OTS 120 - The Role SLPs Play in Schools
- Jayson Davies
- Mar 20, 2023
- 35 min read
Updated: Sep 20, 2024
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Welcome to the show notes for Episode 120 of the OT Schoolhouse Podcast.
Are you an OT who wants to level up your knowledge on how to work collaboratively with SLPs to support students in school? Well, you're in for a treat!
Today's episode features a special guest, Rose, a school-based speech therapist and Founder of ABA SPEECH. She will share her wisdom on the important role that SLPs play in schools and how OTPs can collaborate with SLPs to provide the best possible support for students.
Tune in to learn more!
Listen now to learn the following objectives:
Learners will identify what the role of an SLP in a school setting is
Learners will identify what the SETT framework is
Learners will identify what the communication matrix assessment is and how OTs can utilize it
Learners will identify how to work with the SLPs at your school to best support the students
Resources:
Impactful Quotes From the Episode
“There might be ways that you can collaborate and make your life easier, and maybe the speech therapist is this wealth of information.” - Rose Griffin, CCC/SLP, BCBA
“Having some type of social connectedness is going to help you as an adult when you have a job. And so being able to practice those skills in a smaller environment, I think is very impactful for our students” - Rose Griffin, CCC/SLP, BCBA
“The IEP is a living document, and things can change. We make our best estimate of what is going to support that student right now, with the information that we have” - Jayson Davies, MA, OTR/L
Guest Bio
Rosemarie Griffin, MA, CCC/SLP, BCBA, is an ASHA-certified Speech-Language Pathologist, Board Certified Behavior Analyst, and Product Developer. She is the founder of ABA SPEECH. She is passionate about helping individuals with autism find their voice and become more independent communicators. Rose is the host of the Autism Outreach podcast and is a sought-after speaker. Her mission is to help all autistic learners find their voice. She does this by providing CEU courses, therapy materials, and free resources for parents and professionals alike.
Episode Transcript
Expand to view the full episode transcript.
Jayson Davies
Hey there, and welcome to episode number 120, of the otschoolhouse com podcast. Thank you so much for being here. I am your host, Jayson Davies, I am an Occupational Therapist, a school based occupational therapist with about a decade, just a little over a decade, actually, of experience. And I'm excited to have you here. I'm also excited because we have a very special guest today. You know, typically on this podcast, we're talking to an occupational therapist, but today we are going outside of that scope, and we have on with us today. Rose Griffin. Rose is a school based speech therapist and an expert in supporting school based SLPs through online courses over at ABA speech.org she also hosts the podcast titled autism outreach podcast, where she shares research back to guidance from a broad range of experts. Now I've asked rose to join us today, because when I was a new school based OT, I remember not exactly understanding the role of the speech therapist. You know, I knew that they worked on speech in some capacity, some form, but I didn't know the details of what that entailed. I have since learned so much how they go beyond speech to language and communication, but I didn't know that at first, and so I've asked rose to come on today to share a little bit about what she does as a speech therapist in the schools, and also how she has collaborated with other providers, including occupational therapy providers. So we're gonna dive into all of that in just a moment. I'm excited for you to hear this if you are a new school based OT, or maybe you're just a school based OT, not just a but maybe you're a school based ot who's been in the school for a little while, and you just haven't taken a moment to really get to know your speech therapist. This is the perfect episode for you to listen to. All right, so stay tuned. We're going to dive into the intro music, and when we come back, we are going to have a wonderful conversation with Rose Griffin of ABA speech.org
Amazing Narrator
Hello and welcome to the otschoolhouse com, your source for school based occupational therapy, tips, interviews and professional development now to get the conversation started, here is your host, Jayson Davies class is officially in session.
Jayson Davies
Hello rose and welcome to the otschoolhouse com podcast. How are you doing today?
Rose Griffin
I am doing great. Looking forward to our conversation today.
Jayson Davies
Absolutely, and you know, before we jumped on here, we were just talking about the time difference completely threw me off. But you already have your kids home. It's 330 I think you said, right, yes, yeah, I have a little one now, and so we might hear him in the background. Who knows, maybe we'll hear one of yours in the background. But that's okay. It's a podcast. We are educators, and we are here to to share some knowledge, so I'm excited to have you. Thank you so much for being here.
Rose Griffin
I'm excited to talk today,
Jayson Davies
And to get us started, I just want to give you a moment to share a little bit about yourself as a speech and language pathologist, and just share a little bit about your journey as an SOP.
Rose Griffin
Absolutely I did not know what I wanted to do with my life. So my senior year of high school, my mom was a teacher. She was teaching a career course, and she gave me a career assessment after I asked her to and one of the careers that came up with speech therapist, which I had actually never, ever heard of, we subsequently had a family friend who is a speech therapist, and she was older than me by about 10 years, and so I did a ride along with her, and she worked at a nursing home, she worked at a school, she did all these amazing things, and I knew exactly that day that I wanted to be a speech language pathologist. And so I declared my major my freshman year, spring semester, and I just never look back. I've done this for over 20 years now, and feeling like a seasoned therapist is what I'm calling myself. And I just really love what I do. I love being able to wake up every day and help support clients, and now to help support other professionals as well.
Jayson Davies
Absolutely, and I was just going to kind of lead into that with the next question and ask you, how do you currently support practitioners at this point?
Rose Griffin
Absolutely. So I started my own business about five years ago called ABA speech, and we provide professional development. We have a blog, we have products that we sell, action builder cards, double up game, and we really are here to help professionals, help students who are autistic or students who are not responding to traditional speech therapy. So those students that are, quote, unquote, sometimes hard to help. That is where I come in. And I want to help everybody, help their students find their voice.
Jayson Davies
great. And that's exactly why I wanted to bring you on. You know, just like occupational therapy, speech therapy can just run the gamut of where you can work, right? You can work in a hospital, you can work in probably a skilled nursing facility, anywhere. And it's the same thing with OT, right? And so I know you are specific to working with speech pathologists who work in the schools, and so. So happy to bring you on to talk just about that. So with that, I actually want to let you first share for anyone out there who just maybe they haven't, they haven't reached out to their SLP at their school yet, and they haven't really learned about speech pathology in the schools. How do you define what a speech pathologist does in a school position.
Rose Griffin
Absolutely, we are here to help students with their speech and language skills, and so we know that if a student has a delay or a disorder, it may have an adverse impact on their educational performance. I worked in the schools for 20 years, and so we are there to be the detectives and see, well, what is really going on here and how we can be that related service to help support not only that student, but really the entire team, and to be a support to the parent as well.
Jayson Davies
Absolutely, absolutely. And again, a lot of this is going to sound very similar for everyone listening to OT, but there are some very key differences. Obviously, you're working on that speech and language component, but there's also some other differences, and one of those differences that I found is in most states, speech therapists are allowed to carry their own caseload, if you want to call it, or they're allowed to be the the sole provider for a student, as opposed to OT we have to be on an IEP as a related service provider, meaning that the student already has to receive some other service. And so I want to ask you about that. How does that work? When a speech therapist is the only provider for a student.
Rose Griffin
that is usually a stressful situation for a speech therapist, to be completely honest, because I actually just had my friend over this weekend, and she was like, oh my goodness, I'm the case manager for like, 20 kids, because she was working with the older students. Now she's working with younger and so she has some students that are quote, unquote, speech only. And so that does mean that the speech therapist is running the ship on the IEP and case managing, which is usually not our role. And so that can actually be an added stressor for everybody involved. And so that might be a student who maybe is working on a speech sound, or a student maybe who stutters, and that might be a way those are just examples of why a student may qualify and be considered a speech only IEP. And so that is a whole other dynamic, and definitely something to learn. I know I was working with older students, middle high school, middle school, high school for the past 10 years, and I had two or three students who stuttered, and I just love working with those students. They've since graduated now, and it was really hard for me. I really had to lean on my resource teachers and my school psychologist as far as the logistics of the paperwork, because if you're not used to doing all that stuff, it can be very hard because it's infrequent. You're not doing those things all the time. So those might be ways that students qualify that way.
Jayson Davies
absolutely, and you did bring up that word qualify in occupational therapy, I'm very hesitant to use the word qualify, because there really isn't anything from idea or anything from our state that quantifies how a student qualifies for occupational therapy. Is that the same for speech? Or is there a set guidelines for qualifications? Does it vary? Or what can you share about qualifying? Yeah,
Rose Griffin
I think it really varies. I know that the district I was in was in a very affluent district, and we really took it on a case by case basis. So, you know, I remember I had one student who was extremely gifted, was in gifted programming, but did have a medical autism diagnosis, and did have some social support and things of that nature. And so that student qualified. So I think it really is a very individualized process. There might be really large districts that have, oh, the student has to be two standard deviations below and things like that. But the places that I worked, we it was very much a case by case basis, and we kind of took a holistic approach. It wasn't just a standardized score, it was, how is whatever this communication delay or disorder is, how is it really affecting the student in their day to day life?
Jayson Davies
Gotcha Absolutely. And it's amazing how some of these things kind of, they don't come out of thin air, necessarily, but like, two standard deviations below, or one standard deviation below, someone is putting these processes into place, and typically they're above our head. Or, you know, maybe it's the director of special education that's working with a consultant speech and they're putting that in place. We don't know. But like you said, it differs from place to place, and so for anyone out there, if you're an OT or a speech therapist, you need to make sure that you're talking to your other speech therapist or your other OT department colleagues and trying to figure that out. A if it already exists or if it doesn't exist. Should we create something to make that happen? Yeah, all right, now I asked you about what that qualifying criteria may be, but does that differ between those speech only kids versus those kids who you might see on an IEP from another another provider, where the. If teachers the case carrier or whatnot.
Rose Griffin
you know, like, Let's take an example a student that stutters. I mean, that's going to be really different based on that student. So you might have a student who stutters and it really isn't having an adverse impact on their educational performance. So it doesn't mean that they would automatically qualify, just like a student who has a medical disability has having autism. That doesn't mean that the student would qualify for services. You know, the one particular student I was talking about, they came in from another state, which is a whole other situation, but you want to give those parallel services do your own evaluation. And the where I was working, we were hesitant to ever take something away, because, gosh, in middle school, that's just such a at least for me, it was a traumatic time. It's a hard time for kids, and especially with covid and, you know, all those things that we had to take into consideration. So it really is just really dependent on how is that communication disorder or delay affecting that specific student at that moment?
Jayson Davies
Absolutely. And you know, as you mentioned, Middle School is a tough time, especially when you think about not just the speech side of it, but the language side. And when you get into middle school and high school, there's so much more language components going on between social skills and, you know, a lot more peer collaboration going on. You've talked a little bit about the stuttering, maybe the speech sounds a little bit. But what about on the language side? What are some things that that speech pathologists work on?
Yeah, so for some students, they may just have a hard time understanding language. They may have a hard time, especially third or fourth grade, when we start to read material and have to answer questions about the material. There's a major shift there that happens in about fourth grade, and you really see the students who are struggling language wise, and they may start to get resource support. And I work really closely with teachers and know what's in the curriculum. How can I support their vocabulary that they're learning? How can I be a support? Sometimes the teachers would come down and say, you know, I was in middle school, and sometimes those classes are extremely difficult. I was in a very high performing district, and it's, it's hard, you know, you would read a sentence in the vocabulary word, and me and the teacher would just troubleshoot. How can we help this student who really does have a language delay. Understand this very abstract concept, because if they can't understand it, they're going to be lost in their classroom. They're not going to perform well on this unit. It's going to piggyback on the next unit. And so we would talk about those types of things a lot, and then also just supporting students with social skills. I always say social skills get extremely nuanced starting, you know, gosh, really, once you enter preschool, but you know, it just it never ends. Actually, I'm 44 and I still think there's, like, really nuanced things, whether it's online, in real life, in my neighborhood, there's a lot of really nuanced things. I would always tell the kids, just think of me as your social support. I'm here to help you if you have something that comes up. Because what's so funny about that I, you know, and I have a TPT store, that's kind of how I started my business, making these digital and physical products. But you could never make up some of the things that my kids really needed help with. You know, someone post a Tiktok, or someone did this, and these things didn't exist when you're making these products. So just being very specific to what your student needs support with.
Jayson Davies
Absolutely. I love that, all right. So then one of the things that I noticed about IEPs, right? We have those 13 different qualifying criterias that students can fall into. And there is no ot qualifier on the IEP but there is SLI speech and learning or speech and language impairment. Sorry, do students have to have that speech and language impairment on their IEP to receive therapy services, or can they qualify under several of the other qualifications and still receive speech.
Rose Griffin
I'm not 100% certain, but I think that if a student had, for example, autism, that they would also be able to qualify for speech and language obviously inherent to the disability of autism and how it impacts, oftentimes, communication. So pretty sure about that.
Jayson Davies
Yeah. And again, that might be more specific to specific regions, potentially here in California, what you just said is exactly the case. A lot of students who have a UT or autism on their IEP, they don't have that secondary of SLI necessarily, because under autism, there is kind of that speech and language component kind of built into it. Therefore it doesn't have to be a qualification. We're kind of assuming, with the autism that there may or may not be the difficulties with speech. So yeah, that's what we see here as well. All right, I love RTI tiered intervention, and I think you do too as well. And so I want to just get your take on RTI and maybe how speech therapists can work at the different levels to support students and
Rose Griffin
teachers. Absolutely, RTI for us was very specialized to our bill. Building. So I worked in for the past 10 years. I worked in a very small district, and so it was very much talk with your special ed director, which I always did, and talk with your building principal, because your building principal had all the the keys to the kingdom of as far as like, yes, we doing this. This is how we do it. This is the framework. It was very different from elementary to middle school, and so I really worked with my principal. I also worked with parents, but we did provide RTI, not really where I was going in and doing whole class instruction. I might have a student who doesn't qualify because they're working on R but it's not having an adverse impact on their educational performance, and I'm able to work with the principal and the parent for short term intervention. We called it collecting data, and I had a whole tiered system where I'd get permission and things like that. We wanted to make sure that parents understood that that was not going to be, you know, maybe I was going to recommend an evaluation, but maybe the student wouldn't qualify for that. I think that's what's really hard, at least for me, to be a public school employee, is that, depending on your district and how do parents have money to pay for outside therapy? Do they? Can you say that as a speech therapist, when a parent says, Well, does my student need extra therapy. I don't, you know, like, do I honestly? How do I answer that question? I always those things always made me sweat as a public school employee, because I was always trained that if you say that, yeah, sure, your child, you know, who wouldn't benefit from a little extra, if it's good therapy, that then the district might have the responsibility of paying for that, and so other districts weren't like that. Other districts I worked in, you know, we'd have a list of speech therapists you could contact and but I think every single district handles that so differently, so that always kind of made me nervous. So I always worked with my sped director, and I worked with the principal in my building. Because my district was so small, we didn't have these huge frameworks for this is our district. This is how we do it. It was very building specific. Yeah,
Jayson Davies
and I love working in small school districts. It's the best because you are so close to your special ed director, you can talk to the principals like no one feels like they're above, you know, your pay grade or above being asked questions about and sometimes you get lost in the larger districts, and you know, it's like, you meet with the OT team, where you meet with the speech team, but like, that's all you talk to, and you don't have that ability to talk to the the other team members or the people above you, and and even time to work with the paraprofessionals. So yeah, definitely love all that. Now, you did mention taking data. You mentioned, you know, working to collect data, not only for the students who may qualify, but those who may not qualify. And as IEP related service providers, we have to take data for IEPs, we have to make sure that we're writing goals that can be monitored. And so I just wanted to get your take on any tips that you have, or any way that you found that works for you when it comes to measuring progress for your students, do you use a certain type of data sheet? What works for you?
Rose Griffin
I really love taking I take handwritten data. I do it's plus or minus. I do a lot of cold probe or first trial data. So I might have a student who's working on labeling basketball because they love basketball, so I may work on that label five times during our session, but I may only take data on that first trial. And so that is how I started to write my goals as well, because I may still work and practice that skill, but I'm going to take data on that first trial, or sometimes it's called co cold probe data. I think that's important. When covid hit, and my district had a really great response to covid, I thought, you know, when we started coming back in person, it was just the students who had more complex communication needs. So I was there, but it was just everything was different, and it was hard. It was hard to learn new things. But something I did during that time is I started to keep data online, just through Google Forms. I only work three days a week in the public school setting, so I wasn't there every single day. I didn't have a caseload of 90 I had a manageable caseload, and so for some of my students, I created a Google form, which was nice for me, because then I would have the answers sent over to a Google sheet, and then when it was progress report time, I could really analyze that and input some specific progress into my reports, which I always like to do. So those two things work for me. I wasn't using any type of big electronic system because I didn't have, you know, a caseload of 80 or anything like that. So I was really just coming up with my own framework to try to make things seamless.
Jayson Davies
Gotcha, I love using Google Forms for that reason and many more. So yeah, talking to the right person who likes Google Forms, even for teacher consultations, I would use a Google form. You could just send them a quick google form. How's Jesse doing? Is he making progress on? This goal, and they can give you quick feedback. So absolutely. Now, talking a little bit about assessment tools. In the OT world, we have some very common assessments that we use, the bot, the M fun, the sensory processing measure, just to name a few. In the speech world, are there a few super common, super common assessment tools that you use, and if you just want to share maybe, like a little one line about kind of what you're looking at when you use that assessment tool.
Rose Griffin
Yeah, one that's common for younger kids is the PLS, and that just looks at a student's ability to understand and use language. There's something called the Goldman fristoe That looks at speech sounds. How is a student using their speech sounds? And then once students get a little bit older, we use things like the expressive one word, which we're showing them a picture, or a group of pictures, they're labeling it receptive one word we're showing them like four pictures, and can they point to the correct one? And then the self is a pretty popular language one, and that gets into more nuanced, higher level grammatical understanding. And one that is also really nice is the Communication Matrix. And actually, this might be nice for ot too. And I don't know if you've heard of it, Jason, but it's online assessment. It used to be free. Now I think it's really affordable, and it is for students who have very complex communication needs, so students who are really not communicating. I used it for a student who had physical disabilities, had an intellectual disability, and I did that with her ParaPRO, but the OT was looped into that the physical therapist, because we were really trying to help this person find a way to communicate. And it was very difficult, just because of all the different medical concerns that they had going on. So the Communication Matrix. If you haven't looked that up, you can just google search it. We did a blog about it at ABA speech. It's a really nice tool that's pretty comprehensive.
Jayson Davies
Gotcha, I haven't heard of that one. I've heard of the set framework. I don't know if you've heard of that, which is about kind of collaborating together with the team to determine if any sort of augmentative communication or other accommodations are necessary, but I haven't used that that one that you were just talking about, so definitely something to look into. I will say this, though, within that answer, you talked about collaborating a little bit, and so I'd love to get your take on collaborating. You've already mentioned a few instances, actually, but I'd love to hear your take on collaborating, whether it be with other other species pathologists, maybe outside of the school, or maybe with OTS in the school, or other related service providers and teachers.
Rose Griffin
Yeah, I actually it's funny. I actually just went to happy hour with my old ot that I used to work with, that she quit the district five years ago. I just quit last year, so we haven't seen each other in four years. But I saw her last week. I was telling her about this podcast. She has listened to it. So I was like, but yeah, so I would do, I worked really closely with our OT I just loved it at the middle school, high school level, we had this group of students. We all worked in elementary and this kind of big group of students moved to the middle school. And so we would do these really fun vocational slash Leisure Group. So we had this really great group of kids, or about six of them. And so me, the teacher in the OT, would create these units. Actually, this was really kind of fun. And so let's say we were learning about working at a clothing store. So I would come up with a writing prompt or reading prompt. Some of the students could read. Some were non readers, you know, differentiated instruction, trying to make sure everybody had access to it. So I would go over that part. We would read that together. We would do some of the vocabulary together, and that was the speech therapy part. And then the OT would come up. And then we would work on a skill, an extended skill. So we were working on, how do you hang a shirt on a hanger? How do you hang pants? It's very different than a shirt. How do you use the folding board like you see at Nordstrom, wherever you like to shop. And so that is how we did those groups. So we would start with maybe a question of the day, which I would do. We would do a reading passage vocabulary, which I would run. Then our occupational therapist would run the extension activity, and we would have groups of students that were practicing vocational skills, and then we would end with a leisure skill. And so those were some of my very favorite times working in the schools. Is this collaboration with the occupational therapist. So it was fun for us, it was fun for the kids, and really, I made a lifelong friend in that, in that collaboration as well.
Jayson Davies
That's the best part. And it sounds like you were doing this in a classroom. So then you also have the teacher involved, and maybe some paraprofessionals, potentially, if they're in so was that? Was that the case here?
Rose Griffin
That was the case. Everybody was involved. And it was really, really nice. I was close with the teacher too. She was a friend of mine, and, you know, she was reinforcing the vocabulary at times throughout the week when they didn't have this group. And so it was just kind of that gold standard collaboration that you really, you still talk about, because you know that it's hard to come by. There's a lot of barriers to us all working cohesively together. And then, you know, when I left, we didn't have that type of cohesive group anymore. So it didn't make sense to do that type of group. Everybody was scattered in their skill sets and what they needed to work on. And so that time where we did that group for a year or two, it was just a really special time because it was cohesive, it was collaborative, and we were able to work together. And the kids really enjoyed. It too.
Jayson Davies
Awesome. And I'm going to ask you off the cuff question related to that, but how did that come together? Because I know in the OT world, I often get asked like, look, that sounds great, but I don't know how to get started with that. So I want to ask you, how did that group get started? Did you reach out initially to the ot the teacher, or was there a student with an IEP goal? What happened? Yeah,
Rose Griffin
I think that I was just working really closely with the OT because we had a lot of students who had these shared goals, where they were a lot of overlap and what we were working on. And so we just kind of forged a friendship. And then I'm kind of a visionary of how, you know, I would like things to run, or how it makes sense to all do things. And wow, if we could all see the kids together, and this would hit all the IEP goals, they would be learning new skills. We could collaborate and do all this together that would be really powerful for everybody. And so maybe I suggested it, and kind of kind of helped get that going, and then once we had the framework for it, that was it. We just that's what we did. And another thing that was cool from that that same group of students then went on to the high school, which I was in a really small district, so I also was their speech therapist in ninth grade. But I created, over the course of that whole ninth grade year, I created this vocational binder, which is one of my top selling TPT products, because I just went through and I created these reading passages and these vocabulary and questions and these extension activities, and it was just so organic, because it was what I was doing in my everyday in my everyday work. So I might have just had, you know, that thought of, let's do this, but everybody was on board which made it easy.
Jayson Davies
That's awesome. I find that that's how it typically does start for me. I worked in a high school and my speech pathologist, her office was right next to mine, so same type of thing. We became good friends, and the next thing you know, we both started going into the life skills class at the same time. And from there, we started to develop a program, basically, and it became a great, great avenue for everyone involved, the teachers, the paraprofessionals, enjoyed it, and, of course, the kids as well. Now, one of the things that I find with speech pathologists as opposed to the OTs, is that they tend to see kids more frequently, and then they also tend to see kids sometimes in different settings. You know, for ot we might see a kid one time a week in a pullout method, or one time a week in a push in method. But I'm always jealous of my speech therapist, because they'll often have one of each they'll like, have a push in and then also a pull out, or a group or something like that. So what is a frequent service for some of those kids that you see and kind of explain maybe why you might do that use multiple services. Yeah, absolutely.
Rose Griffin
And it is really individualized. I think that was what was cool about my school gig, is that, and I didn't leave it because I didn't like it. I really did enjoy it. I just got too busy, but I could be individualized and what the kids need. So I might have a kid who is in 11th grade and they're going out to a job site, and maybe I see that student quarterly, out on the job site, and maybe I attend their meetings, because it's a small district. I've known the kids in sixth grade, and I can give the team this type of history. But for some of my students, let's say I have an autistic learner, because that's what I'm most passionate about. Let's say I have an autistic student, and maybe I see them one time individually, where I actually pull them out into my therapy office with a pair of professional for support and generalization, or I see them down in the classroom, in their work area, and then I'm working on more language skills, maybe some speech skills. And then when I go into the classroom and maybe do a whole group lesson, that's where I'm helping to work on social language skills, or just group cooperation, leisure skills. And so it's nice to have that and be able to serve students in that way, but that is a kind of a traditional style of seeing students, maybe one time as a pullout, maybe one time I'm going into the classroom. But really, for the upper grades, rarely did I ever see a student in my office unless it was a student who stuttered or a student who had selective mutism or a student who needed something very specific, related to social skills, where I wanted to see them one on one to work on it, for their privacy and things like that?
Jayson Davies
Absolutely, and I want to kind of push on that last little part that you said, because you've been doing this for a long time. Did you always start out that way? Never seen an older student in your office, or when you first got started? Would you see them in your office? And it maybe took you some time to figure out how you can do that outside of your office.
Rose Griffin
Yeah, that's a good question. I feel like in the beginning of my career, I wasn't working in the school. Schools at that age group, I was working in a private center. You know, one day a week, I always worked in non public programs for students who had unsafe problem behavior. But I don't know I wasn't by the time I got to middle school, high school, I was kind of like, this is how I'm doing it, I mean, and that made us why I have my own business. But I did get into fights, you know, professional disagreements with I'll never forget a school psychologist who I actually really like, but one year, I don't know, he just, we just got into a disagreement, and I wasn't going to let it go. And he had a school he had a student psychologist, and we tested a student, and they wanted me to see the student in the class, in my office, to work on two step directions, and this student was fully immersed in the general education curriculum. Absolutely was not appropriate. And I just really put my foot down. I talked to my director. She had my, you know, she was supporting me and all of that. And I just, you know, I'm really in it for what's my best interest of the client. And so sometimes that might be hard. That might be hard, you might get into disagreements, or professional disagreements with people, but yeah, I mean, when I feel strongly about something, I I go with it. I don't just, you know, I'm not going to say, Yeah, let's just do three times a week in my office for an 11th grader who is failing English, you know, I just it's not appropriate for the kid, and I knew that,
Jayson Davies
yeah, and you should feel strong about that, I asked that question a little for myself, honestly, but hopefully it's helping people that are listening, because it took me a while. I mean, I started working in the high schools, and for a little while, there I was pulling students out, and it took me a, a, just some time to navigate, you know, the whole new setting that is a high school, and then B, to realize how I can work with those students in a different model. There were some times where I would meet that 11th grade student, especially if we're talking about those kids that are fully immersed in general education, I would meet them, but even then, I wouldn't necessarily meet them in my office, right? Because a I'm like, calling the teacher, hey, can you send Johnny to the OTS room? Like that? Just Not That doesn't work. Like the last thing you need, right? You're asking Johnny to go to the OT room. No. So what I would actually do is I would sometimes, because it was during class, I could potentially meet them halfway at the quad or something like that. And those would usually be shorter, more type of check in seeing how they're doing with something that we already put in place, or something like that. But it took a while to get to that point. You know, a lot of us, we start in that that elementary school age where it is common to pull a student out and going to that high school level or even middle school, you kind of got to figure out where to kind of go from there, and how you can potentially see the students in another in another format. So thanks for sharing that.
Rose Griffin
Yeah, you know, I really love that age group, and I actually just did a CEU presentation about functional speech therapy for middle school and high school students. And it was really well attended. It was like a lunch hour. Well, for me here on the East Coast, lunch hour for you guys, nine o'clock breakfast. But it was nice because I had about 50% of people that signed up actually attended live. It was over 150 people on a Friday, because there is not a lot of information out there for that age group, and we know that we want to support those students, and that's all I did for the past 10 years. So I feel like it is, it is just a different beast to work in a middle school and at high school, that's even way different. I mean, it's just collaborating with the teachers. You know, I would love it when I have a kid on consult for a high school kid, it's a kid I didn't know. It's like, well, how do you consult on a kid you don't even know? I would just discreetly say, like, Oh, hey, I miss Griffin. I'm the speech therapist you have. You know, speech is a consult that's what it means. You know, bebop into the classroom. Pretend you're not even in the room, shrink down as small as possible. Don't make eye contact. But the kids I worked with were very, very friendly. Only one time in 20 years did I have to have a meeting with a student, a parent and a principal because a student was dodging me for therapy. So I think that's pretty good for 20 years as a speech therapist, 10 being with older kids, because I, I do remember seventh grade. It was, it was rough.
Jayson Davies
Yeah, yeah. All of high school, most of middle school? Yep, exactly. So we've talked about we've talked a little bit about individual we talked a little bit about consultation. We've even talked a little bit about you going into a classroom and working either kind of with with a student just as an SLP, or working with everyone as a team, potentially. But I want to ask you about that small group setting. Why might a speech pathologist decide to use a small group setting to see a kid?
Rose Griffin
I love working in a small group setting, if you have students who you are working on maybe a specific skill, and then you want to generalize it to a little bit bigger of a group, so maybe six students or seven students. Is you can work on social language skills that way in a less intimidating, less overwhelming environment. And I think it's just a really nice way to practice skills before you go out into that larger school environment. And I that was always my, my most favorite time was planning group therapy. I think when we're planning group therapy, as an administrator, I've had some administrative roles. I would see people where I'm leading the group, and it's all teacher to student conversation. But what I really loved was working on peer to peer interaction, because even though the kids were in the same class, you're going to have some of the kids that is easy for them to socialize and say hi and do all those things, but you're going to have some students who really struggle with that, and they really need to practice that skill, just because having some type of social connectedness is going to help you as an adult when you have a job. And so being able to practice those skills in a smaller environment, I think is very impactful for our students.
Jayson Davies
Yeah, yeah, definitely. And I use a small group in a similar manner a lot of times to practice that skill in a smaller space, you know, whether it be handwriting, co regulation, self regulation, whatever it might be. And then they try to navigate that skill back into the classroom. I have had a few times in my career where I have, you know, recommended small group, and then it has just been atrocious, and we've had to change the service. And that's what I love about amendments. Have you had any situations like that where you just were adamant, you know, I know the students gonna thrive in this group, this individual, this in classroom, and then it just bombed, and you had to change it up a little bit.
Rose Griffin
I have definitely made amendments to IEPs. I do not remember all the specifics. I actually just made a Tiktok about how when I first started in the field, I had a lot of students who were not yet speaking, who had autism, were really emerging communicators, and they had yes, no goals, which I realized after I wrote those IEPs, that that's actually a very, very difficult skill, and definitely not an easy skill, and not one we should work on first. So I can't remember if those IEPs were amended, or maybe we just had not yet introduced that concept on the progress note, can't remember.
Jayson Davies
Yeah, I just honestly asked that question because you've had, you have had experience, and there's a lot of people that listen to this podcast. It might be their first week, their first month in in school, based otschool, whatever it might be. And you know, just know that the IEP is a living document and things can change. You know, we make our best estimate of what is going to support that student right now with the information that we have. And you know, things might change a month from now or two months from now. So don't be afraid. The IEP is a living document, and it can be changed absolutely. All right, well, we are getting toward the end of our talk today, but for OTS out there, who maybe they haven't had a chance to reach out to their speech therapist, they haven't met them. I know this is a very broad question, but what might an OT do to open up that conversation with this piece of therapist? Should they just go knock on the door? Should they send an email? Do you have any suggestions?
Rose Griffin
I would say, start with whatever communication style you're comfortable with and definitely just say hi. Say hey, I'm so and so I just wanted to say hi. I'm part of the IEP team, and there might be ways that you can collaborate and that you can, you know, make your life easier. And maybe the speech therapist is this wealth of information, and maybe they've been in the field a lot longer, and, you know, who knows? You know it could go the other way too. But I do think it's great just to have that person as a touch point, because maybe you're an IEP meeting and you need that person's support, and that person knows you. So I think just knowing who that person is and being able to reach out and say hi in whatever way you can feel comfortable doing, I think, is a great first step, absolutely,
Jayson Davies
absolutely and yeah, if you've been sitting in an IEP, whether it's a speech therapist sitting across from you or someone else, and you've been in like 10 IEPs with them, just say hi to them. I know it gets tougher after each meeting that you sit in without knowing who they are. So say hi, up run. It makes everything a little bit easier. And as rose mentioned, you never know. I have worked with wonderful speech therapists, wonderful OTS that have had never said hi, or maybe they said hi to me. There's so much information that I would not have right now, anything from using amendative communication apps to understanding visual boards and all of that. So much of that information Elise has come from speech pathologists. So say hi to your speech pathologist. All right, there's one thing that I have kind of actually been waiting for the end of the podcast. But you've mentioned a little bit. You mentioned that your website is Abass speech.com implying ABA as a part of your practice, which I know it is, I know you, and I know it is, and you are actually BCBA certified.
Rose Griffin
correct. Yes, it's ABA speech.org. Anybody wants to org? Sorry, that's okay. Jay. Yeah,
Jayson Davies
so I want to ask you, how does that ABA, that BCBA, part help within your speech pathology realm?
Rose Griffin
Absolutely. So, you know, I became a speech therapist over 20 years ago, and probably my second or third year into third year into the field. I started working at a non public program for autistic learners, and they used applied behavior analysis to help students communicate. And these were students who could not be educated appropriately in a public school because they had very unsafe problem behavior that was really a barrier to them being in a traditional classroom. And so I learned all about ABA, and I'll never forget working with an 18 year old student who had no way to communicate besides using unsafe problem behavior. I remember working with my coworker, and we were looking back at his progress notes. He had been in special education since the time he was three, but nobody was able to reach him. And us working together using ABA and speech therapy, he was able to use an AAC device for the first time to talk about music that he wanted to listen to, or to go outside to take a walk. And I just thought, you know, on one side I thought, and I remember saying, Jason to my coworker, I want to go places, and I want to talk to people about the science of ABA, because it's absolutely life changing for this student to be 18 and have no way to communicate. That's just not right, you know. So one side, I felt really joyous that he was able to find his voice, but on the other hand, I felt really sad that it took him till he was 18, and so that really lit a fire in me to learn more about ABA, because there are so many students out there who don't respond to traditional speech therapy, and we know the way that the field is growing now of ABA, that whether we like it or not, we're going to have to collaborate with BCBAs. And so that's really where my superpower is, is trying to build that bridge between speech therapists and BCBAs. It doesn't mean that we have to think the same way about things. It just means that we need to know how to advocate for our role too, especially for OTs, I have a friend that is more behaviorally oriented. She's a PhD level ot she's going to be on my podcast autism outreach here in a couple weeks, so I'm excited about that, but we need to be able to have those professional dialogs so that we can help our students, especially those students that are traditionally hard to help, and that's who I try to help. Focus on at ABA speech.
Jayson Davies
I really like the way that you described that you talked about how it worked with you, but then you also talked about that collaboration piece, and you're absolutely right. You know, there was probably once upon a time where teachers and speech therapists didn't get along. There was probably once upon a time that OTs and teachers people don't always get along, but we see the value that each and every professional can bring to the IEP table and can bring to that student. And we need to keep an open mind. We need to make sure that we're open to different ideas and figuring out how we can work together so well. Said, I appreciate that. To wrap this up, I want to give you an opportunity. You've already mentioned ABA speech.org I want to give you an opportunity to share. Where can people who want to learn more about rose and ABA speech go to learn more?
Rose Griffin
Yeah, visit me over at ABA speech.org that is where I have my podcast, autism outreach. It comes out every single Tuesday. And if you're over on Instagram, ABA speech by Rose is where I put informative posts up and or reels every once in a while. And I'm also on Tiktok, so come and follow me. There
Jayson Davies
you are. Everywhere. We will be sure to include links to all of those different places where you can find rose on the show notes. So be sure to click over to the show notes and you can find all those easy resources just for you. So rose, thank you so much for being here. Really appreciate it, and I look forward to just just keeping you in our OT realm of life and keep in touch with how things are going in the speech world with you. So thank you again.
Rose Griffin
Thanks for having me.
Jayson Davies
Yep, take care. All right, and that is going to wrap up episode number 120 with Rose Griffin. Thank you rose so much for coming on the show and thank you for listening to this episode. I really hope that this helped you just better understand what the speech therapist on your campus may be doing, and also giving you some ideas about how maybe you can work with your speech therapist and just get to know them. The better you know your speech therapist, the more likely you two are to collaborate, which may lead to more success for your students, your teachers and everyone that you support. So thanks again for listening, and we will see you on the next episode of the otschoolhouse podcast. Take care.
Amazing Narrator
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