OTS 189: How switching to a workload model can transform your school-based OT practice
- Jayson Davies
- 16 hours ago
- 35 min read
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Welcome to the show notes for Episode 189 of the OT Schoolhouse Podcast.
Dive into groundbreaking research on the transition from caseload to workload models in school-based OT with Stanbridge University MOT students Jalen, Michelle, Jared, and Ari. Their nationwide survey revealed striking results: practitioners using a workload model reported significantly lower burnout scores compared to those using a caseload model and majority strongly agreeing that the workload approach reduces stress levels.
The students' research identified key barriers to making this transition—primarily lack of administrative support and scheduling conflicts—while highlighting successful facilitators including peer support and improved collaboration with teachers. Their findings emphasize the importance of data collection for advocacy, suggesting that tracking time spent on indirect services provides compelling evidence when approaching administrators about workload changes.
This episode offers practical insights for school-based OTs feeling overwhelmed, with recommendations to start small by tracking weekly time usage and increasing teacher collaboration. Listen now to discover how transitioning to a workload model can transform your practice, reducing burnout while improving service quality and student outcomes.
Listen now to learn the following objectives:
Listeners will compare the impact of caseload versus workload models on therapist burnout, stress levels, and job satisfaction.
Listeners will identify key barriers and facilitators to transitioning from a caseload to workload approach.
Listeners will identify practical strategies for initiating a workload approach.
Guest(s) Bio
Michelle Aquino is a Master of Occupational Therapy student at Stanbridge University in Irvine, with experience as a Behavior Interventionist in a school-based setting. Working with children with diverse needs has sparked her interest in pediatrics. She is passionate about occupational therapy because it allows her to help children build independence and develop essential skills they need to reach their fullest potential in everyday life. After completing the OT program, she plans to specialize in pediatrics in an outpatient or school-based setting.
Quotes
“I’m hopeful for a future where school-based OTs are recognized for the true impact of their work.”
— Michelle Aquino
“Peer support and collaboration make a huge difference for school-based OTs’ satisfaction.”
— Jalen Arcadio
“Administrative support is the key to successfully transitioning from caseload to workload.”
— Ari Aguilos
“Tracking time tells a story administration might not see, and it improves student outcomes.”
— Jared Sarmiento
Resources
Episode Transcript
Expand to view episode transcript
Jayson Davies
Hey there, and welcome to episode 189 of the OT school house podcast. I'm your host, Jayson Davies, and today we have a truly unique episode. Over the last year, I've had the incredible pleasure of advising four master students through their thesis research at stanbridge University. Jalen, Michelle, Jared and Ari together, these four developed their research question, conducted their lit review, formed their hypothesis, developed a survey, and completed their data collection and analysis, all about using a caseload and workload approach. In fact, you may have even helped them with a survey response when I sent that out in an email a few months ago. Now, what makes this especially exciting is watching these students transform from virtually knowing nothing about school based occupational therapy to now deeply understanding the challenges of traditional case load approaches in the schools and maybe why we need to move to a workload approach. Now that they're done with this project, they are currently headed off to their level two fieldworks and are on track to join the OT workforce early next year. Congratulations, guys. I know you're listening to this, and couldn't be more proud of you. Now their research that we are discussing today examines, as I mentioned, caseloads and workloads, and this is a topic that every school based ot practitioner is impacted by every single day. So what we're going to talk about is the transition from one to the other, from a caseload to a workload approach, and how that impacts burnout, effectiveness and even student outcomes. So if you've ever felt overwhelmed by your caseload or struggled with documentation time, or even wondered if there is a better way to structure your services. This episode is essential listening. We'll explore what the research shows about therapist burnout rates, quality of intervention, and even the key barriers and facilitators to making this important transition from a caseload to a workload model. I'm so happy that these four have decided to distribute what they've learned through the OT schoolhouse podcast, and it is truly a pleasure to have them join me for this chat. Let's go ahead and get started.
Amazing Narrator
Hello and welcome to the OT schoolhouse podcast, your source for school based occupational therapy tips, interviews and professional development. Now to get the conversation started, here is your host, Jayson Davies. Class is officially in session.
Jayson Davies
Jalen, Jared, Ari, Michelle, welcome to the OT school house podcast. It is a pleasure to have you here. We've all been working together for about nine months, maybe, gosh, close to a year now, but it's all come to this. We are recording a podcast together. We're going to share what your findings are and kind of the research that you went about to determine a little bit about caseloads and workloads, I don't want to get ahead of myself. I'm going to let you all talk about that, but let's get started. Jalen, how you doing today?
Jalen Arcadio
I'm doing great. Thank you for asking. I hope you guys are all doing well. We're in break, but
Michelle Aquino
living life, you know?
Jayson Davies
Yeah, absolutely. And if I may, what made you decide that you wanted to get into occupational therapy?
Jalen Arcadio
I honestly joined for the sole purpose of knowing that you're helping people always, and it's a great way to expand your compassion and like being just passionate for helping others
Jayson Davies
very cool. And Jared, how you doing?
Jared Sarmiento
Doing good, doing good. Very excited to be here. Awesome.
Jayson Davies
And why don't you share a little bit about the program that you're in and the entire group is in and how you're doing?
Jared Sarmiento
Yes, so we're all masters of occupational therapy students at stanbridge University out in Irvine, what's called, we only got about a little, oh, actually, a little over, oh, under a year now, so, but I stepped into our level two field work very excited about us, kind of get, like, our real first hand experience, and, you know, just the maze, you know, it's come down to this point. A lot of schooling this last full year. Very intense, a lot of work. But, you know, kind of excited to see it come into mutation, whatnot. Kind of get that feel what it feels like to be an OT, you know,
Jayson Davies
it'll be here soon. It'll be here very soon. And Ari, welcome to the podcast. What made you decide to pursue occupational therapy?
Ari Aguilos
Hi, yes, thanks for having me. I'm Ari. I think just like Occupational Therapy and Occupational Science is so valuable. And after shadowing a bunch of different health related fields, I just knew that ot was, for me, fantastic.
Jayson Davies
And Michelle, same question to you.
Michelle Aquino
Hi, I'm Michelle. I think the one thing that really helped me learn that occupational is for me was from watching the school based OTs that I was working under while I was a bi at school district. And I really just sparked a career. Capacity in me.
Jayson Davies
Awesome. And now here you are completing what ultimately is a school based occupational therapy type of project. So awesome. Kind of full circle here. So well, let's go ahead and dive into it. We're talking about cases and workloads within this episode. And I'm going to come over to you, Ari, and I want to ask you that, why do you think that this was important? Why was it important for us to look at cases and workloads, and why was this worth looking into in terms of research?
Ari Aguilos
Yes, ultimately, we had a great opportunity to study the practitioners themselves, and I feel like they're especially during our initial review, we couldn't find any or little to none of research on OTs themselves when it comes to work life balance, when it comes to burnout of the actual practitioners. So what we got to do was answer some of those gaps of knowledge, figure out even more things that could be researched and very generalizable to not just school based OTs, which is a very important role nationwide, but for all, for the all, the whole field of OT awesome.
Jayson Davies
And I kind of want to let anyone respond to this one, because Ari did bring something up, is that sometimes you find research related to other areas, but not what you're looking for. And so for any of you, because all of you had to partake in the lit review, was there something that was there a moment where you remember kind of being frustrated because of the lack of research that you were, you know, looking for, and what you were able to find? And kind of like, that's just what did it feel like? But what were just share that experience, I guess, anyone want to dive into
Jared Sarmiento
that definitely, kind of researching the difference between workload versus caseload was very hard. You know, we had a we'd maybe find like, one or two articles, and then we kind of have to, like, see, like, what they were referencing, just to kind of get like, a better gage when determining the difference. The big difference between workload versus caseload definitely saw a lot for like the realm of for like speech therapy, but it was very limited when it came to the field of occupational therapy and kind of like what the main differences are, especially for school based OTs. It was a lot. It was hard, but kind of have to work with what you get, you know, saying absolutely.
Jayson Davies
And just kind of a quick follow up to that, was it difficult to find research specific to school based as opposed to, more generally, about pediatric therapy as a whole?
Ari Aguilos
Yes, we had some leading sources for our, like, initial research, which we had to follow their sources and dig deeper into that, but it was very limited. And like, we basically had to start from like, we had to understand school based practitioners from from, like, as students, we don't know what their life is like, so we had to, essentially, like, understand that first before even developing our research. So I think we had an extra challenge when it came to even beginning to research and finding that there wasn't a lot out
Jayson Davies
there. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And as you pointed out, right? You're you're all current occupational therapy students. It's not like you've been in the field. It's not like you've even determined exactly what field within occupational therapy you want to go into. And so I know Michelle mentioned, right? She's worked in a school based setting, not as an OT, but for the rest of you, I don't think you really even had an understanding of school basis, so you kind of had to learn that part before you could even do the literature review process itself. And I know that was a learning process as well. All right. Jared, for listeners who may not be as familiar, briefly explain the difference between a case load model and a workload model and why that matters so much.
Jared Sarmiento
Yeah, so for a caseload model, basically the practitioner, their work measure is measured based on the amount of students that they see overall. So for example, they may have 50 students on a caseload, and that kind of determines, like the schedule. They're basically responsible for seeing that at those 50 students within a certain timeframe, whether the week or the month, and then, whereas, for the workload model, it kind of measures the overall work that the practitioner is doing. In total, this can be both direct and indirect services. So both seeing the students you know, doing interventions with them, maybe even doing assessments. And it's kind of like the things outside of just meeting with the students. So for example, documentation, collab, collaborative meetings with the teachers, maybe even the students, families, IEP meetings. And for the workload model, it kind of distributes their time accordingly, rather than just by the measure of how many kids they see. And it kind of matters. It's very. Strong because, you know, a lot of schools traditionally are utilizing just seeing a practitioners work overall, by the amount of students that they oversee, but what they're not accounting for is the hours and time that practitioners have to put on or just outside of everything, kind of like those indirect services, and it kind of leads to a lot of burnout inconsistent, inconsistent types or service deliveries, and ultimately unrealistic expectations.
Jayson Davies
Yeah, and I think that kind of like summarizes the lit review. You guys broke down the lit review into a few different themes. And I think that kind of is the overarching themes from the lit review. So once you kind of had a little bit of background within the realm of school based ot looking at the research, kind of what's already out there. Jaylen, I want to come to you, because once you have that information, what was the way to move forward, what was the main purpose of the study, and what were you trying to or hoping to discover about school based ot practitioners within a workload approach.
Jalen Arcadio
So yeah, like what Jared was saying, we wanted to expand on the school based OTs and how they were experiencing a workload model. But with that, we had to do a survey with Google, Google Sheets. We conducted a state like a nationwide survey to see the transition from caseload to a workload model, and we just wanted to discover and understand their experience and real world impact, like a burnout and work life balance interprofessional collaboration And just the quality that the students were receiving from the OTs, awesome.
Jayson Davies
And then there was also a second kind of theme that we wanted to discover too. And we split that survey up a little bit, but I want to give you that opportunity to kind of like to address the second part of the research. What was that second part that we really wanted to understand when it came to therapists who maybe had made the transition from a case of Joe workload approach,
Jalen Arcadio
we wanted to see, like, how effective it really was. So we wanted to see what types of experiences they were dealing with in terms of, like advocating for this specific case our workload model and how they wanted to be a front line for the students, because at the end of the day, they weren't getting the support from their peers, and it from the survey that we got. It was mostly just their ot peers who were also just supporting them.
Jayson Davies
Yeah, and we'll get more into all the details, because ot peers were important, a few other players I know we'll be addressing in just a little bit. Ari, I'd love to give you a chance to kind of dive a little bit more into how we designed the research, how we how we built that Google form up to get the data that we wanted. Go ahead. Yeah.
Ari Aguilos
So for the Google Sheets survey, we knew that Google Sheets is really accessible, so we knew we automatically just wanted to do Google Sheets now we would do email snowballing, but for the actual content of the survey, we had developed aims such as, like, if they have experienced the caseload, what's their experience with a work, or if they experience a workload, and what's their experience with it? And then the second part was, were they there at their site when they transitioned from a caseload to a workload approach, and what was that experience like? So with that like, we got to do, like a qualitative like we did, Likert scale questions mostly, and then open ended questions, basically aiming to explore those themes. Yeah.
Jayson Davies
And really briefly, can you just share what the criteria was to be a participant, or the criteria to not be a participant. Was, you don't need to read a verbatim but just in general,
Ari Aguilos
yes, essentially, our inclusion criteria was you had to be a school based occupational therapist currently working, and you had to have some experience with the workload model. And opposite to that, the exclusion criteria is if you were retired, s, B, OT,
Jayson Davies
All right, awesome. So we understand we use a Google survey. We had some electric questions, we had some open responses, and then we had school based ot practitioners, non retired who had some workload experience. Now, Google Surveys are great in the sense that they give you these nice clean graphs for the questions that create nice, clean graphs, you know, the yes or no questions, the Likert scale, but when you have open ended questions, that gets a little complicated. So as you all were planning to have these open ended questions, and knowing that we were going to aim for, you know, 100 a few 100 different responses. Is, what was the plan for actually analyzing that data?
Ari Aguilos
I can take that question, so when it came to the open ended questions, and knowing that we would have to sift through a lot of responses, we basically, as a group, wanted to use artificial intelligence AI to do the to use it as an organizational tool to do the initial coding phase and to basically speed up the process of doing the thematic analysis and coding. And it really allowed us to organize the themes faster, kind of, yeah, can I leave it there?
Jayson Davies
You can continue on. So what were the benefits of AI, and how did you use it as a tool to support you?
Ari Aguilos
Well, the benefits of AI is that it was it's really simple to use. I feel like past research tools that we've used in practice, like deduce it was very convoluted. Takes a lot of time versus the versus the model that we used. It was able to be replicated. It's able to be like the output was way faster for us as a group to what's the word I'm looking for, essentially, like
Jayson Davies
to sift through and then determine if it's accurate. Yes. Okay, and you mentioned using AI. What specifically did you use AI? Because some people might listen to this and say, Oh, you just went on to Gemini, or you just went on to chat GBT and and dropped your spreadsheet into there and got some responses. Was it that simple? Or did you do some research into how to use AI to do this?
Ari Aguilos
Yes, we definitely did some research on how to use AI as a tool so that it didn't replace us as researchers. We wanted to essentially figure out, how would it replace the coding phase, just the coding phase. So that way, once we get all our responses, we basically looked for we did like our own research, and looked for like what researchers are currently using AI to do in their research, and we basically replicated what they did. So then that means that they use a specific, a specific tool that can be accessed afterwards. It means that you can double, you can double check, like if the responses are true to what the AI is outputting. It's essentially like, again, not replacing the researchers, but using it as a tool for us, just speeding up the process. And, yeah, we found a few articles that, like Cambridge was playing around with, like, certain AI models, and that's we use that as a guideline, essentially in our research,
Jayson Davies
awesome, and obviously it helps save time with that theme development. This will be an open question for anyone, did the AI at all make things more difficult? Did you get ever get frustrated with the AI at all? Or was it pretty straightforward?
Michelle Aquino
I feel that overall, it was a pretty straightforward process. I feel like it it got us to really think about what to really focus on and what to eliminate.
Jayson Davies
Okay, and was it able to provide you? Obviously, it provided themes, but was it able to help you better understand the, I guess, to a degree, the voice of the therapist? Did it just provide you? Hey, these are the overarching themes, or did it help to provide you additional information to support your research project?
Ari Aguilos
I would say the original quotes from the responses are always like the best and painted the best picture of what they are experiencing. And AI, honestly, just put it into it helped us put it into other words, but it necessarily didn't capture like what they originally said. So that was a limitation. I would say that AI, we would, we would always look out for
Jayson Davies
awesome Ari. I do want to give you one more thing to kind of discuss, and that is the second half of the survey. A little bit. What was that? How did we filter people and how to what was the purpose of the second half of the survey?
Ari Aguilos
The second half of the survey was to get the experience of transitioning to a workload model, because it's an emerging model, not of not a lot of school based occupation yoga therapists have experienced it. So we wanted to see the ones that have experienced it. What facilitators led to that change. So was it administration support? Was it team collaboration? And through a series of Likert scale questions and open ended questions, we were able to get more insight into that experience, just that, like transitioning part or if they were there. Four after the transition of going from a caseload to a workload approach.
Jayson Davies
Yeah, and Jared, I want to come to you really quickly, because we had this actually became something of a we got a little confused at times during writing this thesis about the number of people that we actually had partake in our project, and we were hoping to get somewhere around 300 because of this, like 1% number of school based ot practitioners that we think are represented, but we ended up having two people, 200 I believe it was kind of click over to the survey, and then significantly less actually take the survey. So I want to give you a moment to kind of address that, yeah.
Jared Sarmiento
So kind of like you said, So we initially, you know, we're aiming for 300 hoping, like that was going to be our set number. When we got 200 responses, we're like, okay, like this is pointing in a good direction. And then once we excluded those who said that they had no experience with the workload approach, it only brought it down to like, 114 and then by that time, we're just like, Oh, man. Like, so it kind of showed us like, wow. Like, there's really not a lot of school based therapists out there who really have true experience with the workload approach. And then even just when it went down to have you made that transition, it cut the number in half again. So I think it was only like, what it was only was, only between 75 to 80. So it kind of left like little room. I mean, it helped understand a good perspective. But, you know, we want, we were hoping that we would have a big, big number, so we understood, like, you know, what is working for people to make that effective transition from a case load to a workload approach. So at that point we're kind of like, man, like, it was very eye opening, I would say, very humbling, you know, that way. And it kind of gave us more of that purpose to, like, really produce a really good paper so we could help future school based OTs for the future and whatnot.
Jayson Davies
And based upon that big gap, you know, the 200 104 200 114 that can continue on, and then even the 75 or so that went on to the second half of the survey, based upon that, have, have any of you given any thought to like, if we redid it, would we do it a little bit differently? Or do you feel like we got what we're aiming for?
Jared Sarmiento
Um, personally, I feel like at the end of the day, we kind of got what we were aiming for. I mean, yeah, we would like to obviously see more get, kind of get more perspectives, but that kind of just attributes and shows like how emerging this model is and how there has to be further on research to really, kind of like, understand and helping making the making, help people make that successful transition. You know, it kind of just adds to, like, what we talk about, the literature and the background. It's just, it's very new, but, you know, hoping that it could be the start for kind of, like a big movement, for people to really make that effective change and whatnot.
Jayson Davies
Perfectly Wrapped up. All right, we're going to take a quick break, and we when we come back, we're going to discuss the key findings of the research, as well as how we can translate this research into practice. So stay tuned. All right, we are back, and we are going to start things off with Michelle right now and Michelle, what were some of the biggest takeaways or themes that started to emerge from both the qualitative and quantitative data?
Michelle Aquino
Hi, yes. So for the biggest takeaways and themes that we've noticed throughout our data was there were a lot of barriers when it came to transitioning from a caseload to a workload. A lot of the staff and administration had a lot of trouble trying to change into the workload model. They're pretty resistant with how they wanted to change. They were so used to the caseload model that they didn't really see how a workload model could improve their their overall satisfaction.
Jayson Davies
Okay, so difficulty transitioning from caseload to workload. What were some of the others?
Michelle Aquino
Another other findings was a lot of the therapists noticed that they had a better satisfaction when it came to transitioning to a workload. It they felt a lot more balanced. They felt like they could increase more quality of care. And it was also like very satisfactory towards the clients as well.
Jayson Davies
Yeah, I remember seeing the chart that you all put together when you came back for one of our one of our sessions, and it was like we had asked, I think it was a four point Likert scale, maybe five point Likert scale. And those who felt effective, basically on a caseload model, were like, at a two, two and a half. And those who felt effective on a workload model was closer to four. I mean, that's a pretty significant jump of just feeling effective like, you know, it sucks to work in a job and not feel like you're effective like, just no one likes that feeling. So that's a really cool insight, that just simply switching from a caseload to a workload model can make someone feel more effective. What about collaboration? Do we have any results related to like being able to work alongside teacher, peers and others?
Michelle Aquino
We did have some, some results on that as well for collaboration, from transitioning from a caseload to workload, the collaboration was a lot more improved. It felt like it was better for the OTs to feel like they had time to actually work with the students rather than just doing it and like it was. It didn't really matter what they did, they just like it felt a lot more like they had time to actually focus on the child itself.
Jayson Davies
Gotcha, Jared, we also wanted to look a little bit about burnout and stress. How did the workload approach impact burnout and stress compared to a traditional caseload model? Yeah.
Jared Sarmiento
So we kind of first started off by asking the and the question to the practitioner, like, what type of service delivery model are you using currently in this point in time? And then we followed up with the Likert scale question of how much burnout they feel overall. A score of one meant that they felt little to no burnout, while a max score of five reported reports feelings of high burnout. And you know, based on the 114 participants, those who are currently using a case load model reported an average score of four out of five on the burnout scale, while those who are using a workload service delivery model, or from the past reported an average score of 2.1 so you kind of see like that really big difference in how, how a workload model can lead to less burnout, less job satisfaction overall. And then we also kind of did a follow up question of comparing stress levels between using a workload versus a case load model. Score of one would mean that the practitioner is disagreeing the workload model doesn't play a factor into stress, while score of five reports that they agree highly that the workload model reduces stress, and at least 60% of the practitioners who answer that question reported a score of four or five indicating that they strongly agree that A workload model definitely plays a major factor in reducing stress levels for them.
Jayson Davies
Absolutely, all right. And Jalen, coming to you with this question, Michelle spoke a little bit to the idea that it was hard to transition from a caseload to a workload model. But what were some of the specific barriers that we found when asking therapists about the difficulties shifting?
Jalen Arcadio
The common barriers we really face were like that we were seeing were lack of administrative support, the scheduling conflicts, team collaboration, and I feel like that that's what separated a lot of the workload model to the caseload, was the amount of support from their peers, like I said earlier today. And it's just one of those where if that district or school doesn't see the vision, then it's it's hard to kind of manage and like, go through.
Jayson Davies
Yeah, one question I was really happy that you all added to the survey was that we didn't just look at the barriers, but we also asked them about the facilitators. Like, what was it that actually made it easier to transition from a caseload to a workload approach? And Jaylen, if you want to start in, if anyone wants to add, what were some of the what were some of the comments that ot practitioners who had succeeded moving to a workload approach, what were, what were their thoughts of what helped them?
Jalen Arcadio
What helped them that I was like seeing and from reading, from the surveys, was the amount of peer support that that's what I was reading. They were saying a bunch of things like, Oh yeah, I tried pushing for it, but some of my peers was seeing like that type of idea, so that they were trying to help push that back too. It was just like the upper administrative that just doesn't see it. And that's what kind of like led them to either staying to the caseload and not transitioning.
Jayson Davies
So it really took the OT practitioners to work as a team all get on board before the administrators would get on board to a degree. Does that sound about right?
Jalen Arcadio
Yeah, and it's also like quality, like if the students aren't getting the. Same treatment anymore are the same quality because their OTs are dealing with scheduling conflicts, or they're just too busy prioritizing one student and they have to go to the next one and have that cut short. It's just poor quality at that point, and it's leading to the rest of the barriers, like burnout and all that.
Jayson Davies
Was, and I don't know the answer to this one, but was there any responses that anyone recalls where it was actually everyone thought something was broken in relationship to the impact that therapists were having on students that ultimately led to administration and the OT team deciding, hey, we need to change something because OTs not working. Maybe if we use a workload approach, services will be more impactful and more effective. Does anyone recall saying that?
Ari Aguilos
Yeah, I can answer that. So when we asked them what was successful in transitioning, about 20% 23% said that it was administrative support that essentially supported their transition. So like with that, that means that OTs were like initiated, but the administration helped support that change, and from there, they also rated that their perceived client satisfaction improved, or like their perceived like outcomes improved.
Jayson Davies
So yeah, no, I completely hear that. And that's like, what's awesome that we're able to say that there is improvement beyond or once you move to the workload approach, I guess kind of the question is, and I don't know if there was actually data, and this isn't something that we've talked about in one of our meetings before, but I don't know that we had any particular maybe we can go back and look at the data another time, but I don't know if we had, like, Just even one occupational therapist or one participant say, we took data and we found out that our OT services weren't effective, and so we knew that there needed to be a change and like because ultimately, that's what I would love to see. I would love to see an OT department at a school look internally and say, hey, you know what, only 20% or 25% of our kids are meeting their goals, something's got to change. We need to improve ourselves and make a decision based upon that, how they want to improve, because ultimately, things don't typically change unless there is a reason to change. And we've seen with the Surya and Garfinkel research in the past that ot practitioners tend to prefer the case or the workload model versus the caseload model. Our data is basically showing that the same type of things right and that a workload model can be more efficient and less burnout, less stressful than a caseload model. But I feel like administrators really to get on board. And I don't know if any of you heard how OTs got their administrators on board, but I feel like to get administrators on board, they really need something to be they need to see something broken, data to say something broken in order to make that transition. I don't know if anyone has comments based upon what I was just saying.
Ari Aguilos
Other than that, we agree that there's a lot of systemic change that needs to be made.
Jayson Davies
Was that was that addressed? Was systemic change a term used in our survey responses, or something similar?
Ari Aguilos
It was something similar. It was what we found like in our lit review, but that wasn't the focus of the survey.
Jayson Davies
Yeah. Okay, we'll move on here. All right, so we've got our key results right. We know that we need support. We know that we need to work as a team. We know that ot practitioners feel the benefits of using a workload model as opposed to a caseload model. But we also know from that gap, you know, 200 people who wanted to take the survey, versus only 114 who had the workload experience to actually take the survey. That that this large gap of people that aren't using a workload model. So Michelle for school based ot practitioners listening right now and they feel overwhelmed by their caseload, what's one small step that they can take toward transitioning to that workload approach?
Michelle Aquino
Yes, so I feel like my for my recommendation by starting small, such as, like, tracking how you're spending your week, trying to make time to collaborate with the teachers making that time into your schedule, I feel like that's a step that could could help you transition to a workload model. Just by that small step of like, trying to track your time and how you're using your time can really help a lot.
Jayson Davies
Yeah, absolutely, as we were just kind of talking about, you've got to have some sort of data to show your administrator that things aren't worth. In, and one thing to track is your time. Some ot practitioners, very few. We track individual student goals, but we don't track our ability support our to support our entire, our entire client caseload. You know, we're not looking at, you know, I have 50 kids, and 85% of them met their goals. That sounds pretty good. But maybe that's another thing that we can look at, is overall goal attainment scaling for our entire program, not just, not just an individual student by student basis. And Ari, what role we talked a little bit about administrators, but what role did administrators play in successful transitions? And how can ot practitioners advocate more effectively to their leadership, to adopt this approach.
Ari Aguilos
So it seemed that administrative support was like one of the leading reasons why there was a successful transition. I would say what that means for those that haven't experienced the workload approach. I feel like, unfortunately, it's up to the school based ot to like, have that open communication, have that if you're able to express your needs, express like, like you said, the data that the system that they're currently using isn't effective towards the students. Ultimately, you want to advocate for the student and their outcomes. So when it comes to speaking to administration, you want to have that information, have that information forward approach when it comes to advocating for yourself and the student.
Jayson Davies
Yeah, absolutely. And Jared, how can workload data, like time studies, documentation of indirect services, things like that, how can they help us to make the case for better staffing and for student outcomes?
Jared Sarmiento
Yes, I can say it's definitely, you know, tracking, workload data tracking, it could definitely be like a power tool, like we said, to like, advocate for themselves and kind of like what they need in order to be successful as a practitioner. You know, by tracking their time and trying to gage of like, how long their indirect services take, it definitely tells a story that the administrative side might not be able to see. You know, if the practitioner goes to the administration and goes, I'm overwhelmed, that's going to be different than them telling them, than the practitioner telling them, oh, I spend 12 hours a week in meetings. I spend 10 hours a week in documentation. Maybe I spend three hours a week also in maybe driving back and forth between, you know, different students or whatnot. You know, overall, that tells a very different narrative, and it kind of kind of leaves room for the administration to kind of get that different perspective, like, Okay, this is what the practitioner needs in order to be successful. Maybe that could be more staff and overall, like that can lead to just better student outcomes, you know?
Jayson Davies
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. As we start to wrap up here, I'm going to ask each of you two questions. I want to I want to hear from, from each of you. The first is looking back as researchers. What's one thing that this study taught each of you about the future of school based OT and what gives you hope for the profession moving forward? I'll go ahead and throw this over to Jared.
Jared Sarmiento
I would say this project Well, overall, it took it taught me a lot, or kind of just taught me, like, the basis of, like, what school based ot really is, because I've heard about occupational therapists being in schools, but I never understood, like, you know, is it them doing their own one on one sessions? Are they in the classroom? So it kind of gave me a better sense of, like, what their goal is, especially in terms of making them successful for their academic career. And I think that biggest thing, like say, like, I'm hopeful for the future school based OTs, kind of like them being recognized, of the impact that they're making for these students to know, I think that's like the biggest thing that's kind of undervalued, and more, the more people I told about my topic or our topic of our thesis, and they went, wow. They're like, Yeah, you know. And there's some people I even met. They're like, you know, I worked with the their a school based ot when I was in school, and if it wasn't for them, I wouldn't have been successful. And I was like, wow. Like, kind of just to understand how big, kind of, like we said that, how big of an impact that they can truly make in terms of student success, you know, their ability, also maybe even their confidence.
Jayson Davies
Yeah, yeah. It's, it's kind of funny you say that because, you know, not everyone goes bragging that they got school based occupational therapy services or school based speech services or anything like that, but we do have an impact on on a substantial amount of the population. Absolutely. Michelle, what about you? What's one thing that this study kind of taught you, especially since you have a little bit of experience within the school realm, what did it teach you about school based? OT, in the future of school based.
Michelle Aquino
for this research, I feel like it taught me a lot. Lot about the differences between how to approach your workload in a more balanced way. Before this, I had no idea that a caseload versus a workload was a thing. I was I was really confused. I remember when I was working with the school based OTs. I did remember them talking about how they would feel so burnt out about having to drive from one school to another. And I feel like for the future of OTs and school based, I feel like there's a more balanced approach uphold and it will be a lot easier to to work under.
Jayson Davies
Yeah, absolutely. And Jaylen, what about you? What's, what's one thing that you know you learned throughout this research about school based occupational therapy?
Jalen Arcadio
To be honest, though, I I didn't have any clue on school based ot to get this whole thing started, like I, I was a coach for a basketball team in high school, and I thought that's those are the extracurriculars, besides teachers and like coaches for sports. But I didn't really understand that there was a whole section for OTs in schools, so that was eye opening for me, and that I learned a lot because I didn't really understand the whole concept until this research.
Jayson Davies
Gotcha. Yeah, yeah, you don't know what you don't know. You don't even know who all is on campus. And a lot of us, we all go through public school about eight, no, not quite 18 years of it, 16, no, not even that. 13 years at least. And we don't even know. Wow, I cannot do math in my head right now. So, yeah, you know you don't know what you don't know. All right, what about you? What's one thing that this study really taught you about school based OT, and maybe the future of school based OT?
Ari Aguilos
I feel like what it taught me is OT. School Based OT is very much in demand in schools, but it's also undervalued a lot of kids, special needs, kids that I've worked with, I see that they would get a lot of value from OT, but even the teachers like they don't necessarily know what OT is. So it makes me hopeful to know that there is a great number of great number of people nationwide that care about school based OTs and that there's a lot of research that can be developed and further looked into, just for everyone in the school system.
Jayson Davies
I felt like that would have been a perfect way to end this podcast, but I have one more question for you all, and that is here. I love that answer, by the way, all right, but if you had unlimited resources available to you now, you just completed this research, you've got information from this research, and you had unlimited resources, time, energy, money, maybe, you know, let's just call it like you're going to go get your PhD in OT, and you're just like, driven by this study and you want to continue this on, what would you want to follow this study up with for another study? What would you want to look into that maybe we weren't able to look into? Or what? What would you want to look into now, knowing what you know about caseloads and workloads, it doesn't have to be a survey. It can be a survey. But maybe you're going into the classrooms. Maybe you're having direct interviews with people. What would you want to do?
Ari Aguilos
I feel like if we had unlimited resources, the ultimate question that we would want to give OTs was, how much is this really costing them, and how much it's really costing administration, as we talk a lot about being information driven, being data driven when it comes to transitioning to from a caseload to a workload, and that, like, ultimately, if we give them the right numbers of saying, like, this is how much it's costing this how much it could save you, I feel like that's a big question that would take a lot of time and money and effort to answer.
Jayson Davies
Yeah, definitely something that the OT practitioners, we often either ignore or don't want to ask, but it's definitely something that administrators, principals, and even at the district level, they're always thinking about money, and so giving them a sense of if it's beneficial financially, could could do wonders. Yeah, Jared, go ahead.
Jared Sarmiento
Oh, yeah. I mean, my answer was pretty much the same. I felt like that was a very common theme that we recognized within our research was, you know, like we said, the hardest, the biggest barrier, was administrative support. But on the other side, for people who had that successful transition, was the facilitator, was the administrative support. So kind of want to understand, like, from the administration side, like, what may prevent you from making that effective transition for the practitioner, you know, like, what's the constraints? Because at the end of the day, there's stuff from a ot side that we don't understand, you know, for them. So it's also, and that's why I talk about kind of like, it has to be a collab. Generation between OT and the administration to kind of find a way that they can like gage and like me in the middle, you know, all right,
Jayson Davies
Michelle, I'm going to come to you in just a second.
Michelle Aquino
I'm going to think back on Jared as well. I feel like there needs to be a lot more research on administrative support. I feel like we didn't really get to see that much while we were collecting data. No, not data itself, but more art research articles on on that topic. So I feel like that would be really important.
Jayson Davies
Yeah, and that was something that I know you all had to do. We talked a little bit about the difficulty finding literature at the beginning, but I know that something I had to tell you all very much upfront was you might have to get outside of the OT literature, and I know you all had to kind of go out into education literature, and you had to go out into like, speech therapy literature to see kind of what they're doing. So yeah, it would be fun to kind of get more insights from the administrators, as I think it was Jared alluded to, like the biggest category for success and the biggest category for failure was administrative support, one way or the other. But what, what constitutes as administrator support for one person might be different for another person. So what? What does administrative support actually look like? All right? And Jaylen, why don't you wrap us up with what, what study you would like to look into with all the information that you now have about our study?
Jalen Arcadio
I'm gonna kind of swerve off to the same section that they've been going off, but I kind of want to see the use of AI in all of this. I kind of want to see the growth of AI being actually used the right way. And this is a great start. If we had unlimited resources, it'd be a great start to try and implement AI into the transition and see how we can show them that it's useful. Because in our research tool, we used it and it was, we used it like properly, and it was a great it shortened a lot of stress and, like, time. So that that was one thing I kind of want to dig deeper on. If there is a tool for all this.
Jayson Davies
Yeah, yeah, and and OT practitioners want a tool that is specific to school based ot from Ai, we've seen that. We've heard that from school based ot practitioners as well, and it's interesting because there's a fear and there's a love for AI, there's a fear for AI, there's ethical concerns related to AI, and we all want to use AI to make our lives easier, but you know, as you mentioned, we need to figure out the right way to do it, and we also need to do it in a way that actually saves us time, not creates more kind of wasteful time spent on trying to use AI when actually it would have been just quicker to write the note on our own, like the way that we usually do it. So, yeah, studying AI and school based ot would be a really, really good one as well. Personally, I would love to kind of dive further into that, that impact on students. You know, I would love to be able to look at maybe a historical review and find 10 therapists to use the caseload model last year and see if their students met their goals, and then two years ahead, if they use a workload approach, or different 10 therapists who are using a workload workload approach and see if their students are meeting their goals. And I don't have the know how to make that possible, but it would be a lot of fun to somehow figure that out, to be able to hopefully maybe show that using a case or using a workload model is not just easier potentially for the therapist, but also more effective for the students that they serve. So yeah, all right. Well, I want to thank you all so much for being here. Jared, Ari, Jaylen, Michelle, thank you all for spending the last nine months or so with me and then this hour or so on the OT school house podcast. Really appreciate it. Congratulations again on wrapping up, and hopefully right around the time this episode is coming out, we get to find out if you'll get to present your information in Anaheim at a ot a best of luck.
Jared Sarmiento
Stay tuned. Thank you. Thank you.
Jalen Arcadio
Thank you.
Michelle Aquino
Thank you so much.
Jayson Davies
And that wraps up episode 189 of the OT school house podcast. I want to extend my sincere thanks to Jalen, Michelle, Jared and Ari for sharing their incredible research on caseload versus workload models, as I mentioned earlier, watching these students grow from having little knowledge of school based ot to conducting meaningful research has been truly rewarding. Their insights into how this transition can help us to reduce burnout, improve service quality and enhance collaboration are truly valuable for our field, and I want to thank them for taking this kind of passion project of mine on Be sure to check out the show notes at OTSchoolHouse.com. Slash episode. 189 where you can view their research poster and dive deeper into their findings. Also, if you're feeling inspired to explore a workload approach in your practice, remember that small steps like tracking your time can make a big difference, and you don't have to make this journey alone. For continued support resources and professional development on topics just like this one, I invite you to join us in the OT squash collaborative. There you'll find a community of school based ot practitioners, as well as our comprehensive caseload to workload workshop designed specifically to support ot practitioners like you make this transition. Additional resources on workload models are also inside of the collaborative, and we would love to have you join, and we would love to support you in your transition from a caseload to a workload model. Head over to OTs schoolhouse.com/collab to learn more about that community and more about the caseload. Course, one more time. Thank you so much for listening, and I'll catch you in the next episode of the OT schoolhouse podcast.
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.
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