OTS 177: Supporting Students with Extensive Support Needs: A Path Toward Inclusive OT Practice (Part 2)
- Claudia Elena Grande
- Jun 2
- 27 min read
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Welcome to the show notes for Episode 177 of the OT Schoolhouse Podcast.
In Part 2 of this important conversation, Dr. Savitha Sundar returns to explore what inclusive OT practice can look like beyond the buzzwords. In this episode, Savitha helps us shift from reflection to action, discussing how to align our evaluations, goals, and service models with the values of true inclusion.
We also talk about building meaningful collaborations with general education staff, embedding participation-focused goals into IEPs, and celebrating small wins in systems that are slow to change. If you’ve ever asked how to make your OT services more inclusive and collaborative, this episode is a must-listen.
Listen now to learn the following objectives:
Distinguish between traditional “push-in” models and inclusive OT practices that center student participation in general education environments.
Learn how to write IEP goals and conduct evaluations that promote inclusive outcomes for students with extensive support needs.
Explore strategies for building trust and collaboration with general education teachers to support system-wide inclusion.
Guest(s) Bio
Savitha Sundar PhD, OTR/L.
Savitha Sundar has served in public schools for over 17 years across three states, primarily supporting students with extensive support needs in self-contained classrooms. Her research focuses on the role of school-based occupational therapy in bridging the research-to-practice gap in inclusive education. For five years, Savitha served as an executive board member and later as a partnerships officer for a national nonprofit organization--Changing Perspectives, focused on promoting inclusive practices and social-emotional learning.
Savitha teaches entry-level OTD students during the summer at Texas Woman’s University and has mentored more than a dozen students in school-based practice. She also hosts the podcast Inclusive Occupations – Sharing Stories of Not Just Being Invited to the Party but Dancing. Through the podcast, she amplifies the voices of educators, researchers, and individuals with disabilities working to build authentically inclusive learning communities.
Resources
Inclusive Occupations Podcast by Savitha Sundar
Changing Perspectives (Nonprofit promoting inclusive practices and SEL)
Episode Transcript
Expand to view the full episode transcript.
Jayson Davies
Hello and welcome back to Episode 177 of the OT school house podcast. If this is your first time listening, or if you happen to potentially skip episode 176 of the podcast, I highly encourage you to check out part one of this conversation with Dr Savitha Sundar to get the full context on supporting students with extensive support needs. Our special guest, Dr Sundar has over 17 years of experience supporting students with extensive support needs, and is committed to building more inclusive school communities through ot practice. She's also the host of inclusive occupations podcast, and has mentored numerous ot students and professionals on inclusive school based practice. In part one, Savitha helped us to unpack the history and challenges around how students with extensive support needs are often served, and what it means to rethink our role as school based ot practitioners to support them. Now in part two, we're shifting into the how we'll be talking about practical strategies for inclusive ot services, writing IEP goals that center participation and collaborating with school staff to move the needle one small step at a time to help bridge the two episodes we're going to begin with the final question from part one about how ot practitioners can start redefining their push in practices to become more inclusion focused. Now let's jump back into the conversation with Dr Savitha Sundar.
Amazing Narrator
Hello and welcome to the OT school house podcast, your source for school based occupational therapy tips, interviews and professional development. Now to get the conversation started, here is your host, Jayson Davies class is officially in session.
Savitha Sundar
What if we provided these supports in the general education classroom? What if we put our effort in making that like OTs, the time we spend in what we currently do, don't take away any time. Don't expect adding more work to yourself. But just think about the same time if it was used in making the general education experience accessible, just recess, just cafeteria as an OT team. Can you all sit together and brainstorm? How can we make cafeteria accessible for all our kiddos in our district. How is it going in your school? How's it going in my schools? Can we all implement the every moment counts comfortable cafeteria program? So another finding of my research was when people knew the how. They always had a clear why. Why? When people knew their how, like people who were aware of these programs, you know, like a comfortable cafeteria program, or the you know, like the interoception program, or people who knew these had these tools, felt like they wanted to justify inclusion because they could do something about it using these programs. Gotcha. So I think having the tools to do it is so important for us to actually assume that role in schools. It's just that we don't know how to do it. That's the biggest problem.
Jayson Davies
Yeah, so I guess that kind of automatically leads us into our next area, which is the how part. And before I ask you how you've done this, you kind of alluded to it a little bit here. I mean, there are programs out there, I guess. But what are ot practitioners currently saying? Did you ask them in your survey? Like, how are you doing? How are you promoting inclusive practices?
Savitha Sundar
No, that was not a question in my survey, but the survey was to identify interested therapists who were willing to talk more about it. So I did identify some of my study participants from that survey, and also through a whole bunch of searching that went on for a while to select these inclusion focused ot practitioners, right? So I had a multiple case study of six inclusive ot practices, okay? And the findings were so interesting, great, great ideas. One of the themes that came out of the study was people had different conceptualization of what inclusive ot practice is.
Jayson Davies
Okay.
Savitha Sundar
Right, which sort of surprised me, given that I had very specific questions or like, access to general education, curricular, extracurricular activities, access to peer relationships. These were like the two criteria, despite that when they heard the term inclusive ot practices, or even when we had a discussion about inclusive ot practices, the most common understanding, which I think you can resonate with too, I think a lot of OTs, lot of us can resonate with, is they talk about seeing the student in the natural environment, like the portion services, yeah, okay. But. One of them said, Well, if I see my student in their natural environment, it's not inclusive ot practice at all, because they're all in self contained classrooms. How can that be their natural environment? So that was like, a big aha. Like, yeah, right. So we are working within a broken system, and we are perpetuating that system by providing ot services within like it's better than pull out services. Yeah, pulling a kid out of what is determined as LRE by the school, pulling them out of that and providing services is probably the least in the list. However, I don't even want to say that. If you want to delete whatever I said right now, take it off.
Jayson Davies
Well, it's the least restrictive. I mean, in terms restrictive to least restrictive services, pulling out a student is the least restrictive.
Savitha Sundar
Right? Right switch, okay, so if you switch to a different lens, okay? And look at it in terms of inclusion, okay, you're not going to talk about push and pull out services. You're going to talk about integrative collaborative services. Sometimes we have to give that one on one support to a student, because that's going to lead the student to make friendships with others. Sometimes we have to teach them how to use this assistive technology tool, one on one in a quiet setting, so this kid can actually learn to use it in the in the in so we can make the right recommendation to the teacher so it's used in their natural setting. Okay, so, okay, i That's why I feel like fees put this, oh, I only push in or I only pull out. We want to do focus on integrated services, where we take each person who com brings with their comes with their expertise in certain skills, or would take the responsibility to address certain skills. Can address those skills, and that can be fit into the student's natural routine.
Jayson Davies
Okay? So, yeah. So, yeah, the focus is on the outcome, not necessarily the type of service per se, and.
Savitha Sundar
Also understanding that me pulling this kid and working with this kid on using on a typing program, practicing typing program while learning a math concept in the class. Is not valuable. That's not integrative. Collaborative services. You would provide the service at a time when it's least disruptive to the students, you know, participation in their natural classroom, yeah? So weighing that, pros and cons and collaboratively as a team, coming up with this goal, like, what are the goals we want to focus on for the student with extensive support needs that will lead to the outcome we all desire for the student? Yeah? So I'm sure it's not so black and white and clear however, it's just something to it's something to think about, right?
Jayson Davies
Yeah, so play this game with me then. So for example, one of the service models that I've liked to use in the past was what I called the two to two model for I would see a student in a more traditional pull out setting, and then the next week, I would try to incorporate what I did in that pull out setting, but do that inside of the general education classroom or maybe out at recess the cafeteria. Would that be, quote, unquote, an inclusive ot model? Because the goal was in order to, yes, I did use that pull out service model for one of the sessions, but the goal was to promote the in class participation. So would you view that, then, as being an inclusive ot practice?
Savitha Sundar
In my view, yes, because you are working with this kid to be successful, to access the best quality education they can access, you're supporting with that?
Jayson Davies
Yeah, perfect, yeah. And I wanted to ask you.
Savitha Sundar
And you cannot do that. You cannot do that access by only working in pull out, because you have to know what's going on in the class. How does it translate into being functional in the class, and what are the other resources that are already available in the class that we can pull in that are even more effective than me teaching this kid. So.
Jayson Davies
Absolutely, because every time to look at Yeah, and every time you're observing a student in the classroom, you're also observing the classroom, and you're using what you know about the classroom to then adjust the services that you might be supporting during that pull out session, or whatever you you want to call it. So awesome. Okay, so where do you think the biggest struggles are then, right now, you mentioned, you know, a therapist even bringing up like, How can I provide these inclusive services when I'm when the student themselves is not included? Where are you seeing therapists have the most difficulty with providing, or maybe even understanding the practice of inclusive ot practice.
Savitha Sundar
So I don't know generally how it is with all other therapists, but the participants who I selected for the study were the ones who considered themselves as inclusion focused OTs, or. Or they supported inclusion, or they had enough stories to share about at least two students about inclusive practices, right? So these therapists shared examples of two types of inclusive ot practices, okay? One, when the student is already in a general education classroom and they're enabling access, they're making that the placement meaningful, making inclusion meaningful by supporting their access to participation in general education, content and contexts. The other the other type was, my kid does not have access to general education, peers or experiences, so I'm going to make it happen. I'm going to be the agent that supports this kid to access inclusion. I think they both are very powerful and important for our practice. So when you are in a situation where like, oh, this kid never goes to art, or because he just doesn't do anything, that he's just running around, right, and then you come in and say, Why is he running around? Let me go see well, because none of the activities given there are remotely meaningful to this kid. He likes being with other kids. He likes watching other people do art, but here you are sitting and forcing him to do art, right? So there's a range of experiences you can get. Like, participation has different dimensions to it, right? You don't have to participate. You may sometimes go to a party. You may not like any of the food, but you like you like the company of the people you know. So participation has different meaning to different people. So how can we enable that? How can we make that art lesson meaningful to this student, right? So then that becomes ot for inclusion, right? So you're providing ot with the expected outcome of inclusion. Here I have this other student. He is not able to sit and eat in the cafeteria. He's grabbing food from everybody. How can we make this it's a it's a complex problem. It takes, it takes the takes the skill sets of somebody highly trained like an OT is in participation, right? So we can, we can problem solve that with the team that I think would be include. And then there were OTs who talked about, like, here is inequity. My kids do not go to field day. They're just watching Field Day. Field Day is not accessible to my kids. Why are my kids sitting and watching Field Day? Shouldn't they be participating there? Well, they don't participate because none of the games they first of all, they were not invited. We've never invited kids from the self contained classrooms to our field day. Second of all, none of the sped team has been part of the planning. And thirdly, none of the games there are remotely designed with these students in mind. They don't know any of the staff or the kids in the playground, right?
Jayson Davies
The kids do get invited out because of those other two there ends up not being a successful experience, and therefore, next time, they're not invited out.
Savitha Sundar
Absolutely or they end up having behaviors because nothing was done to make it fun for them. They were not even considered in the planning process.
Jayson Davies
Exactly. It's such a hard because, as you're talking, the other thing that I'm thinking about is, well, going back to my example of using a two to two model, except maybe, let's just assume now that I'm using a a pull out model, strictly pull out one time a week, 30 minutes, pull out of the classroom to a degree. I just don't want us to us to let ourselves off the hook in a way. And so I don't want to say, well, all my kids are pull out, but I'm providing inclusive ot services, because my end goal is for them to be included into the classroom, into their general education setting. And so I you kind of alluded this too, I think. But go ahead, like, how do we prevent that?
Savitha Sundar
I think that's a great point you bring up, and we are at risk for this, because, in general, inclusive OT is considered as pushing services. That's the general understanding that we come from. What's inclusive ot practice is that I don't pull the kid out of the LRE, they're in the LRE, and the LRE is the self contained classroom has been predetermined as the self contained classroom, and there's a lot of flaws over there. How many of these students had a fair opportunity with supplementary aids and services, with related services in the general education environment, to try and fail before they were moved into a self contained classroom? They've only known a self contained classroom for many, many years of their lives. Okay? So it's just flawed in the beginning to start with. Okay, so when I say instead of saying inclusive ot practice, I want to say inclusion focused ot practice. So if it is inclusion focused, then the IEP goals are written with that outcome in mind, and you're not pulling a kid out of the classroom because it's convenient for you and because you have to meet your IEP minutes, and therefore this is the only time you can find to see this kiddo, and the only way I can do it is by pulling them out. Then those are not like justifiable reasons to pull a kid out, right? But if I'm say I'm pulling this kid out to go work. With one student in a particular experience, because this kid is the only kid who needs to go to science camp. And I want to have this kid part of the classroom, understanding the general classroom, understanding the science camp requirements. Then I'm pulling this kid out to get a richer experience, you know, for the purpose of them being able to succeed in beating grade level expectations. Yeah, right, so I hope that's clear.
Jayson Davies
Yeah. I mean, this is a complex topic.
Savitha Sundar
It is not easy at all to wrap your head around, but it's a process that we have to think and as a community, come up with ways to address.
Jayson Davies
Absolutely and I think it's also something, and you've mentioned this a few times now, that isn't often mentioned, or if it is mentioned in an IEP, it's more mentioned in the way that I talked about it, where it's just like, Oh, all right, that means the kid's going to be 15% in general education. But IEP teams, I think need to have more conversations about how much the student is included now, but also a year from now. What do we want their program to look like? Five years from now? What do we want their program to look like and start to I don't know is is it out of the question to make an IEP goal related to the percentage of a day that a student is included like that, obviously, is not a traditional goal by any means. I've never written anything like that, but I don't know. Is that out of question.
Savitha Sundar
I would personally put it more in terms of access and participation related, like say this student will be able to depending on where the student hears the student not even going to the cafeteria. Okay, this student is going to be able to have lunch with a peer in the cafeteria for five days of the week, or, like, three days in a week. Or you can say this kid is going to be part of science lessons for will actively participate in at least five of the 10 activities that are provided in science. I mean, I think creatively, we can come up with different goals to increase the access and participation in general education experiences. We can start with where they are already now so they are going to cafeteria. But how meaningful is the inclusion? Like, how do we want them to be right and and once kids know them and understand them, they have friends, then getting them into Gen Ed is not so scary. You know that is true. Their peers will be talking about this friend that they made and like the device that they use. It's so cool. Now I want to see how they use it in the class here. Let me show you how to use they may even explain it to the teacher. This is how you use her device. Let me show you how. So you know, it's just slowly starting from where you can to where you would like to be.
Jayson Davies
Yeah, I have so many follow up questions. I want to be mindful of our time, but I want to ask you, because a lot of therapists have come to me over the years on Instagram everywhere, and said, like, how do I provide services through a push and model without feeling like a paraprofessional? I want to get your take on that, because I have constantly told people on the podcast everywhere, like it's vastly different. The knowledge alone between what we have and a paraprofessional just immediately makes what we're doing different from a paraprofessional. But I want to get your take on how you see that.
Savitha Sundar
Yeah, it is. It is a hard question, because if the school district requires your one on one service, your individual direct services, like in some states, you're not required to say whether it's individual or group. In some states, some districts, you're required to say individual or group or consult. Some of them would just say on a on a range of indirect and indirect services. Some school district districts write it like that.
Jayson Davies
Depends who's been sued, how many times, and for what.
Savitha Sundar
Right, right, right, exactly. So based on that, I think a bigger conversation is for the team to come to terms with understanding how ot services will be provided, understanding that we are writing collaborative goals. Our expertise comes in planning the IEP and brainstorming it, and how are we going to implement that goal when we are not around sometimes you may you may look like a para educator, but you actually know the kid enough to make a meaningful recommendation in the class. Unless you work one on one with this kid, you don't know the dynamics of that process right. Sometimes that's very essential. And you don't want people to assume that you're gonna take this kid and we all walk away because you have this kid and I'm gonna go take a break or work with another student, right? That's another assumption that comes so making all these explicit in the beginning, and just like try our best to explain your role and say, you know, I want. Work with this kid, but, but my bigger goal is that they meet this goal, and I they can't meet this goal only by working with me. They cannot make this skill meaningfully applied in their day to day lives. If it's only me working with this kid, we need to collaborate on this so emphasizing that, you have to say it many, many, many, many, many, many, times to get the team on board with it, so it takes a long time, but don't give up.
Jayson Davies
Yeah, but I think the other part of that is the OT practitioner not feeling comfortable with providing that push in service sitting next to a student and that they internally feel like a paraprofessional at times. And I don't know what your thoughts on, like, how did you overcome that? How did you overcome this idea that you could be successful by pushing into the classroom and working with a student where you didn't have control of the environment, where you didn't have control of the activity, where you didn't have control of all the external things that go on in a classroom, like, how can we actually be successful in that where there's so much quote, unquote chaos because of the classroom.
Savitha Sundar
It is not easy and it's challenging, and the dynamics of the classroom, how welcome do you feel in certain classrooms, versus how annoyed they are that you are there in that Classroom, disrupting their schedule. So Many factors play in, right? So I think it's a case by case basis. I wouldn't say that. I always would push and like, sometimes I just go in and observe this kid in the class, okay? And sometimes I'm more effective by talking to the peer. So this kid doesn't feel like I'm isolating, yeah, her or him to, you know, to to listen to listen to what I'm doing, but I might just do something with the class, with the group, and it takes time to understand the dynamics of the class and to fit in, and sometimes just talk to the teacher. What is the best time for me to come in and be supportive here? And the teacher would say, you know, if you come during this time, that's when I need your help the most, depending on the goal I'm addressing, if I'm working on, say, writing, then I see like this kid is struggling so much to write. Why can't you just send this as a shared Google document, as a PDF, so this kid can work on the same assignment, but they just have to type the answers. They don't have to write it right? So I would not know that unless I'm seeing what activities they're actually doing in the class. So I go in and I observe a science lesson. They're, all they're doing is like separating these different solids, you know, magnetic versus non magnetic pieces. Absolutely. My kids in self contained classrooms can do that right now that I know what you're doing, I can tell you, I'll bring one kid in, make them sit in that classroom. You know, it doesn't even, it shouldn't even be that. But, you know, given our reality, say, I bring this kid in, and then I'm, like, trying to promote, you know, facilitate this activity. I know what is going to be done ahead of time, so I can plan it right once a week. I can do that for sure. And then you see the possibility, and then you're like, Hmm, it's not so bad, after all, we can take our kiddos, and many times the gen ed teacher is afraid, is afraid of our students. They're afraid they will do a disservice by not sending them to a self contained classroom. And that's such a wrong idea. You know, it's not as bad, as difficult as you think it is. These kids are not any more difficult or any less difficult than all kids in general. So that's true. It's just how we approach and when the teacher has a very positive attitude, the other kids follow suit.
Jayson Davies
That that's a great point, and I just want to cap that conversation off and just let everyone know, remind everyone like what I just took away from what you said was that ot in the classroom doesn't have to look like you sitting right next to the student, supporting them, like what you envision a paraprofessional doing, or like what you also envision an occupational therapist or occupational therapy assistant doing, in a pull out model, where typically we are right there with the student, but we can push into the classroom and work with the entire classroom, we can push into.
Savitha Sundar
Just the environment, the occupation, the activity, and the person, all three.
Jayson Davies
Yes, and the social aspect, of course, yeah. I mean, like, yeah. It doesn't have to look like you sitting right next to the kid for 30 minutes like that. I think that's the big takeaway. Absolutely, yeah. Now you started to bring up something that I wanted to address before we wrap up today, and that is the positive impact that inclusion has, not only for the students that we're working with, but the entire school in general. I assume that to be true, and I don't know that I have anything behind me to assume that to be true, but from your perspective, you've done some research. What is your take on that?
Savitha Sundar
So the research evidence we have is kids without disabilities either have a positive impact or no impact when a kid with a disability is in their classroom. That's what we have right now. The best research findings we have is that. That, however, if you were to expand it further from non research perspective, think about disabilities, how important it is that we all understand disabilities. It is the largest minority community in the world, and it's also the community that anyone can enter at any time. You may end up having a child with a disability as an adult, or you may end up being a teacher in a classroom, and you may find out that the student is not the typical kid that you know of. You may end up having an accident and enter into that community, God forbid. I mean the sense you know losing your skill sets is is sad. So given that reality, it's so important that the world that the society recognizes and understands the world of disabilities and how difficult it is for that community to fit into a world that wasn't created for them, and that it is a community effort to make it accessible for them. You if you know your friend, if you know your friend's strengths, if you know what this friend is good at, then you as an adult, can create job opportunities for this kid. It's so important that the gen ed community understands the world of disabilities. If we want our society to be inclusive in the future, then I think a lot of effort has to go into facilitating that in the schools, absolutely.
Jayson Davies
And there's one piece that we haven't addressed yet, and I don't think it's commonly thought of when it comes to inclusive practices, and that's the evaluation piece. And you know, we talked a little bit about earlier, I brought up that question about having a goal related to inclusive practices, but it's I mean, in order to have a goal for something, we really need to be evaluating it. So I want to ask you, how does inclusive practices, or the inclusion of students with extensive needs support work into the evaluation process?
Savitha Sundar
Yeah, so if we want to see changes in how ot services are structured to better support inclusion. We want to start with evaluating that. If our evaluation is addressing fine motor deficits, handwriting deficits, then we are going to address that area. But if you start off with a participation approach where you're looking into their natural routines, how is the kid coming into school? How are they doing what they're required to do. Why cannot they be doing it in a general education environment? How about are we looking into art and music and PE Are we looking into cafeteria experiences in our evaluation? Are we doing more of a natural routine based evaluation and looking into what are the personal challenges? How is how is the participation? Is it satisfactory or not? If it is not satisfactory, where is the biggest challenge? Is it the environment or the person or the occupation? Where can we address what can be addressed to make the best impact? So looking into every routine in their day, bathrooming or recess or dismissal, emergency drills, are we looking into all of those in our evaluation? So if we, if we start evaluating that and then identifying areas of participation needs in those areas inclusive participation needs, then we can also work on addressing those needs. And we don't have to be the only one addressing those needs, just like how handwriting does not have to be ot addressing it, right? And we always say that we are not handwriting teachers, right? And just a sensory is something that we evaluate and we make recommendations for the environment to change. Same thing with all these other areas of participation, yeah, instead of going, like, the top, the bottom up approach that we currently use, but like, what are the sensory behaviors? Oh, is he aversive to, you know, touch? Is the kid sensitive to smells? Are they auditory sensitive? Those are like they are, but then they're doing just fine in the class, you know? So, you know that that becomes, there may be one you just, you just put your focus light on the kid's problem. But if you start off with, like, here, there's no problem. Oh, there is a problem in participation. But the problem is not just in the child, but it's also in the way, yeah, the environment is.
Jayson Davies
So in your evaluations. Then do you try to point out, make it a point to point out the lack of inclusion in this student's education plan. Or do you try to find a way to observe the student in a more inclusive environment?
Savitha Sundar
I wish. I wish I still work within systems. Yes, I know. And I'm literally started this new job in a new district, so I can't come in with my revolutionary ideas and you know, like, hey, look, you're not including kids with extensive support needs. That's where I'm going to be working on. It's not going to happen over. Night.
Jayson Davies
Absolutely. And that's why I'm glad we're having this conversation, because I want to be real, like, exactly.
Savitha Sundar
Right? Yeah, so we start somewhere, right? So I started having this conversation about, how do we look at a participation based evaluation with my team? So we're going to talk about it. Okay, we need to educate our our administrator about the role of OT okay, we need to take that time. We need to put that as goals, and we need to be working on those things. And secondly, do what you can do. Yeah. So I have I work with in a school where the speech therapist and I have a great relationship, and we want to do something to to increase awareness about disability in our school. So we started, we brought it to our principal, and we were like, What do you think of us doing this program for the kids? What if we do these lunch punches? We got the approval next now, like, okay, provided your the curriculum you're proposing is approved by our district. So that's the next step, okay? And I'm just like, less than six months in this new district, so I try, in my little ways, what I can do. They had an opportunity to write a grant to do any programming. The gen ed teacher and I were the sped teacher, the self contained classroom teacher, and I were like, Yeah, let's do a program together. And we wrote up a grant, you know, just little things we can do. And also, just like, I'm going, I'm going, I'm working with this kid on communication. I'm working with her on her written expression, basically, right? So she has a device. My focus is that she's able to do a presentation in her class that is her written expression. So now I'm teaching her how to make slides to do a presentation. So every community, like every Friday, she does a presentation to her class, and she works with me on it the previous the earlier in the week, yeah. So I work with her in the classroom. Sometimes, sometimes I'm going to a quieter spot so we can put it together. And so it's just, it's just looking at that outcome in whatever little ways I can, because systems change will take a long time, but we have to start somewhere and go in the right direction.
Jayson Davies
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And you know, system change too is something that ot practitioners, especially school based ot practitioners, we are not good at measuring that either, and we probably should be. And something that could be measured from an OT department perspective, is what percentage of our students that we support are being included in general education. And that is something that is something that we can start to measure. It doesn't take a lot of you know, it's an extra column on a spreadsheet in our caseload workload document, like it's nothing super out there, and it is something that we can actually use for data to show our administrators. Hey, look, as we're providing these ot services, we're actually helping students to be more included into the general education population, and little things like that can go a long way to getting your administrator support. So absolutely. All right. So Vita, I do want to wrap up our conversation, but before I do, I have to let everybody know about your podcast. OT for inclusive occupations. I had to throw it in there, because you are doing some amazing stuff over there, bringing on individuals, well, occupational therapy practitioners, but also the individuals that the OT practitioners have worked with to really promote inclusive occupations. And so I want to give you just a moment to to I know you probably don't like being on the spot like this. I'm sorry, but I want to give you a second to share with everyone what you're doing on your podcast.
Savitha Sundar
Yeah, I do like different seasons. Like right now I'm doing season four, and the focus of season four is to highlight the stories of young adults with disabilities and their lives and how inclusion played a role or didn't play a role, or what could have happened. How was their experience with it? And I had, I did a series with three students of an OT Dr, Deborah Schwind, and she shared about how her ot interventions were so inclusion focused, you know, the outcome of inclusion, and she helped these students, like the things that she had focused on with these students, along with what the families prioritized, and the team prioritized just their their lived experience of navigating special education and school life into being successful adults they are today, and how ot helped them in the process. And it's such interesting insights that I got from those interviews. And I just today released one episode again, you know, the perspectives of parents being a mother of a child with a disability, and how she became an advocate. She was, she's also a special ed teacher, and ended up becoming, you know, a global advocate, advocate for international like giving the resources and the training for people to support inclusion. So I think their stories are very, very inspiring to me, and I just share it with my community,
Jayson Davies
Absolutely, and and I agree they are totally inspiring just share. Sharing one, I know you had one young lady who you know she ended up being the or she now works in the cafeteria of the school that she went to. And while she was a student at the school, occupational therapy practitioner Deborah worked with her on helping to understand the cafeteria environment, and basically, kind of helped her to work her way into a community based role once she graduated, and now she's working at that school. So.
Savitha Sundar
Why don't we have a place? Yeah, why don't we have a place in high school? Why do our services continue to go down in high school? Because the area we focus is the developmental skills, right? And so we say they've like, maxed out, and others are going to take over our role. You know, sort of thing when, when they go to high school, but the needs are different. In high school, we're looking into job placements, looking into future. What can we identify as the best work opportunity for the student? How can we create the future that's a success for them? You know. So that's a real, great example of how the OT worked with her through high school to give her the real experience of working in as a school cafeteria lady staff.
Jayson Davies
Yeah. And didn't just think about the academic, you know, portion of today, but the life experience necessary for 234, 10 years from now. So 100% Yeah. Well, Savitha, thank you so much for coming on sharing all your insightful knowledge about supporting students with extensive needs, supports. It's it is something that we all struggle with from time to time, and I hope that this conversation will definitely support all those listening and know that there is a way to improve, like we're all struggling with this, and there is no one correct solution, but we can all make small steps toward more inclusive practices.
Savitha Sundar
Yes, it's just helping to row the boat in the right direction. You know, it's a collective effort the school systems are trying to with. The more research coming out, the more we know that we have been doing a disservice all these years, and now is like the how do we do it? So the educational field has a lot of work on that aspect. So what we can do is to support in the right direction and not Row the Boat backwards, right So, and we have so much potential to do that as OTs, I believe. So thank you. Jayson.
Jayson Davies
Well, thank you, and have a great rest of your day, everybody. All right, and that is a wrap on this two part conversation with Dr Savitha Sundar, I want to give a huge thank you to Savitha for coming on the podcast and sharing this knowledge. Savitha put a lot of time and energy into her PhD, and this was her topic, as you might imagine, as she shared, she's really wants to improve our ability as ot practitioners to promote inclusion for all students, especially those with extensive support needs. So at the end of the day, at the end of these two episodes, I hope you're walking away with not just insights into that, but also inspiration and maybe a few ideas to try at your own school, as Savitha really shared there at the end and got real with us. This is not easy. There are a lot of barriers in the way, but if we take one small step at a time, we can make improvements for our students. If this conversation with Dr Sundar really spoke to you and really kind of just re made you think everything you know, as it did for me, I would love for you to take a moment and share it with a colleague or maybe even your administrator team. Let this be with a colleague or maybe even your administrators. Let's keep this conversation going about what it really means to support students with extensive support needs and inclusive, affirming ways. And of course, don't forget to join us at ot schoolhouse.com/join to get weekly updates with tips, research and strategies for school based ot practice. Thanks for tuning in, and I'll see you next time on the OT school house podcast.
Amazing Narrator
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