Using the SCERTS Model to Support Education Feat. Amy Laurent, Ph.D., OTR/L: OTSH Podcast Episode 62
- Jayson Davies
- Jan 29, 2021
- 45 min read
Updated: Jun 30
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Welcome to the show notes for the Episode 62 of the OT School House Podcast.
In this episode, I interview Amy Laurent, Ph.D., OTR/L, from the SCERTS Model and Autism Level up. Amy uniquely holds degrees in OT, special education, and developmental psychology and she is a Co-author of the SCERTS model which is being used world wide as a way to support children with Autism. Listen in to learn about the evidence supporting the SCERTS Model and how Amy continues to support the Autism community.We will also briefly talk about the amazing TED Talk Amy had the opportunity to present titled: Compliance is Not the Goal: Letting Go of Control and Rethinking Support for Autistic Individuals
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Episode Transcript
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Jayson Davies
Hey, ot practitioners, the conference that your colleagues are calling the most valuable event of the year is returning just in time for the 2025 2026, school year. Join me and over 600 other school based ot practitioners this August for the fifth annual back to school Conference featuring 12 hours of practical a, ot a approved CEUs and resources from expert guests later in today's episode, I'll share with you about our incredible speaker lineup and a special discount just for our podcast listeners like you to learn more about the conference, visit ot schoolhouse.com/conference and secure your spot today.
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 the OT school house Podcast, episode 62 I am excited to be here today. I hope you are as well. My name is Jayson Davies, and I am a school based occupational therapist, and I'm here to talk to you today. So that is what we're gonna do. We also have a very amazing guest on today. It was the best of well, it was just a really good interview. I had a lot of fun. It is Dr Amy Laurent. You may have heard of her. She is actually a co author of the certs model, and I will come back to that in just a moment. But first, I have some super exciting news to share with you all today in Episode 61 I kind of teased about a conference that was coming, and now I would like to share a few details, as registration will be opening soon for the first ever ot school, house back to school, virtual conference. I am super excited about this. I'm actually almost shaking as I as I say this into the mic, but this conference will be held August, 27 28th and 29th that is a Friday through a Sunday, and it'll feature both school based ot clinicians as well as researchers that have collaborated with clinicians in the school. So it is really for the school based ot unlike this podcast, which is amazing, this conference will actually allow you to directly interact with both myself and other presenters, some of which have been on the podcast and some who haven't. So if you've enjoyed some of the presenters that have been on this might be your chance to hear them without me in the way. And I know, I know a lot of times I facilitate things, but I know sometimes you just want to learn straight from the presenter themselves. And this is going to be that opportunity. In addition to some amazing presenters and amazing sessions, we're also going to be having a networking lunch, in addition to an entire forum dedicated to learning together and meeting with like minded clinicians from all over the country and maybe even the world. Who knows, overall, you will have the opportunity to earn 10 contact hours by watching live or the replays of the conference. If you should happen to need to watch the replays, but that is up to you. It is going to be live with available replays. There's going to be a ton of information. It's going to be a ton of fun. And if you would like to learn more about this, you can do so at ot schoolhouse.com, forward slash conference. I hope to see you there. And please, if you have any inkling about this that you might be interested, head on over to the website. I have a video there that kind of explains what's going on, as well as a ton of details, with even more details coming out in March. So stay tuned, and I hope to see you over there. Okay, so now I'd like to introduce you to the brilliant person that is Dr Amy Laurent. Amy is a developmental psychologist as well as a registered pediatric occupational therapist. She specializes in the education of children with autism spectrum disorder and other developmental disabilities. The majority of Amy's work involves collaborating with and supporting early intervention teams, school teams and families in particular, in particular, if I can speak, she focuses on the creation of educational programs and environments that facilitate children's engagement and learning in all settings. Amy is also the co author of the certs model, which we're going to be talking about today. And another passion project of hers that we'll briefly touch upon is autism level up, where her and Jaclyn feedey, a developmental psychologist, advocate for autism in a variety of ways. Amy has a laundry list of experience and credentials that you can learn about by heading over to the show notes at ot schoolhouse.com forward slash episode 62 or at her website, Amy hyphen laurent.com be sure to use the hyphen. If you don't use the hyphen, you may be surprised, like I was, when you end up on Amy Laurent matchmaking website. Maybe I should be getting paid for that little sponsorship right there. But yes, don't make sure you use that hyphen. Otherwise, I don't know, maybe some of you won't use the hyphen. But anyways, like I was saying, I am excited to share with you this very fun, very upbeat interview with Dr Amy Laurent, I hope you enjoy the show. Hey, Amy. Welcome to the OT school health podcast. Yes. And thank you so much for being here today. I am super excited for this chance to have this conversation with you. I mean, we're going to talk about a lot of different things today, autism, the certs model, just excited to have you on here.
Amy Laurent
Well, thanks so much for inviting me. I'm really excited to have the opportunity to reach your audience and have a chance to talk to OTs.
Jayson Davies
Yes. And that's funny, you say that because you that was one of the first things you said to me when we had a conversation. You said you don't get to talk to OTs as often as you like sometimes. Is that? Right?
Amy Laurent
It is true. So we're talking about certs today, and I know we're going to dive more into it, but it's the work of four different people, and three of the four are speech language pathologists, and two of those are kind of monoliths in the field of speech language pathology. So we tend to draw lots of attention from speech language pathologists. And I'm the loan OT, and so sometimes I'm like, Hey, we're here too.
Jayson Davies
It's funny how that works. I mean, in speech and OT, especially also physical therapy, there are several programs that were kind of designed by an OT or speech therapist, and then it's like the other world kind of really takes it on. The zones of regulation comes to mind, like Leah Cooper's occupational therapist, but it's amazing. Now, it's like speech therapists are really the ones that implement that sometimes I feel like, so it's just amazing. I mean, it's great that we're able to collaborate, which, again, I think we're going to talk about in a little bit here. I think we'll get there. All right. Well, before we dive into search model, I want to give you actually a little chance to talk about yourself as an occupational therapist and how you what made you decide to become an OT and how did you get to where you are now?
Amy Laurent
So, a funny and true story. I was one of those hospital volunteers. Wound up working in a rehab department. Was totally fascinated by hand therapy. I thought I was going to be a hand therapist when I grew up. I was going to go into the operating rooms with the surgeons, splint the patients while they were on the tables, make all sorts of cool, dynamic splints. And then I got to school, and I started working with a really wonderful mentor named Maureen nightstad, who was a professor of occupational therapy at UNH at the time, and she kind of took me under her wing and introduced me to the world of neurology. And I loved it, and I never looked back when I first started working with her. We did all work, independent studies and honors thesis and things around traumatic brain injury. So that was really the first work that I did outside of school. And then I had to move when I when I moved, I moved to an area where the traumatic brain injury intervention was not nearly as cutting edge as where I had been. So I was concerned. Because I was concerned on two levels. One, I didn't want to get a head injury where I moved to because I didn't believe the therapy that was being delivered was going to be adequate. And two, I didn't have a place to work. It was a problem, but I decided to take a job to fill my time while I was looking for the correct place to work. I was going to work with kids because I could work use cognitive behavior therapy. I could use sensory integration. I could use NDT. I could use all of the different interventions that I had come to know and love, working with traumatic brain injury with the pediatric population while I figured out what I was going to do with the rest of my life. The first client I had at the sensory integration clinic where I was working was autistic, and I never looked back. I left that room knowing what I was doing for the rest of my life.
Jayson Davies
Wow, wow. That's amazing. It's interesting. You just find where you belong, right? You just like you had all this other things going on in the world, but that one kid, that one instance just kind of all right, this is where I belong. That's awesome. Yeah. So did you end up working there for a while then staying at that clinic for?
Amy Laurent
So that clinic is really the beginning of the cert story, to be honest with you. So I started working there. I was doing all outpatient therapy and some school based work actually, because we had contracts with schools in the area, and we were looking to provide alternatives to traditional behavioral interventions in Rhode Island, if you get in home services, a traditional ABA program is typically What is offered and funded through our Medicaid system. And some practitioners got together and said, Can't we be able to provide some sort of developmental alternative to this for families who are looking for something different for their children? And so the owner of the clinic where I worked, his name was Lisa Gerard, and she kind of brought me into the project, and she teamed up with Barry present, who is the first author of the certs model, who is a speech language pathologist, who brought Emily Rubin along, who is a speech language pathologist as well, and that's really kind of how we all came to start working together. Was looking to provide an alternative service for IN HOME programming for autistic children. So.
Jayson Davies
Awesome. And so where are you actually at right now in your career? Where are you practicing? Are you focusing on training? What are you doing?
Amy Laurent
So I do all sorts of different things. I am a co author of the certs model. And so as part of that, I do do training around the globe. I'm really fortunate in that way, in terms of helping people understand relational developmental intervention and really scaffolding people's competency with that. I mean, that's the goal of certs, is to empower practitioners to have the skills to use on their own. It's not an expert model. It's more about building confidence within staff. So I get to do that. I do teach adjunct at several universities, but the bulk of my time is really spent in a private practice with an autistic developmental psychologist. I'm a developmental psychologist too. I'm an OT but I'm a developmental psychologist and a special educator. I've got a couple degrees, so yeah, my Bachelor's actually my ot degree, and my master's is in special education, and my doctorate is developmental psychology, but the partnership is two developmental psychologists. One of us is autistic, that's Jacqueline Feeney, and one of us is not, that's me, Amy Laurent, and we devote our time to developing all sorts of tools informed by the Autistic community to provide authentic supports, largely focused on regulation, not entirely, but largely focused on regulation. And within that context, we do a lot of training. We do school consultation, that's probably our favorite thing to do, as well as family consultation, where we get to actually work with families and with educational teams and build programs within schools and things. So I do a little bit of everything which is really fun, because it keeps me really grounded. You know, I think a lot of times when people get into roles where they're doing a lot of training and traveling and things, they lose that clinical aspect, and I've been able to hold on to all of that. And I'm really, I feel really fortunate to be able to do that.
Jayson Davies
Yeah, yeah, no, really, I completely understand that. Like, I've always contemplated, like, going to doing adjunct professor or something like that, but I don't want to lose that side of it. So completely understand that. All right, so moving forward, that's awesome. We are here to talk about certs. We've already said the term a few times, haven't talked about what it means. So I'm going to give you the opportunity right now to tell us what does cert stand for, and why does it have the name. It does.
Amy Laurent
Okay, so CERT is a relational developmental model of educating autistic individuals, and that is an acronym because you cannot have a model of intervention for autistic individuals. It's not an acronym. There is not one that exists. Like, I literally, like, will sit around and try to think of like, is there something and there's nothing. They all have acronyms. So we're no different. We had to be just like everybody else, which is kind of funny, because we don't conform in a lot of other ways, but whatever. Okay, so cert stands for social communication, emotional regulation and transactional support. And it really is a model that is a partnership based model. So we're looking at scaffolding skills and development for students in terms of social communication and emotional regulation, these core foundational areas that are going to support active engagement and learning in relationship, right? Because that's where most learning happens. So I just said in relationship, that's the Ts, that's the transactional support part of the model. So we have a curriculum for learners, students, individuals, all ages, in communication regulation, but then we have a curriculum for the partners, which is the transactional support curriculum, looking at how we modify our interactive style, how we modify activities and environments and are supportive to the learner. So if we expect to see change in the student, in the child, in the individual, the adult that we're supporting, we have to be willing to change ourselves. So that's that's the acronym, and it did honestly start as C, E, R t, s, but we did get a letter from the breath mint company telling us there was trademark infringement. So it's true. So we added the s, and the model is much better for it, because it really does highlight the core area that we're trying to scaffold development.
Jayson Davies
Gotcha, that's awesome. And so like you said, You are the lone ot on this project, and I want to ask you, you kind of mentioned a little bit how you got pulled into it, but expand on that a little bit more. And then also, what value do you bring to the certs team as having as being the occupational therapist on board. We'll be back after a quick break, while it may be summer break now, the school year will be here before you know it. Get ready for it. At the fifth annual back to school Conference coming August, 23 and 24th of this year, join hundreds of school based ot practitioners online for this two day transformative learning event where you can attend live or catch the replays. Don't Miss Amy and Jack. From autism level up, sharing neurodiverse strategies to support autistic students or expert handwriting instructor Peggy Morris as she shares the most up to date research on handwriting and how to put it into practice, don't miss this impactful event for school based ot practitioners. By school based ot practitioners as a thank you for listening to this episode of the OT school house podcast. Use promo code podcast, 25 for $50 off your registration at ot schoolhouse.com/conference, I'll see you there.
Amy Laurent
I'm I'm giggling because I have all sorts of ideas that I would so I, first and foremost, I should acknowledge my other co authors. So I have mentioned Barry present already. He is the first author. He is a speech language pathologist, and Dr Amy Weatherby is Barry is at Brown University. Dr Amy Weatherby is at Florida State University, and she's a distinguished research chair in the College of Medicine there. She's also a speech and language pathologist. I think I just said that. And Emily Rubin is my colleague as well. She's a speech and language pathologist. She is the Educational Outreach Coordinator for Marcus Autism Center at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. And then there's me, and so Barry and Amy had worked together for a really long time. They met in graduate school. They did tons of projects together looking at language development, social communicative competence in young children. Some of your listeners might be familiar with some of the tools they develop, like the communication symbolic behavior scales, comes to mind the CSBs it's a tool that's often used. There's a screening tool, the CSB SDP. So they had worked together for a long time. They had published together for a long time. They're very interested in the development of autism and supporting individuals working within the context of their neurology and really in an authentic ways. I always say that. So it's kind of started as Barry's doctoral dissertation, because Barry in the 1970s I still envision him walking around with a real to real camera on his shoulder, right, like because we didn't have, like, cell phones. But what he did was he video recorded five different individuals and analyze their language development patterns, because at the time, you have to think autism still a subtype of schizophrenia. So echolalia is viewed as psychotic speech and something that needed to be extinguished. And Barry was a psycholinguistics major, and he was like, you know, I am working with these kids in camps during the summer, and I'm forming relationships with them, and I'm understanding that this is truly a functional means of communication. It's just a different developmental path for communication for these individuals. And so that was what his dissertation set out to, kind of document. And he was the first person to publish the functions of echolalia and really be able to demonstrate that autistic individuals learn speech differently, oftentimes not all, but many autistic individuals do Adriana work followed quickly, kind of after that, they kind of republishing simultaneously, but that's like the crux of certs. And then as Barry and Amy started to look at, how do we scaffold development to help young children, really, in those areas where they may need some additional support, they started to talk about forming certs. So the two of them started to talk about it, and then they pulled in the other people that they felt they needed to round out the model. And so I got pulled in because, as they were developing it, Barry and Amy felt very strongly that regulation was a big piece of this model, that we knew that autistic individuals struggled oftentimes with being well regulated, being available for learning, engaging, participating in everyday activities, but they felt like they needed kind of a different take or a different angle on it. So when I was brought in, I was originally honestly brought in to help write one chapter of the manual, chapter three, Volume One.
Jayson Davies
Just self regulation.
Amy Laurent
Right? And it really is the foundation of the motion regulation curriculum that chapter. And as we started working together, they realized that regulation touched every aspect of everything that we're talking about, and that is true of certain certs. Is very much an interwoven model. And so very quickly, I was brought on as a full author to help kind of make sure that that was just infused throughout the whole model, which was really for me, I can tell you exactly where I was and what
Jayson Davies
happened, but really though about how long was that? When was the program developed?
Amy Laurent
So we first published on certs, the first art well, okay, very first presented on certs in we first started talking about regulation in construct with communication in 1998 was his first article. We published the first article on certs as a team in 2003 and the infants and young children. In Journal of infants and young children, and then the manuals themselves were first published in 2006
Jayson Davies
Wow. You know, that seems so long ago when you actually say the numbers in years, but really it was like yesterday, as far as like, the with as far as like, how long it takes to do research, or how long it takes to develop a program and get everything, it really isn't that long ago, even though, when you, you know, calculate the number of years, it seems like a while, but programs, I mean, they take so long to really develop and then to actually get them going, and get them known out, and get people actually using it. So I'm happy to hear or happy to happy to have you here so we can help share. Share this for people who may not have heard of it yet.
Amy Laurent
Well, and I think that's, I mean, it's a really good point when you talk about research. So we've always talked about when we've developed cert certs is an evidence based model, meaning everything in those books has an evidence base behind it. And I often jokingly say, like, it wouldn't be in there if it didn't, because Amy Weatherby would not have allowed it, like she's an empiricist to like the nth degree, right? But the reality is, we all are very passionate about evidence based practice and making sure that we are doing the best for our clients, and that means we're taking evidence from empirical research, but we're also taking it from qualitative and lived experience as well, and integrating those pieces too. But so certs is grounded in research. It has a really strong research base, but to get those empirical studies that look at the efficacy of the model, it does take time, just like you're talking about, right? So we've got several, and we one of the most notable ones was just highlighted in a government publication by the Institute of Education Sciences and the interagency inter agency Council, coordinating council in 2019 which was reflecting on 2018 research, which It was the implementation of certs in public school systems in K to two in any educational setting, so self contained setting, versus fully included without support, with support. But looking at these really large districts, and can we bring this model to scale in a public school system, in a real life situation, not in a clinic, but in like where we work every day. Can we make this happen? Can we bring teachers to fidelity? And can bringing teachers to Fidelity impact student performance and performance on things that are quality of life measures so active engagement in the classroom, time on task, responsive to teachers, rate of initiation, those things that really are the foundation of learning that that research was literally just published within the last two years, because those are longitudinal studies, and each one took, you know, four to six years to execute, and then to crush the data and then to get it out. So yes, you are quite right. These things take time to to disseminate, right or to be able to prove out that way.
Jayson Davies
I just want to highlight that you did not miss misspeak. You did say this took four to six years. Like that is how long things take to implement something, take all the data, put it all together, and then eventually get it published. I mean, that's that's a long time, so kudos to you and the team for for getting that all out there.
Amy Laurent
But I will, I was not a principal investigator on any of our major grants. I was a consultant on many of them. So Amy. Amy is actually the spearhead of many of the grants. She she's the one who can, like, write those applications and get that funding. You
Jayson Davies
need that person on the team for sure, all right, so you you actually just kind of led into the next question I wanted to ask, and that was about population. Obviously, this podcast, we mostly have school based occupational therapists listening in some clinic base, but it sounds like you're using this not just with a population with disabilities, but also kind of almost sounded like what you just said there was for even general education potentially. I don't know if I'm wrong about that, but I want to ask you, really, what population is the certs model? What was it designed for? Who is it used with?
Amy Laurent
So certs is designed to meet the needs of autistic individuals, because we're really focusing on those core areas of challenge that they experience that impact their ability to function in their daily lives in ways that are meaningful to them. So that's the communication and regulation with that being said, it's a developmental framework, and so we haven't talked too much about the difference between a model and a framework yet, but it's a framework meaning that I can take any kid, any typically developing kid, and look at our scope and sequence of goals and point out where their strengths are in their profile, and where their opportunities for growth are or their next steps are. What. Does that mean? That means, if you're supporting anyone who's struggling with communication or regulation, certs has application for them, because, and we're always thinking about, how do we support that in a relationship, right? Or how do we make those accommodations and those differences? So with that being said, you know, oftentimes, when we're presenting, people say, Oh, have you used it for this population? Oh, I've used it for this population. I'm thinking about this. And the answer is, we do see applicability beyond the autistic individuals, but all the research has been done on autistic individuals, and some of the transactional supports in our curriculum are specifically designed around their learning style. What does that mean? That means some of them you might look at for a different child, a different learner who has a different style, and say, Oh, visuals aren't as salient for this kid. Maybe I'm not going to use them for this individual, even though they've got this huge section on visuals, right? Well, we have that in there because we know about the learning style of the autistic individuals.
Jayson Davies
Gotcha. Definitely. I mean, it's just, you know, the autism population is very it's, well, it's, it's growing, and there is so much research, kind of, and I'm sure there's a lot of funding to going toward research related to autism, and it's just amazing what is coming out of the world today. And the search model. No different. I want to continue on with now that we kind of have dove into this or Devon and dove into this a little bit. I want slash, right? I'm not the work. I'm not the best with words, but I have a podcast. I try so social communication. I kind of want to break this down a little bit. We've been talking really fast certs is social communication, emotional regulation and transactional support. So if you can break down a little bit more that social communication for kids with autism, and what the goal is within certs, right?
Amy Laurent
And so I think one of the things that I should have highlighted when you just asked me about the population, just so everybody's super clear. I know most of your listeners are supporting school age students. And certs is very much applicable to the school age population. And when we talk about school age population, we're talking about full school age population, like three through 21 or 22 depending on the state you live in. But it is actually given that it is a developmental curriculum. It extends to the earliest diagnosed children up through adulthood we can support because it's this developmental framework. And so you know, our earliest research is done with children starting at 18 months of age who are just diagnosed. So just kind of keeping that in mind for your listeners who might be supporting different age ranges, there is applicability outside of the school years, even though the school years tends to be that sweet spot where we start thinking about intervention models and things. So when we talk about social communication, supporting social communication, we're really talking about helping individuals become effective and efficient communicators, people who are able to get their ideas across to others in ways that they want to so different messages to different people in tons of different environments. That's what we're looking for in terms of social communication competence, being able to connect to other people in meaningful ways. So we really look at supporting two different dimensions of communication. For communication. One is joint attention, which is why we're connecting to other people, right? So things like behavior regulation, getting getting your wants and needs met, which autistic learners tend to be better at. And then there's those social functions of communication, things like turn, taking, sharing, showing off, right? Greeting, things that can be a little bit more challenging for autistic individuals. And then we talk about joint attention in the sense of this kind of like shared experience, shared conversation, shared meaning, where we're co constructing play, or we're co constructing an experience with somebody. So when we think about joint attention, we're thinking really big and thinking about all the different reasons that somebody might be connecting to somebody else, and we want to make sure we're supporting a big breadth of reasons for connecting and communicating. And then the other aspect that we look at is supporting what we call symbol use. This is where it gets all jargony, right? Simply, symbol uses how, if joint attention is why. Symbol uses how. So we're going to start developmentally really young, and we're going to talk about things like facial expressions, vocalizations, gestures, proximity, right? Those really early communicative symbols, signals. And then we're going to build on that, and we're going to start talking about things like symbolic systems. So it could be spoken words, but it could also be some other sort of symbolic form, so sign language, a picture symbol augmentation. And then we're gonna start to talk about how sophisticated are they with those systems? Are they using single words? Are they putting words together? Are they using echolalia to go back to Barry's dissertation, like I said, it's rooted, right? And then we start. Layering in symbol use. We also think about play, because play is largely symbolic in nature, in terms of how we scaffold our development, like language. We know language and play go hand in hand in terms of development. And we also think about things like social conventions in symbol use, because social conventions, they're kind of like social currency, but they're largely dependent on the culture you're in and what the expectation in the environment. So learning kind of what underlies those for individuals, so that they can figure out what and when and why they might want to use them if it behooves them. So that's really where we think about social communication, is this very robust skill set that we're really looking to develop. It's not just how big is their vocabulary, how many words do they have? It's not how they respond to questions. It's how effective are they at initiating with other people.
Jayson Davies
All right, so that's the social communication side of it. And then you the team used a very specific term, emotional regulation, not self regulation, not emotional intelligence, emotional regulation. So explain that piece a little bit.
Amy Laurent
So emotional regulation, it's so convenient we have like, these big, like, you know, domains, and then underneath each domain we have two capacities. So underneath emotional regulation, again, certs is grounded in the developmental literature. So we're going to go straight back and look at how emotional regulation develops, and we're going to talk about self regulation, and we're going to talk about mutual regulation. And those are the two skill sets that we're looking to develop in the individual or support the development or the use of so of course, I mean, we as OTs, we know this, right? We got but self regulation is what we have at our own disposal to organize ourselves, to tolerate transitions, to delay gratifications, to maintain active engagement, right? So we have sensory motor strategies that we can use. We're all pretty good at those. I in full disclosure, Jayson knows that I am standing and pacing and rocking while I'm doing this, so I'm all about the sensory motor regulation.
Jayson Davies
Yes, I love your I love your standing desk setup.
Amazing Narrator
And then there is our language strategies, which are basically informational strategies, which help us navigate our day, things that provide knowledge. Knowledge is power when it comes to regulation, right? So even just being able to check my phone, to look at my schedule, to know what time I had to check hop on the Zoom call. That is a language based strategy for regulation. I'm using that to inform myself. And then we think about metacognition, right? So metacognition is being able to be reflective or forward thinking in a situation. So that's a developmentally really advanced skill or ability. One of the things that we should say is, while we're looking to develop a really robust profile of these things for our learners, for the individuals we're supporting, we have to meet them at their developmental level. So if I'm working with somebody who is pre symbolic in their communication, right, only using those facial expressions, gestures and proximity, that early stuff I talked about, I'm only using sensory motor strategies for regulation. That's how they process and understand the world, right? I'm not going to throw language and picture schedules at somebody who doesn't understand language and picture schedules like that's not smart, that's adding noise, that's adding clutter, and that's probably just regulating them further. So we're going to meet individuals where they are developmentally. What does that mean? That means when I get to students who are emerging language students, then I go, I can use information strategies here. I can use picture schedules. I can use timers. I can use first then boards. I can use emotional identification cards. I can use all of those things right when I get to that that level. And then for that last stage that I talked about, the metacognition, those are going to be for our students who are conversational, our students who are able to think about thinking right and we know in typical development solidly that comes in eight years of age, chronologically, like for a typically developing child, that's when we know that's a Solid skill. So if you're supporting learners who aren't developmentally at and chronic and chronologically, I should say, at an eight year developmental level, stick with the language and the sensory motor strategies don't pull in that metacognition yet. So that's the self regulation basket. But how do we how do we learn self regulation? We learn self regulation through successful mutual regulation with other people, right? Like it's people responding to our signals of distress and providing assistance us learning the strategies that they're offering to us work that we can use them ourselves as self regulation, or we can learn to ask them for help in the future. That's initiated mutual regulation. And so it's this dance of these two different levels. Oftentimes, you know, if we're thinking about working in schools, you know, people are always like, Oh, I gave them a fidget toy, like, you know, I did this great sensory motor thing, and they're like, it didn't work. And my initial response is, usually, did you teach them how to use it? And people go. What do you mean? Did I teach them how to use it? And this is what we need to know from development. Most self regulation is learned through successful mutual regulation. Right? Kids learn to use things because we teach them. Typically developing children who are plugged into the social world pick up on visual models of other people around them. They observe what's going on, and they internalize that, and they learn to use they seem to absorb self regulatory strategies based on what they see other people doing. If you're not so plugged into the social environment because you're autistic, like and that doesn't like you're you're more drawn to other things in your environment, you know, your passionate areas of interest, or something you know, like the number line at the front of the room, the alphabet. How many of us have kids that we know who love alphabets, and they put those alphabet in the front of the room, and then that's like, that's the focus of attention, right? But if that's their focus of attention, they're not picking up on the models, the natural models going on around them, we have to explicitly teach them how to use the fidget, and we also have to teach them why we want them to use it. And hey, we'll know this is working for you if you're able to pay attention, if you're able to answer questions, if you're not, otherwise, you've just handed them the best toy in the room. So when we talk about this dance in certs, about self regulation, mutual regulation, it is often about teaching. The objectives in the IEP often are first mutual regulation, and then we flip them into self regulation. I think so many times we as OTs, jump to self regulation and forget about the teaching process. So certs is big on making sure we don't forget about the teaching process.
Jayson Davies
I can think of one or two IEPs, but I've probably done that. Go back and revisit
Amy Laurent
that we all have. And what we always say is, when we know better, we do better
Jayson Davies
exactly, all right, so the last part of this is if I can scroll back up to make sure I have it right, transactional support. Because this is actually the area that I had never really heard of much before I came across you in the certs model. So I am interested to hear what you had to say about transactional support.
Amy Laurent
So again, transactional supports heavily rooted in developmental psychology and the developmental literature, and it is the notion that learning occurs within the context of relationship. It's a two way street. And as I said earlier, I know I said it, if we expect to see change in the student or the child or the individual we're supporting, we've got to be willing to change too, like it's not all about the individual, it's about meeting them where they are, and scaffolding development as we go. So that's really the the nature of transactional support. So just like we had two capacities in social communication, the how and the why of communication, and we had two capacities in emotional regulation, the self regulation and mutual regulation, we have two fascinating isn't it transactional support. It makes for a very neat and clean form. When we're we have two two things that we're really looking at, how partners are supporting students. And when we talk about partners, it's anybody. It could be parents, it could be teachers, it could be paraprofessionals, it could be special teachers, like anyone who's interacting with that child within the model is considered a partner. And so we're going to look at things like interpersonal supports. And this is where, like, the OT just kicks and meaning kicks in. Well, kicks in in lots of places, but this is, like, therapeutic use of self. Like, this is how do we modify our interactive style to truly meet our client, our student, our person that we care about, that we're supporting where they are, and kind of join with them, right? So modifying our language level so it's comprehensible to them, right? If I'm working with that pre symbolic kid, the child who's not using or responding to symbols, I'm talking to them like I'm talking to you. That's the Charlie Brown teacher that that's the wah wah wah. And what's going to happen the kid is either going to shut down right, push me out of the way, which looks aggressive, but it's not. It's just trying to get a buzzing bee away from them, or they're going to split they're going to run away, which is going to look like escape behavior, which is really just, I need to get away from that really annoying thing, which is me, which is not what we want. So modifying our language level is huge, and not just modifying for developmental level, but also modifying for regulatory state. Right when we get someone who's really amped up, moving towards maxed out and frenzied, even if they're conversational, they don't have the same language processing abilities when they're in that arousal state. So are we as partners monitoring their arousal state and modifying based on where they are and what they're able to process at that time? So the curriculum is really pretty robust, you know, getting down on the child's level, modeling, regulatory strategies that are more conventional, those types of things. It's, it's a full scope and sequence of goals that. We are actually assessing the partners on so at the same time, we would be looking for skills in the child, in terms of their communication regulation. We'd be looking at the partner at the exact same time and saying, how are they being supported? Because context matters. I mean, we, as OTs, of all people, know context matters, right? We don't operate in vacuums ever. And so that's one side is the interpersonal support, and the other side is learning support. And learning support is how this we are so good at this as OTs too. This is how we modify the activity or the environment, right? It's grading the activity. We're so good at this task analysis. How do we break it down? But it really is like thinking about things like infusing visual supports. Are we modifying the length of time? Are we thinking about the social complexity in the environment? Are we infusing visuals? If we're you working with somebody who is an AAC user, are we making sure that we're using that for receptive language, so we're teaching that way, not just expecting them to use it expressively. So again, it's a really comprehensive scope and sequence of objectives that we look for evidence that partners are actually implementing these things, and then we decide, what do we need more of? Or what aren't we doing that we should be doing, or what are we doing that's actually not helpful for this individual learner,
Jayson Davies
absolutely. So one of the key terms that I'm focusing in on as you talk is partners. It's an important term, not just because it's something that you guys use and that we all use, but right now, partners are the teachers are the parents at home are his big brother, big sister, who's on the computer with them. And I get a lot of questions from other therapists on social media and emails about, how do I help my teachers? How do I help my paraprofessionals, and now even the parents. And so when you're coming into a school with the certs model. What are, what is the team doing is, is, are the parents and the or not the parents, but are the teachers and the paraprofessional para professionals getting trained in the certs model? Or is the OT and the speech therapist going in and training them? Or what does that look like?
Amy Laurent
So the goal of certs is really a multidisciplinary model, and that means everybody is on board. I mean that when we're operating on all cylinders, everybody's on board and bringing their knowledge and experience to the table, right? Because we all have a piece that we can contribute that's really important. And so what does that that mean? That means, like, if we, if you're doing a full blown search assessment, like you're really doing the whole thing. It would mean that maybe the occupational therapist is going into the classroom during their morning meeting time and doing the observation to see what communication and regulation skills the students using and how the teacher supporting in that moment. And then the flip side is maybe that occupational therapist is supporting that child during recess or in a physical education class, and then the teacher comes and observes the occupational therapist during those times to see how the OT is supporting this child and what communication skills and what regulation skills the child's using in that environment. And so it's a cross contextual observational assessment that we're using, we try to get as much information from home as possible, because kids don't have home days and school days, they have full days, right? And so you know, if we're not in a remote learning situation, we'll ask families if they're comfortable sending in some video of their child at home, because oftentimes kids look really different at home than they look at school and but we can glean a ton of information about how they're being supported at home and what's working in that environment, and how can we leverage that to use that in the schools and vice versa. So the goal is to get everybody on board. We are also very realistic and knowing that that can't always happen. So we always say, shoot really high and land where you can right, because not, not every family is going to have the energy and the ability and the just even the time to be able to be fully a member of this team. But if we can help in some way, if we can provide some supports that are useful to them, or some intervention strategies, or they can they can share with us too. We're better off. But certs is really designed to be a cross contextual model that as many people can get on board as possible. So even if that's we come up with one transactional support that we think is really going to make a huge difference in the students life, in terms of their ability to be able to engage in their in their daily routines. Let's just say, What? What do I want to pick? I don't know. I have 100 ideas running through my head, but let's just say, maybe it, maybe it's something around communication, and it's around the ability to initiate asking. For help, right? And you know, the families agreed that that's a struggle at home, but it would make a big difference if they could do that at home, and we've seen it in the school in a variety of different environments. So the whole everybody goes, yep, this ask, this initiation for the purpose of asking for help is going to make a big difference. If we help him learn how to use the skill or ability, if we devise transactional supports for that goal or objective, everybody gets access to them, right? Not with, not with the parents expectation that you have to use this and you have to use it in this way, but more like, here's this thing that could be really helpful to you, right? Like, not in a guilt inducing way, we don't want to do guilt but as a resource, no, we don't know, no guilt resources. No guilt resources. We will. We want resources, but this idea of being able to provide the support. But then the flip side of that is in the school environment, is that goal or objective around initiating the request for help becomes the property of the entire team. So the OT is working on it, the speech pathologist is working on it, the teachers working on the paraprofessional is working on it. The special teachers are like, you know, the special teachers as an art, music, whatever anyone who's interacting with this child knows that's the goal or objective, and they know the types of supports that we're using to help facilitate or scaffold that. So what we're basically doing is infusing natural learning opportunities across the child's entire day, which is where we're going to get true learning. We're going to get learning where the child needs to lose use the skill, versus learning in isolated context or a drill based format, which doesn't work well and it doesn't generalize. Well,
Jayson Davies
yeah, and I had a question for you about being multidisciplinary, but you really just answered that. And so earlier, earlier, you kind of mentioned how search almost, I don't know, and correct me if I'm wrong, but you kind of it sounds like search was an alternative to something that was being used a lot, such as, like the ABA type of program. And so I do want to ask you, does ABA fit into certs at all? Do you use ABA type of, type of techniques, or where does that fit in? How does ABA fit or not fit? Or this
Amy Laurent
is a loaded question. No, no, no, it's totally fine. It's a question I get all the time. What we will say is, in the context of certs, when we talk about our overarching goals of the model, which are regulation, availability, for learning, engagement in ways that are natural to the individual. And we talk about social communicative competence, so social emotional competence and social communicative competence. And we talk about students who are able to initiate communication and are able to communicate for a variety of functions in a variety of ways, and truly kind of project themselves into the world traditional behavioral approaches don't support that type of outcome or goal, right? And I mean, that's just true, because when we think about behavioral intervention, and we could dice apart what people mean by ABA, and this is why I say it's a loaded question, because people have so many different perceptions of what they think ABA is and your perception is your perception. But when we're just thinking about behavioral intervention as a whole, and we think about traditional discrete trial training, that model always puts the child in a responsive role, right? So the teacher asks the question, the child's either expected to follow the direction or answer the question, right? It's the man intact, right? If we're going to go back and use kind of the lingo that we tend to hear behaviorist use, you can't become a spontaneous communicator if you're always in a respondent role. If that is our overarching goal for the model that teaching technique cannot support the attainment of that goal. It doesn't fly. It can't happen. And the same thing is true for regulation. You cannot drill somebody into being well regulated. We can pre teach, we can preview, but it's about teaching in the moment for an individual and also learning to be responsive to their cues, and being able to, again, through that successful mutual regulation, support, teach self regulation, and again, you can't do that in a discrete trial format. It is not possible. So when I say traditional discrete trial, or traditional behavioral analysis or ABA doesn't fit with inserts, it doesn't it. It just doesn't for communication and regulation, which are overarching goals. Sometimes, if we start to split hairs, people will say, Well, what about other aspects of the child's program? Right? So this is where I say I'm a developmental psychologist. If you tell me you're using. Behavioral learning theory for an objective, like an academic task, where it makes sense, and I think I might have thrown this example at you earlier, but this idea of we all learned our times table through mass trial, like repetition over and over again, some adaptive skills like tying your shoes, you learn through mass trial. Like it truly works. The teaching technique supports the end product and the goal, the key is certs would never subscribe ever to using a behavioral teaching technique for a child's entire program, right? We are going to say this technique to teach this specific skill, and this specific skill is related to something that everybody learns that way. And that's what's super critical. It's not like, oh, this child is an autistic student, so they need to be taught in this way. It's no this teaching technique makes sense for this skill, and I think that's where, and I'm on a bit of a tangent and maybe a little bit of a soapbox now, but I think that's where we go a little bit awry with ABA, where people go, Oh my gosh. We can use this to do everything, and we can't, and it, but it really doesn't fit within the model. We really want social emotional competence. We really want social communicative competence. We want these children to be who they are and not be trained to act in certain ways. So can you use some behavioral techniques for some certain things? Sure, is it a thing that fits easily within the model for lots of things? Absolutely not, gotcha? No, that's that is a very fair answer. And I well explained, well explained, I don't know, I kind of went into an attention and in circles, but it's a, it is a complicated answer, because I think people often say, and then, and then people will come back and say, well, you're talking about, you know, traditional or old ABA, and this is new ABA. And I often say, if behavior analysts would acknowledge where their new informed practice comes from, you would find it comes from the developmental literature. And then it's really not behavioral intervention, if it's relational. So again, it that's developmental psychologist in me that does like to start to argue, but like to start to argue those points, because sometimes, like, the field of ABA just goes, Hey, this is ours, and they grab it and they hold on to it, and you're like, No, where did you get it from? Like, just acknowledge it. That'd be great.
Jayson Davies
That's interesting, yeah, how you say that? Because you're, I mean, we all kind of grab them some things from somewhere, but yeah, yeah, acknowledge it and say where things are coming from. All right, you haven't mentioned this yet, but you mentioned it to me a little bit earlier, and I think it's something that people need to hear and that is about measuring goals within the search model. And how does that go about? Because I know a lot of times, you know, on an IEP, we have a goal, and it says the student will do this and this, and three out of four trials and 80% accuracy, which I can't stand having, doesn't make sense. But what does it mean in the certs model? I don't know if I should ask, what does the goal look like, or what is it considered when it's met? What are you looking at to make sure that it truly is met?
Amy Laurent
So it's an it's an interesting question. So as I said, the goals or objectives are the property of the whole team. So like, if we have a regulation goal, it's not the property of the OT, it's the property of the entire team. Like, who's measuring this? The entire team is measuring it. The OT may be taking the lead on the types of transactional supports that are used to help facilitate the objective, if that makes sense, because we might have special knowledge in that area, just like a speech pathologist might have special knowledge around augmentative alternative communication systems that they're bringing in for a communication objective, but everybody's addressing it. So what does it mean? It means when we write our goal or objective, we're really specific in terms of, let's go back and use that example of the child that I said, Oh, maybe initiating for the reason of asking help or other social interactions like that was going to make a big difference. Like that's going to come right off of our curriculum, because we've determined that, and we're going to go put that right in the IEP or the IFSP for the child, right? You know, John will initiate requesting for the purpose of help or other actions, which is different than requesting objects when, and this is where a transactional support piece comes in. We write it right in the goal or objective when partners provide choices of objects, maybe for this child or visual supports, or give time for processing recognize signals of distress and offer support like we we wind up kind of coming in with which one of those transactional support. So you're not going to, like have that laundry list of seven that I just listed. You're going to pick the one or two so John will initiating requests for help or other actions when partners give him processing time and a choice of object. X, right? So it's all right there. It's not just like these transactional supports get lost on this accommodations page, which often, like, is at the front of the IP that people forget to read, or, like, whatever
Jayson Davies
you said that. I say that all the time. Okay,
Amy Laurent
so, so, but it's right there. But what that means is, is the whole team's responsible. Everybody knows what they have to be doing, right? Like what they have to be providing, the wait time and the choice of objects, everybody's responsible for it, and then the measurability, which is, I think, the piece that you're really interested in comes into, how many partners, in, how many contexts do we see it right? So we're going to know that John's achieving this goal or objective, not if he just does it in speech therapy or he does it in his gym class being supported by his ot we're going to know he does it when he's doing it in three different settings across the school environment, with two or three partners, and at least one of the partners is a peer. When we see him doing it in that many places with that many people. We go, Ah, he's got this awesome do we change the transactional support, or has he truly internalized it and we're ready to move on to another goal or objective for him?
Jayson Davies
Gotcha? Yeah, no, I really like that. Just that last part that you really touched upon, you know, making sure that it's happening in the context that we want it to happen in not just a single context, that maybe, maybe social communication is easier to or occurs more frequently in the gym class. Well, then maybe that's not where we need to focus it on. We need to focus it on in language arts or at recess or something, whatever that might be, making sure it's happening everywhere across the board, not just in one place. And I think that's
Amy Laurent
an important thing to kind of highlight, and we haven't talked about it is when we say, these are the property of everybody, and we're doing it across the entire day. We are, but we're actually really strategic in certs. And what we do is we embed goals or objectives and activities where it makes sense to do so. So if we say requesting help or other actions is one of those places, one of those goals or objectives for John. Going back to her little guy, John here and we wanted to request help or other actions, it makes sense, probably, to go after that during meal times, right? It makes sense to go after that, maybe in gym class or an activity where there's a free choice. It makes sense to go after that, where it probably doesn't make sense to target make sense to target that is in library, during library, we're probably going to be targeting some self regulatory strategy to help maintain focus and attention. So we're strategic in which goals or objectives we embed. Everybody has knowledge of everything, but we're strategic in what we're really targeting, and in any given activity throughout a student's day, we're not really focused on more than two things at a time, because if we are, there's no way we can provide all the support. It's just not going to happen. And there's no way we can collect the data either, which is really important to be able to do. Yeah,
Jayson Davies
and you know, I in the back of my mind, I can hear occupational therapists listening to this and just thinking, when do I do this? When? When? How do I fit this into a day? And I think that's a whole nother discussion. If you want to speak to this, feel free to but that's a lot more about advocacy for our entire profession, which I don't think our profession has been the best advocates for ourselves, and we need to continue to get better, whether you believe that we've been great or not, we need to continue to get better and advocating for ourselves, advocating for our caseload, workload, whatever approach that your school is willing to call it, and making sure that we aren't biting off more than we can chew. And you know, I get it, there's budgets and everything involved. But it is something that if we feel something's right for a child, then we need to fight for that a little bit. And if that means trying to decrease your caseload by five kids, then maybe that that's worth doing it. I don't know if you want to speak to that at all
Amy Laurent
well. And I would say this, this educational model is really a lot about kind of universal design and really reaching a lot of students. You had said that kind of in the beginning, you were like, oh, you know, we're targeting autistic children, but it seems like it's going to have benefit beyond that it would, but I think it, you know, it is a bit of a paradigm shift to think about. And paradigm shifts are challenging. Change is always challenging, but in the end, certs is about working smarter, not harder, and if you've got everybody on board supporting that child's regulation, supporting that child's communication, you are going to actually wind up developing competency across your staff. Like I said, part of my job is develop competencies in staffs, right? So I kind of, like, want to put myself out of a job. Like, once I get people really invested in this framework, they've got the skills and abilities. I mean, I'm going in and teaching people who've got years of experience and tons of tools in their toolbox. I'm saying here's the framework to organize it, right? But one. You've got that framework, and the team you're working with has that framework. It really it flows in amazing ways. That does not mean the change to bring it about cannot be full of bumps, and administrative support is often really critical in making sure you've got the time to team with other people to make sure that everybody's on the same page. But once it starts slowing,
Jayson Davies
it is a thing of beauty. Yeah, yeah. It's just, it's just getting started getting the ball rolling. Go from there snowball at the top of the hill. All right, we're going to wrap this up here pretty shortly, but I couldn't get through this entire interview without mentioning your TED talk that you completed with seven of your best friends, basically, it sounds like and closest friends with autism based upon, well, you talked about autism, you talked about behavior, functional communication, a lot of things that we've already talked about today, but I actually want to give you the chance to kind of just talk about how that came to be and why you chose what you did. And then everyone can out, everyone out there listening can end this podcast and go watch it. So tell us, how did it come to be, and why is it so meaningful for you?
Amy Laurent
So the Podcast, the podcast, the TED talk, the TED Talks. Title is compliance is not the goal rethinking support for autistic individuals, and I think it really touches on pretty much everything that we've talked about here today, right? My focus, my passion, my interest, is really supporting regulation and supporting active engagement and high quality of life for autistic individuals and helping them kind of live their best lives in meaningful and authentic ways, the ways they want to. And we know from firsthand and lived experience that the ability to support someone's regulation is critical for those things. And for far too long, individuals have been subjected to behavior management approaches where we're trying to get them to comply, to look like we think they should look, versus what is comfortable for their neurology and what actually truly works and is supportive for them. So I do have many, many autistic friends, including my my best friend and partner at autism level, jayvi, who is in in the talk. And as we were just talking about kind of this, this idea of, how do we reach more people? How do you, how do you do this? Or like, okay, there's this TED talk thing, let's do it. But it was an opportunity to help really reframe the status quo and help people start to conceptualize and think from an autistic perspective versus from a neuro normative standpoint. And it was super fun because they did. I kind of, I broke the mold. I kind of like to do that, but I asked if I could use video and if I could bring in some autistic voices to help really illustrate so to be honest with you, I kind of feel like the MC in that TED Talk, like my job was just to set them up and let them deliver their message so it I feel kind of rotten, because you have to search my name to find the TED talk, but, but I feel like they're the stars of it, and they're the ones that we really want everybody to listen to, because they share some really powerful personal experiences and from a real range and background. So,
Jayson Davies
oh yeah, that's what I was really most, most appreciative of, I think, is like you had seven very different people on there, and one of your friends, I think she was filming it while she was in an airport, just showing that she was, like, in the community. While she was filming this, you had another, another gentleman who was filming, like, in a recording studio it looked like, and he said he is, Oh, Michael, yeah, yeah. I mean, just very interesting people from all different backgrounds. And then you also had people that were just sitting on their couch at home, and, you know, and that's fair, you know. And so very different people all living their lives with autism, but they're living their life, which is the important part of it. And I think
Amy Laurent
that, you know, the key part was to be able to show, and I'd be not telling the truth to tell you that that wasn't by design. We, I mean, we really thought about who we wanted to include. And I say we because it was a team. I wasn't, it wasn't just me, it was all of them like, what I I'm always like, it's a collective TED Talk. But, you know, we really wanted people to see that, even though we have individuals who have very different communication styles, very different educational levels, very different age ranges. We wanted to pull the threads of their common experiences. So to be honest with you, the way we did it is I did it like a qualitative study, and I sent them five questions. And I just said, please answer these and answer them on video so they weren't scripted. I didn't ask for specific talking points. I was just like, you know, what does stress feel like to you? What does Joy feel like to you? What is it has Has anyone ever tried to control your behavior? How does that feel to you? Those were the questions I asked. And then we just did a qualitative research study, and we literally reduced them for themes, and then that's how my talk framed around what they came up with. I didn't write my talk first. I wrote it around what they they said, shared,
Jayson Davies
developed like a true researcher data and then work from there. Awesome. All right. Well, before we wrap this up, I actually want to just ask you a simple question that I have no idea what it'll lead to, but is there anything else on your mind that you would like to share with ot school, house audience this evening, I would just
Amy Laurent
say, thanks for listening if you made it to the end. Pretty amazing. And I would say, thanks for being interested in thinking about supporting kids in scaffolding development, in their natural routines and in meaningful and meaningful ways, and that we do have resources available to help support with that. So if you're interested further in inserts or my work, you know we have a search Facebook page, and we have a website too. The website isn't as great, I'll be honest, like the Facebook page is a little bit more like active and current, but you can find some basic research resources on the website, which is just certs.com and the other thing that I would encourage you to do is check out my websites, because I've got a lot of practical tools that you can download and use for free. One is an older website which is my name, so it's Amy hyphen, laurent.com, and there are about 90 downloadable resources on there for supporting regulation and communication in all different ways. And then my current website is reflective of my partnership with Dr fiedy that I mentioned earlier, and that's autism level up.com and so those supports are super awesome and dynamic, because, again, they're around supporting communication and regulation, but everything we develop is infused by at least her perspective as an autistic psychologist, but oftentimes, as you said, as a true researcher, we reach out to the community and do all sorts of kind of surveys and things, and we use the information that we get from the Autistic community to help develop our tools. So you could, oftentimes, we're really transparent about how we've developed them, too, so you can actually see the process of how things have evolved and come along. So we have a Facebook page as well, and that's really fun and really active, and maybe a little where we have some fun and laughable time.
Jayson Davies
Page called Autism level up. It is okay. Well, I will be sure to add links to all of these resources in the show notes, which are, if you're in Apple podcast or right there, or you can go to the episode page on my website@ots.com and find all the links to all of those, plus all I'll get the research article. I think I already have it from you, and I will put a link to the research article that you talked about earlier. I think you actually mentioned too, so I'll do both of them. But yeah, Amy, thank you so much for coming on to the show. OT school house podcast. Really appreciate you having you on and Yeah, we'll definitely have to stay in touch. Excellent. Thanks so much for having me appreciate it. No problem. Take care and have a great evening. You too. Thank you everyone. So much for listening to that amazing interview with Amy Laurent. Be sure to check out the search models as well as autism level up and please, please, please, do go ahead and check out ot schoolhouse.com forward slash conference to learn more about the back to school conference. Really hope to see you in August, August, 27 28th and 29th take care and have a great week. Bye, 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 ot schoolhouse.com Until next time class is dismissed.
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