The ABA Speech Podcast- Easy Strategies for Speech Therapists, BCBAs, and RBTs

Lori Frost is a traditionally trained speech-language pathologist who has spent most of her 40-year career in public schools working with preschool and elementary kids. She met Dr. Andy Bondy when she was working in the Delaware Autism Program and that’s when she began learning about applied behavior analysis. This fundamentally changed her practice and made her more aware of what was leading to good outcomes and what was leading to poorer outcomes for the students she worked with.

When she was working with Dr. Bondy in the Delaware Autism Program, they were helping a little boy who was non-speaking. They tried a range of things including speech imitation, sign language, and picture point systems but he made little progress. When he wasn’t able to communicate, he displayed challenging behaviors. It was only when Lori presented individual pictures carefully selected to be of interest to the child, let him touch the picture, and pass it to his communication partner, thus doing something very overtly to communicate, that he made progress. This was the beginning of PECS or the Pyramid Educational Consultants in 1992 where it grew to have 6 phases in its protocol, offices in 15 countries and made the manual available in 16 languages.

The long-term goal for the kids is to be as independent as possible and independence is only possible if you initiate, so teaching the kids to initiate communication is the first skill taught in the PECS protocol. The starting point always has to be tailored to each student’s likes and the things they enjoy. It can take time to figure this out. 

If kids start with PECS at the right time, they usually transition to a speech-generating device quite easily. This normally coincides with phase 4 of the PECS protocol when the kids have mastered the following skills:

• Initiation
• Picture discrimination 
• Able to make some picture sentences

Even after this transition, PECS remains a useful backup for when technology fails or is misplaced or forgotten. PECS has great results with younger kids. Around 80% of kids who are six and younger who are on PECS for nine months to a year start to talk.

Lori’s most important advice for parents or professionals supporting autistic kids is to listen to the kids and be guided by their wants and needs. 

What's Inside:

• How PECS began.
• How PECS has grown.
• The importance of initiation of communication
• How useful are speech-generating devices as communication tools?
• When should speech-generating devices be introduced?

Laura Smith was a speech-language pathologist, mostly in elementary education, before her children were born. After her daughter was born, she realized that she wasn’t reaching her developmental milestones. She crawled and walked late and feeding, dressing, and speech were also delayed. When her daughter was diagnosed with apraxia, she focused her professional interest on learning everything she could about it and started her private practice specializing in childhood apraxia.

For many parents, the diagnosis of apraxia feels devastating. They wonder if their child will ever speak. What does the future hold? It’s normal to feel sad and to grieve and there should be no guilt about having these feelings. Once you have a diagnosis, you can have a plan.

Early Signs of Apraxia:

• Lack of babbling - a quiet baby.
• Vowel sounds but a lack of consonants.
• Lack of a word by age one.
• Pop-out words - words that a child says a handful of times and then never says again.
• Word sounds morph into other word sounds.
• A “go-to” sound - a sound that is frequently repeated.

How to find an appropriate therapist:

• Search on Apraxia-Kids.org for a therapist in your area.
• Find a therapist through The Prompt Institute.
• Ask the right questions using the list on SLPMommyofApraxia.com.

Resources for speech therapists and parents:

• Apraxia-Kids.org is full of articles and on-demand webinars.
• Dr. Strand’s free online course, Diagnosis and Treatment of CAS, is packed full of useful information.
• Dr. Edwin Maas’s webinar, Principles of Motor Learning and Childhood Apraxia of Speech, is a great place to get an understanding of the basic principles of motor learning.

Laura’s most important advice for parents of kids with apraxia:

• Recognize that this is a lifelong neurological disorder.
• Early and appropriate intervention promotes the best outcomes.
• Don’t be scared to advocate for your kid.
• Have a growth mindset and be willing to learn.

What's Inside:

• Laura’s personal journey of having her child diagnosed with apraxia - testing, assessment, diagnosis, and intervention.
• Diagnosing apraxia - early signs and characteristics
• How to find an appropriate therapist
• Resources for speech therapists and parents

Whether you’re a professional or a parent, you can use these strategies from Chloe Hill in the classroom, in therapy, or at home. As a pediatric Speech-Language Pathologist, Chloe’s focused on pre-reading or emerging reading skills. She works with students to help them develop phonological awareness. For young readers, it can be as simple as:

• Becoming aware of letters
• Understanding that letters stand for something
• Exposing them to books
• Pointing out print while out in public

Chloe and I also cover some of our favorite reading strategies in the classroom. Chloe loves the CROWD strategy which stands for:

C- Completion prompt
R- Recall prompt
O- Open-ended prompt
W- Wh questions
D- Distancing prompt

What if a book is too hard for a child to understand? We also cover strategies you can use to adjust it for a child’s level. This episode is chock-full of so many early learning resources that can help any parent or professional who is looking for inspiration. Check out Chloe’s TPT store or follow her Instagram account for more ideas too.

What's Inside:

• A book can be a window or a mirror into a different world, and we should consider the diversity of our literature collection for the children we teach.
• How Chloe uses the CROWD technique to teach different reading concepts throughout a story.
• We should be mindful that reading progress looks different for everyone.
• How is reading development taught to children with complex communication needs?

Michele’s oldest daughter’s first word was “calculator”. Because she was highly verbal and  seemed to need less intervention, Michele struggle to get a diagnosis for her. Her second son’s presented quite differently, but Michele suspected that he too had autism. Knowing that early intervention was key, Michele was so disappointed to realize that it took until they were pre-teens to get help. She just wanted to understand why her children behaved the way that they do, and this sent her on a journey to get a Master’s in Behavioral Therapy.

Michele speaks directly to parents in her podcast Navigating the Spectrum. As a mom and an ABA therapist, she knows that an autism diagnosis can have an emotional pull on parents. For her though, the diagnosis was a relief since it means that she could get to work helping her children.

In this episode, we have a great conversation about some of the negative perceptions about ABA therapy, and how she approaches those challenges in her practice. She points out that you can do speech all day when you’re in the office, but that it only starts to click when the child also does speech at home with their family. One of the major reasons that she approaches therapy as a whole family event is that she knows exactly what it’s like as an autism mom herself. She practices inside Colorado, and outside the state, she provides teletherapy services.

We are putting together a top-notch teacher of ABA therapists and SLPs to provide teletherapy beyond Ohio. I am so excited for this new venture that will be able to help more children and parents around the world. Check out my website for more information.

What's Inside:

• For girls and highly verbal children, getting an autism diagnosis can be especially difficult since they don’t present like the checklists that most doctors are working from.
• Because she knows that there may be a team outside the school system, Michele works hard to include parents in the IEP goals so that everyone can be on the same page.
• As a parent and an ABA therapist, Michele would like Speech-Language Pathologists to know that she doesn’t always understand their lingo.

After Kelsey’s son started seeing a speech regression at 15 months old, she started on the journey to have him diagnosed. Pretty soon she realized that her second son was also exhibiting many of the same signs. Kelsey moved from Alaska to Canada because she hoped that universal healthcare would help her, but the waitlists in Canada were so long that she soon saw that without taking a more active role in therapy, she wouldn’t have good services for her sons.

When the local therapy center told Kelsey, “Brentley cannot come if he doesn’t wear a helmet”, that was the last straw for her. Because there was no plan for how a helmet was going to help him or what the plan was to eventually remove the helmet. It was just their quick solution to an immediate problem. That’s when Kelsey decided that she could use Mary Barbera’s courses and her own strategies to help Brentley.

I’m really into teaching my students lifelong leisure skills for maximum life enjoyment. For families, there can be a lot of barriers to enjoying activities together. I love following Kelsey on Instagram because she’s made it her goal to teach her sons to enjoy the outdoors safely. There are a lot fewer social rules outside and it’s a low-barrier activity.

There are parents like Kelsey all over the world. Parents who want the best for their children with autism, but don’t have access to resources or services. Whether it’s a waitlist that’s holding you back, a rural area, or any other of the dozens of reasons that parents can’t get the help they need, I want you to know that I see you. We’re going to be offering more teletherapy services very soon. I’m putting together a dream team so we can expand and help even more people. Check out my website for more information!

What's Inside:

• One of Kelsey’s main goals in therapy is to make sure that her sons aren’t isolated, and that’s really driven her to get outside of her comfort zone.
• Living in a rural area with limited resources helped Kelsey realize that she can be a primary resource for her children’s services and therapies.
• Performing what she calls “low-key assessments” lets Kelsey constantly keep tabs on where her sons are at developmentally.

How do you differentiate your speech therapy work from your autism work? Does it even matter? Serving the whole child, Braxton Baker, an SLP, and BCBA is a huge advocate of the big picture approach to therapy. For him, ABA gave him the vocabulary to describe what he's doing, which he can, in turn, apply everywhere. For me, after ten years of being both an SLP and BCBA, I can agree with him. ABA is just how my brain works now, and it helps me approach life with a better understanding of the learning processes.

In this conversation today, Braxton shares some of his therapy philosophy. He starts off IEPs and therapy goals with what the end result needs to look like in the natural world. Because he believes that if you’re not focused on the end result, then you miss the entire point of therapy services. You’re going to hear about how he brings in what he calls the 5 Ps into creating better goals and IEPs for his clients:

1. Creating processes
2. Giving them more purpose
3. Creating more possibilities
4. More overall progress
5. Making more peace

Sometimes emotions can run high at an IEP meeting, so Braxton’s approach is to diffuse the situation with “Do you think that this person or anyone here would have intentionally done something to be harmful?”. If the answer to this question is yes, then you have more than a communication problem; you have a trust problem.

Braxton’s approach is authentic, and it fits well into the real world. You can connect with him on Facebook. And if you love social media, check out my new TikTok channel!

What's Inside:

• The questions you can ask in an IEP meeting to make sure that all stakeholders are on the same page.
• How to make your sessions less rigid and embrace flexibility to meet your students’ needs better.
• Braxton prefers to think of ABA not as a therapy technique, but as a way to describe the world.
• If generalization doesn’t occur, did you actually teach a new skill?

Since July 2010, Erin Long has been the president and founder of Worldwide Speech. Parents who are living abroad may find themselves seeking specialized speech therapy, but for whatever reason, they’re struggling to find speech-language therapists in the countries they’re living in. That’s where Erin’s company steps in. Her services have expanded over the last decade, and she calls herself “a special ed company for anyone living abroad”. Erin spent a lot of time proving that teletherapy can work, but now it’s what people want.

Have you ever dealt with the paperwork for moving an IEP abroad? Erin says that it loses its status as a legal document since it’s created under the auspices of American law. Sometimes companies are reluctant to send employees overseas if there’s a child in the household with an IEP because complying with it in a foreign country can be incredibly hard. Erin’s company provides speech therapy, OT, and special education for children all over the world, no matter where their parents’ jobs take them.

Even for rural Americans, teletherapy is a viable option. Children with mobility issues can benefit from virtual services, and older teens who may be reluctant to admit they still go to therapy can see a therapist privately from their home. For some of Erin’s clients, virtual services offer support and a lifeline for the main caretaker who was previously isolated in a community that had no services of any kind.

Therapists and teachers have had to adjust in the last year, and it’s been inspiring to watch that pivot! If you want more tips and strategies on how to use teletherapy effectively, sign up for my FREE webinar on supporting children with autism virtually.

What's Inside:

• Rehabilitative services all over the world are just not equal to American standards, so the demand for American therapists is high.
• Providing services across multiple time zones can lead to some interesting scheduling problems, but with a little planning, families, and providers can flex with this challenge.
• Even stateside, virtual services can fill a niche for students who aren’t mobile or who live remotely.

Landria Seals Green’s mother says, “A child’s education is as good as the adult in front of them.” With that as her mantra, Landria became a medical-based SLP. For 20+ years, she’s focused on AAC technology, and she’s done a lot of AT work. At a Verbal Behavior workshop, she saw Dr. Vince Carbone present what she describes as speech therapy on steroids. She felt confident about her work as an SLP, but in order to become the best kind of therapist and to improve her marketability, she knew that she needed the BCBA certification.

What really drew Landria to the dual certifications was the method of collecting data. Becoming a BCBA made her more finite in her methodology and gave her more tools to help her students.  And as a therapist who is looking for any tool that will help her understand the child and see where they’re at, Landria has loved the possibilities that have opened up for her students.

Are we working with families to make sure that all of the funds and services they receive actually benefit the child? Landria sees the therapist’s role as a bridge to the child’s future. She listens to the family’s dreams for the child because she has what you might call a “greeter” theory. Is everything that you’re working on with the child only going to land them a job as a greeter at the store? And is that what the family wants for that child?

I think you’ll love this big picture approach to therapy that sees the child as a whole person rather than the small parts you might see in your weekly sessions. For more inspirational and fun-filled ideas about SLP and BCBA strategies, follow Landria on her social media channels as SLP Guru.

What's Inside:

• Why Landria prefers to find features on an AAC that fits a student rather than trying to make an AAC work on the student.
• By focusing on the “rhythm of communication”, Landria teaches students how to respond appropriately to peers, teachers, and casual strangers.
• Helping students find authentic social connections is a challenge that Landria takes on with a unique out-of-the-box approach.

Chris Wenger, whom you might also know as Speech Dude, comes from a family of educators. He started off as a special ed teacher, but he moved into the speech-language field when he realized that the tools he needed to help students were in speech pathology. Because he’s been on both sides of the IEP table, and because he was a teacher first, he’s seen a wide variety of students and he knows how to write an IEP that ropes in parents. Today we have a fantastic conversation about creating a curriculum that teaches older students how to interact online or with their peers on social media.

Starting with the phrase “How you do anything is how you do everything”, Chris’s interactions with his students online often inspire his TikTok videos and Instagram posts. Students need to be able to make inferences and they need the ability to perspective-take. If you see a picture that you like, you comment once on it. But five times? People will wonder what’s going on with you. If you comment on a really old video or post, it can give away that you’re doing a deep dive on a person’s profile. These are the kinds of scenarios that Chris identifies so he can teach his students how to interact appropriately online.

What’s a digital footprint and why should students care? Even for kids in the AP classes, they still need some explicit instruction on online “netiquette” so that they understand that what happens online can affect their offline life. The idea that kids today instinctively understand online behavior doesn’t help kids who actually don’t. That’s where Chris tries to fill in that gap.

Chris’s best advice for a future or present SLP is simple: You don’t have to be a perfect SLP; just do your best to be a happy one. Your positive vibrations can be felt throughout your classroom. Check out Chris’s social media channels or his Boom Learning store for more strategies or curriculum for older students.

What's Inside:

• How to get a teen to turn their camera on when no one really wants to.
• Chris teaches his students about “the hidden curriculum”, or the unspoken rule about how to act online.
• If you want more engagement out of a classroom or an audience, Chris’s positive energy and approach fires up participants.

As a young child, Nathan Morgan was diagnosed with autism. Along his journey of speech therapy, IEPs, and occupational therapy, he felt inspired to give back to his community so he went into social work. Today, through his day job and his self-advocacy work, Nathan supports families who are trying to navigate what autism means.

Within the autism community, people have different ways they like to interact with other people. Some may prefer a blend of verbal and sign language, or only verbal, or some verbal but mostly some form of technology. Unfortunately, verbal communication is still the communication that most people want to push, and this leads to some tension over how to encourage inclusivity when everyone may prefer a blend of communication methods.

The pandemic has been an awesome opportunity for individuals with autism to connect with others in ways that make them feel the most comfortable. Nathan approaches this with the question, “What can we take moving forward that will help us improve our community?”. From virtual conferences to Facebook groups to face-to-face game nights, Nathan shares a variety of ways that the autism community is interacting and communicating with each other throughout the pandemic.

If you’re looking for more ways to engage and communicate with your students, check out my FREE April webinar called 5 Strategies to Help Your Students with Autism Engage and Communicate. Everyone who attends the live session will receive free therapy material and a certificate of participation. See you there!

What's Inside:

• Knowing that communication is going to look differently for different people, Nathan has created group interactions that allow adults and teenagers with autism to communicate in the way that they feel most comfortable.
• Nathan shares his thoughts on how autism can be weaponized in language and discusses both his professional opinion and personal perspective on whether to say “autistic” or “person with autism”.
• For adults with autism, it can be harder to find resources, especially when you combine that with the myth that autism is a childhood disease, so Nathan is taking on that challenge with his Facebook group.