Technology:
This course addressed strategies to increase engagement and participation using technology to maximize students’ progress on goals. Participants learned about new types of technology to utilize during their teletherapy sessions and to create interactive sessions to increase engagement.
Managing Behavior Online:
Challenging behavior can be disruptive to critical treatments including speech therapy. Now with many speech sessions occurring remotely, having a foundational understanding of problem behavior, why they occur, and why they persist, is of great importance. In addition, having a toolkit of evidence-based prevention, prompting, and reinforcement strategies can assist with making online speech sessions engaging, successful, and fun. This presentation outlines ways to prevent and manage problem behaviors so that speech sessions will be optimally productive and fun. Participants will learn about the basic functions of behavior, ways to prevent problems before they occur, and how to maximize learning time in sessions while using evidence-based interventions. Participants will learn how to implement specific strategies throughout online sessions for best outcomes.
Assessment Online:
One important feature of a quality speech-language disability evaluation is the appropriate elicitation and analysis of language samples. Research has shown that speech-language evaluators generally lack this important skill and instead either do not analyze a language sample or simply rely on conversational speech samples that often fail to stress the linguistic system enough to demonstrate true linguistic strengths or weaknesses. Dr. Crowley’s School-age Language Assessment Measures (SLAM) materials are widely used nationally and internationally as they elicit quality language samples and Dr. Crowley has developed a protocol on how to measure student performance. Most recently, Dr. Crowley has created approaches for online teletherapy assessments using the SLAM materials that she will share. This presentation is built to develop skills in eliciting and analyzing language samples that can be immediately applied to the clinician’s next speech-language evaluation, whether virtual or in-person.