OTS 96-99: OT Month Special: ABCs of School-Based OT

Welcome to the show notes for Episodes 96-99 of the OT Schoolhouse Podcast.

Happy OT Month!

To celebrate, the #ABCsofOT are taking over the OT Schoolhouse Podcast for the month of April. More specifically, we are taking on the ABCs of School-Based OT

In this first episode of a four-part series, we will be expanding on the letters A-F and how they relate to school-based OT. Over the next four weeks, we will cover the entire alphabet and share some terms, concepts, and ideas related to school-based Occupational Therapy.

Episode 96: A-F

Episode 97: G - M

Episode 98: N - T

Episode 99: U-Z

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Show References:

• The A-Z School-Based OT Course

  • The course for all OT practitioners looking to better understand school-based OT.

• The OT Schoolhouse: Back To School Conference

  • The online conference for school-based OTs. Earn 12 hours of professional development and get the education you have come to appreciate from Jayson and the OT Schoolhouse. Learn more at otschoolhouse.com/conference

Get the OT Month Handouts

With everything you've got going on, trying to promote OT Month can be tough. So, we are making it easy for you. Submit the form below to get your OT Month Tips Handouts that you can share with your school colleagues as a way to share how amazing you are and how you can directly support them and the students. Subscribe below to get your handouts!

Episodes Transcript

Expand to view the full episode 96 transcript.

Amazing Narrator   

Jayson, hello and welcome to the OT school house podcast, your source for school based occupational therapy, tips, interviews and professional development. Now to get the conversation started, here is your host, Jayson Davies class is officially in session. 

Jayson Davies   

Hello, ot practitioners. Welcome to the OT school house podcast. And even more so, welcome to OT month. We are officially in April, and this is the time that we get to celebrate ourselves and also promote ourselves a little bit within April as occupational therapy month kicks off. We are doing a very special series here at the OT school house podcast, where we are going to be releasing one episode every single week in this month of April 2022, and we are talking about the ABCs of school based OT. You might already be seen on Instagram, on Twitter, the ABCs of OT trending hashtag. And yeah, that was actually started by an occupational therapist by the name of Shannon Marie, and she started the ABCs of OT. You can search for it using the hashtag ABCs of OT. But we're going a little step further. Here. We are doing the ABCs of school based OT. As you know, everything we do on this podcast directly relates to school based occupational therapy practitioners, and so we are going to do the ABCs of school based. OT, so what does that look like? That means that for the next four weeks, I'm going to be releasing a new episode for you each Monday, and we're gonna go over six or seven letters in a row, starting with A through F this week, and then we'll dive into the rest of the alphabet over the next few weeks. So I hope you're excited for this. I'm going to dive into A, B, C, D, E and F today, and then we'll kick it off with G next week. Also, another super exciting thing that is going on this month, this April of 2022 is that you can officially now register for the 2022 back to school conference that we hold in August. I know school isn't even over yet, but I'm already thinking about back to school in August. That is our annual kickoff event of the school year. It's called The Back to School conference. This year, the theme for the back to school conference is going to be all about collaboration. So all of our six speakers, including myself, we are going to be talking about topics that will help you collaborate with other professionals on campus to support those people that you work with, including the students, the teachers, administrators, potentially even some parents as well. So I really do hope to see you at the 2022 back to school conference in August. It is a live online event, but you can also watch the replays. If you're unable to join us live, you can learn more about the back to school conference at ot schoolhouse.com. Forward slash conference. I hope to see you there. All right, so let's go ahead and kick things off. We're celebrating ot month. I hope you already printed out your handouts from a few episodes ago and have them sitting in the teachers lounge right now, or maybe you even posted on a door and grabbed some donuts for the teachers if you did that. Kudos to you. I'm sure you are the new teacher favorite at your school site. Go ahead and keep it up, and also give yourself a pat on the back. You're awesome. All right. Well, let's go ahead and dive in to our ABCs of school based OT, starting, of course, with letter A. And you know, sometimes you just can't pick one word that goes with the letter, and that's the case here. So we're gonna start off with two words for the letter A, and in this very first episode where we are talking about the ABCs of school based ot I'm using the letter A to describe two amazing people that I would love to celebrate, and that is administrators and occupational therapy assistants. Yes, occupational therapy assistants, not occupational therapist assistants. OTs are an assistant to the occupational therapy itself, not a assistant to the occupational therapist, we obviously do not run around asking OTs to grab us coffee or anything like that. If anything, it should be the other way around. We should be grabbing them coffee for all the help that they provide with doing a lot of the treatment that we may not be able to do because we are busy doing evaluations and IEPs, and honestly, as some of my favorite OTs have said, the things that they don't want to do anyways, you know, they want to be with the kids. And, I mean, so do we, but oftentimes we have to do those things that sometimes we don't always want to do. We'd rather be with the kids, but we have to deal with the IEPs and the evaluation write ups, the synthesizing of evaluation reports and whatnot. So with that, administrators, I want to go back to that really quickly and start there, and I'll come back to OTs. Administrators are really the people that we need to get to know really well within the schools. They are the people, even if they're not our direct supervisor. Here, they have kind of the gate and key and the lock to a lot of the funding and a lot of the options that we have as occupational therapy providers. They're the people that can give us the go ahead to implement some sort of RTI program, or to say, hey, yeah, you know, I do have a classroom you can use, or even just giving us a fund, a an account that we can use to purchase some occupational therapy supplies with so an administrator is one person that you should definitely get to know whether or not you're an OT or an OT a it is vital to know your administrators at your school site, and then even possibly at more the district level, going back to OTs this month, April, ot month is as much yours as it is mine as an occupational therapist, this is celebrating this month, I should say, is celebrating all of us, not just occupational therapists, practitioners, but all OTPs and all of occupational therapy, even if you're an occupational therapist working with an OTA or the other way around. You know how important it is to have a strong relationship, a strong rapport and a strong understanding of each other's strengths and even maybe the areas that we're not as strong in, so that we can support each other, help each other out, and making the best possible outcomes for our students occupational therapy and education in general is all about working together. And when an OT and an OT a can work together, it's amazing what can happen. I've had the pleasure of working with a few I just haven't worked with a lot, but a few great occupational therapy assistants from Evelyn to Jennifer and a few others, and we've just had such a good collaboration that we're able to work together. And you know what? Sometimes you'll challenge each other too. You don't always have to agree on everything, but there needs to be that respect for each other, and you need to be able to speak up and say when you don't agree with something in a way that is actually conducive to supporting the people that we're trying to support, being the students, the teachers and anyone else that we are on campus to support. So before we move on to letter b1, more time to all the OTs out there, the occupational therapy assistants listening right now, I just want to say a huge thank you from all the occupational therapists out there. You make this life a little bit easier for us. You make this life better for all the students that you work with and all the teachers that you bring so much value to. So thank you for being a part of this ot team, and that now brings us to letter B. And for letter B, we are using the back to school conference. No, I'm just kidding. We're not using the back to school conference. We're talking about behavior for letter B. And you know, this is something that over the years, occupational therapists, in my opinion, and occupational therapy practitioners, we've gone back and forth as to whether or not behavior is within our scope. And I just want to say that behavior is absolutely within our scope. We have the skills to work on behavior, and we can do it from several different ways. We can see how the behavior is impacting occupation and work on that from a top down approach. We can also look at it from the other perspective as to what is causing behaviors and almost a bottom up approach. And come from that way. I think that when we do our best work, we see all sides of it, and we see the occupation at the end that is maybe not being reached because of some of those lower level skills that that we can work on. And we mesh it all together. We are not BCBAs, or at least many of us are not BCBAs. I know some of you do have your BCBA out there. But that doesn't mean that we cannot work on behavior. So the next time that your administrator or your teacher comes to you and says, Hey, is this sensory or behavior? Well, you can respond maybe. I don't know. I'm not sure yet, but it doesn't matter, either way, I can support you with it. It's very likely that the sensory is actually impacting the behavior, and I would love to help you out with this. So, yes, absolutely. All occupational therapy practitioners can work on behavior as it relates to occupational output. And so if that is something that you can do, by all means, go for it. You can write goals for it. You can provide therapy for it, and you can track data to see if what you're doing is actually working. All right, so that's letter B. We'll keep that one short, and let's move on to letter C. I was conflicted on letter C, but ultimately I want to talk about common core. And if you're not in a state that has common core, then we'll use the terminology state standards. Every state does have state standards, whether it's common core or standards that are specific to your state. Now this is something we don't talk about very often. We don't kind of ask the teacher, hey, what Common Core State Standard are you working on today? No, we don't do that, but we need to be aware of the Common Core State Standards at the end of the day, most of our students are working. Lean toward graduating, and they are trying to meet the state standards, and we need to support them. We are there to support the education, the functional, the academic, the behavioral, the social output for the student when they are at school, and state standards are absolutely a part of that. When possible, you can use collaboration. Hey, there's another C letter for us today. Use collaboration to write a goal that is both academic in nature and relates to Common Core, but also functional, and we provide a little bit of that piece to that goal that is now a collaborative goal that is more likely to be met, because not only is the OT working on it, but also the teachers working on it outside of the 30 minutes a week that the OT sees the student right. We can't just send students back to the classroom another C and expect whatever we worked on in the OT room to be carried over into the classroom. It requires collaboration, and by creating goals that revolve around the state standards Common Core, then you're more likely to get that collaboration on the goal, and more likely for it to succeed, all right, so that's letter C. As you kind of see, these episodes are going to be pretty short. I'm just kind of briefly going over just a little bit of detail about one topic or two sometimes for each letter and that brings us to letter D. This is determining services. D for Determining Services, this is the question that I probably get the most frequently on Instagram and a few other places. In fact, we talked about this very topic in the Q, a, in Episode 95 just the last episode, and in Episode 95 we mostly talked about determining the number of minutes that you might want to provide to a student. However, there's more to minutes when it comes to the services that you are going to provide. Yes, we do need to determine the frequency and the minutes. So is it going to be once a week or every other week, or once a month or twice a week? Whatever it might be that's our frequency, and then we have our minutes. How long those services are going to be. But there's more than that. We need to determine in what setting are we going to see this student, in the classroom, in the OT room, out at recess, in the cafeteria, whatever that might look like. And then there's one more aspect to it, and that is, are we going to see the student individually or in a group? Or if you're in the classroom, are you going to do it more in a collaborative method, or are you going to sit next to that student and just work with that student? One other model is also a consultative model, and that's an option as well when it comes to determining services. So there's a lot of variance out there, and there is no one right answer. It all depends on what your goal for the student is, and what you feel like you can do, and what the evidence that you have learned about will help you and support you in meeting their goal. And just one last point about determining services before we move on to letter E, and that is that when we come to an IEP meeting, we are bringing a recommendation of services to the IEP we are not bringing the IEP team a ultimatum and say, You know what? It's either this service that I'm recommending or nothing when we go to these IEPs, everything has the opportunity, or the option to be discussed and even debated a little bit, and it's okay to potentially, kind of shift your mindset a little bit during the IEP if someone brings up a great point, or maybe you learn something new, or, I don't know, any number of reasons could cause you to kind of say, You know what, let me rethink this a little bit. Instead of using a group, maybe we should go with individual services. I think I said last week, or in Episode 95 of the podcast, that there have been times where I've recommended one thing and then I've changed my service a few weeks later because it just wasn't working. And that's why you need to be taking data to see what is working and then adjust from there. All right, so that is letter D, Determining Services. And we have two more letters for today, E and F, and evaluations, of course, is letter E. I don't know that we could have a better letter E, except for maybe executive functioning, but I may or may not be saving that for letter X, because X is a really hard letter. So evaluations, letter E, this is something that you can't be a school based occupational therapist for very long without having to conduct an evaluation. Evaluation should always be top down and in a OTA, in the occupational therapy practice framework, by a ot a, I should say they require three pieces to an evaluation, and those three pieces are, as you might guess, the first is an occupational profile. First, we need to start with developing an occupational profile, which you can get for free from the OT School House website. Just sign up for our newsletter if you haven't already, and I will give you. My occupational profile that is specifically designed for school based occupational therapists. We also need an analysis of occupational performance, and this comes in a variety of ways. Observations can help with that analysis, both in the classroom or outside of the classroom, as can assessment tools that are standardized or unstandardized, formal, informal, all of those types of tools can help you to to break down what is going on with the student and what you might be able to support the student in and that actually leads right into the synthesis of the findings. No evaluation is complete without this synthesis. You must take what you learned from the occupational profile observing the student, and any assessment tools that you use, and then synthesize that to bring all that information together and share how it's relevant, how things fit together, how the puzzle pieces fit together, or maybe what puzzle pieces are missing and and what can you do to support this student, To to create a full puzzle to use a really, really bad analogy, I think. But anyhow, we need to make sure that for a good occupational therapy evaluation, we need to be conducting an occupational profile, then getting an analysis of occupational performance through observations and assessments, and then synthesizing that all together within our summary to share how we can support the student going forward. All right, and that brings us to our final letter for the day. And for this letter, I don't actually have a word. I have an acronym, which I will spell out for you, and that is FAPE, F, A, P, E. If you have been working in the schools for, I don't know, at least a year or so, you should definitely know this, if not even sooner, the acronym of FAPE stands for free and appropriate public education, and this is what is required for all students, whether they are in general education or in special education, no matter their disability, no matter their race, no matter where they come from, their status as an immigrant or as a legal resident, doesn't matter. Every student is entitled to a free and appropriate public education. Now, going back to letter D Determining Services, when you look at that last page of an IEP, or whatever page it is that lists all the services, you will often see that is the offer of FAPE. And on that offer of FAPE, it will list out exactly what services the student is to receive. And it might say that the student is going to receive 30 minutes a day of occupational therapy, 30 minutes three times a week of Speech and Language Pathology, maybe two hours of specialized academic instruction, or special education instruction per day, and that is a subset of their regular education that they are also a part of, or if they're in a full day special education classroom, then it might say something like 345 minutes per day of specialized academic instruction that is the free and appropriate public education. Sometimes accommodations and modifications also might be embedded within that F, A, P, E, FAPE page. So all of that is part of the the free and appropriate education for a student with an IEP, if the student doesn't have an IEP, then their free and appropriate public education is considered the general education programming, all right. So that is going to wrap up our six letters to start our ABCs of school based ot just to recap, we started with letter A describing both the importance of administrators and occupational therapy assistants. Then we talked about letter B for behavior. We talked about C for common core. Oh, and we didn't talk about this one, but on deck for letter C, I had the OT compact, which is allowing us to practice across state borders, which is pretty cool, but we'll save it for another episode. For letter D, we talked about determining services for a student, letter E, evaluations, and of course, we wrap things up with FAPE for letter F, a free and appropriate public education. Thank you so much for tuning in with me today on the OT school health podcast to get started with our ABCs of school based OT. This is April, 2022 this is ot month 2022 and I cannot think of a better way to celebrate our wonderful profession than by spending some time with you here on the OT school house podcast. And don't forget to tune in next week. Yep, we are not skipping a week this time for letters G through letter M. We have seven next week. And I hope you will tune in for that. It's gonna be a good one. All right, I will see you in episode 97 we are getting close to 197 of the OT school house podcast. And yeah, I'm just excited to get through the rest of our letters. We've got three more episodes to go to get through every letter of the alphabet. And, yeah. It's going to be fun. So I will see you next week on the OT school house podcast. Until next time, take care and don't forget, if you're interested in the back to school conference, registration is now open at ot schoolhouse.com. Forward slash conference. I hope to see you there. Take care. Bye. 

Amazing Narrator   

Thank you for listening to the OT school house podcast for more ways to help you and your students succeed right now, head on over to otschoolhouse.com Until next time class is dismissed. 

Expand to view the full episode 97 transcript.

Amazing Narrator   

Jason, hello and welcome to the OT school house podcast, your source for school based occupational therapy tips, interviews and professional development. Now to get the conversation started, here is your host, Jayson Davies class is officially in session. 

Jayson Davies   

Hello, ot practitioners, and welcome back to another special ot month edition of the OT school house podcast. If you listen to episode 96 then you know we are working our way through the ABCs of school based OT, and today we are diving into letters G, H, I, J, K, L and M, N, O, P. No, we're not gonna get there. That's next week. Last week, we touched on letters A through F. We talked about administrators and OT assistants. We also talked about letter B for behavior, letter C for Common Core State Standards, letter D for Determining Services, letter E for evaluations and F for FAPE, free and appropriate public education. Be sure to go check out episode 96 if you haven't already to get those first six letters, and then we'll continue on today. Or you can just listen today and then go back and listen to episode 96 if you'd like. We're doing four episodes this month. This is the second episode in our OT ABCs of school based ot month, special month. This is our month. It's ot month. We get to celebrate, we get to promote, we get to talk about how wonderful our profession is. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right into letter G. Letter G for us today is going to stand for guardians, as in the people responsible for the little ones we serve. Right? Sometimes it is the biological parent, but other times it is not always the biological parent, as we discussed in Episode 93 of the OT school house podcast, we talked about kinship families, and that is a real thing. As our foster families, right? We are not always talking about the parents, so we need to be mindful about that. When we are writing our report, if you know it's the parent that is perfectly fine to use that terminology, but you may want to potentially shift your templates over to use the term guardian to make everyone feel included, and that way, when you're sending out paperwork, a guardian who is not a parent might not double take when they see that word parent. You know, I'm sure they see it over and over again, and we can make them feel a little bit more comfortable by using that term guardian, potentially. All right, so remember, not all of our kids live directly with their parents. Some have other guardians, and we need to be mindful of that a little bit and make sure we're using inclusive language there. All right. That brings us to letter H, which you probably already know it's going to be handwriting. But I want to take a different spin on this, because, of course, we do more than handwriting, and when I think about the handwriting programs that are out there, size matters, the handwriting without tears, or learning without tears, program, some of the other ones, I don't think of those programs as being directed to us as occupational therapy practitioners. Granted, we are the ones that typically go to those trainings. When you really look deeper into those systems, they are really designed for the teachers, and we can be that middle person, as we know, handwriting referrals probably account for 90% if not more, of the referrals that you get handwriting, sensory and behavior, right? So what can we do with that if we know that all of our referrals are coming in for handwriting? Well, let's get ahead of the game a little bit. Let's introduce our teachers and our administrators and people at the higher levels of curriculum to handwriting programs, let's let them know that, hey, we can save the district a little bit of money and help our students more if we do something about it. And so what can we do? We can introduce these programs to those people, let them know about them, let them see the research and let them just know that they exist. Let them know how they can actually incorporate other parts of curriculum within handwriting, right? A lot of the handwriting programs, they're not just about how to form letters, but they do also bring in the outside components of typical language development and English language learning, right? They don't just talk about or just don't promote handwriting itself. They bring in other factors. So I'll give you a quick example how I actually used RTI in order to bring a handwriting program into a school that I was working at. As you have probably heard me say, I started with one teacher, and it grew from there. So I went to that one teacher who I had a student with handwriting concerns in her classroom, and I went to the teacher and I said, Hey, you know what? If this one student has some concerns with handwriting, then there are probably other students in your classroom that might have concerns with handwriting as well. How can. We support all of your students in your classroom. And you know, we talked a little bit, and I mentioned how I could come in maybe once a week for a few consecutive weeks. In this case, it ended up actually being eight weeks. Technically it was 10 weeks, but week one and week 10 were kind of more of a little screening tool to actually determine what we needed to work on. So I drafted up this program, and it was just something, I think I titled it, like the handwriting Essentials program or something like that. And I showed it to the teacher, and she's like, oh, right, let's do this. And so I came in once a week for about 10 weeks, as I mentioned, and then we had the evidence at the end of the 10 weeks that it worked, we had a writing sample from kids at the beginning and a writing sample from kids at the end that we're able to compare and see, hey, overall, there was improvement over these 10 weeks from there, it was super easy to get administrators and other teachers on board as soon as you can make something happen with one classroom, it's amazing how quickly others will come on board. And so from there, I ended up doing the handwriting program in another classroom, and eventually talking with the administrator, she ordered a curriculum for all the K through three teachers for handwriting, which was quite awesome, and that all happened within the span of about a year and a half. So it can happen quickly. I mean, relatively, right? So that's pretty awesome again. Just start with one teacher, one handwriting program, and well, who knows, maybe you'll end up reducing your amount of evaluation referrals for handwriting by supporting those teachers one time or a few times in a year and a half, it can happen. All right. So that brings me on to letter I. And letter I kind of goes along with what we were just talking about. I have I for in services. And why that's going along with what I was just talking about is because, if you know handwriting is a concern within your schools or in your district, then why not create an in service to support those teachers, create something that's going to help them help their students, and ultimately, potentially send you less referrals. Now, when it comes to referrals, I have three very simple, very actionable steps or recommendations, I should call them first is that be sure that you talk to your teachers and ask them what they want and need. We might see that they need handwriting, but if they don't want handwriting support, then they're less likely to implement it. So talk to them, talk to your kindergarten, your first grade, your second grade teachers, or whatever grade that you want to do this in service for, and say, Hey, what do you need help with? Second, keep it short. Teachers don't have a lot of time for in services. Oftentimes, their contracted day is only about 15 minutes before school starts and maybe an hour after the school day ends, so there's not a lot of time for them to learn from you. So set the time ahead and keep it short. We don't need to give them a lot of information. We need to give them useful information, which then leads to the third and final recommendation for an in service. Keep it actionable. They don't need to know all of the research behind handwriting. They don't need to know whether there is a lot or no evidence behind weighted vest. We just need to give them the actionable steps that they can use, that they actually want to learn about, and do it in a quick manner. All right, so that's three recommendations for conducting your next in service. I do teach a little bit more about in services, in my A to Z school based ot course through my RTI module there, if you'd like to learn more. And that brings us to letter J. This is a fun one, and it is j for jungle gym. That's because the jungle gym is the most under utilized area for occupational therapy treatment, right? We often say that we can't do sensory integration, we can't do sensory strategies because we don't have swings and whatnot, but you can absolutely work on praxis and a few other sensory integration type of skills by just heading outside onto the jungle gym. Now I know a lot of them look and are a little less fun than what they used to be back in the day when people you know, got hurt on jungle gym because they weren't as safe. And we could do a lot more, but they're still out there. There's still a lot of stuff to use. You know, the slides right at recess time, the aides are out there saying, Hey, don't climb up the slide. Don't do this, don't do that. But when we go out there one on one with the student, then we can actually promote some of that stuff. Of course, we need to let them know. Hey, you can only do this because I'm with you right now, and this is a treatment type of setting, or this is a therapy led session, but that's okay. You can still do some of those things that maybe you wouldn't be able to do with the student out at recess when there's so many other kids there. So feel free. Three to ditch the OT room and head out to the jungle gym to do some things. You can even take some materials out there and do some handwriting out there. Use crafts out on the jungle gym. That's perfectly fine, too. You don't just have to stick to the jungle gym. There's other things that you can do out there as well. So that's letter J for jungle gym. And next is letter K. I hope I actually have the alphabet in order. That'd be really funny if you're just like, oh, Why'd he do J before? I don't know I or something like that. Anyways, letter K, we have kindergarten. And you know, this is the only grade level that I bring up here within our our time together, going through the ABCs of school based OT, and that is because I feel like kindergarten is an area that every ot should be a part of. Every kindergarten teacher has always appreciated what I have brought to the table for them, and I love working with them. They are so open. They are so they have a I don't know. I feel like they just have a bigger picture. They typically understand that. You know, kindergarten is a hard time to work on academics, but we are setting the groundwork for these students for the rest of their educational career, if not even further right. And so our kindergarten teachers are always open to any ideas that we have, and I would recommend that if you're gonna do that in service that we talked about earlier, start with the kindergarten teachers. Ask them, Hey, what are you seeing in your classroom? And what can I help with? Now you can do that in service. And you know what, they're gonna love you for it, that they might even invite you into their classroom to do that handwriting, or whatever type of, I know a little early for handwriting. But whatever type of whatever type of help that you might be able to provide in the classroom using an RTI type of mentality, they might welcome you in with arms wide open to support them. And as an occupational therapist, you know, maybe this will help you in the future, by then having less evaluations, because you're supporting the students at such a young age, when their brains are malleable, when those synapses are pruning, and there's just so much learning going on, whether it be based on academics, play whatever it might be. So talk to your kindergarten teachers, ask them what you could help them with, find out what they need, what their students are struggling with, and provide that support that they need. All right. So we have two more letters today, letters L and M. Letter L is laws l, a, w, s, laws that we have to follow as practitioners within these schools now. A OTA has their own set of guidelines in the occupational therapy practice framework. But that's not what we're talking about today. I'm talking about two specific laws, national laws called idea, which you're probably very familiar with, and if you listen to the podcast a few times, then you are probably also familiar with ESSA or the Every Student Succeeds Act. So first idea, that's the one that we all know that basically, you can't get through a school based occupational therapy job interview without the question being like, Do you know what idea is? What is idea? How does ot fit into idea? Right? You need to know idea as a service provider, as anyone working in special education, idea is what governs IEPs and that we must support our students to access their their free and appropriate public education, right? FAPE, which was actually our F for episode 96 but essa goes a little bit further, and Essa is not just for students with special needs. Essa is for all students. And under ESSA, we are identified as sis. I know a lot of a lot of acronyms coming your way, si s p, stands for specialized instructional support personnel. It's kind of like the related service within idea. But as an SI S P, A Cisp, if I can say that right, as a sis, we are able to support all teachers, not just those with in the special education realm, and not just students in the special education realm, all students as well. So ESSA, ESSA, that is our way to get into RTI a little bit more. Unfortunately, essa hasn't been rolled out completely. It exists. The law exists. But Washington, DC hasn't really pushed out what that actually means that the law exists. And so if you listen to our episode with Abe Safar, I believe that was episode 91 we dove into that a little bit more, and hopefully what that will look like in the very near future. All right, so that's laws breaking down idea a little bit, and then comparing that to Essa both are national laws that kind of guide what we can do as school based occupational therapy practitioners here in the United States of America. And that brings us to our final letter for today. We're keeping this episode pretty sure. Short, right around the 15, maybe 20 minutes by time we finished, and letter M is for mindfulness. Yes, mindfulness. And again, we had a recent episode about this, right? Episode 92 with Dr Deirdre as a party. I was I'm always afraid I'm gonna say someone's name wrong, but I got that one right. I know I did so mindfulness, right? This is something, again, that you can do within the classroom or in a pull out setting. You can talk to your teachers and say, hey, you know what? I hear you telling me that you're having a lot of behavioral concerns within your classroom. You're having a lot of students just overreacting a lot. Well, you know what? Do you think it would help if I brought in a mindfulness program into your classroom. We can do this one time a week, maybe even start just every other week, just to see if it'll work. And I'd love to bring that in and support your students. You'd be surprised. What happens when you do that, and then 10 weeks down the road, how many other teachers you have saying, hey, you know you went into Mrs. Jones class, and did this mindfulness program? Do you think you could come over and do it in my program too, or in my classroom too? You will be surprised. It's amazing what happens when we start with that one classroom, whether it be handwriting mindfulness, whatever type of program you want to do, you can make game changers with starting with one teacher. Now, why mindfulness? Like I said, maybe you are talking to the teachers, and they're saying that my students are just out of control. To share. You know, they're so fatigued from all the zoom that when they came back to the classroom, they are just overwhelmed, and Things are hectic, they're crazy, and I need help. Well, that might be your key in and say, hey, you know what? I can provide some mindfulness activities within the classroom, and then look that up, go take a class on mindfulness, find out what you want to learn so that you can support your students within the classrooms on your school, remember your caseload is not your students. You are directly responsible for providing IEP services for those students, but every student on campus is your student, just like every student also is the first grade teacher. Student. The first grade teacher doesn't go out onto the playground and only watch her kids, right? The first grade teacher goes out onto the playground and watches all the kids. And the same thing applies to us as school based occupational therapists or practitioners. OTs, right. We are not there just for our caseload. We are there for the entire school. All right, so that is our seven letters for today. We had G, H, I, J, K, L, N, M, guardians, handwriting in services, jungle gym, kindergarten, laws, particularly idea and Essa and M for mindfulness. So thank you so much for sticking around with me on this ABCs of school based OT, ot month special episode of the OT school house podcast. This has been episode 97 and I really appreciate you being here today. If you want to see all the letters, or at least all the ones that we've done so far on the website. You can head on over to OT schoolhouse.com, forward slash episode 97 when you do that, you're going to see all four episodes. Well, at least once, all four are published right now, that you'll only see two if you go there right now, but if you're listening a little bit later, all four episodes will be published, and the entire ABCs of school based ot will be there, so you can see every letter and how it kind of relates to school based occupational therapy. So I hope to see you over at ot schoolhouse.com, forward slash episode 97 and yeah until episode 98 I will have a great week, and I hope you will as well. So take care, and I'll see you next time. Bye. 

Amazing Narrator   

Thank you for listening to the OT school house 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

Expand to view the full episode 98 transcript.

Amazing Narrator   

Hello and welcome to the OT school house podcast, your source for school based occupational therapy tips, interviews and professional development now to get the conversation started, here is your host Jayson Davies, class is officially in session. 

Jayson Davies   

Hello, everyone. And welcome to episode 98 of the OT school house podcast. Thank you so much for being here today. We actually have a very special guest. However, he may be a little quiet here with me today. This is the first episode that I am recording as a new dad and joining me right now within my Moby, which is a wrap. If you're a parent, you probably know what that is. Is my son, Kyler Kiyoshi Davies, this is the very first episode that I am recording as a father. Now, all the other episodes that you've heard leading up to today were actually recorded previously, before he was born. However, now he is about three weeks old as I am recording this, and yeah, I'm excited to do this. He is here. He may make a peep or a few cooing or crying noises, so you may hear that throughout this episode, but I'm excited to have him here with us. I'm excited to share Him with all of you, and I'm sure you will be a part of his journey growing up a little bit through social media and through this podcast. It's gonna give me a whole new topic to talk about a little bit over, over the air, over the podcast. So I'm excited for that. But today we are here to continue our ABCs of school based OT, or ABCs of OT for ot month in April. So this is the third installment of our ABCs of OT, and we are covering letters n through letter T today. So N, O, P, Q, R, S and T, we have seven letters to get through today. So before we get into letter N, I just want to give a quick reminder to everyone that the OT school house back to school. Conference is going to be happening in August, August, 26 and 27th that's a Friday and a Saturday. And right now you can get registered for this event at a special ot month discount. During the month of April, you can head on over to OT schoolhouse.com/conference to learn more about that. We are going to have six presenters, including myself, talking all about school based OT and how to improve and enhance collaborative practices within school based ot to support student success. We're going to be talking a little bit about sensory a little bit about visual impairments and visual processing and ocular motor skills. We're going to be talking about building and collaborative ot toolbox, and I will be helping to talk about how to make the shift to a more collaborative model within your practice. So if you want to join us for the OT school house, back to school conference in August, be sure to check it out at ot schoolhouse.com. Forward slash conference. Hope to see you in August. All right, so let's go ahead and kick off the second half of the alphabet with the ABCs of OT, and more specifically, what I like to say the ABCs of school based OT. Because, of course, that's what we're talking about here at the OT school house. So letter N for letter N, I have decided to use the word notes all of us as occupational therapists or occupational therapy practitioners, we have to write notes about our treatments. However, when it comes to writing notes in the school based setting, it's a little bit different I have found from other settings where you are billing directly to the insurance for a particular client, patient, whatever you want to call them. So in the schools, we don't, typically, you know, we don't get insurance information from every kid that we that we see. Sometimes we do collect Medi Cal or Medicare information if it's available, but no student is required to have insurance in order to to get the services that they require for school based occupational therapy. Therefore, our notes are really more for our self. Now that doesn't make them any less important or any less meaningful than if we were submitting them to the insurance to get reimbursed for that most districts do actually submit for reimbursement to, again, Medicare. In California, we call that medical so that's why you hear me say Medi Cal Of course, in California, we have to do things a little bit differently anyways. But back to the notes in school based occupational therapy, our notes are primarily for us. They're kind of a way to cya cover your own behind, you know, to make sure that if someone were to come back and say, Hey, you didn't see my kid this many times for the 2021, school year, whatever, you could go back to your notes and say, Look, yes, I did. This is what I did with your student. I have it documented, and it's all here. It's. Also your way to keep track of those progress on goals for you to write into your notes once a month, or however often you need to put in there the student met the goal in one out of two opportunities during this session, or whatever it might be, you have those specific notes for you, and oftentimes, I found no one ever sees my notes. The only time anyone ever sees my notes is when a particular student's case goes to trial or parents request all the documents for that student. Sometimes the notes will go with that. But other than that, our notes are really for us. Oftentimes, if a district does have us do billing, it's in a different platform. Some districts have gotten to the point where they kind of combine those platforms where you write your notes and bill on the same online platform. But that's not the case everywhere, and even then, most of the time, those notes aren't getting read by anyone. It's more than just the fact that we put those in there that they are getting billed. So when it comes to notes, a little bit about what we should be documenting, I do still use mostly a traditional soap note, right? You have the subjective, the objective, the action and the plan. I kind of go with that for the most part. I might adjust it a little bit, but I like doing that, because you get a little bit of each part right. You get to document how the patient, or in this case, our student, was feeling that day, maybe what you saw about that student, maybe what the student said. Then you talk about what you objectively observed with the student, and maybe you are putting into that objective, the data. What data did you collect? From there with your action, what did you do that was therapeutic? And then what is your plan for the next session? Or moving forward, I find that the plan that P is often left out, and unfortunately, when we leave that P out, it makes our job more difficult, because if we don't plan now for the next session, and it doesn't need to be a all full out plan like this is exactly what I'm going to do, but just a little bit of an idea of all right, I saw this this week. What's the next step that way? Next week on Wednesday, when your sessions on Thursday, Wednesday night, you're like, What am I doing tomorrow? You can really quickly look at that your soap note from the last week and kind of get an idea for what you need to work on the next day. So that's going to cover notes. I actually went on a little bit longer than I expected to on notes, but I'm glad I did, because that is something that we all have to do. And you know, it's, it's something that it's mostly for us. But also, like I mentioned earlier, cya, do your notes. Don't fall behind. And also make sure that you schedule your notes on your calendar time to do your notes. I mean, if you can't fit it in, in the last five minutes before the end of the session, or whatever might be, schedule time on your calendar, because it is part of your workload, and you need to have time to do those, otherwise you will fall behind. All right, so that covers notes and for letter o, we have observations. Now. If you have ever attended one of my evaluations, webinars that I do online occasionally, a few times a year, you know that I am big on observations, and for me, there's two different types of observations that are a part of every single evaluation. There are structured observations where we pull a student out and we are able to kind of control the environment. And then there are in classroom observations or in context observations where we are going to see the student in their natural setting. So observations are big for every single evaluation. We should not be doing an evaluation without at least one in context observation by getting into the classroom, getting into the cafeteria, recess, wherever it might be that we know that the student is having a little difficulty. We must see them wherever that that that struggle, that inability to access the environment, is happening. So that's observations. What I look for when I do my observations, like as I just mentioned, the context in context in the classroom, I'm really looking for the big picture. Is the student succeeding? What are they succeeding at? What are they not succeeding at, potentially in the classroom or wherever you might be doing your observation. And then in the more structured observations, where I'm able to pull that student out into my own ot room, or even out to an area that I can just control a little bit. Then I look more at the details. You know? I'm just going to use it the handwriting grip, right? I'm not going to go into a classroom to look at a child's handwriting grip. Or at least, that's not what I'm really looking for when I do my my classroom observation, I'm looking to see more of like, are they actually a. Able to get writing onto a paper, if that's the concern, right? But then once I get them out into my structured observation, that's my opportunity to break down that task a little bit more, to look at the the pencil grasp, or to look at, are they using both hands, one hand to support the paper, the other to write. That's where I get more into the details. All right. So one final point, when it comes to observations, I really like to do my in class observations before my pull out structured observations, especially when it is a initial ot evaluation for a student, and that's because I can do my in context, my in classroom observations while the student doesn't know who I am, doesn't recognize me, and hopefully won't try and, quote, unquote, show off for me. If I do those structured observations before I get into the classroom, then that student now knows me, and when I'm going into the classroom, you can kind of bet that they're gonna be looking be like, Oh, hey, you know, I worked with you yesterday in a pool out. Obviously you're in here to observe me. So let me show off a little bit, or even just, you know, it's almost like that flight or flight syndrome, right? You either get the kid that shows off or the kid that just, like does nothing. And so that's why I like to get my in classroom observation done first, before I move to my structured observation and talking about those push in observations, or classroom observations that leads perfectly to our letter P, which stands for push in model. Now the push in model may also be synonymous with collaboration, or collaborative model, which is kind of, you know, getting into the classroom, rather than focusing on always pulling a student out of the classroom into the OT room, or into the lunch room. Wherever you have your space, it may be a hallway at your school, but instead of doing that, instead of working with a student one on one, the push in model is about getting into the classroom to see what a student is doing in the classroom, and helping them be successful within that classroom. Now the push in model is different from observations. We were just talking about in letter O in class observations. For those, you might stand back right, you're gonna maybe stand by the door, walk around the classroom, but you're not interacting with the push in model of therapy services. You are interacting now you may be interacting with one student, you may be interacting with a group of students. You may be interacting kind of with one student as well as with the teacher, because they have such an important relationship, right that student to teacher relationship, maybe you're helping them both build a relationship and both understand each other to build upon successes that maybe you had in a pull out model. But either way, when you're going into the classroom, you're really there to actually do therapy, not observe. The push in model is actually a therapeutic model, as opposed to an observation, which takes place during an evaluation to see what is going on, where the student is right now. So one of the things that I really like to do with the push in model is first, I like to collaborate with the teacher on whatever the goal is that we're working on. I want to make sure that the time that I schedule on my calendar to get into that classroom every week, every other week, whenever it might be, is related to the goal that we have for the student. For instance, if that goal has to do with socialization, then I want to make sure I get in there during maybe a group time. If it has to do with handwriting, obviously I don't want to go in during math time. So you need to work with your teachers to find out when the best time is to go in. Now, when I go in, I'm not necessarily sitting right next to the student. Sometimes I'm actually doing more of a larger group collaboration with the teacher, where I'm helping co teach with the teacher, maybe a specific lesson. But other times I do go in there for one specific student, but even then, maybe I don't sit directly with that student, and I kind of maybe work within the group that that student is in. Of course, there are some times where I do go in and I do sit right next to that student, because that's what we need to do for that student. Now I'm not sitting there as an aide telling them exactly what to do and just hand over handing everything. No, that's not what I'm doing. I am finding the just right challenge for whatever they are working on as it pertains to the goal that we are working on. So it takes a little bit of use to to doing this type of model, because you have to find that sweet part, that sweet spot, I should say, between being a a nuisance to the teacher or a nuisance to the student. But you also don't want to be a aide. You are not a one on one aid for the student. You are there to help the student to meet their goals, right? You're not just there to give the student the answers. You are there to push the student forward, per se, all right, so that covers the. Push and model. And that is three of the four that we are covering today, N for notes, O for observations, P for push and model. Now this next one is a little outside the box. You know, Q is always a difficult letter to do when it comes to the ABCs of OT, or really the ABCs of anything. And I thought about this one a little bit, and I really like it, because sometimes, as occupational therapists, we get in a rut where we feel like every session has to be different. We have to do something different for the student this week that we did last week. It can't be the same activity, right? Well, wrong, and that's why letter Q I have quest, because I want to take our students on a quest a little bit I want to combine sessions together to to meet that overarching goal, and I have a great story to tell about this, because we had a student, and the primary goal for her was to get language written down on a paper, whether it be handwriting, typing, whatever it might Be, she had a lot of difficulty with organizing. Handwriting was very labored, very sloppy. We were moving toward a computer or even speech to text. But you know the last thing this student, who I don't think she was diagnosed, but probably really did, have ADHD, she could not sit in front of a computer and just like do typing practice right? That wasn't even an option, really, because it was just too boring for her, per se. So what did we do? We started a quest, and this quest for for a long period of time almost actually, is basically started right before the pandemic, and kind of took us through the entire time of the pandemic. Was to write a book, and we went through the entire process from planning the book to writing the book to illustrating the book. I mean, we spent a lot of time just developing an outline for the book and going through the organizational skills that it takes to develop an outline, and that is something that she's going to use for the rest of her life, right? I still use outlines when I'm creating these podcast episodes. YouTubers make outlines for their videos, right? Understanding how to make an outline and then going from there. What is the next step? What is the next step? How do we prevent ourselves from going from letter A to letter G, right? We need to go A, B, C, D, we got to go in order, and that is something that you can do within your therapy sessions. Maybe you do end up doing step one for an entire month, right? If you see a student once a week, you do step one on week one, you do step one on week two, and you're repeating, you're repeating, you're repeating the same things. That's okay. It's not practice. It is therapy. Well, I mean, it could be either, but for the most part, if you are leaving the student down a quest, there's a longer range goal, then that's okay. You are slowly moving through the process of meeting the student's goal. Don't feel like you have to have a whole new activity, a whole new craft, a whole new lesson plan for every single session that you meet with a single student, it's okay to spread things out a little bit and to make them longer. Lessons that that occur over time, that's perfectly fine. So quest queue for quest, take your students on a bit of a quest in order to meet their long term goals. And, of course, after letter Q comes letter R. And for letter R, if you have listened to this podcast more than a few times, you know, I am a big, a big advocate for RtI response to intervention, or as it's often called, RTI, two Response to Intervention and instruction. RtI is something that OTs have historically not been a big part of, but I think that we need to be more more part of RTI. Oftentimes, you'll hear of MTSS, which is multi tiered support services. Sorry, I was just trying to throw an L in there, but RTI, MTSS, they're often synonymous. But oftentimes you might hear an A or a B added after MTSS or RTI, they're they're basically the same thing, RTI and MTSS, but a and b referring to academic or behavior. But what about the other aspects of school, right? What about the actual functional activities that we so often work on as school based occupational therapists? Now we can support students, not just through the IEP process. In fact, IDEA says that we can actually work with students as a preventative model, and that's exactly what RTI is. We can go into a classroom, maybe support a teacher and CO lead a group on handwriting, or a Groupon typing or a Groupon organizational skills, something like that, and we could potentially help all 30 kids in that class. Room, rather than a single kid in that classroom. Now I'm a huge believer in RTI, and I really think that you should learn more about RTI. And if you would like to learn more about RTI, instead of going on a 3040, minute rant right here about RTI, I'm actually going to refer you back to episode number 42 I believe it was where I go in depth into the three tiers of RTI. So check out that episode, and, yeah, learn more about RTI. I really do see it as the future of occupational therapy in schools, and I really think that it'll help you out to know more about it. And now that brings us to our second to last letter for today, which is s, and for s, we are talking about screenings, not evaluations. Screenings, yeah, just screenings. That's it. Just just screenings. All right, sorry. Alan Iverson got to my head right now, practice, not a game. Practice. Now we're talking about screenings, and when it comes to screenings, screenings are very different from evaluations. And this is a hard one for many people, not just occupational therapists, but for people in education in general, to understand the difference between a screening and an evaluation. And it's very important to understand the difference between a screening and an evaluation, because A, they're different and B, if you do one in place of the other, it could get you in a little bit of a predict predicament. So yeah, you want to make sure that you, when you are doing an evaluation, you're actually doing an evaluation. And when you are doing a screening, you are doing a screening. Now the question that I often get is Jayson, do you do screenings? And my answer to this is twofold, because yes, I do screenings, but I do not do screenings of individual students. I do evaluations for individual students. I do screenings for entire classrooms or entire grade levels. Think about vision screenings. I'm using vision screenings because it's pretty consistent across the United States. I think that in certain grade levels, all students do a vision screening, right? Well, notice I just kind of said the definition in there, all students do the screening. They don't pick and choose a few students had a different classes, who the teacher thinks is having difficulty seeing the board, and only send those students to do the screening. No they screen all the kids in second grade or all the kids in kindergarten. That is the definition of screening, when every single student, or at least every single student within a classroom, is given the opportunity to do that quote, unquote test, if you want to call it that. Now, obviously that's different from an evaluation, because an evaluation is individualized. Now I'm not going to go into evaluations. We are in letter S, not letter E, so we are talking about screenings. So what might it look like then, if someone asked for a screening, so rather than screening an individual student to determine if that student needs an evaluation, I don't think that is what we should be doing, based upon how I have interpreted idea and Essa as well, but what I can do is help a teacher out by screening their entire classroom. If a teacher comes to me and says, Hey, I have this student named Johnny, I really want you to come take a look at him, I will gladly let them know the process for referring the student for an OT evaluation. But if they come to me and say, Hey, I have several students in my classroom, and they're struggling with this. Can you come and help me? I'd be happy to I'd be happy to come in observe or screen their classroom a little bit a screen could be an observation, or it could also potentially be getting a handwriting sample from all of their students, and kind of looking at all the handwriting samples, not too in depth, but just enough to get an idea for maybe what they need, a little support in and then I can meet up with that teacher at a later time and we can develop some ideas. Maybe I just give her or him some strategies, or maybe I end up co teaching with that teacher for a few lessons, whatever it might be. Now, the other thing that has come out of a screening. Say I do go into a classroom and I do see one student, or maybe even two students that I do feel like need a evaluation for occupational therapy or even something else, speech or just a psycho educational evaluation, then I do have the right, and actually I have the responsibility, to speak up and to help that teacher go through the process of potentially referring that student. Of course, I'm going to follow whatever the guidelines are for the district or the school that I'm working in, but that is the case again. That is different from the teacher saying, hey, I want you to come in and see Johnny. That was not the intent. I went in there. To see her entire classroom. I happened to find Johnny or said student while I was in the classroom, and then I helped the teacher go through the evaluation, or not the evaluation, but the referral process with or for Johnny, I should say so. Letter S screenings, to kind of keep it short for you to recap everything, the way that I like to say it is, screenings are for classrooms or even grade levels. Evaluations are for individual students. I think that's a pretty good way to kind of remember it. You know, one is for classrooms and grade levels or even an entire school, potentially, although it's hard to get to that level of a screening, and then evaluations are for individual students. And that brings us to our final letter for today, which is a fun one, or at least, I hope it is fun for you. It is team meetings, but we all need to have them. I shouldn't say, I was about to say we all have team meetings, but I know that's not the case. Some of us work in very small districts, and we don't have the opportunity to have team meetings. And when I say team meetings, I'm talking about those ot meetings, or maybe even a related service meeting where you meet with the other related service providers, like the speech therapist and the PTS, or maybe even the school psychologist. You know, we should all have some sort of of team meeting. And now, with the ability with everyone understanding how to use Zoom, team meetings should be a must, even if they're not in person, we should all be meeting with other OTs. Now, if you are in a small district where maybe you're the only OT, I would encourage you to reach out to the surrounding OTs in other districts, other counties, other co ops, other selpas, depending on what your county departments are called, and county of education departments in different states, they're all called something different. But reach out to other OTs and say, hey, you know what? What are you doing? Maybe one Friday afternoon, a month, or every other month even. Let's get together. Let's talk about some evaluations. Let's talk about research. Let's talk about the evidence. Let's talk about the struggles and the wins that we are having. We should all be capable of having team meetings. And yeah, you know, I know not everyone has them, because they are difficult to get together, and we are all so spread thin with our case loads and our workloads, but it is important to have those team meetings, because too often as occupational therapy practitioners, especially, we are left in our three, 510, Schools, and we may not see another occupational therapist for weeks or even month at a time, and by doing that, we don't have the ability to really grow to see what others are doing. So I would encourage you to talk to your administrators if you need to, and set that up. Ask them, Hey, can I meet with an OT from another district event? Or if even not with the OTs, can I meet with the PT or this speech therapist? Can we have a meeting together just to get on the same page of what's going on? And maybe that leads to more collaboration. Maybe that leads to more push in models. Maybe you decide to listen to an episode of the OT school house together and go over a specific piece of evidence, whatever it might be we all need to have team meetings. All right, so that's going to wrap things up today. Man, I'm still stuck in that team meeting. I have had big ideas about this, because I know many of you don't have the ability to have team meetings. I've thought about having an OT School House team meeting, where we kind of have open hours where people can come in, and maybe we have a set topic that we're going to talk about. I'm really excited for doing that, maybe in the future here, but yeah, sorry. It just got me it got me going. It got me thinking, something that I really want to do. Because, again, I really feel like we all need to be part of a professional learning community. You might hear the term PLC at your school. We all deserve to be a part of a learning community together. So that was letters, n through T. A quick recap. We had n for notes, O for observations, P for the push in model Q for taking your students on a quest to combine some sessions together to to cover a larger overarching goal we had R for RTI, S for screenings, as opposed to evaluations, and, of course, T for team meeting. Thank you so much for taking a listen to episode 89 of the OT school house podcast. Be sure to check out the show notes using the link in your player, your podcast player to check out the other two or three, other three episodes. Actually, if you're listening to this a little bit later, where we covered all 26 letters of the alphabet. Next week, when the next episode comes out, we will be talking about letters U through a letter Z. There's only. Six of them left, so we're going to knock those out of the park, and you can learn about every single letter by heading on over to OT schoolhouse.com. Forward slash ABC. We'll have all 26 letters there for you, and all four podcast episodes that you can listen to to hear all the ABCs of school based OT. Until then, I will see you later. Yeah, it's gonna be fun. We're gonna close out the ABCs of school based ot in Episode 99 and then a very special episode coming in, episode 100 take care. Have a great rest of your ot month, and I'll see you next time. Bye. 

Amazing Narrator   

Thank you for listening to the OT school house podcast for more ways to help you and your students succeed right now, head on over to otschoolhouse.com Until next time class is dismissed. 

Expand to view the full episode 99 transcript.

Amazing Narrator   

Hello and welcome to the OT school house podcast, your source for school based occupational therapy tips, interviews and professional development now to get the conversation started, here is your host. Jayson Davies class is officially in session. 

Jayson Davies   

Hello, everyone. And welcome back to Episode 99 of the OT school house podcast. I can't believe we have made it to Episode 99 and even better, Episode 99 correlates with ot month. And as you know, you've been listening to the last few episodes, we are diving into the ABCs of school based OT, and this is the final episode in our four episode series where we're going through all the letters of the alphabet and putting terms, putting words, putting phrases to each letter of the alphabet. In episode 96 we actually went through letters A through F. In episode 97 we went through letters G through M. In episode 98 the last episode. Last week, we went through letters n through t, and this week, we are finishing off the alphabet with letters U through Z, so u, v, w, x, y and z, we're gonna wrap up the ABCs of school based ot this week and then next month, which is moving out of OT month in to wow, it's already going to be May. I cannot believe that moving into May. It's even crazy to say that, because of the final month of the school year, it is that final home stretch, right? Well, in May, we are going to have a celebratory episode 100 of the OT school house podcast. I can't wait for that. It's a very special episode, and I'm bringing on someone to help me out with that. And yeah, you don't want to miss that that's going to be in two weeks from now. So I hope to see you there before we dive in two letters U through Z. Just one final reminder that the back to school conference that is coming up in August, is $50 off right now during ot month, and we are going to have six speakers talking all about how to collaborate more efficiently, more effectively in school based occupational therapy at this virtual, online conference, it's going to be live, but if you can't attend live, you will also have the ability to get access to the replays, and when you sign up quickly, you can also get a very special swag pack full of goodies for school based occupational therapists. We're going to be sending that out in August, just before the conference gets started. Now, during ot month, the month of April, you can save $50 on the back to school conference when you register early, and you can do that at ot schoolhouse.com/conference, you can learn all about the conference, everything you need to know, and also save $50 when you register this month. If you can't register this month, that's okay. The registration will continue to be open until August, but right now is your best opportunity to register at the lowest possible price. So I hope to see you in August. It's going to be a blast. We're going to kick off the school year the 2022 2023 school year with a blast at the back to school conference. And I hope to see you there. All right, so let's go ahead and dive into our first letter for today. We are kicking it off with letter U, and for letter U, I've got universal design here every ot that graduates from ot school. Now, you know, we can't get through an OT program without learning about universal design. And if you've been in the schools for, I don't know, maybe a year, maybe a few years, you might have heard the term UDL or universal design for learning that can add that for learning within the educational realm. They add that in there. So universal design is all about making the environment friendly for everyone, not just most people, right? And so one of the the best stories that I have to share about universal design has to do with something so simple, like it's something that most people don't even think about because it's so simple, and it has to do with seating right. When we walk into a classroom, whether it's a kindergarten classroom or a high school classroom, we have to remember that people come in different sizes, different shapes, different heights, different everything, right? Everyone's a little bit different. And one of the things that we forget, well, OTs, we kind of remember it a little bit more, I think, because we are so adaptive in nature. But a lot of educators need support and making sure that their classrooms are fit for all and not just the average student. And so I've walked into many classes, but I'm going to talk about one particular time that I walked into a kindergarten classroom and I'm looking around the classroom. This teacher has told me that she has some concerns with her students being very fidgety, and so I wanted to help her out, right? So I went into the classroom and I'm just. Watching, you know, just taking it all in. Why might these students be fidgeting? First of all, they're kindergarteners, right? All kindergarteners are fidgety. But I started to look under the desks a little bit. I started to notice that kids weren't sitting, but they weren't standing. They're doing that half sit where, like they have one knee on the chair, but the other foot is like standing straight up right one foot is they're standing up, but also sitting down at the same time. And I'm like, All right, what's going on here? Why? Why are we half standing, half sitting? And then I look over to another kid, and I see a kid who is tilting her chair onto the two front legs, and she's doing that so that her feet can sit on the ground. I look over at another table, and I see another student basically trying as hard as he can to move the chair a little bit over to the left without moving it too far so that his feet can rest on the leg of the table. Because what I notice is he can't reach the ground with his feet to support himself. So universal design. This is an example of an environmental change, right? So what did I say to the teacher? We need to look at the chairs that you have and the desks that you have. It seems that your chairs are too big. Well, if we get smaller chairs, then it's very likely that our tables are going to be too big. So you can't just change one factor. You have to change a multitude of factors. So I worked with the teacher, I worked with the custodian, and we figured out a way to lower some tables and lower, sorry, not lower, but change out some chairs for smaller chairs. But we didn't do that at all of the tables because there were also some students who everything was fit correctly for. So we had a multitude of different sizes of chairs that fit with the table that it should be because smaller chairs, smaller tables and bigger chairs, higher tables to fit for the students that were a little bit maybe they were older, maybe they weren't, but they were a little bit taller, and so that worked for them. So that's a little story, a little just something to think about when it comes to universal design. Now, just really briefly, as I mentioned earlier, in education, they add on for learning at the end of it. So it's Universal Design for Learning or UDL. Now it's very similar. It's just that when it comes to or learning, we're often talking about the actual curriculum. And as an occupational therapist, you can support with this too. You know, we think about, here's an example. We think about students who we give them a worksheet, and they struggle to fit their words into whatever boxes they're supposed to fit their words into, right? Well, as a universal design for learning tool, maybe you suggest to the teacher, hey, the next time, before you run off 30 copies of a worksheet, maybe just try adding some lines in those boxes. Or maybe letting your students know that if they can't fit their words into the boxes, then they can use a separate piece of paper, and they can just write like the number one inside the box on the worksheet, and then write number one on the line paper and put their responses there and that way when they turn in their sheet of paper, rather than it being four boxes squished with so much writing. Now it's a box that doesn't have really any writing in it, but it correlates to the writing that's on the line, paper that they know how to use better. So that's universal design, universal design for learning. You might hear it that way as well. And yeah, I hope you enjoy that little story, and I hope that helps you to think about what you can do to support a teacher, very simply, when you walk into their classroom and just notice a little bit about the environment, or just when they tell you, you know, I have a struggle. I have some concerns about my class. You know, there's more than having to evaluate a student. You can go in and provide general strategies for the teacher. All right, so wrapping up with letter U and moving to letter V, this brings us to a little bit of a controversial topic in occupational therapy and even in really special education in general, and that is the term vest, as in weighted vest, or maybe compression vest. Now when it comes to vest, I will admit it was one of my go to strategies when I was a newer occupational therapist, back in 2012 2014 and actually, if you look at the research from back in 2012 2014 there is some research that kind of said, You know what weighted vest might actually work to primarily help students with ADHD. That's what the research was really revolving around. ADHD. Now, those studies were very small, and since then, more research has kind of come out that flips the other way around and says, You know what, there isn't really a significant change in a student's outcomes when wearing a weighted vest or a compression vest. And so it just it. Just an interesting topic, because I have heard so many stories from individual parents, from individual therapists that just say how much great changes they've seen in their student when they wear a vest. But the research on the flip side has now kind of said, You know what, there's no really significant change, which then leads me to the terminology EBP, evidence based practice and a reminder to everyone out there that while evidence based practice, we do need to look at again the evidence right? It's in the name the research, the evidence behind different interventions. Evidence Based Practice also takes into account the evidence that we create as a therapist with the clients that we work with. And so while a research article out there may say, You know what, there was no significant change with a child with ADHD wearing a weighted vest, well, just because there wasn't a significant change for those 13 kids that they did the research study for doesn't necessarily mean that we shouldn't try it out with one of our students, because maybe it will work for one of our students. Every single student is different. What works for one student may or may not work for another student, right? So if there are limited or no contraindications for using something, such as a weighted vest, then it's okay to try it, but make sure you take data to determine if it's actually working. The worst thing you can do, I shouldn't say the worst thing, but what you shouldn't do is hand out a weighted vest to a teacher. Say, Hey, use this with whichever kids you want. And, yeah, just have it as at your disposal to use it with anyone or even here's a way to vest for Johnny. Take care. I'll see you in a year, and we'll see how it's going. It's going. No, we need to be very specific and saying, Here's a weighted vest for Johnny. Now, it may or may not work, and we need to track to see if it will work. And so for the first three weeks, we need to take data every time that he wears the vest. And you know what? We're going to start off with short increments of time, only 10 minutes of wearing and then maybe 30 minutes off. There hasn't been a very structured on off schedule for weighted vest. They don't kind of have a protocol for that. So you can kind of play around with that. But you want to make sure that you are taking data to determine whether or not it is actually working. If it's working, awesome, you can adjust to maybe see if you can get to work a little bit better in whatever you're trying to measure. But if the data is showing that it's not working, or maybe even things are getting worse, then switch it out. Try something else. You are creating evidence every time you take data, when you're using an intervention with fidelity, if you're not using an intervention with fidelity, if you're not actually measuring the intervention that you're putting into place, or noting down how you're implementing that intervention, then the data doesn't really show what you're doing, because maybe you're wearing the vest for 10 minutes today, 15 minutes tomorrow, and whatever. So you need to have a consistent intervention and a consistent way to measure that intervention, all right, so that's what I'm going to share for weighted vest or compression vest. Both of them work similarly. I will just kind of note in the past, I have leaned more toward the compression vest. I've seen a little bit more influence on the student, positive influence on the student when we use a compression vest versus a weighted vest, but that's just my personal experience. I am not referencing an article that says anything about that. Oh, right. That brings me to one of my favorite terms to talk about, and that is workload. And before we jump into workload, I need to take a nice big breath, because, you know, sometimes I just get going, and to be honest, I forget to breathe while talking. But that is part of my excitement. That's part of my joy of being a school based occupational therapist and also having the ability to share with you on the OT school house podcast. I really appreciate you being here listening to this episode right now. And yeah, I'm just excited to work with you. So real quick everyone deep breath in and deep breath out. All right, so work load. I love this topic because I believe that every school based ot needs to move from a caseload model to a workload model. And here's a little bit about my reasoning. A caseload model strictly looks at the number of students that we are responsible for on our spreadsheet, on our PDF, that tells us what kids we have to see, however many times we have to see them in a given week, month or year, the average caseload, I believe the last article that I looked at, was around 55 however, I have talked to therapist. And even in that article from ceru and Garfinkel, they found that therapists have caseloads anywhere from like 30 up to like 150 it ranges wildly. However, the average is about 55 now this is why caseload is not a good amount. Measure of the students that we are responsible for. Because bear with me here. It's going to take just a little bit of explaining, but if you have a caseload of we're going to use a round number, 50 kids, and each of those 50 kids has 30 minutes a week. That's 25 hours a week of services. Now say that same caseload of 50 only has 30 minutes every other week of therapy services, so the same amount of kids, so the caseload is the same. However, their workload is different. So if they only have 30 minutes every other week, then instead of 25 hours a week of service, you really only have 12 and a half hours a week of service. So there could be two OTs in the same district schools that are just a few blocks apart, and they could have the same caseload, but one caseload is 25 hours a week of therapy services, and the other is 12 and a half hours of therapy services in a given week. That's a drastic difference, right? And so we don't want that to be the case, and that's where workload comes into play, because a workload doesn't just take into account the number of students that you have on your spreadsheet. It takes into account all the time that those students require, as well as all the time that maybe your classrooms require for doing some RTI in the classroom, or maybe for doing evaluations right? A lot of us get a lot of evaluations. We need maybe three hours a week or so to do evaluations IEP time. Sometimes those happen after school, but sometimes those team meetings occur during the school day, and those eat up into our therapy time, so we need to be tracking our workload, not just our caseload. Now, just a shameless pitch here. I do have a course about moving from a caseload to a workload model. It's called making the shift caseload to workload, and you can learn more about that at ot schoolhouse.com/make, the shift. But yeah, I just love talking about caseload to workload because I think we all need to advocate a little bit more for ourselves. We all need to share with our administrators exactly how we are impacted by our high caseloads and what it would look like if we moved to a workload model. And that's exactly what I share in that course, and I share step by step how to make the shift from a caseload model to a workload model, including how to work with your administrators so that they understand why and how you're doing that and the long term benefits, not only for the OT but also for the school district as a whole. So again, you can learn more about that@otschoolhouse.com forward slash, make the shift if you're interested in shifting to a workload model. So that's letter W. I hope over the course of your career, you all are able to move to a workload model at some point or another. All right, letter x is always a hard letter to find something, and so I am cheating here just a little bit. I'm not going with like xylophone or something, because that doesn't really relate to OT. So I'm going with instead executive functioning. We are highlighting the second letter in executive the X. And executive functioning is such an important skill for any student to benefit from school. There is so much talk about kids not having EF right, executive functioning, short and EF skills these days, and I really like to associate this with free play. I wish I had more research behind me to back this up. I just haven't looked at the research. My guess is I could find it, but I just haven't taken the time to do that yet. And I really think that free play builds executive functioning skills. I think that our frontal lobe really does develop when we have the opportunity to play. Get bored, figure out more play. Get bored again and figure out how to play over and over and over again these days. So much of what kids are doing is very directed, whether it be a video game with a storyline or a YouTube video, or even tick tock that just automatically shows you the next video. You don't even have to look for. You don't even have to think about what you want to look for. It. The computers are just telling us what we want to look for, and unfortunately for us, in a way, they're correct. And then even with sports and whatnot, right? Not just because they're getting into games, but also when you get into sports, sorry, not just video games, but physical activity. Sports are very structured. There's a very set routine to sports. It's different from free play. I remember going over to my buddy's house, and right, we'd like, build like sand balls, and we'd fortify them with water and more sand. And then, you know, we do that for an hour, and we get bored, and then we'd have to think, all right, what do we want to do next? So then what would we do? We'd find, like, army men or something, and we'd bring those, and we'd incorporate them into the sand balls that we throw at them. And then we get bored with that, and then we'd find something else to build upon. And I really do think that that is part of the executive functioning skills that. We built as younger children, that kids aren't necessarily getting today, and it's not because they're not playing. They are playing. Kids are still playing right? They're playing video games, they're playing sports. They're playing even at recess, although recess has gotten shorter, but we're not seeing them use their skills when boredom comes into play, because they're never given that opportunity to be bored. We're constantly giving kids something to do, and they don't have that ability to build up the initiation and the planning phases of new unstructured play. So that's what I'm going to talk about, executive functioning. This is definitely an area that I want to learn more about. And at the back to school conference last year, we were very fortunate to learn a little bit about executive functioning from the pocket OT. That's Kara Kosinski. You can learn more about Kara, and she actually has a new course on executive functioning at the pocket ot.com I will be sure to link to that in the show notes at ot schoolhouse.com, forward slash, Episode 99 so that is letter X, executive functioning. And, yeah, you know now that I'm thinking about it in the last episode, Episode 98 for the letter Q, I talked about quest and helping our students go through a quest over multiple sessions of a ot therapy treatment, right? Not just this week, but the next week and the week after. And I think that going on that quest, leading our students on a quest where we're giving them options, that is one way that we can support students executive functioning. All right, we're down to our final two letters in the ABCs of school based OT, and that brings us to y, and for the letter Y, I'm going with things that happen yearly, so things in school based OT, or in education in general, that happen every single year that we can count on just as much As we can count on that annoying surge and evaluation referrals that come after every winter break. It happens to OTs all I know it happens to me. I get messages all the time in January, early February, saying, Where did all these referrals come from? And so I know about it, but there's a few other things that happen yearly, and one of those is our annual IEP for a student. This does happen every single year. Every student must have at least one IEP if there are a student in special education. And so at these annual IEPs, we have to remember that we look at the previous year's goals, we measure those goals, and then we develop new goals as well as present levels, so that we can eventually lead to services. Back in episode 96 for letter D, our letter for letter D or our word phrase for letter D, was determining services. But we can't determine services unless we have goals in place. The present levels of the student lead to goals, lead to new goals, I should say, and those new goals lead to the new services. So without developing where the student is presently, and developing our new goals, we don't know what the services should be. So based upon those new goals, if you have two goals, three goals, four goals. Maybe you have collaborative goals where you don't really have your own goal, but you're collaborating on a goal that still should help you guide your decision making for Determining Services. Some of the other things that happen on a yearly basis in the schools that I like to actually kind of take advantage of is the back to school night, which happens, you know, in August, September, sometime around the beginning of the school year, and also open house. As a school based occupational therapist, you're often not expected to attend these events, or you're just not invited, but I would definitely check in with your administrator and ask them, Hey, I would love to attend and maybe even support teachers or leave my own session for parents who are either receiving occupational therapy services or maybe they're receiving RTI support and see what your administrator says. I had the opportunity one time to speak at a it wasn't a back to school night, but it was like a parent learning night. The theme of the parent learning that was all about play and the importance of play for our students and how to incorporate play into learning. And as an occupational therapist, I was actually invited to talk about the importance of play. And so it was so awesome, because I get to stand up, not for too long, you know, 10 minutes or so, and just share with parents why play is so important. And it kind of was similar to the spiel that I just gave about executive functioning, we really need to make sure that our students are playing and you can do that by sharing with parents at an event such as back to school night or the end of the year open house, which might be coming up fairly soon for some of you all. All right, so that is yearly, and another thing that is yearly. Is the end of the school year, which is coming up. So congratulations, everyone. We are almost there. You're almost to that end of the school year, maybe four to six weeks or so from now, and you might get a summer break, or you might be heading into extended school year, but yeah, hopefully you're getting a little bit of a break. And that now brings us to letter Z and and, you know, I must admit, I had a little bit of a struggle coming up with the letter Z terminology. I didn't want to use the zones of regulation. I just feel like we all are very familiar with the zones now. So I went ahead and I'm using zigzag lines, such as when you are trying to teach a student how to either draw zigzag lines or maybe cut out zigzag lines right those jagged lines, it is something both drawing them and cutting them out that typical developing children will typically develop that skill right around the age of five years old, and so a lot of kindergarten teachers are kind of expecting students to have that skill in place when they arrive for kindergarten. Unfortunately, as you and I know as As occupational therapists in the schools, that isn't always the case. So there are a few things that we can do with students, and there's also some things that we can let our teachers know that they can do to support these students who just haven't quite mastered that skill yet. So I'm just going to share a few things that I like to do to support our students in mastering that ability to either draw and or cut out zig zag lines, which, of course, this applies to most other pre writing shapes, pre writing lines, maybe even some letters. You can use this strategy for all those but I just want to share a few ideas of what you can use. My go to favorite all time activity for working on cutting and drawing pre writing shapes, including zigzag lines, has to be using stickers. Some kids love to cut the stickers. Other kids love to avoid the stickers. And this goes for both writing and cutting. And so if you're going to do zigzag lines, you can either put stickers on the line and say, Hey, let's aim for the stickers right? And they cut right through the middle of the stickers. Other kids, they don't want to cut the stickers. And so I'll put the stickers around the line, but I'll kind of put them in places where if they make a mistake, they might get that scissor, so they have to be extra careful. And so yes, it is a little bit of a behavioral strategy, but it's a fun it's a fun game for them. And so I put the stickers around the lines, as opposed to on the line, because they don't want to cut the sticker. So that's one idea. Feel free to use that as much as you'd like. Another idea for cutting specifically is that you get a long sheet of paper, and you tape one side of that paper to the desk, and the other side of the paper is just hanging off, and it has a zigzag line drawn on that paper, so it's just hanging off the table. And so assuming they are right handed, which I know not all are, but I'm just going to use that for this example, they have to grab the paper and hold it up with the left hand so it's not hanging off the desk, and then they use the right hand to then cut. You can include the stickers or not include the stickers, but this really helps with the bilateral hand skills. A lot of times, kids, if the paper is just sitting on the desk, they won't use that second hand to support. But if we have that paper hanging or even just take away the table in general, it does prompt the student to use that second hand. Play Doh is also a fun idea when it comes to cutting. Play Doh tends to cut. If you have a real Play Doh, it tends to cut pretty easily, and it's kind of nice. So feel free to do that if you're really working on fine motor skills and the actual action of using scissors, then you can play around with the thickness of the paper. That can help as well. So those are some of my go tos for zigzag lines. Also a fun one is using DRAW by the letter or draw by the number, right? You know you connect letters, A, B, C, D, E, F, G, all with a line. That's another fun one. You can also do with numbers, right? 123456, and eventually it creates an elephant, or whatever. You can create your own zigzag line, type of draw by the numbers, and you can make sure it incorporates some zigzags, because a lot of those don't right. It's more like circles and squares. And then also, for a little bit more advanced, is imitation drawing. I love bringing up a YouTube video where they are teaching how to draw, and then we pause it. We watch the video. We watch what they do first, and then we pause the video, and both myself and the kid take a turn at drawing what we just saw. And if you have a drawing with zigzag lines in it, of course you're going to be working on zigzag lines. So those are a few ideas that I have, using stickers, using paper that just hangs off a table. Play Doh drawing by the numbers, or drawing by the letters, and also imitation drawing where you are watching a COVID. Someone, or even you, you can actually do the drawing. If you're good at drawing, by all means, go for it. I'm not good at drawing, so I bring up a YouTube video, but you draw one step, the child draws one step. That works for not only zigzag lines, but just about any other zigzags or any other pre writing lines and shapes. And also, it can be a little bit of an executive functioning activity as well. So there you go. That is letter Z, zig zag lines. So we have done letters A through Z. Next time. Won't you please sing with me? And yeah, we are wrapping up the ABCs of school based OT. Today we did cover letters u, v, w, x, y and z. We had Universal Design vest, as in weighted vest, workload, executive functioning, yearly things that happen yearly, and zig zag lines, cutting and writing them out. So thank you so much for sticking with me through all the letters of the alphabet. This has been the first time we produced four episodes in a single month, and it has been absolutely amazing. It's been rewarding, and I appreciate you for for listening along. I hope this brought value to you. I really do, because that's why we're here. The last thing I want to do is, Have you listened to an episode and you feel like you learned nothing that is obviously not the intentions here. I hope everything here helps you. I hope you go back to work tomorrow or after the weekend, whenever it might be, and you implement something that you learned right here on the OT school house podcast until next time, episode 100 is going to be fantastic. I hope you have a great week. I hope you have a great weekend. Hope you have a great morning, afternoon workout, whatever you're doing right now. And yeah, I will see you in episode 100 of the OT school house podcast. Don't forget to head on over to OT schoolhouse.com forward slash conference to learn more about the back to school conference. And yeah, hope to see you in episode 100 and at the back to school conference. Take care, talk to you later. Bye. 

Amazing Narrator   

Thank you for listening to the OT school house podcast for more ways to help you and your students succeed right now, head on over to otschoolhouse.com. Until next time class is dismissed

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