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Click on your preferred podcast player link to listen wherever you enjoy podcasts . Welcome to the show notes for Episode 196 of the OT Schoolhouse Podcast. Artificial intelligence is quickly entering healthcare and education, and occupational therapists are asking an important question: How can we use AI responsibly without losing the clinical reasoning that defines our profession?  In this episode, Jayson Davies sits down with OT educator and researcher Tara Mansour to explore practical, ethical ways school-based OT practitioners can begin using AI tools. Tara shares how she teaches future occupational therapists to use AI as a “first draft partner”  while still prioritizing evidence-based practice, professional judgment, and student-centered care. They also discuss privacy considerations, prompt strategies, treatment planning ideas, and how AI can support data collection, documentation, and intervention development. If you're curious about how AI might fit into your school-based OT workflow—or concerned about how it could impact clinical reasoning—this episode provides a thoughtful and practical perspective. Tune in to learn how AI can support occupational therapy while keeping the human clinician firmly in the loop. Learning Objectives — Learners will describe appropriate ways AI tools can support school-based OT practice, including treatment planning, documentation drafting, and intervention idea generation. — Learners will explain ethical and privacy considerations when using AI, including FERPA and HIPAA concerns and strategies for de-identifying student information. — Learners will identify  the "human-in-the-loop" approach to AI-assisted practice, distinguishing between AI-generated versus AI-assisted work and the role of critical clinical reasoning in evaluating AI outputs. Guest Bio Dr. Tara Mansour, OTD, MS-HPEd, OTR/L, is an Assistant Professor and Academic Fieldwork Coordinator at the MGH Institute of Health Professions with over 23 years of clinical experience. As a PhD candidate in Health Professions Education, she investigates innovative approaches to prepare students for professional practice, with a focus on integrating artificial intelligence into fieldwork education to strengthen learning and critical thinking. Dr. Mansour co-chairs the Generative AI Task Force at MGH IHP, leading initiatives to explore AI-driven innovations in health professions education. She has authored scholarly articles on AI integration in clinical education, including publications in Frontiers of Medicine , Medical Education , and the Journal of Allied Health . Nationally recognized for her contributions, she has presented at AOTA's Education Summit and Academic Leadership Conference and serves on ASAHP's Clinical Education Committee, shaping best practices in clinical training across disciplines. Quotes "AI is really… a first draft partner or an option generator. It is not a decision maker.” — Dr. Tara Mansour "The risk isn't the tool—it's turning off your critical thinking. When used well, AI can actually strengthen reasoning." — Dr. Tara Mansour “Unreflective use weakens reasoning. Over-reliance without thinking weakens reasoning.” — Dr. Tara Mansour “AI probably won't replace us soon, but we need to use AI. to basically enhance OT and to keep it at the forefront of health sciences.” —Jayson Davies Resources 👉  ChatGPT for Educators 👉 Claude 👉 Co Pilot 👉 Google Gemini 👉 Linkedin 👉 Tara’s Research 👉 Pearson Clinical Assessments 👉 American Occupational Therapy Association 👉 AOTA INSPIRE Conference 👉 MGH Institute of Health Professions Episode Transcript Expand to view episode transcript Jayson Davies     Welcome back to the OTs schoolhouse podcast, your source for all things school based occupational therapy. I'm Jayson Davies, and today we're diving into a topic that is reshaping our profession, artificial intelligence and occupational therapy. Joining me today is Dr Tara Mansour, assistant professor and academic fieldwork coordinator at the MGH Institute of Health Professions with over 23 years of clinical experience, including extensive work in school based occupational therapy, Tara has become a national leader in integrating AI into health professions education. In this episode, we are tackling some of the questions that you have been asking me, like, Can AI help with IEP goals. How do we ethically use AI in our practice? Will it weaken clinical reasoning for current and or maybe even future occupational therapy practitioners? And most importantly, how can AI give us back the time that matters most so we can work directly with our students, whether you're AI curious or AI cautious, this conversation will give you practical, ethical strategies to make AI work for you, not replace you. Let's get started.    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, CLASI is officially in session.    Jayson Davies     Tara, welcome to the OT school house podcast. It is a pleasure having you on as you know, I love AI, and it sounds weird to say I love AI, but it is true, and I love it, how it can support us. And I know you have a lot of experience with AI, so I'm excited to dive into this topic with you. How are you doing today?    Tara Mansour     I'm well, thank you for having me here. I'm excited Absolutely.    Jayson Davies     And, you know, as we get started, I just kind of want to give you an opportunity just to share a little bit about where you are in the world of occupational therapy, and you can even start to dive into, kind of how you came around into the world of AI,    Tara Mansour     sure I'd love to. So I've been an occupational therapist for almost 25 years, and I spent a large portion of my clinical career in school based practice. I started my career in inpatient rehab with a specialty in neuro rehabilitation, and then transitioned to school based practice working in an elementary school that housed a medically complex sub separate classroom. Over time in that same public school district, I worked across different elementary schools, the middle school and the high school, really working with a variety of students with different needs. In that setting. Also, I served as a level two fieldwork educator for many students, which led to my transition to academia, where I now serve as the academic fieldwork coordinator and assistant professor at the MGH or Massachusetts General Hospital's Institute of Health Professions. There, my role focuses on preparing future occupational therapists for clinical practice, especially through field work education.    Jayson Davies     And that is not an easy job. There's a lot of people that you have to coordinate with, the students, the field work educators, the people in your program    Tara Mansour     there sure are. It is satisfying. I love when our students come back from their level two field work placements and are ready to jump in and ready to make the transition for my students to my future colleagues awesome.    Jayson Davies     And before we really dive into everything, I kind of want to ask a fun question here, and that is, how is AI been the most helpful for you in this role as a field work coordinator,    Tara Mansour     from an education perspective, it helps me in developing resources for our students and our field work educators, from learning activities to evaluation tools. It is a great draft partner. You know, we'll talk a little bit more as we move forward about a human in the loop approach, but from composing emails to creating learning activities, I find many, many ways to utilize it within my current practice in education, perfect.    Jayson Davies     All right, so yeah, now let's kind of get to that point where you started to maybe the first, the first points at which you started to realize that AI could be helpful, and what brought AI onto the radar for you?    Tara Mansour     So honestly, AI first got on my radar because I have teenagers. They were the ones who introduced me to chat, the chat GPT app on their phones, and at first it was more of a curiosity thing. Coincidentally, around the same time, I was also hearing from field work educators that they wanted to see our students coming up with more creative intervention ideas. Well, I absolutely can appreciate and understand that I was a level two fieldwork educator myself, and very much appreciated a fresh set of eyes and creativity from my perspective now as an academic field work course. Of neater. My concern was different. I was less worried about whether students had creative activity ideas, and more concerned about their clinical reasoning. Were they grading activities appropriately? Could they create a just right challenge? Were their intervention choices evidence based? Could they successfully document the treatment session? I didn't want our students spending an hour and a half scrolling Pinterest or maybe these days Tiktok for treatment ideas. I'd rather they spend that time thinking through the clinical decision making behind the plan, especially because they're new and they don't yet have a deep toolbox to draw from. So that's when the question shifted for me, how can we leverage AI to generate idea options quickly while still teaching clinical judgment, ethics, safety and responsibility? And for me, that really became the entry point for my work with AI and OT education.    Jayson Davies     All right, perfect. I like that because I think there is a fear. I've done some work, some research, in AI, and some of the things that we hear is that students aren't going to have that clinical ability, that ability to process clinically because of AI. And I'm sure you probably have had this idea and wrestled with this idea as well. So I really want to kind of dive into this. It's not a resource, this program that you've started to put together a little bit and how you are trying to help the students without, you know, giving them this tool that makes it too simple for them, absolutely.    Tara Mansour     So, you know, AI is really, I frame it as a first draft partner or an option generator. It is not a decision maker. So while AI can indeed suggest things like goal language, intervention ideas, ultimately, as the OT practitioner or student occupational therapist, you are the one evaluating and editing everything clinical reasoning you know, lives in the filtering and the adapting. You know you're asking, does this actually match my client? Is it the right challenge level? Is it appropriate in this environment? Is it evidence based? So while AI might be able to handle some of the repetitive scaffolding pieces, the structure, the wording. Some idea lists the therapist always have has to apply professional judgment. It widens the option set, but the OT still chooses the path.    Jayson Davies     So I will mostly, you know, frame this all around school based OT, because that's exactly what 99% of the people that are listening to this are so I guess my question is, then, when you're supporting your students or either even other clinicians, how are you suggesting that they prompt? Is it more of because you talked about right finding ideas versus the actual clinical reasoning? Are you suggesting that they prompt in a way that's like, I have this student experiencing this strengths? Are this? What are some ideas? Or do you kind of flip that approach and say, Hey, I have this idea for painting something. How would this apply to my student? Or is it a mix of both, or more than those two?    Tara Mansour     Yeah, I would say it's really the first but that's just the first part. So I teach them how to enter in case study information while not providing any client identifying data. That's the first part. We do talk about prompt engineering, what makes a good part a prompt and what doesn't make a good prompt. And they get the opportunity to kind of play in that playground a little bit. Ultimately, though, what is generated by AI that is just really the first part of the assessment, because then they need to take what they have found, those intervention ideas. And maybe they scaffold that, or they they reprompt Based on what the output is right to narrow things down. But once they choose three intervention ideas, which is what we do as part of the assignment, then they have to go to the literature, they have to go to their textbooks, they have to go to peer reviewed journal articles, and they need to justify, for me why that intervention is indeed an evidence based choice. They have to go back to what I provide them as the patient's chart, looking at their precautions, and they have to determine why, ot what their final choice of interventions is based on that review. So we're not just teaching them to utilize generative AI for intervention planning ideas, but we're incorporating evidence based practice so they can effectively evaluate what AI is putting out there.    Jayson Davies     Yeah, that's smart. I think we all. So the term hallucination should have been like the word of the year a year and a half ago or so. It's still it's still happening. I like to think that it's happening less when I'm using it, I'm seeing less completely made up research articles being linked, but it still happens, and obviously the output definitely have to judge it and find out if it's right, just like you have to do honestly with any article, though, like any article we read, we have to go through that process to make sure it's worth reading and worth really taking information from So, yeah, absolutely okay. One thing that you brought up was making sure that your students aren't using identifiable language, right? We have to be HIPAA, compliant, fair, but compliant within the school based realm. What is important to not put into something like chat, GPT? Can we use a first name? Or can we not use a first name? Do we need to use pseudonyms? Should we just erase all information period? What's safe, what isn't?    Tara Mansour     So I think, you know, some non negotiables, no matter what setting you're in is no identifiable student information ever goes into a public AI tool. So I would not even consider using a first name and not a last name. I would say, you know, make up a name, no dates of birth, no school names, no facility names. You know, I think sometimes even within our communication as practitioners, we think that using initials is non identifying. When, in reality, if somebody was, you know, being, you know, if public records were being utilized, they're going to search for those initials as well. So no initials, no unique facts, and no uploaded reports or IEP documents.    Jayson Davies     Yeah, yeah. It's funny when I was doing sorry really quickly, when I was doing my initial, like HIPAA review, you know, for myself again, just to kind of go back and look, I forgot that you know if that first name can be attributed to you and where you work, and you only have you know one or two of people with that name on it, well, that is officially identifiable information, and anyone can go on to your LinkedIn page and figure out where you work. And so that's pretty easy.    Tara Mansour     Yeah, absolutely. And I think that you know, what I teach students and clinicians is to really make sure they're using generalized de identified descriptions. They can they can mention functional skill areas, maybe interest themes, goal categories that should be really more than enough to generate useful ideas without risking privacy. The other thing from my experience is that in the school system, they often have contracts with sites that do indeed allow you to provide identifiable client information. And I've heard some things around Google and public school access that has said it was FERPA compliant. But unless you have that from your district's IT department, I would always default to the side of caution and depersonalizing any added information.    Jayson Davies     Yeah, absolutely. While you're speaking, I was trying to look up the chat GPT free educator version, because I know they provide chat GPT to free for educators and students, I believe, but I don't know if that free version is HIPAA compliant. I want to say maybe, but definitely do your own research. And it could change, right? They can change anytime.    Tara Mansour     And I wouldn't go by the the external program telling you that super compliant. I would go to your IT department and make sure that you're following your own institution roles.    Jayson Davies     Great point, yeah, third party, or even the people that on your side, make sure you're covered from that and not don't always. I mean, we don't trust the AI for the content that they generate all the time, so we should definitely be mindful of what they are saying as well. Good point. Okay, we're gonna go ahead and take our first break, but when I come back, I want to talk to Tara about where she feels that AI can best support school based ot practitioners like us. So stay tuned. Okay, so, so there's a lot of OT practitioners in the research that we've done, they were worried about new students almost being having an over reliance on AI and not having the clinical reasoning skills because they've had chat GPT since, like your teenagers have. So the question is, is, how do we prevent that? How do we ensure that these students that are coming out of OT school aren't just relying on chat GPT, and that if chat GPT were to, you know, die overnight, they would still have that clinical reasoning.    Tara Mansour     So I would say this is a large concern, and I take that concern very seriously, especially as, you know, faculty in an OT education program, I actually don't think that the tool, it's. Self weakens reasoning. Unreflective use weakens reasoning. Over reliance without thinking weakens reasoning, and that risk exists with many tools that we already use. True from a school based perspective, let's think about the example of weighted vests. Okay, if a clinician reads an article in a peer reviewed journal about weighted vests, and then starts using weighted vests with their students, without collecting data, because the article deemed it effective, yet they proceed without any monitoring, without monitoring any outcomes. The issue is not the vest. The issue is the reasoning process around its use. So did they look at the evidence base broadly? Did they individualize? Are they measuring the students responses? I really think that AI is similar. The risk isn't the tool. It is turning off your critical thinking. I do believe that when used well, AI can actually strengthen reasoning, because it gives you multiple options to compare and critique, and that comparison process in itself is a clinical reasoning exercise. The key is how we teach and we model use AI should really expand their option set, not make their decisions. And clinical reasoning lives in the selection, the adaption, the justification and the outcome tracking, and that part remains fully human.    Jayson Davies     I want to, I want to press on that. How does, how does Chachi BT expand options? I mean, you mentioned the vestibular or the weighted vest or pressure vest, and I totally understand that, right? We need to make sure that on the back end, we are tracking data and whatnot. But you mentioned that idea of chat GPT opening up the options. What do you mean by that?    Tara Mansour     So it may give you a variety of interventions, ideas that you may or may not have considered, but again, that human in the loop approach. We're not using chat, GBT as our Google and then just taking what it says. We are saying, okay, these are some good options. Now I need to critically reflect on what it is suggesting and think about is it evidence based? Is this beneficial for my client, is it going to be of interest to my client? So so it expands that as long as you are not you know, what I say to my students is, if you're running late for a field work and you haven't done your treatment planning for your 8am session, you cannot use chat GBT in the five minutes that you're getting off the bus to say, I am working with a patient who had a stroke. What should I do? And then jump in there five minutes later and just translate the output of chat GBT into your treatment session? There is no reflective use in that    Jayson Davies     good point. Yeah, it's true, and it's interesting, because I think there is kind of this, these tools, I don't think are readily available yet, but eventually, I think that, good or bad, you will be able to do something to that degree. I think because eventually, and it's already happening, AI is being built into our EMRs, and therefore it knows what I did with Johnny yesterday. Knows what I did with Johnny last week, the week before, the week before that. It it has the evaluation in a form that is secure and HIPAA compliant, and it does know a lot about Johnny. And so to what degree should I still or do I still need to reflect upon something if it has all that background data on Johnny tough    Tara Mansour     question, well, we're not there. We're not there yet. I think you're right. I think that what initially was spoken about when we thought about generative AI were these standalone, large language models, chat, GBT, copilot, Gemini, you name it, but what we're really seeing now in clinical practice, just like you said, is that there are systems, there are AI systems being built in to the EMR. My concern is, less How much does it know about Johnny, and more about how much does it know about Johnny's diagnosis or appropriate interventions? What it's not going to know is Johnny's interests, that Johnny likes cars, but he hates baseball, right? And so you're not always going to be to be able to rely on the suggestions outputted, right? It also depends on what is your system. Where is your system pulling the data from? Is it pulling I would always continue to be extra cautious if data is being pulled from the web, or are you behind a firewall and it's only using the information you've provided it with? So I do think we are a long way away from simply throwing a prompt out there and being able to act on it again. From a school based perspective, it might have wonderful ideas. When students are presenting with certain disabilities or diagnoses, but it still doesn't know their interests and that personalization piece that makes us OTs, yeah. I mean, never say never. But I that wouldn't be a way in the near future I would envision teaching anybody to use the tool,    Jayson Davies     yeah, yeah. I also know, I mean, how many times have all of us gone into a session with an idea that we thought was great, whether it came from Instagram, Tiktok, our own brain, or chat, GPT, and then we had to go through three different interventions during that session, because students, you know, have days. We have days and and sometimes plan A and B don't work, and so you got to move to Plan C and D. So you've got to have that clinical reasoning skills to do it in the moment, not five minutes or five days before the session actually starts,    Tara Mansour     absolutely and I think that goes into just old fashioned treatment planning, right? Like, you know, even with with generative AI aside, students have to be able to, you know, be iterative or change their treatment plans. And to be fair, that is a more challenging experience for them, because they don't have the toolbox. They don't have the automaticity yet that those of us with more years of experience have. And so you know that goes back to a whole nother activity that has nothing to do with chat GBT per se, which is making sure our students are completing treatment plans when possible that has a variety of interventions so they're not panicking and freezing in that moment when things ultimately have to Change. Yeah, that's a best practice in field work, education, I would say, versus, you know, generative AI,    Jayson Davies     yeah, yeah. And that's fair, kind of touching, you know, going specific into school based OT. I often like to break school based ot into a few categories of things that we do. One is that evaluation piece. Then we kind of have the after the advice, after the evaluation. We have to do treatment planning. We actually have to do the treatment itself. And then there's some, you know, administrative side to it. There's some MTSS, do you think that AI can really support all of those areas equally? Do you find it more beneficial for particular areas? Obviously, we've talked about treatment planning a little bit, so little bit so far today, but what areas encompassing school based OT, do you feel like AI can really be supportive?    Tara Mansour     So, you know, I think, I don't think it's equally across all of the things that you just mentioned. I think that first draft note, writing, goal wording, again, with full human review, can be accelerated with the use of generative AI. I think that accelerated time gives students and clinicians, you know, more time to think deeply about what actually happened in the session or what to do next. I think it's important to realize, especially within the context of school based practice, this kind of technology isn't completely new. In ot we've seen earlier ways of digital assessment technology, right? Many of our evaluations moved from manual scoring to digital platforms years ago. You know, tools like Pearson's digital scoring lets you enter subset scores and generates for you structured summaries and interpretive language. If your district subscribes to that platform, the sensory profile went digital. No more hand scoring grids, right? That was an early automation supporting clinician efficiency, and I think I see AI, you know, as a part of that same evolution with a little bit more flexibility and more interactive. I think it can help with things like drafts of reports, you know, drafts of progress notes, drafts of IEP goals, drafts of present levels of performance. But ultimately, the interpretation and clinical judgment still belongs to the OT. I think the goal is, you know, time saved on mechanics, and it's kind of reinvested, reinvested in, in reasoning, if you will, gotcha.    Jayson Davies     And, yeah, I completely agree with the time saving thing. I've experienced this before, and I want to hear if you've experienced this, or, or, if you've, you know, worked with some of your students or other clinicians that have experienced this, where you think that AI is actually going to save you time, but then you get playing with it, and you go down a rabbit hole. I mean, we always talk about how many tabs we have open in our, you know, our Google Chrome, but oh my goodness, the chats that I have on the left hand side of my chat, GPT, like it's infinite. I don't know how many are there. So have you experienced that yourself and or from others,    Tara Mansour     I think, as a new clinician, or being exposed to a new tool that you are not that you are not used to using. So it's always going to be time heavy. In the beginning, the your clinical reasoning is going to be more time heavy. Learning best prompts is going to be time heavy. I don't think that it's one of these things that you introduce and all of a sudden it is, you know, a magic fix. When I was working in school based practice, I did have a student who was struggling with report writing, and a friend of mine, a peer of hers, had this company where you just entered in some of the student information from the evaluation, and it actually generated a whole report for you. Now I didn't love the format of that report, and initially, when practicing to utilize that system myself. It took me longer to write a report than if I just sat there to write the report myself, but over time, it did decrease the amount of time I needed to write the report, and I came to really appreciate that as a resource.    Jayson Davies     Yeah, yeah, and I agree. I mean, it takes a it takes some time getting used to chat GPT and or if you're going to use Claude, or whichever going to use, it takes some time to get used to it, and again, some time to understand prompting. You talked earlier about how you help with prompt generation for the students that you're working with and helping them understand AI, do you find that there are specific ways, or specific, I guess, templates for prompts that work out well for school based occupational therapy, or just ot in general? Or can you just write in anything?    Tara Mansour     So I don't, I very intentionally don't create templates as it's different for every student, every client. What you're asking, you know, generative AI to do. What I will say is, I do educate them on a process in generating good, you know, strong prompts. And I I just pulled up my slideshow that I use with them. And what I'm looking at is in generating an effective prompt. This is the outline that I suggest they go through, which is, step one, identify the client population and condition. Step two, specify the occupational performance challenge. Step three, define the intervention focus. So for example, as I bring them through this learning activity, as we are reviewing the case study, I am asking them to determine the frame of reference to their approach. Am I looking for a compensatory, rehabilitative frame approach? Am I looking for a more remediation or biomechanical frame of approach? Then I'm asking them to consider the treatment setting and available resources. Is this inpatient outpatient school based? Where is this session happening? And then they can request a specific response format, give me some intervention ideas. Or they might say, give me some ideas for a 30 minute session. Or they might say, just give me ideas that fit within the biomechanical, you know, frame of reference. And then step six, which is most important, is refine the prompt. So when you get that first round of generated text, what do you like, what don't you like? Do you need to refine your initial prompt? Or can you just dive in deeper with some additional clarifying questions? I like to think of it. This whole approach was built for those people that have experience in doing literature reviews or searching databases for literature, you might put in a few words and get 12,000 responses, and then you're going back and you're saying and this, and that narrows it down, and this, and that narrows it down. So my whole instruction of utilizing generative AI in prompting and follow up prompts really is based on that whole idea of a literature review.    Jayson Davies     And you bring up that idea of a literature review, and I love that, because one of the biggest problems that I've run into with AI, and we talked a little bit about hallucination making up links and whatnot, is that I don't know what Article, database, chat, GPT or cloud have access to, and what they don't have access to. And so if I'm asking it for evidence or best practices, I am sometimes shocked, because it sometimes has access, complete access to an article, and other times it's only using just the abstract, and I never know what it's actually using, unless I kind of go into or click on the link and try and figure that out. So I guess my question is is, how do we and maybe the answer is, we just have to do it, you know, on our own. How do we know if something is actually evidence based? Raised if it's citing these articles, but we don't know if it has access to it. Does that make sense?    Tara Mansour     Yeah, absolutely. So I think that you know, remember, some journals are open access and some journals are not open access, right? So, so it can indeed only have access to an abstract, which sometimes will give you enough information that you need, and then other times it doesn't have access to full journal articles. Regardless, you should never trust gender, you know, generative AI's output into quoting the evidence, even if you put into your prompt, find only for me. You know, peer reviewed published articles. I still would not trust the system. I think a great first step is to say, give me the DOI number and follow the link and see if it's actually a DOI, right. And again, you're still never just trusting the information that it told you about the article. But now you have the DOI. Now you have access to the article. Read the article right, or download the article, put it back into the generative AI system and ask for a summary. Even that isn't always right, but now at least you're looking at very specific information that you fit it.    Jayson Davies     Yeah, interesting that you say, say that I have definitely gotten a quote from chat GPT, clicked on the DOI command, F or whatever search feature, type that quote in, and then you're always like, wait, you told me this was a quote. Why can I not find this three set of words in a row in this article that you said was directly from this article? So yeah, you got to be careful. You mentioned pulling the article and putting it actually into the source or the AI, I am, I have gone back and forth on this all the time, and I don't know where we fall as a profession on this one, and where is the line drawn, because i don't know i i Just troubled with it a little bit. I have done it. I definitely have downloaded an article, put it into chat. GPT, hey, help me summarize this, or what are the key points, or whatnot. But I'm torn on this, and I don't know where the profession stands on this. Have you heard anything?    Tara Mansour     I haven't. I feel like I have come to my own personal judgments for how I am choosing to utilize it. What I'll say is, if an article is open access, anybody has, yeah, access to it, right? So it's not that you are uploading copyrighted protected information. I will tell you that I have, I have been able to access an article. When I say access, I mean, understand an article more that if I was just reading maybe some of the statistics, language was going over my head, and I was having trouble really engaging in that article. But rather than just pushing it aside, being able to, then again, interact with generative AI to ask it specific questions, right? Not just give me a summary, but the article talks about Cohen box, you know, statistic. What does that mean? What is that measuring that, in my opinion, is a best practice of how we're utilizing it's almost your own personal tutor. You know to go back and just say you're going to rely on something for a generated summary. I agree with you. I have fed it content different across different platforms, actually, and and the different platforms vary about how accurate the quotes are that it gives it back. But even at that, find me a quote. Find the quote right? Like you should never be in a position to just use ever what generative AI outputs and then assuming it, you know, is correct. That goes back to what I said in the beginning about that reflective reasoning. There is always a human in the loop approach. It is never copy and paste.    Jayson Davies     Yeah, absolutely. All right, we're going to take a quick break, but when we come back, I'm going to ask Tara how she thinks that ot practitioners like us can use AI in our evaluation process. All right, I want to go through a few common tasks that school based ot practitioners would use or would complete throughout the day, and kind of just get some ideas from you about how AI might be used, and you've already mentioned a few, but kind of just task specific here. So for any evaluation, you know, most people already have their kind of set evaluation. They do certain things in order, but how might you begin to incorporate AI into the evaluation process?    Tara Mansour     So, you know, I'm not sure that I would, from the get go, be incorporating AI into the evaluation process. If I was given a referral and the students challenges, I would still initially, independently identify. By which tests I was going to complete, right? I would not utilize AI per like within the testing, because it is so much more. Testing is so much more than just following the protocol. It is observing their posture. It is absorbing it is observing their pencil grasp. It's observing their behaviors in the environment. I see the possibility of entering some of the data into the system after to help it draft with that being said, Because AI was introduced as I was outside of the clinical career, outside of my clinical practice, I'm not really sure how successful that would be or necessary. I always say that we're paid the big bucks that we are because of our clinical reasoning. So I still do think it is our responsibility to, you know, evaluate that ourselves. With that being said we said earlier. There's systems like Pearson that you're entering that information, and it's generating for you some summaries. Again, you're deciding what you're including and what you're not including. But I'm not sure that I would say in the evaluation part is where I would be utilizing AI. Now, if that was moving forward to the creation of an IEP, maybe entering my de identified evaluation and asking for some goal recommendations in the goal areas that I identify, that might be a nice step. We're always looking to kind of expand our goal bank, if you will, and then utilizing that system before you've even started the treatment to help you develop, you know, data tracking sheets so that once you start your interventions, you're able to track that data to determine if they're, you know, making effective progress. Yeah.    Jayson Davies     And I think a piece that school based ot practitioners can really use is during their like synthesis process, because I think we often question ourselves if we're thinking the right, you know, recommendations. And I think if we use it like a thinking partner and and talk to it, hey, you know, based upon what this assessment said and my clinical observations, I'm thinking this, you know, tell me where I'm right. Tell me where I'm wrong, tell me where what I'm not even thinking about, and get some ideas that way.    Tara Mansour     So maybe another way I might think about utilizing it is I've seen OTs in the past write handwriting goals that a student would likely never be able to do because they don't have the reading skills to match the expectations for the written output, right? So we don't necessarily, we're not necessarily masters of our Inter you know, professional colleagues tests that they're doing, but we might say, you know, again, de identified, how do their results on these tests impact their success with handwriting, right? What does develop, you know, what is a reading level of? I'm going to make something up, you know, for mean, oh, that means that they are, you know, at the syllable level, okay, well, then I don't want to write a handwriting goal around writing full words or sentences, because, you know, they're not necessarily able to, you know, if they have such significant challenges with encoding and decoding, yeah, we have to work within those boundaries.    Jayson Davies     Interesting, I hadn't really thought about that that much, because we often don't understand all the assessment tools that the speech therapist use, or we don't understand the psych assessment tools, or the teacher assessment tools. And that actually came up with me a few about a week ago, my son came home with assessment. He's in preschool right now, and I never heard of it. I don't even remember the name of it, but I was really quickly able just to take a few snapshots of the assessment results. And it's like, oh, this is what this actually means. I was like, Thank you, because there were no keys to what these graphs meant and whatnot on this test. So that can definitely be helpful for us to better understand the student in a way that we couldn't before, because we didn't know what the assessment results that the teacher or psych or SLP were giving us good point exactly.    Tara Mansour     And it's important that we have that whole picture right when we are creating our goals.    Jayson Davies     I guess, moving on from the evaluation piece, you've talked about an IEP and how it could be helpful with generating, you know, drafts or ideas for goals, ideas for maybe what the present levels of performance might look like, maybe even accommodations, rather than asking you the specifics of how you might do this, I want to go a different way with this question and ask, have you created, or have you advised others at all to create custom GPT prompts or custom gpts or that kind of help make this a little bit quicker, because. You're doing it so often.    Tara Mansour     So I will say right now I have two Capstone students working on developing custom gbts, one to support our field work educators, and one, believe it or not, to support their fellow peers through studying for, you know, their own courses I have, you know, I will say that within the conferences I have presented with we started at the level of playing in the sandbox, of utilizing it for things such as, I have a 30 minute session. You know, it is a six year old with this diagnosis, this diagnosis, with these goal areas. I mean, in diagnosis, in school based practice matters less, right, but they it is a six year old with these goal areas. They love trains. This is the format of my typical treatment session. Give me treatment ideas and a timeline, and that is both thrilling and exciting for my audience of practitioners, I think that what you're describing would be like next level, intermediate, advanced, right? I think people have to be comfortable before they can even wrap their head around a custom GBT. I've been playing around with it myself lately. I think there's amazing potential for it, absolutely, but I don't think that is your entry point for practitioners to utilize.    Jayson Davies     Ai, yeah, we've been playing around with one. I created one specifically to help students or not students. Sorry, I created one specifically to help ot practitioners take their de identified, present levels of performance, their goals for a student, or sorry, their present levels of performance, maybe some accommodations that they have in place, and any other information about the student, of course, de identified, and the tool will then, basically automatically, without Any additional prompting, create smart IEP goals. It will create some treatment ideas based upon those IEP goals. It will create both pull pull out and push in ideas. It also kind of will generate, if you tell it what grade the student is, it'll say, hey, this goal is related to these standards for that grade level, which I think is a piece we sometimes miss a school based ot practitioner. So I think it can be very helpful, but it's, it takes, like you said, a little bit more advanced, and it takes some time to set up in order to actually use it. So, yeah, yeah, all right, we talked a little bit about evaluation piece. IEP, we really started this, this process with talking about treatment planning per se. Where do you feel like the best opportunity for AI use exists for school based ot practitioners? Do you feel like it is that treatment planning piece, something we've already talked about or something that we haven't discussed yet?    Tara Mansour     I do think it's the treatment planning piece, and I think it's the data collection piece. I will say that you know, learning to take data that is not just a conversation you have with a teacher in the hallway is something that is our speech and language counterparts are so good at, and I don't think that OTs are always great at collecting data. So I think saying these are my goals. This is my timeline. How can I track this is an amazing use to show that you know our role is justified. I just had a student finish level two field work, and she speaks to how amazing it was to personalize sessions for her children, for her students, and how much more motivated they were to participate in the session when she came to the table with pictures, she quickly printed of resources, you know, of their favorite Disney characters or their favorite something. And so I think that the hard, the clinical reasoning part of you know, what level do we want to perform this at? Do we want to be asking them to copy letters? Do we want to be asking them to, you know, write it from memory? Do we want to be asking them to write words or full sentences? But then we can kind of say this person is a reading level of four. Again, they love trains. Give me some words I can ask them to write that have to do with trains that are able to be, you know, encoded by somebody with a reading level of four. And now, in an instant, you potentially can get so much more buy in and ultimately it, you know, the impact of that is not just efficiency, but it really is about, you know, increasing students participation in performance, and that motivation might help your your students, like, become even more engaged. Watched in their sessions.    Jayson Davies     Yeah, yeah. I've heard the same thing from from therapists as well, really being able to kind of bring the interest of the child into therapy much more easily. I mean, if you wanted to bring bluey into your session five years ago, you had to go back and research Bluey, watch some bluey episodes. Now you can just go on and say, hey, look, this is my treatment plan. Let's, let's implement the bluey version of this treatment plan. And, you know, put a few details, like their reading level or their writing ability and and you could get a lot of pretty ready to go stuff. So yeah,    Tara Mansour     and look, I'm a theater kid at heart. You want to have a conversation with me about Broadway shows, I know a lot, but if you want to have a conversation with me about how the Patriots did in yesterday's game over my head, but I can do a quick search in a system that looks at the web that if I get it wrong because it's not validated, that's fine, but like, I could easily bond with somebody in the first 30 seconds of building rapport, you know. Think about how many times, you know, our middle school students come into an evaluation session with the hood over their face, and they don't want to shut they don't want to say anything, you know. But if you can do a little bit of work in advance and find out what they're interested in, all of a sudden, you can come to the table with some facts that maybe wow them, or, like, at least engage them, and then all of a sudden, you know, what used to take, you know, a lot of time. You can shorten that rapport, building time. Good point.    Jayson Davies     Very good point. You mentioned a little bit about the research that you got going on, but I do want to give you an opportunity to share a little bit more about that, because I personally think that, and I think you kind of share this as well, that OTs need to be addressing AI in multiple fronts, otherwise there might be some negative consequences. And so I want to understand what you're working on in terms of AI. You mentioned a few of your your students doing some custom gpts? But what else you got going on?    Tara Mansour     Sure, so you know again, what was already published was from something that we did in 2024 about this education process. I told you about this learning activity, and we measured for the students, what did they learn? What did they like about use learning to use generative AI? What were the ethical challenges, safety challenges? And so that's something that we did and was already published. I just recently published something else that we need to study a little bit further. It was kind of an opinion piece on how can we use things like voice GBT to train our students with professional behaviors or difficult conversations, or how to explain the role of OT to a patient, to a family member, how to have a difficult conversation with a field work educator and be able to practice in a psychologically safe environment, right? And so again, depends on the prompting, because you're asking it for feedback, but that is one pretty cool way I'm currently having my students utilize it, and something that we need to get a formal study around. One of the bigger projects I'm working on most recently is this idea of using AI for qualitative data analysis of field work educators narrative comments in the field work performance evaluations, where there is so much valuable written feedback that clinical educators or field work educators provide about students strengths, their challenges, their professional behaviors during level two field work, but traditionally, the qualitative analysis of narrative data is incredibly time intensive. You're hand coding comments, you're building theme structures, you're checking reliability, and you know, it limits how large a data set most ot education faculty can realistically analyze. And so what we're studying right now is how AI can assist with this early stage qualitative coding and theme clustering, again, with a human researcher absolutely still in the loop validating and refining the findings. The goal is not to replace your typical qualitative methods, but to scale them in a responsible way so that we can use that information to, you know, adjust our curricula, better support our students and better prepare them for clinical practice.    Jayson Davies     Yeah, it's it's going to be amazing. The next five to 10 years of research with AI being embedded into every facet of the world, it's going to be interesting. I mean, in OT alone, I can only imagine all the studies that are going to be if not already happening right now. I mean, we've used AI to support some of the research I've done, and I know others are doing the same. I cannot wait to get to an. Inspire in Anaheim and and wherever it's going to be next year, and just see how many, how much research is going to be coming out that is AI supported OT, basically, to a degree. I think it's going to be interesting. I think it's something that we got to do. I've said it several times that like AI will not replace us, and we're very fortunate in OT, by the way, that we have registration, like we're certified, we're licensed, we have some protections, and I think we need to lean on that, but so AI probably won't replace us soon, but we need to use AI to basically enhance OT and to keep it at the forefront of Health Sciences.    Tara Mansour     So yeah, we do. You know, I've heard some valid concerns, right? Like, if you speak to folks, especially those in outpatient and acute care settings that are dealing with significant challenges in productivity demands, I think there, I've heard the concern, and it's a valid concern. Well, if you make my documentation time even more efficient? Are they going to expect me to see even more patients, right? So that also limits people's interest in adoption. Per se, they're not going to be eliminated. AI is not going to take them to the bathroom or teach them how to shower, right? But how many people you might have to work with could change if things get, you know, potentially more efficient.    Jayson Davies     Yeah, I mean, I think it's hard, it's gonna be hard to get more efficient, because we already have these high I mean, I'm in the school based role. We don't have this nearly as much, but I hear people in, like, acute rehab. It's like 90% plus efficiency. Like 90% of the time is supposed to be with a client, and I don't know how much more you can really get out of someone, even if documentation gets easier, but I'm sure, yeah, private companies will squeeze when when given the opportunity, so hopefully it occurs in a way that is sustainable, because otherwise, yeah, won't, won't be good.    Tara Mansour     Well, I think that's where our own research and being on the forefront and being proactive about how we best utilize it in our practice is really important, rather than waiting for someone to tell us how we should be utilizing it in our practice,    Jayson Davies     I think that is possibly the most important point of this episode, because we really do have to understand it so that we can make recommendations based upon it. Otherwise, someone else is going to make those recommendations, and it's going to be someone who is at the hospital above our head, is not an OT and is worried about profits over patients, and so absolutely got to do that. I was going to ask you, I think I still will ask you this one, it was kind of on the same, same line that we're talking here. And that is, if it's not that, what are you most concerned or fearful about? Ai, is it that, or is    Tara Mansour     it something else? So what worries me most? I guess, I mean, yeah, while I do recommend the importance about teaching reflection. I think what worries me most is over trust and over automation. People treating AI output as an authority instead of just an input. If we do stop questioning, verifying and reasoning, that is indeed a problem. I'm also concerned about privacy, equity of access, and, you know, tools being used without the proper literacy or guardrails. My hope is that, you know, in OT, we begin to model this balanced path forward of innovation with ethics, efficiency, judgment, and always, always, you know, a human in the loop approach.    Jayson Davies     Yeah, that's going to be key, especially for us who are so, you know, whole human centric as occupational therapy professionals. And, yeah, we got to, we got to keep that in the loop. Tara, it's been wonderful talking to you. Where Can anyone interested in you and your work learn more about you.    Tara Mansour     So you know listeners can find my work through my presentations and publications, both in occupational therapy and Health Professions, education, I mean, especially around AI, literacy, clinical education, field work support. I regularly present at OT and health professions education conferences on practical and ethical AI use in both teaching and clinical practice. I'll be at a ot a inspire in California in April, and I'm running a pre conference Institute focused on using generative AI for content analysis, for both educational and clinical applications, it's going to be a very hands on and grounded in real ot workflows, ethics and that human in the loop practice. You can find me on LinkedIn. I've made some wonderful connections for research and collaborations. I with people across the country, so you can find me there.    Jayson Davies     Absolutely Tara thank you so much. We really appreciate it. We will link to all those different sources, your research articles, as well as your LinkedIn so anyone interested can learn more. And you're going to be in Anaheim for like five, six days. Enjoy that. Have fun. Thank you. Thank you. I'm looking forward to it as well, so we'll see you there. And yeah,    Tara Mansour     thanks again. Wonderful. Thank you so much, Jayson.    Jayson Davies     All right, that wraps up episode 196 Thank you, Dr Mansour, for sharing your insights on how AI can support and, of course, not replace our clinical reasoning as school based ot practitioners from treatment planning to data tracking, it is clear that when we use AI thoughtfully, it can help us to free up time for what matters most, meaningful student centered practice, if you're looking for more practical resources, professional development and real time support from a community of school based ot practitioners who get it and are in the thick of things just like you check out the OT schoolhouse collaborative. It's where you'll find mentorship from myself and other school based ot practitioners, access to tools like our ever growing goal bank and documentation templates and a space to connect with other practitioners navigating the same challenge as you are. Head on over to OTSchoolHouse.com slash collab to learn more. Thanks for listening, and I'll catch you in the next episode.    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 OTs schoolhouse.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

No matter the university you attended or the experience you have in other OT settings, starting as a school-based OT is equal parts exciting and overwhelming. The caseloads are high, the calendar is packed with IEP meetings before you've even met your students, and no one has handed you a manual on where to start. The good news? You don't need to have it all figured out on day one. Here's a week-by-week roadmap for your first 90 days to help you get from overwhelmed to a point where you actually have an idea what is coming next. Get your FREE 90-Day Checklist! Before we dive in, I put together a free companion checklist that walks you through every step in this guide, organized by week. It's printable, it fits in your binder, and it's yours to keep. Enter your name and email below and I'll send it straight to your inbox. *School districts sometimes block our emails, so we suggest using your personal email to ensure you get your checklist. Week 1: Orient Yourself Get to Know the People Who Will Support You Before you worry about therapy schedules or IEP goals, invest time in building relationships. Your effectiveness as a school-based OT will depend far more on your connections with people than on your clinical skills alone. Make it a priority to introduce yourself to: Other OTPs: If your district has other OTPs, be sure to connect with them. Try shadowing or meeting up with another OTP for lunch once a month to get the support you need. The speech-language pathologist (SLP): When there isn't an OT to ask for help, SLPs can be your next best option for IEP and goal writing support. Later on, they also make great collaboration partners. The school psychologist: A key partner in evaluations and eligibility decisions. They tend to have a good sense of the referral processes and district policies. They test a lot of kids and may be able to help you understand standardized assessment data. School secretaries: T hey run the building (no joke). Be kind, be grateful, and never underestimate them. When you need a quiet room, copies of your report, or help finding a kid, the secretary will be your go-to contact. The custodians: They will help you solve problems you didn't know you had. The custodial staff has helped me with everything from finding a chair for a kinder kid to building a Southpaw Swing rig in the OT room. Organize Your Caseload You can't serve students if you don't know they exist. Set up a spreadsheet before your first week is over and populate it with the following for every student on your caseload: Student name and grade Classroom teacher Case carrier (If different from the teacher) Service frequency, minutes, and type (direct, consultative, or both) Date of last evaluation Annual IEP date Triennial re-evaluation date This spreadsheet becomes the dashboard that guides your week-to-week operations. It may not be glamorous (unless spreadsheets are your jam), but it might be the single most important organizational tool you build. Get the Google Sheet I developed to track my caseload by joining the School-based OT Collaborative. Quick note : To complete this step, you will need access to your district's IEP and student management systems. Don't be afraid to reach out to the IT department if you don't have access to these systems in the first few days. Get Ahead of Upcoming IEPs Scan your spreadsheet immediately for students with IEPs that are past due or due in the next 4 to 6 weeks. Get in touch with the case carrier to see if an IEP has been scheduled, and block time on your calendar now to meet with those students to review their goals before the meeting. The thing you want to avoid at all costs: walking into an IEP and telling a parent, "I haven't had a chance to see your child yet." Unless it is genuinely your very first week on the job, this erodes trust quickly. IEPs don't wait for your timeline, so flag them on day one. IEPs are such a big deal that I have heard of new school-based OTPs being asked to attend an IEP even before their official start date . So, yeah, you want to be prepared for them. Weeks 2–3: Get Moving Set Up a Schedule. It Doesn't Need to be Perfect. New practitioners often delay starting services until they can build the " perfect schedule ". But let me share a secret with you. There is no such thing as a perfect schedule! Build a schedule, start seeing students, and adjust accordingly as conflicts arise. You can (and will) regularly revise your schedule as you add students, dismiss students, and make changes to students' service minutes. A schedule that starts imperfect and gets refined beats a perfect schedule that never gets off the ground. Movement is progress. Pro tip: Using a Google Doc or Sheet to keep your schedule makes it easy to share with teachers who want to know exactly when you see their students. Some teachers care, others don't. Build Your Goal-Tracking System Keeping track of student goals and progress doesn't need to be complicated, but it does need to be consistent. One approach that has helped me is using a physical binder for each school site (or every one to three schools, depending on caseload size). Organize each binder by the days and times you see students. When you finish with one student, flip the page, and the next student's goals and data sheets are right there. No hunting, no guessing. And if a student is absent, you just flip to the next student. Your daily progress notes and data tracking can live in the same binder. Prefer digital? A Google Doc or folder system organized by school and session time works just as well. What matters is that your system reduces friction so you can focus on the student in front of you, not on finding paperwork. Want to fast-track your way to being a confident school-based OT? Skip the uneasy feeling of being brand new to the schools & learn how to better support the students you serve with the A-Z School-Based OT Course. Learn and implement the processes and systems I put in place as school-based OT beyond the first 90 days to make my life easier and support my students more effectively. Click here to explore the A-Z school-based OT Course Weeks 4–6: Build your School-based OT Momentum Prioritize Rapport Over Progress This might feel counterintuitive, but for your first six weeks, worry more about building genuine relationships with your students and their teachers than about driving measurable goal progress. It is very difficult to make meaningful therapeutic progress with a student you don't know yet. Once rapport is established, students trust you, and teachers see you as a collaborative partner, progress tends to follow naturally. Show up consistently, be curious about each student, and earn your place in the classroom. That investment pays compounding returns. Conduct Your First Assessment At some point in these early weeks, you'll face your first school-based evaluation. If you're not sure where to start, Episode 1 of the OT Schoolhouse Podcast walks you through the process step by step. Don't let the unfamiliarity paralyze you. A solid evaluation follows a clear process, and you've been trained for this — even if it doesn't feel that way yet. We also have posts about completing evaluations and various assessment tools in our article archive. Get Comfortable Not Knowing the Answer You will be asked questions you don't know the answer to — in IEP meetings, in hallway conversations, even from students. This is not a failure. It is an unavoidable feature of being new to a complex setting. The professional and perfectly acceptable response to this is: "That's a great question. Let me look into that and get back to you." Then follow through. Teams respect this far more than a confident-sounding answer that turns out to be wrong. Lean on your SLP, school psych, and fellow OTPs. Find a mentor if you can. "Fake it till you make it" is not the correct approach as a new school-based OT. Weeks 7–12: Find Your Footing Start Driving Intentional Goal Progress With relationships established and your systems running, you'll (hopefully) begin to feel confident enough to shift from orientation mode to practice mode. You know your students now. You know the teachers (enough). Start pushing intentionally toward goal progress and use your data tracking system to document it. Lean Into the PLOP → Goals → Services Framework If there is one idea that will get you through 90% of your IEP meetings, it's this: the Present Levels of Performance (PLOP) drive the goals, and the goals drive the services. Services are not justified by a diagnosis, parent/doctor referral, or even a well-intentioned teacher. They are justified by a documented gap between where the student currently performs and what is required for educational participation, and by goals that aim to close that gap. Understand this deeply, and you'll be able to confidently explain and defend your recommendations to any team. When in doubt: start with the PLOP. Everything else follows. Inside the OT Schoolhouse Collaborative, I teach a course on how to determine services. Learn more about it here if you need additional support. Refine Your Schedule and Systems By now, you're starting to figure out what's working and what isn't. Adjust your schedule, move some pages around in your binder or digital system, and start building the rhythms that will carry you through the rest of the year. What NOT to Worry About in your first 90 days... Just as important as knowing what to do is knowing what to set aside... at least for now. Advanced CEU courses. Your energy is better spent consolidating what you know and applying it. Focused, short-form courses ( like these ) will give you far more practical value in year one than a deep dive into a specialty framework you haven't had a chance to use yet. Hours of therapy planning. Over-detailed session plans don't survive reality. Absences, scheduling conflicts, and the unpredictable energy of real students will constantly reshape your plans. You will be amazed at what you can create in the moment with just the student, some paper, a few different manipulatives, and some open space. Trust your ability to adapt in the moment. MTSS. The multi-tiered system of supports is an important framework, but it's a layer of complexity to add after you have a solid foundation in the IEP process. Get that foundation first. MTSS will still be there when you're ready. You've Got This The first 90 days of any new position are hard. In a school, they're particularly difficult because real students, real families, and real teams are counting on you. But every experienced school-based OT you admire walked through the same uncertainty you're in right now. Follow this roadmap, give yourself grace during the learning curve, and focus on the relationships that will make everything else possible. The clinical expertise you're still building will catch up to your commitment — it always does. And when you need support, this is what the OT Schoolhouse is here for. We'll be here to support you with articles, the OT Schoolhouse Podcast , and the OT Schoolhouse Collaborative. Now, go enjoy being a school-based OT practitioner! Don't Forget your FREE 90-Day Checklist! I put together a free companion checklist  that walks you through every step in this guide, organized by week. It's printable, it fits in your binder, and it's yours to keep. Enter your name and email below and I'll send it straight to your inbox. *School districts sometimes block our emails, so we suggest using your personal email to ensure you get your checklist.

Click on your preferred podcast player link to listen wherever you enjoy podcasts . Welcome to the show notes for Episode 195 of the OT Schoolhouse Podcast. Join us in this episode where Nicole Dahl shares her powerful journey as a parent navigating occupational therapy services for her son on the autism spectrum. She opens up about the challenges of understanding the "why" behind therapy activities and the frustration of disconnected communication between providers, teachers, and home. Through Nicole's story, school-based OT practitioners gain invaluable insight into what parents truly need: clear explanations in plain language, collaborative communication between all team members, and practical strategies they can implement at home. She emphasizes that while the journey wasn't always smooth, consistent OT support—combined with strong parent education—transformed her son's trajectory from struggling in isolation to thriving as a high school senior and water polo team captain. Ready to hear how better communication and parent partnership can make all the difference in a child's IEP journey? Listen now to gain perspective that will transform how you work with families and create lasting impact beyond the therapy session. Learning Objectives Understand the critical importance of communicating the "why" behind OT interventions to parents in accessible, non-clinical language to increase understanding and home carryover Recognize the value of collaborative communication between school-based OT, outpatient providers, teachers, and parents to create cohesive support systems for students Identify practical strategies for empowering parents as active IEP team members through education, consistent feedback loops, and actionable recommendations they can implement at home Guest Bio Nicole Dahl is a notable marketing leader whose efforts have helped launch companies onto the Inc. 5000 list, guided by a career rooted in both purpose and performance. Her personal journey as the mother of a son on the autism spectrum—now 18—has deeply shaped her perspective, informed by years spent navigating diverse therapeutic environments. That lived experience fuels her commitment to human-centered innovation and meaningful change. At Korro AI, where she currently serves as Vice President of Marketing, Nicole is driving change by empowering pediatric providers, caregivers, and the children they serve, ensuring every child is truly seen. Quotes “I know 100% we would not be where we are today without OT. A decade ago, I never would have imagined college tours and captain of the water polo team were possible for him.” – Nicole Dahl “We undervalue how important simple communication is.” – Jayson Davies “I didn’t understand the why behind everything they were doing. I’d say he can’t tie his shoes, and then I’d see him on a swing playing with Play-Doh and think… did she not listen to me?” – Nicole Dahl “It’s coming from a point of love. When a parent keeps calling meetings or asking questions, it’s because you both have the same goal — to support the child.” – Nicole Dahl “It wasn’t that he was ‘fixed.’ He was equipped. He had tools, and he understood himself.” – Nicole Dahl Resources 👉 Korro AI  - AI-powered platform for pediatric therapy (OT, speech, PT) that captures data during gameplay, provides progress tracking, and includes parent portal features 👉 University of Central Florida's Card Center  -  Resource for autism information and checklists 👉 Nicole Dahl's LinkedIn Episode Transcript Expand to view episode transcript Jayson Davies     Hello and welcome back to the OT school house podcast. This is episode 195 and I'm your host. Jayson Davies, today's conversation is truly special, and I think it's going to resonate with you in more ways than you might actually expect. We're speaking with Nicole Dahl, who is the Vice President of Marketing at Koro AI. You might have heard of it, but more importantly, for today's conversation, Nicole is a mother who spent years navigating the occupational therapy world alongside her son on the autism spectrum. Nicole's journey began over 15 years ago when her son was kicked out of multiple preschools, thus she and her family were thrusted into the world of IEPs, evaluations, therapy sessions and everything in between. She lived through the frustrations that many of the parents that we support right now are facing every single day, that disconnect between clinic and the classroom, the lack of communication between providers and the family, and that persistent question of, how is catching a ball in therapy going to help my son zip up his jacket. Fast forward 15 years, and her son is now a high school senior captain of the water polo team and preparing to jump out of an airplane with a Navy SEAL. That's a long way from learning to zip up his jacket, right? Well, in this episode, Nicole is going to help us by pulling back the curtain on what parents really need from us and what they want from us as school based ot practitioners, you'll share why communication matters more than we might actually realize how collaboration between both home and school made all the difference, and why educating the parents on the why behind our interventions can transform outcomes. This conversation is a very powerful reminder that our role extends beyond the student. We must support the parents, we must support the teachers, just as intentionally as we support the student, and we got to do this if we want to make that lasting change. So please help me in welcoming Nicole Dahl to the OT school house podcast. Let's dive in,    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, CLASI is officially in session.    Jayson Davies     Nicole, welcome to the OT school house podcast. It is such a pleasure having you here today to talk about your experiences as a parent of a student with occupational therapy as well as with an IEP. And I'm so happy to have you here.    Nicole Dahl     Thanks for being here. Absolutely. I'm happy to share and hopefully inspire some people and learn some fun stuff along the way.    Jayson Davies     Yeah, and you know, it's really interesting how you and I got connected. Never would have thought that you work with coro.ai and I'm sure you'll explain a little bit about that as we get going. This podcast is not about Koro AI, but we actually connected about you being a parent through our connection at Koro AI. So to get started, I would love to just let you kind of introduce how you fit into the world of occupational therapy, which is very different from all the other times I've ever asked that question.    Nicole Dahl     Yes, absolutely. So it kind of came full circle and backwards all at the same time. So I was introduced to core ot so I'm currently their VP of marketing, but really I fell in love with it from my personal experience. So I am a parent of a child on the spectrum, so I have the lived experience of being in and out of different therapeutic environments for over five years, solid in a private practice, and also school based as well. So we've gone through OT, pt, pt, feeding, speech, you name it. We've been there and done that,    Jayson Davies     yeah, and that is part of why I really wanted to have this conversation and and before we go way back in time to you know, when everything got started, I would love just to kind of hear an update from you about how your son's doing now, where he's at and how that's going.    Nicole Dahl     Oh, that'll get me crying right off the bat. I am so grateful for ot I know 100% we would not be where we are today without it. So he is currently a senior in high school. He for their last game he was captain of the water polo team. Tomorrow, he is jumping out of an airplane. What?    Jayson Davies     Oh my gosh, yes. So we, are we? Are we associating that with some, you know, vestibular seeking tendencies?    Nicole Dahl     It's more of like his open I never in a million years. Would I have guessed that he would even consider that? That's a whole different funny story. But we're an active Navy family, and so he's getting strapped to the back of a Navy SEAL like a spider monkey and and jumping out of a plane tomorrow, but, but, yes, he was the child who was sitting on top of the refrigerator as like a self soothing, I'm just cool up here type thing. But he's doing so well and looking at colleges and things like. That, and I never, you know a decade ago, would have imagined that's possible for Him.    Jayson Davies     That is awesome. That's fantastic. You love to hear like because I can only you know as an OT, as a parent, both, both of us, and we're going to go back right now, but like when you see your child when they're three, when they're five, when they're seven, it's sometimes hard to think what they're going to be like, you know, when they're 1516, 18. And I can only imagine how many times he has forced you to reconceptualize your perception of what he can do, what he wants to do, what he enjoys, what he doesn't enjoy. And as a newer parent, I'm looking forward to all that as well.    Nicole Dahl     Yeah. I mean, I would get asked, like, What's your goal for your son? And, you know, at that point, I was like, let's get out of the house without a meltdown, or let's get dressed and not fight what clothes we're wearing because they're uncomfortable. I mean, the goals back then were so different than they are now,    Jayson Davies     yeah, wow. All right, well, let's dive into that actually. And let's, you know, jump in that DeLorean, and head back 15 years or so. And when, like, did you first start to realize, you know what, hey, my son might need additional support. Or, hey, you know what they're he might not be neurotypical, and what was that point in your life like?    Nicole Dahl     So it was very different, I think, from the traditional journey we were at. So we had a hard go of it at first, because he kind of falls in between that line of, you know, standard symptoms and things like that that you would normally associate so he would be considered more on the like Asperger's spectrum of things, but he was diagnosed with ADHD and after he was kicked out of four different preschools because they said he was too much or wouldn't follow instructions, or would kind of be doing things for self soothing, of just not wanting to get off a swing and come inside when recess ends. So that was hard as a parent who was working full time saying, Okay, now we have to figure this out all over again and establish a new routine in a new place. But I was very lucky enough to find a school who in the mean in the kind of in that timeframe, I worked as a publisher, and so one of the schools advertising with me was actually a school for mostly disabilities, but they admitted children, what they can called role model children. And then so my son was admitted as a role model child. And then later the teacher was like, hmm, there's there's something else, something else here. Have you considered having him tested? And also, at the same point, I was developing a website for the University of Central Florida's card center, and going through the checklist of symptoms, I was like, This is my child.    Jayson Davies     Sounds familiar. Sounds familiar. Check,    Nicole Dahl     yep. So it was through the encouragement of the staff at his preschool that we then got on a wait list to get him tested. It took probably nine months to a year before we actually were able to get tested and get that diagnosis. And then I really think I was handed a Xerox sheet of paper that had been copied multiple times over. Of, here is autism, here's types of things you can expect. And then that was it. I was handed a referral to OT and there was no in between of, hey, what's next, or what is OT,    Jayson Davies     yeah, yeah. Can I ask really quickly that that evaluation process, that preschool, was this a public preschool, or was it a private preschool? And was the assessment done through like a medical model, or through more through the school.    Nicole Dahl     It was a private preschool, and then the referral was done at a medical clinic with a medical doctor, yeah.    Jayson Davies     Okay, so you you got this referral then, and you have a referral, sounds like for occupational therapy. I don't know if speech or anything else was involved, but were they then recommending you to actually, I guess, get services through the school, or were they recommending you reach out and go through insurance? Or how was that?    Nicole Dahl     So at first we it was a recommendation for outside private OT, and so I had submitted the paperwork to his school ahead of time, saying, you know, here's his diagnosis, here's what we do. And they were like, Okay, we'll get you on the calendar for an IEP meeting that probably took nine you know, if we're talking about the beginning of the school year system, where he's now in kindergarten, I don't think we had that initial meeting until the spring after you. The new year. So it took so three quarters of the year in, yeah. And during that time, you know, I kind of brushed it off that he was not liking school because it was a new transition, because his preschool was so amazing, but he did not want to go to school at all every day, it was a fight to get in the car and go. And I kind of trusted the process and said, you know, we're figuring this out. It's a new school, it's going to be okay. And then, come to find out, at the first parent check in, which had, you know, maybe several weeks had passed during school, the teacher was like, you know, I figured out a way for him to focus. And ever since then, it's been going better. And I'm like, Well, what, what do you mean? Like he's saying he does, like he's having a hard time, and so she had put him at a desk facing the wall by himself, isolated away from the classroom. Yeah, and that's how she got him to focus so, very inclusive, not very inclusive. He wasn't making friends. He had been kind of, you know, labeled, almost like a leper, like, oh, that child is, there's something going on with that child, because he's isolated away from everyone else. Wow.    Jayson Davies     Okay, and then it like you said you didn't end up getting that IEP until, you know, several months later, wow. Okay, before we dive into that AP process, I first want to ask you about your initial thoughts on occupational therapy. It sounds like to me that the first time you really heard of occupational therapy was when you got that referral. I mean, maybe you had heard of it, but this is the first time you really had to think about it. What were your initial thoughts when you heard about occupational therapy and maybe you did some initial research, like, do you recall?    Nicole Dahl     Yeah, I do, actually. So I had never heard of occupational therapy beforehand. I was never exposed to it. I didn't have any friends kids who had gone to it. So obviously, you know, looking online, I was like, Well, this is supposed to help with our daily life. This is supposed to help him, you know, work at handwriting to even kind of daily living goals of getting dressed, transitions in the day, things like that, to help things go smoother. So it kind of looked like this golden treasure trove of here's possibilities that can help and then, unfortunately, my experience in the beginning did not necessarily offer that interesting.    Jayson Davies     Okay, so let's dive into that then, and let's talk about some of those experiences. It's hard because, as you know from the experiences you have outside occupational therapy and school based occupational therapy, and throughout this podcast, I might ask you to clarify a little bit, just because it is a little overlapping, and I don't want to make you have to figure it all out all the time. But so I guess you know, as you dive into that confusion, where did that start? And was that it sounds like you probably started with outpatient before the IEP, because it took so long to get to the IEP. But correct me if I'm wrong and and go ahead, we    Nicole Dahl     started definitely with outpatient before we got the IEP implemented for in school and outpatient, I felt like they kind of just went off of a pre prescribed checklist, like, here's what we do for every child who has these goals. But it never felt like it was directly connected to my child. So nothing felt personalized. I often talk that we were, you know, given carry over homework that truthfully, felt like and sometimes I would even see like we're taking a piece of paper off of a stack that I'm sure every family got on their way out of the clinic that day. So it wasn't relevant to my child at all, nor was, you know, chances are it would probably get destroyed in the car before we even got home. And then I was left feeling like, Okay, I have this one five minute activity that I can do to help support my child through the week, but what else can I be doing in between? So a lot of the time I felt kind of frustrated and looking for answers that I didn't know exactly where to find or how to find to better support my child.    Jayson Davies     Yeah, and I can only imagine that being tough. Were you going basically once a week?    Nicole Dahl     We were going once a week to OT and then once a week for feeding or sorry to speech as well in the beginning.    Jayson Davies     Okay, so I can only imagine that is, you know, you're there for the let's just call it an hour, assuming, and you get that hour of time where your son is with the therapist, and then at the end of the hour, you're walking out with maybe a little general piece of paper, maybe some quote, unquote homework, per se, and then you're expected to come back next week with maybe that completed homework, and, you know, for the next session and and so you're for seven days, you're questioning what I'm. What the heck was it going on? What did they do? Is this working? I mean, how are you feeling?    Nicole Dahl     Yeah, that's exactly how it felt. And then I felt like, you know, even during the session, because they would go back, you know, into a room somewhere where all me and all the other parents were left sitting in the waiting room. Typically, that handoff was maybe no more of a two minute check in. Of, Hey, how are things going? Anything new this week? And you kind of had to have this pre script plan of, here's what we really struggled with at home. Or finally, you know, I was like, Hey, can I go back in the session with you guys? And they were like, Oh, well, that's like, really, we have the parent waiting room here, but I guess we could try, but you'll have to sit kind of on the floor in the corner, which I was fine with. But I would say things like, you know, he can't tie his shoes, and then I would see them him on a swing and catching a ball, or playing with Play Doh. And I was like, did she not listen to me? Because I said he can't tie his shoes, and now they're they're just playing. How is any of this supposed to help? I really didn't understand the why behind everything that they were doing, and I wish that had been explained to me as a    Jayson Davies     parent, trying to figure out which follow up I want to ask her. So obviously, you know, you came to love ot so things got better, and we'll get to that point. It sounds like you wish things were a little bit more collaborative. Communication was a little bit better. Did that eventually start to get better? Did it take, you know, multiple different therapists, multiple different, you know, clinics, or at what point did you start to transition from, you know, what? I don't understand how playing with Plato is supporting these goals to Okay. I start to understand    Nicole Dahl     it took being involved as a parent, and then we did have a great school therapist. Once we finally got involved with in school OT. We had also switched districts. We had moved in between, and our new ot in school had brought up things that I had never even considered, or had ever even kind of been discussed with me. So things like, you know, the teacher would say he's he's rocking and doesn't stay still all day. So then the OT would go in the classroom and say, Well, what's going on here? And come to find out the legs of his chair were uneven. So he would sit there and and teeter back and forth all day. And so the OT was like, okay, Mom, here's this little seat thing that he can sit on and kind of just wobble without making noise and a distraction. Would you be okay with getting that support in classroom 100% yes. Or, you know, in this particular classroom, the lights overhead buzz a little bit loud and can be a little distracting, you know, mom, would you be okay with, you know, getting a floor lamp for the classroom. If the teachers okay with that, yes, 100% are you kidding? I had never even considered that lighting was coming into play as a distraction. When the teacher would say things like, Oh, he's not focusing, or he's drifting off and staring into the the abyss, it was because he couldn't filter out that sound of the fluorescent lights to really be able to hear her over the lights.    Jayson Davies     Yeah, you know, I, as I listen to you really quickly. Like, the way that you're explaining things are the way that I feel. Like, oftentimes we should explain things, especially when we're talking to parents, but I think sometimes we try to get too smart sometimes, and like, use complex words and, you know, sensory processing and vestibular and proprioception and and all that. And it's nice to hear from a parent, like, just, you know, in layman's terms, like this is what they kind of want to hear from a therapist.    Nicole Dahl     Yeah, I wanted to hear real world, relevant insights for my child. So the provider would come and say, you know, what are your biggest struggles at home? Or what? You know, what goals do you have? And you know, after we got integrated with school, ot I was like, You know what I would love for Him, to be able to have a friend and to have someone that he can talk with at school, because otherwise it seems like he's really alone. And so the school of Tay was like, That's a great idea. I've got some other kids that I'm working with that I think a social group would be really valuable. So during lunch, I'm going to pull these kids and we're going to start a group of saying, hey, what's another child who maybe likes some similar things that you like, and practice those like reciprocal conversation skills back and forth, and that was a thing I had never even considered as a parent. I'm like, I know he's obsessed with sharks and dinosaurs. What? Where can we find those other children who are also obsessed with sharks and dinosaurs? Maybe ask like, which ones do you like? Or why? Yeah, but I very vividly remember the first time he asked me how my day was after practicing those reciprocal conversation skills. And it was jarring. And I had never realized that he had never asked me that before. Wow.    Jayson Davies     That really tugs at the heart strings a little bit when that happens on Yeah, that's awesome. So it sounds like we've got this occupational therapist in the schools. You've already mentioned them, kind of consulting with the teacher regarding the lighting, regarding the seating, as well. Now you've also mentioned a small group. It sounds like with, you know, working with you know, working with other students on social communication and social skills. Did you also, did your son ever have on his IEP individual pull out services with an occupational therapist? Yeah, he did. Okay. Very much. So okay, and then if I can, because I have a follow up, but I just want to get the the basis here, did he also have the occupational therapist ever actually go into the classroom to work with him individually?    Nicole Dahl     Yes, and that's where we kind of would see some of those things that hadn't necessarily been brought up as maybe a difficulty before. Is, you know, we would get feedback from the teacher, and then the provider would see it and from a different lens and say, Okay, let's try this, or even giving feedback to the teacher. Of, instead of saying, you know, time's up on this activity, come to the carpet. How to word things even a little differently. Of, hey, we're going to work on this for five minutes. That's okay. If you don't finish, you will have time later in the day to work on it, and then we're going to go to to the rug for story time, or just framing things a little differently so he didn't get caught up in the I'm supposed to finish this. I need to finish this, or I'm going, you know, it's going to be counted negatively against me, so I'm not going to go to the carpet and I'm going to sit here and finish working on my paper.    Jayson Davies     Yeah, yeah. And it sounds like you're the occupational therapist or occupational therapist that you know you you and your son have worked with over the years, but years have been very flexible, because one of the things that I've found is that, and the research backs this up, is that sometimes occupational therapists can be a little rigid, and the type of services that they provide, some therapists provide, or they prefer more that pull out model. Some prefer more pushing into the classroom. And it sounds like you've experienced, you know, kind of the gamut of that. And I guess my question here for you is, looking back at that, did you feel like one service was better than the other, or do you feel like it was something that needed at the right time, and that all the services you know, fit into a particular part? Does that? Does that make sense in the question?    Nicole Dahl     Yeah, it does. So I would say, from my lens, when things really started to click is once I got everyone talking together. So when I got the outside private, ot talking to the in school, ot talking to the teacher, I had requested, you know, for the next IEP meeting, can can you come to this? Or can we loop you in on the Zoom call? Because it's once we started talking together. That's when the biggest differences would get made, because the in school at ot would say, Okay, here's what we're working on here. So then the private ot would say, Okay, I hear that. Now we can work on this, and then I can give carryover skills for you to practice at home in between. So it wasn't just these, like, you know, little hour snippets two times a week when there's, you know, over 160 other hours in the week that nothing else is happening. Here's actually tangible things that I could be doing at home. And that's when the difference really got made is when I started understanding the why behind everything, and had skills that I could be working on at home to further their work.    Jayson Davies     How long did it take to get to that point? Because I know you experienced a lot of frustration, so how long did it take to get    Nicole Dahl     to that? It took a solid three years before we got to that point.    Jayson Davies     That's a lot of missed opportunities. It was, and    Nicole Dahl     it's huge. I mean, that's such a critical period in their life, too. And you know, there were times when a provider would leave on maternity leave, and they would say, you know, oh, we're just gonna hold his spot with this provider. Are you okay with waiting till she comes back on maternity leave. Yes, a horse of 100% we love her. Then she would decide not to come back. And then, so then we were put back on the wait list waiting for another provider. Or they'd say, you know, you can look for somewhere else to go. And then we'd try getting on a wait list somewhere else. So accessibility. Was also a huge part of that. In the meantime, too, trying to find a spot of somebody who had opening. You know, I learned both personally and professionally my work with coro, like there just aren't enough providers to handle the demand that's out there.    Jayson Davies     That is true, very true. All right, we're going to take a quick break, and when we come back, we're going to talk about more of that advocacy piece a little bit as well as you know how we can improve communication between parents and the parents. So we'll be right back. All right, we're back, and Nicole, I wanted to ask because in a previous conversation we had, you've mentioned that you've lived a few different places, and I can only imagine that moving while having a student on an IEP can be a little difficult, and so I wanted to ask you about that experience. Was it difficult, or was it seamless, and what made it better?    Nicole Dahl     Truthfully, I had a couple of years under my belt at that point, so I had learned my lessons that I need to speak up and almost, you know, get labeled as that annoying parent who's not going to go away right out of the gate. So that was the biggest lesson I had learned. Is, you know, you're your child's personal cheerleader. You're the one who's with them the most. So if anyone's going to speak up, it's, it's going to be you parents?    Jayson Davies     Yeah, I know. I completely agree with that. Like being on the inside right in the school, you almost get a little frustrated sometimes with parents who are like that. But when you take that step back and you realize, like this parent is simply trying to make sure that their student doesn't get forgotten, like you kind of understand it. And as a parent, I would absolutely do the same thing for my kids, like we have to stand up a little bit, just like as an occupational therapist, you've got to stand up for yourself in the school to make sure that you don't get forgotten as an employee in the school, and we're all trying to, at the end of the day, get the services and the support for the people that are important in our lives. And so yeah, I get it. Sometimes you feel a little defensive as a therapist when you have that parent who is calling an IEP every three six months, but from your perspective, right, you're just trying to get the best services for your student. So yeah, yeah, and it's coming from a point of    Nicole Dahl     love, by the way, whenever, when you have a parent that does that, it's and you guys both have the same goal to help and support the child. So it's a shared goal, but it's just figuring out, like, how are we communicating or not communicating what's happening behind the scenes? So there were times when they would say, you know, oh, this has actually started, and I just didn't know that it had started. Or my son didn't know that that's what that was, yeah, where it was not even, you know, he just thought he was meeting with another teacher at the school. But it wasn't said, Oh, this is your new in school occupational therapist. So when I would say, Have you started ot in school yet? He would be like, No. And then there was a time when I was like, Oh, well, you know, they said, Mrs. So and So was your new OT? Oh, yeah, her, yeah, I do meet her, yeah. So making sure things are explained as, like, super baseline, basic conversations,    Jayson Davies     and it's it's amazing, because in today's world, it is so simple to communicate, like you don't have to pick up a phone, you can do a quick email. We all have systems in place at the schools where we have, you know every single person and their mom's email on file that we can send a quick email and and whatnot. But it does take time. It does take energy, and it does actually take that initiative to say, You know what, something changed. It's not that big of a deal, but communicating this to the parent or to the teacher or to the outside provider, whoever it might be, really goes a long way. Like we undervalue how important a simple communication is.    Nicole Dahl     Just remember, like we're humans on the other end of it too. And, you know, and sometimes I don't even think parents know that that one provider could have 80 students that they're helping. So just keep that in context as well for parents of saying, you know, I hear you. I got your message. And it may even seem a little like combative to say I have 80 patients, but most parents don't know that. They may think you work with like, four or five patients, but if you don't have that inside lens, you might not understand why it's taking so long to get back to you.    Jayson Davies     Yeah. So that actually leads me on to a question about an IEP like being in an IEP meeting as the parent, and when it comes to the occupational therapist, you know, sitting across the table from you, let's assume this is like, maybe not an initial, but a triennial, and they have an evaluation to present. Yeah. From a parent perspective, how much detail are you expecting? Do you just want a quick overview? Do you want the full, you know, page by page rundown? Obviously, every parent's ever but your perspective, what do you like?    Nicole Dahl     I had both ends of the spectrum on that? You know, in those initial days, it was just a quick run through of, you know, here's the goals, here's where we're at. Any questions, okay, now we're done. And then, truthfully, it felt like just a check box that was getting hit. And at that point I didn't know what to ask for, or what to kind of dive in, or even what was possible. But then I had providers who, you know, after we kind of made that switch a few years into it, who went through everything, but I understood, they also kind of translated it, what was on the page, into parent friendly language that I could understand. And again, that's when things really started to click. And things that I could also practice at home, that I just became more aware of how to support my child. You know, there were things like incorporating motor brakes or, you know, they would set up like stickies on in the hallway floor outside. It's like a little obstacle course for him to go through. And sometimes they would even bring me and show me how it is and what it helped, or, you know, different things like that and that. I truthfully felt like that was the most valuable. Yes, it was in depth, but I had a better understanding of why they were working on the things that they were and how it supported my child?    Jayson Davies     Yeah, absolutely. And, and it can be hard because, like, I don't know, in the area across the nation, evaluations vary widely. In my area, in California, we would often write 1012, sometimes longer reports. And in other areas, I know it's very common to write a one and a half two page, you know, report as an occupational therapist to provide to the teacher. So I guess my question is, when you receive a report, and it doesn't necessarily just have to be ot but what do you taking out the verbal communication aspect, right? We're not in the IEP, just looking at a report. What do you hone in on? Is it the recommendations? Is it the analysis? Is it everything? What do you really hone in on?    Nicole Dahl     The recommendations? That was definitely the biggest part for me, other than, you know, there were things, little highlights, I felt like, because they were reports sometimes where the teacher would also have to do a report compared to the OTs report compared to the outside OTs report, and they would mesh them all together and then figuring out where the misalignments were, or where were the things that, you know, hey, maybe he's regressed a little in this skill that we had been working on over here, but it's showing up in the classroom. So that saved space where, really, everybody could talk together and figure out what was best moving forward, if anything needed to be adjusted. So everybody was on the same page. That was really helpful for me.    Jayson Davies     I think again, it's hard when you get a 15 or even 10 or even a five page document about your student, and then you also got a document from the school psychologist, a document from the speech pathologist. Like going through all of them is not simple. And so I think that's kind of why I wanted to ask you that question was to see, is it just, you know, mostly the recommendations. And I say that because, I think a lot of occupational therapy practitioners, we really put a lot of focus on the scores inside the assessment, as opposed to the actual synthesis and analysis that then leads to our recommendations. And I think it's important to know that your recommendations are just as valuable as conducting if not more. So the SPM or the bot three, or whatever it might be like, those recommendations aren't just they don't go or they do go somewhere. They go to the parents, and that's something that the parents can can look at. And the    Nicole Dahl     recommendations were obviously the most helpful from my perspective, because, you know, the reports are great. It shows, like, the measured progress, but in my brain, like, that's that's done. What are we doing next? What are we doing looking forward? Or what can I be doing to support the work you guys are doing in the in the school?    Jayson Davies     Yeah, all right, so you mentioned a communication has just come up, like time and time again in our conversation so far, like and I understand that, and I want to ask you beyond just you know, communication, both with yourself and with the team, is there another aspect of occupational therapy? Especially within the schools, that tended to make you feel more comfortable with occupational therapists or understand that things were going well versus going bad.    Nicole Dahl     It was just those feedback moments of saying, you know, hey, we talked about implementing the motor breaks between classrooms. I touched base with the teacher, and you know, she said that that's made a huge difference. Here's when they were doing it, and, you know, it's made an impact. So I just wanted to touch base and let you know that.    Jayson Davies     So someone's saying they're going to do something, doing it, and then touching base with you to let you know it was done and and that was the outcome, or whatever the outcome was, yeah, yeah. You know, at the end of the day, that's pretty simple, simple, right, right? And so now I ask you, because it sounds like you've also had some, you know, troubles, maybe even beyond those first few years. What was the breakdown when there was a breakdown ever? What do you mean? I guess, yeah, if the communication, and you know, the simple, you know, the simple communication, making sure everyone's doing their job is what works really well, I guess my question is, is in times with an IEP, where maybe things with the district haven't gone so well, and, you know, things maybe last year they were good, and this year they're not. What do you feel led to that? Was it just simply the communication, or was there anything else that led to, you know, something's not right here. I need to call another IEP, because things aren't going well.    Nicole Dahl     It was, truthfully, that disconnect when people weren't talking together, collaboratively. So when you know the teacher would say, you know, oh, I have that paper, but I have 30 other kids in the classroom, and I can't devote this special attention just to this one child, or just that, that disconnect, when it didn't feel like everybody was, was really working together. And there's so many invisible moments that that happen when each of us are are with, you know, my son, and how can we it? And, yes, it's a lot on each person to say, here's how it relates to this, or here's what we're seeing, and that's, you know, truthfully, one of the reason I love Koro is because it takes those invisible feedback and translates it into real data that everybody can see on the back end. So it brings people together and not just keeps them all isolated on their own.    Jayson Davies     Yeah, it's amazing. I really feel like we undervalue communication, and it's something that, and it's not just us, it's an entire school district, like, you know, it's, you know, I'm sure, from your experience, it's not just the OT, who you needed to communicate, right with? It was the SLP, the teacher, the psychologist, whoever else at the district level. So, communication, yeah, just, just so important. One thing I wanted to ask you and talk a little bit more about your son is how things changed as he got older, both in relationship to occupational therapy, but also with IEP. I mean, a did he continue to receive ot for for a decent amount of time? Or how long was that    Nicole Dahl     he continued. So he in school. We first got it at the end of his kindergarten year, and then we stopped receiving it as he transitioned. So the middle school he went to was six seven, so we stopped receiving it after seventh as he transitioned into high school or eighth after the end of eighth transition, or we stopped receiving ot as he transitioned from middle school to high school.    Jayson Davies     Gotcha, that makes sense. And can I ask then, because you already had experienced a transition from elementary to middle school. Was it even a thought to discontinue ot transitioning into the middle school, or any other services from elementary to middle school? Was it one of those things like, and you no one made the recommendation, or B someone maybe thought about it, but we decided, You know what? This is a transition. Let's hold on to it.    Nicole Dahl     We definitely scaled back going from elementary to middle school. A lot of those things he'd been working on in elementary school were kind of like baseline toolbox of items I felt like he needed to develop. So he was able to kind of get these strategies that that helped him, where he could then implement them on his own going into middle school. So it was more as that IEP was there as a buffer in place for middle school, saying, Okay, we're going to give him some a little bit more freedom to see, see how he does, and test it for those two years before transitioning to high school. I think.    Jayson Davies     That's a perfect opportunity to do something like that. And I've definitely have sat in IEPs and kind of maybe said in a slightly different way, but yeah, you know, we're going to keep it on, but maybe we're going to scale back to a consult, you know. We'll be there if necessary, you know. And we can always increase services back up again, but let's see how this goes and be able to support the teachers, yeah. So then going into high school, what made you feel, you know, OT, it's a safe point at this time to discontinue OT,    Nicole Dahl     well, he's always been a smart kid, so grades were never really his problem, and that also worked against us, because in the early years, they would say, you know, academically, he's fine. There's no need for intervention. But at the same point behaviorally there, there was a lot, you know, he would get in trouble for not following instructions, or even sometimes arguing with the teacher, because he would look at it from another lens and say, You know what? I know, I'm right and you're wrong, yeah, because his brain just saw things a little bit differently. Yeah, so, but it really made sense for us going into high school to give him that freedom and say, okay, you've learned years like you know this. You've got this. We believe in you to now take that step forward. In hindsight, are there some teachers he's had in his high school career where I wish we would have still had that in place? Yes, 100% but it's very isolated, and we're able to talk through it at home, because I can say, You know what? Remember, you know, let's and like, let's break that down, and we talk about it at home, but that's because I've learned so much from the providers over the years that I can help see maybe what he's struggling with, or what tools I can also say, hey, remember this, or remember when. And that's helped a lot too.    Jayson Davies     Again, coming back to the communication like just the more that we can empower our parents, our teachers, to be able to use the strategies that we support them with. It's just so impactful. And it leads to not just impact today, but as you just kind of confirmed, right? It leads to impact years later, and you're able to point back to those so awesome. I love it, yeah,    Nicole Dahl     and I would say, you know, just remember that a, you know, yes, you have your your client or your patient being the child, but really, I encourage people to think of it more as the family or the caregivers also as your clients and patients, because the more you can educate us. And I know some parents will just say, you know, yeah, okay, got it or good. But really, some parents are, you know, or depending on the day, can be struggling to get through that single day. And so don't be afraid to say the same thing multiple times, because, you know, our brains might have been so filled with what just happened in the parking lot before we even got into the school or into the appointment, that it may have went in one ear and out the other, right?    Jayson Davies     And you're a VP of marketing. What is it? How many times does someone have to hear something before they get it into their brain, like seven or something like that? It depends.    Nicole Dahl     It depends. Recent studies have actually shown that it can be up to 21 times that they need something to turn it into a habit.    Jayson Davies     Yeah, see, those are the things that you're not going to learn in OT school. But we need to, like, we need to remember that just because we say something one time doesn't mean that the teacher heard it, or the parent heard it, or that they it was processed. So don't be afraid to kind of, you know, in a very polite way, nudge a little bit and and send reminders. So, yeah, yeah. All right, Nicole, looking back at just, you know, the last, gosh, 18 years now, then about what are you most proud of in your son's journey?    Nicole Dahl     Again, I never would have imagined that where we are today is where we would have been back then. You know, truthfully, when he was in preschool and kindergarten, I never would have anticipated him going, you know, we were even wondering if he would be okay in a mainstream school at that point. I never thought he would go to college. I never thought he would drive a car or maybe even be able to live on his own, and all of those things are very tangible, and we're talking about them and having those discussions now, never in a million years, what I'd say, you know he's going to play a team sport, know all of his teammates names, be able to engage in conversation, Much less a sport like water polo, where it's so stimulating all of the time, we were just blown away watching him being able to do that. And I think back to to little him who would struggle with wearing a itchy sweater that he got from his grandma. And think it was you. Know the worst thing ever in his life, and then have to in high school, say you're going to stand up in front of a speedo in front of the entire school like I no way would I have imagined that without OT and all the supporting services in between.    Jayson Davies     That's fantastic. I'm so proud. I'm so proud of him. I don't even know him, and I'm proud of him. I love it. I love that you and your family have gotten to a point where it's just a point where you never knew, never potentially thought that you might get to that's just, that's really awesome. Kudos to your entire family. All right, I do have two final questions here for you, and the first one, I think I might already know a little bit of the answer, but if you were well, I mean, you are speaking to school based occupational therapy practitioners right now. What is one piece of advice or wisdom, or what do you just want them to know? As a parent,    Nicole Dahl     we want to be educated. We may seem busy, or we may seem, you know, passive in the process, but every parent I've ever met wants the best for their child and make us understand, if you have to, you know, stand in front of us and say over and over again, this is why I'm doing this, and this is how it can impact your child. You have to tell us the why behind things, or we're not going to understand and we're not going to get the buy in that you deserve for all the hard work that you do.    Jayson Davies     Yeah, yeah. I think that's what sometimes we need to hear as therapists do, to know that you know what, we do need to support a little bit, not just the student, but also the parents, and let them know everything that we're working on Absolutely. And the final question here is actually for the parents listening, because I imagine that there might be some parents who find this podcast and just really want to hear from a parent perspective. And so words of wisdom for for parents who are kind of, maybe they're in their kids in kindergarten right now, and they're just getting into school based. OT, what words of wisdom do you have for them? Check with it.    Nicole Dahl     That is the best advice that I got from that preschool in the beginning. As this will help, because in the beginning, you know, if I'm honest, those first two years, I didn't see a difference that it was making. I didn't understand how it was going to help. I didn't understand the why behind anything, but really just trusting the process, but getting involved to educate yourself. It takes a village that is said over and over again, but really, you have to communicate what you're seeing at home, find supports that can, you know, communicate things holistically, because your child deserves that chance. And days are hard with a special needs child, they are long, they are frustrating, but your children deserve your attention, and you're the one who can provide the biggest impact in their life and what it's going to look like.    Jayson Davies     Yeah, yeah. Nicole, thank you so much. It has been a pleasure. Thank you for being so open and sharing your story and letting us know about both the good and the difficult times. I know that's not always easy, and I'm just so glad we're able to do this. I think it is going to help, you know, school based ot practitioners, this episode is going to help them just as much, if not more than 100 other episodes that we have that are about the details of an assessment, or about, you know, the details of sensory processing or something like this, like it is so important. So important for us to remember that a parent is just as important to the IEP team as anyone else that's there, and that we need to work with them. They are not our foe. They are part of our team, and we need to be in communication with them. It sounds like that is just a huge piece that can sometimes either be missing or really make the entire team come together to support a student. So thank you, Nicole. Really appreciate it.    Nicole Dahl     Thank you for having me and sharing stories.    Jayson Davies     Yeah, and that's going to wrap up episode 195 thank you so much for joining us today, and also a huge thank you to Nicole for sharing her family's journey with us and reminding us why parent communication and collaboration matters so much. Nicole's story is a powerful example of how occupational therapy, of course, when paired with clear communication and teamwork, can really change the lives of the students we serve. If you found this episode valuable, I would love for you to share with another school based ot practitioner who might benefit from hearing a parent's perspective, or perhaps share it with a parent who you think could benefit from hearing Nicole's story. And if you're looking for more resources, professional development and mentorship to support your school based ot practice, come check out the school based ot collaborative at. OTSchoolHouse.com , slash collab, we've got a whole community of practitioners ready to support you, plus monthly PD courses, a global bank, AI tools and so much more. Thank you again for tuning in to this episode of the OT schoolhouse podcast, and I will catch 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

The community-based learning community for school-based OTPs looking to make an impact! Unlimited CEUs Live-online Mentorship Every Last One of Our Resources Join the OT Schoolhouse Collaborative, where we provide all of the necessary tools to help you implement evidence-based practices in your schools. GET INSTANT ACCESS Kelsey K. School-based OT Jhenny R. School-Based OT Talia G. School-Based OT In the OT Schoolhouse Collaborative, we are putting an end to the "learn but never implement " cycle that OTPs often experience after attending PD courses. Our goal in the Collaborative is not to learn more best practices. Our goal is to help you implement best practic es . With our practitioner-powered professional development community , you will benefit from things like: 12+ hours of LIVE-online AOTA- approved sessions every year 30+ on-demand AOTA- approved CEU courses Over 75 templates, handouts, resources, and tools to share and make your own (Plus new tools every month!) Group Mentorship Calls, where you can ask your most pressing school-based OT questions And the ability to receive ongoing support from the OT Schoolhouse team and your colleagues . Here are some of o ur recent and upcoming AOTA-approved courses: Price Only available to members of OTS Collab Live (recorded) on: January 21, 2026 Duration This course is 1 hour in length. (0.1 AOTA CEUs) Learn More Price Only available to members of OTS Collab Live (recorded) on: December 17, 2025 Duration This course is 1 hour in length. (0.1 AOTA CEUs) Learn More Price Only available to members of OTS Collab Live (recorded) on: November 19, 2025 Duration This course is 1 hour in length. (0.1 AOTA CEUs) Learn More VIEW ALL COURSES OT Schoolhouse is proud to be an OTS Collab gives you the education, resources, and support you need to make changes in your school-based OT programs. 01 Highly specific course material Attend highly specific, action-oriented courses directly related to school-based OT. You may attend live or watch the replay to learn from our speakers who have your best interest in mind. 02 Mentorship Group Calls Engage in group mentorship meetings where we review current research and create plans to improve outcomes for our students. Hosted by Jayson, these live and recorded calls are designed to meet your needs. 03 Ongoing community support Utilize our resources and research library to make changes to your practice and ask for feedback along the way. Share what worked, what didn't, and how others can do what you did. By combining professional development courses from leaders in the field with a community of professionals dedicated to school-based OT, you will be ready to take what you learn and implement best practices to better support your students. Each month in OTS Collaborative, we host: One highly specific live professional development course. And one "Ask Anything" Collaboration hour, where no question is off limits. Ask Jayson and the community anything you'd like in a live Zoom call. Plus, all courses, team meetings, and collaboration hours are recorded, so you can catch anything you missed at your convenience. What members are saying? The OT Schoolhouse Collaborative may be new, but we already have therapists thrilled to be a part of this community-powered professional development community! Here is what they are saying: "Having other OTs to collaborate within a safe place is exactly what I have been looking for." "In the OTS Collab, I know I have a group of people in the same boat as me that I could lean on for help, vent to, and share my wins with." "THANK YOU for organizing this!" The support continues long after the courses are over inside OTS Collab. In addition to the live events, you will also receive tons of support and the just-right amount of accountability in our private community. Studies show you are 42% more likely to reach a goal that you declare publicly. But when we attend a professional development course, we often head right back to work without any time dedicated to reflecting on what we learned, developing a goal, and creating a plan. In OTS Collab, we help you to develop goals you can take action on in your practice. The days of attending a course to implement only 1% of what you learned are over. It's time to incorporate best practices, not just learn them. The OT Schoolhouse team and OTS Collab Members are here to support you in our dedicated community portal. Learn More Earn Professional Development. Collaborate with your people. Implement best practices. $39 9 per year SECURE YOUR SPOT HERE Member Pricing SECURE YOUR SPOT HERE Interested in a group rate? Contact us here OTPs Supporting OTPs A safe place to ask questions, seek research and therapy interventions, commit to growth challenges, and generally learn and grow without fear of judgment or rejection. Relationship-building opportunities with like-minded school-based OT practitioners that can yield solutions to problems, lead to job opportunities, and establish friendships. First access and discounts to new content and other offerings from the OT Schoolhouse. A community that welcomes members from diverse backgrounds, including race, ethnicity, gender, orientation, neurodiversity, and physical ableness. A focused environment to accelerate professional growth and networking due to the absence of fluff content, noisy discussion channels, advertisers, and recruiters. A privacy-first attitude toward all current and future aspects of OTS Collab. The OTS Collab is a place for occupational therapy practitioners who are serious about using strengths-based and best practices to support all students accessing their educational curriculum. We promote and encourage knowledge translation, collaboration, thorough evaluations, tiered interventions, and the creation of evidence through documentation to support students. Feel like it's a match? Outstanding! We can't wait to support you inside the OT Schoolhouse Collaborative! Join Today Community Fun & Emotional Support While fun and professional development are not always mentioned in the same sentence, we know as mental health providers that all work and no play does not make for a great day. That is why we like to have some fun within OTS Collab. The school year is long. So to break up the grind and let out some steam, we like to have an occasional OTS Collab celebration to acknowledge all the hard work we put in as OT practitioners. Your Community Managers Supporting you to achieve your school-based OT goals, whether you are an experieinced therapist or just getting started in the schools. Jayson Davies, MA, OTR/L Jayson is the host of the OT Schoolhouse Podcast and has been emersed in school-based OT for over a decade. He is a husband, father, and dog dad who loves to spend time with his family. Jayson loves school-based OT because he believes that all students deserve to have access to education no matter their abilities. Jayson aspires to be a school district administrator and have a larger impact on staff development and student success. Favorite OT Model: P-E-O Location: Southern California Pets: TJ, a black lab/staffie Favorite aspect of SBOT Jayson loves seeing teachers have success with students. He believes that it is important for both the student and the teacher, that they succeed together. This builds vital rapport among both individuals. Love of Community As a new therapist, Jayson was fortunate to work in a district where the OTs met monthly. But that didn't happen in his second job. Jayson appreciates the ideas and growth that come as a result of OTs gathering. Interesting fact about Jayson Jayson lacks pain sensation on the left side of his face as a suspected result of trauma to the Trigeminal nerve when he was younger. He attributes this to one of the reasons he wanted to become an OT. Favorite OT Model: Kawa Model Location: Ch icago, Illi nois Favorite Activities: Dancing, outdoor activities, traveling, and reading Chandler Sárközi, MOT, OTR/L Chandler is an occupational therapist who began her career as a travel clinician, supporting preschool, middle school, and transition-aged students up to age 22. Prior to graduate school, she worked at a nonprofit school for Autism that utilized the DIR/Floortime model—an experience that deeply shaped her relational and developmental lens. Through her clinical work and global travel experiences, Chandler has developed a culturally responsive approach grounded in compassion, curiosity, and collaboration. She approaches her work with a holistic lens, recognizing that meaningful progress happens when children, families, and educators are supported together. She prioritizes authentic relationships and interprofessional collaboration to create cohesive, goal-aligned support systems that are sustainable and contextually responsive. Chandler is passionate about strengthening caregivers as a way to strengthen entire communities, and she aspires to one day develop innovative, developmentally informed schools in underserved areas—creating environments that empower both children and those who support them. Interesting facts about Chandler Chandler has played the violin since she was seven years old and was a part of her school orchestra for eight years. She has a love for music, languages, and has traveled to over 30 countries and over 30 states. OTS Collaborative Community + Professional Development + Mentorship JOIN NOW Important FAQs That's a lot of information. Still, you may have questions. Here are some important ones to know about as you consider joining. Is there a cost to joining OTS Collaborative? Yes. The OTS Collab is a paid membership. Members can cancel their subscriptions at any time inside the community or by clicking here . Do I have to participate in all the live events? How much time does this community require? You can spend as much (or as little) time as you'd like in the community. All events are optional and recorded in case you'd like to watch them at a later time. We host three 1-hour live events each month on Wednesday and Thursday evenings. One of the three events is a live AOTA-approved professional development course. Some members attend each of the three live events and post or comment in the community a few times a week. Other members attend some of the events and occasionally post in the community. You get to choose what works best for you. What platform is used for OTS Collab? We did a ton of research on various membership platforms before making our choice. Ultimately, we chose Circle. Think of Circle as a cross between Facebook Groups and LinkedIn, but without the need to have a profile out in the open. Courses and other events are held on Zoom. Does OT Schoolhouse Collaborative include access to the Back to School Conference? It does not. While the OT Schoolhouse Collaborative includes a great amount of support, it does not include admission to the annual Back to School Conference. However, as an OT Schoolhouse Collaborative member, you will be able to save and get the best available price for the Back to School Conference. Once a member, check out the "Start Here" space for more details. Will professional development be AOTA-approved? All live and recorded professional development courses are AOTA-approved. Podcast Courses are the exception. They will not be approved for AOTA credit, but you can still earn a certificate of completion. As a reminder, NBCOT and most states do not require courses to be approved by AOTA. Be sure to check your state guidelines. Can I earn professional development from the podcast without being an OTS Collab member? Yes, you can. However, we feel that the community aspect within OTS Collab helps therapists to incorporate the knowledge they learn into practical use and student outcomes. Can I register via purchase order? Absolutely. We accept purchase orders for annual membership plans. Click here to learn how. What is the refund policy? We do not offer refunds for OTS Collab. However, you may cancel your subscription at any time. Do you have Community Guidelines? Absolutely, we do. You can read them here. Still have questions? Contact us here. $39 9 per year SECURE YOUR SPOT HERE Member Pricing SECURE YOUR SPOT HERE Interested in a group rate? Contact us here OTS Collaborative Community + Professional Development + Mentorship JOIN NOW

The trusted course for school-based OT practitioners covering everything from RTI and evaluations to student graduation SCHOOL-BASED OT A Z A step-by-step guide to help you implement everything from tiered interventions and evaluations to student graduation Self-paced CEU Course + Live Q+A Get instant access Course + Mentorship " Every aspect was fanta stic. Every OT working in the schools should take this course . Thank you, Jayson for all your hard work." - Tara Larson M.S. OTR/L - Learn the OT Schoolhouse Framework WITH JAYSON DAVIES, MA, OTR/L Taking on the role of a school-based OT practitioner is tough. Nearly 20% of all OT practitioners work in the education systems, yet OT and OTA education programs barely touch on the uniqueness of occupation therapy in PreK-12 education. As you may already know, working in the education system is vastly different from any other occupational therapy setting - yes, even from other pediatric settings. In school-based occupational therapy, we do things like: 👉🏼 Support entire classrooms 👉🏼 Consult with teache rs and teacher assistants 👉🏼 Attend yearly IEP meetings to develop student goals for an entire year 👉🏼 Implement accommodations into a classroom 👉🏼 Work with the same student at their elementary, middle, AND high school With this course, you will get a step-by-step guide to building a solid foundation for your school-based OT services. You will understand the difference between 504 plans and IEPs. You will learn how therapists can implement a tiered intervention program and what to do when a student does not improve with that plan. I will walk you through every step of the process, from receiving a student referral to student graduation and everything in between. What you'll learn in this course Hint: School-based OT is much more than 1-on-1 sessions Through this strategically designed course, you'll learn the OT Schoolhouse framework for handling school-based occupational therapy referrals, evaluations, IEP development, intervention planning and execution, and ethically graduating students from OT services. The scope of school-based OT You will gain an understanding of the role OT practitioners play in education and the laws and governing bodies that oversee our practice. Pre-referral interventions You will learn preventative tiered interventions so that you can support the teachers in addition to the students you serve. You'll gain insights as to how using tiered interventions can save you time and energy as a therapist while supporting more students. The referral and evaluation process Implementing systems at both a site level and at a personal level are both key to preventing you from burning out as a therapist. You'll learn how to implement a referral process to limit unnecessary evaluations. You'll also learn how to conduct evaluations and receive the templates and tools you need to produce legal and ethical evaluations. Developing and implementing goals, services, and accomodations You'll learn how to use your evaluation to develop goals, determine service type and frequency, and put in place accommodations to support your student. I will guide you in the options you have as a school-based OT practitioner for providing direct and indirect services for a student. Graduating students from OT services Relieve your fear of repercussion when graduating a student from OT services in the final segment of the A-Z School-Based OT Course. You'll learn how to identify when to graduate a student and how to do it in a way that the whole team is on board. LEARN WITH JAYSON ⤵ Here's what you'll receive with this course A comprehensive understanding of your role as a school-based OT practitioner Jayson Davies, host of the OT Schoolhouse Podcast, will guide you through the processes and systems he uses to support students in accessing their education programming. The A-Z School-Based OT Course takes you sequentially through the school-based OT process from supporting teachers though RTI and MTSS programs and all the way though the student evaluation, treatment, and graduation process. 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 and show you how to use the templates I use to ensure that my therapy provisions are both legal and effective. Ongoing Support from Jayson and other dedicated therapists Students can easily ask questions and receive timely answers from Jayson and the OT Schoolhouse team throughout the course by submitting them on our dedicated platform, designed to enhance learning. We're here to support you every step of the way! AOTA-approved Continuing Education The A-Z School-Based OT Course is AOTA-approved for 9 ½ hours of continuing education. Upon completion of the course, quiz, and survey, you will receive a certificate of completion for 9 ½ (.95 CEUs) contact hours good for your national board re-certification and licensure renewal, where applicable. A-Z School-Based OT Curriculum Eight strategically organized modules to walk you step-by-step through the process as a school-based OT practitioner Welcome Intro to school-based OT (25 min) Module 1 The scope of OT in schools (49 min) Module 2 OT in general education and RTI (67 min) Module 3 The referral and evaluation process (83 min) Module 4 Preparing for the IEP PLOPs goals, & accommodations (60 min) Module 5 Preparing for the IEP: OT services in schools (67 min) Module 6 Presenting at the IEP team meeting (53 min) Module 7 Developing & Implem enting Your Treatment Plan (77 min) Module 8 Graduating students from occupational therapy services + Case study (86 min) Bonus Module Getting organized (35 min) What real school-based OT practitioners have to say about the A-Z School-Based OT Course "I highly recommend this course!" "Jayson does a great job of organizing all parts of a school therapist's job and making it seem not as overwhelming. The resources he provided were great! Also, for new therapists this is a great course to take to feel more confident in what your role is as a school-based OT. I I highly recommend this course!" Rebecca Olsen First Year School-Based OT Upgrade your A-Z course 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 A-Z School-Based OT Course to build a solid foundation for your practice, 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 Anchor 1 A-Z School-Based OT $399 one-time purchase ENROLL NOW Best for those who want long-term access to the foundational A-Z School-Based OT Course material and resources. Includes Lifetime access to the A-Z School-Based OT Course curriculum & resources Lifetime access to over 2 dozen resources & templates you can save, edit, and share to save you hours every week! A certificate of recognition upon successful completion of the course - (9.5 hours of AOTA-approved CEUs) OT Schoolhouse Collaborative Starting at $249 year ACCESS THE COLLABORATIVE Best for those who want access to the A-Z Course PLUS mentorship, advanced courses, and additional resources. Includes Access to the A-Z School-Based OT Course while you are a member Access to the Caseload to Workload Workshop while you are a member Monthly office hours with Jayson Davies A certificate of recognition upon successful completion of the course - (9.5 hours of AOTA-approved CEUs) 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 where I was 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. I have learned a lot from those experiences, like how to collaborate with teachers and develop educationally relevant goals. I've also developed dozens of resources for students, teachers, and myself to make my practice more efficient and effective. But more importantly, I have taught hundreds of OT practitioners just like you how to use the OT Schoolhouse Framework to effectively and efficiently implement OT services in their schools. For over five years, I have been helping therapists implement proactive tiered interventions, support IEP teams with goals and services, and feel more satisfied with the job they are doing as a school-based OT practitioner. As the host of the OT Schoolhouse Podcast, I have had the opportunity to learn from 100+ leaders in our field and apply their knowledge to my practice. Now, I look forward to helping you do the same thing. There are many challenges to thriving as a school-based OT practitioner, but the OT Schoolhouse framework I have developed and taught to therapists around the world has helped them to feel more confident in their role and allowed them to support the students they serve in a meaningful way. Now, it's time for you to have that same success. To help your students AND feel good while doing it. 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 be a school-based OT practitioner. It's difficult when you work at schools with limited resources, mentorship, and support. Even with guidance, it took me over two years to begin feeling confident in my role and ability as a therapist. That's why, after several year years of experience, I created this course. This is the course I wish I had as a therapist in the schools. I want you to not only have the knowledge you need to succeed as a school-based OT practitioner. I also want you to have the tools to make it easier and guidance for when the job gets tough. That's why I've added these built-in supports to this course: Editable Templates As a course participant, you will receive access to over two dozen valuable handouts, editable templates, made-for-you spreadsheets, and Google/Microsoft forms that will assist you in your practice every step of the way. Most of these templates are fully editable so that you can customize them to your liking! Get Answer to Your Follow-up Questions I share a lot about school-based OT in this course, but I know you will have questions unique to your situation. That is why I set time aside every week to answer the questions you submit while viewing this course. The OT Schoolhouse team and I will be there to help you with any situation or technical question you have while learning. Course Objectives We'll cover each of these objectives in a logical way to bring them all into focus for you. You w ill: Identify the role of school-based OT practitioners as outlined by governing bodies and laws Recognize the key factors within the Educational Framework for Child Success Identify a screening process under the Response To Intervention model Differentiate between the uses and procedures of a screening and an evaluation Identify the steps of moving through an IEP from present levels to recommending services Identify appropriate language and content to include in an IEP Identify how the frequency and type of service can impact a student engaging in the least restrictive environment. Recognize the differing views among IEP participants and how that can impact the IEP process Identify strategies to streamline the process of getting organized as a therapist Recognize ethical and legal methods to graduate students from OT services. This course has been structured to make each learning objective easy to learn and implement into your practice! After all, what good is knowledge that you cannot 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 A-Z School-Based OT, you will receive: Access to all 8 training modules consisting of broken up into 20-60 minute easily digestible videos with slides, totaling 9.5 hours of instructional material. The most comprehensive training for School-Based OTs anywhere! We use case studies and introduce you to technologies to improve your ability. Access to digital PDF reference handouts that will make your job easier and keep you organized. Access to customizable and digital templates, including Jayson's evaluation template and annual report template. A certificate of completion for 9 ½ (.95 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). BONUS ORGANIZATIONAL VIDEO for those who are just transitioning into the school-based setting or starting at a new school site. This video will help you get organized at your new site and provide tips for your first few weeks on campus. Join hundreds of school-based OT practitioners and become a more confident therapist today! A-Z School-Based OT $399 one-time purchase ENROLL NOW OT Schoolhouse Collaborative $399/year ACCESS THE COLLABORATIVE Learn M ore Frequently asked questions About the course How is the A-Z School-based OT course presented? The A-Z School-based OT course 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. 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 9.5 hours worth of continuing education. The assignment of AOTA CEUs does not imply endorsement of specific course content, products, or clinical procedures by AOTA. https://static.wixstatic.com/media/undefined Is the A-Z School-Based OT Course for me? The A-Z School-Based OT Course is designed for occupational therapy providers who are relatively new to the school setting, who are ready to take the leap to school-based OT, or experienced therapists ready to revamp their systems and become more organized therapists. Both novice therapists and therapists with a few years of experience will appreciate the handouts, templates and everyday tips that will help create an organized occupational therapy system at your school. More experienced therapists may appreciate hearing how Jayson provides RTI services in general and special education classes as a means to help more students in an effective manner. Educational content is rated as introductory with some intermediate concepts in the area of Response to Intervention (RTI). AOTA uses the following definitions to grade educational levels: Introductory—Information is geared to practitioners with little or no knowledge of the subject matter. Focus is on providing general introductory information. Intermediate—Information is geared to practitioners with a general working knowledge of current practice trends and literature related to the subject matter. Focus is on increasing understanding and competent application of the subject matter." What is the cost to me and can I pay via a purchase order? The total cost of the A-Z School-Based OT Course is $399. 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 office 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(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. (otschoolhouse.com/collab) 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 A-Z School-Based OT Course 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. Over 800 therapists have registered for and benefited from this same 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! This includes the evaluation template that I use and the treatment plan template to help you guide your student outcomes. I'll even show you how to easily digitize your records. 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 the OT Schoolhouse Team. We're here to support you! 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 A-Z school based OT course 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 (info@otschoolhouse.com)prior to registering for the course. For questions about your billing or accessing the course materials, email help@otschoolhouse.com.(help@otschoolhouse.com) If you have a question about how you put the course methods to work in your own practice, we encourage you to ask those in the Learner Center or at the Office 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 A-Z School-Based OT Course is an introductory 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 A-Z School-Based OT Course, you agree to the following: Professional Development/Information Disclaimer The A-Z School-Based OT Course 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 A-Z School-Based OT Course, 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 A-Z School-Based OT Course, Schoolhouse Education, LLC, OT School House, and its staff, presenters, and any other individuals or entities associated with A-Z School-Based OT Course 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 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 We offer a 30-day money-back guarantee for A-Z school-based OT course purchases. If you are unsatisfied with the course, email us at contact@OTSchoolhouse.com , and we will refund your registration cost. This does not include OT Schoolhouse Collaborative subscriptions, which is a non-refundable program, but you may cancel anytime. Contact Information This course is presented by Jayson Davies, MA. OTR/L and is hosted by the Schoolhouse Education, LLC. Any questions may be directed to Contact@otschoolhouse.com ©2021 Schoolhouse Education, LLC Click here to enroll now!

Get the support necessary to make an impact in your schools as a school-based OTP. Join 300+ OTPs learning and implementing best practices together. Get Started Start Feeling Confident in Your School-based OT Role. The School-Based OT Collaborative (The Collab) gives you access to practical resources, a supportive community, and AOTA-approved CEUs so you can confidently apply evidence-based practices in your schools. You may be the only OT at your School, but in The Collab, you have a community of 300+ school-based OTPs helping you turn professional development into real impact. Explore Membership Options See what’s inside ↓ All The Support You Need - ALL IN ONE PLACE - Save hours every week with ready-to-use tools Explore 100+ ready-to-use resources for school-based OTPs, including referral tools, observation forms, treatment ideas, handouts, and IEP supports. Stop guessing. Get answers that move you forward Get practical support through collaborative learning that helps transform “good ideas” into “real change” for your students & OT program. Learn only what applies to school-based OT Access unlimited live and recorded AOTA-approved CEU courses to learn from experts with real SBOT experience. Connect with experienced OTPs solving the same problems you face Join hundreds of OTs & OTAs who understand school-based practice challenges. Share, get feedback, and feel connected in your work. View Membership Options → Join 316 other school-based OTPs Learn. Implement. Make Real Impact in Your Schools. As busy school-based OTPs, we’ve all been there. You attend a great workshop, feel inspired… and then nothing changes. Caseloads grow, systems get in the way, and without ongoing support, even your best ideas stall out. The Collab is designed to break that cycle. We don’t just help you learn best practices — we help you implement them with clarity, confidence, and support so they actually improve outcomes for students and teachers. - What Collab Members Are Saying - “I initially joined the OT Schoolhouse Collaborative two years ago for access to relevant CEU courses. What I found was a community of OTs willing to troubleshoot tough cases, share resources, keep me updated on current research and relevant topics, and so much more. I use the resources in the Collaborative far more than I expected, and the value goes way beyond continuing education. ” — Brooke, School-Based OT Here’s how the Collaborative helps you turn learning into action: ✔ Live Collaborative Hours (Group Mentorship) Get real-time guidance on cases, systems challenges, and school-based OT decisions so you always know your next step. ✔ School-based CEUs you’ll actually use AOTA-approved courses designed specifically for school-based OTPs — not generic PD. ✔ Ready-to-use tools and templates Evaluations, intervention tools, IEP resources, communication templates, and more that save time and improve consistency. ✔ A community that supports implementation You’re no longer the only OT on an island. Get feedback from practitioners who understand your setting. ✔ Advanced tools for efficiency and advocacy Goal Bank, curated research, AI tools, and the Caseload-to-Workload course to elevate your practice. Explore what's included > Join 316 other school-based OTPs CEUs Designed for School-Based Practice Not all continuing education is created with school-based OT in mind. Too often, courses are built for clinical settings, leaving you to translate ideas on your own. In The Collab , every CEU is designed specifically for the realities of school-based practice — from caseload demands and system constraints to collaboration with teachers, administrators, and families. Our goal isn’t to overwhelm you with content. It’s to help you learn what actually applies to your role — and earn CEUs you can use with confidence. What makes our CEUs different ✔ School-based focus, always Every course is intentionally designed for school settings — not clinics, EI, or home-based. ✔ AOTA-approved learning you can trust Earn CEUs through live and on-demand courses that meet AOTA requirements while staying grounded in real-world practice. ✔ Taught by experienced school-based OTPs Learn from practitioners who have worked in schools and understand the systems, challenges, and decisions you face every day. ✔ Practical, immediately applicable content Courses focus on strategies, frameworks, and decision-making you can apply the very next day — not abstract theory. ✔ Flexible learning that fits your schedule Attend live sessions when you can, or access recordings on your own time without falling behind. CEUs in The Collab don’t stand alone. They’re designed to connect seamlessly with mentorship, tools, and implementation support when you’re ready to take the next step. View the full CEU Course Library > Recent & Upcoming Courses This course is 1 hour in length. (0.1 AOTA CEUs) Live (recorded) on: January 21, 2026 This course is 1 hour in length. (0.1 AOTA CEUs) Live (recorded) on: December 17, 2025 This course is 1 hour in length. (0.1 AOTA CEUs) Live (recorded) on: November 19, 2025 Get Support for the Questions You Didn’t Learn in OT School In The Collab, you don’t have to guess or go it alone. Through live Collaboration Hours, Q&A sessions, and community discussions, you can bring real cases and real questions to experienced school-based OTPs who understand your role. This is where you get clarity — not generic advice. Here’s the kind of support members receive every week: I have an IEP meeting coming up — what should I assess? How do I decide if this is sensory, behavioral, or executive function? What assessment tools actually make sense to order? What is my role in middle or high school? How do I provide consults effectively? These are all real questions we address as a community inside The Collab As a member, you can ask your most pressing questions and get detailed responses from the OT Schoolhouse team and other experienced OT practitioners. Explore Collaborative Membership → Join 316 other school-based OTPs Ready-to-Use Resources You Can Apply Immediately Professional development is only helpful if it translates into real practice. That’s why both membership tiers include access to practical, ready-to-use resources. So you’re not starting from scratch after every course. Essentials Members Essentials helps you apply what you learn in individual courses. Members receive resources directly connected to CEU learning, so what you learn can be applied right away. You’ll get access to: Resources associated with all CEU courses All tools and materials included with the A-Z School-Based OT Course Practical handouts, templates, and examples designed to support course implementation A growing collection of resources added alongside future CEU offerings Essentials is a great fit if you want to stay current with evidence-based practice and confidently apply what you learn from CEUs on your own. Impact Members The Collab supports implementation across your entire OT program. Impact Members receive full access to the entire OT Schoolhouse library, designed to support every part of your practice. You’ll have access to: All downloadable templates, tools, and checklists The complete OT Schoolhouse Goal Bank for faster & stronger Intervention planning and documentation. Curated research summaries and evidence resources AI-powered tools that reduce documentation time and decision fatigue The Impact tier is designed for OTPs who want ongoing, comprehensive support. Not just learning, but full implementation across their OT program. An Annual Experience That Brings It All Together Included with Impact Tier Membership Each year, Impact Tier Members receive full access to the OT Schoolhouse Back to School Conference — a live, virtual experience designed specifically for school-based OTPs. The conference is intentionally scheduled to support you when it matters most: right as you prepare for a new school year. It’s where learning, mentorship, and real-world application come together through: Practical, evidence-based sessions led by experienced school-based OTPs AOTA-approved CEUs for your certification and license renewal Real conversations about caseloads, collaboration, and sustainability On-demand access so you can learn on your schedule For many members, the Back to School Conference becomes the moment each year when everything “clicks.” ✔ Included at no additional cost for Impact members ✔ Live + recorded access ✔ AOTA-approved CEUs Trusted by hundreds of school-based OTPs each year to start the school year with clarity and confidence. Purchase Options - Collab Find the Membership that’s Right for You Whether you’re just getting started in school-based OT or looking for CEUs, mentorship, and implementation support, The Collab has a membership tier built for your needs. Purchase Options - course Essentials CEUs, core resources, and community for school-based OTPs $249 / year Perfect for OTPs looking to keep up with evidence through school-based specific CEUs and core resources Join Essentials Learn The A–Z School-Based OT Course ($399 value) (9.5 hours of CEUs) Access to live-online and recorded AOTA-Approved CEUs ($1500+ value) Earn 50+ hours worth of CEUs Support Access to the "OTP Lounge" forum to ask experienced OTPs for support without judgement Implement Access resources directly tied to accessible CEU courses Not included in Essentials: Live Mentorship Collaboration Hours The Back to School Conference The OT Schoolhouse Goal Bank The Caseload-to-Workload Course Custom-trained AI tools to save you time & energy Our Library of over 100 ready-to-use school-based OT resources Impact Full Access to ALL Resources, CEUs, Mentorship, & Back to School Conference $499 / year Designed for OTPs seeking for support implementing the most recent evidence and best practices Join Impact Learn The A–Z School-Based OT Course ($399 value) (9.5 hours of CEUs) Access to Live-online and recorded AOTA-Approved CEUs ($1500+ value) The Back to School Conference ($419 value) The Caseload-to-Workload Course ($299 value) Earn Professional development by listening to the OT Schoolhouse Podcast (ultimate time saver) Support + Mentorship The "OTP Lounge" to ask experienced OTPs for support without judgement Live-on-Zoom Q&A sessions (Collab Hours) with Jayson and the OTS Team Non-CEU events and discussions (eg. Journal club calls, assessment reviews, etc) Opportunities for 1:1 mentorship calls with Jayson and the OTS Team Implement Access ALL downloadable templates, tools, & checklists ($299+ value) The OT Schoolhouse Goal & Treatment Bank ($99 value) Curated evidence abstracts and links Access to AI tools to save you time most popular Start simple. Grow when you’re ready. Many school-based OTPs join Essentials for CEUs and core resources, then upgrade to the Impact Tier when they want mentorship, advanced tools, the Back to School Conference, and deeper support. Members often tell us that the tools and mentorship they receive within the Impact Tier finally allow them to feel supported as school-based OTs. Join Essentials Join Impact What our Members Think about The Collab Elevated Confidence and Capacity "The OT Schoolhouse Collaborative has been one of the most valuable professional supports in my practice... It has genuinely elevated both my confidence and my capacity as a school-based OT." - Mary Not Just Continuing Education "I initially joined the OT Schoolhouse Collaborative two years ago, primarily for access to relevant courses for CEUs. What I found was a community of OTs willing to trouble shoot tough cases, share resources, keep me updated on current research and relevant topics, and so much more. I use the resources in the collaborative so much more than originally anticipated, and the value in being a member goes way beyond continuing education courses." - Brooke A Safe Space for Questions "The Collaborative is an amazing space with amazing community that has both been awesome to share knowledge and ideas as well as ask questions in a safe space with other individuals in the same setting as me!" - Payton Tools to Advocate "I am thankful for this resource as I navigated my first couple of years as an occupational therapist in the school based setting. Having the articles, community and knowledge available to newer therapists like me has been helpful. Personally, my OT team at my district has used the resources like workload vs caseload model to advocate and shape how we distribute schools and service minutes." - Jamie Members love The Collab Community, Not just the CEUs Members often tell us they join for CEUs, but then retain their membership for the abundant community, mentorship, and resources. The Collab is not your typical CEU subscription. It is a place to connect, share, and grow as a school-based OT practitioner. If you are looking to learn, connect, grow, and better support your students, The Collaborative is right for you. Select Your Membership → Join 316 other school-based OTPs Purchasing for a District or Team? We are proud to work with districts, counties, and therapy teams to support multiple school-based OTPs. Group pricing and purchase orders are available for both membership tiers. 👉 Contact us to learn more Your Community Managers Supporting you to achieve your school-based OT goals, whether you are an experieinced therapist or just getting started in the schools. Jayson Davies, MA, OTR/L Jayson is the host of the OT Schoolhouse Podcast and has been emersed in school-based OT for over a decade. He is a husband, father, and dog dad who loves to spend time with his family. Jayson loves school-based OT because he believes that all students deserve to have access to education no matter their abilities. Jayson aspires to be a school district administrator and have a larger impact on staff development and student success. Favorite OT Model: P-E-O Location: Southern California Pets: TJ, a black lab/staffie Favorite aspect of SBOT Jayson loves seeing teachers have success with students. He believes that it is important for both the student and the teacher, that they succeed together. This builds vital rapport among both individuals. Love of Community As a new therapist, Jayson was fortunate to work in a district where the OTs met monthly. But that didn't happen in his second job. Jayson appreciates the ideas and growth that come as a result of OTs gathering. Interesting fact about Jayson Jayson lacks pain sensation on the left side of his face as a suspected result of trauma to the Trigeminal nerve when he was younger. He attributes this to one of the reasons he wanted to become an OT. Favorite OT Model: P-E-O-P Location: Tampa, FL Favorite Activities: Exercising, cooking, and watercolor painting Taylor Poirier Taylor graduated from University of St. Augustine, Miami Campus in December 2022. She began working as a pediatric OT within the schools and home health setting with Alyssa Campbell Therapies in the Tampa, FL area. She loves learning and creating new ways of therapy for the most client-centered approach. She has now created resources based on the information provided in this podcast and can truly see a difference in the progress her kids make. She loves making other therapists feel confident and excited about the world of OT! Interesting facts about Chandler Taylor works with a private company serving private schools and providing pediatric home health services. Prior to OT school, Taylor worked as a sensorimotor aide, gaining foundational experience in sensory integration and gross motor development. During training, Taylor developed a strong interest in mental health and now integrates both approaches into daily practice. Taylor was also a dancer for 22 years, competing locally and performing in the Disney Thanksgiving Day Parade. Important FAQs Will professional development be AOTA-approved? All live and recorded professional development courses are AOTA-approved. Podcast Courses are the exception. They will not be approved for AOTA credit, but you can still earn a certificate of completion. As a reminder, NBCOT and most states do not require courses to be approved by AOTA. Be sure to check your state guidelines. Can I earn professional development from the podcast or CEU courses without being a Collab member? Some OT Schoolhouse podcast episodes and individual CEU courses may be available outside of the Collaborative. However, membership provides the most consistent, cost-effective way to earn school-based professional development while staying current with evidence and best practices. Is there a cost to joining The Collab? Yes. The Collab is a paid membership, and memberships do automatically renew each year until cancelled. You can cancel your subscriptions at any time inside the community and by clicking here.(https://collab.otschoolhouse.com/account/billing?tab=subscriptions) Do I have to participate in all the live events? How much time does this community require? You can spend as much (or as little) time as you'd like in the community. All events are optional and recorded in case you'd like to watch them at a later time. We host three 1-hour live events each month on Wednesday and Thursday evenings. One of the three events is a live AOTA-approved professional development course. Some members attend each of the three live events and post or comment in the community a few times a week. Other members attend some of the events and occasionally post in the community. You get to choose what works best for you. What platform is used for OTS Collab? We did a ton of research on various membership platforms before making our choice. Ultimately, we chose Circle. Think of Circle as a cross between Facebook Groups and LinkedIn, but without the need to have a profile out in the open. Courses and other events are held on Zoom and a similar video hosting platform Does The Collab include access to the Back to School Conference? Impact members receive full access to the OT Schoolhouse Back to School Conference at no additional cost. This includes live attendance, access to session recordings, and the opportunity to earn AOTA-approved CEUs. It’s intentionally included as part of the Impact experience to support learning, reflection, and implementation at a key point in the year. Note: Access to the Back to School Conference is not included with the Essentials membership. Can I register via purchase order? Absolutely. We accept purchase orders for annual membership plans. Click here to learn how.(https://otschoolhouse.forms.ac/otscpo) What is the refund policy? We do not offer refunds for either tier of The Collab. However, you may cancel your subscription at any time. Do you have Community Guidelines? Absolutely, we do. You can read them here.(https://editor.wix.com/html/editor/web/renderer/render/document/cea483a3-93fa-4187-bba6-a80ecb53a12e/communityguidelines) Still have questions? Contact us at Contact@otschoolhouse.com(Contact@otschoolhouse.com) What's the difference between The Essentials and The Impact tiers? The Essentials tier ($249/year) includes unlimited CEUs, access to the OTP Lounge for community support, access to resources associated with CEU courses, and the A-Z School-Based OT Course. The Impact tier includes all of these benefits plus live group mentorship, the full library of resources, access to the OT Schoolhouse Goal bank, AI tools trained by school-based OT practitioners, research briefs, and access to the Back to School Conference. Can Essentials members attend the Back to School Conference? Access to the Back to School Conference is not included in the Essentials Tier. If you would like to attend the Back to School Conference, you may purchase that separately at an additional cost. The Impact Tier provides the most cost effective way to attend the Back to School Conference. Are the CEUs in the Essentials tier truly unlimited? Yes, they are. Essentials Tier Members can access the A-Z School-Based OT Course (https://www.otschoolhouse.com/a2z)as well as all courses listed at OTSchoolhouse.com/courses (https://www.otschoolhouse.com/courses)for as long as your membership remains active. Will my membership auto-renew? Yes, memberships are set up as annual subscriptions that will automatically renew each year. You'll receive renewal reminder emails before your membership renews, and you can manage your subscription settings at any time to cancel or modify your membership. Will The Collab help me get a job in the schools? Many OTPs have told us the courses we offer in The Collab helped them to secure a school-based job. While we do not frequently provide content around applying and interviewing for jobs, the content you'll learn in the community will absolutely help you during your job search. JOIN 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!