OTS 119 - Supporting Students to Self-Regulate with The Alert Program®

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Welcome to the show notes for Episode 119 of the OT Schoolhouse Podcast.

Do you know how your engine is running right now? Is it high, low, or just right?

In this episode of the OT Schoolhouse Podcast, Sherry and Molly discuss the OG self-regulation program that helps all ages understand their alertness. Using analogies that The Alert Program® utilizes helps people understand their alertness in an easily comprehensible way.

Listen in wherever you get your podcasts.

Resources:

• The Alert Program Website
  

• Youtube Channel
  

• Facebook Page
  

• Engine Analogy? One Metaphor Does not fit ALL!
  

• Who can benefit from Alert Program®?
  

• Preliminary Findings on Children with Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder

Guests Bios

Sherry Shellenberger, OTR/L, is an occupational therapist who has always wanted to enhance the school experience of children. She believes working together with the educational team allows for positive change to happen. She has over 30 years of experience working in different settings, including a camp setting. She has focused on developing practical ways to teach people of all ages how to incorporate sensory integration theory into everyday living. She has published numerous products and books relating to self-regulation.

Molly McEwen, MHS, OTR/L, FAOTA, has a professional career spanning over 30 years. She has practice experience in major medical centers, public and private schools. She has established and maintained a private practice serving children and youth developed a professional continuing education business, and provided consultative services to educational institutions and industry. She has been an occupational therapy educator at Texas Woman’s University, the University of Texas Health Science Center at Dallas, and most recently at Pacific University in Oregon. She is currently in private practice in Hillsboro, Oregon. Molly has received both state and national awards for contributions to the profession and is continually promoting occupational therapy as a cost-effective approach in supporting and maintaining healthy communities.

Episode Transcript

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Amazing Narrator   

Hello and welcome to the otschoolhouse podcast, your source for school based occupational therapy tips, interviews and professional development. Now to get the conversation started, here is your host, Jayson Davies class is officially in session. 

Jayson Davies   

Hey there. And welcome to Episode 119 of the otschoolhouse com podcast. Thank you so much for being here today to kick off this episode. I have a quick question for you, and you might have heard this one before. How is your engine running right now? Are you running a little high? Maybe you're running a little low, or is your engine running just right now? I must admit, right now, my engine is running a little bit high, and that is because I just had a wonderful conversation with Shelly Schellenberg and Molly McEwen about the Alert program and now how it has evolved since Sherry And Mary Sue Williams first implemented the program back in the 1980s now if you're not familiar with the Alert program or the reference I used to kick off this episode, you should be the Alert program is one of the OG self regulation programs out there, and it has been used worldwide to not only support people who don't quite understand their own arousal or alert levels, but it has also provided caregivers and adults of children to have the language and analogies to use to better help their students, their kids understand their self regulation. Sherry Schellenberg is actually one of the founders of the Alert program, and also joining us today is Molly McEwen, who has actually helped Shelley and Mary Sue to build the wealth of research around the program and help to create what it is today. So let's go ahead and cue that intro music, and when we come back, we're going to dive further into the Alert program to talk about the famous car analogy, the research behind the program, and how you can use the program in your classrooms with success. So stay tuned, and I'll be right back with Sherry And Molly. Sherry Molly, welcome to the otschoolhouse podcast. How are you doing today, Sherry? We'll start with you. 

Sherry Shellenberger   

Oh, awesome. Thank you, Jason for having us. It's good here. I'm in Albuquerque, and we got a little bit of snow. Any moisture we get is always welcome. So it's been a great day to hunker down and be with you on the podcast.  

Jayson Davies   

Absolutely. Thank you for joining us from Albuquerque and Molly. What about you? Where are you joining us from today?  

Molly McEwen   

Well, I'm joining you from White Salmon, Washington on the Columbia River Gorge, looking out at Mount Hood and all its glory, and that beautiful Columbia River, so beautiful, sunny day, cold, I think 

Jayson Davies   

it's cold just about everywhere right now.  

Molly McEwen   

It feels like, yeah, like.  

Jayson Davies   

Yeah. So Well, thank you both so much for being here. Really appreciate it. You know, the Alert program is definitely something that I learned about early on in my career, it is one of those programs where it's been around a little while. Thanks to both of you, and we really appreciate that. I know a lot of the newer programs that have come out that talk about social emotional learning and social emotional skills self regulation, really kind of throw it back to you all at the Alert program as kind of the founding a little bit. So I'm excited to talk a little bit about that before we do dive into that, though, I want to give you both the opportunity to just kind of share where you are at right now in your ot journey. So Sherry, you want to go ahead and share that first sure, 

Sherry Shellenberger   

in terms of my ot journey, it started for me really about how I became an OT in terms of the I have a brother who is quite a bit younger than I am, and I was 12 when he was born, and he had Down syndrome, and so I got to see this is so now you're we're dating ourselves and myself. And I knew anybody that can do the math can figure out where I am in life. But I was 12 when he was born. He was born in 1970 it was the beginning of a lot of the early intervention programs. You know, up until then, a lot of our work in OT didn't exactly involve that particular population and so, so what I got to see was this little guy who needed a lot of extra support and got to go from two months until throughout he was 21 to different for his school career, basically, if you will. So the early intervention was like a half day program. It had OTs, PT, speech and some teachers, early learning specialists. And so it was a time when I was like, this is beyond amazing, and I want to know more about this. And so that's how I kind of got into OT. And then I think pediatrics in general has been fascinating to me, and I kind of haven't ever left you know what I mean? I have a great. Of working in the schools. That's where I started my career. And so I think right now, we'll talk later in the podcast about kind of where the Alert program information has evolved, what we've added, stuff like that. But for right now, that's probably the best kind of general background of where I am in my professional journey. Which the cool thing that I realized, too about myself and OT was that the thought of doing one thing for forever in the rest of my work career was appalling to me, like almost, that's almost death by nervous system. And I thought ot seems like a very good bet, because there's so many incredible areas that you can work in. If you felt one wasn't a match for you, you wouldn't get out of school and go, Oh, no, I have done a terrible thing. 

Jayson Davies   

Absolutely, you know, it's amazing, right? You hear about OTS that, you know, they come to school based occupational therapy for the first time right out of college, or they don't come to school based ot until they're 40, 5060, years old, even sometimes. So you're absolutely right. It's nice that we can work the gamut of the life cycle as an occupational therapy practitioner. So yeah, love it all right. Molly, what about you? You want to share a little bit about your ot background?  

Molly McEwen   

Yeah, I, I've been kind of all over the board, but always pretty much working with children in pediatrics as well. And I came to OT from two parents who were both healthcare professionals, and thought that at the time, when I went to school, there weren't a lot of options that talk about dating you for women that were very exciting. Education was one in nursing. My mom was a nurse. She said, Absolutely not. You don't want anything. You don't want to so the allied health professions were a real viable option. And ot won the prize, and it has served me very well. I think what has served me the best is it's not a technically based profession, it's a philosophically based profession, and so it's a way of life. And so once you become an OT, you live it and you practice it in your own life, in addition to the services you offer as an OT. So I worked, started first in the schools. Was my first before 94 142, was even in enacted. It was a very progressive school in Minnesota that I started with and learned a lot and moved on, had other positions, and ultimately ended up in academia and taught for a while, and now doing primarily consultation and but not I'm not working much. I'm in up here on the Columbia River porch, enjoying time 

Jayson Davies   

sounds like a great place to be and talking to you, yes, yes, and thank you for talking to us. We really appreciate it. So you know what we've learned a little bit about you both. Let's go ahead and dive into it. And I don't know which one of you wants to take this question, but I just want to ask you how you define self regulation? Well, 

Sherry Shellenberger   

I will start and I will let Molly wrap it up, which she is very excellent at doing. And so despite her trying to give her all the time, she needs to be able to relax, I count on her a lot for what I would term higher level questions. So but we talk about self regulation, it's the ability to attain, maintain and change arousal appropriately for a task or a situation. And that's, you know, the words of it. It definitely involves many neurological connections and different levels in the nervous system. And so that's how we define it in our courses, and in in the original in the leaders guidebook, and then mal you want to talk a little bit about some of the parameters of that need.  

Molly McEwen   

I think an important concept when we talk self regulation is context, how we attend based on the activities we're involved in and the environment in which we are engaged. So that's pretty important. Piece of it is so how well we are able to stay alert and attend is dependent upon the demands of the environment. There's been a lot of emphasis of recent on this concept of self regulation, and it really can be defined differently depending on the frame of reference or discipline from one where one comes, for example, psychologists will define it very differently than a basic scientist who's studying it, neurologist who's studying it, or a teacher who is looking at it. Research and study in this concept has helped us obviously get a lot better understanding, and it has helped us to come up with and identify different levels of self regulation. These levels of development are developmental. They're intertwined with each other, and they coincide also with the hierarchy of the nervous system. So now. Know, which we didn't know before. There are different types of self regulation, and we're going to be talking a lot about that today. But as OTs and the schools well know, sensory regulation has really been seen as a really important skill set for kids, and it helps determine success in learning. So teachers, educators have been more and more focused on it. And often what teachers and educators focus on in self regulation is emotional self regulation, which is not the self regulation that we're going to be talking about today and that the Alert program focuses on primarily, but the Alert program focuses on all levels, but the underlying sensory motor self regulation is really the focus of the Alert program as a as a good basis and a foundation for higher level learning.  

Jayson Davies   

Great, you know. And I want to dive into that in just a moment, the sensory motor versus the emotional self regulation. But you hit on a very important topic that I think a lot of us overlook, and that is that everyone defines self regulation differently. The same is said for sensory like you're talking to a teacher, and they have a completely different view of what a sensory item is compared to an occupational therapist. Same thing with self regulation, as you mentioned, they tend to think of that emotional self regulation where, depending on what we're looking at, we could be talking about emotional self regulation or more of that sensory motor regulation. So I just want to thank you for bringing that topic up. That's not something we've ever really discussed on the podcast before. So thank you. Now, diving a little bit further into that. You did mention sensory motor regulation and emotional self regulation. So can you dive a little bit further into that and how they influence each other?  

Sherry Shellenberger   

Also? I'll give a start, and then we'll see where we go with it here. Because I do think it's really I get reminded, Jason, you have such a good point. I get reminded of my anatomy teacher years and years ago in the coursework in otschool, going, let's get oriented here. And it's like, you don't want to start trying to identify a body part till you know what you're doing and what you're looking at, right? And I love that, that kind of framework, and I think that's true with our definition. So just having those conversations with people about, Oh, tell me more about what you mean or what you see, as far as that, because to me, sensory motor self regulation is when what we start with first in the Alert program, which is using sensory motor strategies to change how alert you feel, okay and emotional regulation being typically more about your feelings, you're sad, you're mad, you're you know, whatever. But being dysregulated or well regulated in both are hugely important. And of course, even though they're two really distinct different forms of regulation. They are hierarchical. They are entwined. When you're really great at sensorimotor self regulation, it supports you and provides a foundation for developing good emotional regulation. When you're good at emotional regulation, it helps to support the lower level sensory motor self regulation. So while they're really they affect each other. And I know as OTs, we all know a lot of this by focusing first. Our experience was by focusing first on the sensory, motor self regulation that that gave a really good baseline. It was also something the individual, if they have the potential to be independent in self regulation, could do for themselves. It was strategies that our teachers could use and build into routines. And it just, you know, if we want higher levels of the brain to function optimally, we want to assure that those foundational levels are strong and solid and in good place, so that both can support each other. And so I think that's where that defining what we mean and being really clear, and not only assuming that when we say self regulation, that it's only emotional regulation. So Mahler, I know you might want to build on that a little bit.  

Molly McEwen   

Well, or give an example quite simply, if one if your level of alertness is too high or too low for appropriate attention to whatever task or demand comes from the environment, then learning at a higher level, that's problem solving. Being able to learn a new task can't occur or doesn't occur? Well, the system then will either overreact. You'll have, will have temper tantrums. Even adults have temper tantrums. You have a lot of disorganized behavior, or you underreact. For example, you shut down, you withdraw, you don't participate. So emotional learning can't really evolve. Beyond this, what we called, and I think most of these have heard the fight, flight, fright response, that's very much of a biological level. And when that is not organized, then emotions are, you're you're emoting, all right, but you can't use those emotions, identify them, explain them, in order to problem solve and learn at a higher level, more sophisticated learning just will not occur if those lower levels of the brain and sensory motor regulation don't have some degree of organization. 

Sherry Shellenberger   

Sorry, Moll didn't mean to step on you there, but yeah, I mean, that's really the deal. And so kind of the differences in these two self regulation systems, I think, make it really hard for a lot of us as practitioners, because much of the literature, not all of it, but a lot of it, addresses the perspective of emotional self regulation and doesn't really address the nervous system, the central nervous system, arousal systems that what we call for obvious reasons, because I did not want to run groups where I'm talking about arousal with young children, so we named it the Alert program, and took that liberty. But this is where I feel like as OTS week, I get so excited, because this is a wonderful piece that we have to offer that is so valuable, and to help our teachers and our parents in this podcast, that's the scope we're looking at right to help them understand the concept of sensory, motor self regulation that's totally in line with our holistic view of how we treat and wanting, You know, treat children, treat clients, and how we consult and support our colleagues, our teachers, our our counselors, our social workers, all those folks, is that an awareness of that, of that part of self regulation, I think, plays a really huge role.  

Jayson Davies   

Absolutely. I love how detailed you both get in your answers. This is awesome, I love it. 

Sherry Shellenberger   

 May not feel that way by the end, but okay. 

Molly McEwen   

we're also very excited about this. This is corner of the market for OTS. I hope they absolutely understand that more and more many do, and many have yet to learn about it. So hopefully they will. 

Jayson Davies   

 Yeah, and so, you know, Sherry, you started to dive into it. And so the Alert program, one of the most famous analogies from the Alert program, I think everyone knows it, is the car engine analogy. And so I want to just open the door and let you all talk about how that car engine analogy fits into self regulation for children.  

Sherry Shellenberger   

Cool. Well, I may, I may hog this one up in terms of answering, but Molly will stop me if, if she's got something to add here first. So Mary Sue was the person. Mary Sue Williams was the person that really initially started the work and that, and I'll talk a little bit about how that got started. But basically what we've ended up finding is that, but just by saying, how does your engine run, or if your body's but rather than making it a question, we really want to do the teaching, we said, if we had one thing we could do over is we wouldn't say, how does your engine run. We would talk about the engine analogy first, and then allow the individual to tell us about it. So, so I'll just disclaimer right there, but we talk about, if your body's like a car engine, sometimes it runs on low, sometimes it runs on high, and sometimes it runs just right. And as I said, Mary Sue developed that terminology. We work together on it. The main purpose was to avoid jargon and to avoid blame. So I don't want anyone in the podcast to think I'm talking down to them about their knowledge level, but keeping it simple seems to help the most in terms of how we can get buy in and understanding across different disciplines. So So basically, when we avoid jargon and blame, which we want to do, of course, it just helps everyone to understand. We all have engines. They all fluctuate. So what do we do about that? And how do we be able to be more independent in our ability to support ourselves, right? So it's appropriate the engine analogy, I think what happened is, it's just it struck a chord. It just made sense to people, right? You know, you don't drive at 70 miles an hour all the time, but sometimes it's really fun to drive at 70 miles an hour, right? And we don't get into miles per hour. But I mean, just the engine analogy, I feel like has a lot of resonance per people. So what we found is that the engine analogy is appropriate for all kinds of levels, cognitive and age levels. Oftentimes, if it's older students, like middle school or high school, I would say something like, when I talk to kids, this is what I tell them, right? So that they're getting to be able to be part of that analogy, but not necessarily having to embrace the engine words if that's too deemed to be too babyish or whatever, right? So we want have to have language that everybody can use and that caregivers can use, so that because if for those who don't have words yet, or may not be able to have words in their development, it'll be their caregivers that are going to need to do the identifying of engine levels and to be able to build things into the routine to provide good, comprehensive care. So, and that's kind of addressed in a couple of the links I gave you guys that you're going to be putting in to a couple of the blogs and some of the information that way. So that's kind of the engine thing. Mal, did you have anything you wanted to add on to that? No, we're good.  

Molly McEwen   

Actually, go ahead, 

Jayson Davies   

if I can really quickly. I was actually going to ask Molly if she wanted to add on to that. But also, do you change how you're talking about the engine run program, if you're talking to maybe a teacher and a therapist, as opposed to talking to a child, do you explain it a little bit differently? Or how does that look? Or is it the same? 

Sherry Shellenberger   

 Yeah, me, it's kind of the same. All I do is put in front of it. When I'm talking to children, I say, da, da, da, right? And so they still can understand the analogy as adults, but I'm not kind of comparing them to a car, right? Or I could say we use the metaphor of a car in order to be able to describe this. 

Molly McEwen   

It gives a framework. Doesn't matter how old you are, but it gives a framework to understand the analogy, just as once it whether you're, you know a three or five year old or 90 year old, you understand the concept. And once you understand the concept based on a simple engine analogy, you can use a lot of different vocabularies, but you have the concept and the organizing construct to deal with it. 

Sherry Shellenberger   

And I will add, I know I'm always adding, Jeez Louise, so, but I will add that in the courses, we really go into depth in that about that, Jason, because it's such a great question that you bring up, and that it's not that we need you to stay with the engine analogy. That's the way to introduce it. When children have something else they are totally jazzed about. Of course, we would use analogies related to that, right? But in order to kind of get everybody on the same page at first, that's what they're where we go. And then, if we want to customize it, we'll get into that later, especially in different cultures or different countries. You know, may be much more appropriate to do a different analogy, but start just so we know what the language is about. Yeah, 

Jayson Davies   

yeah, absolutely. All right. So I might have, I might have jumped the gun by jumping straight into the car engine analogy. A little bit. Call it clickbait. Call it ear bait for podcasting, I don't know, but taking a step back, you mentioned Mary Sue, can you give us just a little bit of background on where the Alert program came from and how it got started? 

Sherry Shellenberger   

Sure, sure. So Mary Sue and I are both occupational therapists, as most of the people here would know, but she had in and now again, I'm dating myself here because but see good things can last for a long time and be and be modified and updated. So that's always fun. So in 1987 she had the opportunity to work with an 11 year old girl who was very bright and very capable, but her engine often went really low. And what Mary Sue realized is she wasn't understanding what her arousal levels look like. There was no vocabulary. So she like we have vocabulary around feelings as we develop as children, we don't have vocabulary around our alert levels. And so what she realized is she wanted a non jargon, non blaming way to teach this young woman who is so bright and capable that she could be responsible for and understand more about her own self regulation. So that's when she got into the analogy of your body's like a car engine. Blah, blah, blah, blah, right now. Again, this was a really bright, capable young woman, so and she was also such a wonderful truth teller, if I if you will. You know so many of our kids are right? And she said, after she understood the concept, because she was very bright, it was just more like, Oh, she said, You know, I think I maybe get in a fight with my siblings in the morning so that I'm in a better place to be able to get myself ready to get out the door, right? And I know. And so what a beautiful thing, right? So it could be called emotional regulation. Oh, is she depressed? Is she anxious? We can go into all those things. And I'm not saying none of those are concomitant at the same time, of course, but you know, it's, it's that moment of giving kids language, just like we have for feelings about our alert levels that's really. Goal. So the engine analogy, great. But, you know, obviously customization really good. And in this case, even though she was 11 and a real bright, capable kid made total sense to her. 

Jayson Davies   

Great. And I guess driving off of that you've already kind of started to mention, right, that this program has been around for 30 plus years, which is 40 plus years, no four, no 30 plus. 33 or so sounds like. Anyways, it's been around a long time, and as we all know, things must adapt. I mean, Disney has had to adapt. Country, everything has to adapt, right? And so what about the Alert program? How has it adapted? And what has driven some of that adaptation over the years. 

Sherry Shellenberger   

Great. Well, again, I'll probably start it off, and Molly will chime in here. So basically, what's happened is we kind of thought we were going to only be developing work that related to the kiddos that we were working with at that time. Mary Sue and I, as we, as we started to use the analogy more, right? So let's started with it. First of all, it's based on sensory integration that airs developed. It's a framework and not a recipe. This feels so important to me. This is our, you know, our jam as OTs, right? Is not recipes, but frameworks. And like Molly had said, even philosophies right reflecting the art and the science of what we do. So it has three stages and 12 mile markers. Those have proven to be constant, and we continue to refer back to those, because what we did was we put those down as we worked with the information. We put those down and laid them as the order in which one learns about self regulation. It doesn't mean you have to spend a different session on every one of those things, but this is what we found to be true for children and for adults, because, of course, the adults in the individual's life need to know what's going on and why we're talking engines and all that good stuff too, right? So originally, we had designed it thinking, Oh, it'll be for children who have some learning disabilities between the ages of eight and 12. It's a population that we had the most, that we were directly working with at that time. What happened was the engine analogy made sense to people we really didn't have language to talk about all the great observations that we do as OTS about alert levels, and so basically that when we shared that information, it expanded into other populations. And that's better because we had our colleagues saying to us, oh, here's the application in this particular area, and cognitive ability and developmental ability and that kind of stuff. So the framework thing, I know I might kind of beat this to death, but the framework is really important to me. It's so easy to say, Oh, we're just going to do a treatment plan, and here's how you do it, and then that, and we're going to assess what you know, what the outcome was at the end. And that's just so belittling our wonderful knowledge as therapists, right? And in terms of been best practices, lots of our colleagues contributed to us learning more, expanding it across different diagnostic and age populations. So we feel really good and really confident about how it has started and then how it's evolved and and expand it so, Moll, you want? 

Molly McEwen   

I think it's important to all species self regulate. 

Jayson Davies   

This is true. 

Molly McEwen   

Across the age. So it isn't a concept that only applies to children or to children with special needs. You know, some people say, well, that program was developed for children, so it's not appropriate for this population. I have, I have to tell you, I can't enter a room in socially, personally, or enter a therapeutic environment for services provided without taking in information about how this person I'm talking to organizes their nervous system through sensory motor input, through self regulation. It just is automatic, and it is the basis, based on that I can kind of predict how they occupy their time, or what they're not doing or need to do. It's self regulation is normally developing in normal developing individuals. Is quite automatic and self conscious subconscious. We don't even conscientiously attend to it, but we all know that people have varied degrees of competence in their ability to self regulate, and the better self knowledge we have, the more competent and self regulating, and that's another piece of this program is it allows children and people across the age span that learn to understand their own nervous systems in a way they never have in the past, the stuff that comes automatic they just think happens, but no, this is what your nervous system needs to be able to attend. End, this is what your nervous system needs to be able to stay alert and be at your top place for taking this exam or for playing in this tennis match or whatever. How do we set up ourselves for optimal function? And once it's well understood and used, then that becomes automatic. People will integrate that piece of knowing that it's not important, necessarily necessary to follow the stages and milestones as a program is developed. But as Sherry said, that is a developmental continuum. Once you understand that concept, then you know, if somebody's not getting it, you need to go back further developmentally and understanding it. There's a developmental continuum to understanding self regulation and how we all learn it and become aware of it, and to develop it and to get more sophisticated in using it to learn optimally. 

Sherry Shellenberger   

I'm sorry, the blog that relates probably the most to what Molly has just said is called engine analogy. One metaphor does not fit all, so that's just kind of a fun one. People could check out on the website if they were interested. I know I interrupted you there, Jason, 

Jayson Davies   

I was just going to kind of feed off of what you were saying, or both of you were saying, about the recipe versus the framework, good or bad, that is true. I mean, sometimes I get, I get frustrated with ot because of that very reason, it's hard to tell people right, we have we work off of a framework. A lot of times, not necessarily. Recipe is what people want, right? They want that step by step by step. How do you get from point A to point B? But sometimes there's a one, a, two, A, three before you get to B, and a lot of sub areas, and you kind of have to go back and forth a little bit. So yeah, just wanted to touch on that. And then the other thing was, I was going to ask about what population the Alert program was designed for but I think both of you somewhat answered that in your response, and that initially, it was for this 11 year old girl who maybe had a learning disability. It sounds like that. The Alert program was based off of air sensor integration, which I know was primarily looking at learning disabilities in students or in young children. And now, as Molly kind of alluded to, right? Everyone has to self regulate. And I know this program has been adapted and adopted by entire schools and entire districts and whatnot, and so they're not using it just for learning for students with a learning disability. They're using it for all students, which is really cool. I don't know if either of you want to kind of elaborate on that point a little bit. 

Molly McEwen   

Go ahead, Sherry. 

Sherry Shellenberger   

Well, yeah, I'm really again, that kind of is like point of pride for me that we're looking at something. And that was the, probably the thing that I loved the most when we were working in the schools is that we had administrators who once they understood what we're talking about, and that we could help to, kind of basically help to solve the problems, right? If, as a principal, you've got this kid that's constantly in trouble, and we can find out how to help that to not happen quite as often. That's an amazing thing as a teacher, if you've got a kiddo who just can't handle more than a couple minutes of time before they get distracted or disrupt others, or whatever it's the it's the cool thing is, it's true for all of us. And I kind of think that maybe the pandemic emphasized that a little bit, right? Because we found out a lot about ourselves. How do we work? How do we concentrate? How do we focus? Is it good? You know, they had articles and stuff, and that's kind of a fun thing about the are your best self online course that I'll get into later, but, but, but it's like There were articles all over the place, zoom, fatigue and this and that. And how do we work? And can you carve out a place where you you need to do your work alone in a quiet place, and then the kids are doing school over here, and all these other things. So there were so many tough things about the pandemic, but actually, it makes sense like it, it almost amplified a lot of the information that we had to learn about ourselves and how we work and how we work best, and when we work best, and what we do, like you said, mild to set our nervous system up to be as successful in what we're doing as possible. 

Molly McEwen   

Well, we limited our environment to just home. For a lot of us, we weren't in lots of different environments. We many people were isolating. So they isolate. That in itself, was a huge change in input to their central nervous system, almost the fact that if they went out every day to a highly stimulating environment, all of a sudden they have to stay home. I mean, it took people quite a while to, I always say, find their pulse again, to figure out. Where their set point was to figure out what that's all nervous system modulation, nervous system, you know, their level of attention, arousal of the nervous system, to figure out where that is, and then what it is that sets it off in a positive way, and what it sets off in a not so positive way. 

Sherry Shellenberger   

Yeah, so that I think you're exactly right, Jason, that it just self regulation is for all of us, and the more we understand about it, the thing that I've been excited about is that what we see then is a lot more compassion about what other people are going through and understanding rather than, Oh, that's just so and so, and they irritate me and they're just awful. And then, you know, like, if we can start to learn more about that, it then helps with our compassion and understanding, even, even in terms of the emotional regulation, right? 

Jayson Davies   

Yeah, so one of the things that I really appreciate about established programs like the Alert program, being around for 30 plus years means that there's been some time for others to take a deep look at it. There's been some time for researchers to get their hands on it. And so I wanted to ask you, of course, I know there's been a lot of research, but if you could boil it down, what are some of the key research over the years that you have just been super proud of about the Alert program that has come out, and I'm sure that has driven the program forward. So just wanted to ask for maybe a few highlights within the research that that you'd like to point out. 

Sherry Shellenberger   

Yeah, perfect. The first thing I'll say is it's so interesting because, of course, we're not doing our own research. I Mary Sue and I will fully say we are not researchers. We are clinicians, through and through and so so other people do research on your information, and then sometimes you find out about it, and sometimes you don't right. And so the great thing is that what has happened for us is that, especially in the FASD populations, there have been some beautiful more, more what people are looking for, sometimes especially our administrators, in terms of published studies that are significant. And again, that whole social science thing you address, Jason of you know, well, what did they do, and how did they do it, and da, da, da, da, but the FASD population research, especially, and you can find that in our on our I have it the link that I gave you for posting for people, and then just on our website, in the footer, it has all the research. But for instance, like there was in 2018 there was a wonderful study that they did, and it and, oh, and I should brag on what I think Molly has helped me to organize and make so much better for practitioners, which is, it's not just a list of citations for the articles. What we did is, and Molly was so helpful in this is we went through and listed, kind of the different levels of research and down to popular press right from the big, more scientific stuff. And then also, we made a comment after each of the articles so that you could know generally what that article was about. Is it worth your time and effort to go look it up right, as though we all have time to go. Oh, yeah, sure, I'll look up these all pages and pages worth of citations that don't end I get them and I don't even apply to my setting, right? So that part feels like important to say. So when people go to that document, they'll be well led as to what might apply to them. But the one that I'm probably the most proud about was this one by Nash in 2018 and you'll be able to find it in the in the document on our on the website there, and it's called preliminary findings that a targeted intervention dealer program leads to altered brain function in children with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, and That was in the journal for Brain Science, but basically our comment about that one is, and we have a YouTube on this one too, because previous research showed that the Alert program improved behavioral regulation and executive functioning, specifically self regulation, in children with emotional problems. So these in this study, they had already been identified as FASD and having emotional challenges. So the study asked if the Alert program also leads to improved neural function in associated regions, and they go on and tell the population and the age range and all about the how they did a randomized control design study with pre tests, post test measurements. Go no go. Functional MRI. You know, they go into all of it. But what was so cool is that at the end, they said that the findings suggested that the treated FASD groups were starting to resemble children who had never been exposed prenatally to. Alcohol, possibly implying that more mature neural integrity was actually a result, you know, so to have evidence like that, where and and functional MRIs, like, that's just, like, totally got me psyched, because then you're talking about, oh, okay, we're really seeing things. And I think that speaks to the whole and it's appropriate for all different populations, especially those that are having executive function challenge from a treatment perspective. But just that one got me like super jazz. That was pretty fun, you know. So let's see. 

Molly McEwen   

Not very often that we get some basic research technology and evaluation strategies that help us look at Applied clinical practice and its impact on actual change of the nervous system. We know we change the nervous system because behaviors change, but we don't often have neuronal visible neurological changes that we can see in some of those CAT scans and MRIs and stuff, and this showed some. So that was very exciting. 

Jayson Davies   

Yeah, I was just trying to figure out how to summarize that up, and you did a perfect job of it. Molly, you're right, like, we don't get that type of research a lot. So that's very cool that that they were able to do that awesome.  

Molly McEwen   

I do want to say in this, before we change topics here a little bit, is that I want to remind practitioners out there, research informs practice, and practice informs research. So just as the Alert program at various levels and it's intertwined in different types of regulation, self regulation, research and practice, do the same things, and Sherry reflects what and I'm an academician, so I can say that I'm also a clinician, but I'm a clinician. I'm not a researcher, but I am here to say as practitioners, we are researchers by virtue, virtue of measuring baselines, evaluation of your patient or client, and evaluating and measuring outcomes of your programs. And if we do that, well, which is what I call program evaluation. And if you set it up, it is very significant means of research. It is research you are providing the foundation and the basis for more highly sophisticated you know, your PhD type of research is where you can have control groups and all that, but we provide the data that suggests that further research needs to happen. So we need to make sure that we don't this our own data that we produce on a daily basis. It's very valuable. It helps us, guides our treatment on a daily basis. It doesn't have to come out of a formal research project of how we make decisions. It's also based on our experience and interaction with our clients and patients, 

Jayson Davies   

absolutely, and we've been talking about that a little bit more on the podcast about creating your own evidence, and that's something that practitioners can do, and it is. It's not easy. It does take a little bit of work, because you do need to, when you're implementing a program, you need to actually know what you're implementing, and that takes time and energy to set up beforehand. If you're coming up with an individual treatment on the fly. It's hard to put those together and say that you have collected data on a specific program, but if you do kind of put your treatment plan together at the beginning and think about, okay, this is what I'm going to do over the next several weeks. Then at the end of that, you can go back and say, did that work or not? And then you can repeat it or change it a little bit and get more and more data. So absolutely great point Molly.  

Sherry Shellenberger   

Well, one of the things that Molly, and fair point Molly about that, I think a lot of times as clinicians, we don't think of ourselves as researchers, so I'm really glad, glad you brought that up. And the thing I was thinking about there is that Molly constantly reminds me, you know, the road that we should not take is to not consider what outcome are we looking for before we start the doing, right? You know, just giving fidget toys and movement games and stuff like that, without knowing what it is that we're wanting as the outcomes. And that's one of the things, Molly, I feel like you've been so valuable in in talking about that are stepping back. Jason, you referred to it too, like stepping back looking at, what is the treatment that, what is it that we are feeling needs to change or needs to be supported for this individual? 

Molly McEwen   

And that's, that's your outcome. I mean, that's what you're measuring. And sometimes researchers, that I will say, or clinicians, will measure the success of whether or not a child goes through the milestones or hits the various stages. And that's the outcome, success, no. Success. Well, that's part of the process. But you know, if a kid gets through the mile. Milestones, but behavior doesn't change. Then, you know, then are we successful or not? No, we there's a reason why we're using a particular intervention approach, like the Alert program. We use it because we have a problem that is interfering with one's ability to be competent and successful in their daily routines and occupation. And what is that problem? This is one. This is another. If one of them relates to self regulation, then that's the Alert program is a viable tool. But when you apply it, you have to see, is there change in those behaviors or not? And that tells you whether you're successful. 

Jayson Davies   

I love it. I love it. I love this feedback between Sherry, kind of, like giving big picture and then Molly, just like boiling it down to, like, exactly. It works so well. 

Sherry Shellenberger   

How come we really need each other? There you go. 

Jayson Davies   

All right, so diving into our next area of this discussion, I guess we can call it. I want to talk about some of the best practices for implementing the program. And I'm sure you have a ton to say about this. You already talked about the different steps to getting to supporting a student, but what are some of those best practices for implementing this program to make sure that we're actually going to as we've just kind of talked about, use a program that actually makes progress? 

Molly McEwen   

Well, one of the one of the best practices for implementing the Alert program, I believe, is that we when we're working with children, particularly if they'll just keep it to children this situation, the more we as adults understand our own nervous systems and how we ourselves self regulate, the better we can understand the kids we work with. I can't tell you the number of teachers that go in and the teacher say, you know, help me with this student. I've got this and this and this. And as I watched the teacher stress, dealing with a lots of students, lot of special needs kids, or just regular kids, I watched that teacher's nervous system, and how that teacher regulates, or doesn't regulate, where they can pull themselves together, where they become organized, how they do that, and when I can mirror that back to that teacher and integrate that with the concept of the engine analogy. It looks like your engines running pretty high. Mine would be too if I had to deal with these kids, blah, blah, blah. You get into that. Look how you are, helping yourself get back organized so you can focus on your kids in the classroom, that kind of conversation. Sometimes I don't see the child for treatment over a couple sessions because I'm working with a teacher. Once the teacher has that, sometimes the child ceases to even be a problem in the classroom. The teachers got it can just intuitively go at it. Once they go, ah, oh, that's like me when I do this. But and I need to help the teacher maybe come up with different strategies, more age appropriate, different sensory diets than the teacher needs. So that is a huge best practice to me. We have to make it worse. The teacher's while to support the self regulation. We have to have them, but they have to have a buy in. If they don't, then they have the pull out mentality, take the kid, fix them, bring them back. Well, the teacher has more knowledge and skills. They feel more satisfied with their job, more efficacious when working with a child. So we can do a lot of modeling in the classroom. That's another big piece of implementing it, demonstrate with the class of the child, so others can see how it's done and support the child and the adults learn a lot from that, 

Jayson Davies   

absolutely. So I have a question. Then, when implementing the Alert program, is it best to implement individually, in a small group and a whole classroom? Can it be all the above? But maybe one works better? What would you say about that, 

Sherry Shellenberger   

I would say all of the above, because I've done all of the above, and it requires, but it does require different setup, different amount of time, different level of commitment to and like Molly said, you know, modeling things and giving teachers tools, one of the things that I find a lot is therapists, and why we stay away from jargon so much is that we don't want to teach the teacher to be a therapist. We want to teach support them to be able to be a teacher. If they have new math concepts, they have to get through these their standardized testing that's going to happen related to this, then we want to give them what they need to be able to do the math concepts right? And so that's what I think is beautiful about what you had said there, Mal and in I in our online courses, we really get into, what would you do if you were doing a group? What would you do? How do you share information with this person, this kind of person, versus that kind of person? So. I'll just say even an example of that is for teachers. If a teacher has, when you go through the course and when you do some of this work, and they look at, say, a sensory motor, the sensory motor preference checklist that we have for adults, if a teacher loves to do things in the movement area, then those would be the first things that make the most sense and they feel the most comfortable within their classroom. It doesn't mean that eventually they can't do things in all five areas of mouth, move, touch, look and listen, right strategies, but we kind of want to start with where are our teachers comfortable? How do we support them? All that kind of thing. So I'd say in terms of best practice, make sure that you get trained, make sure that you stay up to date. We have Facebook and emails and newsletters and YouTubes and stuff like that. Use a lot of the resources. We have a lot of free resources on the website designed for individuals, groups, you know, that kind of thing. So just, I would just say the thing that I found a lot in terms of helping people, making it like kind of lightening the load for therapists, was a lot of the free resources that we do have put up there. But definitely you can do it in all those different ways I joke about, and I think this is in the in the Alert program online course, that you might not want to start out with a whole classroom of kids that have behavior disorder, diagnos and give everybody fidget toys. That's not probably your first go, right? What you want to do, though, is find out what works for these particular kiddos, and then we go ahead and introduce those things into the classroom and help to support the teacher. So, I mean, that's kind of a duh, but I mean, it's also a thing that sometimes, as OTs, we get very gung ho, and we're going to start out with the hardest situation. Let's give it some time. Let's find out what's working. As Molly said, Do fidget toys even work for that particular individual? We don't know. We're going to try it out. We're going to assess whether that seemed to be a right match for that individual. So I hope that answers kind of the whole ball of wax, really. 

Jayson Davies   

Yeah. And I was going to ask you about some of those activities you have up on the website, games, Songs For Children, but you kind of ended that answer and with the word assessment, talking about assessment. And so I want to ask you about that. I don't think we even technically had this maybe in our questions today, but when it comes to assessing students, is there a particular tool within the Alert program, or do you recommend a specific tool for kind of assessing students, self regulation? What would what would you recommend? 

Sherry Shellenberger   

Well, no, there is not a specific tool in the Alert program. What happened was it really, and our emphasis really is on when we know that there's identified behaviors or challenges for self regulation or executive function or that kind of thing, then definitely we can try the Alert program as a viable thing to do, but there are plenty of different standardized kind of things out there, I mean, and things keep evolving. I don't have any one favorite thing, because I think sometimes just even doing general motor skill evaluation, we can see the regulatory components right? And so I'm not dissing on standardized things. I'm just saying I think there's we kind of assess it in all that we do, right? Molly was talking about, there's 

Molly McEwen   

some. There are some the Canadian occupational performance measures. Copm has a tool for kids that is a checklist format. And I think if you use a Likert scale checklist, I've used that with teachers a lot, where they can observe a whole classroom, or they can observe an individual child, and there are B behaviors in which they say, this child is good at this or not. And those behaviors are very basic, fundamental self regulatory behaviors like can turn transitional from transition from one activity to another, gets along with his peers, you know, on and on. If you look at those type of activities, you have to have pretty good self regulation to do those for elementary school. So those are there are, yeah, therapists have extrapolated from existing tools certain developmental skills that require a high amount of self regulation, and use those as ways to measure on a scale of maybe one to five how good this kid is. And then you have a baseline pre test, post test. 

Jayson Davies   

Thank you. I was fully going into that question, assuming that the response was going to be, you can use the sensory profile, you can use the SPM, and that's not the response that we got. And I actually appreciate that, because so many times we I get questions, and you probably do as well from school based OTS is like, how do I interpret the SPM? How do I need to. Do the SPM or the sensory profile to look at sensor to look at self regulation. And what I just heard you both say is that you can use alternative types of tools. You can use the copm, you can use some more observation based assessments to get some of that information, as opposed to relying just on the SPM. And maybe you do use the SPM or the sensor profile to help you a little bit, but there are alternative methods. 

Sherry Shellenberger   

Yeah, definitely. And one of the things that I loved when we did a couple little projects with some students, especially middle schoolers that Molly you had met, we had talked about doing the copm, and it's so interesting because the the middle schoolers perceptions of what they're great at and what they're not is very disparate with the other adults, right? And so then that tells us something, right? Because then we have to be very gentle about how we show, oh, you know, some people would say this is how we show that we're really good at these particular skills, right? But it's that it kind of speaks to that, while we're teasing about the car engine analogy, this is really personal, right? It's our nervous system, for gosh sakes, and so we don't really want somebody point out to us, Hey, you don't do this, and you don't do that, and I know that's not what the OTS that are listening here would do, but remembering how scary it can be when we're talking about changing how our nervous system feels. 

Molly McEwen   

If I can just add one, I know we're probably running short on time here, Jason, but you have to ask yourself, why are you evaluating? Are you evaluating to determine the underlying issues that interfere with one's ability to perform their task, or are you evaluating a level of task performance which is like the copm, which you can get a baseline and then watch that performance and see if it's better, because that performance requires self regulation. So there's two reasons there for evaluating. And, I mean, there's probably more, but those are, yeah, yeah, exactly. I could come up with some more, but anyway, 

Jayson Davies   

no, but that actually kind of leads to the next topic that I wanted to discuss. And, you know, I remember in otschool, this was very common, and it's still a common discussion between therapists using top down or bottom up approaches, and so I wanted to ask you how you feel, or where you feel the Alert program fits on that top down versus bottom up approach, and the benefits of that approach. 

Sherry Shellenberger   

Yeah, great question, because that's a little bit of especially in the schools, I would say that most people are thinking about top down, right? We're gonna, we're gonna think our way through this. We're gonna by golly, once we're past second grade, we don't get an afternoon recess, or whatever the rules that are currently in play are, because now we're big people, and we can sit for longer and that as though that's a goal, right? You know, but the Alert program incorporates both of them, because that's what we needed in our setting when we were utilizing it, that depending on the individual's cognitive level, it would be a terrible shame to waste the ability to use both when it's used well, the Alert program is supporting from a bottom up way for that top down to be able to be reflective, problem solving, all those other good things, right? So I guess my opinion is that this is again, where we shine as OTS. A lot of programs are only thinking it through. So now I'm gonna, I have to be careful how I word this, but there was a professional from another discipline who had said to me at one time, I know you guys are doing all this great stuff with your kiddos, and I came across this program where every five minutes, this buzzer will go off and the kid has to check whether they were paying attention or not. Ugh, right? Like the like, my innards get tight. You're just hearing that that that's such a top down way. Now you've interrupted the person, if they actually were paying attention. Now you've interrupted them with this alarm. And so what a bad use of technology, in my opinion, there. But this is where as OTS we we get it. We know that we want both. We want to support the nervous system from the bottom up, and we want to use top down skills to say, well, this is where we have to always use our words. This is where we have to know that if we can't use our words, we need to take a break. This is where we know that we can ask the teacher for this help, you know, whatever, and and kind of piggybacking on that, I'll say that this is a big emphasis to me, and it's important, if you've been trained in the Alert program, you understand that we would have separate gages, because these are separate areas of the neurological system, one for measuring our engine speedometer, one for measuring our emotions. Don't put them together. High does not equal angry and low does not equal sad, right? We I can be in a low state of alertness, taking a nap on the couch. I am perfectly content, right? So this is that moment to just be really clear, as great as we are holistically, being very precise in how we're supporting the correct neurology of those kind of things, and we want to have both. But what we found is we needed to start the kiddos we were working with and young people that we were working with. We needed to address that sensory motor part, support that then we could have conversation time from that top down kind of way about, well, what happens when this happens, and what do we do? And what are acceptable things that won't cause other people trouble, won't cause us trouble, those kind of things. So I've gotten into some into the weeds a little bit there. Moll, you want to help pull me out. 

Molly McEwen   

Oh, I think then just, I think, as OTs, we need to remember we don't function like a fluorescent bulb, we function like a very intricate crystal chandelier, and we go in lots of different directions, up and down, all to get the lights to go on. And so fluorescent bulb, you just start the beginning, and you work your way through. But a crystal chandelier is just all the pieces that come together for excellence, competency and health. 

Jayson Davies   

We shine bright, like a diamond, if I may. All right. All right, moving on. Thank you for that answer. I think it is. It's a tough one, but I really appreciate you going into the detail that you did. It's not an easy answer, and it's something that I think we have various beliefs on. And I don't think there is one right answer. And I think Sherry kind of really narrowed it down. You know, it really depends on where the student is, some students, you might be more effective using a top down approach, and other students, you might need to use more of that bottom up approach. And also depends on what their goals are, where they are at in life. And there's so much right, like, that's why I love the PEO model, right? You have to look at the person, the environment and the occupation. You can't just look at one all right, earlier. I think it was Molly, you mentioned a little bit about program evaluation. That is something that I have seen OTs, especially in the schools, struggle with, mostly because we don't have time to do that. But it's very important, you know, that's what leads to us developing that evidence that we talked about a little bit earlier, as well being able to create our own evidence comes from program evaluation. So I want to ask you, when it comes to the Alert program, is there a way to evaluate your own program that you use with the Alert program as a school based ot? 

Molly McEwen   

Absolutely, program evaluation is my big, big thing that I would like to see OTS tick and just run with it, but I think it goes into that category of research, and it makes everybody apoplectic, and they get intimidated and all that, but not necessary. It's not that difficult. First of all, in implementing the Alert program. Training really provides accurate guidelines, and the training manual provides what we call fidelity measures, which is the degree to which an intervention or program is delivered as it was intended. Because sometimes research comes out and they say, Well, they probably didn't do this or they did that. Did they apply the the intervention appropriately? Did they implement the Alert program? Right? Well, the fidelity measures, which the manual really doesn't explicitly go through, but implicitly goes through. Are there the the we are planning to publish a list of fidelity measures so therapists in schools and researchers more in the scientific research month, and could use those to make sure that when they are using the Alert program, all the pieces of it are well implemented. Program evaluation. When therapists start at the beginning of the school year or start with a child, it just if you have a basic outcome you're after, you evaluate the level of that on some Likert scale or some standardized test, and you determine all the strategies that you are going to use to be able to get to them, and you just list them. And then you go through and implement, and you look how to and you come back and you evaluate, did I succeed or not? Is the behavior change? Is the child's performance as we anticipated or not, what went well, what did not? All of those are program evaluation. If you don't do that, you just go blindly and applying therapeutic interventions without really knowing if your time is well spent. I worked with a a. Whole school system up in Canada who implemented the program because the OTS were getting more and they were getting more referrals than they could handle.  

Jayson Davies   

Sounds familiar. 

Sherry Shellenberger   

And yeah, nobody else has had that problem. 

Molly McEwen   

And much of the issues, a lot of the issues, it was early elementary school, were self regulation, and so we created a program the therapist and and I consulted with them over a period of about six to nine months where we took the Alert program and we said, these are all the pieces of the Alert program that we want to implement in this classrooms, for teachers in regular classrooms that have some special needs kids. Some of those kids came out for special intensive treatment, but the teachers were trained, and then we evaluated. We listed out the tools, the strategies, how we had stuff on the portal for them to go and get, you know, boosted up on information of this or that, all the ways that we could really bolster those teachers ability to implement a program in the classroom. And we had them all outlined, then we implemented it, and then we had an evaluation, which was a checklist at the end, the improvement the teacher's response, the teacher's sense of efficacy, the teacher's sense of being satisfied much more in the classroom was astounding. They could take that data into the Board of Regents, which is what they have up in Canada, and they got more positions funded. There are other programs I've worked with where they do a pilot, go to your administrator. There are lots of grants out there, small grants that will give you monies to either pay for your time or for equipment. There are lots of principals who, right now, when they're really struggling, would say, Oh, fine, what do we need to do get it going on a small, one school basis, two or three classrooms, teachers who want to learn something new, put it into place, but create your program evaluation framework before you start, then implement it and evaluate. And you have your data 

Jayson Davies   

so simple. 

Sherry Shellenberger   

I know, and I will say Molly did a brilliant job, and these were great OTS up there too. But the in my mind Molly, another payoff, besides that it was so incredibly effective, was that some of the things that the therapists were spending a lot of time doing, so again, coming back to how limited we all feel about our time, were not the things that the teachers found to be the most helpful to them, that's the beauty of the program evaluation. They dug into this. And so then as a What a relief. As a therapist, oh, I don't have to do that. Frees me up to do these other things that because, mil, you are always so great at saying, we kind of sell ourselves short on the amazing amount of information that we have to offer people, and we just think it's kind of a given, and it's not. We have to explain all the good stuff we're doing and why we're doing it in the way that we are. But I found that to be such a fascinating component of that program evaluation that you did with them mal the things that were so labor intensive for the therapist that they thought they needed. 

Molly McEwen   

Promote necessary, right?  

Sherry Shellenberger   

Yeah, yeah.  

Molly McEwen   

And, you know, and that's that'll get a teacher, a therapist, an administrator, buy into that, because when there's only so much time and so much money, if you want to use your human resources well, if you want to use your your financial resources to buy equipment. Let's buy the stuff that's going to work. Let's use the time where we want to, you know. 

Jayson Davies   

Absolutely, absolutely, and that's fantastic I could do. I mean, Molly, maybe we need to have you come on again and just talk an entire episode about program management one day. But I think it's something that many of us need to start doing, and we're not doing, and I think we might see the value of it. We should. I don't know if our administrators see the value of it, and we need to better connect that value to them. We need to share with our administrators how it could be even beneficial to them, for us to do a program evaluation. I think administrators have become scared of OTs, PTs, speech therapists, doing program evaluations, because it often leads to spending more money. And I think we need to figure out how to be more on the same page with them, so that they're more inclined to to encourage us to do program evaluation. So, yeah, that's kind of my take on on that a little bit, but we need to do more of them.  

Sherry Shellenberger   

All right. I'll just say to them, I know, I know we're getting along, but that my experience, basically my experience in the schools, was that people said, If. You keep telling everybody information, you're just going to get more referrals for OT. And we actually found that to be the opposite, that when we gave classroom teachers enough to support to deal with the couple little things that were going on the classroom, they didn't turn into being major things. They didn't turn into more referrals. We got more appropriate referrals, but we did not get more in number referrals. So I think that speaks to some of that fear of the administrators you were saying, Jayson.  

Jayson Davies   

Yep, yep. And we need to let them know that. I mean, they just assume that they hear us complaining, they hear us saying that we're drowning, and they assume that if they listen to us, we're just going to say we need help by having more OTS on staff, but there are other ways to say, I need help, but I don't need more OTS. I need to be allowed to do this, or allowed to do that, which can sometimes be just as effective as bringing on another therapist to the team.  

Molly McEwen   

So we need to be smarter. We need to do this smarter. We need to change the model. We used a model for so long, and the model isn't always working, so let's, let's pull back and not let the flurry and the craziness of what's happening in the systems just move us. We need to stop and say, We got to do this a different way, and this is how. 

Sherry Shellenberger   

And we got into a little bit of a trap, or at least they that we did in in my main time being in the schools, where somehow individual treatment was preferable to treatment in the classroom or support in the classroom. And our poor parents, you know, they're trying to get the best for their kids, so if they're told, Oh, individual tree, you must demand individual treatment, and you must demand that the therapist do this and this and this and this is we kind of boxed ourselves into a corner and didn't again, look at the context of it, right? Moll, I mean, yeah, just interesting. 

Jayson Davies   

Another topic for another day, I promise. But with that, let's go ahead and start wrapping up. I want to let you all share. You've already mentioned it a few times. Share. You all do have a course. Now I was just looking at it, at least the one I was looking at, it's two CEUs, which is 20 hours, aota approved. I want to give you a moment to just share a little bit about the program that you have over on the website.  

Sherry Shellenberger   

Sure. Thank you. So we do have the Alert program online course. That's the one you were looking at. We also have, and that is for when you're going to use in your practice, taking through and teaching your client about their own self regulation. Okay? And then the your best self course is one that we developed a number a couple years ago now here, and that is for adults to learn about their own self regulation. So we have a lot of businesses that use that with their employees. We have a number of folks that work in trauma and behavioral health and stuff like that, and those counselors, social workers, those kind of folks that need to maybe understand that sensory motor component of that so that they can help to show their clients information, but also to know it about themselves, right? So, and I think I'm really excited about the possibilities that we've had with certain agencies, training their whole agency in the your best self. Course, that one is, I think it's eight contact hours through a OTS. What is that point? Eight? You can go do the math and look at it on the website, but on them, on the main website, is the menu tab courses. And both the courses are listed there, and kind of the differences of them. But I'm really thrilled, because, you know, it's that same thing again, it applies to self regulation. Applies to all of us. If, if you are a runner and you get hurt and you can't do your running, you notice a difference in your self regulation, and you would hopefully want people to be able to help, help you, or inform you about what you could do, so that you don't just re injure too quickly. But you go ahead and, you know, so it should be part of discharge planning. It should be part of all those good things. So I'm really excited about that, course, because it's new. I will say that one not like we are deep into the neuro because that's not really our jam. But, I mean, we it's neurologically sound, the Alert program. But I like to to describe it as like the Alert program, and the lack of jargon is kind of like the express lane for Neuro and if you want to go on the wonderful country roads and do all the other great things of learning all about neural pathways and all that kind of neurochemistry and all that good stuff, then that's the stuff where maybe you want to be trained In polyvagal theory and all those kind of good things. We actually have that as one example in the your best self courses like this is the express lane. We're talking neuro on Mr. Potato Head here, not in the very detailed way. And then we're going to go ahead, and if you want to dive into it, know that there are wonderful other resources. So those are. The two courses that we have, we have lots of books, game songs, all kinds of stuff like that, on on the website, as you said, and and we are an aota approved provider of professional development. So I won't belabor this at this point. Who wants to listen to that? Just go look at it if you're interested in it.  

Jayson Davies   

Yep, you say you hit on the nail right there, right everyone, just go to Alert program.com you'll find it all there, and we will have all the links that we've mentioned in this podcast. I want to give a huge shout out to Chandler, who helps us find all that good stuff and put it into the show notes. For the show notes for this episode, you will find them at otschoolhouse com, slash Episode 119 or if you're listening to this on a podcast player like Spotify or Apple, just click on the link somewhere below where the play button is, with that. Sherry Molly, thank you so much for being here today. It was wonderful talking to you all about the Alert program and program management or evaluation and all the good stuff. Really appreciate it, and we'll have to stay in touch. 

Sherry Shellenberger   

Absolutely. Thanks so much for having us 

Jayson Davies   

take care. All right. I hope your engine is still running well right now. Thank you so much to Sherry And Molly for coming on explaining the Alert program and how it has evolved to support people around the world, be sure to check out the show notes for this episode at otschoolhouse com, slash episode 119, or you can simply head to Alert program.com to learn more about the program. If you go to the Episode notes, we'll have direct links to the parts of their websites for all the things that they talked about. So that might be a good starting point, and then just have a blast looking at their program. They have courses. They had tons of free resources over there. So be sure to check it out until next time. Take care, stay safe and keep collaborating. 

Amazing Narrator   

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