Raise your hand if you’ve come across any of the following challenges:A mismatch between therapist and caregiver goalsChild behaviors that “get in the way” of therapy and are challenging for caregiversCaregivers’ feelings of grief, anxiety, and frustration with their child and/or themselvesLack of generalization of strategies beyond the therapy sessionCaregiver comments like “They’re just being difficult. They’re being stubborn.”…

First up: CHAAOS. No, really, it’s a good thing!  It’s an academic vocabulary intervention—Creating Habits that Accelerate the Academic Language of Students—and is featured in this article from Sanchez & O’Connor. The program includes 48 scripted lessons across three, 4-week instructional cycles that target a total of 48 academic vocabulary words–aka Tier 2 words. These are fairly frequent, useful words found across academic texts and disciplines, but aren’t words that students would typically hear in everyday conversation—words like cajole, hoist, and brazen…

You receive a swallowing referral for a patient living with advanced dementia. A VFSS reveals severe pharyngeal impairments that negatively impact swallowing safety. Given the patient’s poor physical mobility and dependence for feeding and oral hygiene, they are judged to be at high risk of dysphagia-related aspiration pneumonia. Sigh. Now what?  Medical SLPs are often faced with helping families navigate this difficult decision, which can then trigger a discussion between the POA and the medical team about the patient’s clinical situation and goals of care…

In a  recent review, we delved into the meaning of play and the potentially problematic ways that play is used in the therapy world. There are still many questions surrounding how we can ethically use play in our interventions. Maybe the field of play therapy can help us out?  Play therapists are mental health workers who have specialized skills in the use of play to elicit and reflect on feelings, to work out problems, and to develop a relationship with the child. There is substantial evidence that play therapy can decrease challenging behaviors and improve self-efficacy. In this collaboration, Loeb et al. developed a hybrid play-language intervention that gives us many many concrete suggestions for how to infuse play therapy into our sessions…

Conversation with a teenager: Hey, how was your weekend? Fine. What did you do? Nothing. Ok sooo… ready to talk openly and productively about how the very personal topic of stuttering is affecting your life?  *Crickets* Ouch. We’ve all been there—working with adolescents who stutter (or, really, any of them) can be daunting. This two-part study from Zebrowski, Rodgers, and colleagues is here to help you change how you help them change.  First: what’s our goal, anyway? 

How do we know which dysphagia resources are high-quality and which aren’t? This paper from Hazelwood and Pollack starts to tackle this question by using the DISCERN scale to judge online dysphagia resources—from podcasts, to CEU sites, to Facebook groups.  The first finding was that most of the resources named by SLPs earned “mediocre quality” scores. Oh, great. The second finding was that it wasn’t easy to predict which people would…