This course will discuss the importance of social skill instruction and leisure skill building for students with autism and other complex communication disorders. The focus will be on individuals in 6th grade to adulthood.

This is Part 1 of the five-part series, Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE): The Effects of Childhood Trauma on Communication. This course will provide a brief review of conventional and expanded adverse childhood experiences and discuss their implications. Specifically, the impact of ACEs on brain and behavior and the importance of this information to clinical practice for speech-language pathologists will be described. This course is presented in partnership with the American Board of Child Language and Language Disorders (ABCLLD).

Once eligible for services, students need well-crafted goals in order to meet expectations. This course will address writing SMART goals for students from collected data.

This is Part 1 of a two-part series. This course delineates individual metacognitive processes known as ‘executive functions’ and the various developmental profiles of executive dysfunction in school-aged children. Three case studies will highlight the nature of the diagnostic challenges and lay a foundation for assessment principles to help the SLP determine best approaches to intervention.

This is Part 2 of a two-part series. This course will detail the relationship between language and executive functions (EFs), and the nature of EF deficits in children with language disorders. The use of inner speech and self-talk to regulate behaviors and efforts; the use of complex syntax as a tool to reason, plan, predict, and solve will be discussed. Additionally, the course will describe the use of hands-on problem solving, Socratic questions, and discovery learning to elicit language-based EFs.

This course will discuss the social thinking difficulties in adolescents with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) that create barriers to academic achievement. It will also describe tools that SLPs can use in collaboration with classroom teachers to help students with ASD overcome these challenges.

This is Part 4 of a four-part series on severe phonological disorders. Selecting multiple targets and anticipating rapid change across all sound errors requires a different method of writing and documenting goals and objectives. This course will examine how to establish a baseline for general speech intelligibility, and how to write goals and objectives that can be quickly and easily measured to document progress.

This is Part 3 of a 4-part series on severe phonological disorders. After selecting multiple target phonemes based on complexity theory principles, incorporate the targets into therapy using maximal contrast pairs and evidence-based selection of practice words. This course will focus on therapy activities that support new sound acquisition in meaningful contexts and promote target phoneme use across levels of difficulty in each session.

This is Part 2 of a four-part series on severe phonological disorders. Careful assessment and analysis of a child’s phonologic knowledge has the potential to maximize speech sound progress in the shortest amount of time. This course will describe an assessment routine that can provide the information needed for target sound selection and create the foundation for setting measurable, yet flexible, goals that reflect improvement in speech intelligibility.

This is Part 1 of a four-part series on severe phonological disorders. Research-based selection of speech sound targets for treatment has the potential to significantly accelerate children’s therapy progress. This course will examine research supporting use of a non-traditional approach to selecting speech sound targets in order to facilitate rapid change in overall intelligibility. It will then discuss how to apply that research to treatment decisions in daily clinical practice.