Children with autism struggle with social engagement. Given Western society’s emphasis on academic learning and technology, a perfect storm is brewing with implications for connectedness to the social world. This course will discuss the obstacles technology can present to social engagement, and strategies to train parents to use technology to build functional communication skills.

Person-centered care is emphasized as a best practice in general health care as well as speech-language pathology. This course is an introduction for SLPs treating adults, to show how simple choices for each step of the clinical process can lead to a person-centered approach and highly meaningful, functional therapy.

Self-determination skills are directly related to successful post-secondary living skills for students with disabilities. This course teaches clinicians how to positively impact student self-determination skills from early elementary through high school.

This course will outline the new state survey process which was implemented industry-wide in skilled nursing facilities in November of 2017. The importance of interdisciplinary-based team care and person-centered care planning will be discussed.

This course will review the research on how default roles, burn-out, extra duties, and lack of training on Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) mandates adversely affect service delivery to children with disabilities. This course will discuss key strategies for how SLPs can advocate for students with special needs through professional role empowerment methods.

Workbooks, card games, and board games are often readily available for use in speech therapy to treat cognition in neurogenic disorders; however, these treatment methods are not in line with the most recent research for best practices in acquired brain injury (ABI). This course offers evidence, support and practical ideas for embedding functional treatment into current evidence-based frameworks for neurogenic disorders.

This course will discuss evaluation and management of auditory processing disorders (APD) in young children. The role of different professionals will be reviewed and case discussion will be included.

A hallmark of age related hearing loss is difficulty understanding in noisy environments. The difficulty requires significant listening effort on the listener’s part which, when prolonged, is associated with fatigue. The fatigue in combination with the listening effort and cognitive load often leads people to withdraw from social situations. Social disengagement has many downstream negative outcomes - including dementia - that will be discussed, along with simple solutions for clinical practice.

Like many other discrete skills, student participation in the individualized education program (IEP) process can be taught in a straightforward and systematic way, slowly increasing their participation and independence. This course will focus on keys to a successful student-driven conference, including carefully scaffolding the process in ways that provide support at each stage of the process until the student reaches maximum independence.

This course will discuss anatomy of the nasal cavity, nasopharynx, oropharynx, hypopharynx and larynx in adults, as viewed endoscopically. Normal variations in anatomy that would NOT necessitate referral to an ENT will be described.