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Click on your preferred podcast player link to listen wherever you enjoy podcasts . Welcome to the show notes for Episode 192 of the OT Schoolhouse Podcast. Dr. Aimee Piller joins the OT Schoolhouse Podcast to explore how school-based occupational therapists can apply their sensory expertise within a Multi-Tiered System of Support (MTSS).  She shares practical strategies for moving beyond traditional IEP-based services to support entire classrooms at Tier 1 and small groups at Tier 2, helping OT practitioners maximize their impact while managing their caseloads more effectively. Learning Objectives Identify the three tiers of MTSS (Multi-Tiered System of Support) and how occupational therapy services can be effectively integrated at each tier to support students with sensory processing needs Describe assessment strategies for evaluating sensory processing patterns at population, group, and individual levels within the MTSS framework Implement evidence-based sensory interventions at Tier 1 and Tier 2 levels, including strategies for training paraprofessionals and monitoring progress through data collection Whether you're new to school-based practice or looking to expand your service delivery model, this episode offers actionable insights on implementing tiered sensory interventions. Listen now to discover how you can support more students while staying within your professional scope and managing your time effectively. Guest Bio Aimee Piller PhD, OTR/L, BCP, FAOTA Aimee Piller PhD, OTR/L, BCP, FAOTA is the owner and director of Piller Child Development She volunteers with the American Occupational Therapy Association in various capacities and with the American Occupational Therapy Foundation. She is the author of Implementing School-Based Occupational Therapy Services: A Multi-Tiered Approach to Sensory Processing Needs and has several national and international publications, presentations, and podcasts. Impacrful Quotes "Anyone can Google classroom sensory strategies, but they don't have the expertise that we have as occupational therapists to understand the theory behind it and really that interaction between the client and the environment." - Dr. Piller "We have to be the ones that are saying, 'Hey, we can be here too.' Your MTSS processes are already in place and we know how to do this."  - Dr. Piller "Find the one person who's open to your ideas. There's going to be one, maybe two teachers that really see the impact that the OT makes, especially when we're talking about sensory processing."  - Dr. Piller "Sometimes these kids don't need our services individually. A paraprofessional compared to hiring another OT — that's a huge difference from a budget standpoint."  - Dr. Piller "We can move from three to two to one and not leave our parents or students with no support. We can ease out of that direct intervention."  - Dr. Piller Resources 👉 Implementing School-Based Occupational Therapy Services: A Multi-Tiered Approach to Sensory Processing Needs  by Aimee Piller 👉 Piller Child Development Website: pillerchilddevelopment.com Contact: aimee.piller@pillerchilddevelopment.com Episode Transcript Expand to view episode transcript   Jayson Davies 0:01 Hello and happy 2026 and welcome to episode 192 of the OT school house podcast. I'm your host, Jayson Davies, and today we are addressing sensory processing within a multi tiered system of support, aka MTSS with occupational therapist and newly minted author, Dr Aimee Piller, I'm thrilled to welcome Aimee to the podcast fresh off this publication of her new book for ot practitioners, titled implementing school based occupational therapy services a multi tiered approach to sensory processing needs. Now I've had the pleasure of sitting in on a few of Aimee sessions at a ot a also here in California at OTC, and I'm always impressed by her ability to take ideas within the OT world that are sometimes more focused on the quote, unquote, clinical side, and apply them to school based ot practice, such as the case with sensory integration and sensory processing inside of MTSS. So if you've ever wondered how to support more students with your sensory expertise beyond just the IEP. This is the episode for you. Aimee shares practical strategies for implementing sensory supports At Tiers one and two, helping us shift from only working with individual students to supporting entire classrooms and small groups within those classrooms. We'll discuss assessment approaches for each tier, intervention ideas that don't require more of your time, and how to advocate for your role within your school's MTSS framework. So whether you're brand new to school based ot practice or a seasoned ot looking to expand your impact in the classroom, don't miss this episode. Let's get started. Amazing Narrator 1:36 Hello and welcome to the OT school house 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, CLASI is officially in session. Jayson Davies 1:53 Dr Pilar, welcome to the OT school house podcast. It is great to have you, and we're actually have a few episodes with you coming out, this being the first one, and I'm excited to have you on so welcome for the first time of hopefully several, to the OT schoolhouse podcast. Dr. Aimee Piller 2:09 Well, thanks, Jayson. I'm really excited to be here today and share a little bit about some the book that I wrote. Jayson Davies 2:15 Yes and congratulations on that a book is never easy. I have had the idea of books for a long time, and just getting started is probably the hardest part. So congratulations, a on getting started and B, completing it. That is a monumentous, or I don't even know how to say that, but a wonderful thing that you have done, and I know it's gonna help so many, not just ot practitioners, but also educators and whatnot. So yeah, actually wanna start with the book, because in the book, you actually shared an experience that is kind of similar to mine, in the sense that you kind of dove head first into the real school based occupational therapy right out of school, out of OT school, you jumped right into, I don't know if it was in the Arizona area where you are now, but you were the only ot practitioner with a team of occupational Are you the only ot with a team of occupational therapy assistants? I just want to let you kind of share how that has shaped your experience, kind of just diving into it head first. Dr. Aimee Piller 3:12 Well, yeah, so I actually started my ot career in the school system. I worked not in Arizona. I was in the Midwest, and I was a great job. I mean, I was one of those where if I hadn't moved, I probably would still be there all these years later. It was a very supportive environment. I had a great mentor that I can meet with, and now she wasn't on site, but I still was able to meet with her work at the assistants. But what was really nice, I think, is being a young, new practitioner, you kind of are like, you don't really know how it's supposed to look, so you just figure it out, right? And that's how that kind of happened. I was able to just build learn from my assistants. I was able to learn from the teachers. They had not had an OT fully in their building before, or had been many years since the OT had been in their building, and I was able to stay in the building the whole time. So that was a really nice opportunity for me to just kind of get into the classrooms. And then I just started working with teachers in different ways, even though, when I stepped into the role, it was everything was pull out based I kind of was like, I was talking to the teachers, and they're like, one teacher in particular is very open to, what do you do, and how can I support the kids in my classroom? And I was just like, Well, why don't I just come in for a little bit? And then, of course, as we know, caseloads grew, and I was like, why don't I come in for more kids? And so just became a really nice model, as probably many of your listeners have worked for a long time in the profession and done these things that now are part of who we are in this, in our models of school based therapy, Jayson Davies 4:37 yeah, yeah, absolutely. You know, you mentioned a few things. One, you know, it being a pull out model, and you just kind of maybe didn't know better, and so decided to work with that one teacher. And how awesome is it to have that one teacher? Because I think we all have that one teacher, but we don't always recognize that we have that one teacher, and how important they can be. Unknown Speaker 4:54 Yeah, I mean, and I talk about that, and when I in the book, when I discuss, you know, kind of, how do you. Get started with changing the model of practice, or what your current practice setting looks like. It's find the one person who's open to your ideas. There's going to be one, maybe two teachers that are really, really see the impact that the OT makes, especially when we're talking about sensory processing and our sensory strategies that we can implement. You know, if you have some great ideas, and the teachers start to see their students doing better, and it's kind of reducing some of that teacher burden, for lack of better word to manage behaviors. So you know, they want you to be in their classroom. They want to know your strategies. And then they talk in the work room, and then in the work room, another teacher says, Well, I'd like that too, or I'd like to know more about that. And that's kind of how it got started, when I was again, not knowing what I was doing, just in there doing it. And the teachers would then she would talk in the work room, and another teacher would come to me, say, can you come into my class? And then it spiraled, yeah, yeah. Jayson Davies 5:52 And before we dive, you know, full head in on MTSS and sensory The other thing that you mentioned in your first answer was talking about a mentor. And you mentioned that your mentor wasn't necessarily on site, so I'm assuming, probably not even working within that district or with the contractor, whatever system you were set up with. But can you just share a little bit about a how you went about finding a mentor? Was this someone you know in your past already, or or someone new, and the impact that that had, like, and how did that work? Yeah. Unknown Speaker 6:23 So she was just a member of that the, you know, the OT community is very small. Even as a new practitioner, I was kind of working in a more, not a rural area, but a small city. So there was a pretty known on who the pediatric OTs were in the area. I had come back from ot school to where my hometown was, and so I'd heard of this person, you know, before, like, Oh, she's that. They would call her the sensory guru. And I was like, I'd like to be a sensory guru too, right? So that's how I was like, just, you know, I was that, you know, perhaps you'd like to mentor me. We would meet once a week, and we ended up doing things like, we would go on bike rides, and then we had more formal meetings as well. And she was like, I'm happy to mentor you. I had a good mentor, and I wanted to pass that on. And then we became friends, of course, which then just gave us the opportunity to talk about ot all the time, which was invaluable as a new as a new graduate, right? So it was a great opportunity for me, and I have tried to do that now, and my career is to pass that on to other therapists as well, because I was given such a great gift. I want to share that with the next generation of therapists. Jayson Davies 7:23 Wow, wow. That's, that's very awesome. You mentioned her kind of being a sensory guru. Obviously, your book is now on sensory and MTSS a little bit. What kind of drove you down that route of sensory Why did you want to follow the sensory guru? Why did you want to learn so much about sensory? Unknown Speaker 7:39 Yeah, and being, I've been in OT for about 20 years now, so things have changed a bit. And sensory was important in OT back then, but not so mainstream as I think it is now. But, you know, I think when I was I knew I always wanted to do pediatrics. It's always been, my passion has always been kids. And I remember studying about sensory integration, I was like, it's so when you're in school, it seems so hard to understand. And I remember, and that's one of those things, but when you see it in practice, it's like, Wow, that really works. But it seems it's hard to learn, right? There's lots of different aspects to it. You need to learn and figure out how to do. But I could see such a difference in kids. And I was like, I really enjoyed studying it too. Is very interesting to me. And then I have found, and I tell my younger therapist now too, like, when you find something that you're interested in and then that you're actually pretty good at, like, that's your specialty area. And so I found myself to be pretty good at sensory and I loved it. And so that's where I specialized Awesome. Jayson Davies 8:35 Now, something that was also relatively new 20 years ago was MTSS, I mean, it's still relatively new. You mentioned, right that when you got there, I'm assuming most of the OTs and previous OTs were using that pull out model, as you kind of mentioned, and and you kind of started to ask why, and started to think about what the alternatives could look like. When did you start to hear about MTSS and start to think like, hey, this could be a model that ot practitioners or that could apply to OT Unknown Speaker 9:06 well, I'll admit, it was many years later, not something I knew I was doing at the time, you know. And I think a lot, a lot changed in education since when I was a first practitioner, and continues to change. It's an area that we always have to that molds and modifies as we move along. So I never really put it into that model, until later, when I was like, Oh, wait, this is exactly what I was doing as a new practitioner, and didn't really know about it, you know, I had worked at the, you know, if we identify that level, tier one, as a classroom level, I was able to work at that level. And then I had small groups, and then I had individualized kids too. And it was really something that when I plugged it back in to the MDSs model, it fit so nicely, but it was not a prospective way of treating at the time. Jayson Davies 9:50 Yeah, yeah, definitely. And I think especially when you come from the background of occupational therapy in general, but then even more specific sensory processing. And you know, whether you've taken a sipped course, whether you've taken CLASI, there, you've gone to the USC program, Star Program, whatever it might be, or if you've never done any of those, and you just know occupational therapy, we know that it is very Client Center. And I use client in the sense of one individual, yes, ot practitioners can support communities, groups and whatnot, but for the most part, we look at individuals, especially in school. So T that's kind of like what we focus on. And the same goes first century, when we're talking like one of the most famous lines, I think, if you go through any of those courses, is it depends, it depends on the client. It depends on the client. It depends on the client. So the question that I'm coming up here, and it's admittedly probably a little bit of a toughy, but when we are taught so much to look at a singular individual, especially when it comes to sensory, how do we start to move this framework to thinking about sensory for a group of Students, or a entire classroom of students? Unknown Speaker 11:02 Well, it's certainly a big question. That's kind of what most it took a lot to get that model and that mindset to change a little bit, and I'm sure, and I've only touched the surface, right? I mean, so other people will probably do it more justice than I did in the book, but it sensory processing is very individualized to the person, right? Each of us have different sensory processing patterns and preferences, and how we interact with our sensory environment is very individualized based on who we are, but we also function in groups and we function in communities. And so we can look at patterns of the client and the population sense, or the client and the group sense, as well as, as we see the individual within that context, and see that there are patterns. Are there certain areas of and I talked about that in the book, as well as, like, how do we see that? You know, at this time of day, students need to be at this level of arousal, and all students need to be there now. They may need to have different needs to get there, but that's where we need them to be. If it's time to sit down and do quiet reading, that's generally speaking about the same level of arousal for most kids. But how can we incorporate those sensory strategies within that routine, which is really important. I talk a lot about routines in the book, and how to structure routines to help that aspect to switch from Yes, it's an individualized sensory need, but it does fit within the participation of the group. Jayson Davies 12:26 Awesome. Appreciate that. So I have a little bit of a fault in the sense that I believe that every single person listening to the podcast has listened to all 180 plus episodes of the podcast, which obviously isn't true. And so I know not everybody understands MTSS and all that. And so I want to give you a moment to kind of share how you identify MTSS, how you define it, and the tiers that you kind of when you talk about MTSS, the tiers that you define. Unknown Speaker 12:55 Yeah, and thanks for that question, Jayson, because I know when you and I first spoke, we found that there are some state differences as everything in education, right? So it's important that I define, and giving thanks for giving me the opportunity to define what I mean in this particular book is that MTSS tier one in this book, I defined it as a population, which could be the entire district, school building or classroom, and then this tier two is defined as smaller groups individuals that have been identified as requiring additional support, but not all the way to the point where maybe they need very individualized support, which would be under the tier three. So those tier two kids are okay. These general population or general strategies the entire school or classroom is using isn't enough support for these clients. They need a little bit more, but maybe not quite individualized. And then the tier three is really what I think our classic thought of OT in the school system is, which is that under the IEP, more individualized services. So that's how I define them in the book Gotcha. Jayson Davies 13:55 And for tier two, could that potentially include students that maybe are on a 504, plan, or maybe, like a student study team of some sort that the schools might have? Unknown Speaker 14:05 Yeah, absolutely. That's a great example of what a tier two might look like. Jayson Davies 14:09 Okay, perfect. All right, so we're going to dive more into how we can begin to assess these different tiers, or students within the tiers and the maybe even classrooms within the tiers. But before we do that, let's take a quick break. All right, we are back with Aimee, and we are going to begin to talk about assessments within the tiered model. So Aimee really quickly, or maybe not so quickly. It's up to you. It's your response. How does an individualized assessment look very different from maybe a tiered assessment, and we can go deeper into this, but kind of an overarching, Unknown Speaker 14:47 yeah, and one thing I really want to point out that's important if you're going to be functioning or providing services, especially sensory supports, at a population or group level, is that you do still follow the OT process and do. That assessment piece. I know that can be sometimes we get something in our mind, especially in a school based setting, where it's like, oh, assessment, well, I've got to follow the IEP process. I have to follow that met plan. I have to get the permission. It's like, No, we assess in lots of different ways. Right? As OTs, we're constantly assessing our clients and in various points within the OT process, but assessment is really important for us to make sure that we're tailoring those sensory interventions to what the client needs, whether that is the population or group, and not just providing a blanketed here's a sensory plan like I feel like that's very important for us if you're functioning and working under MTSS model as an OT with sensory integration or sensory processing. What you need to make sure you're doing is providing that high quality assessment, and I'll talk a little bit about some ways to do that well, to provide more tailored interventions that then you can see if they're effective or not. I mean, anyone can Google, send classroom sensory strategies, put them in place, right? But they don't have the expertise that we have as occupational therapists to understand the theory behind it, and really that interaction between the client and the environment and the client sensory processing needs. So it can be it's a little bit different model. I talk a lot about different ways to do it in the book that are effective. I had give some ways to gather the occupational profile. Some of that from the district standpoint, is, you know, what do students have access to outside of school that's sensory related, right? Are there parks nearby? Are there do they have extracurricular activities they're able to engage in? What kind of things are valuable to the school district? What is matters to the district from that kind of occupational profile, and then also looking at the clients themselves, right? I want to know what's important to the student, but I also want to know what's going on and what's important to the students. So I provide some examples of different games that you can play that are like classroom based games. There's a bingo game in the in the book that I talk about, there's kind of a two truths and a lie, just just fun games that you can gather some information and how to do that on their occupational profile, and then ways to look at sensory processing patterns, especially in a population and group. You know, some of that is still looking at the individual processing needs of a student, whether that's just a simple questionnaire or that you can give to the students and the teachers, maybe it's just an observation interviews. I talk a lot about how to do interviews that you can do very either quickly in person or maybe turn them into something electronic, so they can be done at any point in time, rather than having to try to find that face to face time with teachers and students. So there's lots of examples of those and questions that you might ask, so you can really start to see what the sensory processing patterns of each student is the teacher's sensory processing patterns and preferences and the classrooms routines and sensory environment piece. Jayson Davies 17:49 Okay, so obviously, if we, if we're going into any kindergarten, first, second, grade, third, any grade level classroom, we're going to go in, and we might begin to say, you know, 90% of the students, or 75% of the students, of the students, probably closer to 50% of the students are showing maybe some heightened needs for movement. But then we're also going to see 25% of the classroom that maybe it's the complete opposite, or some variance of a sensory processing need. So when it comes to that assessment piece and we're providing our our findings, I guess my question is like, how do we represent that? And how do we provide recommendations for a classroom that has varied needs? And I'm trying to stick to the assessment piece here, not go too far down the weeds. We'll get to that. But, but how do you explain that in assessment? Unknown Speaker 18:40 And I think that's an excellent question, because you think, does it all have to look the same? But that actually is your assessment, right? That some of the people in this environment and in this classroom, in this population need this input, and the other part need this input, and that is your assessment, and we have the clinical expertise to make those determinations, as well as designing a population based intervention that provides two types of input, right? And you think, Oh, that could be kind of tricky. I mean, so because we have this mindset of, I'm so used to like the child needs calming input, so I give calming input, right? But sometimes you need calming and someone else needs alerting. So I talk a little bit in the book about how to design different interventions that you can modify it based on the client's needs. It's the same kind of activity, but this group does it calming. This was a more alerting and movement basis. Of course, really common. And then also the environments I talk about how some students, I think when we talk with teachers, they really do a good job of trying to, you know, help students with sensory needs. But there's oftentimes that that mindset of, I can help the students that are hyper reactive to sensory input, and they don't think about those kids who need more stimulation to function at the optimal level. And so helping them design areas in their classroom that are low stimulation, on on sensory input and higher stimulation. And big parts of that too. Especially at the population level, is just observing and assessing that routine of the day, when is the best time for this input to happen for each for the individuals. And then I think one last thing to think about is sometimes you are going to see those clients as you're assessing that population level that really are just not fitting in those patterns, and that's a good indication that now, of course, after progress monitoring and data collection, those are probably clients that might be more appropriate for a tier two okay. Jayson Davies 20:32 And that's a perfect kind of segue, because I think what we've talked a little bit so far with it, within the assessment world, is like kind of larger picture tier one assessment, and I think for the most part, ot practitioners are relatively familiar with what a tier three in the realm of what you discussed kind of being that traditional IEP assessment might look like, but then we have this messy middle of tier two, and so does a tier two assessment look more like a tier one assessment, where you're being kind of more broad, getting a lot of information from the teacher, or does it look a little bit more specific, like an IEP assessment or the messy middle? Unknown Speaker 21:09 Yeah, so it's, to me, you're going to start off with that kind of broad based population assessment, but as naturally, we're going to see those clients who don't, kind of who clearly need more intervention, right? We're really good at that. As OTs of picking out. We just know, we know the kids that need the support that we can provide them, right? I don't I think anyone could walk into a classroom, you might be there for one kid, and see two other kids that need you, right? Really need you. And so as you're doing those assessment pieces, especially as you're working with those individual as you're getting individual information on each participant of that population, sensory processing needs. You're going to start to see those clients that have higher needs. Now, in the book, I talk about how to match those clients at that point, since it's a more, a little bit more intensified intervention, you can kind of match those clients so they're those kids that need more input. We can put those in a group and those who need kind of less stimulation, we can put those into a group, and so you can do a little more targeted intervention at a group level, but your assessments are fairly similar at that point. Okay, you Jayson Davies 22:13 mentioned matching a little bit, and I get that process of matching some of the kids who I pause here because too often, every single person has been guilty of this is putting kids together in a group that have no reason to be in a group together. And so I like that you talk about that matching, because sometimes we just match kids because we need to cut down on our minutes in a day. And so we group a third grader with a sixth grader. That makes no sense at all. So I like how you talked about that matching. To what degree does the other staff have an input when it comes to matching a little bit? And I ask this because sometimes we have kids who maybe are not in the same classroom that might be able to be matched a little bit together. Within that tier two, are we able to potentially see a kid that is in Mrs. Jones class and Mr. Jones's class, or should they be in the same class? Or I think this varies from district to district, but what have you experienced? Unknown Speaker 23:10 I mean, ideally, if your district is supportive of that, it is about not just in the classroom. It can be across classrooms like these students have the same needs at about the same time of day. I mean, that's obviously the idealistic world. It doesn't always work out that way, right? But we can advocate for those aspects, especially if we're collecting really good data that's showing this is effective for the students being more successful. And so sometimes it's just maybe I can only do three at a time, and then if, when this occurs, maybe we can form another group that's similar, with different students. So when I talk about it in the book, the tier two does take students from across classrooms, not just from one, if that's available to you at your district, Jayson Davies 23:49 yeah, yeah. I think that is something that we default to thinking that it's not possible. I know I did when I was first in school based OT, and then I started to realize that if I advocate for it, people are usually actually open to it, so long as we can explain how it connects to MTSS because people typically think that if an OT is doing something, it's an IEP, and therefore everything needs to be on the IEP before you do anything. But if we come at this from an MTSS perspective, people seem to be a little bit more open to it. Does that sound familiar? Unknown Speaker 24:25 Yeah, I agree 100% and that's sometimes when I'm talking with other OTs about kind of this concept and model. They're like, Well, how do you fit it in? I'm like, well, MTSS is really already laid out for us to put it in. We don't have to come up with new policies or procedures. We just have to embed ourselves within that MTSS process. I will mention, I just think it's just an interesting story is that I was, I was at a school climate conference, and it was all about, you know, promoting social emotional and I happened to go to a class on someone who was, she was in charge of the MTSS program for a very large. District in Southern California, and I just happened to it was great breakout session. And I mentioned to her afterwards, like, so great. I'm always trying to talk to OTs about how we can embed ourselves in tier one and tier two, and we shouldn't shy away from it, and we need to be at the table. And she looked at me very large district, and said, I have never considered asking the OT to com to MTSS meetings, or tier one or tier two. So we have to be the ones that are that are saying, Hey, we can be here too. And here your processes are already in place, and we know how to do this. We can really help students so that then at the end of the day, we have more time for those individual students that need, those that have those higher needs, and we have the time to service them individually. So sometimes these kids don't need our services individually. And I do have a whole section on how that looks. How do you train your staff to get there? Jayson Davies 25:52 Yeah, I love that, because obviously we're going to maybe talk a little bit about advocacy and implementation at the very, very end, but we might as well like just work it in here, because you're right. We have to kind of speak up and let people know that we can do this. And I think a lot of districts often have two MTSS routes, if you want to call them, there's MTSS a, academics and MTSS B, behavior. And sometimes the academic might be broken down into English, language arts and math, but nowhere in there is there like speech. MTSS, OT, MTSS, ape, MTSS, like it's just not necessarily designed with related service providers in there, because Esso didn't really come around and kind of define a little bit until 2015 everything you know takes some time to implement. So, so we do have to speak up, and that's absolutely important. Thank you for bringing that up. One other question that I get often is, at what point do we need to let parents know that they are receiving some form of occupational therapy support? Obviously, with tier three IEP, they're very informed at tier one or tier two. Do you feel like there or what does MTSS kind of say? What are districts doing in terms of letting parents know that OT is involved? Unknown Speaker 27:10 Well, and Jayson, I think that's the best part of it. Is that whatever that that procedure is already in place for those MTS kids who are receiving MTSS one or two, there's some procedure already in place in the district on how those parents are notified of that. And so just embedding yourself within whatever that district policy is on, hey, now the OTs involved in this process is the best thing. And so it's not, to me, something that we need to reinvent the wheel of or say, hey, we really need to make sure this happens. Like, what's your current policy? I think that will be fine. Can we just add to it that the OTs is going to be involved in this situation? Obviously, tier two has a little more, you know, kind of communication with parents in that way, and that's all right, but again, it's like, that's our guiding practice for that is going to come from the district, all right? Jayson Davies 27:56 And one last question, in terms of assessments, you know, we talked about that tier one assessment being a little bit more, I think, teacher centric and larger picture centric. And then as we move to tier two, it is a little bit more about the students. I think people have a difficulty, especially with tier two, in terms of, is it occupational therapy, or is it educational services provided from an occupational therapy perspective. And then either way, what does that mean in terms of, like, what is occupational therapy actually working on? Are we working on a specific quote, unquote goal, as it might say on an IEP? So I guess the first question at tier two, do you think it is intervention, as we move to interventions a little bit, is it occupational therapy for those students, or is it more of educational services provided by an OT if that makes sense, or how do you explain that? Unknown Speaker 28:52 Yeah, that's kind of a complex question and such a simple question, right? Because, of course, anything that OTs doing is occupational therapy, right? But I can, I think of it more as educate. It's the education from an occupational therapy perspective, and even in the book I present that the OTs probably not doing the actual intervention piece. They've designed it. They're monitoring it. But it's not necessarily done by the OT it might be done by a pair of professional maybe someone else that's doing some of the RTI situations or things like that. And that's why, when it comes down to it, because, of course, we're very busy as practitioners. We have so much to do, not enough time in the day. And so it's, well, how can I add in? That's the question I get. How do I add this? And I'm like, well, you're training someone to do it, and then you're monitoring that progress to see what needs to be changed and what's working what's not working. When do you need to come back in and kind of reassess or remodify the programming? But you the OT doesn't necessarily have to be the one that's implementing it at those levels. Okay? Jayson Davies 29:54 I'm going to give a second to have a follow up to that, because I know we just lost some people. Because they heard we need more support in some way, and it can't be us and and they love that you said it's not going to be them necessarily, because, yeah, like you said, OTs don't need more work, but at the same time, teachers don't need more work. So I diving into that intervention piece. How does that begin to work? Like we're developing a program and then maybe training a paraprofessional. Is that kind of what tier two in what you've done kind of works, Unknown Speaker 30:27 yeah, and models that I've worked in, and when I especially, like, when I was that first initial job where I had no idea what I was doing, it just came about. What happened was the teachers were like, This is so great, but Aimee doesn't have enough time, and we don't have enough time. And they were like, they came together as a group and said, We need another paraprofessional to help us with this sensory piece. They came to the because of the effectiveness. And I said, that would be fantastic. Like, I could train her. I can make sure she can kind of not report to me, but in a way, we can always touch base about data. And the school said, Yeah, okay, we're seeing that students are being more successful. We're not having as many, you know, referrals. This is a good thing, and a pair of professional is something that's in the budget. So that was great, because the teachers came to my advocacy, not me, right? Yeah. And so that was excellent. And sometimes it can just be embedded within another program, like, if you've got some of those working on some of those social emotional pieces, can you put some of that sensory piece into whoever's doing that social emotional piece? There's things like that that you can utilize as strategies to try to help get those extra services. And then I also, you know, I know we're getting into this later, but there's an element of, you know, a paraprofessional compared to hiring another OT, that's a huge difference how much budget that is. So if you can really, really show that you're through progress monitoring and data good quality data collection and training, that you a pair of professional can help you. So maybe we don't have to, you know, hire another ot from a budget standpoint, that's what districts want to see, right? Jayson Davies 32:01 Yeah, see, this is, this is, like, the exact reason why I wish we were posting this on YouTube, because, like, I don't know if you can see, but I'm like, thinking like crazy right now, like, because you got me thinking, like, we think about all the things that we do, and we often try to say, Man, if only I had another occupational therapist, if only I had another ot a to help with this. But we rarely think about, man, what if I just had a three hour paraprofessional, like, even, not necessarily even, like five days a week, even if it was just a few days a week and and I think that kind of goes back to that very first question that we talked about assessments where you talked about doing a tier one overall assessment of maybe it's the entire first grade level team, or, like, the entire school, but you could show in that quote, unquote assessment, where 15 hours a week of paraprofessional support could make a life a lot easier for every single person at that school, Dr. Aimee Piller 33:02 Yeah, correct. And it really comes down to that aspect. And when you're going to advocate for things, is to really make sure you have your data right. I mean, if I because data and data is not just hard data, I mean, that's part of it, but those teachers were huge for me to get that paraprofessional right. She was a part time person. Just came in. I think she was there four hours a day, four days a week. It was great, though, right? So that the teachers are a huge source of that data as well, but as you're gathering those data too and making sure that, and I talk about strategies, and I give really good methods and ways to make sure your staff is well trained so that you can keep that fidelity of intervention. But I've utilized that model, and I'm I utilize it in schools even now. I work in clinic based but I still consult and contract with some schools, and I utilize that model a lot, because I can't be there every day, right? And I need to make sure that they're that some of these students are working, have really high sensory needs, that the staff is trained well, they're able to gather the data. I need to make determinations on if that's effective or ineffective, or if we need to make changes, and then also seeing the improvement within that setting. And so we can sometimes think other people can do certain things we do if we train them correctly and and teach them how to gather the data we need to to know to make decisions. Jayson Davies 34:20 Yeah, and I think I'll just kind of put the quote, unquote disclaimer out there, like some states kind of lay out, what an occupational therapy, not an assistant, obviously, not an OT a but there is another term I don't even know, because I've never really been there, but I I don't know if that has to be really looked At here, if we need to think of them. Obviously, they're not an OT, a they're not an occupational therapy practitioner in any way, but to some degree, they're supporting you, and I think that's something that the district needs to look into. And as well as the OT, if they're the ones implementing this program, like, what can and cannot that person do? Just to make sure everyone is staying in compliance with licensure laws and all that so but yeah, no, I love the idea. It's got me thinking a lot like you could do Dr. Aimee Piller 35:07 that's really very important to consider too when you're putting the programming in place, Jayson, is that if this person is a teacher or a paraprofessional, you're not going to provide anything more than what maybe would be as part of a home programming, like what you would give to parents. And so I think that's a real important distinction, because if I'm going to be doing like, real ot based interventions under that model, where it's an I'm working towards, you know, a specific goal, and it's skilled intervention that's you need to abide by your licensure laws. These are more and supports of participation, which is something in any setting, we give teachers all the time, we give to parents all the time, right? So that's the kind of modeling that that you would want to use. Jayson Davies 35:50 Yeah, yeah. Awesome. All right. Well, let's talk a little bit about the interventions. And I kind of want to, I think we're just go through all three, well, at least the main two, obviously, when we get to tier three, as we've talked about, that's more IEP specific. We can talk a little bit about it. But when it comes to tier one, you do that assessment a little bit that you talked about earlier. After every assessment, we tend to have, like these goals. So when it comes to tier one, what are some things that you might be looking to as a goal? Are you looking and I say that with goal being loosely, it may not be a SMART goal, right, but at the end of the day, you're doing an assessment with an outcome. And so what is that outcome that maybe you might try to look at and kind of say, well, this is here we are, and this is what we could work toward. Obviously, it would be different from a district to a school to an individual classroom. But what are some things that you've used as as outcomes? Dr. Aimee Piller 36:44 Yeah, well, again, you know, I try not to reinvent the wheel. What? What goals to the district have, per se, you know, are we looking at, are we looking at number of referrals for behavioral difficulties? Are we looking at test scores? Are we looking at teacher retention? Like all those things can be indirectly related to how the students perform in the classroom, right? So I sometimes will look and see like, that's where it goes back to that assessment process, your occupational profile, what's important to the district? What's important to the classroom? If the teacher is really like, I need my students to be, you know, participating in a certain time of day, or I need them to make sure I'm having trouble getting the students to pay attention at this time. That's the goal of that classroom. And so those still can be semi individualized. And I give some examples of goals in the book, and some of them, I do try to provide SMART goals if possible, but I think you make a good point that sometimes it's just an outcome, what's our what's our desired outcome, and it can just be that, you know, sometimes it is like the teacher can report that she doesn't, you know, she feels less stressed at the end of the day. That's not a bad outcome either. Jayson Davies 37:49 Yeah, yeah. And, and, I just want to say, like, that's one of those. It depends responses. Like, everybody hates that response to hear, Oh, well, you know, what is the district worried about? And like, but that's absolutely like what you should be doing here. Like you've said several times, don't reinvent the wheel. Like, I think, especially when it comes to tier one, some of your most valuable tools are looking at your school's website, looking at your district website, seeing what their What's that called like, the plan that they have to create, like a school site plan or district level plan. And like, what is their mission? What are their values? What are they trying to actually accomplish? What are they telling every parent in their district that their kids will achieve? And how can you support that? Like, that is a great way to develop an outcome. So I love that answer. It's not the one that people often want to hear, but I think it is a great response. So, yeah, okay, so based upon that, what are some wonderful intervention kind of ideas at tier one? What are some easy go to things that you often share with ot practitioners that are relatively simple to kind of get started with? Dr. Aimee Piller 39:01 Yeah, I talk a lot in the book about designing simple sensory environments within the classroom. I also talk about how that's so important to know the students needs, but also the teacher's needs as well, and teachers preferences and meeting the teacher where they are as well. I don't want to come into their classroom. It's like, what do you have that's working for you? How can we provide some supports for different students. I provide a lot of examples, of course, of that movement base. There's just lists of different movement based and heavy work activities that we all are using all the time, right? But how do I put them within learning environment and structure within that routine? Is really what that chapter is focused on in the book. I also talk about some things when it comes to like, do we need extra tools for, maybe tactile input or proprioceptive input? How do we create, creating a lending library of sensory equipment so that then you can also, you know, get some of that data. Let's try some of this equipment. Is it working? Well, maybe we can advocate, then for a budget to get a little bit more and how to, how to establish a. Sensory lending library. What does it look like? How do you put in a referral for a piece of equipment? So all that's in the book too, because I know we're all working on budgets, and we don't all have endless Some districts have lots of money and some don't have hardly any money. And so how can we, you know, provide the support? And of course, like I said, as we know, sensory processing changes all the time, right? Like sometimes our kids have different needs in the second quarter than they did the first quarter. So if I advocate to purchase something, it may not be good for that classroom for the whole year. We might need to change that. So utilizing things like a lending library to do some of these activities can be really effective. And I also have a little section on the importance of and how free play and allowing opportunities for free play is so key to the sensory piece for our kids, and how to advocate for that recess time. And what does it look like to allow students to have the free play opportunities at recess, not just structured play time. And so there's a little bit on in the book, if you are advocating for recess time in your district, that might be helpful. Awesome. Jayson Davies 41:06 Yeah, no, absolutely. And I thought you were going to go even a little bit further to where I was going to go right now. And I want to ask you about this, because it is something that ot practitioners frequently come across, and that is the use of sensory rooms within a school. And I guess the first question is, A, have you and or your schools utilize sensory rooms on campus? Dr. Aimee Piller 41:27 Yeah, I've worked with schools. And then, of course, you know, my first, my that first job, again, had a sensory room, which was also my room, right? Or I didn't get to design it, but I had to treat in there, yeah, yeah. So sensory rooms are sometimes available, and I think they're really good for a tier two because you have access to more equipment. Most of the interventions provided in the book for tier one are things that are just really can be done in the classroom. This is the idea of it, right? Is that we're working at that population base level. If we do have access to a century room, and you can bring the whole class and great, but that's, I don't know that that's feasible for everyone, and since tier two tends to have a little more intensified needs, sometimes that that sensory room can be a better option, or space for those interventions and groups to take place. Jayson Davies 42:15 Yeah, and that's kind of where I wanted to go with because the question with people who, a already have access to a sensory room, or B are thinking about, you know, asking their district, their school, to have a center room, or maybe they've even been funded for one, but don't know where to start. What have you seen that works best? Or does it not work for tier one and sensory rooms? Do you think that? I mean, I don't see many cases where an entire classroom can go into a sensory room, but to what extent could a small group from a tier one like and, and I guess, what would you want to do to set up to make sure that it's actually helpful and not harmful? Dr. Aimee Piller 42:56 Yeah, and, you know, ways that I've utilized kind of a sensory room, or the idea of a sensor room in the past, is that more like kind of when they have their independent work time or center work time, that's a great time for them to this group goes to the sensory room for 15 minutes, or this, you know, these are we're doing independent work time. So this section of the class gets to go do those sensory based activities in the sensory room. And so I know that sensory rooms look very different depending on where you're at. So I will be honest that I didn't write the book necessarily from the perspective of sensory room, since they I wrote it more on based on, like, what equipment, wherever that may be located in your in your district or school, so that you can put that together either in a more structured, formal way, like a sensory room, in which case I would probably make sure that I had access to, alerting equipment, calming equipment, and then kind of making sure that I'm guiding those students to the place they need to be when they return to the classroom. So that goes back to that routine pace of like, when they go back, what are they doing? Is it time for them to then sit down and do their independent work? Or are they finished and they're going to lunch? So where are they in that routine base, too, changes your activities. Jayson Davies 44:02 Yeah, yeah. I've just heard so many different stories with sensory rooms. Like we had a child using a sensory room at our school, the teacher, I believe, had taken the student in there, and there were multiple students. Student was on a swing, fell, broke their arm. Obviously not a good situation. And it ended up being that, basically the school decided only the OT can use the sensory room with one on one or small group services. And I've been at another school site where we basically, these were, every student had an IEP in the classroom, but we would write up on the wall, like Johnny a. These are some activities that Johnny a can do, Johnny or, you know, Sophia, these are some activities that Sophia can do when they're in here. So in that sense, they came in in small groups, and they had more of a defined routine for that for each child. So there's several ways to do it, but yeah, it's always a tricky situation that I also try to. OTs that it's not only on you, like that sensory room is for the entire school, and it should, in my opinion, be the entire, you know, the players that need to come up with the rules. So it's everyone's responsibility, not just the OTs responsibility. Dr. Aimee Piller 45:12 No, I think that's a great point, and that's really the importance too, of like, when you're working at the MTSS level, the making sure and advocating so that you have the opportunity to train staff so that they know is that the right piece of equipment, is that that right activity for the this group, or these these students, and then how to do it, but it is absolutely everyone's responsibility to make sure kids are safe and their needs are met, and you have the expertise from a sensory standpoint as an OT on how to help them make sure those needs are met. Jayson Davies 45:41 Yeah, yeah. All right, I'm gonna ask you an either or question, and feel free to completely shut it down. But would you rather have a sensory library or a sensory room? Dr. Aimee Piller 45:52 I'd rather have a sensory library really? Yes, I just am such a and I think that's one thing that's important to me, and one a big reason I wrote the book, besides the fact that I thought, you know, so many kids need sensory supports these days, right? We know that many times we can provide these good, quality sensory supports without having to be direct intervention, but we really still need to be the one that's assessing and guiding that intervention. And I'm such a proponent too, of like, when you're at like, if you can be in the classroom more, of course, that's what we want to do, is be in the classroom more. And so I love that aspect of if I can provide sports supports and what this class is already doing, that's the ideal aspect, not always possible. And sometimes it's great to have that separate environment where I can go out and get the sensory needs met. And that's a great thing too, but if I could only have one or the other, I'd take this at the library. Jayson Davies 46:48 I appreciate you going with it and picking one like I know not many people do that. They're always like depends. That's the OT answer. So no, appreciate you doing that. All right, we're gonna take one final break, and when we come back, we're gonna talk a little bit about tier two interventions and some data collection as we move over to tier two. All right, we'll be right back. All right. We are back with Aimee to wrap up this episode, and we just talked a lot about tier one, what the outcomes might look like, what the intervention itself might look like as we transition into tier two, I first want to ask you during that tier one, what might data look like? What are you how are you collecting data? Are you having the teachers fill out a Google Form? Are you using pencil and paper, maybe just a few things that you might be wanting to track? What does that look like? Yeah. I mean, any Unknown Speaker 47:39 of those methods are great. I prevent I prevent I present a couple of different ones in the book. So some are paper pencils. Some are, you know, something virtual, like, easily, Google form, like Likert scales. Sometimes it's you making sure you're coming into the classroom every so often, and checking those progress and goals, you know, once a month, or something along those lines. So there's lots of ways that you can monitor that progress, and you're still track. I mean, you really do want to try to write goals that you can measure in some way. So sometimes it's just like, if you're looking at, well, how many students have you had for a behavioral referral this month? It's like, well, that's a pretty hard piece of data, yeah. So that's just a quick ask to a teacher, so easy to do on those Yeah. Jayson Davies 48:19 And you can do that classroom by classroom, by classroom, or you can do it by grade level, or you could do it entire school by how many visits to the vice principal or assistant principal's office. So, yeah, cool. Okay, so then moving forward into tier two, how are you deciding which students need that tier two to tier three? We did talk about assessments a little bit earlier. Would you say you're doing more of an assessment piece here, or is it more based upon that data collection that you got from tier one? How does that work? Unknown Speaker 48:51 I really kind of, again, function, put it, embed it right under the MTSS model. Let's start with the least amount of intervention. Gather the data on that, do that progress monitoring, and then if we are showing that that's not effective, and we've even changed interventions, or whatever we need to do, is it time to add in more support? And I that's where that data comes in. Because one, you need it. It's a it's part of the MTSS model. You have to have the data for that. But two, it's going to also give you the information on what kind of groups do you need, like, how often do these groups need to meet? Do I have enough for you know, one group, two groups, three groups. What does that look like? What types of sensory interventions do they need to implement? And a lot of times, these groups don't have to be very extensive or long periods of time, 510 minutes can sometimes be just enough. Maybe after recess, we got five students that need to go do some extra calming input before they come back to the classroom. That's that's real easy to embed in a in a day, but still kind of functions under that tier two model. Yeah. Jayson Davies 49:50 So I'm just going to play what the listeners thinking right now, because we just talked about data collection, and we talked about maybe one of the examples we gave was referral. Right? Referrals to the teacher giving us data, the assistant principal may be giving us data, or the entire first grade team giving us data. So how do we go from that data? That's more about like this month I had 30 referrals versus last month, I had 25 referrals. And pare that down into Okay, well, these are the kids that need that additional support? Unknown Speaker 50:22 Yeah, and that's a great question, because then it becomes like, are you seeing patterns of the same students as those students have been repeated? Do you have students that you might be concerned with that these interventions don't seem to be helping out? Right? That's a question that I'm going to ask teachers, like, Who's Who do you feel like these are not being effective for and those are then you can come in and take another look at that, rather via observation, talking to the students themselves, things like that, to see if that's something that's matching the data that you're collecting a lot of times too. Once the intervention might start going at that kind of tier one level, I might ask teachers to just kind of make note of specific students that seemed to what I would I just put I make it so easy for them, as easy as I possibly can. It's a plus or minus. It was plus it was they seem to have a pretty good inner response to it. Minus. It didn't seem to work, you know. So if I have a lot of those kind of like, Who are these? Minus kids, can I come in and take an extra look at them? Or what kind of things are you noticing? Do you think they might need a little more support things like that. Yeah. Jayson Davies 51:23 So you've got your larger data set, but then sometimes might have to look a little bit deeper. And then, even then, I can imagine that's where you might need to do a little bit of an assessment to kind of determine why the other approaches, the tier one approaches, weren't necessarily working to to update what tier two might look like, all right? And then, so let's dive into tier two. We talked a little bit about it briefly, being like more small group, but what does that actually look like day to day? Unknown Speaker 51:51 Yeah. So again, these are a little more our targeted, designed interventions. But you know, depending upon your setting and where it may be, these are things that you've trialed with the students that you know are going to be the right intervention. You've done a good quality assessment. You know what their sensory needs are. Hopefully you've paired them, kind of based on their sensory processing needs, the best you can with what you have. And so that you've designed these interventions. And I often would suggest that ot does those group interventions a few times as she's training whomever will take that to do those again, they don't have to be long, be 510, minutes at a time, sometimes longer, but they don't have to be so can to make sure that that's the right intervention for that group, or that that's the right mix of students together as well. You know that's important piece to consider. I even had the colleague of mine was explaining how she implements tier two with her tier she has her one of her tier three students lead the yoga group for the tier two, which is, like, just a fun way to kind of incorporate some social, pro social participation with the tier three student. And then the tier two is getting extra input. She's there guiding and getting minutes for taking care of everyone. So just a fun idea. Jayson Davies 52:59 Yeah, and earlier, we talked a little bit about that, like, paraprofessional support. How has that looked like? And one of the questions I kind of have with that is, are you creating the programs, or are you even finding programs that already exist, or a mix of both, yeah. Unknown Speaker 53:16 I mean, a little bit mix of both, right? We know that there is just a laundry list of sensory, you know, activities, right? You can put those together in your own programming based upon what a student needs. You can pull a little bit from things you've done in the past. We know that that vestibular piece is really important, proprioceptive, tactile, especially deep pressure, tactile. All of those are going to be in a mix of whatever you want the student to do, whether that's that kind of, I need to increase my alertness level. I need to decrease my alertness level. What's my match for that? And again, this tier one and tier two, from that standpoint, really does focus mostly on that reactivity side of sensory processing. And I didn't mention that before. It's not a lot on that kind of, that more motor aspects or motor planning pieces. It's more about like, is this child getting the sensory needs met so that they can participate in the classroom? So I wanted to make that distinction too. So once you're kind of getting the that programming in place, it's going to look very routine based after that. And that's a great time to pass that on to the pair, or whomever can can help implement that. Jayson Davies 54:18 Yeah, yeah. I really like that. And, and, I mean, when you were working with a with a pair of professional sounds like you had about four hours a day or so with that paraprofessional, what did their day kind of look like? Was it kind of going from class to class to class and implementing these for a few minutes in each class? Yeah. Unknown Speaker 54:33 So what would happen every morning she would come in and we just touch base, kind of like, make sure we had a plan for the day. What's she gonna do? Anything didn't go great yesterday, if I didn't get to touch base with her, you know, whatever it may be. And then she had a schedule. She had a schedule of students that some needed more intensive. And she did a lot of the tier two, mostly, and tier three. But then she also during her extra time, which was what was great, is she was there in the classrooms with the teacher, so not all of her four hours were filled with one. What I needed her to do, she got to float around the classrooms and help them out. And since she had, like, a little bit more training and sensory she could always implement that within the within the classrooms. So it was really great model, and she was a fantastic, you know, pair, but the teachers just found it so valuable. So when she would come in, we'd touch base, she'd go implement she'd give data trackings. I would check those every day or often, you know, if I could, and then anything that seemed awry, that would be a flag for me that I need to go in and see what's going on with that kid, or I need to maybe take a peek at that group that you're working with. So it's real easy to identify when I needed to go in there and take a peek at it. Jayson Davies 55:36 Yeah, and we haven't talked much about tier three, because we already identified that's like the IEP, but I'm assuming then you're talking about looking at the data from that paraprofessional. That's the data that you would look at to then maybe make a determination if a student needs to go to tier three. Oftentimes, within the MTSS, there are periods of time, typically eight to 12 weeks or so. People often talk about every eight weeks, every 12 weeks, needing to look at the data to determine to move up or down. Is that kind of what you use, or is it just kind of, when you see the data, that makes sense? Yeah. Unknown Speaker 56:11 I mean, a little bit of both, right? You want to make sure you're at least checking that, you know, usually every other month. But, you know, I try to check a little more often than that, if I can. And I do also want to mention and just because it's something that I don't think we always think of with the MTSS, but I don't know about everyone, all of your audience, but I know sometimes parents get a little bit nervous when services are discontinued from the tier three level. And so that's something that I think is a very valuable if you're working in a district that has good supports at a tier two and a tier one. Yeah, we can move, you know, from one to two to three, but we can move from three to two to one and not leave our parents with, like, our students, with no support. There's still support tier for you. You know, we can ease out of that direct intervention, because I know sometimes parents get kind of nervous student, my child's finally doing well in school, and now, you know, you're saying he doesn't need it anymore. Jayson Davies 57:05 Yeah, yeah, definitely. And that's kind of what I tell tell practitioners as well. Like, it's always nice when you have the MTSS program embedded, because then you can say, Look, you know, we're still gonna be even though the students not receiving an IE or OT on the IEP anymore, they will still definitely have access to supports from the occupational therapy team that that does help a lot. All right, really quickly, talking a little bit about barriers and ways to get around them, a little bit you talked earlier about working with that one teacher that is that's willing to support you. But what are some of the other barriers, and how to overcome those barriers that you've experienced or have heard about others experiencing. Unknown Speaker 57:45 Yeah, and you know, time is always a big barrier for us as OTs, right? We're just busy people, and we really, really care about our clients, and we want to give them the best services that we can. But oftentimes there's just not enough hours in the day. So I do talk a lot in the book about how to, like, read, redistribute your time, how sometimes you can put a little extra time in at some point to get Freer time, and it pays off in the end. So not being afraid like I used to go and attend the meetings with the staff, not every time, but sometimes like that, I was a familiar face then right and then I knew what was going on. I knew what was important to them as teachers and staff, I knew that. I knew what was important to the department. So all those things paid off in the end, even though it took a little extra of my personal time and the beginning, it paid off in the end. So thinking about that aspect too is something that when you're considering time, and at the end of the day, if I can provide supports for more students and have more time to give that individual, that student who needs that individualized I'm less stressed as a person. More kids get help. It's just a better match if you can get put the groundwork in. The other aspect I already did talk about is that sometimes they just don't think of us as part of that plan, like that the MTSS is not thinking of the OT as part of that plan. So we might have to insert ourselves as part of that. And I provide some ways in the book, a very formalized proposal that you can present to your administration, how to actually write that to have the data and information that's meaningful to administrative staff, that's might look different than what's meaningful to us and so that, but that but that can get their attention. Sometimes they're just like, I need to have a meeting with you, or I want to meet with you, but for not speaking their language, or may not give us the opportunity to tell them how great we are, how much we can help them. Jayson Davies 59:32 Yeah, absolutely. And there are team meetings happening without us even knowing about them. And and we won't know about them unless we ask, unless we, you know, do some digging on the website to determine that some sort of group called Ice BD do whatever, like MTSS like, even exist in our district, and we have to figure it out. So, yeah, no, definitely, we have to be a part of those teams. I have one final question for you, and hopefully it's a little bit of a fun one and idealistic question. In if you were, you know, just kind of, let's just assume you have one school in that school. How would you first start, like, tier one? What would you want to do for tier one? If you're just starting a brand new job today, and you're like, you can do anything, everyone's on board. What would you do at tier one? First, like, the first thing Unknown Speaker 1:00:19 you would do that's when I would set up sensory programming for the whole school, but I would probably do it at a classroom level. So I would train my staff really well to understand what sensory processing is. How does it impact it? And then I would embed, since it's idealistic, I would help them to learn how to teach in a was sensory, right? That would be like my ideal classroom. I have a I have a degree in elementary education as well, and so just to combine that sensory piece with the academics and create this beautiful curriculum that would be my ideal world. Obviously not really feasible, but that's because I think if you can teach, if you can embed sensory in the learning process every it's just more effective for everyone. Jayson Davies 1:01:06 Yeah, yeah. And then obviously, moving kind of on to tier two. Then how much time do you think you might have to dedicate to tier two? Unknown Speaker 1:01:16 You know, hopefully, if you're if your tier one is looking really good and it's doing a lot for those students, your tier two shouldn't be a lot of time, right? And you know, because it's just they need a little more, a little different, but they're already getting all this great sensory in tier one anyway, so it's just a little bit more or a little bit different, maybe a few more frequency and during the day, yeah. Jayson Davies 1:01:37 Okay. And then obviously, tier three, we have IEPs, which we can't always control, versus where they come from, but hopefully we are with tier one, tier two, we're able to limit the need for that tier three, although I will ask you, what are some of the things that you mentioned a little a moment ago, about how everything that we talked today is More about sensory regulation, not that motor piece and whatnot. So what are some things that if you see you almost kind of instantly think you know what? Maybe we need to move toward that tier three. Yeah, I mean, Dr. Aimee Piller 1:02:11 and from a sensory standpoint, that's a great question, because if I see a kid that has significant kind of motor planning or Praxis that's related to that sensory processing, I know that that's going to impact everything they're doing in the day at school, right? So that's a and that's a whole different intervention, right? It's a completely different type of sensory intervention, and it's very individualized and should be serviced under a tier three versus like a child who's just kind of, maybe just needs a little, you know, having trouble paying attention or sitting down or following directions, but with some added support, does Okay, and can participate in those classroom routines. So the motor plate, the motor planning, or then that sensory integration and processing piece is really key, or just those kids who have really, just really high sensory needs, right? So I'm not going to be able to embed a two minute movement activity, and that's going to be enough for that kid. That if a child has really high movement needs, then that's obviously something that's going to be needed, needing to be serviced under a more individualized approach, absolutely. Jayson Davies 1:03:12 Well. Aimee, thank you so much. It has been a pleasure, and please remind us where we can find both yourself and your book. Dr. Aimee Piller 1:03:18 Yeah, so you can. I have a website that's my company, pillar, p, i, L, L, E, R, child development.com There's resources on there that'll take you to the book. The book is published by Routledge press, and so if you go on to their website, they will have a link to that book, and you can purchase that for your own use. Jayson Davies 1:03:36 Yeah. And that is implementing school based occupational therapy services, a multi tiered approach to sensory processing needs. Aimee, thank you so much. It has been a pleasure, and I look forward to having you on the show very, very soon. Thanks again. Great. Thanks, Jayson. All right. That wraps up our conversation with Dr Aimee Piller on implementing sensory strategies within an MTSS framework. I want to extend my sincere thanks to Aimee for sharing her expertise, of course and practical insights on how we can support more students through a tiered approach to sensory processing. I think it's also super important that we are helping the teachers, because those teachers will go on to support many students that we will never even come across. Now, if you found this episode valuable and you want to dive deeper into implementing these strategies that Aimee shared in your practice, I encourage you to check out her book implementing school based occupational therapy services a multi tiered approach to sensory processing needs, which is available through Rutledge press as well as on Amazon. We will be sure to add a link to to the book in the show notes, and for those of you looking to connect with other school based ot practitioners and access additional resources, not just related to sensory processing, but all of school based occupational therapy. I invite you to join us at the OT schoolhouse collaborative. The OT school house collaborative is where our community comes together to share ideas, solve problems and grow professionally. You can learn more and become a. Member at ot schoolhouse.com/collab thanks again for tuning in, and I hope you have a great start to 2026 I'll see you next time. Amazing Narrator 1:05:09 Thank you for listening to the OT schoolhouse podcast for more ways to help you and your students succeed right now, head on over to OTs schoolhouse.com Until next time, class is dismissed you. Transcribed by https://otter.ai Click on the file below to download the transcript to your device. Thanks for listening to the OT Schoolhouse Podcast. A podcast for school-based OT practitioners, by school-based OT practitioners! Be sure to subscribe to the OT Schoolhouse email list & get access to our free downloads of Gray-Space paper and the Occupational Profile for school-based OTs. Subscribe now! Thanks for visiting the podcast show notes! If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts , Google Podcast , Spotify , or wherever you listen to podcasts. Click here to view more episodes of the OT Schoolhouse Podcast

Click on your preferred podcast player link to listen wherever you enjoy podcasts . Welcome to the show notes for Episode 191 of the OT Schoolhouse Podcast. In this Episode of the OT Schoolhouse Podcast, Jayson Davies welcomes Dr. Jamie Hunter and Dr. Kaisa Syväoja from The College of St. Scholastica to discuss how OT practitioners can utilize grants to advocate for mental health services in schools. Learn how grants can expand your OT practice beyond traditional tier three services, whether you're looking to fund a sensory room, provide professional development, or implement a school-wide mental health initiative. This conversation demystifies the grant-writing process, offers practical tips for finding and applying for grants at the federal, state, and local levels, and highlights the power of collaboration to sustain impact beyond the grant period—making this a must-listen for OTs ready to expand their role and amplify OT’s value in schools. Listen now to learn the following objectives: Learners will identify how to apply for grants (both small and large) to expand mental health services and other OT initiatives within school settings. Learners will understand how to effectively advocate for occupational therapy's role in supporting mental health at all tiers (especially tiers 1 and 2) within school-based practice. Learners will develop strategies for creating sustainable partnerships and programs that can continue beyond initial grant funding by demonstrating OT's value to school administrators and staff. Guest(s) Bio Jamie Hunter, OTD, OTR/L, AFWC Jamie Hunter is an Assistant Professor, Academic Fieldwork Coordinator, and Co-Director of the Department of Education Mental Health Service Provider Grant at The College of St. Scholastica in Duluth, MN. She has over 27 years of professional experience in school-based practice, pediatrics, leadership, and fieldwork education. Kaisa , OTD, OTR/L Kaisa Syväoja OTD, OTR/L is the current Program Director for the Master's of Occupational Therapy program at The College of St. Scholastica and the co-project director for the Mental Health Service Provider grant funded through the U.S. Department of Education. She has a background working with a variety of practice settings including early intervention and school-based practice. Her recent work has been focused on providing mental health related occupational therapy services within school-based settings . Quotes “It’s opened my eyes to how school-based practitioners can practice. It expanded my practice and just different ways that I see school-based practice and where the future of school-based practice can be.” — Dr. Jamie Hunter “It’s a lot of collaboration and co-teaching with counselors, teachers, and really focusing on the prevention and promotion aspect of just positive mental health and well-being.” Dr. Jamie Hunter “If you are an idealist and a visionary, find someone who’s a type A analytic.” — Dr. Kaisa Syväoja ”You have to be able to sort of build your project around their timetables. So that's something also to think about, is it's nice to have like a longer range plan, where do you want to go as a district or as an OT? So then when those grants open up, you're able to apply for them.” — Dr. Kaisa Syväoja ”Those businesses in your community, if you see them out there supporting your local school district…that probably means that business is interested in supporting endeavors that might be related to occupational therapy.” — Jayson Davies, M.A.,OTR/L Resources 👉 Every Moment Counts  - Susan Bazyk's program for supporting mental health in schools 👉 Autism Level Up  - Program developed by Jack and Amy 👉 Energy Meter  - Tool developed by Jack and Amy at Autism Level Up 👉 Grants.gov  - Federal government grant resource portal 👉 Mental Health Service Provider Grant  - U.S. Department of Education grant program 👉 The College of St. Scholastica OT Program Episode Transcript Expand to view episode transcript   Jayson Davies     Hey there, and welcome to episode 191 of the OT school house podcast. Thank you so much for being here. I am your host, Jayson Davies, and I'm excited to have you here. So I think I speak for a lot of school based ot practitioners when I say even just the idea of submitting a grant seems too daunting to even consider. Am I right? If I'm not, please reach out, because I want to know what grant you have submitted. But if you do feel that way too, the next 54 minutes or so will definitely help to calm your nerves and also help to see how maybe a small grant can help you to implement a new change in your schools, whether you want to build a sensory room or organize a library of tools that you can share with teachers throughout the year, or maybe you even want to bring on a full time or part time employee to support a program that you designed. This episode will help guide you to do just that. Today, I'm thrilled to welcome Dr Jamie Hunter and Dr Kaiser savoya from the College of St Scholastica. Dr Hunter brings over 27 years of professional experience in school based practice, pediatrics, leadership and fieldwork education, while Dr savoyes serves as the program director for the Masters of OT program and has extensive experience in both early intervention as well as school based practice. Together, the two of them are leading a groundbreaking mental health service provider grant that's transforming how ot practitioners approach mental health in the school setting. And so if you have ever wondered how maybe a grant could support you and the practices that you want to implement at your school site, you are in the right place, we'll explore how to effectively utilize these grants to support your practice, implement mental health initiatives across all of the MTSS tiers, and also create meaningful partnerships within your district. So let's go ahead and dive in.    Amazing Narrator     Hello and welcome to the OT schoolhouse 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     Jamie Kaiser, welcome to the OT school house podcast. It is such a pleasure to have you here, and you know we're going to be talking about grant writing within school based OT or not, particularly the writing process, but the actual using of grants to help school based occupational therapy practitioners. And I'm excited to have you here to talk about that, to get started. I would love to let you both share a little bit about where you are in your ot career, kind of how you got here, and why supporting grants or helping school based ot practitioners get grants is so impactful for you, Jamie, would you like to kick us off?    Jamie Hunter     Sure, absolutely. Thank you, Jayson for inviting us to speak today. I am Jamie hunter. I am school based practitioner by heart. I think I practiced for 23 years in a school district in Wisconsin, prior to shifting to academia, I am now currently the academic field work coordinator for the occupational therapy program at the College of St Scholastica in Duluth, Minnesota. I work alongside kaisa as co director of our mental health service provider grant, and it has been an absolute whirlwind, you know, over the last few years for us to be able to grow and develop programming we are supporting area school districts. And so it has just been It's opened my eyes to how school based practitioners can practice it is has expanded my practice and and just different ways that I see school based practice and where the future of school based practice can be.    Jayson Davies     Love that I appreciate you sharing how school based OT is kind of been supported by your expansion beyond just school based OT, and you know how grant writing can really support you. So kaiza, what about you? I'd love for you to share a little bit about your background and your your passion for grants and school based occupational therapy.    Kaisa Syvaoja     Yeah, thank you, and thank you for having us today. This is a topic that we love to talk about. We spend a lot of time talking about it, so we're happy to be here. My name is kaisi suvoya. I am the Master's Occupational Therapy Program Director at The College of St Scholastica, and like Jamie said, I'm also the CO Project Director for a mental health service provider grant when we embarked on this journey. And Jamie puts it very eloquently, like it has been a whirlwind of a journey, but it's been really exciting. We launched this particular grant initiative being one of the first ot programs to be able to be awarded this particular grant. And that has really. Shown us what OTs can do and how we can practice at the top of our licensure in so many different ways. I too came from school based practice. I worked in rural practice settings, so I've worked in a lot of different settings. But prior to coming to academia full time, I had been in rural school districts. I had a really big caseload birth to 21 and I think that this particular grant showcases all that OTs are actually able to do within those spaces, and a lot of it is advocacy. It's advocacy that we see on the ground with these particular grants, and it's also advocacy for all OTs to say, like, yes, you you have the capacity to be able to do this. And I think that's been the beauty of this particular grant, perfect.    Jayson Davies     You know, why don't we just actually go right into the grant that you both have? Kind of are working with that mental health service provider grant and share a little bit about what it entails. I know nothing about grant writing or about grants or very little, and I'm sure most of the people listening similar. So just share with us, kind of what the goal and what it looked like to potentially even get it, and what it's allowing you to do. Yeah.    Kaisa Syvaoja     So this was a depart federal us, Department of Education grant. So at the federal level, which has its own nuances. So if you're looking at for somebody, that's brand new, if you're looking at grants, there's federal grants, state grants, and then grants that are from outside of governmental organizations. So when you're dealing with a federal grant, there's a level of structure that goes into both the application and applying for it, as well as the day to day operations and the management of grants. So this particular grant was a mental health service provider grant that was really focused on training, so working with professions that are considered mental health within scope, which occupational therapists are within mental health. We know this as OTs. We've done a lot of advocacy in those areas, and so this particular grant was really intended to train individuals to be able to go into school settings and be able to provide some of those supports, to kid OTs, to school personnel to really address some of the mental health needs that our young people are experiencing today. This particular grant came from the bipartisan safer homes act. So it was something that came through Congress as a grant for expense. So that was sort of a little bit of the general context to that particular grant.    Jayson Davies     Gotcha, and you mentioned that it allows for training. Is this training occupational therapy students? Is it training ot practitioners that are already practicing, what does that what does that    Kaisa Syvaoja     look like? So our particular grant right now has been working with Level Two fieldwork students. So ot students obviously pre licensure and going out into area schools and completing one of their level two rotations through the school districts, with the primary emphasis on mental health and how ot can work within those school settings to support the mental health of kid OTs from an occupational therapy lens, wow.    Jamie Hunter     And I think if I can jump in and just add a few additional details when I think about the vision of what it was expanding and helping to fill the gap of mental health services. We're partnering with four area school districts to be able to provide additional supports. Many of them were in rural areas or areas where they just didn't have the services to be able to support needs of students. We're not only doing the training with this next generation of OT practitioners that could potentially be school based practitioners in the future or pediatric mental health practitioners in the future, but also being able to provide training to the staff, the teachers, the administrators, paraprofessionals, anyone that is working alongside our students. It's a lot of collaboration and co teaching with counselors teachers, and really focusing on the prevention and promotion aspect of just positive mental health and well being so that's kind of a nutshell of the beginning of our project.    Jayson Davies     Yeah, I love it. And, you know, we as as ot practitioners, we often reference like the 17 year research gap, how it takes 17 years from research to get into practice. And, and, yeah, you're potentially working primarily with the level two students. But how? Much of that knowledge is then going back to like what you mentioned, Jamie, the rest of the staff there, and it sounds like you might even be working directly with the staff a little bit education. But even more importantly, the OT practitioners that are supervising those fieldwork students. I'm sure they're learning a lot more because, I mean, I speak with ot practitioners, you know, every week, if not every day, and I often get I don't know how to support mental health on campus. I don't understand what that actually means. I don't understand what it looks like. You know, is that SEL or what is it? And so it's great that we are now supporting those students, and this grant is allowing you to do this, but in turn, those students are going to kind of spread the word and support others, which is fantastic, congratulations.    Jamie Hunter     Yeah, and our students enter additional training before they start their rotation, we built out training modules that really focus on understanding school based practice. What is multi tiered system of support. What is individual education plans? What is special education? What is all of those components? How do we begin teaching them additional avenues to explore pediatric mental health? What are the supports that they need to be able to be functional in those settings? And we relied on every moments counts. Susan basics, her, her work, that, that she has done, to develop that every moments count, programming autism level up. We referenced that and gave additional training for our students to be able to use the edge the energy meter that Jack and Amy, Amy, Amy, yes, that Jack and Amy have developed so definitely giving the students a forefront of learning before they even hit the ground, running at at the sites that they're Going to and the school districts that they're helping.    Jayson Davies     I love that, because those are not cheap programs for new practitioners to get access to, to learn from Amy and Jack and Sue basic and the entire team over at every moment counts. So that's awesome. Kaiser, did you want to add?    Kaisa Syvaoja     Yeah, I was going to say that that's a really critical element to what we've been doing is because what, what our students are doing, is a little bit unique in the sense that we don't have a lot of OT practitioners in the school settings that are doing this, in practice, in in a large scale. I think all of us as OTs do this, right? It's, it's foundational to who we are as providers, but we don't necessarily have that Avenue at the district level to be able to do this in a larger scale. And so a lot of the practitioners and providers right now are looking at it from approaching it from that tier three aspect, which I think is really important, right? We have a lot of kiddos at that tier three level that need additional mental health supports. What we are doing is focusing a lot more on that tier one and tier two, so preventative, and also those students that are more at risk. And I think that that's been really, a really great thing from a ot advocacy lens, because we are able to showcase at the district level. This is what you can use your OTs, and this is sort of your your return on that investment. But also that's been something that we've had to be really mindful of when we work with our level two students to say, you know, you're going to be walking into spaces that are going to look different. You're going to have to apply your ot critical thinking skills in a little bit different way, and so we've had to do a lot of that early training for them in order to be successful. And I think our students have really walked away with a lot of benefit from that.    Jayson Davies     Yeah, you know, I have so many follow up questions I just want to and we can touch on this maybe in a moment, but both of you have really mentioned that rural component, and how there aren't a lot of practitioners in the area using mental health, and this is just going to overflow. But before I do that, I want to kind of direct follow to that question, because I know with if you get a grant, you've got to kind of measure this, just like an IEP goal, you've got to measure in order to get potential future funding and whatnot. And so are you? I'm sure there's multiple ways you're taking data, but are the field work level two students then in some way implementing our project in their level two that kind of corresponds with this program?    Kaisa Syvaoja     Yes. Jamie, do you want to take that one?     Jamie Hunter     Yes. So our students absolutely are, they're doing projects. They're, you know, I think this last cohort of students that that we have out currently started doing some research. You know, even in their their coursework before, like, two semesters. Before they actually went out to rotations. And you know, they've done research to be able to develop programming and planning. Some of them were focused around teacher burnout and well being. How do we use cognitive behavioral therapy supports to be able to support the teachers we can't support our kids without identifying that we need to address teachers well being as well. You know our students when we think about application of tier two interventions, being able to develop some cafeteria interventions, some things that are happening at the resource recess level, all of our students, depending on the district needs, are meeting the needs of our clients, which are our districts in a variety of different ways. Some wanted those embedded strategies right in the tier one classrooms and our students have created an intervention menu to be able to push to teachers and say, What things are you needing in your classrooms? Is it movement and mindfulness? Lessons, is it growth mindset? Lessons? Are there ways that we can look at just regulation and CO regulation needs within your classroom? Our students are doing assessment to be able to determine what might be needed in a classroom. When we look at the population level of a classroom, or a whole cohort of sixth grade students, or do they look at more tier two, where it maybe is some smaller groups of students who might be at risk, and the teachers are bringing forward, hey, could we do an anxiety group? Or maybe we've got a tech dependency theme that's happening, and we can help address and provide some lessons. So those are just snippets of some of the projects our students have been working with, and it just depends each district has come forward with different areas of need to be able to support the students they have.    Jayson Davies     Yeah, I am totally resisting the urge to go on a deep dive with you all into MTSS, because I know that's not the topic of this podcast. We have other podcasts that we can save that for. But you mentioned all these wonderful things that are happening. Remind me again, how long have you all been working kind of under this grant?    Kaisa Syvaoja     So we are in our third year, okay? So we've been working with our districts, really, for about two, two and a half years, okay? And we've done a lot of build with that space. This particular grant was a non continued grant, so we'll be ending in December, so we'll we're sort of wrapping up our project as we have initially envisioned it. We've got a lot of things that we've got in the works, as far as how we're continuing this in other capacities, and those partnerships with our districts, because we've done a lot of really good work. The other piece with this too, is with a federal grant, there are specific things that we have to measure. This was a mental health service provider training grant, so we were really looking at like number of students that were trained and practitioners, number of placements, number of like recent hires, those types of things. So they're looking much more at that higher level space, which gave us a lot of opportunity to be able to really directly interact and meet those district needs. And then what we have done from an OT advocacy piece is we have really encouraged and focused on being able to disseminate this information to other ot practitioners, to other people that are going to interface with our districts in various ways, whether that's at the local level or nationally. So we've been a lot of different places, and that's that's been a really, I think a big benefit of this particular grant is we've been able to do that, and obviously having conversations with you that type of thing.    Jayson Davies     Yes, yes. We love conversations about it.    Jamie Hunter     Yeah. Even though it's been a non continuation, it definitely has planted seeds of how, how could this look? How can we continue this with sustainability? Specifically within our four area school districts, there are things that are going to continue that we've been creative to identify. How can we continue this, this work, but then also, at, you know, there is going to be that continued advocacy to to examine, how does this impact where school based practice is going in the future, you know, whether it's impacted individual OTs. And just saying, Hey, I never even thought I would be able to work in this area. Oh, I didn't know that the ESSA laws allowed for ot to work in this space. Yes, there is idea you could allocate funding to be able to support those preventative and promotion levels. So it definitely for me. I came from school based practice where I was mainly tier three. I. With IEPs, and I thought I was siloed in only being able to work with those on my caseload. And it really has opened up the opportunities to to see the possibilities of where I knew that we could work, even though I felt like I had the restrictions of where I could work, if that makes sense, yeah.    Jayson Davies     Oh yeah, absolutely. And, and I the reason I asked how long is because I actually want to look a little retrospective these four districts. Were you working with them actually, before? Did you have students going to those four districts?    Kaisa Syvaoja     No, we weren't currently working with students in this capacity, like we might have had field work placement students, in a general sense, going in, yeah, and doing what we consider that typical OT, but no, we were not doing this particular program or partnership with any of these districts prior.    Jamie Hunter     Yeah, they had gone there for a traditional school based practice, and it opened the door because we had the existing partnerships with these districts, but it allowed for expansion of, how can we really enhance this partnership to be able to support the district beyond just the student learning aspect of a level two student being taken by a ot at the district, perfect.    Jayson Davies     And that's exactly what I wanted to bring up. Is, what did it actually look like for our Level, Level Two students going before this program, right? These students were, you had students five years ago. They were going to school based ot placements, but they weren't going with this knowledge that they're now going in with. It sounds like they get one or two terms of education before they go into their field work on every moment counts, and autism level up and other programs that are fantastic. But have you seen, I guess, a big shift in what you know, your level two fieldwork students from five years ago compared to those that are going in today?    Jamie Hunter     Yeah, I would say yes, we've seen a huge growth with the students capacity for learning while they're on the site, but then also what they can bring as as resources to the districts that they're working in. And so previously, students that would go into school based practice in these four school districts, it was that traditional tier three, you know, caseload that that you see OTs typically working in, you know, and I think even from the our first year of the grant, there we were, what is our phrase, Kaiser, we were saying we were building the plane as we were flying it, right? So here we're building programming. We're building the different interventions. How do we assess at the group level? How do we assess at the population level? We're building things that our students could be using, reflecting now to the students who are out on rotations right now this group of students, we embedded them in research prior to going so here they immerse themselves in in the language of everything school based, all the language you know, it's a foreign language when you're a medical professional and you're going into the educational setting, right? And so it immerse them in that. It immerse them in the evidence based components that are going behind. What is school based practice, and what are the mental health components that are needed? And definitely in addition to those learning modules that we have the students do before they go on site, but then also the programming that our students and our field work educators have built over the last two and a half years. Now we have programming. We have things built so that we can really expand and begin to build those things at the district level. And so it definitely has made a huge difference, and students are feeling more confident in in that advocacy and being able to build programming for our districts.    Jayson Davies     Yeah, yeah. And on the flip side of it, because you mentioned right having that opportunity to collaborate, I'm sure you're also getting feedback from people at the district, whether it be teachers, other service providers, hopefully even administration. What has that looked like? Like? Are people like, Oh, I understand ot now? Or are they like, Oh, I'm surprised. I didn't know that ot could support mental health. Or, I guess, what are you hearing when? When other both OTs, but also non ot practitioners?    Kaisa Syvaoja     So all of the above you can probably imagine. You know, a lot of that goes back to the advocacy piece. So, you know, like when we first started those conversations, we got a lot of, oh, I didn't realize that ot could do that. Or some hesitancy is that, you know, is that a direction we want to go? You know, we sort of got the system and process, so there was a little bit of that as we have built the relationships. And I think as you are able to see. What your OTs in those schools are able to do to support the whole school, that conversation has really shifted to, you know, what else are you able to do? How can you expand these types of things? They start to come and see you as more of a partner in whatever those initiatives are at that district level. So I think a lot of that just comes back to continually being present and advocating for for us as as a profession, and then advocating for those kiddos too.    Jayson Davies     Yeah, yeah. Love it awesome. I just love how you know, it starts with just the fieldwork students, but then it expands so much beyond the fieldwork students and like, what I mean to extent you call that, like, grassroots advocacy, right? Like you just start with the smallest number of people that you can and just grow from there. And that's awesome. Kudos to y'all. All right, we have spent a lot of time really talking about the program, what it has looked for the two of you, and for the students and and for the schools that you work with, but now that we got everyone excited about what they can do if they get a grant, let's talk about grants. And first of all, is this something that is too overwhelming for a school based occupational therapy practitioner? Obviously, the grant that you got, the two of you got, is a little different, right? You were getting a grant to educate others so that they could make progress. But is getting a grant, whether it be federal or others, I don't even know what exists out there, feasible for school based ot practitioners that are, you know, working a 3540 hour week, absolutely.    Kaisa Syvaoja     I mean, will it be work? Yes, but I think that there's a lot of payoffs for that, you know, whether that's getting a smaller grant, and there are a lot of smaller grants out there, especially if you're looking at maybe just a school level or at the district level, and you're not trying to do, like, what we're doing, where we've got really big partnerships and placements and stipends related to placements, and, you know, that type of aspect, and you're really just looking at the implementation of an initiative like this, you can certainly find smaller grants that are going to support that, that are going to support some of those startup development costs, getting diversifying your assessments, and, you know, resources that You have at at the school level, and then also being able to provide some potential offset to your increased workload, or shift in that workload. I think that that's a big area that people need to be thinking about, if you're looking at it more from that practitioner level, is the school districts, especially if you're coming from a district that is short OTs, they're not going to want to pull you, even if you are really skilled and wonderful and can do all these wonderful things. And so being able to have some dollar amount, to be able to offset that, is going to be incentive to your districts, and it's going to help you get your program launched. There's a number of non government grants, but then at state levels, there's a number of states we're in Minnesota, so I pay attention to Minnesota, Wisconsin pretty frequently. But you know, there are state level grants that do come through. The big thing with applying for a grant, whether this is at the small level or the larger level, is really think what your project. Think through what your project is. Think through what are all the different elements of it. Have a really clear vision of what that is. And for OTs, that can be really hard, because we're good at everything. We can do lots of things. So narrowing that down being really concrete with what it is that you are able to offer how many people or kid OTs, or what's that impact look like? You know, how are you serving them? And what are your specific project areas are going to be helpful to somebody that is going to be reviewing that grant that is 99.9% of the time not going to be an OT. So you have to explain what OT is in a way that's tangible, and also not get tangentile in that explanation with really clear. This is my like to say, like the artifact. These are the things in the point that you can that you can see and walk away with,    Jayson Davies     yeah, yeah, absolutely. I want to touch on something you just said. But before I do, we're going to take a quick break and we'll be right back. We'll be right back. All right, we're back. And you mentioned this thing that, how do I phrase this? I thought about grant writing. I've thought about trying to figure out something, maybe even Donors Choose, or whatever that website is called, where other people finance things. But I always, to a degree, almost felt a a little bit selfish or b I didn't know what to actually ask for. And so I love that you brought up some assessments. I also really love that you brought up the idea of potentially compensation to bring on, like another ot practitioner to help out, even if it's a few hours a week. Yeah. Is that something you've seen practitioners do? Like, in I guess do you have to kind of, like, lay it all out on a spreadsheet? Like, I need these assessments. Is going to cost this much. I need a part time. OT, we have a contract company that we work with. It's going to be this much. And is that kind of what it looks like?     Kaisa Syvaoja     Yeah. So you would essentially be creating a budget spreadsheet. And within that budget spreadsheet you're going to have those operational things that you know are tangible things, you know, the assessments, the equipment that you need, the potential, you know, if you had to do any renovations, those kinds of things, right, that have a really easy attached dollar amount. The other part to that budget is your time like you have to see yourself as an entity, or somebody else as like you need to. You need to monetize that time in some way, whether that is yourself to say, Okay, this percentage of my workload is going to be covered through this and put $1 amount to that, and also then for the district, because now they're going to lose that person percentage of your workload for your traditional services that you had been providing that then you're going to need to say, okay, and I'm either going to work overtime, and this is going to be the percentage that The grant is going to pay me for overtime, so you essentially compensate that for yourself, or you're going to bring in somebody else that's going to be able to offset that cost, and you're able to pay for that through a grant source. Obviously, some grants don't allow for personnel, so that would be something you need to look at specific to your grant, but assuming that you have a grant that allows for you to build that budget, and they have, they have guidelines, and you're not just, you know, you don't guess here, um, they'll tell you, I can    Jayson Davies     totally see, sorry, really quickly, I could totally see, like, an OTs will therapist, like, going out, getting this awesome grant for like, $50,000 to help them, like, offset their work, and then being like, how do I give this money to the district? Like, just not understanding all that, but obviously, all the guidelines, or each grant has guidelines. Most of the times it goes through the district in some capacity, correct?    Kaisa Syvaoja     Yes, yeah. And this is where, like, obviously, like, you might have one person writing it, you might have one person envisioning this, but you're not going to probably go rogue and just, you know, create a grant, or apply for a grant and get a grant, and your district's not aware of it. So like, you need to have these conversations at the district level, or if you're in a cooperative, you know, with your cooperative, however you're however you're structured. So yeah, don't go rogue. But within that budget spreadsheet, like you really want to be thinking about, what are those tangible things, and also, what are those personnel aspects? Because that is what's going to make your grant successful. Because you can have all the most brilliant ideas in the world, and you might not have either time to do it, or there's nobody to be able to pay to be able to do this. And when you are looking at shortages of personnel, districts, cooperatives, whoever is paying you and building out that case so that they're going to be really protective of your time in those other spaces too, because they need you to be working with the kid OTs that they currently have. And we know that there's a lot of kiddos that need to be worked with for ot across the board. So these are really, really great opportunities to build my recommendation. If you're a practitioner looking at this, start small. You don't need to do a multi million dollar, massive project with all of these different aspects to it. Think about, what can you do if we're looking at like a tier one approach, and that's your focus. Like, what can you do in that classroom level? What can you do in those between classes times that's going to help with supporting the culture in a positive way at that particular school that you're working with, or that particular classroom that you're working with like these don't need to be huge, massive projects that are really challenging to organize. You can start small and then build that also is helpful. If you're working with a district that maybe is a little bit on the fence, or you've got teachers who don't really understand this, it's a good way for them to be able to see in small snippets what you are able to do and how you can support them, and then you can build from there, and whether that's through additional funding or they reallocate things at the district level, and you've got some release now for that, because now they're allocating dollars coming in from other sources to your salary. You know those are those are ways for them to be able to see it, but those grants are really helpful to be able to launch that, especially with a district that maybe doesn't have the means or resources to be able to do that on their own, or maybe doesn't understand what you are able to do as an OT in those spaces.    Jamie Hunter     And I think, yeah, I think, you know, like Kaiser said, Don't go rogue. It is you have a team. You know, many times you're working alongside counselors or teachers who have passion and have, you know, similar ideas. Start having conversations about, hey, I have this idea of how we could grow programming. I saw this grant right? How do you work collaboratively as a team? It may be something that you need to bring to administration and get that buy in too, right? And maybe, then, whether you're at a bigger district where maybe you might have some people who have been had experience writing grants, you know, that was my first taste. Is I partnered with a teacher and we wrote a grant for a sensory room, you know. So I think it's very feasible to be able to write those grants. But you know, having other eyes on it is another supportive measure. And and showing your district administration, hey, this is what ot can do. And how can we showcase this through grant writing? And here is the idea that we have to bring to the district to enhance what's already happening and and build from there. So yeah, definitely start small, but don't do it by yourself.    Kaisa Syvaoja     My big advice to this is, if you are an idealist and a visionary, find someone who's a type A analytic to read through and clean your proposal.    Jayson Davies     Yes, yes, I am the first and definitely need a lot of help with the person, people who implement so I totally understand that statement. I had a question, and you made me laugh, and I forgot about it. But no, the question is, is ot practitioners, we often go to our administrators in times of need, and the sense of I'm burnt out, I need more support to help me get through my already high case load. And we sometimes forget that when we go to our administrators, I find when we go to our administrators, we go with problems, and we don't often go with solutions. And I feel like this can kind of help us to go with a solution. Yes, it takes a little bit more work. Don't get me wrong, it does take hours beyond seeing kids, assessing kids going to IEPs, to sort this all out. But long term, it can support us. Is that kind of how the two of you see it?    Kaisa Syvaoja     Yeah, absolutely. You know it's, it's definitely some work on the front end and and I don't think it's a quick fix. So if you are a practitioner who is burnt out, this is not going to be just like the next day. Things are all wonderful. But the work that we have particularly been doing through the grant, and if you can get a grant to support this is sort of twofold, like you're able to do more at that tier one and tier two level, which, in theory, and we've seen, I think, good, good anecdotes to that this actually works. But you know, when you're working with tier one and tier two, you're preventing potentially more involved tier three needs, which, if you're a burnt out practitioner, can also be helpful, because maybe you're not working with them at a high intensity in a tier three IEP capacity, and you're maybe working preventatively with some of these kiddos so that you don't have as large of a tier three caseload. So that's where a benefit is. Obviously, that's not immediate. I think the other thing to just in context and have people think about is like, this will take time for you to learn and to get a system and process like we've been doing this now for a couple of years with our students. We've learned a lot along the way. Definitely, the way we're doing it now is not how we started, and if we could go back, it would probably be a lot easier. But, you know, those that first time that you're trying something new, it's going to take more cognitive load and also planning and work on your part, so you're putting more time in early, yeah, with the return hopefully later on, yeah, in different ones.    Jayson Davies     Yeah, absolutely. And Jamie, if I can come back to you, because you mentioned how you actually worked with the teacher to develop a sensory room on campus, I would love to just kind of get a quick overview of kind of how that got initiated and the steps that you kind of took to make that happen. Yeah.    Jamie Hunter     So in practice, when I was working for our school district, I was working with an autism teacher, a teacher that's specialized in in that area. At the high school, we did not have a resource room. We did not have a place that that students could go to decompress, to take a break, to get some of those sensory needs met. And so we had a local grant that the teacher was like, Hey, do you want to see if we can apply for this grant together and see if we can get funding to be able. To get the equipment that we need. The district was on board to say, hey, we'd provide a classroom space for you. We'd allocate that, but we just don't have the money to be able to buy the equipment that we would need to be able to support that. And so the grant was written to be able to get equipment. So we were able to get swings, we were able to get scooters. We were able to put mats in the room. We had lower lights, you know, all of those sensory based tools that that students may need, depending on on what where they were at with their regulation for that moment of time. And so it definitely was a great opportunity for us to apply for the grant. We received it again, those same factors that Kaiser shared before, we had to itemize everything that we wanted on our wish list. What would this money go towards? How would we spend it? We had to give like we were going through catalogs and absolutely writing down every single thing that we could potentially put in for the funding, and then we had to document that on the tail end side when we did receive the grant, to be able to spend the funding down.    Jayson Davies     So so just to demystify a little bit more, here you thank you for kind of sharing that last step that you really had to do, or several the steps that you had to do at the end of your answer. If, how long did it take from the moment that you guys, like, had this idea to actually being done with the process? Not like, how many hours it took you? But was this a week long project? Was it a years long project, months?    Jamie Hunter     So kaisa asked, Hey, do you want to do this grant?    Jayson Davies     I'm just talking about the small one. Not the not the big one, but like the small one, the small one that we're talking about right here, the sensory room, right?    Jamie Hunter     So the small grant that we did, gosh, you know, I think it was a meeting. We we met. We talked about, what does this look like? You know, I think we met a couple times. We had a shared document that we were growing and developing. The application process, I took over kind of looking, because OTs, we look at those sensory catalogs and equipment and things like that. A lot I took on that aspect of diving into what things would we want to go in there, how much money would each of those things cost? The teacher kind of took on more of the responses to, what are the questions? Why do we need this? What is the need? So we kind of tasked it out that way when we were applying for for the grant, you know. So, I mean, definitely it took some time and investment, you know, definitely a few meetings looking at that deadline, you know, are we meeting that deadline of when it needs to be applied and submitted? You know? So, and then on the tail end, once we did receive the grant, then it took a little bit more time again, going through the orders working with the district, because it had to come through the district where all the funding went, and, you know, the processes to get it all ordered and set up, and then the training, yeah. So then, after that fact, we had to do training to whoever was using that room so that we knew that the equipment and everything was going to be used appropriately. So definitely, when you're thinking about, what is your product, what are those outcomes? What are the components that you might need to invest in to make sure it's a successful run?     Kaisa Syvaoja     Can I jump in real quick just on some logistics for grants? Having some ideas in your head is a really great thing. You can write them down on paper. Obviously you're going to tailor your project specific to the funding requirements in the source. So you might have a big project that you have to make a little bit more tangible to that particular grant. So, you know, have that in the back of your mind. The other thing with grants, typically, they operate on cycles. So usually, you know, there might be a heads up for a grant, like, Hey, this is going to post, or we anticipate it's going to post at a certain time. But grants typically aren't just continually available. I mean, smaller maybe non governmental grants, you might have just a pool of money that's available and they do it on a rolling basis, but usually you're going to get a grant window time. So between, you know this date and this date, you can put in an application. And so you have to be able to sort of build your project around their timetables. So that's something also to think about, is it's nice to have, like, a longer range plan. Where do you want to go as a district or as an OT? So then when those grants open up, you're able to apply for them. Yeah?    Jayson Davies     Is the easiest way to find grants. Just kind of go on google search California education grants and kind of obviously type a little bit more details than that. I'm assuming every state's different and all that. But is that kind of the starting point?    Kaisa Syvaoja     Um, yeah. So. There's a couple of good places at the state level, like looking at your state websites are going to be probably your best options. And there's there's grants specific to individual elements or aspects of that state government structure. So you can apply to be on listserv and get email notifications when grants get posted at the state level. I do that for Minnesota, and that's across, I    Jayson Davies     think, like the Department of Education,    Kaisa Syvaoja     Department of Education, but it's really through, like, there's your state government, and it posed pretty much all grants, at least ours does within that that spectrum, as far as what you're wanting to sign up for. So that's one grants.gov is going to be your go to for federal grants. And that system, you know, once you're in it, it's a little bit clunky. You can sift and filter through and just look at forecasted ones or ones that are open. You can look at certain funding sources, so if it's us, you know, Department of Education, or an NIH grant, or something along those lines. It lets you sift through that way that's going to cover your governmental grants, non governmental your we have foundation level for, like, local areas, whether that's a city level or, like a couple of counties, that's usually a good place to start, because they might be pooling a number of people, or just reaching out to those foundations and organizations is also helpful to just say, Hey, we've got this project. We're looking at some funding sources, you know, what might be some local, you know, area dollars that might might be interesting to look at, and they're usually pretty useful.    Jamie Hunter     I think the local one, like, like I spoke to about funding equipment for the sensory room at the high school, right? That was a foundation locally. It was through a hospital, you know. So looking at your local organizations, sometimes those retail organizations that are local to you might put out small grant funds that that you can apply for funding. We've had some of our students apply for those at a retailer, and they've gotten $500 for equipment to help at middle school recess. Kind of you know, where they have some more equipment available for for students. So definitely different ways that you can look at exploring those funding options.    Jayson Davies     Yeah, that's a that's a good idea, like, because I know recently in our community, I think it's smart, and final, has been just kind of out there in the community. Really like doing things for our schools, and I almost see that as like a way to also potentially find they might not have a specific, quote, unquote grant writing or grant a program. But those businesses in your community, if you see them out there, supporting your local school district, if you see them out there, you know, maybe your city just opened up a new playground and it was provided by or sponsored by this business. Well, that probably means that business is interested in supporting, you know, endeavors that might be related to occupational therapy, and so reach out to that company, and maybe it's not a formalized grant or something, but they might be able to support you in some way. So great idea.    Kaisa Syvaoja     One of my best advices is go with a project. Don't necessarily go and ask for the money. Just go and say, Hey, I've got this idea. I'd love to be able to talk to you about it. You're not asking for anything. You're just having a conversation. So you know, starting there for those smaller partnerships and conversations, that works really well, then you can go back and ask later, or they might offer something.    Jayson Davies     Yeah, yeah. You never know. You never know. I would be remiss if I didn't ask this question, is chat GPT helpful in any of this?    Kaisa Syvaoja     Well, we didn't use chat GPT when we developed our grant. That was still a little bit before chat GPT was very well versed. Yeah, I think that there are some benefits, you know, being able to put in, like, if you're brand new to building spreadsheet related stuff, don't really know what you should be including help with definition of terms, that type of thing. I think AI can be a really useful tool to sort of help structure that narrative or pull out aspects of that document. Maybe as far as developing and building I don't think that any of our AI sources are that adept at the nuance of OT especially if you're wanting to build a innovative and new project. I think that AI generative AI is really good with things that it already knows a lot of what you are wanting to do, hopefully and be innovative and creative. Hopefully, AI doesn't have a really great idea looks like. So you're going to have to build that aspect of the narrative for sure. But I think it can help with some of the nuts and bolts, maybe of some of those grant writing resources.    Jamie Hunter     And I think if you. Have that idea and you're like, okay, am I addressing this question to the detail that they're wanting? You could run it through an AR generator, you know, is it more clear? Is this? Can this be more clear and concise? Is this, you know, am I addressing all the components that is in this application and have it be like a second set of eyes to just say, is there anything else that I could expand on? Is that a way that you could use that tool? But again, I think you still need to have those ideas. You have to have the build of it and use it as a supplementary support. It's not going to generate everything that you're going to need?    Kaisa Syvaoja     Yeah, and I review grants. We still have humans reviewing grants, at least at this point. I think it'll be interesting. The next couple of years, are we going to see generative AI doing screenings for those initial grants? So that might be something interesting to pay attention to. Like, are they screening out certain things. If you don't have certain words in that initial application, to my knowledge, that's not something that's happening at this point, but that might be a way of also pulling in generative AI for the future to say, Hey, do I have all the key words and target things that this particular grant might be looking at, so that you are at the top? But when somebody is reviewing a grant, they want to hear your story. They want to hear what's what's really exciting about what you're doing, how it's going to impact your local community, or whoever it is that you're working with, like that's what they want to see. So you have to be able to showcase that.    Jayson Davies     I love that. That's a great I think that's kind of a great wrap up here. I was going to ask you both for one more tip, but I feel like you all have given so many great tips throughout this entire episode. So unless there is one more thing that you kind of have on the tip of your tongue and you really want to share, I wanted to ask if is LinkedIn the best place for someone to find you, potentially, if they have a question, either specifically about the program you're working on, maybe a quick grant question, or maybe they're local to you, just want to you. Just want to support you. Is that the best place for people to find you?    Kaisa Syvaoja     Yeah, this is crazy. You can certainly reach out to me on LinkedIn. I'm pretty active there. Love to connect with anybody and everybody.    Jamie Hunter     Yes, I would say the same. You know, I guess the only other thing that I think about is that, can this be done without grant funding? I think another advocacy piece is thinking about your ot practice and what things you may want to expand in your practice. There is always partnerships. You have local ot programs in your state. Are there ways that you can collaborate to help build some ideas and programming and just being able to expand where we are with school based practice.    Jayson Davies     Absolutely, that is a great wrap up. Kaiza Jamie, thank you so much for coming on this show, sharing so much about your grant that you received, and congratulations on getting this all like you're at the finish line now. Congratulations on that. That is amazing, but also here to support others who might want to do something similar with grant. We really appreciate your time, your energy and, of course, your knowledge.    Kaisa Syvaoja     Thanks for having us.     Jamie Hunter     Thank you, Jayson.    Jayson Davies     Thank you. All right, and that wraps up episode 191 of the OT school house podcast. Thank you so much for tuning in all the way to the end. I want to, of course, extend a heartfelt thank you to Dr Jamie Hunter and Dr Kaiser Savoia for sharing their incredible insights on how ot practitioners like us can use these grants to advocate for mental health within our school sites, as we've learned today, grant writing doesn't have to be super intimidating, and whether you're looking to fund a sensory room or provide professional development or implement A school wide Mental Health Initiative, there are resources available to you to help expand your practice and better serve your students. If today's conversation inspired you to think differently about your ot practice, or want to do more within your ot practice, I encourage you to join us over inside the OT school house collaborative. This is where you'll find additional resources, professional development opportunities and direct mentorship from myself and other school based ot practitioners to implement what you've learned today. Together, we can elevate school based ot practice and make a lasting impact on our students and, of course, our school communities to learn more about that head on over to OTSchoolHouse.com , slash collab and join our growing community of innovative school based ot practitioners, until next time. This is Jayson. Thanks so much for joining us, and remember the small steps that you take today will lead to big changes in your practice tomorrow. I'll see you next time.    Amazing Narrator     Thank you for listening to the OT schoolhouse podcast for more ways to help you and your students succeed right now, head on over to otschoolhouse.com Until next time class is dismissed. Click on the file below to download the transcript to your device. Thanks for listening to the OT Schoolhouse Podcast. A podcast for school-based OT practitioners, by school-based OT practitioners! Be sure to subscribe to the OT Schoolhouse email list & get access to our free downloads of Gray-Space paper and the Occupational Profile for school-based OTs. Subscribe now! Thanks for visiting the podcast show notes! If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts , Google Podcast , Spotify , or wherever you listen to podcasts. Click here to view more episodes of the OT Schoolhouse Podcast

Click on your preferred podcast player link to listen wherever you enjoy podcasts . Welcome to the show notes for Episode 190 of the OT Schoolhouse Podcast. Get ready to blast off into a powerful new way of understanding sensory processing in schools. In this episode, Danielle Pluth and Ruth Isaac—Canadian occupational therapists and creators of the Good Sense OT Rocket Ship —share the innovative visual framework that’s transforming how OTs assess, communicate, and support student participation. The Rocket Ship helps therapists differentiate sensory-based behaviors from other performance factors , guiding you from foundational sensory regulation all the way up through sensory-motor, reflexes, perceptual motor skills, interoception, and cognitive functions at the top of the “rocket.” This structure gives OTPs a clear map for identifying root causes of behavior and choosing targeted, meaningful school-based strategies that go far beyond “wiggle cushions and chewelry.” Whether you’re brand-new to sensory integration or have years of experience, this conversation will deepen your clinical reasoning, strengthen your confidence, and help you clearly communicate sensory needs to teachers, parents, and IEP teams. If you’ve been searching for a practical, visually powerful way to explain sensory processing to your teams and build stronger intervention plans, the Good Sense Rocket Ship may be exactly what you’ve been missing. Listen now to learn the following objectives: Understand the Good Sense Rocketship Framework and its application in addressing sensory-related behaviors in school-based OT practice. Learn strategies to identify and assess sensory processing challenges and their impact on students' functional performance. Explore effective interventions to support regulation, sensory-motor development, and collaboration with educators and parents. Guest(s) Bio Danielle Pluth is an OT in Medicine Hat, Alberta Canada. She graduated from the University of Alberta in 2002. She worked in various areas before starting her business Advance OT where her team provides OT services in local schools, community and their sensory clinic. Danielle has done extensive post graduate education in the area of sensory and OT. In addition, she completed her SIPT certification in 2016. Danielle has created a universal sensory program for teachers and parents that has been used throughout schools in her division since 2008 called Good Sense for Teachers and Parents. Ruth Isaac is an OT who has worked in pediatrics for 20 years. She studied at the University of Manitoba and has been working exclusively in pediatrics since 2005. She has worked with Danielle at Advance OT since 2008. Ruth has also done extensive post graduate education in the area of sensory and OT. In addition she complete her SIPT training in 2012 and completed the University of Southern California's Sensory Integration Certification program (OT610)in 2017. Ruth has created a universal fine motor program for teachers and parents that has also been used throughout schools in her division since 2007 called Fine Fun for Teachers and Parents. In 2021, Danielle and Ruth created Good Sense for OTs to fill the gap to help all OTs feel confident in using a sensory processing lens for OT services in the school and clinic setting. She is passionate about educating as many OTs as possible in this area to help change kid's lives. Quotes ”The first layer was looking at regulation, being out of that just right state. Thinking about how sensory is coming out as an output in motor sort of a way. And it's a foundation as well. And it can also impact regulation. -Ruth Isaac “Often we see behavior being that tip of the iceberg. And we want to have a lens or a way to look at what's going on below the surface.” -Ruth Isaac "The semicircular canals are going to tell me is my head up, is it down, is it spinning around, and that information is going to feed the muscles around my eyes for eye coordination." -Danielle Pluth “Connect the dots and make it super easy for someone to understand, why I'm working on sensory regulation and how that is impacting daily living activities or academic learning and hitting all the other sections in between.” -Jayson Davies Resources 👉 Good Sense Rocketship Framework 👉 Instagram Episode Transcript Expand to view episode transcript Jayson Davies     Hey there school based ot practitioners. This is Jayson, and you're listening to Episode 190 of the OT school house podcast. Thanks so much for clicking play on this episode, and I hope it provides you with precisely the sensory information that you need in this moment today, I'm thrilled to welcome Danielle pluth And Ruth Isaac, the creators of the good sense ot framework, this pair of OT practitioners based in Canada have developed an incredible visual tool called the good sense rocket ship that will make it super easy for you to understand and address all the sensory processing concerns that you may see in your school practice. If you've ever struggled to explain the connection between sensory challenges and classroom behaviors, or if you found yourself handing out fidgets without a clear framework for why you're doing that, this is the episode for you. Danielle and Ruth will break down their comprehensive approach that goes far beyond wiggle cushions and jewelry without explanation to help you confidently assess and address your students sensory needs, you'll learn how to trace behaviors back to their sensory foundations and communicate effectively with teachers and parents using this powerful visual model. Whether you're new to sensory integration or an experienced practitioner, you'll gain practical strategies to elevate your practice immediately. Stay tuned as we blast off with the good sense rocket ship framework.    Amazing Narrator     Hello and welcome to the OT school house 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     Danielle and Ruth, welcome to the OT school house podcast. There's two of you here today, so I'm going to do my best to prompt you. So Danielle, how are you doing this afternoon?    Danielle Pluth     Oh, I'm doing well. Thank you. Yeah, it's beautiful here.    Jayson Davies     So yeah. And Ruth, how about you? How are you doing?     Ruth Isaac     Doing good. I'm excited to be here and chat with you.    Jayson Davies     Yes, and this is a special occasion, because it's happened a few times, but this is one of the times that we are speaking to an occupational therapist combo here that are not in the United States. So why don't you go ahead one of you share a little bit about where you are and kind of the setting that you're in.    Danielle Pluth     Sure, we are in medicine, Hat, Alberta, Canada. We work within we have contracts with the school divisions here, and we also have a clinic, so we see children privately within the clinic and also in the community and in their homes. So our city is about 60,000 people or so, and we're in all the school divisions here.    Ruth Isaac     One of one of our school districts is a lot of driving. I drive two hours to get to one of my schools and two hours to get back. That's the farthest one.    Danielle Pluth     Yeah. So it's fairly large region of southeastern Alberta, wow.    Jayson Davies     So that is a very large area to have to cover really quickly, because I think you are a little familiar with school based ot in the States, at least from you know, just, I know you haven't practiced here, but you've heard about it. If you kind of had to quickly explain to someone just the differences, like, how do you describe it as being similar or different to school based ot where we follow, or in the states where we follow, idea, we have a lot like, we have our own caseload and whatnot. Is it similar to that in Alberta, or is it a little different?    Danielle Pluth     I think so. I mean, we have, they're called ISPs, that we follow like so documents that the teachers will write that have the functional goals and whatnot in there. A lot of our recommendations are in there, along with speech and physio. We have kind of a set amount of time per school division, and then we have a lot of freedom to determine how we do our service delivery with regards to OT and OT assistant. What I've heard from the States, it sounds like you guys are a bit, maybe a bit more restricted with you have to really say how much time you're spending per child per week. Those kinds of things. We don't have those kinds of restrictions, so we can kind of flow a bit more within our service delivery, from Universal to groups to direct one to one. We probably can't do as much direct one to one as we sometimes hear that you can do down in the States. But even that, I don't know for sure, we tend to be more of a consultative model. Our ot assistance would do more of maybe, like direct like treatment groups and stuff like that that we've oversee. I think.    Jayson Davies     Yeah, yeah. I think that kind of is a good, good idea. It gives people a good sense of what's going on. So today we're here to talk about the good sense program that you two have developed and put together and are now even providing training for and I had the pleasure of sitting in on one of your webinars a few months ago, and just so excited to have you all here, because I was like, Oh, this is awesome. I want to bring it to everyone here on the OT school house podcast. Yeah. But before we dive into kind of the the nitty gritty of it and talk about. This really cool, good sense rocket ship you have here, I want to ask you, like, what inspired you to develop this program? What was the problem that you saw, and what was the problem that you aim to solve?    Ruth Isaac     Well, we've been working for a little while. It's probably over 20 years ago, and we never really okay, it's hard to admit, but we never really knew exactly like, the theory that we were using. We were just, like, eclectic. We're just doing a little bit of everything. And I think we've all been at that place at 1.0 yeah, where you're trying a little of this, and you're trying a little of that, and you're trying a little of this. And we just realized that we needed more of some structure to help guide and support us as we were doing our treatment and as we worked at mentoring more people in our community here, or our group of therapists.    Danielle Pluth     Yeah, I think we've come a long ways. Like in the early 2000s sensory theory was pretty new in Canada, and it was pretty kind of ooga booga To be honest, like people didn't really so, yeah, it was kind of new, and initially, like, a lot of our referrals were for like, wiggle cushions and fidgets and like things that eventually you're like, wait a minute, I think I can do more as an OT and we really didn't get much training on sensory theory in school. So both Ruth and I went down to the states, and we did all of our SIP training, and Ruth did the OT 610 so all that extra stuff that we brought back here, we started developing universal programming for the schools, because we're like, you know what? You guys can trial legal cushions and fidgets. So we developed a good sense, actually, for teachers, program that is a step by step program to help them implement strategies in the classroom. And then what was happening is our education kind of just really took off, and as we would get new therapists in, they just wouldn't be at the same level that we needed them to be. And what the schools were now expecting us to know, because we are supposed to be the sensory experts, right? So I kind of progressed where, you know, we needed, like, an in between. We can't send everybody away all the time.    Ruth Isaac     To all the different therapy, like, yeah, like, trainings, right? Not everybody    Danielle Pluth     can do all, yeah, we've done so many. I mean, when, when you have like, 15 years, we're worth a post grad education, right? So just needing to pull that together, and we decided to come up with our own sort of training model. And then it just kind of grew and grew where we ended up developing a framework, and that framework now, you know, it's what we use every day when we're working, and it's what we train our staff in. And then we decided, you know, let's try to make an online course, because it looked like it'd be so easy, but, and we just, we're very passionate about sensory, so we wanted to bring that to everyone out there who's interested, right? To have a way to use leaders really feel sensory is really occupational, like, based in an occupational therapist invented it. So we want, we want to own sensory and we want to make sure OTs are trained to be able to run with it right out of university. Because a lot of schools don't teach, even teach the theory, let alone how to then functionally use it out when you're working.    Ruth Isaac     So yeah, and I think that our different areas where we work are looking to us to be the experts, and so we want to be at the table. We want to be having these conversations, and we want to be showing what we can do as occupational therapists. And we don't want to be this, that the other thing and just trying different things. We want to have a structure and a way of approaching how we're providing service.    Jayson Davies     Awesome and that kind of I have two follow ups here, but I'll start with this one. As you mentioned, you in the system that you're in, you work both in a clinic and also from a school perspective, as you were developing good sense, did you find that it catered more to one versus the other? Does it fit for both? Kind of how did that develop?    Danielle Pluth     It fits for both? Yeah, yeah. It's the foundation of how we do OT services here. So we developed the good sense rocket ship framework, and that's specifically looking at the child from a sensory theory, sensory lens. But we are also using it within like a PEO model, where we're still looking at the environment around the child and the tasks themselves. So we can use it in the school, and we can use it in the clinic, in the schools. The other thing about it is, as you use it for your clinical reasoning, for how you're assessing and then coming up with your intervention strategies, you can decide where on the rocket you kind of want to start, and are you going to take more of a bottom up approach or a top down depending on. Environment around the child. So if you're in a more consultative model, you might do more of a top down approach to help children in those areas to optimally function within their let's say, their classroom, whereas if I'm seeing them in the clinic, I might be able to do more of a bottom up approach, because I can go a bit more with actual treatment and intervention to make you know, impact some of their functioning within that that theory as well, if that makes sense. And we also look, even within the school, how much can we do some bottom up as well? I think what it helps the most is to help you to know where are my biggest priorities, and how am I going to intervene? So I know for sure. Am I doing a top down? Am I doing a bottom up? And who around the child is going to do what? So we might have an OT assistant or an educational assistant doing some of the bottom up stuff, and we might be doing more of the top down or vice versa, just depending on who's available. So it helps that whole thought process, no matter where you are, even if you're in the clinic, it might be, what can parents be doing to help support the child as well?    Jayson Davies     Awesome, perfect. And then the other follow up that I had here was because it's really hard these days to talk about sensory without talking behavior, and so I wanted to get kind of your take on as you were developing this, like, how was that conversation in your own mind? Because I'm sure you anticipated people asking you about sensory and behavior. I'm sure you've been asked about sensory behavior and behavior plenty of times. So how did that kind of work its way into the good sense program? And how do you share that with people?    Ruth Isaac     I think that often we see behavior being that tip of the iceberg, right? And we want to have a lens or a way to look at what's going on below the surface. Sometimes, maybe we've seen where people will say, OTs behavior, and then we don't get involved. And when we're like, oh, somebody else has to deal with that. That's not something that we can deal with. And we feel pretty strongly that actually using a sensory frame of reference can be a great way to help navigate and support a child who's having difficulties and having different behaviors. And there might be different reasons as to why you might be seeing those behaviors. If we're thinking about the good sense rocket ship, those behaviors are things that are at the very top right and and we're looking at what else could be going on there that could be impacting.    Danielle Pluth     Yeah, like, if they are over responsive to noise or touch or movement at the bottom of the rocket ship, that could be impacting their behavior, they're going into fight or flight, or they're going into shutdown. You can have kids who have poor postural control in the middle part of the rocket that can impact their breathing and their regulation that way they might have a startle reflex that's impacting like so they're, yeah, I think we, we really feel like it's our job as occupational therapists to own sensory and to use our lens to bring to the table what might be going on for the child as for that piece of the pie, right? There could be other reasons why they're having behaviors other pieces of the pie, but I think it's super important that we bring that full assessment piece there to show you know because, and if they are struggling with those areas, we definitely want to figure out how to help them with those areas. And maybe it's not going to solve everything, but it's going to solve or help that piece of the pie.    Ruth Isaac     Because there's no, there's so many, there's so many reasons that could be going on. That's why that tip of the iceberg.     Danielle Pluth     Yeah, we are also really lucky with the division that we're working in that, you know, like 20 years ago, them seeing, wanting to have a more proactive approach, and being really supportive with us, getting sensory strategies universally in place. And we've seen a huge shift within our division with having universal strategies in the classroom for all kids, having hallway sensory stuff in place for some kids, and then we have sensory rooms for a few kids who need that even extra input. So we've been able to see over the years how much this approach can impact those behaviors overall. So to us, it's just, it's for sure, it's so obvious you absolutely have to Yeah, yeah, awesome. Take a look at that part for every child that we work with.    Jayson Davies     Yeah, yeah. And I love, I mean, I remember sitting here and watching the presentation you all, you both gave. And I remember sitting here you talked about evaluation, Danielle, I believe. And I was sitting here like, just thinking about how this is so helpful. Like every ot can just print this out and kind of fill this out as part of their, you know, part of their evaluation, part of their occupational therapy profile, like this can really help you to better understand a student. We're going to dive into the rocket ship here in just a moment, but first we're going to take a quick break, and we'll be right back all right, and we are back here with Danielle and Ruth and. We're going to dive into the good sense ot rocket ship. But before we do, I want to let you all know that Danielle and Ruth have been very kind and are providing a way for you to get the good sense ot rocket ship PDF. So be sure to check out the show notes. You'll find a link there. You'll head over to their actual their website, where you'll be able to get that resource for yourself. So let's go ahead and dive in to the rocket ship here, and I'll let one of you take the lead here and share with us, kind of where we start.    Ruth Isaac     So if you imagine in your brain, because it's a podcast, if you imagine how a rocket ship looks, it's just a fun visual way to show how things build on top of each other, a little reminder that there are things around a rocket ship, if you imagine being in space, there's other things that could be impacting, like fuel or asteroids or things like that, and that might be like sleep or nutrition or home life and all of those pieces that, of course, are going to impact.    Jayson Davies     I just have to say, really quickly, I'm sorry to cut you off, Ruth, but I love that you just like, work the combo model in here, like that is awesome. I love it.    Ruth Isaac     There we go. But, but, like, the rocket ship itself is looking at the sensory but, of course, there's other things going on around there, right? And so when you're looking at that, Danielle kind of talked about starting at the top or starting at the bottom for the point of now we'll start at the bottom and we'll work our way up.    Danielle Pluth     Okay? And I think we mentioned earlier too. So the good sense rocket ship is a framework to look at the child that you're working at with within their environment, and then the tasks as well.    Ruth Isaac     So excellent. So at the bottom of the rocket ship, that's where we're thinking about sensory regulation. So this is where we're looking at visual, auditory, tactile, vestibular, taste and smell, proprioception, overuse, and how that might impact your ability to be in a just right state.    Danielle Pluth     Yeah, and when we're looking at this. We're looking at how, yeah, how does this area impact this child? And in our course, we go in a lot more detail with regards to looking at, like, what would a profile of this child be, what's the neurology, what's the assessments that you would do, and then what's the interventions and recommendations? But what we like about this is, as you're doing your assessment, you can start kind of plotting on there how this child is impacted from a sensory lens, and we have down the side of it, fight or flight, too fast, just right, calm, freeze, kind of all down there as well.    Jayson Davies     Yeah. Quick question on that actually, really, if I may, obviously, I have it right in front of me, and hopefully everyone's going to your website so they can get it too. You talked about how you have the visual, auditory, vestibular probe, tag, taste and smell here. Do you tend to get this data by talking to the student, talking to the parents, the teacher? Do you tend to use something like the SPM sensory profile? Obviously, you both have extensive experience, and I'm sure you can get a lot just from observation. But what are some of the different ways that you use to get this data?    Danielle Pluth     So yeah, we like to use the sensory processing measure. Sometimes we'll use the sensory profile, and so we'll get a background, basically sensory history from the parents and also the teacher. And what's kind of unique about our good sense rocket ship is we've put on there the areas that we feel can put you into fight or flight or so we have like, over responsive to touch. You can see on our rocket ship we have that higher up as a thing that could send a child into that fight or flight. We don't. What's different about our approach is we don't say you can be over responsive and under responsive to touch. So you're not going to see touch below the just right state on our rocket this might be confusing until people actually look at the rocket ship, but you'll see on there that we have under responsive to vestibular as something that can cause you to be under the just right state. So our approach is a little bit unique that way. And what it does is, when you're then mapping it out, it really helps clarify from a sensory lens what's actually impacting regulation. So you'll never hear us say they scored out, over and under in every single area, and it's all definite difference. We can't figure out how sensory is impacting them at all. You'll never hear us say that, because we can clearly map it out as to what's what they're actually over responsive to, versus under responsive. And we have it that if you're under responsive to touch, we have that higher up in the rocket ship into sensory motor.    Ruth Isaac     So we're jumping up, yeah.    Danielle Pluth     But I think it's a thing to really clarify, like that's something that a lot of OTs we see struggling with, and that our framework will help you to not struggle with, yeah.    Jayson Davies     And so as you move up into that next level, you do have sensory motor and under under sensory motor. You've got vestibular probe, tactile bilateral coordination, ocular motor and postural control listed. So I'll let you all share a little bit.     Ruth Isaac     So there, as you've moved up in the rocket ship that are the good sense rocket ship, excuse me, there is your sensory motor output. We're taking in that sensory information, we're processing it, and then that can impact our output. And there's a difference here, right the first layer was looking at regulation being out of that just right state. Now we're thinking about how sensory is coming out as an output in motor, sort of a way, and it's a foundation as well, and it can also impact regulation. And there's an example that we talked about earlier, is if you have poor postural control, that actually might be impacting your regulation overall. You might look super wiggly and having a hard time focusing, but it might actually be more related to the sensory motor versus the sensory regulation.     Danielle Pluth     Yeah. So helping you to come up with those kinds of hypothesis. And for a long time, I really, I mean, maybe it's obvious to everyone else, I really struggled with how sensory, sensory regulation, sensory motor were related. And now I feel like I've such a clear picture of how they fit.    Jayson Davies     Danielle, you are definitely not alone in that. Trust me, there are many OTs listening right now that totally feel what you just said right now. Like, that is hard. And then you start talking about praxis, and it's like, the same thing, right? Like, Praxis versus executive functioning and stuff like that. Like, yeah, the sensory world is confusing until you get the education.    Danielle Pluth     Yeah, yeah. And I think, and then having that, that framework right to see that, you know, Praxis is higher, even higher up. And you know, and you need to have your intact proprioceptive and vestibular and tactile motor systems to then have good praxis, good motor planning. And so, you know, if you're jumping, you know, if you find out that your child struggling with motor planning, you have to look lower down to see what's going on in that framework before you can address it. Yeah, so then it just becomes way less overwhelming, because you can figure out where to start and what you're looking at.    Jayson Davies     All right, so I just got an idea, because so many people reach out to me and they're like, the teacher thinks they know everything about sensory. The ABA therapist thinks they know everything about sensory. The admin thinks they know everything about sensory. If that's the case, send them the last two minutes of this podcast and let them see if they still know everything about sensory. I'm just gonna    Danielle Pluth     say that right now. Oh yeah, very complex, but yeah, sorry, keep going.     Jayson Davies     Yeah. No, it is complex. You're right, and we're gonna start moving into what I think makes the good sense rocket ship very unique here, because in a lot of sensory courses that I've taken, they talk about regulation, they talk about sensory motor talk about modulation a little bit, but the next four phases of the good sense rocket ship are often not really addressed in sensory courses here. So the next level up on my screen, it's yellow. So if you have the color version, it's yellow. It's sensory reflexes. And I really like that you have built this in there. So I'll let you talk about that.     Ruth Isaac     Yeah. So on this level, now we are looking at the sensory reflexes, and we're looking at some of the commonly seen reflexes in the classroom, right? So the moral, the tonic lab, atnr, stnr, the spinal glont. There's more, but these are the main ones that we see functionally in the classroom. And we just see how there's an impact there on the higher levels of the rocket ship, and these are impacted by the lower parts of the rocket ship. So again, I know that with reflexes, we need to be careful, right? Because we don't want to just address reflexes. We need to have a functional output for it. But if we seeing a reflex, what else is going on below it that could be causing that? Right? All of those reflexes are based on some of the way that we process the sensory motor and potentially some of the sensory regulation as well. So it's building up as we go up the rocket ship.     Danielle Pluth     So yeah, when you're looking at reflexes, we want to make sure our staff are also looking at that underlying sensory motor systems that play into that. And reflexes is kind of one of those controversial areas in the OT world, but we've seen differences when we address them so clinically, we see that it helps children. So that's why we've added it into our into our rocket ship.    Jayson Davies     And I want to go back Ruth that you were talking about, why you put the sensory reflexes there, kind of in the middle of the rocket ship, because I have very little training in reflexes, and it was kind of my perception and the limited experiences that I have that it could potentially be at the bottom of the rocket ship. And I don't know if this is you kind of alluded to, and I would just want to let you kind of reiterate that a little bit, why it's kind of at the middle as opposed to somewhere else.    Danielle Pluth     Yeah. Yeah, that's a good question, because I think, yeah, some people will think that's the first thing to get integrated. But as a baby, as you're developing the vestibular system and the proprioceptive and touch system that that sensory motor level, that's how you are then integrating those reflexes. So they're foundational to the integration of the reflexes, and that's why we have it higher up, because most often, if you do have a reflex that's not integrated, it's because you have a delay underneath in that sensory motor system, in the vestibular or the probe or the tactile. So we want to make sure therapists aren't just jumping right to that reflexes. We want to make sure they're digging deeper to see what's going on underlying.     Ruth Isaac     Exactly, digging deeper.     Jayson Davies     Yeah, I think that's important. Because, like, you kind of said, I think a lot of the trainings, especially if it's not from an OT perspective, a lot of the popular professional development courses out there about reflexes, often call that the base level, and they don't necessarily look deeper.    Danielle Pluth     No, no, and they kind of, like, sell it as like, oh, you test the reflex this way, and then this is the exact exercise you do without you really clinically reasoning through why you're doing what you're doing. So I think it's important to understand that's how we've decided that it fits best, and, and that's Yeah, and we want to make sure that we're addressing those underlying things, yeah.    Ruth Isaac     Yeah. And I think that's then some of those reflexes also can go all the way down and impact regulation. That's where, like, the moral, that startle reflex, right? Like, oh, what was that? And then OT, we're out of that just right state, and we're into a different dysregulated place. So as we're working up the rocket ship, you can see how, as we're going up, things higher can impact all the way down to the bottom, as well as from the bottom, impacting things moving up.    Danielle Pluth     That's one thing we don't have on there. Is kind of arrows coming down. But that is what happens, like when we were talking about if postural control impacts your regulation, you need a little arrow OOP down to regulation, or if that startle reflex down to regulation. So, great point.    Jayson Davies     Great point. Because when we often think about a lot of the theories that we learn, you know, even in elementary school, a lot of things are used in a pyramid, type of MTSS, right? Is an example, level one, level two, level three. But oftentimes it's the top of the pyramid is impacted by the bottom, not vice versa. But the rocket ship goes both ways.    Danielle Pluth     Exactly, even the way we have the too fast, too slow, just right, shut down, you know, down the side of the rocket ship there. We know that that can be circular. It's just, how do you make a model that you can use? That's, you know, we it's, we couldn't make it in a circle, so we didn't know how.    Jayson Davies     Yeah, totally get it all right. So we covered sensory regulation at the base of the rocket, sensory motor at the next level, and then sensory reflexes. What's next?    Ruth Isaac     Now we're up to the perceptual motor, and this is the area that, like most occupational therapists are super familiar with. This is where fine motor fits in. This is where Praxis is in there. There's other pieces in there as well, but those are the pieces that often we know that really well. Again, what could be going on at that level that could be impacting all the way down to the bottom? So if we've got a kid who's really struggling with fine motor skills, for example, that might be causing all sorts of dysregulation, or the opposite way, it could be going all the way up to the way up to the top and impacting the behaviors, right? We're looking at how it's a moving framework, right, right?    Danielle Pluth     And it helps you to be an advocate for your child, to be able to say, like, yes, you're seeing these behaviors up at the top, because they actually, you know, I've had kids in grade seven and eight or whatever who are scoring first percentile on the berry VMI, and nobody realized they had these extreme fine motor delays that were then actually playing into the behaviors they were seeing in the classroom. So I think that's really important when we're able to show that.    Ruth Isaac     As they're moving up and then higher up, that's where we've thrown in, introception, right? The like being aware of hunger and thirst and pain, temperature, your bowel, your bladder and and a lot of our kids, they don't maybe are not as aware of these, like, not like ear quiet, but like quieter sensations within your body, right? And so because everything else below can be so overwhelming, from regulation, from motor reflexes, from perceptual motor, all of those things could be impacting so they're not really as aware of that interception piece. And then, and then you're up at the top, and there we are at the beginning again, with that cognition, right, academics, behaviors, activities of daily living. This is where our referrals come from, right teachers, parents, they're they see and they know that there's issues up there, and they're saying to us, hey, help what's what's going on, and we're able to look at what more could be going on underneath there.    Jayson Davies     Yeah, I love how you frame that, like that's where the referrals are coming from, because that's truly as like, we get a referral for handwriting. We don't get a referral for proprioception and bilateral. Motor coordination. Like, yeah. All right. All right. So now that we have this rocket ship framework here, for the good sense rocket ship framework, I want to get a sense for how you actually use it during your evaluation, and maybe we'll go into intervention a little bit, but I'm like envisioning printing this out for every single student that I evaluate, and just marking the heck out of it. And I want to know if that's what you all do, or how do you kind of use it in the evaluation process?    Danielle Pluth     Yes, we have kind of an expanded we basically we have a background observation form that's color we really are into this color coding thing. Our background observation form is color coded to match the rocket, and that's where we put so when I go out to see a child, depending on how much time I have for the child, I mean, in an ideal world, I get a sensory processing measure history done on everybody. I then am going to do my clinical observations based on like earn a Blanchet kind of stuff to help look like the sensory motor pieces. I'm going to do some kind of fine motor screen or assessment. I'm going to talk to the teacher. I might do a classroom observation. And again, all of that is going to depend on the severity, the case load and whatnot, for how in depth I go at each level of the rocket. So basically we have, you know, different assessments that we would do, or different observations at each at each level, and then pulling that together, basically that is where you could mark up the rocket to start seeing, where are you seeing all of the different areas of concern that might be impacting the child's function. And then we do have a color coded initial visit summary to then relay that information to the teachers. And if I will pull out the actual rocket to explain my report to them and show them where my thinking is coming from, and my recommendations, then, as well, are also based on all the areas of the rocket. So whether I'm going to start at the top or the bottom, all of that I outline in my visit summary. So that's how I I use it every single day. So yeah, that's always in the back of the now it's pretty much in the back of my mind. I don't necessarily need the print ot right in front of me, but.    Ruth Isaac     The thing that I like about it as well is that you, once you've marked it up, then you can start to see like, Oh man, I'm doing a lot of circling around one specific area that is going to guide me in my report and in my interventions. And then, if you're at a meeting with a parent, you also have that visual right in front of you. You have a teacher, you have that visual right in front of you. I think we talk about having visuals for kids, but I think we as adults need visuals to help guide us as well, right? Yeah, and then that way it can help to focus you. Where am I going to start my intervention? Sometimes that rocket ship for a kid can be completely like circled every area, almost right. Some kids, you start to see a pattern where you're like, oh, okay, well, I'm just gonna really target a certain area. But yeah, I would use this, this handout a lot, obviously, a little shameless plug for our course, would be to come and learn more about all of those pieces.     Danielle Pluth     But yeah, it's definitely used for my assessment, my clinical reasoning, and for my intervention, the whole process, and then communicating it to everybody, yeah, and it helps us to just feel super confident in knowing why I'm recommending what I'm recommending. I can easily trace it all the way back and show you exactly why do I have that kid on a bungee? I can trace it right back to where I am on the rocket. What the neurology is, what assessments I used, and I can lay it all out for you, which is super helpful.    Jayson Davies     Yeah, that's perfect. I love the idea of visualization. I mean, I don't know, in our conference room at many of our schools, we always had the bell chart, like, just so we could kind of show a parent, like, this is the bell chart for the assessment, and where, where the student is on the assessment, mostly used by the psychologist. But, yeah. All right, well, we're going to take one final break, and when we come back, we'll dive into some intervention strategies with Danielle and Ruth. All right, we are back with Danielle and Ruth, and we're going to dive just a little bit into the idea of using the good sense framework and the rocket ship to help you collaborate and educate others when working with a student. And then we're going to talk about some intervention and advocacy pieces as we wrap up. So the question here is, how do you really use the good sense framework, and I can imagine the visuals being helpful to really help parents to understand or to help teachers understand maybe why behavior is impacting sensory or being impacted by sensory, or maybe even how sensory motor is being impacted by another area.    Danielle Pluth     We like to talk. Um, a lot about and train our staff a lot in we call them little elevator pitches. Basically is, how can you quickly summarize what's going on? So a very quick example might be the vestibular system. So being able to say in a meeting like, you know, little Johnny is over responsive to movement, so it's harder for his movement system to get the input that it needs. And the movement systems in our inner ear, and we have like the semicircular canals are going to tell me, is my head up? Is it down? Is it spinning around? And that information is going to feed the muscles around my eyes for eye coordination. It's going to feed my cerebellum for bilateral coordination, for using both my hands to cut and those kinds of things. And it's going to impact the extensor muscles of my neck for that postural control to keep me upright. And so we'll use little spiels like that to then link it to the top of the rocket ship to show functionally, what they're seeing. So just having little spiels for like, all parts of the rocket ship, and then being able to quickly link it so I feel like I can quickly explain, in a pretty succinct way, of how the different areas are impacting the child so.    Ruth Isaac     And it also helps us to think about, are we doing treatment, or are we doing an accommodation? Right? For example, like, if you've got poor postural control, right, first off, accommodation, make sure those feet are flat on the floor, right? Do they have foot support? Something as simple as that, some different seating options, right? All of these things that we know, but it just helps us to say, okay, that's what we're targeting. Is the postural control of the sensory motor, let's say, and we're doing an accommodation teacher. Here's a quick something I want you to use this. This is why, or maybe we are looking at more of an intervention strategy, right? Could we work at something like just keeping it really simple, getting on the floor, doing some tummy time, where that body is in an extended position? Can they hold that position for a little while.    Danielle Pluth     Or we might give specific exercises that will ask them, you know, for six weeks, can you do these once a day? Because we're targeting this area to help that posture control, so that they can now sit at circle time, you know. So just keep bringing it back to here's where we're targeting. Here's what we're using to target that area, and why the functional impact, and so you just get way more buy in then, because people really appreciate knowing the why and the background, and they're just way more willing and excited to do the recommendations, because it just makes more sense to them.    Jayson Davies     I could totally see myself like, I don't know, I don't know if you have this yet, but I would just like, somehow get this on a whiteboard and carry it around, like I'm a coach on a football team, and just like, Hi teacher, look at this. Is the line. This goes here, and then, just like, connect it for them, and connect the dots, and make it super easy for someone to understand. You know, why I'm working on sensory regulation and how that is impacting daily living activities or academic learning, and hitting all the other sections in between, and kind of showing exactly how it how it works. So question here you've talked a little bit about, and this is more from the theory perspective that we talked so far about how you can go up or down the rocket, vice versa, how one part impacts another part, whether it's top to bottom, bottom to top. When it comes to the intervention side, though, how do you start to decide where to start? Do you start down at the bottom with sensory regulation? Do you start with reflexes? Do you start with interoception? I mean, as I kind of just alluded to, you could draw a line all the way down right and hit each part. But then, how do you move from understanding the difficulties to actually deciding where to start?    Danielle Pluth     I think, like you'll notice on our rocket ship, that regulation piece is the biggest chunk, like even size wise, visually, and so typically, that's where we will usually start. Is that regulation piece, we need to make sure kids are regulated before you can even start accessing the higher level of the rocket. So whether you know and you can look at that different ways, you might be looking at that from a universal level, what needs to happen for that child universally? Are there things in the classroom that we can start implementing that can help them do we need to start implementing, you know, heavy work breaks or things like that, and then looking at, maybe for the child specifically, is there different exercises we need to start working on to help them with those overall systems, depending on, again, how much time you have to work with that child, like, if they are tactically defensive, is, do we have time to actually work on that system, or do we need to put accommodations and strategies in place to help them cope and manage with that system, and just knowing that and being able to communicate that to everyone else around them, like, you know, I'm not going to be able to maybe change this child's tactile system at this like the way that they're processing it. That's why we want to make sure we're accommodating. Working for it.    Ruth Isaac     So yeah, and I think it also depends on where you are working right, what your setting is, what you've got. I think having this background helps you to then be creative in where you're using it. And you know your own setting. You know who you have access to, who your extra tools are, if there are extra people, if there are extra resources, what you have available, but at least you have that structured approach, and you're not just grasping at things. It's taking away that guesswork of like, let's try this thing and let's try that thing, and let's try this thing. It's giving you that organization and confidence to then take it to wherever you are using it.     Danielle Pluth     I'm going to know why I want to try different sensory tools and and in saying that too, you know, we might also need to address the fuel to the rocket initially as well. Like, is this child getting any sleep? Are they getting enough nutrition? Some of those things that might be your biggest red flags at the moment that you've got to address first. So it gives you kind of that systematic you could even number on your rocket which ones are your top priorities that you want to intervene with? First, you know, what, what? And also, kind of looking for your biggest bang for your buck. You know, if I have a kid with a startle reflex and dysregulation and postural control issues, what exercises can I give that's going to target kind of more than one area. Is another thing that you can be looking at too.    Jayson Davies     I am totally looking forward to version two of the rocket ship that has like asteroids on the side of the paper. No, but real question though, there's a lot on the good sense rocket ship, right? There's a lot of different areas that we're going to look at. And I know the two of you at this point, you're no longer, I don't know, maybe you do sometimes, but you're not marking it up, like I've talked about, like we've talked about a little bit today, but in your experience with it, do you ever find that one section doesn't have any difficulty, or is it pretty regular that If you're finding some difficulty with cognitive you're also going to find some difficulty in the other aspects as well.    Danielle Pluth     I think, I think what's fun about it, what I enjoy the most is you're building a profile for each child, and so you might be doing a lot of repetitive assessment type work, but in the end, the mapping out looks different for every child. And I think that's what's kind of neat. It keeps you away from getting like I think in the past, I would just get stuck every kid looked the same, you know, you'd kind of just have whereas, I don't know, for this now, I feel like I'm building a profile that's different for every child. And so I would say I've probably hit every area in some kind of combination for kids that I have worked with.    Ruth Isaac     And it's not cookie cutter, and it's not boring. It's, it's, it's individual, and it's and what's, what's that child's needs, and where do they need support? And where is that just who they are, you know? And what are the things that we need to work on and support?    Danielle Pluth     Yeah, and I think too, like, yes, it, the foundation of it is all sensory. But as you get to the top, we have definitely incorporated other areas of OT and even though the like the self care kind of classroom participation area, we look a lot at like kids play skills and developmentally where they're at with their play skills. So using we bring into it different assessment tools that help us figure out those different areas. And so it just keeps it, yeah, very comprehensive and, like, thorough without it being cumbersome. It's not like we're always assessing every single area, but yeah.    Ruth Isaac     and definitely, today we are doing a very fast recap and stronger chip, we could dive in and spend a lot more time talking about each area.    Danielle Pluth     But I think it, yeah, it starts it gives us that framework, and we run with that, with the majority of our kids, and we talk about like we still, we want to get training from all the OT gurus out there, and that's where we end up adding on the asteroids and all that kind of stuff, right? Because there's other thoughts and stuff out there, and we're always bringing it back to see, how does it fit with our model?    Jayson Davies     Yeah, absolutely. And I think we're down to the last two questions here, and I want to go back to, I can't remember. I think it was Danielle who mentioned earlier about, you know, initially having difficulty understanding sensory regulation, sensory motor and and I know you know, both are providing a lot of professional development, both online through this program, but also just, you know, mentorship within the therapist and OTs that you work with. And so I want to ask you, what are maybe one or two of the hang ups that you find that practitioners often get hung up on when it comes to sensory maybe those who haven't gone through the SIP training, maybe those who haven't attended some of the other, you know, big programs, the CLASI or whatnot. What are some of those, those hang ups that you often see?    Danielle Pluth     Well, okay, I have, I guess, two things when it comes to sensory, motor. What has happened is, I'll give exercise. And people think my exercises are to impact regulation, and they'll say, you know, there was no change in him afterwards. And I have to get them to understand that we're working on the underlying motor system, and it will take longer, maybe, to see changes. So helping them to see that my exercises aren't always just for regulation, that sometimes it's for other areas of the rocket. So that's one area, I think, for OTs, what happens is, if they haven't been trained yet in sensory, What scares me is that they then sometimes want to dismiss it as an area, they'll say, oh, you know, everyone thinks everything is sensory, and it's a super key area. And so I do, I don't want people to just dismiss that, because they can then struggle, like we had said earlier, with interpreting the sensory profile, thinking, Oh, it's all definite differences, and not being able to pull it apart and clinically reason it, and then also getting hung up on evidence. So saying, like, oh, you know, somebody wants me to trial a weighted vest or a neoprene vest, or we just don't get hung up. We feel like, yes, definitely we want more research articles for all the sensory tools and all the things that we do. But I don't think we should constantly just be throwing stuff out because we are not a profession that has a super well established research base yet, and so I worry that we, if we just start throwing that stuff out when it can be effective, that we're doing a disservice to the children that we work with. So we very much believe that through having our framework, it gives us a way to properly assess and come up with interventions and then to trial them. And so, you know, so we use weighted vests, we use neoprene vests, we use brushing, we use the astronaut training. We use therapeutic listening. We do all of those things in the schools in a systematic way that has proven to be extremely effective. And I think that it's sad to me when I hear OTs just say, Oh, I'm not using I'm not touching that because, and maybe it's different down in the States, maybe we have more leeway or whatnot, but we have we track it, we document it, and we see impressive outcomes. So.    Ruth Isaac     And we just don't we stop.     Danielle Pluth     Let me say, yeah. And we just really want OTs to experience, I guess what we're experiencing in the schools, we're having a lot of success with a sensory approach. It's, you know, yeah, so I think I might have just gone, I'm not sure if I went way off your question or.    Jayson Davies     No, that was spot on. You gave, you gave several great answers. I really appreciate that. Ruth, did you want to add anything?    Ruth Isaac     Yeah, I think when you were asking about, like, when the confusion, I remember when I first started, there's there's so much terminology in our profession, and there's so many acronyms, and it can be really complex. And I remember something just as simple as somatosensory and thinking that was a whole nother thing, that's just tactile probe, that's all that is, and sometimes just sharing that basic information with people so that they understand, Oh, we're talking about proprioception. We're talking about tactile that's what that is. And then how does that functionally impact? That's the piece that I feel like was just really eye opening, especially when I'm working with new therapists. And I remember myself wondering, what is going on here, how, what is the difference between these things, and how does that impact? And having a bit of that neurology in the background is also super important, so that you understand what's working there and how it's not ooga booga.    Danielle Pluth     It's actually grounded in science Exactly. Yeah, exactly. And I was gonna add one more thing on to what you were saying there. Go ahead. I was also just gonna add in there that we've spent a lot of time going through that vocabulary. So anytime we go to a new course, or we hear new terminology, we're constantly trying to figure out, okay, what do you exactly mean by sensory seeking, for example, or sensory craving, or, you know, and distilling that down to what it is, and then figuring out how it fits in with what we're already thinking. Do we need to change what we're thinking? Or is that different than what we're thinking? Or does it already fit into what we are thinking? It's just semantics, right? So we've have spent a lot of time figuring those kinds of things out.     Ruth Isaac     And still working on it. Like, I feel like it's a never ending thing, right? He is, yeah, like, and thank goodness, because otherwise I think we would be bored. Yes, I don't want to be bored with what I do. I want to keep pushing myself. I want to keep thinking about how this impacts a child's function overall. And I want to share that passion which we have with other people, so that they can see that as well.    Danielle Pluth     And that's the thing. Like within our community, we have built a whole program around OTs using sex. Sensory intervention, like with regards to our universal strategies, our direct one to one, our sensory rooms in the schools. And it's been a lot of fun to see impact across our whole division of, you know, 15 schools or whatnot. And so it's, it's neat, and it's nice to have something that you keep coming back to, that you keep, you know, we can keep training our teachers and parents and whatnot in it, and we're continuing to have success.    Jayson Davies     Yeah, perfect. Yeah, no, I think that's another five minute segment that people can send to their admin teachers and people who think that they're sensory experts or even another therapist, like, there's a lot to do with sensory and it requires training. And, yeah, it requires training.    Ruth Isaac     Ongoing, right? You never, I don't think you're ever done, like we're still learning as we continue on.    Danielle Pluth     And I think that that's the thing. Like, if we can have the OTs well trained in sensory, then you can really see that sensory is not just wiggle cushions and jewelry. That kind of brings us full circle, back to the beginning, right? So some people can think, Oh, if I give you a box of sand, I'm doing sensory intervention. Well, that's a sensory strategy, but that's not the basis of sensory theory, right? So, yeah, I think there. There's so much more to it and that that I know psychology has really gone into sensory but we've like, it's that vestibular probe piece too, that we really bring, as occupational therapists to that whole lens as well, that we can really understand.    Jayson Davies     So, yeah, absolutely. Well. Danielle Ruth, thank you so much for being here and sharing your good sense ot rocket ship and all the theory behind it and how you use it in application that's really amazing. Before you leave, I want to give you both the opportunity to kind of share where people can go to learn more about the good sense rocket ship, the theory that you're putting out there, and learn more about you all.    Danielle Pluth     So if they want to go and get a download of our good sense rocket ship, they can go to advance. Ot.ca , back, slash, sensory. Hyphen. Approach.     Ruth Isaac     And we're also on Instagram.    Danielle Pluth     Yes, you can follow us on Instagram at good, underscore sense, underscore OTs as well for our little video educational clips and bloopers.    Jayson Davies     Bloopers are always fun, awesome. We will be sure to link to both of those resources and all the other resources that we mentioned today. I don't think there are too many, but we'll have those two for sure, and any others that that we, you know, can find to send your way, and we'll put those in the show notes, so it makes it super easy for you to find everybody. I have the rocket ship up right in front of me. I am not lying when I say like I would mark the heck up of out of this thing during all my evaluations. And I think that you will find it very helpful too. So be sure to go get it, and you're going to learn a lot from Danielle and Ruth over however long you follow them on Instagram and are part of their atmosphere. So Danielle Ruth, thanks so much for being here. Really appreciate having you, and can't wait to see asteroids on the rocket ship.    Danielle Pluth     And thank you so much.     Ruth Isaac     Thanks, Jayson.    Jayson Davies     Of course, I want to give Danielle and Ruth A big thank you for joining me today to share the good sense rocket ship framework with you. And of course, I also want to say thank you for listening to this episode. I hope you found value in understanding how this framework can help identify, assess and address sensory challenges that you come across with your students. Be sure to find the good sense rocket ship PDF in our show notes, and be sure to follow Danielle and Ruth on Instagram at good sense OTs to continue learning from their expertise. And as always, if today's episode left you wanting more practical strategies and support for your school based ot practice. I would love to invite you to join us inside the OT school OTs collaborative. It's where hundreds of school based ot practitioners come together for resources, professional development and direct mentorship from me. Within a group setting, you'll find frameworks like the one that we discussed today, plus tools to help you advocate for sensory, informed practices within your schools, head to OTSchoolHouse.com slash collab to learn more and join our community. Also, as a bonus, as a member of the OT schoolhouse collaborative, you can even earn a CU certificate for listening to this episode and many others within the OT school house Podcast Network until next time. Keep making a difference in your students lives through the power of occupational therapy and just have a good time. Don't forget to play. Don't forget to kind of sit down and just be in the moment with your students. Sometimes the best sensory interventions just come out of being present with the students. Take care and we'll see you next time bye, bye.    Amazing Narrator     Thank you for listening to the OT schoolhouse podcast for more ways to help you and your students succeed right now, head on over to OTSchoolHouse.com Until next time class is dismissed.  Click on the file below to download the transcript to your device. Thanks for listening to the OT Schoolhouse Podcast. A podcast for school-based OT practitioners, by school-based OT practitioners! Be sure to subscribe to the OT Schoolhouse email list & get access to our free downloads of Gray-Space paper and the Occupational Profile for school-based OTs. Subscribe now! Thanks for visiting the podcast show notes! If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts , Google Podcast , Spotify , or wherever you listen to podcasts. Click here to view more episodes of the OT Schoolhouse Podcast

A virtual conference for School-Based OTs focusing on supporting all students! - August 2025 Conference Login Register now & get our "AI in SBOT" course for FREE! BACK TO SCHOOL CONFERENCE Professional development & more to kick off the 2025-26 school year. August 23 -24, 2025 Attend live-online or watch on-demand ATTEND THE CONFERENCE Groups & Purchase orders Two days of live & recorded courses Internationally recognized speakers with a passion for SBOT 12 hours of CEUs specific to SBOT Conference Theme OT for One, OT for All In six sessions, we'll address how our ability to support students makes us the perfect providers to support individuals, groups, & entire classrooms NEURO-DIVERSE AFFIRMING TREATMENT SCREEN + TREAT VISION DIFFICULTIES MULTI-TIERED SYSTEM OF SUPPORTS HANDWRITING BEST-PRACTICES INTEROCEPTION IN SCHOOLS AND MORE! Why OTPs love the B2S Conference "This is the 1st conference that provided 100% relevant topics for every presentation. This conference is worth every cent." - Bev Carrasco, school-based OT - Secure your registration today! $419 Your B2S Registration Includes Access to all SIX online B2S Conference Sessions Replay access to all sessions until November 30, 2025 Access to the supportive B2S Community Opportunities to win one of many OT Giveaways Use code EARLYBIRD50 to save $50 Pricing SECURE YOUR SPOT HERE Conference Schedule Times listed in the Pacific Time Zone The OT Schoolhouse is proud to be an AOTA-Approved Provider of Professional Development Presenters & Sessions Interoception, Our Eighth Sense: The Science of How We Uniquely Feel Kelly Mahler OTD, OTR/L The Interoception Curricullum Respecting the Evidence: Handwriting & Advocacy for 2025 Margaret (Peggy) Morris OTD, OTR/L, BCP Experienced school-based OT practitioner & Educator What's Energy Got to Do with It? Supporting Regulation in Affirming and Accessible Ways Amy Laurent PhD, OTR/L Autism Level UP Jacquelyn Fede PhD Autism Level UP Empowering Futures: Promoting Self-Determination & Preparing Students for Life Jan Hollenbeck OT, OTD, OTR, FAOTA Partnership for Advancement of School Service-Providers (PASS) Self-Regulation and Interoception in MTSS Alex Thompson B.A, CYC, Min Kin, B.ECE, MOT Power For All Adventure Therapy The OTP's Role in School-based Supporting Functional Vision Difficulties Jaime Spencer MS, OTR/L Miss Jaime, OT Register now to secure the lowest conference attendance rate! SECURE YOUR SPOT Great Value! This conference is designed for you as a school-based OT and every session has been researched, vetted, and hand-selected by Jayson to be relevant for school-based OT practitioners looking to support students in the least restrictive environment. Each presenter has over a decade of experience and demonstrates the ethical decision-making you expect from the OT Schoolhouse! On top of a curated schedule of sessions, you will have the opportunity to earn 12 hours of professional development in just one weekend! "I love this conference." "I love this conference. I think all school-based therapists should attend because all the information is relevant to our daily practice. Every lesson has big takeaways. It is worth every dollar!" - Audrey White, OTR/L - Previous B2S Conference Attendee $419 Your B2S Registration Includes Access to all SIX online B2S Conference Sessions Replay access to all sessions until November 30, 2025 Access to the supportive B2S Community Opportunities to win one of many OT Giveaways Use code EARLYBIRD50 to save $50 SECURE YOUR SPOT HERE Pricing Session Information Interoception, Our Eighth Sense: The Science of How We Uniquely Feel Interoception is a crucial sensory system that allows us to perceive internal body signals, helping us identify and manage our feelings, such as anxiety or hunger. This course will explore the latest research on interoception, its impact on neurodivergent students or those who have experienced trauma, and its relevance in the context of post-pandemic recovery. Participants will learn evidence-based strategies to enhance interoceptive awareness in three key areas: body, emotion, and action. Self Regulation and Interoception in MTSS This interactive and experiential workshop will help you re-imagine the delivery of programs to address self-regulation and interoception in the MTSS framework. Using strategies from nature-based research, we'll address how OT practitioners can use nature to impact self-regulation in the classroom What's Energy Got to Do with It? Supporting Regulation in Affirming and Accessible Ways This workshop will introduce regulation supports developed by Autism Level UP! Participants will have opportunities to apply the tools and strategies presented with opportunities to consider the tools for children with regulatory challenges that they teach or with whom they work, live and/or play. Modifications for the supports will be discussed for individuals at a variety of developmental levels (e.g., students who are not yet communicating using words, those who are emerging language learners, and those who are conversational). Empowering Futures: Promoting Self-Determination and Preparing Students for Life Occupational therapy practitioners play a vital role in preparing students with disabilities for meaningful, independent lives. Empowering Futures is designed to equip school-based OTPs with the knowledge and tools to promote self-determination, support post-secondary transition planning, and engage key stakeholders—students, families, and educational teams. Grounded in IDEA’s purpose and best practices, this course emphasizes early, intentional, and inclusive approaches to building self-awareness, advocacy, and life skills from early childhood through age 22 and beyond. Participants will explore strategies for embedding life-readiness goals into everyday school experiences. Respecting the Evidence: Handwriting & Advocacy for 2025 Current evidence strongly supports the notion that occupation-based approaches are the most effective for improving handwriting skills. It is essential to reflect on both the evidence and our current practices, as this reflection will guide us in creating an impactful script to share this important shift with others. Together we can close the gap in handwriting proficiency! The time for action is now. The OTP's Role in School-based Supporting Functional Vision Difficulties This presentation will explore the critical role of school-based occupational therapists in identifying and supporting students with functional vision difficulties. Participants will learn how to integrate vision support strategies within Multi-Tiered Systems of Support (MTSS) to promote student success across all levels of intervention. Register now to ensure access to all 6 growth-focused sessions! SECURE YOUR SPOT Conference Objectives Participants will: Describe how occupational therapy supports diverse learners’ engagement and participation in individual and classroom educational settings. Identify evidence-based strategies to enhance self-regulation, interoception, and functional skills that improve student occupational performance. Explain collaborative and inclusive approaches to promote self-determination, life readiness, and vision support within a multi-tiered system of support. View All Session Objectives Here "What a great conference" "What a great conference on expanding our collaborative practices in our school settings with all of our teams. I will definitely be using all of the tools, and strategies learned here with my students, teams, and schools! Thank you to Jayson and all of the incredible speakers who presented and for their time, talents, and expertise!" - Previous B2S Conferenc e Attendee - ATTEND THE CONFERENCE Audience & Education Level The OT Schoolhouse Back To School Conference is intended for current school-based occupational therapy practitioners. The conference consists of introductory and intermediate-level courses. No prerequisite courses are required, but one should have a general understanding of OT in the schools. 2025 Conference Theme OT for One, OT for ALL At this year's Back to School Conference, we're highlighting the role of Occupational Therapy in enhancing learning for both individuals and groups. Since 1976, OT practitioners have leaned heavily on individual services. But in today's world of education, we must be able to support individuals, groups, and entire classroom populations through the Multi-Tiered System of Support (MTSS) framework. By collaborating with educators, we can create an inclusive environment that addresses the diverse needs of students both on and off our caseload. Get practical insights on effective handwriting techniques and early screening methods that help identify student needs. Together, we can provide targeted support that empowers every learner to thrive. Join us in creating an educational environment where all students succeed! This conference is your opportunity to discover strategies that make a lasting impact. Session Handouts & Replays For each session, handouts will be made available to download and print prior to the start of the conference . Participants will be able to download and print the slide and supplemental materials in the conference Portal one week before the conference. Replays of each session will be available for four months. As a registered conference attendee, you will have access to the conference handouts, session video replays, and course community until November 30, 2025. Community Engagement What's a conference without the networking and sharing of ideas? In addition to lively, interactive presentations, there will be designated times for live Q+A sessions with the presenters. Likewise, we will have an online space dedicated to discussions related to the content of our guest speakers. You'll also have the opportunity to engage with other like-minded OTPs. Join me and hundreds of other School-Based OTPs advancing our clinical skills This conference is designed for you as a school-based OT practitioner. Every speaker and presentation has been researched, vetted, and hand-selected to be relevant to the school-based OT practitioner who wants to help diverse learners access the least restrictive environment. Each presenter has years of experience and has demonstrated the ethical decision-making you'd expect from the OT Schoolhouse! At the OT Schoolhouse, we understand the intricacies of school-based OT and know the therapists and topics you want to learn more about. Register now to secure your spot! REGISTER NOW Important Dates July 16 Last day for Early Bird Pricing July 16th is the last day to save $50 using code EARLYBIRD50 Register now! Aug 23 Conference Kick Off! Join us live in the Back to School Conference community to learn and grow together! Don't Miss Out! NOV 30 Replays Available Until November 30 Get access to the replays until November 30. That is a full 3 months to watch (or rewatch) all six sessions. Register now! Conference Attendee Disclaimer/Agreement By registering for or attending any event or activity associated with the OT Schoolhouse: Back To School Conference, I agree to the following: Professional Development/Information Disclaimer The Back to School Conference is a virtual event for professional development, networking, and OT Schoolhouse business purposes. The material presented is not intended to represent the only or the best methods appropriate for the occupational therapy and/or medical condition or professional development issues being discussed but rather is intended to present the opinions of the presenters, which may be helpful to other health care professionals at arriving at their own conclusions and consequent application. In order to earn a certificate of completion for each session, attendees will be required to watch speaker-led sessions and pass a proficiency quiz for each session with a score of 75% or greater. Financial and Non-financial Disclaimers Jayson Davies owns Schoolhouse Education, LLC, the parent company of the OT Schoolhouse. Speakers at the Back to School Conference are paid for their professional presentation. Speakers may discuss other programs with which they are affiliated and earn a commission and/or other compensation. Speakers may be affiliates for the Back to School Conference and may earn a commission when learners register for the Back to School Conference. Public Relations Agreement Registration and attendance at, or participation in, Back To School Conference meetings and other activities constitutes an agreement by the registrant for Schoolhouse Education, LLC’s use and distribution (both now and in the future) of the registrant or attendee’s image, voice, and survey responses in photographs, videotapes, electronic/print reproductions, and audiotapes of such events and activities. Waiver of Liability Agreement I release the Back to School Conference, Schoolhouse Education, LLC, OT School House, and its staff, presenters, and any other individuals or entities associated with the Back To School Conference from any and all liability connected with my participation, as well as from any liability related to changes to the schedule, events or activities. I acknowledge and agree that I am participating on my own choice and assume all risk in connection thereof and that in the event that a need for emergency medical service arises, I authorize and consent to such services being provided at my own expense. Attendees participating in this professional development education program do so with full knowledge that they waive any claim they may have against the Back to School Conference, Schoolhouse Education, LLC, and OT Schoolhouse and its staff or representatives for reliance on any information presented during these educational activities. Refund Policy If Schoolhouse Education, LLC receives notice of cancellation before the start of the conference, a refund, less $50 per person administrative fee, will be issued. Refunds will not be processed until after the conference. Request a refund. Cancelation Policy In the event that Schoolhouse Education, LLC cancels the event for any reason, participants will be offered the choice of a full refund or, when applicable, a credit toward the rescheduled event. Purchase Order & Group Registration Schoolhouse Education, LLC welcomes Purchase Orders (POs) and Group orders for the Back to School Conference. You may submit a purchase order here. A W-9 can also be found on the purchase order submission page. Interested in Sponsoring the Back To School Conference? Email us! Past Sessions & Speakers The Intersection Between Sensory, Trauma, and Neurology Dr. Varleisha Lyons Providing Sensory Supports Across All Educational Settings: From Least to Most Restrictive Dr. Danielle Delorenzo, MS, OTR/L, RYT-200 My Bui-Lewis, MS, OTR/L, AT, RYT-200 ADL + IADL = A Big Deal Deborah Schwind, DHSc, OTR/L, BCP, SCSS, FAOTA School Sensory Rooms: A Guide for Teachers and Therapists Adam Griffin, OTR AKA @Adam_the_OT Trying Differently: ADHD Informed Classroom Support and Strategies Lori Flynn, MS, OTR/L Using AOTA EBP and Knowledge Translation Resources in the School Systems Susan Cahill, PhD, OTR/L, FAOTA Re-Framing Behavior: How Understanding Felt Safety, Regulation, and a Child’s Sensory Needs Can Help OTs Move Educators From “Managing” Behavior to Improving It Greg Santucci, MS, OTR Harnessing our Strengths: How Occupational Therapy Improves Post-school Outcomes for Youth with Disabilities Theresa Carlson Carroll, OTD, OTR/L, CLA And More!

Interviews, trainings, and discussions about common school-based OT topics The OT School House Podcast A twice a month audio experience to keep you up to date on research, guidance, and best practices in School-Based OT. Listen on Apple Podcasts Earn Professional development for Listening Looking for a specific Episode? With over one hundred podcast episodes, we have something for every OT practitioner learner! WE HOST BRILLIANT OT PRACTITIONERS Meg Proctor Program creator and advocate for autistic children Listen Dr. Sue Bazyk Program Director at Every Moment Counts. Listen Olivia Martinez-Hauge Owner at The Center for Connection & Neurodiversity Listen Ushma Sampat Private Practice owner & Mentor to school-based OT practitioners Listen Dr. Zoe Mailloux Faculty member of the Jefferson University OT Program Listen Dr. Susanne Smith Roley President of the Collaborative for Leadership in Sensory Integration (CLASI) Listen Episodes List Podcast Episodes & Show Notes OTS 192: Applying your Sensory Knowledge to MTSS Tiers 1 & 2 In this Episode, Jayson Davies welcomes Dr. Jaime Hunter and Dr. Kaisa Syväoja from The College of St. Scholastica to discuss how OT practitioners can utilize grants to advocate for mental health services in schools. OTS 191: Turning Grant Funding Into Mental Health Advocacy in Schools In this Episode, Jayson Davies welcomes Dr. Jaime Hunter and Dr. Kaisa Syväoja from The College of St. Scholastica to discuss how OT practitioners can utilize grants to advocate for mental health services in schools. OTS 190: From Behavior to Regulation: How the Good Sense Rocketship Framework Transforms OT Practice In this episode, Danielle Pluth and Ruth Isaac—Canadian occupational therapists and creators of the Good Sense OT Rocket Ship—share the innovative visual framework that’s transforming how OTs assess, communicate, and support student participation. OTS 189: How switching to a workload model can transform your school-based OT practice Dive into groundbreaking research on the transition from caseload to workload models in school-based OT with Stanbridge University MOT students Jalen, Michelle, Jared, and Ari. This episode offers practical insights for school-based OTs feeling overwhelmed, with recommendations to start small by tracking weekly time usage and increasing teacher collaboration. OTS 188: Everyday Ethics in School-Based OT" Everyday Ethics in School-Based OT: Navigating Challenges with Clarity & Confidence equips school-based occupational therapists with the tools to confidently address real-world ethical dilemmas that arise in educational settings. OTS 187: Realistic Strategies to Build Work Skills for High School and Transition-Aged Students" Matthew Husband, OTD, OTR/L shares his innovative "Get to Work" program, an after-school initiative providing realistic work experiences for high school students who could succeed in employment with the right supports. 1 2 3 4 5 Earn continuing education by listening to The OT School House Podcast! First, select and listen to an episode Then, purchase and pass the quiz Check your email for your certificate of completion Earn Professional Development HERE Do You Have Something To Share With Listeners of The OT School House Podcast If so, click here to get in touch with us

Make the shift to a workload model in the school-based setting with this AOTA-approved guided workshop. Making The Shift: Caseload to Workload An interactive workshop to help you get the support you need and move to a workload approach in as little as 4 weeks. Self-paced CEU Course + Live Q+A Get instant access Course + Mentorship "I Feel Confident..." "This course has given me the appropriate tools and skills to transition from a caseload to a workload approach. I feel confident in collecting and analyzing my data, problem solving solutions, and approaching administration for my needs using my data." - Ashley Hartley, OTR/L - Learn the process necessary to get the support you need Research has shown that over 60% of school-based OT practitioners feel that their caseload is not reasonable (Seruya & Garfinkle, 2020). Likewise, 55% reported being unable to fulfill the required service minutes mandated on their students' IEPs. In 2018, I found myself in this exact situation. My caseload of nearly 60 kids led me to have more service minutes per week than I could handle. Between evals, meetings, and trying to keep up on notes, my log of missed therapy sessions just kept growing. That's when I knew I needed to do something. Rather than continue with the status quo and be okay with missed therapy sessions, I created a plan to get the help I needed. I knew it wouldn't happen overnight, but I had to start somewhere. Four months (and way too many missed sessions) later, my plan had worked. I collected my data, showed my supervisor that my caseload was unmanageable, and received additional support in the form of a contracted therapist helping to see my students on my caseload. Unfortunately, very few OT practitioners have had the same success in trying to get the support they need. With this course, you will get a step-by-step guide to understanding your current caseload and using that data to make changes in your school. You will learn how your administrators think about your caseload and how you can collaborate with them to support not only yourself but also the entire school. In this course, I will walk you through every step of the process, from collecting data on your caseload to sharing solution-driven ideas with your administrators. Ready? Let's go! Get instant access Course + Mentorship What you'll learn in this course Hint: Your Workload is more than the students you see each week. Through this action-oriented course, you'll complete the necessary steps to get the support you need. I will be by your side as you identify your workload, gather data, create a plan, and present your plan to administrators. We'll do this together! Understand Caseloads & Workloads You likely already know how many kids are on your caseload. But do you know how long it takes each week to complete your job? We'll look at research and data to determine what an average workload looks like among school-based OT practitioners. Identify Your Workload Once we have a baseline for what a workload should look like, we'll make a plan to identify YOUR unique workload. Do you partake in RTI, recess duty, and evals? All of these must be considered in your workload plan. Gather Workload Data Now that we know what to measure, it is time to gather data. I will guide you through this process with a plan and easy-to-use spreadsheets to help you track your time and identify how many hours it really takes you to see every student on your caseload. Make The Change This is where things get fun. I will help you to create a plan that both you and your administrators can agree on. With your workload data in hand, you'll feel confident sharing the results with your supervisor. I'll even provide you the template for putting it all together. Maintain Your Progress Many believe that making the shift to a workload model is a one-time deal. They're half-right. Once you make the shift, it takes some yearly data collection to prevent reverting to the ways of a stressed caseload model. You'll learn how you and your team and maintain your workload progress for the long term as we wrap up the course together. LEARN WITH JAYSON ⤵ Here's what you get with the Make The Shift: Caseload to Workload Workshop! A detailed program to help you get the support you need. I will guide you through the process of showing your administrators that your caseload model is not working. During the workshop, I will support you in completing the three-step process I have used to shift my practice to a workload model and get support from my administrators. By the end of this course, you will be able to show your administrators why your caseload is not working and provide potential solutions for their consideration. Resources to save you time, energy, and headaches. You could spend hours developing your own templates and resources. Or you could use mine. I will provide you with spreadsheets, templates, and forms to make this process simple for you. You can even use them with your team to make the shift to a workload program together. Some of the several resources included: A caseload to workload calculator Time study spreadsheet with calculations to analyze your time A report template to help demonstrate your workload to your administrators Ongoing Support from Jayson and other dedicated therapists As part of the workshop, you will also have access to monthly support calls with me - Jayson. Join me on Zoom once a month on a weekday evening and ask any questions you have about school-based OT, caseloads, and workloads. You also get access to a space inside our dedicated Le arner C ommunity where you can interact with other Caseload to Workload Workshop Le arners. AOTA-approved Continuing Education The mts: Caseload to Workload Workshop is AOTA-approved for 4 hours of continuing education. Upon completion of the course, quiz, and survey, you will receive a certificate of completion for 4 contact hours (.4 CEUs) good for your national board re-certification and licensure renewal, where applicable. Caseload to Workload Workshop Curriculum Three action-oriented sections to help you make the shift! This is not a theory-heavy course. It is a workshop that will allow you to take action & make changes this school year! Part 1: Caselaod vs. Workloads It's a caseload world and we are all just living it. It doesn't have to be that way, though. In the first part of the course, we will define how a caseload differs from a workload, both in theory and in practice. I will show you real-life examples of various caseloads and workloads so you can better explain the differences to your OT team and supervisors. I will also share the research with you related to why we should be making the shift now! Our well-being and our students' outcomes depend on us making the shift. (50 minutes of lessons + 15 minutes of assignments) Part 2: Planning & Taking Action It's time to take action. We are going to complete four specific actions to fully understand your workload. We'll also look at your team's workload. Don't worry; I will help you get them on board with this, even if they are not all OTPs. By the end of Part 2, you will have a detailed analysis of how you spend your time at work to share with your administrator. You will also have the knowledge and tools to implement the shift. (130 minutes of lessons + 30 minutes of assignments) Part 3: Sticking with it! Unfortunately, if you don't continue to track your workload, it will get out of hand. That is why in part 3 I will provide you with the knowledge and tools to prevent you from moving back into a caseload model. Yes, it will take a little upkeep every year. But with every year, your workload will become more clear and your administrators will learn to appreciate what you have done for the OT department, if not the entire special education department. (15 minutes of lessons + 10 minutes of assignments) How I make it easy for you Using pre-recorded videos with slides, accessible online tools, and hands-on assignments designed to facilitate your learning experience, I will make it easy for you to make the shift to a workload model at your school sites. Most video lessons are less than 30 minutes in length. Vital lessons are paired with action item assignments that will directly assist you in making the shift. If you start today, you can make the shift to a workload model in as little as 4-6 weeks. I'm ready to help you get there, so let's go! What real school-based OT practitioners have to say about the Caseload to Workload Workshop "This course helped our OT department gather data that our administrators could not deny!" - School-Based OT practitioner Upgrade your workload workshop experience with the OT Schoolhouse Collaborative Further your school-based OT knowledge and capacities with community-based mentorship and professional development experience inside the OT Schoolhouse Collaborative. As a member of OT Schoolhouse Collaborative, not only will you have access to the Caseload to Workload Workshop to help you overcome your impossible caseload demands, but you will also have access to our growing library of AOTA-approved courses designed to take your practice to the next level. Individual Course Purchase vs. OTS Collaborative Pricing options Caseload to Workload Workshop $299 one-time purchase ENROLL NOW Best for those who want long-term access to the Make The Shift: Caseload to Workload Workshop material & resources. Includes Lifetime access to the Caseload to Workload Workshop curriculum & resources Monthly office hours with Jayson Davies A certificate of recognition upon successful completion of the course - (4 hours of AOTA-approved CEUs) OT Schoolhouse Collaborative $120/quarter or $399/year ACCESS THE COLLABORATIVE Learn More Best for those who want access to the Workload course PLUS mentorship, unlimited PD, and additional resources. Includes Access to the Caseload to Workload Workshop while you are a member Access to the A-Z School-Based OT Course while you are a member Monthly office hours with Jayson Davies A certificate of recognition upon successful completion of any and all courses included in the Collaborative Monthly mentorship group calls to help you implement what you learn Live AOTA-approved CEU courses from Jayson & other school-based OT practitioners all year long Access to our growing library of recorded AOTA-approved courses for school-based OT practitioners Access to every OT schoolhouse-developed resource including our AI school-based OT goal generator Earn professional development by listening to the OT Schoolhouse Podcast Member-only events, channels, and community forums Access to our library of school-based OT research summaries Peer-to-peer support from other OT practitioners Both options get you full (and instant) access to the course and resources today! Plus, you will be able to attend our the next office hours session! Purchase Orders & Group Enrollments Have a group of 3 or more OT practitioners who want to take the course. Each therapist can save $50 or more! Click here to email us and learn how Meet your course instructor Hey there! My name is Jayson Davies, and I have been supporting students and teachers as a school-based OT for over a decade. Now, I support school-based OT practitioners in implementing best practices. So, if you are looking to support your students and teachers while saving yourself time and energy, look no further. Since graduating from OT School in 2012, I have been neck-deep in school-based occupational therapy. I've worked as a contracted therapist in a large suburban district as the newest therapist in a department of more than 15 OT practitioners. I've also worked as a district employee in a rural area where I was one of only two OT practitioners - myself and an OTA. From those experiences, I have learned a lot, like how to collaborate with teachers and develop educationally relevant goals. I've also been in my fair share of challenging situations with caseloads that are too high to allow for effective therapy services. From those experiences, I have learned how to track, evaluate, and communicate with administrators how high caseloads impact the entire school. More importantly, I have taught thousands of OT practitioners just like you how to best ethically support students, which includes advocating for the time you need to implement best practices. Now, I look forward to helping you do the same. Let's get started on shifting your school to a workload model today! How this program sets you up for success It's much more than just a course I know all too well how intimidating it can be to ask for help from a supervisor. When you work at schools with limited resources and mentorship, you almost feel guilty asking for the smallest amount of support. That's why, after many years of impossible caseloads, denied help requests, and even biting my tongue when I had something to say, I created this course for every school-based OT practitioner who is experiencing the same things I have. This course is not a "quick fix" to your caseload concerns. It is an action-oriented workshop designed to help you one step at a time. In addition to the steps laid out above, you'll also receive the following supports: Editable Templates As a course participant, you will receive access to all of the handouts, editable templates, and made-for-you spreadsheets that I created while making my own shift from a caseload to a workload model. I've also added a few extras I wish I would have had while making the shift, as well. Live Office Hours With Jayson I share a lot about caseloads and workloads in this course, but I know you are going to have questions unique to your situation. That is why I set time aside every month to answer your questions live in a private Zoom session. During office hours, I will be available to answer your situation questions directly and thoroughly. Community Support Not only will you have full access to the course content, but you will also be welcomed into the Private OT Schoolhouse Learner Center, where Jayson and other like-minded professionals are available to answer case-specific questions. There is no judgment in our group, just plenty of helpful support! Course Objectives We'll cover each of these objectives in a logical way to bring them all into focus for you. By the end of this course, you will be able to: Identify how a caseload model differs from a workload model. Recall research related to occupational therapy and using a workload approach. Appraise your current caseload and workload and distinguish how it is impacting your practice. Create a plan for moving to a workload approach and maintaining it. This course has been structured to make each learning objective easy to learn and implement into your practice as you work through it. After all, what good is knowledge you can't use? You get it all! Instructional m ethod s and tools designed to support you. What's a course without all the helpful supplemental materials? When you register for the Caseload to Workload Workshop, you will receive: Access to all 3 sections of the course broken up into 20-45 minute easily digestible videos with slides, totaling 3.5 hours of instructional material. The most comprehensive training for transitioning from a caseload to a workload model and getting the support you need from your administrators. Access to the Private Learner Center that will allow you to seek advice from Jayson and your peers in the Caseload to Workload Workshop. Access to monthly LIVE Q&A sessions (Collaboration Hours) with Jayson via private video sessions! Access to digital PDF reference handouts that will assist you in making the shift and showing your administrators the work you do. Access to customizable and digital templates, including Jayson's plug and play template to show your administrators all the work you do and the ideas you have. A certificate of completion for 4 (.4 CEUs) contact hours - good for your national board re-certification and licensure renewal where applicable (Please refer to your state guidelines to determine if your state accepts live and/or recorded online courses for renewal). Join hundreds of school-based OT practitioners and get the administrative support you deserve! Caseload to Workload Workshop $299 one-time purchase ENROLL NOW The OT Schoolhouse Collaborative $120/quarter or $399/year ACCESS THE COLLABORATIVE Learn M ore Frequently asked questions About the course How is the Caseload to Workload Workshop presented? The Caseload to Workload Workshop is a recorded, learn at your own pace course. Unlike some recorded seminars, this is not a "previously recorded session." This compilation of videos were recorded directly for the purpose of this online course. The workshop also includes optional assignments that are designed to facilitate your ability to make the shift to a workload model and get the support you need. Learners who have completed the assignments also report increased results when meeting with their administrators. Will I earn Continuing Education for participation? Schoolhouse Education, LLC is an AOTA approved provider of continuing education and this course is an approved course. At the completion of the course, you will have the opportunity to demonstrate your learned knowledge through an online quiz. Upon completion of this quiz, you will receive your certificate of completion for 4 hours worth of continuing education. The assignment of AOTA CEUs does not imply endorsement of specific course content, products, or clinical procedures by AOTA. Is the A-Z School-Based OT Course for me? The Caseload to Workload Workshop is designed for school-based OT practitioners looking to effectively manage their caseloads and transition to a workload approach. It provides strategies, tools, and resources to help OTs streamline their workload and enhance their impact on student outcomes. If you are tired of working 45, 50, or 60 hours per week, this course is for you. I will help you show your administrators that your program is not sustainable and that something must change. What is the cost to me and can I pay via a purchase order? The total cost of the Make The Shift: Caseload to Workload Workshop is $299. This price includes all recorded sessions, slides handouts, customizable templates that you can use the next day, and lifetime access to the Student Center and Q&A collaboration hour sessions. You may also opt to have your district or employer pay via a purchase order. to submit a purchase order, please email us at Registration@otschoolhouse.com For even more support, you may appreciate the OT Schoolhouse Collaborative where you can access this course and many others. Learn more here. What if I don't like the course? Oh no! We don't want that. We offer a 30-day money back guarantee. If you are unhappy with the Caseload to Workload Workshop for any reason, let us know and we will refund your payment within 30 days. We may ask a question or two, but it would only be find out how we can improve the course better for future participants. No hard feelings, I promise! This does not apply to the OT Schoolhouse Collaborative. OT Schoolhouse Collaborative purchases are non-refundable. Will I be taking the course alone? Absolutely not! Everyday, therapists just like you login and learn from this course. As a student of the course, you will have access to all videos as well as a private Learner Center with myself and the other participants. Many therapists just like you have registered for and benefited from this course. Aside from the live videos, what else will I receive? Let’s be honest, the best part of a presentation are the slides, right? Well, you are going to get all of my slides and more! Along with the slides to my presentation, you will also receive several handouts and templates designed for you to customize and use in your practice! Some of the resources included are: A caseload to workload calculator Time study spreadsheet with calculations to analyze your time A report template to help demonstrate your workload to your administrators And more! You will also be invited to join our private Learner Center where your questions and ideas can be shared and responded to by myself and fellow members of the course. This is a great opportunity to keep the learning going with other therapists dedicated to school-based OT. What equipment/tools will I need to complete the course? You will need a computer or smart device with an internet connection to access the course. Videos cannot be downloaded to your device and must be watched while connected to the internet. All files (slides and resources) may be downloaded and/or copied to your Google Drive or Microsoft Cloud What if I need accommodations or support in accessing the course material? The Caseload to Workload Workshop uses an audiovisual platform. That allows for making the video presentation full-screen on your device (use of a computer recommended) and allows for you to adjust the volume to your desired volume. Likewise, you will have the opportunity to play, pause, and re-listen to the content for clarity if needed. Handouts of the slides are provided to all participants AI generated subtitles for the video content is available, but may not be 100% accurate. If you feel that you might require additional accommodations to access the course, please reach out to info@otschoolhouse.com prior to registering for the course. For questions about your billing or accessing the course materials, email help@otschoolhouse.com . If you have a question about how to implement what you learn, we encourage you to ask those in the Learner Center or at the Collaboration Hours with Jayson. Disclosures, Terms & Conditions, Wavier of Liability & Participation Information Disclosures Presenter Disclosure: The speaker, Jayson Davies, is the owner of Schoolhouse Education, LLC, and the OT Schoolhouse Sponsor Disclosure: This course is presented by Schoolhouse Education, LLC Content Disclosure: This learning event does not focus exclusively on specific products or services. Target Audience The Make The Shift: Caseload to Workload Workshop is an intermediate level course designed for school-based OT practitioners. No prerequisite courses are required. Course Completion Requirements Passing (70% or greater) an online exam and completing a course evaluation will be required to earn continuing education credit. To participate in the course, complete the exam and course evaluation, and earn continuing education credit, you must be the original purchaser of the course. Participants must complete the entire course; partial credit is not allowed. Schoolhouse Education, LLC is committed to ensuring accessibility to the widest possible audience. We are continually improving the user experience for everyone. If you have questions, or requests, or would like to report an accessibility-related issue, please email accessibility@otschoolhouse.com . We will review your request and respond in a timely manner. Terms and Conditions Schoolhouse Education, LLC will keep a record of your CE courses. This includes all complete, incomplete, and pending coursework. When applicable, transcript services may include reporting to professional associations and/or state licensure boards. While Schoolhouse Education, LLC will make all reasonable efforts to offer CE credit for its courses, it is not responsible for state or national, or regulatory current policies or changes in CE requirements that may make courses ineligible for CE credits. Participant Agreement By registering for or attending any event or activity associated with the Make The Shift: Caseload to Workload Workshop, you agree to the following: Professional Development/Information Disclaimer The Making the Shift: Caseload to Workload Workshop is a virtual event for professional development, networking, and OT School house business purposes. The material presented is not intended to represent the only or the best methods appropriate for the occupational therapy and/or medical condition or professional development issues being discussed, but rather is intended to present the opinions of the presenters, which may be helpful to other health care professionals at arriving at their own conclusions and consequent application. Attendees participating in this professional development education program do so with full knowledge that they waive any claim they may have against the Making the Shift: Caseload to Workload Workshop, Schoolhouse Education, LLC, and OT School House and its staff or representatives for reliance on any information presented during these educational activities. Waiver of Liability Agreement I release the Making the Shift: Caseload to Workload Workshop, Schoolhouse Education, LLC, OT School House, and its staff, presenters, and any other individuals or entities associated with the Making the Shift: Caseload to Workload Workshop from any and all liability connected with my participation, as well as from any liability related to changes to the schedule, events or activities. I acknowledge and agree that I am participating on my own choice and assume all risk in connection thereof and that in the event that a need for emergency medical service arises, I authorize and consent to such services being provided at my own expense. Cancelation Policy & Refund policy In the event that Schoolhouse Education, LLC must cancel the event for any reason, participants will be offered the choice of a full refund or, when applicable, a credit toward the rescheduled event. Refund Policy In the event that Schoolhouse Education, LLC must cancel the event for any reason, participants will be offered the choice of a full refund or, when applicable, a credit toward the rescheduled event. Participants who have not completed the course may cancel and receive a full refund within 30-days of registering for any reason. ©2021 Schoolhouse Education, LLC Click here to Enroll now!

Join us as Jayson Davies, MA, OTR/L, shares how AI tools can support school-based OT assessments, interventions, and documentation processes. By using AI to reduce the hours we spend on paperwork, we increase the amount of time we spend with our students. We'll cover current and evolving research, ethical considerations, and practical use cases for AI in school-based OT. Also, discover innovative use cases for Artificial Intelligence in school-based OT through an interactive demonstration. Stay ahead of the curve and use this innovative technology in your OT practice!