned because I think that's a really great example of some of the different strategies that we can use.

Marisha: One last thing, where can SLPs find you if they want to learn more about what you do or just read more about your resources?

Lauren: Yeah, you can find it at busybeespeech.com. That's my blog and my website. I am on Instagram and Facebook at Busy Bee Speech. On Teachers Pay Teachers, I am a Lauren LaCour Haines. If you need to reach out, you can always email me at [email protected].

Marisha: Perfect. Thank you so much, Lauren. I so appreciate your time. You are an incredible SLP and blogger and just resource and friend. Thank you so much. Thank you to everyone who listened in today.

Lauren: Thank you so much too.

Marisha: Hello there and welcome to the SLP Now podcast. I am so incredibly excited to have Kayla Redden with us today. She is my SLP bestie, but she's also an amazing school-based speech-language pathologist currently working as her sixth year in a rural preschool and elementary setting. She also serves as the secretary of the Kentucky Speech and Language Hearing Association and has participated in KSHA's ICANN Advocacy Network where she learned how to advocate for herself, her students and other SLPs. This is definitely a topic that I'd love to chat with Kayla about, all things advocacy, but today we are focusing on some articulation strategies, and if you're wanting to find out more about Kayla, we'll talk about this more at the end, but she also is ... She creates materials for elementary-age students on her Teachers Pay Teachers store, which is called Kayla SLP and she also blogs about therapy tips at kaylaslp.com. So without further ado, let's jump into today's conversation. But before we get into all of the practical tips and tricks, Kayla, first of all, welcome.

Kayla: Thank you. I'm so excited to be on here.

Marisha: Then, I also would love to hear a little bit about your experience as an SLP, in general, and how you started or how you got started with the service delivery model for articulation.

Kayla: I started working as a preschool and elementary SLP about six years ago. I've worked with preschool through high school, but the last few years I really zoned into the younger students. Something that has always bothered me about articulation therapy is that we so often gravitate towards the two times a week, 30 minutes a session, and it just kind of fits into our schedule and that's what we're so used to doing. But I wasn't seeing the progress that I really wanted to see with my students, and especially some of these younger students with such short attention spans. I was hearing some other students, I'm sorry, some other SLPs talk about five minute speech and I wasn't entirely sure what that was. So I did some Googling, I talked to some other speech therapists and I found out that it's a top of service delivery model.
Now, you can buy a specific product, they have Speedy Speech in Five Minute Kids that lay out the whole program for you, but you not really have to have that necessarily to implement this program. I started thinking about my own students and some of the difficulties I was facing like my students getting bored, or distracted, or me not feeling like I was spending enough time on each individual student in large groups and so I thought I'd try it out to see if it would work for me and my students.

Marisha: That is amazing. I love it. Just solving some problems in your SLP world and now you get to share about it with us. Awesome. So it sounds like you already told us a little bit about what convinced you to give it a try, but were there some aspects that you weren't sure about when you started looking into it and where you found those answers or was it a pretty easy decision? I'd love to hear a little bit more about how that process went.

Kayla: Honestly, I struggled a little bit whenever I started to implement this because I hated to switch all my students over to this model and then find out that it didn't work. And also with it being sort of non-traditional, it made me nervous that maybe my administration wouldn't want me to be doing this specific model or maybe the parents would be cautious about me pulling their students only for five minutes at a time working on them with their speech. But once I figured out a way to make it work with my schedule and talked to my administration and parents about it, I realized that it wasn't too much different than what I was already doing. Just shorter sessions basically.

Marisha: Yeah, and I bet you tried this with a couple of students before making it part of your inventory of strategies to use across your caseload.

Kayla: Yeah. That first year I picked three students, I believe, who only had a few sound errors, maybe one or two just as a test run. And when I saw how it was working for them, I started moving more and more over. But I would definitely recommend starting small with this just to see if it's going to work for you, and your students, and your schedule and just your school as a whole.

Marisha: Yeah, and I think that really helps guide that discussion with administration and parents and teachers, because if you're selling this approach and trying to implement it with everyone on your caseload, but you haven't gotten to use it yet, then it's harder to answer some of those questions and speak from a place of authority or experience maybe would be better. So I love that approach and I think that can apply to any type of change we're wanting to make with our caseload or our service delivery models or anything that. So super helpful.

Kayla: Absolutely.

Marisha: Then I'd love to hear a little bit more about the pros and cons of using this approach. So you talked a little bit about potentially having to modify your schedule, which could be a con initially. What else was on your pros and cons list when you were getting set up and implementing too?

Kayla: I would say some of my cons or initial inconveniences to getting started with this approach was, like you said, changing my schedule to make this model work. I will say that starting small help with that because I could see how much time I would need to block off just for three students. But just changing my schedule little at a time, changing over the IEP service minutes, trial and error with students who are starting out, trying to figure out who you want to use this approach with and who it might not work with and then just educating the parents and staff on what this service delivery method is.
As far as pros, I definitely have more pros. I see more increased attention and engagement within the tasks because there's no time for these students to lose interest. It's very quick and they're engaged the entire time. I've seen a increased ability to recall sounds they're working on whereas previously seeing students once or twice a week, they would sometimes seem to forget the sounds in between sessions. You know, "What sound are we working on?" "Oh, I don't know." And these kind of pick a sound, but when they're working on it almost every day it's really hard for them to forget what they're working on. I see more productions per session, decreased frustration because even if something is hard, I feel a student can do just about anything for five minutes and they're missing less class and they're sooner to be dismissed, honestly.

Marisha: Yeah, I love that. So many pros and it is definitely challenging to switch and try something new, but I think if we can remind ourselves of the impact that it can have on students, we can give it a try too, especially using that approach where we start small. So let in terms of helping SLPs get this set up with our caseloads, I'd love to dive into some of the cons or challenges that you mentioned. So the biggest one I think is getting administration onboard. So how did you go about this and what did that look for you?

Kayla: My best advice is to bring the research to the table when you're talking with your administration. Obviously, it's going to depend on who your administration is and I'm very lucky to have a director who trusts my decisions and what I say I would to try with my students, she's very flexible. But bring their research because they may say, this is something I've heard others say to me, "Well my administration says five minutes isn't going to do anything for these students because they're so used to seeing speech therapists use the traditional 30 minutes at a time approach." I do know that the Speedy Speech and the Five Minute Kids websites have research available that you can print off and bring to your administration, but just be upfront with them so they know exactly what this top of therapy looks. And really the research is just talking about how short, frequent, intensive therapy can lead to greater outcomes. So you don't have to have the program in front of you to bring to your administration. Just talking about how those short sessions with lots and lots of repetitions can make a change with students.

Marisha: Yeah. And especially for something articulation. There's some really cool research out there and I love that we can find we get easy access to summaries and handouts from those sites as well. That makes it even easier.

Kayla: Yes. I love it.

Marisha: So what about communicating with parents and teachers? What has that looked like for you?

Kayla: I feel I've had a very positive response from parents and teachers alike. The teachers really it because the students are missing less class and really they're with me no longer than they would be at a bathroom break, for the most part. So they're not missing all of science or all of social studies when they come with me, they're just missing five minutes. So they've been very on board with that. They to see that these students are really engaged with what I'm working on, because sometimes I'll do this in the classroom and they see what I'm doing and they're like, "Oh my goodness, I can't believe you get so much in just five minutes." And parents like that their kids are getting one-on-one therapy, and that's something that we don't always offer a lot of in schools. We see most of our students in groups, but even if it's just for a short period of time, parents knowing that their students getting all of your attention a few days a week for a short period of time means a lot.

Marisha: Yeah, and did you have any parents or teachers who were resistant to it at first?

Kayla: I personally have not had any. I came fully prepared that I might have some that were upset or worried about just a change in approach and I get it because it seems like five minutes, what can you do in five minutes? But I think if you're just upfront with them, especially after you've tried it a few times with other students and you can say, "Listen, I've seen really great results with this. Your student is missing less class and they're getting dismissed faster." Then that's enough to convince most parents and teachers that we're on the right track.

Marisha: Yeah. It's just a matter of bringing that information to the table and not just saying, "We're switching to five minute sessions." And instead, setting up the conversation and sharing the research and what it would look and just like we would with any other approach. So I love it.

Kayla: Yes, So whenever I had that initial meeting where I switch over, I do go over that with the parents and the teacher as to why I want to switch, what I've seen in the past and I just go over the reasoning. I think it puts everybody at ease.

Marisha: Yeah. Then also just before we dive into the logistics of actually getting it set up with your caseload, I'm wondering too if you can break down from what you've read in the research or what you've seen in your experience, who is a good candidate for this approach and maybe who wouldn't be as good of a fit?

Kayla: So like I said, when I first started out, I wanted to test it with my more mildly impaired articulation students. So I picked some single error or two error students and it worked really well. So over time I've learned that it does not have to be just those students. You can work with R students, and I say R is not a single sound error because there are so many different versions of R and it can take so long to fix an R, but those are great students to work on this with. Multiple sound error students. Phonology, you can use it with your kids who are using cycles because it doesn't have to be five minutes. You can do five, seven, 10 minutes for a child depending on what they need. So you could do three 10 minute days and use a cycles approach with these students. I've used it with kindergarten through elementary. I believe my other SLP at my school has used it with high school and I've used it with isolation through conversation levels. But the one group that I might not use this with will be preschool just because preschool doesn't always respond the best to drill, drill, drill, especially these new three year olds and four year olds. I use more of a play-based therapy approach with those students, but I feel most anybody else you can make five minutes for each work.

Marisha: That is super helpful, and then it's also case by case too. Maybe if we're in the very beginning stages of establishing a sound and it's really tricky, maybe the student would benefit from a longer session but I feel like from my experience that's pretty consistent with what I've seen too. I'm just trying to think if there's any other exceptions, but I think you got it. So I think we're ready to dive into some more of the logistics. What do you think, Kayla?

Kayla: Yeah, let's do it.

Marisha: Okay. So I'd love to dive into how you set this up with your caseload. So do you have any general setup tips or should we dive into the specifics of the IEPs? What do you think makes the most sense here?

Kayla: Just as a general rule, like we already said earlier, I would just start small. That's my best tip because you're going to be so overwhelmed if you start trying to change your entire schedule and all of your IEPs at one time for this. I would say wait until a student's annual rolls around before you change their IEP instead of trying to amend everyone's at one time, but yeah.

Marisha: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Then speaking of IEPs, what did that look when you ... So you said to wait until the annual, so you're not amending them, but then what did you write in the IEP or do you have any tips there in terms of how the Five Minute Kids approach, or the Speedy Speech, or just any variation of that would look in the IEP?

Kayla: I know that every IEP program allows you to write different things as far as service delivery times go. For Kentucky, where I work, we have to write how many times we're going to see the student either per day, week, or month and then for how many minutes. So when as soon as annual comes around, I typically write five minutes, 12 times a month and that allows me to see these students three days a week and that can be pretty flexible. You could write maybe nine times a month or 10 times a month if you want to allow some flexibility but I feel like five minutes, 12 times a month has worked well for me.
But let's say that you want to do cycles with a child you may choose the 10 minutes, three times a week or if a student is working on placement still and you still want to try shorter sessions maybe 15 minutes twice a week. Or if you can write ranges, which I think would be great, five to seven minutes, nine to 12 times a month or however you want to write it. It doesn't have to be that five minutes, three times a week. You can be flexible depending on your student and I know the manual, a Five Minute Kids kind of goes over that too, but again, five minutes is not the magic number. It's whatever works for your student. It's really just short, intensive sessions.

Marisha: Yeah, and I think that's a really important point to drive home. I think we get into our templates of once or twice a week for 30 minutes and this could become another template of, "Yeah, I do five minutes three times a week." But it's really like we're expanding into these different service delivery models and exploring them because we want to find the optimal service delivery time for that individual student. So you're absolutely right, it's not a template and we get to consider each student's individual factors as we're setting this up. So that's perfect.

Kayla: Yeah.

Marisha: Okay. Then what about Medicaid billing? I feel like there's a lot of questions about billing with this approach.

Kayla: Yes, lots of questions. Again, I'm very lucky to work in a school who does not force me to write my IEPs based off of Medicaid. I do know that if you want Medicaid to reimburse you can't write five minutes and some administration may want you to write your minutes more than five minutes just so that you can get that reimbursement. And I understand that and that's where I say the eight minutes, the 10 minutes may be just as beneficial for your student. They're getting a few extra minutes with you and it will meet your Medicaid requirements. So that's the discussion that I would suggest having with your administration before getting started just so everybody's on the same page and they know that five minutes will not get you reimbursed, 10 minutes will but still do what's best for your students. So if your students truly need the five minutes, that's a point that you need to really emphasize when you're talking about this approach with your administration.

Marisha: Yeah, and that absolutely makes sense. Putting students first and then advocating for them in that way, and then yeah, just kind of making it work and being a problem solver. We get to be really good at that.

Kayla: Absolutely.

Marisha: Then, what about scheduling? How did you get this set up in your therapy schedule?

Kayla: I set up a block of time for three days a week to see my students. I do allow some time for movement because I am going from classroom to classroom working my way down the halls seeing these students. So for example, if you have four students who are getting five minutes speech and you're seeing them five to seven minutes each, you may want to schedule 30 minutes just so you have enough time to transition between classrooms, make your way down the hall and see everybody. Because if you really only allow yourself five minutes, you will get behind and I have learned that the hard way because at first I set up my schedule five minutes, five minutes, five minutes and there was no way I could see three Five Minute Kids in 15 minutes even if they were in the same classroom together basically.
So always allow a few minutes of movement time. But I do suggest scheduling a block just so you can leave your room, work your way down the halls, and then come back to your room for whatever you have to do for the rest of the day. But there will always be some students who don't fit into that block. So the good thing about five minute speech is you could always say, "Okay. Well, third grade does not fit in this block. I will see them the first 10 minutes of school and I will see everybody in these 40 minutes in the afternoon." There's a way to make it work because it's such a short period of time.

Marisha: Yeah. And I'm curious, what does that block of time look like and how many students are you seeing in that amount of time?

Kayla: I probably see 10 students in about maybe an hour because that gives me about 10 minutes that way to ... Well, I don't know, I'll have my schedule in front of me. I think I see about 10 students maybe in 50 minutes and then that leaves some time for me to move down the hall, but I've fluctuated and I've actually dismissed so many students I'm not entirely sure how many I'm seeing that block of time. Because I've actually got to dismiss two of those students just recently and that helps a little bit. But I say, however many students you're seeing allow about 10 extra minutes of movement time just because you may be walking across the entire school building to see some of these kids or one may be in the bathroom and you have to wait a minute. So just allow some flexibility.

Marisha: Yeah, that makes sense. Then I'm curious too, if you have three students in a class, do you just tell the teacher, "Okay, I'll be here on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays from 3 to 3:30."

Kayla: Yes.

Marisha: Or do you give each student a specific time?

Kayla: I just sort of give the teacher a block of time and then I make my way into their room and just call them over one at a time to see me, and a lot of times they'll even go get the next student. If we're all in the room together they're like, "Oh, do you need so-and-so? Let me go get them." So it flows very fast but the teacher knows within about a 15 minute period that I'll be in their classroom.

Marisha: Yeah, that's awesome. Then of course I bet that some days everything goes super smoothly and then other days it takes a little longer. So having that range I think is helpful.

Kayla: Yes.

Marisha: Awesome. So totally doable. Then that also reminded me of a question that comes up a lot in terms of student privacy because these sessions are typically happening in the hall or the classroom, right?

Kayla: Yes.

Marisha: Yeah.

Kayla: Just to make sure that your students are not ... You're not breaking FERPA because you do want to keep your students' privacy protected and the fact that they are receiving a special education service. Taking students into the hallway may not always work. Now, if you were in a school where you have a ... The end of the hallway where no one's coming down and it's a quiet end of the hall, that may be okay. Or if you have some fold-out barriers, I know that we have some fold-out cardboard barriers we can put up at the end of the hallway to use you can do that. But I also see students in the classroom. I try to go in during a busier time in the classroom, so when they're not doing silent work so that I can just pull them to the back or the side without disturbing the entire classroom for them to work with me.
So I see students at a back table in their classroom, on the rug, I've pulled them into the library before. Just anywhere where I'm not disturbing the rest of the class and the rest of the class isn't disturbing us necessarily. But you don't have to go in the hall, it doesn't work for everybody. I know that you don't want to parade your speech students around. So definitely, if you can find a little corner somewhere to go, just go there.

Marisha: Yeah, that's perfect. Then also I'm curious what the sessions typically look in terms of the structure, the materials, all of the good tips you've got.

Kayla: So this may be my favorite part of five minute speech, besides the fact that so many kids get dismissed. You don't have to plan much for it. You don't have to print off worksheets, or bring a ton to flash cards, or set up a game. Usually, when I go to five minute speech it is me, my clipboard and my iPad and that's about it. So my iPad has all of the apps that I would use for my articulation students for flashcards or reading passages, conversation starters. Most of the apps that I use allow me to track my data on them so I don't really have to bring a data sheet with me most of the time, but I usually keep something just so I can jot notes down for my next session with that student.
I use Articulation Station Pro and it goes from word-level two reading passage level. So that covers most of my caseload. I use Little Stories Pro, which has reading level and conversation level and super-duper story starters, which may be free, I believe and it's conversation level. Just fun little topics for your students to work on conversation carryover. But I love that I don't have to bring a cart full of stuff down the hallway. It's just my iPad and my clipboard and me and I time it on my watch, or you can use a digital timer, but if you have an Apple Watch you can just say, "Five minute timer." And it'll start vibrating whenever time's up.

Marisha: Ooh, that is a fun little hack too. I love that.

Kayla: Yeah, and my students think it's super cool that I talk to my watch so you earned some cool points doing that too.

Marisha: I love it. And it keeps you on track, so win-win-win.

Kayla: Yes. Yeah, It kind of keeps you from going over too much on time because it is easy when you get in that session just to keep going and going. So I do suggest setting a timer so that you and the student know when time's up, next student, but I'll see you tomorrow.

Marisha: Yeah, no that's great. So you grab the student, they sit down with you, you pull up whatever activity they're doing on the iPad, then you drill, drill, drill, drill, drill. Do you have anything that you do when they first sit down or with the wrap-up? Obviously, you say hi and check-in, but do you frequently share their progress or is there any other little elements that you think are helpful that you add in?

Kayla: Usually, when we first sit down, I will ask them, "What did we work on yesterday?" And I mean 95% of the time, even my kindergartners can tell me exactly what we did the day before, which is a huge win in my opinion because with the traditional models, they didn't always remember that we worked on T last time or Ks last time. So just a quick refresh, "What do we work on yesterday?" Then sometimes we'll pull up their scores and we'll say, "Okay, here's how we did yesterday. Let's try to beat that score today." Then we'll do our drills for five minutes and then at the end I'll let them see their data. And the good thing with Articulation Station is that it gives a little checkmark if they've hit 80% or 90% whichever one you set it to. So if they see that checkmark, they know that they're reaching that goal, but even if they don't reach the goal, they can see if their progress went up or stayed the same or went down from the day before and they enjoy that.

Marisha: Yeah, that's super fun. And it's so easy to see progress using this approach because it's super fresh, they're practicing it regularly, all that good stuff. That's awesome. Then do you ever send home homework or anything like that with this approach when you're implementing it?

Kayla: I usually will send home something. Some of these students, if they're having particular difficulty with a certain set of words I will email that word list to their parents, and Articulation Station allows you to do that. You can pick the sounds they're working on and send the email, I believe with the flashcards on it to the parents. And I'll also send home a monthly little checklist thing of, "Okay, if you practice your sounds 15 days out of this month then you get something." Or, "If you practice every day this month you get something." So I do send home a little bit of homework because I feel like if I'm working on it every day, then it should be pretty easy to carry over at home because the students can tell their parents exactly what they're working on and that's one of the biggest barriers I see to homework is that the parents don't understand how to help their child. But when I've seen them almost every single day the student can say, "Well, here's what we're doing and here's how I say that sound." And it just helps with the carryover.

Marisha: Yeah. And I love that tip that because I don't think I've used that feature. I love Articulation Station. I don't think I've used the email feature other than to email myself the report in the evaluation app, but that's so helpful. So cool. Awesome. That's so easy then and you definitely ... It's super relevant and you don't need to do any printing and that's probably easier for parents too because that way if they're waiting, I don't know, if their sibling is in soccer practice and they're just sitting in the car waiting they can just pull that up and run through some words, and it can just very easily become a routine, which is amazing. I love it.

Kayla: And you can also screenshot it, I believe. And if you, if your school uses Remind or ClassDojo, you can send it that way too. So if a parent doesn't have email or doesn't check their email often, most of them will check a text or Remind. So I send it that way too. I just take a screenshot and send it through Remind and it's just they're on their phone at anytime. They can practice anytime.

Marisha: Yeah, I loved using that with my caseload. Then in case listeners aren't familiar, what is Remind and ClassDojo and all those kinds of things?

Kayla: Those are apps for parent communication, and I know that most schools adopt some system of parent communication as a whole. It's basically another way to text parents without giving out your phone number to parents. And we personally use Remind at our school and you can send text messages and photos. You can't send videos, I wish you could. I would love to share my students doing their five minute speech with their parents, but you can share the photos of whatever you're working on or take screenshots and send it to parents that way.

Marisha: Yeah, that's perfect. And I had loved using that with my caseload. It was something that the school was already using and I would just have them ... I did send out emails just in terms of getting it set up, and I'd love to hear how you did this, but I ... Because I was new to this school so I sent out handouts asking the parents to join. I set up a class for my speech students and I set it up so that the other parents couldn't see other students. So they only could see their student. But I sent that invite out and then some parents responded to that. Not everyone did though, but at every IEP meeting I would bring that up and I was at ... What do you call it? A title one school.

Kayla: Yes, right.

Marisha: I think they traditionally get a rap for not having as much communication or less just involvement, but every parent that I talked to about it ended up signing up for it and we were able to communicate. It just makes, this is a little bit of a digression, but it just makes a really huge impact on student progress because we're able to just send super quick notes back and forth. I don't know what it is, but answering the phone or listening to a voicemail or reading an email even sounds like a big chore, but this just feels a super easy little text message and they just respond really quickly. And I've seen it help tremendously with generalization and I love the tips that you shared of sending screenshots and with this approach, it's super easy to implement that because it is one-on-one.

Kayla: Right, and you can even say just a quick text to the parent that says, "Hey, we worked on K this week. Here are some words to practice at home." And like you said, you're way more likely to get this parent engagement I feel like when you send a text style message to the parents because it is, it's so quick for you to send it and it's so quick for them to respond. So if anyone is not using one of these programs I really suggest you look into it, because I think you'll be surprised at what the open lines of communication will do for you and your students.

Marisha: Yeah, I absolutely agree. Then also just a couple other tips. Some school districts or some schools might not be using an app Remind or ClassDojo. I've heard of some SLPs using Google Voice and just setting up a number and then they can ... Because then that way they don't have to share their personal number, but there's a way to communicate and just check with your administration and check with your confidentiality and all of that, but those are things that I've heard of other SLPs doing just as a way to navigate that.

Kayla: I've heard that too and I've actually had that before. So I also recommend Google Voice if no one's used that. Give it a try.

Marisha: Yeah. And I think it's especially helpful for EI or if you're traveling or whatnot because then it's easy, then you don't have to give out your personal number and you can call parents and send them updates just as you're communicating scheduling and all that.

Kayla: Completely agree.

Marisha: So awesome. So thanks for humoring that little digression, but I think that's super important. If we're seeing a student for three times a week for five minutes, and if we can get the parents to help us we could essentially be doubling or tripling the student's practice time, which would result in much more progress. So this is a very important element of it and I'm glad we got to dive in.

Kayla: Me too.

Marisha: Okay, so another question. Do your students get bored? Because it sounds like it's ... Like it's not any fluff. You didn't mention a bunch of reinforcers or gains, you're just running through the articulation apps. Do they get bored?

Kayla: That was a fear of on when I switched over to this method, just because these students that I was using this with were used to getting to leave class, coming in my room, playing a game, getting a reward, and then going back to class. So I was nervous that I might have some pushback from the students themselves because they were no longer getting to come to my room, or get these fun games that we've been playing in my classroom. But I learned that maybe the first couple of times they may say, "Well, why don't I go to your room anymore? I want to go in your room and play a game." But I just tell them, "You're doing so well. This is how we're going to start working on your speech and I want you to be able to get back to your friends as fast as possible." My students really don't get bored. And I think it's just because the sessions are so quick there's no time to get bored. Whereas even in the classroom, when you're doing something super engaging you're going around the table and everybody takes a turn. Student one may be bored by the time you get to student three. Well, in five minutes speech is just you and that student, and there is no time for boredom because they're the only ones doing all the work.
So we still joke around and we still have fun and they love using the iPad. So bringing that, it's just a reinforcer in of itself even if you are practicing flashcards on there, or playing a matching game, or reading a sound loaded story. It's sort of rewarding in and of itself versus having to get a reward in the classroom.

Marisha: Absolutely. And I think if we are having that discussion with our students and they're really clear on what they're working on and if we're seeing them that frequently they're making that progress. So I think being able to see that progress is really rewarding. I know that would get me super excited. It's like, "Last week I was at 60 and I got 80 this time. I'm getting better." So I think just emphasizing that progress and mastery can be a huge win and we need all the extra stuff.

Kayla: Honestly, and sometimes your students are just excited because they're seeing you more. They're seeing you for less time, but they're seeing you almost every day and they love that. They're like, "Oh, I get to see you three days this week, four days this week." Or however often you're seeing them. But that gets them excited too, just you say, "Well, you used to only see me once a week for 30 minutes, but now you get to see me three days a week and I'm bringing the iPad." And yeah, it's a good time.

Marisha: And they get your one-on-one attention. How often does that happen throughout the school day and maybe even at home? That's, pretty special.

Kayla: Yeah, it means a lot to them, I can tell.

Marisha: Yeah. Oh, that's amazing. Have you ever run into behavior issues or do you feel like the length of the session is just so short that it doesn't even come up?

Kayla: Knock on wood, I have yet to have a behavior issue and I have used this with maybe 20 plus students so far. Actually, I'm sure more than that, but I've never had an issue. It's just because the students look forward to working with me one-on-one. Like you said, they love that attention. They don't want to get in trouble. And I tell them, I'm like, "We only have five minutes." That's one thing I do tell them if they start to get off task. You know, "We only have five minutes together today. So let's make the most of it. Let's not be silly, goof around, roll on the floor and I'll see you again tomorrow but we have to work hard today." Then that pretty much nips it in the bud right there.

Marisha: Yeah. Then another thing too, because when I was using Remind to communicate with my parents, they knew that I would be sending a note to their parents at the end. That wasn't something that I said often. Like, "Oh, I'm going to text your mom." But I feel like they just know that I'm going to be having that communication and they know that their teacher is right there too. It is just so incredibly short that I think all of those factors just combined make it really easy to manage that behavior because it just ends up being a non-issue.

Kayla: I agree.

Marisha: Okay, awesome. Then do you reward students at the end of the session or what does that look like?

Kayla: I don't always give rewards during five minute speech just because it's such a short period of time. I feel like they're getting rewarded, I know this sounds ... This is going to be controversial because some people believe in stickers every time or candies every time, but I feel like if I'm seeing a student for five minutes, then maybe not a candy for hanging out with me for five minutes and working hard. I will sometimes bring a smelly, which is what I use for some of my younger kids, a scented chapstick, put it on the back of their hands but that's sort of a rare thing even. It's usually, "High five, great job, look at your progress, see you again tomorrow." And they don't ask for things. It could be partially because even when they were in traditional type therapy with me I didn't really give out a lot of rewards. I was more of a, "Here's a smelly." Or, "You can sit in the teacher's chair for the session." That kind of thing. But they don't really ask for rewards and when they do get one it's super exciting because they don't come around that often.

Marisha: Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. And I mean the reward is in being able to spend with you and make progress towards their goals, and they get to do fun stuff during the session. It's not like you're making them pull their teeth out or anything.

Kayla: It is not just straight-faced flashcard drill, and I'm talking even kindergartners. So I'm not just talking older students. Even my kindergartners do not necessarily require a reward at the end. It's literally just, "You did so great today. Look at how much you went up." Maybe you could say, "I'm going to text mom and tell her how great you did today." High five and then we'll do it again the next day.

Marisha: Yeah, that's perfect. Then I loved what you mentioned because I think you ... From what I understand, you don't do a prize box or the stickers or the candy in general, right?

Kayla: Right. I've stayed away from that recently.

Marisha: Awesome. And you have a really great blog post that you wrote. So I'll link to that in the show notes as well as the different apps that you mentioned and any other resources that came up. Like the links to the programs and that'll be slpnow.com/44 but I really loved that blog post because they think if you are struggling with that and your students are always asking for more stuff, or you're not sure if you want to be spending money on that, Kayla has a lot of really great ideas so look for that in the show notes as well. That's a really helpful post.

Kayla: Thank you.

Marisha: And I just love the scented chapstick idea because it costs one or two dollars and it probably lasts you forever. So tell us a little bit about how you do that just in case it's not super clear.

Kayla: I have a box of about 20 different chapsticks that I've bought up throughout the different seasons and at Walmart and on Amazon, and at the end of a session if a student worked hard, was nice to others, did their job, then we get a smelly, that's what we call them. And I close my eyes and make a really big deal out of picking out a chapstick from the box and we talk about what smell it is and then they all get just a little smudge of it on the back of their hands, and they can smell that for the rest of the day or until they wash their hands. But they love it. It's a huge, huge, huge deal.

Marisha: Yeah. And that gets to be a language activity in and of itself because you're working on describing and all of that.

Kayla: Yes.

Marisha: Awesome. I love it. Awesome. And I love the experiential rewards, like getting to sit in a special chair or ...

Kayla: Right, and I tried the treasure box, but it was more of a, "You don't have what I want in there." So I just kind of got rid of that and now it's more of, "No shoes." Or, "Sit in the teacher's chair." Or, "Five minutes of iPad time." Just something that doesn't require physically buying something and stocking a treasure box that may not even suit all of your students' wants and needs.

Marisha: One of the rewards that I would give was to have lunch with me, which was a surprisingly exciting prize. And I think it's cool too, we can get creative with how we implement this. With articulation, we're working through the hierarchy, so we're from isolation to ... Or yeah, isolation to syllables and words, and phrases, and sentences, and maybe we can implement some rewards that way too. Like if you get to the word-level or if you master this level then we'll get to have this celebration thing. And maybe it could be just a scented chapstick depending on how long it takes, but there's fun little things that we can do.

Kayla: The great idea though, I didn't think about that. Yeah. As they master a level then the reward comes. That's a great idea. I love it.

Marisha: Yeah. I have a little ladder that I print out. It's just like ... And all of my students have a little articulation folder, but then we'll use that. We'll get to color in the levels of the ladder as we move through the steps, and I think it helps to educate the students so they know what they're working towards and we'll kind of say ... Not all students are going to go all the way to the top of the ladder right away. Some students take longer than others, but I feel like with this approach it could happen pretty quickly. So we just-

Kayla: Yeah, it moves fast.

Marisha: Yeah.

Kayla: And I love it, but definitely write your goals a little loftier than you normally would I feel like with this approach, because if you write just a word-level goal your students are going to surpass that it seems like in no time. So that's another thing to keep in mind when you're writing your IEPs. Think bigger than what you may be thinking now because the progress is going to come faster than what you think.

Marisha: That is so exciting. I love that. I wish we could ... We need tacs this for all of the different types of goals that we write because it's amazing.

Kayla: Yes.

Marisha: I love it. Okay. So let's just recap real quickly. So in terms of some of the pros to using this approach, so we've got ... Maybe we can round-robin it and see how many we can come up with. So we've got increased engagement because of their short sessions and all of that. Is there anything else?

Kayla: Increased ability to recall those sounds. They know what they're working on.

Marisha: Yeah, goal awareness. And then rapid progress.

Kayla: Yes. Less time missing class.

Marisha: Yes, and less of that educational impact, which is awesome. Then, let's see, what else can we think of?

Kayla: Sooner to be dismissed? That faster progress leads to sooner dismissal.

Marisha: Yeah, and then more impact in the therapy time too.

Kayla: Yes. And the one on one therapy, which a lot of students, like you said, they're not getting that most of the times, that one on one.

Marisha: Yeah. Anything else? Or do you think that covers the essentials?

Kayla: I think that's the biggest part of it.

Marisha: Oh, and then last prep time too.

Kayla: Oh, yeah.
My favorite. I already forgot my favorite. I just love that I don't have to prep for those 10, 12 students or however many you have on it. It cuts your planning time greatly. Greatly, you'll love it.

Marisha: Yeah. And I love when those worlds collide where there's less planning and more impact. It's the like thee ...

Kayla: Could it get any better?

Marisha: Yes. So that's amazing. Then for some of the challenges, we talked about just like getting it ... The setup seems the biggest challenge and we talked about how to communicate with administrators, how to communicate with parents, teachers and then-

Kayla: Just starting small.

Marisha: Yeah.

Kayla: Don't overwhelm yourself, just start small and go from there with your schedule and service minutes and all of that. Because that is the hardest part, is getting everything moved over but give yourself the year. Give yourself that school year to start moving students over and then the next year it'll already be set up for you.

Marisha: Yeah. Perfect. Then I love that tip that you gave too, as you're updating student's IEPs to decide if it would be a good fit for them and then making that change there and then, yeah. We can get creative there if we feel like, "Oh my goodness, this student is not making any progress. We need to make a change ASAP." We can problem solve in those situations, but I think that's a good strategy to make it feasible because rolling it out over the course of a year is better than never rolling it out because it feels too much of a hurdle.
So we can let go of a little bit of our perfectionism because it can be hard to think about, "Oh my goodness, I want to do this and if I'm going to do it, I have to do it all the way." But I think that's something that was helpful for me. At least I'm implementing it with these students and then the rest will come. But that's really the most feasible way to make a change in any area of our practice.

Kayla: Absolutely.

Marisha: So awesome. I love that. Okay, and then I think we are ... I think that covered ... That was a good recap of what we covered. Did you have any other tips for success or strategies that you found to be particularly helpful or just anything else you want to share?

Kayla: Just my biggest tip besides not stressing yourself out trying to get this started is to, when you start to roll it out, like I said, have the research, have those open conversations with the parents, and with the teachers, with your administration. Maybe even talk to the teachers before the meeting and just say, "Hey, there's this service delivery model that I'm really wanting to try out with some students. I think your student would be a great fit." And that way explain it to them first so when you go into the meeting, nobody's caught by surprise and when you talk to the parent about it, the teacher's already on your side. They understand your rationale behind it instead of just saying, " inaudible understand what you can do in five minutes." Talk to the teacher beforehand, talk to administration beforehand, and the parents, I think they will be in agreement with what you want to do for their child because you are doing what's in the best interest for their child.

Marisha: Yeah, and I think that automatically shines through when that's the case. So that is super helpful and I love the tip, particularly if you think it might be a challenge if you let the teacher know upfront. I think that could make a really big difference because the parent will, especially if they have a good relationship with the teacher, they might look towards him or her to kind of see, "Okay, what's her reaction or what's his reaction?" So if she or he is nodding along and they're positive about it then I think that can help, especially for parents who you think might be a little more resistant to change or whatnot.

Kayla: Absolutely.

Marisha: Awesome. Okay, so that was super helpful. I feel like this was jam-packed with practical tips and strategies to get this started. I love all of the suggestions for really easy things that we can do to work through this. So thank you so much for sharing all of this, and I was wondering if you could share where ... If SLPs listening to this want to find out more about you, where can they connect with you and what's a good place to learn more about your therapy strategies, and materials, and all that good stuff?

Kayla: You can find out more information about how I run my therapy and some of the activities that we do in my therapy room on my blog, which is www.kaylaslp.com. You can also find me on Facebook and Instagram, Kayla SLP. And I also sell on Teachers Pay Teachers. Again, Kayla SLP. So you can find me pretty much anywhere just by Googling Kayla SLP. But I talk about a lot of this stuff, the five minute speech, the reward systems, lots of good stuff everywhere. So just find me on social media.

Marisha: Awesome. I just remembered that you wrote that post, so I will link to your ... If SLPs or listeners prefer to get a readout of some of the points that we talked about, Kayla did write a super helpful blog post. So that will also be in the show notes at slpnow.com/44.

Kayla: Sounds great. Thank you for having me.

Marisha: Yeah, thank you so much, Kayla. This was so incredibly helpful and thank you to all of you who made it to the end of this podcast for listening in. I hope you're walking away with tons of practical tips and strategies and that's a wrap. Thank you.

Kayla: Thank you.

Marisha: Hello there and welcome to the SLP Now podcast. I am so incredibly excited to have Amy Chambers with us here today. She has been a long time friend. We met back in the day on Periscope and she is a special education teacher who just shares the most wonderful tips for behavior. She has helped me tremendously with my previous case loads and students and so I'm super excited to be connecting with Amy again to share all of her amazing tips and tricks with you, and just a little bit more about Amy. She is the CEO and founder of lightenupteaching, a business based on helping educators and parents bring mindfulness and social emotional techniques to students.
Amy is also a national board certified educator with over 18 years of experience and I'm super excited to hear more about all of the amazing things that Amy is doing because that's definitely a very, very tiny snippet, but without further ado, let's jump in. Hi Amy.

Amy: Hi Marisha. I'm so glad to be here.

Marisha: Yes, I am so incredibly excited. It's been far too long.

Amy: Yes.

Marisha: Like I gave a little bit of a snippet of what you do, but can you tell us a little bit about your experience as a special education teacher, and kind of your journey there and where you ended up?

Amy: Sure. I actually, went to college a very long time ago to be an art teacher, and kind of as part of my study, I knew that I would be teaching all the kids in a school and so I always kind of sought out experiences to work with kids with special needs and I ended up babysitting a lot in college and I kind of got on the list of moms that had kids with special needs who I was willing to babysit. I ended up working at an autism camp the summer after I graduated and as I was doing my student teaching and art, I was spending a lot of time with the kids with special needs and I ended up starting to take classes in special ed and so I started out in a autism classroom with students who were mostly nonverbal, lots of communication devices and the 2003 version of communication devices which are a lot different than what we have now.
I did a couple of years in that really intense middle school classroom with kids with pretty significant autism or significantly affected by autism I guess, and then I taught art for a little while after that and then I went back into more self-contained classroom in elementary and I've been at the school I'm at now. This is my 14th year and I moved from the self-contained setting to more of a resource classroom and now I kind of have a blend of separate setting resource, mostly second and third graders but I've had experience with pretty much any kind of special education that you could think of at this point, I think.

Marisha: That is so amazing and I'm really excited to be able to learn more about how all of those experiences kind of shaped all of the things behavior for you but I feel like you're kind of recognized as a behavior expert, especially in the teacher groups. How did you come to learn so much about behavior and like what led to you to that?

Amy: Well, as a special educator, and as an art when I taught art, it was actually to center for young people who are detained, so it was like a juvenile detention center. I've pretty much always had caseloads in classes with lots of intense behavioral needs and it's just been very clear to me from the beginning that these were really sweet, wonderful kids who wanted to do well and didn't know how to do well. I really don't believe that kids come to school and want to make you have a hard day as their teacher or therapist and so I've just really... I'm very curious person so I've always done a lot of research and I try things pretty much as soon as I learn about them and so I've just put a lot of things into practice over the years and it's just, I feel like helping kids with behavior is one of the best ways that you can impact them in school and in their life, so it's just something that I feel like I can share with other educators too to kind of help the whole school community be improved.
And so much of it is communication and I think that what you guys as speech therapists do is very important and that's a lot of what I'm doing with behavior, is helping kids communicate more effectively about what they need.

Marisha: Yeah it's so true because behavior is a form of communication and I feel like a lot of times... like a lot of the students on my case load are the ones that teachers like in the teacher's lounge or whatever, those were the students that they'd be pulling their hair out about because they didn't have... they weren't able to communicate what they needed to communicate and so then that manifested in terms of their behavior.

Amy: Absolutely.

Marisha: So yeah, I think it's amazing when teachers and speech therapist can collaborate and work on behavior together because it's such a... yeah so this is a perfect conversation to be happy. And then how would you... like, let's start kind of broad first. I think you started touching on it already, but how would you describe your approach or your philosophy when it comes to behavior?

Amy: Well, yeah, like I said, like I really feel like most people, most kids especially are doing the best that they can and so when a kid is having behavior problems at school that is something that is not just the kid's problem, it's the adult's and the students need to work together to help solve that and I just really like being able to help kids be as successful as they can be at school and also for teachers to be able to do the work that they have gone into education to do and I really like Ross Greene who does proactive and collaborative solutions. He's a behavior expert and he said that all disruptive behavior is a result of either lacking skills or unsolved problems and I really enjoy that challenge of helping to figure out what skills could kids need to help them have more success at school and what problems they're having that we can help solve for them. It's a great challenge and I really enjoy helping kids be more successful.

Marisha: Yeah. I feel like that mindset or that philosophy makes it much easier to start troubleshooting and work towards solutions instead of... because I think it's easy to... I feel like I saw this happening a lot in the schools where children were just labeled as being difficult or having behavior issues and there wasn't as much of that digging to really understand the why behind it and figuring out how we can support but it's totally doable. Like you and I worked together on some of my students who were really challenging, but just after... even the most challenging students after some initial digging and sometimes it did take a little bit more time but it wasn't... like by showing up in that way, I think the students really respond to it and we come up with some pretty amazing solutions. So, yeah.

Amy: Absolutely. Yeah and I think one thing that kind of goes under my philosophy, but I know that sometimes when teachers or therapists or people working in the schools have a student with a behavior problem and the behavior is really causing a lot of issues for them in a classroom, they don't see it as fixed unless the behavior totally goes away. Whereas we know if we're teaching a kid sound or we're teaching them a new skill, we measure progress and we take those small steps and see that as progress and one of my philosophies with behaviors that help teachers notice progress with behavior and not just when the kid is no longer disrupting class at all because that might not even be a reasonable goal, but helping kids learn how to manage their own behavior and how to make those little steps and improvements I think is another really important part of my philosophy, is looking at it just like you would a therapy goal for a sound.
You wouldn't expect a kid to master it in one session. I don't know that much about speech therapy, but I would think normally it's not just a one and done situation, so helping to come up with ways to measure that progress and celebrate that I think is really important.

Marisha: I totally agree and I think that like speech therapist experience with writing those goals does give us a little bit of an advantage when it comes to... because we're already in that mindset and we're looking-

Amy: Absolutely.

Marisha: ...for crosstalk progress. I love that you mentioned that because we conduct... like especially if a student is struggling, we should be able to celebrate the small wins and progress because we're heading in the right direction and that's amazing.

Amy: And I think that's an important part of our role with the regular education teachers is to help them recognize that progress too, because we do get that smaller group setting or that more intensive look at just one or two kids and so that's a really important thing that the SLPs can bring back to the other teachers in the building. As you know at the beginning of the year this was happening X amount of times during our group and now it's happening 50% fewer times or whatever because I think you're right. I do think the therapists are much more ready to recognize that and that is a good thing that we can do for the kids, is to point that out to others around us.

Marisha: Yeah. And are you ready to dive into some of your favorite strategies and tool?

Amy: Absolutely, yes.

Marisha: And is there one that is absolute favorite that you'd want to start with?

Amy: Well, I think the overall umbrella that I kind of work everything into now is mindfulness and just using trauma informed practices because I think we're learning more and more about a lot of the persistent behavior problems we're having at school are having to do with things that are not just related to school. Just really incorporating mindfulness in my classroom at all times so things like having an agenda to check off, like a schedule or just an agenda for what you're going to do in that session for the day is really helpful for kids who don't always know what to expect in their lives or have had unpredictable situations in the past. I find that to be a really easy thing that helps me stay on track and it also helps the kids feel more calm and relaxed in our time together.
That's one of my favorite things that works for all kinds of different situations. It never hurts to have an agenda to check off for your group and that's a really great mindfulness strategy. That's not too wuwu that pretty much anyone can get behind so I also think that that is a really good thing to just start out with and to implement off the bat, and I really like using growth mindset language. I assume most people are probably familiar with that at this point but there's a book called Growth Mindsets by Carol Dweck and she's done a lot of research on praising effort rather than smartness or ability and that's just such an important thing in the work that we do because we are working with kids that have skill deficits and so a lot of the times they're comparing themselves to others in their classrooms and so really using a lot of growth mindset language and teaching kids to say yet, like I can't do this yet or I haven't mastered that yet and really praising effort and growth is such an important thing and that has really changed my teaching.
I know, you had mentioned I like to really celebrate mistakes in my classroom and this is a really fun thing to do. I read a book a few years ago called The Art of Possibility and it was all about growth mindset and different practices to use when working with people and one of the authors was a conductor and he taught the people in his orchestra to celebrate their mistakes by throwing their hands in the air and saying how fascinating every time that they hit a wrong note or something because mistakes are how we learn and learning from our mistakes helps our brain grow. All these kinds of things I say all the time in my classroom now.
A lot of years I'll train my groups to notice when they make a mistake and to say how fascinating and it's really great when a kid really latches onto that and really does start to get excited about their mistakes. One of the things, I've done, like if we're doing writing together, I have lots of washi tape. I really like to do crafts so I have an overflow of craft supplies so I take them to school, and I had some glittery washi tape that will cover up our mistakes with a magic tape and so it's something that they can literally see and get excited about when they make a mistake to help them learn to find that process exciting, that process of making mistakes and learning from it.
That is something that I think works really well and could be easily incorporated, especially with younger kids. I think you can get older kids behind it but I've worked with elementary for so long. My husband actually teaches middle school, so I started to test things out through him to see what still tracks with seventh graders.

Marisha: That's amazing. Like what have you found that you... were there things that you think wouldn't work or that did work or that were surprising-

Amy: With the older kids?

Marisha: Yeah.

Amy: Well, he had a mindfulness club last year where he did different meditations and everything, different kind of mindfulness practices and he had several kids sign them because they really liked it. He uses GoNoodle a lot in his classroom, with the movement brain breaks and I definitely feel like GoNoodle is geared toward younger students, but his kids love it when they use GoNoodle in his class. I think that's really fun that that works for them. He uses the professionals in training a lot with middle school and what that is is instead of teaching kids to have respectful behavior since respectful is kind of a subjective term and people may have a completely different type of meaning of respect in their home than what we might think of as respectful, but everyone can kind of get onboard with the idea of we're learning how to be professionals, we're learning how to have a job one day when we're not in school.
Instead of saying that behavior's rude or bad or wrong or disrespectful, that's not professional. He uses that a lot with his seventh graders and I think it helps him feel a lot more like he's not just making arbitrary rules and just... I think it helps them be a lot more consistent to just say that behavior is not professional. We are working towards getting a job one day and we need to learn how to have professional behavior when we're in the school setting.
What I do when I do that with my kids is I really talk to them about what they think they would like to do when they grow up or what they could see themselves doing as a job one day and so I'll even have them like draw a picture or write it down and keep it on their desk so that... actually had a student today and we had clubs at school and he really wants to be a chef and we were baking and he spilled the sugar on the table while he was measuring it out and he picked it up with a singer and put it in his mouth. I was like, well, you have to go wash your hands and he got really upset with me and I said, I understand like if you're at home and you're baking, it's one thing, but when you're baking for other people, like different people in the school are going to eat this. You have to wash your hands. That's professional behavior.
It's not that I think it's right or just something that I made up but you have to learn if you want to be a chef at your own place or in a restaurant, you have to wash your hands. That's a really important rule and he's really upset with me at the outset, but he did come back around and understand what I was saying and that was a really good framework for us to work in later on when we discuss the behavior, and kind of debriefed and learned from our mistake because growth mindset really applies to behavior just as much as learning an academic skill. I try to apply that growth mindset with our behavior talks too and not just that I know the rules and you don't and I'm right and you're wrong. I really try to kind of meet the kids on a, we both have something important to say and so I really try to meet them where they are and not just act like I'm the teacher and my way or the highway kind of thing.

Marisha: Yeah, that makes sense and I love that you mentioned professionals in training. That's one thing that I learned from you and that I've used a lot over the years because I think it's so incredibly helpful. Like especially with students who are getting older and who are a little bit over speech in the context of being a speech therapist, like-

Amy: Absolutely.

Marisha: ...crosstalk get tired of their goals, like they're tired of coming. That we can talk about how it relates to how their goals will help them and it's even better if we can involve them in the discussion from the beginning and if they can be involved in like picking their goal but when I first started using it, like the students already had their goals and so we got to have the discussion about what do they want to be when they grow up, and then we got to map their goals on to that so that they have like that motivation behind it too. I think it's like a little bit different from what you described but I latched onto that and have definitely been able to use it with my students inaudible so far.

Amy: Well, and that's the thing about it, it's so applicable in all kinds of different ways. It also, I feel like just being at school in general or yeah, going to speech outside of school or whatever, we know that it's the law that kids have to go to school and most people that end up working in these types of fields really valued school when they were kids and their families really valued education but a lot of the students that we're teaching don't really know why they're there. They just kind of think that's what you have to do. They're not necessarily motivated to do well just because someone told them they had to go.
I feel like when you put it in that lens of we're here to learn how to be grownups one day, then it really... and when they're thinking about what they want to do as a professional, you can help hook them in and make everything more meaningful to them which is how you get kids motivated to work hard and do their best and all of that, so the professionals in training is definitely something that applies to all ages and to all different types of situations at school.

Marisha: Yeah, I completely agree. And then is there anything else that you wanted to add in terms of the middle school pieces that your husband is doing or should we jump onto some other...

Amy: I think the professionals in training is the biggest thing he uses and he also uses a Two-by-Ten strategy a lot, which is a behavior strategy where basically every day for 10 days in a row of when you're in the same place as the kids. If you see them at school they come to you every day. You spend two minutes talking about things that aren't related to school or behavior or anything to do with your school goals, but just talking to them about their life or their favorite football team or their best friend or just connecting with that kid as a person outside of whatever our agendas are in terms of school.
I mean, I feel like that one is a biggie. Like if you can just take some time to check in with the kid and show that you care about them not just because it's your job to teach them something. I think that's been really useful and it also works for the adults. If you're having difficulty professionally with someone else in your building, just kind of taking some time for a few in a row, finding out about their life or asking them how they're doing, that can be really useful across ages.

Marisha: I've definitely seen that work too. I love that that strategy inaudible the Two-by-Ten.

Amy: Yes.

Marisha: It's perfect.

Amy: So yeah, two minutes a day or 10 days in a row.

Marisha: 10 business days, I guess. inaudible. No, we're going to go call up these students on Sundays. Okay, awesome and then... okay, and do you mind if we circle back to the mindfulness piece, because I know... like I love the agenda checkoff thing. I think that's something that a lot of SLPs can get on board with that. I'm curious like what else that looks like in your classroom and whether it's wuwu or not. I'd love to hear what that looks like for you.

Amy: What mindfulness really means is just paying attention to what's happening right now, being present in this moment. That can look a lot of different ways and I've done some training with compassionate schools, which is a lot about trauma. There is a great TED talk by Naomi Burke Harris about the adverse childhood experience survey, which I would really recommend that people that want to know more about trauma informed practices. Watch that TED talk it's about 15 minutes, but there's so much that affects the way kids learn that has to do with their home environment or what kind of background they've come from and it's actually been shown that trauma can make a kid look like they have ADHD when really it's the result of these traumatic experiences that they have gone through.
I do a lot related to that of just like really asking the kids what's going on, setting up things like temperature checks, which is where I have like a thermometer in my room and it'll either go from zero to five or zero to 10. I usually do zero to 10, but for some kids it's kind of hard to, that's maybe too many choices, but zero is like the worst day of your life and 10 is like the best day of your life like you went to Disney World and I just kind of have them stop and think about how they're feeling and what their temperature is and they can just hold up their fingers so it's not really public and I just notice if someone's five or below, I know that I need to kind of circle back and check in with them.
And even in one class we had the kids write their number on a sticky note and just stick it on their desk if they wanted us to know what their number was so that, that way I knew if a kid had taken the time to put that on their desk, that I might need to check in and see what's going on. I did talk to a middle school teacher who does this temperature check as like a check in on a computer. She has a Google form and she asked the kids like a couple of questions like, how are you doing? Have you eaten today? They rate their mood from one to five or one to 10 or whatever and she has the form set up so she gets an alert if they're below a certain number so she doesn't necessarily read all 100 of her forms every day since she has so many students but she's alerted to the kids who have said there's a problem or is there anything you want me to know?
That is a really useful mindful strategy. I also have these little trash cans that are really cute, they're like pencil boxes. I got them at the Dollar Tree and I just kind of have one up in my classroom and that's where our worries go. Anything that a kid's perseverate about or worried about or just really excited about and they can't calm down, I teach them to kind of put that in the trash can.
It's not that we're getting rid of it, we're just going to hold it safe there so that we can move on with whatever we need to do in our time together and that is really helpful to a lot of kids and I have a few of them so if like I have a kid who's having a lot of emotional trouble and they need to take a trash can with them to keep in their classroom, I have enough where they can do that. That's been really helpful for some kids and it helps them stay mindful in this moment at school and not have all that anxiety of all the other things going on. They're not carrying that around with them all day.

Marisha: So much good staff.

Amy: Yes. That's been really useful and I could really see that being useful in a situation where you only have the kids once or twice a week and you really only have 30 minutes to get done what you need to do. You need to have some kind of way to honor their experience without having to sidetrack your whole group. The little trash cans are great and you could draw one or whatever but the little ones from the Dollar Tree are really cute. It's okay since the kids love them.

Marisha: Yeah, if it's cute, it makes it that much more fun I think-

Amy: Absolutely. For sure.

Marisha: I hadn't used the trash can idea yet, but I definitely use the thermometer check and I think that was super helpful for me. It's like an integral part of my therapy routine, like the students walk in and just check in to see how they're doing and I think that really helps set us up for success because then I know if a student is that a two, they're not going to participate in the session so just taking... or they're not going to benefit or get the most out of it.
Just knowing that right up front and being able to do... like a lot of times it's just a quick fix. Like what are some things... so like when you circle back, can you give us a couple of examples of like when you circle back to the student, like what do they tell you and what do you do to help them? What does that process look like?

Amy: Sure. Like for example, sometimes I'll ask the kid did you get good sleep last night? And sometimes they haven't gotten good sleep and then they're worried that they're going to get in trouble in their classroom. I used to have a morning mindfulness club where the kids would come to me before they went to class, which was great and I would help them maybe like I'd say, is there anything I can do to help you with that? And I would help them like write a note to their teacher to say, dear so and so, I had a really hard time sleeping today and I'm kind of grouchy and I don't want it to affect me in class. Is there anything you could do to help me with this? Or just that like process of writing that out I think helps the kids notice what's really going on with them but then I think it's such a valuable skill to teach them how to communicate with the people that they're working with that I'm not at my best today and I realized that and I could use your help with it.
I model that with my students a lot too when we do temperature checks. I give them my temperature too and every once in a while I'll tell them I didn't sleep well last night. I'm feeling kind of grouchy and I don't want to be a mean grouchy teacher. Is there anything you guys can do to help me with that? And they're they're usually extra nice or they'll give me a compliment or do something to help us have a better day and they're really sweet about it but I also just think that modeling that is really important because there's days sometimes where it's really hard to be patient with kids when other things are going on in our lives. It doesn't happen very often, but I do try to model that with the kids when I have a day like that.
I'm trying to think what I have. These pictures is just like a profile outline of a head and it says what's going on in your head? And I'll laminate those sheets and just the kids can just write out at the beginning of a group what's going on and one day a kid was really sad because he lost his iPad at home then he was sad that he lost his iPad. Sometimes it's just acknowledging, oh that's really hard. I'm sorry to hear that and sometimes they're hungry and I can give them a snack or... yeah, it's usually things like that or something really sad has happened and I can help them write a note with the counselor to the counselor to help the counselor check in on them.
There's all kinds of different things that you can learn from kids, but often I just want to know that you care about them as a person and a lot of times just that process builds your relationship to a point where you can get a lot more accomplished.

Marisha: Yeah and I feel like that works with adults too. Like if I'm having a bad day and someone takes a second to like check in with me and just ask how things are going or offer support makes that a huge difference.

Amy: Yeah. And that reminds me one thing I've really tried to do, especially in the past couple of years, is to not ask a kid how they're doing unless I actually have time to listen to their answer. I went through a divorce a few years back and it was really painful and one person at school asked me how I was doing and I said something like, or not great and he said, great and he just kept walking and I thought, I don't ever want to do that to a kid. I don't want to ask them how they're doing when I don't actually have the time to listen to what they're saying so I try to say things like, good morning or it's good to see you or I'm glad you're here and I try to save the how are you doing for a time when I can really listen to them because they usually just say fine, but sometimes they have things going on that they want to share and I want to be present for them if that is something that they need to talk about.

Marisha: Yeah, that's a really good point.

Amy: It's very hard to not say how are you? It's like so ingrained.

Marisha: Yeah. I love the others options that were like, I'm glad you're here. It's good to see you, or giving them a compliment or whatever it may be. I feel like that's almost more meaningful because how are you just gets thrown around so much that it's just like fine, fine. No one really... it's just kind of noise.

Amy: Absolutely.

Marisha: crosstalk breaking that. I think it's super interesting. I love that. Okay. Man, we talked about a lot of things and like when I didn't... I just did another podcast about mindfulness and it was very different and so when I was thinking, when you started talking about mindfulness, I thought it would be more like that, but there's some like really simple things that we can do, like having that agenda, the thermometer check and I think like teaching kids to identify how they're feeling is huge. Like I feel like as an adult I struggle with that so that absolutely makes sense and like many trash cans and what's going on in your head.
I love all of those strategies and those are all really simple things that we can implement to help students develop that mindfulness about anything.

Amy: Another thing that we have as part of our compassionate schools project is every classroom in our school has a calm spot and it doesn't have to be a huge... I tend to have a couple in my room because I tend to have kids with lots of emotional challenges but every teacher has a calm spot and it could be just a chair or a spot in the corner and just a little place where kids know they're safe to go for a couple of minutes if they need to regroup.
This is our third or fourth year with the school inaudible calm spots and it's so cool now to see the different kids that use it and how they use that spot. It's not a timeout and it's not a punishment but it is a place where I can invite the kids too if they're having a hard day. Do you need a couple minutes in the calm spot? Would that be useful? Do you need me to find someone to take a walk with you? That kind of thing and that I feel like in most therapy rooms, so it would be easy to set up a spot where the kids can go and kind of regroup.
I use a calm spot sometimes in my classroom. Again, it's kind of that modeling, we're never going to get this all figured out like we've got to be gentle with ourselves too. The calm spot is a really great thing to use. And I also... we have class mission statement school wide and for me what I found at works with the resource groups where they're coming in and out is to have each group write a mission statement at the beginning of the year and that's really helpful when we start to get off topic or if kids are kind of not in control of their bodies, I can just say what's our mission? And we can use that mission statement as the redirection instead of that mission statement that we wrote together.
I would think for SLPs that would be really useful, like it's our mission to learn to speak like professionals so we can be better readers and writers or whatever it is that you're working on because sometimes I think the kids don't know, but we're working on in my groups and... so the mission statement has been really useful and it's a good way to set the tone for the group. Like we say the mission statement together before we get started. That's been a really good mindfulness-

Marisha: crosstalk.

Amy: ...in our class and it's really fun to write it together.

Marisha: Yeah and do you do like display it in the classroom or what does that look like?

Amy: Yeah. I have them like outside of my door for each different group and when we get to the room, I don't have an actual door so when we get to the opening we like stand on the line and the carpet and say it together and I'm not the most structured regimented person and once I do this for a couple of weeks, the kids will remind me if I'm kind of getting harried and forget to do it, the kids will remind me to read the mission statement and it's a really great thing to do to regroup if we're getting really off track or the kids are being super silly, is to go back and regroup and read the mission statement and then you don't have to be like, hey, we're not doing... we're supposed to be doing and be all angsty. You can just redirect to the mission statement.

Marisha: Yeah, that's perfect and do you have anything else that you'd want to share under the mindfulness umbrella?

Amy: I just think it's really good to remember that mindfulness doesn't necessarily mean doing yoga or breathing all the time, although those can definitely be parts of it and I think movement and breathing techniques are really helpful but I think just anything you do where you're keeping the kids present and you're honoring their experience is using mindfulness in your classroom. One thing that I have done in the past couple of years is kind of remind kids that they're the person that's going to be with them all the time so they're kind of their own best friend and helping them learn how to like live with that best friend and advocate for that best friend and just be their own bestie, I say.
I'm their advocate at school but I want them ultimately to learn how to be that advocate for themselves, so all these things that we're learning are things that we can take out into the world and help us all have a better experience.

Marisha: Yeah. That's so amazing and I love... because you've given so many examples of how you model that for the student and how you scaffold that so that they are learning those skills and are able to achieve that. I love that. Okay. So a couple more questions. I'm trying to just inaudible to start. Because we touched on growth mindset and you mentioned that Carol Dweck book which is inaudible thinking and talking about like celebrating mistakes and I love your literary washi tape idea. I had so much fun using that when you taught me that several years ago but what about... because the MindUP curriculum is part of that too, right?

Amy: Yes.

Marisha: Can you tell us a little bit about that and what that looks like or how you like incorporate more elements into the growth mindset?

Amy: Yeah, the MindUP curriculum, it was actually developed by the Goldie Hawn Foundation several years ago and there are three volumes. There's a K-2 curriculum, a 3-5 curriculum and then a middle school curriculum. It's just probably 20 bucks on Scholastic. They have all kinds of mindfulness lessons, like mindful eating, mindful walking. It has book recommendations and all kinds of great lessons and it's really nice if you like more of a step by step curriculum and they're short lessons, most of them are 15 to 20 minutes so there's definitely things you could implement into any type of setting at school and that as another one of those things that kind of crosses the age ranges.
I've really enjoyed using that a lot. There's a lot of great ideas in there. I also really like the zones of regulation, which was developed by an occupational therapist. I can't remember her name at this moment. It's Leah and it starts with a K. But it teaches kids how to kind of classify different feelings they are having into different zones, different colors and we use that a ton in my classroom and it's really helpful and we can apply that when we're reading books and talking about feelings of a character. Oh it looks like they're in the blue zone. Just really helps the kids kind of classify what they're feeling and what type of strategy might help them the most. Like different things work when you're feeling low or sad or when you're feeling excited and restless, so that's been really useful.

Marisha: Ooh, that is so good. Yeah, because I know a lot of SLPs have heard of the zones of regulation, that's something that is used pretty frequently, but I love that idea of incorporating... like identifying it that in book characters and modeling it that way because like if a student is having a meltdown and we're like, you're in this zone, they're going to... they won't, but they won't have it.

Amy: It's not the best time.

Marisha: Yeah, I love that idea to model it in that way and that's something that... like I love using books in therapy and I think that is something a lot of speech therapists do, so awesome strategy there. This was one of my... jumping back to the MindUP curriculum too, because this was one of my favorite things that you talked about but well first of all, you get like a giant brain poster crosstalk right?

Amy: Yes. I love my brain poster. Yes. That's worth the 24 bucks right there.

Marisha: Yeah. And so how do you use that brain poster?

Amy: One of the main things about MindUP is it teaches the kids about the three part... I mean, there's more than three parts of your brain, but it teaches the kids about the hippocampus which that cause the scrapbook where you store your memories and your learning that you've mastered and then the amygdala is like your security guard and then the prefrontal cortex is the part that helps you make good decisions and kind of keeps you following the guidelines of good social skills and all that and it really helps teach the kids about how when you flip your lid and you start acting out of control or even just getting really wiggly and unfocused, that's your security guard acting up, or being overactive.
I always tell them if a bear walked in the classroom, our security guard would take over and we would get away as fast as we can without thinking about how we're supposed to behave or any of that but most of the time we're safe and so we need to help our PFC or the prefrontal cortex keep us safe and making good decisions and helping us have that good social behavior. I really teach the kids a lot about their brain and which parts of the brain are working for different things that we're doing and it's so fun to teach the kids words like amygdala and prefrontal cortex.

Marisha: And then they will go into the other classrooms or they go home and like my amygdala is crosstalk.

Amy: Right. Exactly. Yeah.

Marisha: Oh I love it.

Amy: Amygdala is probably a good speech challenge word too.

Marisha: Yeah. No, those are awesome. I love that. Okay, cool and then I think we're... One thing that you also talked a lot about was alternative seating. Can you tell us a little bit about how you set that up and how you navigate that and use it as a strategy?

Amy: Yeah. I kind of view my resource classroom as like a lab. I try things in my classroom to see if it will help the kids in regular ed or in their classes that they spend more of their time in but I have... I don't love for me yoga balls for the kids to sit on because I find those to just fly across the room a lot of the time but I have some yoga ball chairs that have like solid metal legs and those have been great and the kids... it's like an experiment for the kids to figure out which seating really helps them the most and I have some standing desks that a lot of the kids really enjoy and some of my kids really prefer regular chairs and the rule is that they have to keep at least one foot on the floor.
I got some gardening stools at Lowes that rock really nicely that were very inexpensive and the kids pick their seat when they get there. That's good for their learning and as long as they're showing that they're using it well, that is the seat that they get to use. I use a tally system for the groups, so if the group earns five or gets five tallies, I should put a tally up if the kids are not using the chairs appropriately. If like there's unsafe behavior, I don't really call people out. I just put a tally on the board and when there's five tallies, we take a vacation from the chairs. I let kids sit in the floor with clipboards but it really helps the kids feel like they have some ownership of the classroom and I'm not just directing all of that.
When I need to do a lot of work, I don't sit in a hard chair with a straight back. I usually go to Starbucks or sit on the couch. It's just another way of helping the kids learn what works best for them and how to use something different in a responsible way.

Marisha: Yeah, it makes a lot of sense and I love all of the different ideas that you gave, like the yoga ball chairs with solid legs. You are right that they just fly everywhere. Standing desks, sitting on the floor, like the gardening stool and I've seen... like if you Google an alternative seating, there's lots and lots of crosstalk-

Amy: Yeah, it's definitely taken off in the last several years. Bouncy bands are pretty inexpensive and you can just hook those to the chair or the table and then kids can kind of bounce their leg while they're sitting in a regular chair. My students tend to like those too.

Marisha: Yeah. Okay, that's a good one.

Amy: And with all of this I teach them it's a tool not a toy, we're using to help grow our brain, to help our learning and not just to play.

Marisha: Yeah, that's perfect and then I'm curious too, like we're almost at the end of our time so we can start wrapping up. What would you recommend to a speech therapist who like... because they obviously listened to 50 minutes of this podcast already, so they're definitely wanting... they might be struggling with some behavior issues in their speech room or wanting to implement some of this... because you could just threw out a lot of different things. What would you tell an SLP in that situation? Like what advice would you give him or her or where would you suggest that they start?

Amy: I think using the agenda is an easy thing to start and just maybe doing a mission statement if not with every group with those groups that they are kind of keeping them up at night, wondering how they're going to get them to behave, I guess for lack of a better word. If I'm having more of a difficulty with just one student, I really like to do contracts and we call them win-win agreements, where I talk to the kid about what's going on and I ask them what they need from me and so we kind of each say my goal is to help you with in this way or like I'm not going to say your name in front of the group.
Like it's kind of the teacher will do something and the kid will do something and then it's a good way to kind of take data and I also really like doing the love languages for kids survey which... it's like The Five Love Languages. Gary Chapman I believe is the author. There's a kids survey and so you can give the students that survey and then you really have a good idea if a good incentive would be to eat lunch with you or to have some sort of tangible prize or if they would love like a note home with positive feedback about their behavior because each kid really is motivated by different things.
I really find that like finding what motivates a student, especially if you're kind of having, you need to zero in on one student that's not being as successful as you want and if it's more of a overall management I think mission statements and agendas and just finding some way that feels good to you for measuring progress and tracking is really helpful.

Marisha: Yeah. And then what would you suggest, so like an SLP is doing the agenda and mission statement inaudible working while, in terms of the other strategies, I assume that you approached like any new strategy as a little bit of an experiment.

Amy: Absolutely.

Marisha: Like how long would you recommend trying a strategy before deciding it's not a good fit and like how do you navigate that decision making process?

Amy: Yes. Well, it normally takes about two weeks to tell if something is working or not. If it's something that I just thought might be fun and I'm finding it cumbersome then I don't usually stick with it because I know there's no point in finding out that if it's not working great for the kids right away, then it's just kind of taking up valuable time for me. I can usually tell pretty quickly if something is just not working with my style because it's really important that you match the strategies that you're using with your personal style as an educator. I like to have fun in class but I'm not a goofball telling jokes all the time. If using humor was my strategy, that would be really challenging for me every day on top of just having a challenging job anyway.
It's really important to try to fit something that matches your style. Like if you're more of a old school, really all about structure and having like a really calm classroom, doing a lot of dancing and wiggling and all that kind of stuff all the time just isn't going to sit well with you. I think it's important to go outside of your comfort zone a little bit, but not so far that you're just stretching your limits too much if that makes sense.

Marisha: Yeah, that does make sense and I love that suggestion to try something for two weeks, then it doesn't work on day one and we still don't have a true answer.

Amy: Absolutely.

Marisha: ...crosstalk that's helpful but then also we get to use our clinical judgment and just like personal values and style to kind of guide those decisions too. So awesome. Well, I feel like... I hope everyone walks away with a lot of new ideas and things that they can try and just feeling motivated and re-inspired to tackle some of these challenges potentially or just have things ran a little bit more smoothly in the speech room. Thank you so much Amy for sharing all of this inaudible was done and can you let us know where people can find you if they want to learn more?

Amy: Absolutely. You can go to lightenupteaching.com. So L-I-G-H-T-E-N-U-Pteaching.com. That's my website and there you can sign up for my newsletter, which is going up about every other Tuesday. I am at lighteupteaching on Instagram. I have a mindfulness in the making course that launches about once a month that I would love to have some of your SLPs be a part of and you can email me at [email protected]. If you have any questions about anything that I've shared, I would love to hear from you guys and I really appreciate you having me, Marisha. This is so much fun.

Marisha: Yeah, so much fun. Yeah, and you can find all of the links that we mentioned today. Like I'll get links to all of the different books and resources as well as Amy's contact information in the show notes and you can find that at slpnow.com/44 and thank you again, Amy. You are so amazing.

Amy: Thank you.

Marisha: We will see you next time.

Amy: All right, thanks.

Marisha: Hello there and welcome to The SLP Now Podcast. I am so excited to be introducing Kristin Bowers today. She is an ASHA certified speech language pathologist, she graduated from the University of Pittsburgh in 2007, and she graduated in 2010 with a master's in speech language pathology as well. So Kristin has utilized her skills as a speech language pathologist abroad, including her participation in the Bosnia autism project in 2012. I wish we had time to dive into this more, because that sounds super interesting. But she is here today to talk about data collection. We've been getting a lot of questions on this topic lately, and I thought she would be the perfect person to break this down with us.
Just a little bit more background, she has experience in early intervention, working with three through five-year-olds, she's also worked in private practice, and she currently works in the schools, and she serves kindergarten through fifth grade students. She's also the owner of Kiwi Speech, and she creates amazing materials for speech language pathologist, and she also has some amazing resources for clinicians in private practice. But without further ado, let's dive into all things data collection. Hi Kristin.

Kristin: Hi, how are you?

Marisha: Amazing. We were talking about this before we went live, but I feel like such a nerd when it comes to this topic, and I'm like genuinely excited.

Kristin: I totally agree. I definitely geek out over the data helping people do it more effectively, because I just think it's... No, it doesn't need to be as complicated as we all make it. So hopefully we can simplify it a little bit.

Marisha: Yeah, I totally agree. I wish I had you to talk to when I was first starting out, because I felt like I tried about 5 million different tools and strategies and just all the things to try and get a hold of my data collection. I had these super elaborate systems with like labels and I was printing things all the time and it was just kind of messy, and so I'm really excited to hear... Maybe you have had some of that experience too. crosstalk.

Kristin: Are you even an SLP if you have not already tried all the things? No. Of course, I have. I wish I had had the things I knew now when I was... Even if you years ago, I wish I had it figured out. Not that I have it figured out now, but I think I have a much clearer picture for myself now and I found a system that has worked for me consistently. Over the last probably three years, I've used the exact same system. That's when you've figured it out for yourself, because usually at the end of every year you think, "Oh, next year... This is okay, but next year I'm going to do like that a little bit differently or that a little differently." And when you come back and you're like, "Nope, I'm going to stick with it. Okay, I'm onto something."

Marisha: That is amazing. I used to switch things like on a monthly basis. I had a caseload in the triple digits at one point, and I was just drowning and I felt like it was so hard and that there had to be an easier way. So yeah, I was... I probably made it much harder for myself. crosstalk. But can you give us a little bit of a tour in terms of the different systems that you have tried and maybe just tell us a little bit about kind of why you switched? If your list is as long as mine, just highlighting like a few potential.

Kristin: I think more than anything, when I... Before I did data the way I do it now, I think I just really didn't have a consistent system, and it just made it really hard to write a progress report and compare apples to apples, because you'd collect data on something one day, and you'd collect data on something on another day and you just really want to write that progress report and you're like, "All right, well, I can see that they're doing R in the initial position of words independently at 20%. Oh wait, that was back in November. Let me see where they're at now. Oh, I haven't collected data on that recently."
So you didn't really feel like you had anything to report on your progress reports or whatever was current inaudible. It was just all over the place, and I felt like I was just mentally trying to pull all this information together, and I knew I needed it to be laid out for me. I had tried collecting data. Even just with my data sheets, I'd have a data sheet per kid or I'd have a data sheet per day or... I had data sheets changing every year. So now, I do my data logistically, I collect daily data and I have data sheets that are by group. So I just pull out the group's data sheet and I collect daily data on that.
And then three times a year, I collect more what I consider my progress monitoring data. So I kind of have my daily data, and then I have these three overarching data collection systems. Between the two of them, I find it really easy to write a progress report. All the data is like right in front of me now. Hopefully, I never go back, because it's working out much better.

Marisha: Yeah. No, that makes a lot of sense. I definitely went through all the different types of data collection sheets too, like by individual student and by day and by group.

Kristin: And by post-eds, like I did the post-ed system for a little while, or the labels, that was a good one for a while. Yeah, I've tried them all.

Marisha: Yeah, I did. I tried setting up Google Forms, and I printed like QR codes for-

Kristin: Yeah. God.

Marisha: ... then their links won't-

Kristin: Marisha, why am I not surprised that you made QR codes?

Marisha: Yes. It was super exciting. I thought it would work really well and I thought it would be fun to involve kids in their process, but it's just like Google Forms wasn't meant to help us manage our caseload. There's definitely issues with using Google Forms as well. So yeah, it just gets messy.

Kristin: Yep. I totally agree.

Marisha: Okay. But if you are listening and you are an SLP who has tried a lot of different things, you're definitely not alone. So hopefully that helps you feel that way. Kristin, you told us a little bit about how you currently use group data sheets and you do daily data and then you do your... you said it three times a year?

Kristin: Yeah. crosstalk. We send out progress reports just in my district. We send them out mid year and then at the end of the year. So I try to do a big data collection probe in one of my first sessions for all my kids. And then again, I do it in the middle of the year and then at the end of the year. So if nothing else... like if all my data through the rest of the year turned out really poorly or I wasn't... whatever, I always have these like three really excellent data points to run back on. So I tend to use those for... We use rubric based progress report, so we can check kind of zero to 50%, 50 to 75%, that kind of thing. I use the progress monitoring data to do those, but then I tend to use the daily data to do more anecdotal stuff or make more subjective comments.
So I might be able to say, they produced R in the initial position of words completely independently 30% of the time. However, when they're in a session with me and I'm giving them feedback on productions or some visual cues, they're actually able to do it 80% of the time, that sort of thing. So I usually read through those progress reports to give that kind of more subjective descriptive data that I think resonates with the parents when they're reading the reports.

Marisha: Yeah, that's super helpful. So we're definitely going to dive into more of the logistics for both of those in just a little bit. But I'm curious if you have any suggestions for SLPs who are struggling with data collection, like they're hopping from system to system. What suggestions would you give them to work a system that is sustainable and that you can stick with for three years and not have to change?

Kristin: I think there's probably a million systems out there that could work for you, depending on your style. But if I could give one bit of advice, it would be to separate your therapy from your data collection. So if you're collecting data and you're finding that you are playing a large role in that moment and you really have your therapist hat on, then to me that is just not the greatest time to be collecting data. So I think it's really important to conceptualize, you're either giving therapy or you're measuring progress. Because you're not supposed to be measuring yourself. We're not there to collect data on how great of a therapist you are in that moment, we want to know how the child's performing.
So, when I do my data, whether it's the daily data or the more progress monitoring data that's intermittent throughout the year, and like you said, we'll go into that, but in both situations, I'm really never collecting data at the same time that I'm giving therapy. I'm either doing one or the other. Just conceptually separating out those two things, to me, will change the way you collect data, no matter how you record it or what sheet. If you use the labels or you use the post-it's, it really doesn't matter. But being able to separate those out would be like my number one takeaway from this podcast or from when I presented. That to me is like the one point, is just really learned to think it's okay that you're not collecting data in a moment if you're giving therapy, and it's okay to not give therapy in a moment when you're collecting data.

Marisha: Yeah, that's perfect. Is there anything else that you want to share before we dive into more of the logistics in terms of broad suggestions?

Kristin: Maybe just that sitting down and coming up with a plan can really make a difference. It doesn't mean you have to sit down for a whole day and come up with an elaborate plan, but just taking a minute before a session to think, "Okay, what am I going to collect data on today?" For me, at the beginning of the year, taking a moment to say, "All right, what am I going to work on probably in this whole semester? I need to make sure I collect date on that now so I can show their progress." So little bit of planning goes a long way. Again, just keep it simple. It doesn't need to be super complicated, I promise.

Marisha: Ooh, I love that. Have a plan and keep it simple. Because you probably don't want to be like me during my CF where I was juggling all of these QR codes, making it way, way, way too complicated. And then I would also... I love how you said that we want to know what we're going to measure. I think this is one that... I definitely agree with what you said about separating therapy from data collection. That's what I've landed on as well. And then the next important thing is knowing how we're going to measure what we need to measure. So whenever I write a goal for a student, like when we update an IEP, I make sure that I have... that I really know how I'm going to measure that goal and I have... I just make sure I have a sheet, like, this is the probe that I'm going to use for that goal. It makes it really easy because then all you need to do is have time to collect that.

Kristin: Absolutely.

Marisha: So I think those are... like, if you only listen to a part of the podcast, hopefully that helps get you started. But let's talk a little bit more about your daily data collection. What does that look like today?

Kristin: So when I say daily data collection, I mean I collect data on most days. There are definitely days that I'm so involved with what we're doing that I maybe don't. But most days I collect data. To me, the main thing is that more data points doesn't mean better therapy or better data for that... Oh gosh, I just inaudible. Anyway. More data points doesn't mean better therapy, and it definitely doesn't mean better data either. So if you think about if you were to collect data on the first 10 productions a child makes and they were 50%, if you were to continue to collect data over 20 data points or 50 data points or 100 or 1,000, the more data you're getting over a session, you're really just diluting that and that initial number.
Because assuming you're a good SLP and you're helping them improve their production of their sound over the course of the session, the longer you collect data, the closer it's going to get to 80, 90%. So all you're doing is taking out the sensitivity of that number you're recording, and it's going to be really difficult for you to show progress or change over time. So I really just stick with 10 data points typically. So kids will come in, I might have a therapy activity ready to go, and my therapy activity does not necessarily... it's not necessarily the exact same thing I'm collecting data on. It's okay to collect data on a skill in a slightly different way than you're teaching it.
I always think about teachers who give a spelling test. They do a pre-test at the beginning of the week, and they have the kids spell the words. And they don't help them or give them clues, they just say the words and kids write them down. And then they probably do the same thing at the end of the week. They say the words, they're not giving clues are not helping them, they're not giving feedback, they're just measuring. But in between, they're using all sorts of brilliant strategies to teach those spelling words. They don't just continue to administer that same test over and over and over. So that's how I like to think of my daily data, is I this little probe at the beginning to see how they are, to see what they remembered from last time and then I can spend the rest of the session teaching it in whatever way that I feel is best, and that's where our professional expertise comes in. Anyone can collect data, but only... we are the people who are trained to get the therapy.
So they come in, I pluck 10 data points, and it's usually as independent as possible. I might flip them 10 flashcards, I might run through... Like we're doing some sort of worksheet, I might run through the words on there, I really don't give them any feedback about it, I'm just measuring, and then we jump into the therapy. But that data takes me 30 seconds per kid at the beginning of a session. So it really doesn't suck up a lot of time, and it's a really nice data that I can compare from one day to another.

Marisha: Awesome. I have a couple of questions that always come up when I talk about this too. But why do you choose to take data at the beginning of a session?

Kristin: It's really funny, that question. When I was in grad school, we did like a big project, and part of it was asking us to look at a case and ask how we would ideally collect data or how we would turn it into almost like a single case study. I had given an example which was similar to this. Now that I think about it, it kind of came full circle. But they asked me the same question, why are you collecting data in the beginning? My answer inaudible. I don't think it really matters if you collect it at the beginning or at the end as long as you're being consistent with it. Because obviously, how a child is performing when they walk out of my speech room is very different than how they perform when they walk in, and we all know that's the case. We've all got kids that walk in, aren't using their sound, by the end of your session, they use it 100% of the time and then they walk out into the hallway and don't use it again.
So I think as long as you're consistent, it really doesn't matter. I collect it at the beginning because I think that that's a better representation of probably how they're using it outside my speech room. At the end of the day, that's what I care about. There are definitely kids who walk through that threshold and see me and turn on those sounds, but a lot of them are not necessarily thinking about it until we kind of get into our direct activity. So I collect it at the beginning because I just think it's more representative of what they're doing independently. But I think if you're consistent, you could make either one work.

Marisha: I agree that consistency, and you get to use your clinical judgment, you get to decide how to inaudible your caseload and your data and all of that. But I think starting at the beginning makes sense because it also... I also think about it as... Because if it's at the end, I feel like it's a measure of how well I'm doing-

Kristin: Absolutely.

Marisha: ... versus inaudible in fresh. And then it's also helpful me to know where they're starting because I feel like if we're working on K and I give a student 10 initial K words and they're at 20% accuracy, that's going to... I will prepare and make sure I do some initial teaching or just make sure I cue up my visual strategies or whatever type of queuing I want to use with that student, versus if they get 80% accuracy, I would approach things a lot differently, like I might jump to the next level. That would drastically change what that therapy session looks like. Granted, we can get that information as we dive into the therapy activity too, but I think this just helps me be more prepared and just use my time a little bit more efficiently.

Kristin: No, I totally agree. I supervise some grad students for one of the local universities, and that's one of the things that comes up that we score them on, is, are they using session data to guide clinical decisions? That's exactly it. If we collect data at that first session and they're at 90%, I want to see my students changing the complexity of what they're giving them or making it a little bit harder somehow and challenging them versus if they come in and they're at 0% in that initial data probe. I want to see it, like you said, doing some initial teaching or using some new strategies or prefacing the lesson with something that's going to help them. So I totally agree.

Marisha: I love that you have that experience too. Because you work at... Is it a university too?

Kristin: No. I supervise students from the University of Pittsburgh. That is really local.

Marisha: It's amazing.

Kristin: So one of the schools I work at is on a university campus, but no, I don't work at a university.

Marisha: But you get to supervise-

Kristin: Yes, I do.

Marisha: ... students.

Kristin: So yeah, it's nice. They send the students out, so all their placements are out in the community, they don't have an in house clinic. So they're there with us getting really hands-on knowledge and skills and being taught by a variety of people out in the field. So I think that's a real strength to the program.

Marisha: Yeah. That's amazing. I love that. Oh, I was going to ask something else about data at the beginning of the session, but it's escaping me, so we'll just have to come back to it.

Kristin: That's fine.

Marisha: Another question that comes up a lot is how you get through your probes quickly. Because you said it takes you 30 seconds. Because I talk about this strategy too, about just collecting those quick probes at the beginning, and every time I talk about it, people ask like, "How do you get through it quickly?" So I'm curious what you say to that.

Kristin: Yeah, I don't know. I guess part of me is... you just keep it simple. Like I said, I try to keep these probes as independent as possible. So with some of the younger students, I may be giving them a model. And this isn't an exaggerated model that has sort of built in cues to help them, it's literally just, I'm providing them with the stimulus. But I don't give them... During this data collection, I really don't often give them feedback, even, I just want to know how they're doing on those words. So it's just a quick Amandy from hand to speech, it's just quick data sampling. That's what she calls it, data sampling. That's what it is. Boom, boom, boom, I go through 10 words. I often don't tell them, yes, no. Oh, can you fix that, or try it this way. I'm literally just measuring. So it takes them exactly as long as it takes them to say 10 words and really not a lot more.
I also save time just by sticking... Typically, I use whatever we're going to do for that activity that day. I use the stimulus items straight from there. So I'm not shuffling around other things. When all else fails, I have a word list, and I just go down a word list. So I keep it really, really simple, and I keep myself out of it a lot, which saves a lot of time. When I'm not talking, it saves everybody a lot of time.

Marisha: I love that. And then if you have your... Because you use the strategy of using the treatment activity. So you have that on the table already, so you can just run through it-

Kristin: Exactly.

Marisha: ... super quickly, and that makes sense. I think this is where our approach is just a little bit different. It's like, that's a cool part of this, because like you said, there's not one... There're so many ways we could set this up, and it really just depends on our style and our caseload and just all the millions of factors that play into all of that. But I like to use like a set probe for the different goals, and so I just have those ready to go. Like I have a really simple but like very intentional system on how I keep those organized so I can quickly pull up whichever probe I need. So that's been super fun too. But whether you're using the therapy activity or some probe that you already have prepped, just being prepared for the session makes it really, really simple to run through that.

Kristin: Yeah, totally I agree, and I love that idea. I do have a set of probes I use for the interim progress monitoring that I'm doing a little bit less frequently. Those are always the same words, and they're ready to go. But I do mix it up throughout the week. I like it, because you know how every now and then you come across a word that for whatever reason is really tricky for them? I feel like sometimes when you're mixing up the stimuli between sessions, you come across this little subset of words and you're like, "Wow, they really struggle with that context for some reason." So I do love that about it. As you said, either way works, and I love your organization.

Marisha: I am definitely an organization nerd, so we can talk about that all day long. I remembered what I wanted to circle back to. I use this especially as a newer clinician when I wasn't feeling as confident in terms of taking data at the beginning of the session, because I feel like data is power, and if we know exactly where the student is, it sets us up to be that much more successful, and I feel like it helps us... we can approach the session just a little bit more confidently.

Kristin: Absolutely. Absolutely.

Marisha: Even if you end up taking data at the end of the session, having that information is... it's what enables us to provide amazing therapy because we are able to adjust and all of that. So I think it's a great confidence tool.

Kristin: Absolutely.

Marisha: So I just wanted to inaudible. It's funny, I definitely took more data on the weeks where I was feeling like I don't know what I'm doing, and then I have the data and be like, crosstalk.

Kristin: Yup, I totally agree. Every now and then, it's really nice. Especially if we've had a week off where I haven't seen a child and I am lesson planning in the morning and running through my lessons and I'm like, "Man." Sometimes I'm able to just look back at the last session, and it's just like given to me. Even with very few notes from a quantity standpoint, I'm able to look at it and be like, "Oh, I know exactly what we're doing today." It's just really nice.

Marisha: Yeah. That's amazing. So speaking of that, how do you keep it organized? How do you organize all that data so that it is easy to go back to? You mentioned the group data sheets.

Kristin: Yeah. So it takes a little bit of work, and this would be the one thing I don't like about it, but to me it's well worth it. Again, knowing that I've stuck with the system now for a few years, tells me it is. During the first few sessions of the year, I actually do just collecting on like a blank piece of paper and save it because I like my data organized by group. So each group has like a packet of data sheets, and I can usually fit... I don't know, depending on the size of the group, like if it's a three child group, I can usually fit like three weeks on one side of the paper, and it literally just has the date on the left side for that day and then it has each child's name and then each child has two lines. The first has one line that's split into a 10 boxes for my 10 data points, and then there's a blank line where I could write some notes and then there's a little space down the bottom where I could write additional notes.
So we're talking like a three inch section for an entire group for the week. So the reason I said, in the beginning, I collect on a blank sheet of paper is, at the beginning of the year, it just takes you a while to get those groups ironed out, and kids are moving from this group to that and the times they're changing. But once I feel like I've got them, I do sit down, I take a day to make these data sheets. I make them on my computer, so all their names are typed on there. And then I just use that same sheet throughout the year. So like I said, I can probably get three weeks on a page, so it's not a ton of papers.
During a single session, I'm never flipping between pages, all the kids are there in one section on one page. I absolutely loved... I resisted doing that for a while because I didn't want to take the time up front to set it up. And then they also had this thought that I needed all these data sheets filed in each kid's individual file, but when it came down to it, like I just don't think I need that. So like no one ever said I did, and I finally just did it. I said, "If I absolutely needed it, I could copy them and blackout the other kids or something." But that has never happened, and having them organized by group to me is 100% the way to go. Flipping through pages is definitely not me. So that's what I do for my daily data.
And then for my progress monitoring, I have these big data sheets, it is one like eight and a half by 11 page. Now, it is jam packed with a grid, but I use that one side of one sheet for an entire year for one sound. So it typically has, I think, 10 words for each. So say I'm inaudible, those will all be on one page and it'll have 10 words for each of those sounds in the initial, medial and final positions and enough space for me to collect it three times. So I can use literally one side of one piece of paper for my entire year for my progress monitoring that I just do the three times. So I am not a paper flipper, I just want everything on one page. I feel like we just use so much paper. I'd like to be better, and I'm no environmentalist, but come on, the amount of paper we waste just kills me. So I'm trying to keep it down to one page, it is the least I can do.

Marisha: Yeah, that's super helpful. Because you have those data sheets in your teachers pay teachers store? Right?

Kristin: I do. So I have them in my store and then they come with printable stimuli, so you can put a page in front of the child and they can just read through the words and look at the pictures. But I also made it as like an interactive PDF, so you can pull it up on your iPad and they just... I've kept it real simple, there's not a ton of buttons or anything, but they can just swipe through the pictures, and it has the picture real big in a work. They like it because it's on the iPad, so that means apparently it's a game, even though they're literally just swiping pictures. But Hey, whatever works. It moves really quickly because I don't have to facilitate it. I typically let them swipe through themselves. If they're moving too fast, I just let them know to slow down, and I can get through... I can easily do an entire group of four kids working on R in an under a session if they're all pretty on track.
I tell them, "Hey, this is not going to be the world's most thrilling therapy session, but it has to be done. We only do this three times a year, so we can get through this in one session, we're done." So most of them buy into that and we get it done and move on with therapy.

Marisha: I have that articulation, I forget what it's called. But I have that progress-

Kristin: Yeah. I think it's literally called-

Marisha: It's beautiful.

Kristin: ... the ultimate Progress Monitoring Kit. I can't remember exactly what I've labeled it, but it's pretty self explanatory.

Marisha: You definitely have a knack for design, and so it's just like... I don't know. I feel like especially when it comes to... Well, I kind of enjoy progress monitoring because I geek out about the data. But it makes it even that much more exciting when it's just something that's beautiful to look at. crosstalk.

Kristin: I geek out about it now that I have a good system. Whereas before, it just overwhelmed me. But now it's like, yeah, you go back to something exactly four months later and you're seeing little check or a little pluses where before there were little minuses, and it's just so nice to see it because you're... it's so easy to see. You're comparing apples to apples. With some of my older kids, I have them charted and... No, I totally agree. I geek out over it too. When you keep it simple like that, oh, it just makes your life so much better.

Marisha: Yeah. There's nothing like seeing those minuses turn into the classes over the year.

Kristin: Totally agree.

Marisha: So I do like that one sheet for the year idea. That makes a lot of sense. And then since I love organization, I feel like I have to jump into... I assume you just keep the sheets just in a binder and then you would just flip through those. Or do you keep them in individual folders-

Kristin: I have actually... It's funny, this is one thing I switched this year. I used to just file them after I collected it at those times back in their folders, but then I was like, "Why am I continuing to file these just to pull them out again in four months?" So now I have a folder in my filing cabinet right at the front of all the kids' folders and it just says progress monitoring. So all their data sheets are in there, and they'll stay there until the end of the year and then I'll put them in their folders. But no, it was like three times a year, I was pulling them out and putting them back in, and I was like, "Wait a second, this doesn't make any sense." Actually, I think this is the first semester I had this like, aha moment and thought, "Wait a second." So now I just throw them in a folder. Like I said, they'll all be there ready for me in May or June.

Marisha: What about your data sheet?

Kristin: The data sheets, so I don't have like daily folders for my kids or anything, so I just have one of the hanging file folders and they... I make a real quick kind of cover sheets, so to speak, that has each of the kids and their goals on it that came straight from their progress reports just to make sure that I'm always reminding myself what ultimate goal we're working on, and then the data sheets are just stapled. So each group has a packet, and then if I have materials or something I'm using for them, I will just paperclip them to the back of that and they just get filed.

Marisha: Perfect.

Kristin: I'm pretty minimalist as far as keeping papers around for data collection and stuff. If you can't tell, I just can't stand it.

Marisha: Yeah, it definitely adds a lot of clutter, because we have like all the data sheets and all the paperwork that we have pending, plus the therapy papers, and it's just... it's a lot. So anything to minimize that is-

Kristin: crosstalk. I would obviously keep all the sheets I needed to if felt like having the meetup better, but I honestly think it makes it worse for me when I'm trying to write those progress reports and I have to flip through so many things. It's just so much harder. Now, I can usually just look at one side of my daily data notes and one page of my progress monitoring, and I can very quickly and easily write up a progress note that has a lot of great information in it. More is not always better.

Marisha: Oh, and then I meant to ask too, with your data, at the very beginning of each session, do you pick one goal, or how do you decide what you're taking data on?

Kristin: I typically pick one goal per session. I have a lot of articulation kids on my caseload more so than language. So yeah, we're typically only working on one speech sound in a session, so that part's easy. For language, it depends on honestly what I have planned that day as far as activities. So if I'm going to do, I don't know, some irregular plurals and I don't know, some pronouns, I might collect data on both. Or I might collect data on one, see how we go time wise and then do the data probe on the other one as we move into that. But I typically only do one per session. You know how it is, we only have 30 minutes, so depending on what I'm targeting, that's usually what I collect data on.

Marisha: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And then another question that always comes up is, how do you manage data collection with mixed groups? So if you have like three or four kids sitting in front of you, like you're obviously collecting data on one student at a time. Do you have any strategies to help that run smoothly? What do the kids do while they're waiting?

Kristin: For me, so much of that comes in the planning for the session anyway. Like I said, I collect that data on... Well, if you're talking about the daily data I often am using stimuli straight from the activity, so I've picked whatever stimuli it is or whatever activity, and I'll go through that. As I said, I keep it so quick that it's not even a question of what the other kids do during that time. They all know they've got... If there's four kids in the group, they've got one minute and 30 seconds. They just have to sit there and be quiet while I do the data and then we'll move on to our fun activity. They learn pretty quickly. If we can't get through it, then they have less time in their game. So there's that.
For the progress monitoring at the session or that I do intermittently, now, that one sometimes does take a little bit longer. If I have... this is going to sound complicated, it's one of those things, verbally, I feel like it's going to sound confusing. But if I am using my progress monitoring kit with the stimuli on the iPad, if I've got say like two R kids and to S kids in our group, I will try to get my hands on two iPads and I'll have one pair switching one iPad and one pair switching the other, and I'll have them do 20 at a time. So they do 20 words, and then I move on to the next 10 and do 20 words, and then once they get to the end, we start over, but start at the other person. So they're like alternating which stimuli they do.
I know it sounds super complicated, but it's really not. So basically, by the end of it, they've all done all the words with their sounds in them and they've only had to sit quietly for maybe a minute at a time. Again, I know I said before, it's just one of those days that's not super fun. It is what it is. There's no gains, there's no antic, but I think most of them at the expectations there can handle it for one day. They know typically in the next session we'll do something a little bit more interactive and fun. But hey, it's three times a year, it's got to be done, and if we can get through it in one session, then so be it.

Marisha: I think that's a good skill to work on too.

Kristin: Yeah. Totally.

Marisha: It's an important life skill to be able to sit and be quiet and wait patiently. So we get to practice that in speech too.

Kristin: I agree. But I also think from the standpoint of the SLP acknowledging to them, like, "I know that this session is going to suck a little bit. Sorry about that." I recognize that. I think that that goes a long way, rather than having them come in and you pretending like this is the most thrilling thing ever and being frustrated that they are bored. So we all know it's boring, but it has to be done, and I think if we can all get on the same page with that, the kids and I, then we kind of just have this mutual understanding. It's not all that thrilling for me either.

Marisha: I think just being able to crosstalk is... that goes a very long way.

Kristin: Exactly.

Marisha: So that's perfect. So you've told us a little bit about this already. In terms of the articulation, you have your set stimulus items that you use three times a year, and if you're working on... like in the daily data you use just whatever you're using in the session. Do you have any favorite tools that you like to use for the language goals when it comes to that three times a year progress monitoring?

Kristin: I don't. It's been on my list of something to do, is to create some similar types of things for language. But I do have so many fewer language kids on my caseload, and I also just find... For me at least, their goals are also vastly different. So that one I do honestly on a really case by case basis, and I don't have as well set up of a system as far as what probes I'm using. I do try to keep the same theoretical plan about it, where I think in September, what can I use right now that's really going to measure their progress in this? So if that is... I'm just thinking of one example. So I have like an irregular plurals puzzle, and it's just a simple puzzle, I think it came probably from some old reading curriculum and it just happened to be at one of my schools when I got there. But it's great, because it has a whole bunch of irregular plural words. So that may be the task I use as my progress monitoring, and I may not use that same task again until I progress monitor again in January.
So I do really collect data for my language kids on a case by case basis, but I try to keep that same idea of keep being consistent with whatever I used to measure in September is the same thing I used to measure in January is the same thing I used to measure in June and then that way I can really see their progress. And then that thing, whatever it may be that I use to measure, is typically almost completely excluded from materials I use to teach throughout the rest of the time.

Marisha: Yeah, that makes sense. Like I said before too, when you're setting up your caseload at the beginning of the year or when you're writing an IEP, it's really helpful to be able to identify what you're going to use-

Kristin: Absolutely.

Marisha: ... and just make a note of that or attach it, like add it to that folder with all the other progress monitoring stuff, because then it's not even a question, you're just ready to go. I agree that language is a little... Because the goals can vary so much, it's not as easy as the articulation. It would be lovely if it all fit crosstalk into a nice little box like that.

Kristin: Even kids with "the same goal", they're all kind of... sometimes they struggle with it in a different way or have difficulty with different examples of that. So yeah, I definitely... Language is a little bit harder, and I have few enough on my caseload that inaudible on a really case by case basis isn't too big of a deal for me. I'm also reporting on progress reports, those things, a little bit differently. To me, they take just a little bit more. Not that they can't be reported in numbers, because they can, but to me, they take just that little bit more explanation of exactly what they're doing and what this looks like when they're speaking more so than like, they say S about 50% of the time and words independently. That's relatively self-explanatory.

Marisha: Yeah, that definitely makes sense. Because I feel like that's the more subjective aspect of what we do, and it's just like really being able to describe things. Do you have any strategies that you like to use when tackling that in progress reports? I guess you would just be looking back at your data sheets to see-

Kristin: Yeah, and that's why I think I... When I presented on this topic at The Flash at a CEU on the cruise, I really talked about these two methods of data collection, and there's daily data collection and then intermittent progress monitoring. But one thing I probably at that point didn't make as good of a point is that I combine the two. I do both, and they both can serve a purpose. So they're not mutually exclusive. I think depending on what your data requirements are from your district, you may be able to use just one. But for me, it's a really good fit to use both. I typically keep that progress monitoring that happens infrequently really, really independent. If that means there is 0% to measuring periods in a row, I'm okay with that.
So think about those kids who just started R. Some of them take well more than four months to get a true R. So if I got them for the first time in September and I collected data on their initial R, it's 0%. I either just literally looking at a picture and saying these R words, if they're still at 0% independently in January, that doesn't concern me. But what I want is some daily data that shows how they performed with support or with feedback or with cues or with prompts. Because I don't want to just say they went from zero to zero independently, I want to say, "Right. So they still can't say it independently, and that's okay, but look what they can do now."
Now, if I give them a model and I remind them about their tongue placement and I give them a visual cue, they're at 70% in the initial position of single words. So being able to use both the internet and progress monitoring and then that daily data collection, that really helps with some of those more subjective things. Plus, I often just make notes on my daily things. Oh, I tried the L to R slide, that was really effective, or today they did a really nice job not rounding their lips, those kinds of things. So I do make notes like that outside of just my numerical data, and those often make it into progress reports just to be supportive of the families and the kids and the progress they are making even when the numbers don't always show it, as you know is the case, unfortunately.

Marisha: I'm so glad that you broke that down and talked about why you include both types of data, because I think that's incredibly important. I feel like that... It definitely applies to R and some of the... that can happen with some of the other articulation sounds, but I feel like it's especially applicable when it comes to some of the language aspects too. When you were describing that, I kept thinking back to like when I was in the autism preschool, that was something that would happen a lot. Like, they wouldn't be doing things independently, but at the beginning of the year, they would need a tremendous amount of support, and then by the second reporting period, they could do all these things with just a verbal-

Kristin: Absolutely. Absolutely.

Marisha: ... versus hand over hand to all of those things. That is still indicative of progress, and I'm so glad that you broke that down.

Kristin: Yeah, absolutely. crosstalk. Right. There are so many increments to progress. I know, I always refer to R, but I feel like it's... First of all, I think it's one of those things that almost all SLPs are struggling with, but you can also tell what a large majority of my caseload is working on. But I do think R in particular has so many steps when you're shaping from, just say W to the actual R, more so than I feel like these other sounds do. I don't feel like there are as many incremental steps between FNTH, as one example. But R, there are just so many little steps along the way, and I want to be able to report that progress.
For some of the kids that are really struggling with it, I will make it a short term goal. This isn't an official short term goal, but I'll kind of write it in my notes that I'm accepting any production, any production that is not a W, and I do not care if it sounds like an L. I do not care what it sounds like, but if it is not a W, they are getting cheers and claps and applause, because that is the first step, for me, getting away from that W. So in the same thing, when I'm using some strategies, if they produce an R that sounds more like an L, I tell them what a great job they did because at least that means they're finally moving their tongue instead of it sitting on the bottom of their mouth. If they made an L, that means they're moving their tongue, they're getting towards the roof of their mouth and you're in the right direction. So Hey, they get praised, for that, and I'm calling that a win for the day.
But again, that goes back to deciding what you're going to collect data on at the beginning of your session. So it's okay to collect data, for me, on anything that's not a W, but I have to define that and I have to write it down so that when I refer back to it, I know that yeah, they were 90% on anything that wasn't a W. It doesn't mean they got 90% Rs, that just means only 10% of them were Ws. So that's something I definitely work with my students on, is just taking that moment to define what you're working on and what you're measuring. Within reason, I think measuring almost anything within the course of one day is fine, and that's where we're going to get that subjective data that's going in that progress report.

Marisha: And then a followup question to... Because I feel like I've read a lot of notes where it'll just say, gave mean cues or a mean support or a mean mod or... and I feel like that's not incredibly transparent in terms of what actually happened in the session. So do you have a strategy or any kind of system in terms of how you're describing what you're doing in this session? One example you said was the L, like the slide, that that was like a helpful strategy. I think getting super specific like that makes sense. But do you have any other strategies? How do you typically approach-

Kristin: That's one of the reasons that I try to keep, in many cases, those daily data probes as independent as possible, because you take that gray area out of, exactly how did you obtain that data, or what was that data really showing? So that's one reason I just tried to keep it as minimal as possible as far as my input is concerned.

Marisha: So I think that's a question that comes up a lot too. But id write support and crosstalk, but how do I do that? So I think that we should... I think it makes sense to write a goal without support because it's really clear how that's going to be measured. Any SLP could measure it, and there's ways to adjust the goal so that it's still achievable. It might just be at a simpler level like saying R in isolation versus R in sentences-

Kristin: Absolutely.

Marisha: ... for example. But then I was curious about just the data in... When you're taking your subjective notes in the session, do you have any tips or strategies for how you're describing your support?

Kristin: Absolutely so. I do still keep it as simple as possible. So I consider, did I give them a model? Yes or no? And then the other thing I consider, and I think that gets forgotten a lot... So like you said, some people are writing mean cues or maybe even writing independently. But the question I always have is, if someone's writing independently, so say they're giving words, with or without a model, and the child is supposedly producing them independently. The question I always have is, did you give them feedback? So I think sometimes people write independently, but they're telling the child after each production, "Yeah, you've got that one," or, "Oh, can you fix it?" Whether or not they mark that one that was corrected as correct or not, feedback is a type of cue that you're giving, it impacts their performance on any production that comes after it.
So to me, there's a huge difference between giving 10 productions with no feedback and giving 10 productions where you're telling them after each or after some whether or not they got it correct. So sometimes I know I've seen people write, Oh, they did it with a model independently, but they gave feedback, and they're calling it independent because they didn't give a cue before they elicited each response. But giving a feedback after where response is really the same thing. So that's the one thing I always want to point out, is that feedback really is a type of input that you're giving them, even though it comes after the stimulus.
But going back to the question, I think I try to keep it simple. Did I give them a model? Did I give them feedback? And then did I give them some sort of verbal cue? Most of my kids are responsive to a pretty simple verbal cue. I only have kindergarten through fifth grade. I don't have a lot of preschoolers. I'm not doing a lot of like tactile queuing, that kind of thing. So all that other stuff really is coming during that teaching period where I'm not heavily collecting the data. So when I am collecting data, yeah, I just try to keep it kind of those three things, model, yes or no, feedback, yes or no, verbal cue, yes or no. So a verbal cue might literally look like, "Okay, we're going to do this. Don't forget to get your tongue back, rabbit." And that would be it. So yeah, I do avoid use of minimal, moderate or max queuing. Because as you said, it's really open to interpretation.

Marisha: I like how you said it before, like the student benefits from this type of cue or this specific verbal prompt, because different students will respond to different ones differently. Or if they respond to like you making a gesture at how their tongue is supposed to move, that's helpful for the next SLP to know or for us to remember when we're jumping into the next session to set them up for success. So I think that's a very useful and meaningful way to set that up, and it's incredibly transparent. Because yeah, it's super clear what that-

Kristin: Oh yeah. You've got to write down those little tricks that did or didn't help because as you know, we're trying... In some of the cases, we're trying so many of them, so it's like, did that L to R slide work? So sometimes telling the kids to smile works like a charm and sometimes it makes it worse. So yeah, writing down those little notes, they do a ton of time in your next session trying to figure the same thing out again.

Marisha: Ooh yeah. I like the point of writing what didn't work too. That can be helpful-

Kristin: I probably have some session notes that they're like, "Do not bother trying eggs."

Marisha: Well, it does save time. You got to work smarter. Okay. Awesome. So I think that was a super helpful overview of how you set things up and just some really actionable, just really simple tips that I think can make a really big difference. Is there anything that you wanted to close with or anything you wanted to emphasize before we wrap up?

Kristin: Nothing we haven't talked about. But I would say that... If I could emphasize one thing, it would just be that more data points does not mean better data. It certainly doesn't mean better therapy. But it doesn't mean better data, so just really give yourself permission to take less data, but take that moment to think about it so it's more meaningful and useful to you. Because having 200 data points that mean nothing probably means you weren't as present as you could have been during that session, and you still don't have data to help you write your progress reports or all the other things that data is great for. So yeah, give yourself permission to collect a little bit less data. That would be my one takeaway.

Marisha: I love it, and that definitely makes a ton of sense, like everything else that you said during this podcast. So thank you so much for sharing all of your tips and tricks with us today. I definitely walked away with some new ones myself. So I so appreciate you. If SLPs are interested in checking out any of the things that we talked about during the podcast, they can head to slpnow.com/43. I'll also include some links in case SLPs want to connect with you. So where are your favorite places to hang out in the online world?

Kristin: So Instagram, I am reasonably active on. I would say that's probably the best place. Best place to reach out to me would be on Instagram, that's just at Kiwi Speech. I do also have a Facebook page, I'm just not there as much.

Marisha: You have super helpful content-

Kristin: Thank you.

Marisha: ... on there. If you liked what Kristin shared today and if you are as obsessed with her materials and design as I am, you definitely want to hang out with her on Instagram. But yeah, thank you so much, Kristin.

Kristin: Thank you so much. crosstalk. I appreciate. Thank for having me.

Marisha: Yeah. And we'll-

Kristin: Bye.

Marisha: ... see you next time.

Marisha: Hello there and welcome to the SLP Now podcast. I am so excited to introduce today's guest, Venita Litvack. She is a speech language pathologist currently serving as a full-time augmentative and alternative communication and assistive technology consultant for public schools in Florida. So, she has a passion for using AAC, AT and literacy to support individuals with complex communication needs, autism and other disabilities. Venita has also just delivered poster presentations in several topics related to AAC at ASHA. She also coauthored two articles published in the ASHA Leader as well as the Lou Knows What To Do book series published by Boys Town Press. She's also an amazing fellow podcaster and blogger at Speechie Side Up and just an all-around rock star, SLP and person.
So, today we're going to be breaking down all things AAC and literacy. And then before we dive in to all of the things, I just wanted to, because we're kind of taking ... This is like AAC 102, maybe 201. And so, before we dive into all of the things, I just wanted to give a really quick recap of some other amazing resources that Venita has shared.
Her Speechie Side Up podcast is amazing first of all. If you haven't subscribed yet, definitely do that. She has several episodes on AAC, so I will link to those in the show notes at slpnow.com/42. And then she also did a podcast interview with my colleague and fellow podcaster in the speech therapy PT network for Michelle Dawson's First Bite and she has a really great crash course on AAC there as well. And then she has an absolutely amazing blog post with some tips to help you start navigating AAC if it's new to you. So, it's called 10 Ways to Boost Your Knowledge in the Area of AAC. And so, I'll link to all of those resources in the show notes in case you're just trying to start navigating AAC because I think that would be an amazing supplement to all of the tips and tricks that we're sharing here today. But that was a little bit of a longer intro, but hello Venita.

Venita: Hi Marisha. Thank you so much. That was such a nice intro and I think you covered a big part of where I would recommend people get started before they dive into a topic like this with AAC literacy because this is definitely going to be a very comprehensive and dense topic, but I'm really excited to chat with you about it.

Marisha: Yeah. I have been nerding out, like we've been going back and forth and I cannot wait to hear from you on this topic. Like as you guys know, I am a huge advocate of using literacy in therapy and a lot of you have been asking about how to use this with students who use AAC. So, I just cannot wait for us to break this down and you're the perfect person for it.

Venita: Oh yay. Well, I'm excited that we were able to kind of combine both of our interests.

Marisha: No, that is so amazing. And I think we're going to have a blast or I know we are. And then I'm curious, is there anything else that you'd like to highlight in terms of places to get started? Like if there's anything in particular that really stands out to you like from your blog posts or do you think that's a good enough place to start at this point?

Venita: I think you've mentioned some really great resources. One other one that I might recommend is the Core Calendar Club Group on Facebook that I am doing with and page from Beautiful Speech Life and Kristen Bell from the Daily Dose of Speech. It's a year-long AAC challenge where we provide you with weekly resources for a specific core word. And then we also present discussion topics weekly where people share their favorite AAC tradings, the troubles that they have with AAC and how they're addressing them. So, we have about 1100 people in that group and it's just a really great supportive group. We have a goal in mind, which is to increase your AAC knowledge. So, it's not just going in there and asking questions whenever they come up, but kind of structured format for learning more about AAC across the school year.

Marisha: That is so amazing. And that's a free group?

Venita: It's free. Yup.

Marisha: Oh my gosh. I feel like that would be worth ... Ugh, that's so valuable. That is amazing. Especially if you're really wanting to tackle AAC in your practice, like as a listener and just like having these resources plus the Facebook group to just get like continued inspiration, I mean that's amazing. I'm so glad that you guys are doing that. So, helpful.

Venita: Thanks. It's a lot of fun.

Marisha: Oh yeah. And I will definitely link to that group as well in the show notes if you can't find it with a quick search. But okay, so, I think we are ready to dive in. So, let's just get straight to the strategies. And so, let's start with some evidence-based strategies for teaching literacy to children who use AAC. I've heard you talk about, and it's RAAP/ I forget how you like how you say that acronym. Is it RAAP?

Venita: It is. Yup.

Marisha: I know you've shared a lot of other strategies as well, but it'd be amazing just to get an overview of some of the ones that you found in your research and just help break that down for us a little more.

Venita: Sure. Yeah. I think this is a really important topic and a great starting point. I will definitely reference the RAAP strategy as we get into specific activities that you can use. So, in the timeframe from when you first asked to an interview and we decided that the topic would be literacy, this amazing book came out and as soon as I saw it I was like, "Oh, I have to get that." And this book is kind of taken the AAC world by storm. Everybody's getting it. And it's called comprehensive literacy for all teaching students with significant disabilities to read and write by Karen Erickson and David Copenhager. I hope I'm saying that right. And it's amazing.
I mean, they have just synthesized all of the research on teaching individuals with significant disabilities to read and write. And their basic premise is that all students, no matter how severe their disabilities, can learn to read and write, and they provide a framework for that. So, I'd like to start with providing the Literacy Bill of Rights because I think that that's really important for people to keep in mind when they're working with students who use AAC and keeping in the back of their mind. Like maybe it doesn't seem like they could learn to read and write at this point, but here are their rights that they're entitled to. So, I'll briefly summarize these. And these were outlined by Yoder, Erickson and Copenhager back in 1997.
So, number one is that all students have the right to the opportunity to learn to read and write. All students have the right to accessible, clear, meaningful, culturally and linguistically appropriate texts at all time. All students have the right to interact with others while reading, writing, or listening to texts. All students have the right to life choices made available through reading and writing competencies. All students have the right to lifelong educational opportunities incorporating literacy instruction in use.
All students have the right to teachers and other service providers who are knowledgeable about literacy instruction, methods and principles. I think that's really important for us to keep in mind. And there's two more. All students have the right to learn in environments that provide varied models of print use, which we're going to outline later today. And then all students have the right to learn in environments that maintain the expectations and attitudes that all individuals are literacy learners. And I love that last, right? Because I think it's so important that attitude makes a huge difference. And when we presume or assume that the child has the ability to grow and has the ability to learn and read and write, then we're already setting them up for success.
I know that was a lot and I definitely encourage anybody who has not seen that Literacy Bill of Rights to go look at the full version because that was an overview even though it might've not seem like it, but I like starting there because I think it's important. Then the next thing, this book, the Comprehensive Literacy for All that I told you about earlier, they share in there that when you are starting with literacy instruction for students who use AAC or any individual who uses AAC, you need to determine where are you going to start and what the student needs. Do they need comprehensive emergent literacy instruction only? Do they need conventional instruction only or do they need a combination of both and that's really for like a group-based setting.
And the way that they tell you to determine that is by asking four questions. The first question is, does the student identify most of the letters of the alphabet most of the time? The second question is, does the student engage and interact during shared reading? The third question is, does a student have a means of communication and interaction? And then number four, does the student understand that print has meaning.
So, if you answered no to just one or any more of those questions, then you should start with comprehensive emergent interventions. If you're able to answer yes to all four of those questions, then you would start with comprehensive conventional interventions. So, for today's purpose, I'm going to be sharing mostly about emergent interventions because according to Janice Light, she said currently the majority of individuals who require AAC do not have functional literacy skills. And I heard a quote recently where something around 80% of individuals who use AAC or who are nonspeaking verbally are at the emergent literacy level. I tried looking for the research reference prior to this interview, but I wasn't able to find it. So, I did quote Janice Light instead. But I think that's really important and I'll kind of stop here in case there's anything you wanted to say about those.

Marisha: That is such a helpful overview. I'm just so excited to keep diving into all the other things. But just a quick recap. So, we've got three main types. So, immersion, conventional or both in terms of the intervention that we can use. And that really just depends on where the student is that, like are they identifying letters of the alphabet, are they engaging in shared reading? Do they have the method of interaction and do they understand that print has meaning? Did I get that?

Venita: Yeah. Thank you for summarizing that. And they're set up differently, the type of instruction. So, it's nice to have a framework and know where we should start with the student rather than just saying, "Okay, they need literacy. Let's read books." Because we know literacy is so much more than that. And we're going to talk about the five different areas that encompass comprehensive emergent literacy instruction.

Marisha: Okay, let's do it. I can't wait.

Venita: Great. So, I'll briefly share those. The first area of comprehensive emergent literacy instruction is shared reading. Then you have shared writing. Then you have alphabet and phonological awareness, independent writing with full access to the alphabet and self-directed reading. And all of these were outlined in that book. So, when we start to talk about the different activities that I would recommend when teaching literacy to students who use AAC, I will break them down by those five different areas.

Marisha: Perfect. Let's do it.

Venita: In terms of shared reading, Erickson and Copenhager recommend that you do this activity at least two times a day for 10 to 15 minutes a day. Now, I know SLPs, we have different schedules, different settings, so you have to do what you're able to do. When I worked in a school for children with autism, I actually got to go into the classrooms every day for about an hour, but I know that looks drastically different in other types of school settings. Maybe you're only seeing the student one time a week, two times a week.
So, kind of take this with a grain of salt or what you can do and we'll actually talk about some ways that you can incorporate these strategies in group lessons. And I am sensitive to the fact that you might not see the child every day of the week, so we'll talk about that later. But in terms of shared reading, Marisha, you brought this up earlier. One of the strategies that I really like and talk about is the RAAP strategy. And I like it, one, because I actually studied under one of the researchers, Dr. Kent-Walsh, and got to see the impacts of that research, got to help present at the actual convention, but it was developed by Dr. Cathy Binger and Dr. Jennifer Kent-Walsh. And it's not rap music, but it actually stands for read, ask, answer and prompt.
And it is an interactive reading strategy for improving literacy experiences for individuals who use AAC. It encourages aided-language input, so a form of modeling on the AAC system, which is really critical for our emergent communicators. And it gets the communication partner to slow down and allow the AAC user more processing time. And along with that processing time, I do like to highlight what the research tells us in terms of the amount of time it takes students to process questions or information that we present to them. So, there was a study by Hilary Johanna Mathis entitled, the effect of pause time upon the communicative interactions of young people who use augmentative and alternative communication. And in that, they suggest that we provide a wait time of up to 45 seconds and that would support AAC users to claim more conversational turns and use more words.
Now, I know 45 seconds seems like a really long time. So, I think on average, the research says that between 10 to 20. That was the only reference I was able to find though, and that's why I brought it up. But it just illustrates the importance of how much time we need to be giving. And in reality, we're probably getting closer to like two to three seconds.
So, the framework for the RAAP strategy, when you're reading a book together with a child is on every single page, you're going to do the RAAP. So, the first step is to read the book or read the page and model two symbols on the device. Then you pause for five seconds by maintaining eye contact and looking at the AAC learner expectantly. Then you're going to ask the WH question and model two symbols on the device. And again, you're waiting for five seconds.
The reason you're waiting for five seconds is because you're allowing the child to comment to answer the WH question, whatever they want to do in order to be an active reader along with you. And then the third step is if they didn't answer the WH question, you'll answer it for them and model two more symbols on the device and then pause again. And then if they don't say anything or if they do say something, you're going to provide a two to three-word response using the AAC system and verbally. So, you might say something like, your turn or show me the, if there's something on the page like a caterpillar, show me the caterpillar and you actually repeat this process for every single page of the book. And it really helps the reader or the student who uses AAC to be more active in the reading and less passive, less of a passive listener. So, that's my shared reading activity that I wanted to share. Do you have anything you want to add to that before I move on to the next area?

Marisha: No, that was perfect. And do you know if they have ... I'd be super curious to see this in action. Like do they have examples of this like on YouTube or anything?

Venita: That's a great question. They definitely have videos. I'm not sure if they're sharing it on YouTube, but there's a name of the lab and I'll try to get that for you. What I'll do is I'll share that in an email with you and you can put that in the show notes, but they have a lab and I would assume they put the videos on there, but I'll do my best to get those for you.

Marisha: Amazing. Thank you so much.

Venita: No problem. In terms of shared writing, again, Erickson and Copenhager recommended to do this again for 20 to 30 minutes a day and this doesn't have to be done just by the SLP. This can be done by the classroom teacher as well. So, you're finding this information helpful. You can share this framework with the teachers that you collaborate with, but predictable chart writing has been found to be really helpful for these shared writing activities. So, I'm going to talk about the framework that was outlined by Hanser Cunningham Hall and Williams. Separately, of course, they had different research studies looking at predictable chart writing.
But in summary, predictable chart writing is a fun and easy shared writing activity that supports emergent and conventional writers and readers. It's a way of providing some structure while allowing students to generate their own ideas. And it provides many different activities that occur around the predictable chart over a five-day period.
So, this is going to look very different depending on whether you are in the classroom every day doing collaborative teaching or if you see the student one to two times a week. But again, the classroom teacher can definitely implement this. So, I'm going to discuss all five days, the activities across all five days with you. So, on day one, you are going to write a chart. So, for that, you're going to need chart paper or you could use a big dry erase board on the front of the classroom and a single message device.
So, what happens is that you're going to pick a phrase that's repetitive. So, let's say we're going to use the phrase, "I like to." If you're working in a group, every student who uses AAC in the group or every student in your group, they're going to tell you something that they like to do. So, the phrase is repeated for each student. So, let's say you have five students. Maybe student one says, "I like to swim." The next student may say, "I like to sleep." The next one might say, "I like to eat." And the only word that changes is the last word. But they get to kind of write their own sentence or finish their own sentence by providing something that relates to them.
And then on day two, you are going to reread the sentences as a group and you're going to put them on individual sentence strips. So, you're going to together as a group, reread the chart while pointing to each word. You can clap out the words. You can rap the words. You can sign the words. But it's just getting them to recognize that those words have individual units of meaning as you're rereading them.
And then on day three, you're going to cut up the sentences. So, you want to make sure that you have the students sentence their own sentence on two separate sheets of paper because they need one as the model and the other one you're going to cut up and they're going to rearrange the words to remake the sentence and play with the words. Maybe they can even make a new sentence. So, goal of this step is to help support students in understanding that sentences are made from left to right. And that students don't have to create a perfect sentence. They just have to get comfortable with using these words, manipulating these words and the process of writing.
And then on day four, they get to act out the sentence, which is fun. So, you would give each student their AAC system or a single message device with the word of the sentence programmed into it. So, let's say you have five students in the group. One student would be I. The other student would be like. Another student would be to. And then it can be like one of the words that the students had said, maybe I like to swim. So, they're going to read the sentence together. So, the person that says I is going to do I, and then the next one's like, and the next one's to, and the last person would say swim. So, they're acting out the sentence by saying their individual words. And you can actually have them if possible, depending on like their physical limitations, line up in the order of this sentence too. And that gets them to understand like the structure of a sentence.
And then on day five, the last day of the week, you would make a book with all of the students' sentences. So, one-on-one, you're going to support the students in making their page, which will be part of a class book. So, if the first student said I like to swim, you would help them find a picture to go along with that to support the text. And then they get to make one page of the class book. Then the next student might have, I like to eat and they'll find a picture for that and they get to make the second page of the class book. And at the end, you can print it out and add it to your class library.
And it's really nice because it's a book that they created together as a group and can reference and get to know each other a little bit better. And one resource for making the book, which I really like is called Tar Heel Reader, which I'm going to talk more about later.

Marisha: That is so amazing. Like I'm just imagining this happening in a classroom and oh my goodness, I love it. Because I talk a lot about creating like parallel stories in my literacy-based therapy framework and like the students, they just love that and they get so much out of it. And I feel like for this population, like making that book and having it be a shared experience and something that they can all take is absolutely amazing. And I love my structure, so I am so appreciative of this framework that you're sharing. So, thank you so much.

Venita: No problem. Well, thanks to Erickson and Copenhager and all the other researchers that developed it. But I'm like you, I love frameworks. I love structure and I love that it's evidence-based. Like we know what literacy is comprised of. We know what makes up literacy instruction, but it's important to know what the evidence says in terms of this population, what works, you know?

Marisha: Yeah. That is so helpful. We could make up our own little frameworks and everything, but it's that much better when we do feel confident about it being evidence-based as well.

Venita: Exactly.

Marisha: Especially for the specific populations. But I feel like this is amazing that you've been able to pull together all of these different strategies to use. So, you're amazing.

Venita: Well, it's a passion of mine, but I am a good synthesizer. I'll say that.

Marisha: I agree. Okay. So, are we ready to do the third?

Venita: Yeah. Yeah. So, the third area is alphabet and phonological awareness. So, we're going to be talking about different activities to use for that area, but I think when we talk about the terms phonological and alphabet knowledge, it kind of brings back nightmares from grad school. So, I'll just provide some brief definitions for both of those because if you're anything like me, it was definitely crossed over the two definitions.
So, phonological awareness is the ability to identify and manipulate sounds and spoken language. And then alphabet knowledge includes the ability to distinguish letters, shapes, name them, write them, and identify the sounds they represent. So, now that we've talked about both of those, let's get into the activities that we can address for both.
So, interestingly, what I read in that book that I referenced in the beginning is that Treiman, Levine and Kessler in 2007 found that teaching a letter of the week or month is not the appropriate amount of time to learn each letter. And I thought that was so fascinating and super applicable to even like a core word of the week approach, that's a whole another topic. But they found that this is the case because if they're doing a letter of the week, it's going to take 26 weeks for that letter to be revisited again, unless it's being embedded in daily routines. But really to be specifically targeted, it's going to be another 26 weeks before it's reintroduced. It's almost the entire school year. And it just is not enough time for students to embed that letter, use it in functional ways.
So, instead what they recommend is that use a letter of the day approach so that letters are retaught every 26 days using the following routine. They want you to identify the letter, identify the sound of the letter, find the letter in text and write the letter. So, those four components are really important for teaching a letter. Any questions about that, because I know that was a lot of information.

Marisha: No, I think that that makes sense. I really appreciated the just defining what we're talking about with phonological awareness and alphabet knowledge and I think that's a really great tip of like focusing on using the letter of the day approach versus the week or the month. And yeah, I love the four strategies that you shared too. Because I feel like this is so incredibly actionable. Yeah. And I'm curious to hear if you have any other tips for this area.

Venita: Okay, perfect. So, we'll move on to our ideas for phonological awareness instruction. So, these are fun. And I'm sure that a lot of these you've heard of, you can go on Pinterest for some ideas on addressing phonological awareness, but things like clapping out syllables, listening to nursery rhymes, even raps for your older students, poetry and playing alliteration games. And like I said, Pinterest has so many different activities that you can do to address those areas.
And then in terms of alphabet instruction, same thing. You can use alphabet books, alphabet puzzles, games, student names, environmental print. There's so many different ways that you can address that just by looking at ideas on Pinterest. And if I didn't say this already, Erickson and Copenhager recommend doing this for about 20 to 30 minutes a day. So, the explicit alphabet and phonological awareness instruction.

Marisha: Perfect. I think that's a really great overview and starting point. And I feel like we could dive into each of these areas could potentially be a whole podcast. So, I think we'll leave it at this and maybe we can revisit if we have time at the end just to kind of like break it down a little bit more. But I think this is a really awesome place to start.

Venita: Okay, perfect.

Marisha: Yeah, so what's the next one?

Venita: So, the next two areas, they're much shorter. They're not as dense. So, we'll go through those pretty quick. The last two areas were independent writing and self-directed reading. So, some ideas for promoting independent writing, 20 to 30 minutes a day, is to provide access to a variety of writing materials such as crayons, pencils, dry erase markers, alphabet letters, computers, AAC device.
So, the idea here is to provide access to a ton of different writing materials, not just a pen and paper or pencil and paper. And then make sure to ask the student to read aloud what they have written and write it down for them. So, a training that I just attended, it was so fascinating because she had us go through different writing examples and we know that emergent writing is not letter based. It's forming circles, forming lines, kind of doing little drawings that communicate a message.
So, she had us look at these drawings and then she told her what the child explained the story behind the picture was and then she would ask us as a student and emergent writer or a conventional writer. And I just thought that was so fun. So, if your students are not writing conventionally like with letters, you can definitely have them tell you the story behind their drawing or their writing and summarize it for them on like another page by writing it down so they can see what that looks like.
And then one really special thing is like you know when your parents would put up your writing on your refrigerator or like a board, it's really special for kids to be motivated to keep writing more by publishing their writing that way. So, if you can put it up in your speech room or in the classroom, maybe you have like a writing corner or like a board, that would be really helpful as well.

Marisha: Those are such great ideas. And I'm curious too like I assume that a lot of the same strategies ... Because you could potentially use some of the like RAAP strategies that you talked about here too. Like with some of these students, if we ask them and they don't respond within a couple of seconds, we probably want to wait a little bit longer. Do you have any additional strategies when it comes to like talking to students or asking students about what they wrote?

Venita: That's a really, really good question and I would assume that they dive into that in the book that I presented in the beginning. So, I would recommend looking at that. On the top of my head, I don't have like a framework for writing like I do with the shared reading. But it's a really good thought because if it hasn't been developed then, that might be a nice thing for somebody to look into.

Marisha: Yeah. And if they don't have well-researched answers for us, I think we can definitely pull from some of the other strategies you've shared to make that happen.

Venita: Yeah.

Marisha: Yeah. I love that. I'm loving these tips so far. So, what about self-directed reading?

Venita: Yeah, self-directed reading. So, that was the last area of comprehensive emergent literacy instruction. And some ideas that are recommended to promote independent reading include building a library of reading materials. And it's important to note that this should be done about 10 to 15 minutes a day. So, depending on the time that you see this child or time that you see the group, that might not be feasible for your group if you're only seeing them for 30 minutes.
But again, working with the teacher to provide that additional time for self-directed reading but providing access to magazines, newspapers, song lyrics, reading apps, comic books, audible, all of those different ways that they can access reading. Because believe it or not, audible reading, like read alouds is reading and there's tons of research to support that. I just heard it recently and it kind of reaffirmed that because it's definitely questionable but it is still considered reading. So, it's important for people to keep that in mind and provide access to that for students.
And then you want to provide a variety of materials so that all the students have access to something they want to read, so not necessarily materials but maybe you genres. So, some students might like to read comic. Some students might like to read like fantasy, fiction, sports. So, it's important to provide a variety of reading materials to them.
And then at the end of the self-directed reading, this is really important, have the students share out what they read about.

Marisha: That is perfect. Yeah. And so, I'm really curious, how do you work towards like implementing, because you just shared a ton of different strategies, lots of different resources and things that we can use, but there's a lot, definitely way more than can fit in one session. So, how do you go about like planning your group lessons to incorporate these strategies and just tips for making this happen in general?

Venita: That's such a good question and I think it's so important because looking at the research is one thing, but putting it into practice is a totally different thing. So, you explain what my role is now and I'll just be very transparent here. I am an assisted technology specialist, so now I support teachers and SLPs in the middle school. But I did work in a charter school for children with autism when I first got started.
And so, I'll kind of explain what that looked like when I was doing a AAC and literacy in group lessons when I was doing collaborative lessons with the teacher. So, it's going to look a little bit different than what I described and I think you do what you can until you know better. And I'll explain what I did and then maybe some things I might change knowing what I know now.
So, one of the things that I did in terms of shared reading is that I would put pick a book or theme of the week, which I know you're really passionate about and that's great. So, I pick a book or theme of the week and if it could go along with the academic lesson, all the better. So, I would talk with the teachers about what they were working on and try to pick a book that went along with that. And then I would identify core and French vocabulary that can be modeled while reading, which is important when you're doing that RAAP strategy.
And then I provide access to AAC so students could use their personal AAC systems or BIGmacks. And on the BIGmack, I might put like a repetitive phrase that I want the student to say. So, if we're reading a book like Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? I might have that whole phrase or I might have, what do you see on the BIGmack and the students that don't have an AAC system, they can push the button, take turns pushing the buttons so they feel like they're helping me read. And then, I don't know Marisha, are you familiar with story grammar marker? I feel like you would be,

Marisha: Yes.

Venita: Okay. I love story grammar marker. And I would use the Braidy doll to discuss story element after the reading. So, we would talk about the character or the setting and the story sequence using the story grammar marker doll.
And then in order to address shared writing, I would pick a phrase that relates to the book such as, say we're reading Brown Bear again, maybe I see a, and then the students, we could do that predictable chart writing with them filling out what they see. So, each student would say, "I see a teacher. I see a chair," whatever they see at the moment that they want to say for their little phrase.
And then I like to reiterate this, depending on how often you go into the classroom, you can do each step of the predictable chart writing or some steps and help the teacher or even assign homework to the parent.
And then in order to address alphabet knowledge and phonological awareness, every day I would sing a letter song with my groups. So, you can find these on Pinterest or TPT. Mine were cards. And so, for each letter, it had like a sound that went with the letter and we would sing it out as a group. This was really for my like younger elementary school age kiddos.
And then in order to also address the phonological and alphabet knowledge, we would incorporate the academic words. So, the programs that the teachers that I worked with provided like words of the month, and these tended to be a lot of sight words. So, there's a lot of crossover between sight words and core words. So, we put it up on a word wall or they might already have it up on a word wall and we would try to read the words, clap them out, spell them out. And there's other research out there or other strategies that are pretty well known at least in the education field on how to target those words as a group and do phonological awareness instruction with those words.

Marisha: Yeah. I love the practical examples here and just like what this could look like in practice. And then I have just a quick experience share too. I worked in an autism preschool and this was my first job that I had. So, I didn't know all of this research yet. And I totally resonate with what you said about you do what you can until you know better. Because there's definitely no way to know it all when we first start out. But I feel like I was able to use a lot of these strategies when I went into the classroom.
For me, circle time was a really good time to make that happen because the teacher was already using like we did songs so we could work on like we had an alphabet song and we would show the letters and we would work on clapping. We had a lot of that alphabet, phonological awareness kind of aspects built into that routine. And then I would always bring in a book and do some different activities around that. And at this level a lot of us or a lot of the students were just using like a single switch, a button like the BIGmack or whatnot. And we included some of those different activities.
We identified like the core vocabulary that we wanted to target during that. But I wish I had known, like if I were going back, I think I would have done like the RAAP strategy. I don't know, did they say in the book which ages you would start this with? Would you do the sentence activity with preschool too?

Venita: That's a really good question. They did say that you can start pretty young. I haven't gotten to a point where they said there's like a specific age limit. They give ideas for targeting these areas with different age groups, but they didn't say that like a child is too young, but I haven't completely finished it so I don't want to say that they do or they don't.

Marisha: Yeah, that's amazing. And I feel like in terms of like as I was in a typical preschool to where they definitely did activities. In the autism preschool, they also did activities with their names and letters and all of that. But I know in the general preschool, they cut up sentences and things like that. So, I've seen it in practice and I've seen little kiddos do it. So, yeah, I am definitely going to check out this book because it sounds like an amazing resource for this population. I'm so grateful you shared that.
But yeah, I think it's just really helpful because I think a lot of us are like we might be able to as we're listening to this, like we're able to identify strategies that we've used in our practice and this is just a way to celebrate what we're doing and reinforce those activities that we are using and then maybe think some things to add to our own session or to work with the teachers on like, "Hey, I heard that this was really great."
Oh, the reason that I wanted to share my preschool experience was because I would go in on Monday with the book and I would model all of that and then the teacher and the paraeducators would be in the classroom with me too. And it's the best thing when you walk into a classroom and they're using those strategies that you modeled the day or earlier in the week. So, I definitely led it a couple of times, but it was just really cool to see them reinforcing that throughout the day too. So, we definitely get to use a team approach to make this happen. So, it's not all us.

Venita: Yeah, I love that. Yeah, and like you, I've done both sides. Recently I had to help cover for SLP services and I got to work with the gen ed population in the schools and I could see why that collaborative teaching wouldn't work because their goals are very different. Maybe we're working on sound specific goals, but even in your group settings, you can definitely address those areas of literacy at the same time that you're targeting those other goals.

Marisha: Yeah. So amazing. And then we've got one more question. What are your go-to resources when you're implementing these strategies and just incorporating AAC and literacy in your sessions?

Venita: This is probably my favorite question because there's so many great resources out there and I don't know that everybody knows that they're available and you kind of wonder like where are these resources? But they're so disseminated. So, I like to summarize them all here.
In terms of AAC and literacy or just literacy in general, Tar Heel Reader is like an amazing resource. It was developed by the University of North Carolina's Center for Literacy and Disability Studies. And what you can do on Tar Heel reader is you can create your own books or you can look for books and you can look for books based on keywords. So, if let's say are doing like a core word of the week or the month or the day, then you can look up books that have that core word in it. So, that's a really great resource that you can use online. You can pull up on a projector or a smartboard and implement it within a group setting.
And then Epic books, which I'm sure you probably mentioned. I know that's a hot one in our field, but Epic books is great and you can access it for free if you have an educator's email or a school email. And then Overdrive is also great. You can access thousands, tens of thousands of books that are available at your local library for free. Just have to put in your library card information.
And then this one's not as well known, but I've spoken about it in other trainings that I've done. It's called the Novel Effect app. And the reason I like that one is because it provides sound effects for like popular books and they're building their library all the time. So, if you're reading Brown Bear Brown Bear, it's crazy. It knows when you are on to the next page without you even clicking anything on the app just based on like your reading of the book. So, if you say like "Brown bear, brown bear, what do you see?" And then you pause, it'll play music just for that page and sound effects just for that page. So, I think that's a really great way to get, especially younger kids engaged in the reading.
And then PRC or the Prentke-Romich Company, the creators of LAMP Words For Life and Unity and other AAC language systems and devices has a resource called Literacy Through Unity on the AAC Language Lab, which is a phenomenal program that's online that you can go to and they have free resources on the AAC Language Lab and they also have a paid subscription, but it's very little for the year. I want to say it's like 20 bucks for the year, maybe even less. But they have a literacy through Unity program that actually Karen Erickson helped develop. So, if you have a student who uses Unity or LAMP, then I would check that out.
And then Saltillo, if you have a student who uses like a NovaChat or the TouchChat app, they have these calendar supports. So, like for the month of January, they give you a book and then the words that you can target with that book and some other like literacy-based suggestions for that month. So, I love that resource and it's free.
And then the Tell Me curriculum, I just want to mention it here. I, full disclosure, don't have a lot of experience with that book just because I think it's primarily geared towards the preschool population and that's not a population that I work with, that I support at this time. I would love to learn more about it, but in my department, we kind of provide resources and trainings to the areas that you work in. So, at some point, I'm looking forward to diving into that curriculum a little bit more, but I just don't know a lot about it. But if you work with that population or like the elementary population, then I would really encourage you to look into that curriculum.
And then any of the resources from UNC Center for Literacy and Disability Studies is phenomenal. They have like trainings on there and modules. So, check that out. And then now we have this resource and I'll just say the name one more time because I think it's worth noting. A lot of the information I spoke about today is from this book and it's just a really helpful book. I will forewarn you though that it is like a textbook, which I wasn't really expecting because it has this like beautiful cover. It's very dense and it is bringing me back to grad school days. But you know what, it is just so amazing and every page is like a mic drop, so I really encourage you to check it out. It's called again, Comprehensive Literacy for All Teaching Students with Significant Disabilities to Read and Write by Karen Erickson and David Copenhager.

Marisha: Oh, I love books like that where there's just so many mic drops and knowledge bombs. I feel like it can be hard to find those types of answers. So, when you find a resource that really breaks it down and you just kind of hone in on that.

Venita: Definitely.

Marisha: And those were so many amazing resources. If you're listening and you had a hard time keeping up with all the amazing ideas, I'll list and link to everything that I can at slpnow.com/42, so you can kind of start checking those out. And then is it okay if I add one more that came up for me too.

Venita: Sure.

Marisha: So, I just discovered this maybe a few months ago. It's called Vooks, so V-O-O-K-S. But it they make animated videos for a lot of popular books. So, I think it could be a great activity for that independent or self-directed reading time because it really draws students in and I think they even animate the words in some or all of them. So, it's just a great way to draw attention to the literacy piece but it supports the students in reading that too and just keeping them engaged. Like the students I've used it with have loved it. So, I really like that one too.

Venita: I love that. I've heard about that resource. I haven't actually had the opportunity to look at it, but I think it is a great idea for that self-directed reading. So, thank you for sharing that.

Marisha: Yeah. And then I also just want to emphasize because I feel like one of the biggest barriers is getting access to books because you feel like in some SLPs aren't able to go to the library or they don't want to use library books in therapy because things happen. And so, I just think like the resources that you mentioned to get books for free, like Epic and Overdrive are so incredibly helpful because you don't even have to go anywhere. You have instant access to these digital books for free. So, I don't think that budget or time to drive and get physical books should be a barrier here.
And if those options don't work, YouTube has books as well. They have lovely like grandmothers who record themselves reading books. And definitely check out the video first. But there's lots of ways to make this happen. And I feel like after listening to this episode, you are equipped with so many strategies to use literacy in therapy. And so, I feel like that's just the last step to start practicing and working on implementing this.

Venita: Yeah, absolutely.

Marisha: And then Venita, is there anything that you would add or that you just really wanted to emphasize?

Venita: No. I think that you as an SLP already have a lot of these tools and knowledge in place and now you have a framework for implementing them for students who use AAC, so you're doing an amazing job and I hope that this information will help. It certainly has helped me as I'm reading through that book because it was just really nice to see like, okay, we're doing the right thing, but this is how we can do it even better. So, I encourage you to just keep doing what you're doing and you are going to do amazing things to help support your students who use AAC to learn to read and write.

Marisha: I love ending on that note. Thank you so much for sharing your time and wisdom with us. And if people want to find out more about you, where are the best places for them to connect?

Venita: Good question. I tend to hang out on Instagram @speechysideup. And then my website is also speechiesideup.com. And if you want to come join us on that Facebook group called the Core Calendar Club, we would love to have you. We do ask two questions in the beginning and one includes taking a quiz. The reason that we have you take the quiz is because we're gathering data that we are hopefully going to present at a conference in the near future. And we also want to see if the group is helping you from the start to finish. So, you'll take the quiz at the beginning and you'll take a quiz at the end. But it's a fun quiz. It has like maybe 5 to 10 questions and then you find out if you're like more like Ariana Grande, Lady Gaga or Beyoncé. So, we make it fun for you.

Marisha: Oh, I love that. Definitely something fun to check out. Okay, so I think that's a wrap. Thank you so much, Venita. You are amazing and such an inspiration and I definitely appreciated all of the information that you shared and thank you to the listeners for tuning in.

Venita: Thank you so much for having me, Marisha. When you asked, it was like such an honor and I think you are so inspiring too. And again, I love that we were able to combine both of our passions into this episode today.

Marisha: Yeah, this was definitely a highlight, so thank you.

Venita: Thank you.