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

Are you nervous before a therapy session because you don’t know how it will go? Let’s make therapy fun and functional again by giving you the tools you need to reach every single one of your students. If you have students with autism and they’re not making a lot of progress, or you’ve used every trick in the book to help a student and you’re stumped, my course Help Me Find My Voice is a great next step for you.

Inside Help Me Find My Voice, you’ll learn:

• Assessments to use with students
• Common SLP terms explained
• Simplified goal setting concepts
• Easier data collection
• How to plan therapy sessions for students with emerging skills

You’ll also have lifetime access to this course, plus access to a private Facebook group where you can collaborate with other SLPs.

This course is geared for speech-language pathologists, but it also benefits anyone who’s working on communication issues with students. Enrollment is open now, but it will close on April 14th. And I don’t know when I’ll open this course again.

We’ve had over 400 people join us already for this 5-hour ASHA-approved course because the bite-sized modules mean you can fit your learning into your busy day. The cost is $99, and we will send you the proper CEU certificates upon completion.

I also have a FREE webinar on April 6th, 7th or 13th called 5 Strategies to Help Your Students with Autism Engage and Communicate. If you attend live, you’ll receive free therapy material and a certificate of participation.

What's Inside:

• When you’re seeing a student with autism or with complicated needs and they’re not communicating on their own, what can you do?
• If you need ASHA CEUs, but don’t have time for a course, I’ve structured this course to meet your current time constraints.
• Come and collaborate with other professionals to help you breakthrough any roadblocks you might have on difficult cases.

Recently, Deidra Darst was able to take her son who has autism to get his first big haircut in four years in a salon. Using tips she learned in my Help Me Find My Voice course, Deidra’s son has really grown in his communication abilities. As a Speech Language Pathologist, Deidra has seen first hand how ABA techniques can blend or enhance the work she does with clients. You’re going to love hearing how BCBAs and SLPS can collaborate to help students find ways to share their voices.

In her work as an SLP, about half of Deidra’s caseload was students with autism. But it wasn’t until her own young son was diagnosed that she got a true window into what a parent was experiencing. She realized that 30 minutes of therapy a week just wasn’t enough, and she wanted to help parents take a more active role in therapy. Since then, she’s learned how to support parents better in her SLP practice, and she leads with the phrase, “If you have questions, ask”.

How can SLPs and BCBAs learn from each other? This idea of collaboration is one that Deidra and I really explore. What we’re doing is similar, but we’re calling it different names. And we miss out on the chance to collaborate positively when we can’t understand each other. Deidra and I talk about some techniques in each of our respective fields that can enhance the work each professional does for a child with autism.

Be sure and check out the Help Me Find My Voice course that helped launch Deidra’s success, and send her an email if you have any questions.

What's Inside:

• Using vocabulary that parents and other professionals can understand and improve the chances that our goals are aligned and everyone’s headed in the same direction.
• Teletherapy has had a surprising benefit for therapists because it’s given them more contact and communication with parents.
• Deidra’s advice for parents and professionals working with autistic children.
• The hardest part of therapy is actually communicating with the team and making sure we’re all on the same page.

How do we help our students generalize their language skills in the community and the larger school environment? Fellow “unicorn”, BCBA, and SLP, Katie Castro is an alumni of my Help Me Find My Voice course, and she’s also a clinical director of speech therapy at Children’s Autism Center.

You can’t just hope that a student figures out how to generalize on their own. As therapists, we can build a system that helps lead them to generalize. Generalization is teaching students to apply skills in different environments and circumstances. We may not realize that when we teach a word, there are many different examples of that word. For example, how many kinds of dogs are there? If we show a picture of a Labrador and only that kind of dog, it doesn’t teach a child the variety that is inside the word “dog”.

It’s hard for therapists to have the resources they need to teach generalization which is why I ended up creating some. Katie talks about how she uses multiple examples and teaching loosely to help a child learn a less strict definition of a word.

It’s important to keep really specific data when you’re working with students, but when you combine specific data with IEP goals and first trial data, it can be difficult to keep track of where a student is progressing. If you want to make your progress reporting easier, then Katie and I have some techniques to streamline the process.

For more SLP strategies, be sure to check out my FREE webinar 5 Strategies to Help Students Engage and Communicate. Register now for this April event.

What's Inside:

• How I use a variety of flashcards to expand the concept of basic vocabulary words like dog, cat, or car.
• Maintenance goals can feel like a drag for a child, so I share ways that I keep it fresh for that child.
• Collecting and reporting data might feel complicated, but Katie and I have both streamlined the process so that it’s easier and takes less time.
• Katie incorporates parent training to help reinforce what a child learns in speech therapy, and that has actually been made easier by the pandemic and telehealth sessions.

There are times I feel stressed as a therapist because I want to get through all of the goals for my therapy session, so that’s why I love Liz’s playful approach to therapy. Liz Willis is an SLP who went back to school for her BCBA so that she could provide speech therapy and ABA services. Her dual degrees have made her feel more confident in the services that she provides, and you can really see how they inform how she structures her therapy sessions.

It can be tempting to jump straight into the language piece of an IEP, but Liz suggests that you consider focusing on the social and play piece first. Every interaction begins with social engagement, and when therapists nail down the basics of engagement first, expanding into other skills can reap dividends.

Liz is passionate about supporting teachers and providers, and she shares some of her favorite strategies including:

• How to use play centers to teach language skills.
• Her favorite assessments and why you should use more than one.
• How to encourage play in students who only like one kind of play.

As an educator or service provider, there are going to be times when you just don’t have the skills your students need. Liz says that you need to recognize when you don’t know something and refer your clients out to someone else. There are so many pieces to the therapy puzzle, and collaborating makes your job easier. If you’d like to connect with Liz, you can reach her at her website, on Instagram, or at [email protected].

What's Inside:

• How early learners who have autism may play differently from their typically developing preschoolers, and why that matters.
• Does every moment need to be language enriched?
• Which comes first: engagement or play? Liz gives her thoughts on this chicken vs. egg dilemma.

Have you ever worked with a student who needs an AAC, but you don’t know which one would work best for them? If you have, then you’ll appreciate this episode. Annabeth and Mara from The Fanny Pack Therapist have found that their respective therapy styles, as a speech language pathologist and an occupational therapist, mesh so well that they teamed up to help more students.

Annabeth and Mara love how AACs empower students to find ways to communicate their thoughts and needs with the people around them. They’ve found that AACs don’t prohibit verbal speech, but simply give a child a way to communicate while they work toward verbal speech. You don’t want to miss their ABCs of AACs on their Instagram page from October 2020.

By collaborating together, SLPs and OTs can get a more holistic view of a child. While the SLP is evaluating a child’s expressive and receptive skills, an OT can come in and see where a child’s fine motor skills are. And once they’ve passed the initial evaluation, together, the SLP and OT can try signs, low-tech options, verbal speech, and just about anything else to see what works.

I hope this episode gets your wheels turning on how you can work with other professionals or how you can help your students or clients use AACs to meet their therapy goals. Make sure you check out The Fanny Pack Therapist for more ideas on collaborating with other therapists.

What's Inside:

• Listen to how Annabeth and Mara collaborate in the age of COVID.
• The importance of shared goals with other intervention specialists, and what that can look like for your students.
• Communication is a basic right, and an AAC gives a student a chance to communicate.
• How can someone improve their competency in the AAC world if they don’t have any previous experience?

Something I find so inspiring is to watch a student find a way to communicate with the people who exist in their world. For over 47 years, Susan Berkowitz has been helping students with autism learn to communicate by whatever means are necessary. Using Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC), Susan is reaching students who are complete non-speakers or who struggle to communicate the full range of their thoughts and feelings.

Susan has a wealth of knowledge, and she’s passionate about helping teachers, parents, and fellow Speech-Language Pathologists find the tools they need to teach their students. She tells the amazing story of one of her students who stopped his self-injurious behavior after she created a POG book filled with 120 pages of pictures that he was able to use to communicate that he wanted to run outside.

There are so many options for AACs, and since the technology for this field is so new, there will continue to be new options every year. Susan has found it helpful to become good friends with the AAC customer service reps so that she has direct insight into this industry.

If you think one of your students would benefit with an AAC, or you’d like to learn more about apps, games, or strategies that you can use in your therapy sessions, Susan is really a wealth of information. Check out her book, her websites, or her TPT store for more resources.

What's Inside:

• Why we should never rearrange the symbols on a child’s AAC system.
• How to move a student beyond requesting and into communicating.
• Susan’s tips for using technology to teach students how to communicate.
• If you have limited cognitive energy, you’re limited by how much effort you can put into communication. 

Can you imagine if someone stood over you and evaluated your behavior with a clipboard while you were trying to act naturally? Organically evaluating your student or client’s progress while they participate in group activities can be a challenge, but it’s one that Shayna Gaunt happily takes on.

There are a variety of assessments that are available to use to help you figure out where a student is at, and Shayna often combines assessments because none of them are completely perfect. She’s rewritten the VB-MAPP to help with some of the more abstract skills that students have to learn, and she shares with me how she creates groups for in-person or telehealth therapy sessions.

Shayna and I know that it can be lonely and overwhelming for therapists, especially since so many of us are virtual now. I am so excited to announce The ABA Forum, which will be a free virtual conference for SLPs, RBTs, and ABA therapists to help give them resources to support their clients. On March 2nd, 3rd, and 4th, we invite you to join us from 7:00-9:00 pm for a chance to network with other experts. And while this event is free to attend, CEUs will be available to purchase if you need them.

What's Inside:

• When putting together a group session, a certain level of independence is needed before a group will benefit the student.
• Social skills can mean a wide variety of skills, from ordering something from McDonald’s to standing in line at school.
• Learn how to obtain CEUs through The ABA Forum on March 2nd-4th.

The day before his 3rd birthday, Dr. Mary Barbera’s son Lucas was diagnosed with moderate-to-severe autism, and she felt like she’d fallen into a hole. Even though she had a nursing background, she still felt completely unprepared to help her son. Lucas wouldn’t keep his clothes on, he only spoke pop-out words, and she had no idea how to even start helping him.

Like many other parents, Mary took on the role of the lead therapist as she worked to find proven therapies and techniques that would help Lucas. In the early 2000s, it was like the Wild West in the ABA world. Inspired by her work trying to find solutions for Lucas, Mary went on to get a BCBA-D, and wrote her dissertation on The Effects of Fluency-Based Autism Training on Emerging Educational Leaders.

Mary is passionate about helping families help their young children. She believes that the sooner we can get to the parents and teach them how to help their children, the better their families will be. Today, 1 in 6 children have some kind of developmental disorder. The increase in this population puts stress on the medical community that hasn’t quite caught to the demand. Many of these parents are sitting on a waitlist because therapy places are backlogged.

The information that Mary shares help parents get a headstart on how to help their children, and it puts tools into their hands that help them become their child’s best advocate. Her newest book Turn Autism Around: An Action Guide for Parents of Young Children with Early Signs of Autism will be published on March 30th, and if you sign up now, you can join her book launch team.

What's Inside:

• Mary shares the early signs of autism that parents and professionals should be prepared to identify.
• Why Mary chooses to focus on the age 1-5-year-old age group, and why she stopped giving lectures to focus on other means of getting her message out.
• Mary shares some of her most influential mentors, and how she’s been able to collaborate with some of them.

Lisa Chattler works with middle school and high school students as an SLP. In this podcast, we talk about how to teach conversation-based skills to students who are struggling with asking and answering questions. All of us learn some form of “faking it”, where we pretend to be interested in casual small talk with strangers or acquaintances. For children with autism, this back-and-forth can be even harder as they learn to ask and answer questions while actively listening to their conversational partner.

Lisa’s strategies cover different learning styles for students, and include:

• Using videos as prompts to retell a story
• Teaching students to summarize a story
• Having an expository retell
• Modeling a conversation and asking “Did I get that right?”
• Transcribing the conversation

Students who are confident in therapy can sometimes stumble during tests or in classroom discussions. Why do some students avoid asking for help? Lisa shares her thoughts on the self-advocacy piece of asking questions that we may be overlooking as we work with our patients.

What's Inside:

• The classroom goal structure can affect whether a student learns to ask questions.
• Teaching exactly to the test will completely miss the concept of whether a student can answer questions correctly.
• How to create IEP goals for teaching students how to ask and answer questions.
• The one piece of advice that Lisa, after 42 years as an SLP, would pass on to new speech-language pathologists.

Pediatric speech-pathologist Cari Ebert’s passion is the birth to three stages where she focuses on laying the foundation for children to begin to speak. And even though my focus is on middle schoolers with autism, we have a similar approach to teaching children. I loved hearing how Cari lays down a solid foundation of nonverbal skills before she moves on to teaching speech.

A big focus of Cari’s therapy work is setting a child up for success by teaching them how to “learn to learn”. Speech therapy isn’t about making the child less autistic; it’s helping the child learn how to engage with the important people in their life. With that in mind, Cari shares how she uses these 5 foundational skills to prepare a child to learn.

Cari's 5 Autism Early Intervention Foundation Skills

1. Non-verbal imitation
2. Joint attention
3. Self-regulation
4. Purposeful play
5. Early language development

Cari is passionate about helping children with autism communicate in any way possible. Listen carefully to how she uses PIE, or participation, independence, and engagement, to move children forward with her goal to help them find a way to communicate with the people they care about.

What's Inside:

• How to get a child in a ready space to learn requires strategies to bring them up to or down to the right level.
• AAC should not be the last resort because every child needs and deserves a way to communicate.
• The language Cari uses when she discusses a child’s behavior is something she carefully considers so that it doesn’t affix a negative label on the child.
• Every moment doesn’t have to be a speaking moment with the child, especially when you’re in the beginning stages of building rapport.