FREE PRINTABLE: Don’t Forget to Feed Your Brain!

Just because it’s summer doesn’t mean our brains take a break from growing.  Use this printable to remind yourself, your child, or the families you serve to keep up the good work of “feeding their brains”!

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The PAW Strategy for Structuring Your Session

Therapists (hopefully!) spend a lot of time carefully planning goals and activities for each Auditory Verbal Therapy session, but professional planning is not enough.  Parent coaching is the heart of AVT.  It is not enough for you, the professional, to know what’s going on.  Parents deserve this information, too!  Below, I’ll detail a strategy I came up with called “PAW” that can help you structure your sessions for maximum engagement.

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AG Bell 2018 Presentation Slides

This summer I had the opportunity to present with some incredible friends and colleagues at the 2018 AG Bell Convention in Scottsdale, Arizona.  Below are PDFs of the slides from our presentations.  Enjoy!

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“Minimally Invasive Therapy” (Rethinking Equal Talk Time)

When I began studying auditory verbal therapy, one concept I learned was the “equal time pie” or “equal talk time,” — the idea that all three participants in an AVT session (child, parent, and therapist), should each be doing roughly 1/3 of the talking during the session.  For years, I tried to self-monitor during my intervention to make sure this was happening.  But then I started teaching students about AVT at the university level.  After weeks of hearing me drive home the point that families are their children’s first and best teachers, one student raised her hand and asked a question that revolutionized the way I think about sharing talk time in sessions…

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The World’s Best Mirror

As Auditory Verbal Therapists, our job is not to evaluate or judge parents, but rather to guide and coach.  How can we best offer feedback that validates families’ effectiveness at helping their children grow?

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Provider Quality Checklist

When you have a child with hearing loss (or any disability), you are instantly thrown into the deep end of new jargon, appointments, professionals, and more.  When a therapy or early intervention provider is assigned to your family, how do you know if who you’re getting is any good?  They’re supposed to be the expert in this, so how are parents who are new to this whole world supposed to know if they and their child are getting what they deserve?

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The Best Gift for Your Teacher or Therapist

This time of year, I see many parents asking on social media, “What is the best gift for my child’s teachers/audiologist/speech-language pathologist/auditory verbal therapist?  While there are many wonderful gifts out there, I’m going to rock the boat a bit.

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Chunks vs. True Sentences

“Shut the door,” “Sit down,” “Go to sleep.”  We write them as multiple words, but do young children view them that way? How do we know if a child has learned a “chunk” versus really putting together a multi-word utterance?Continue reading “Chunks vs. True Sentences”