How I Do Assessments
(And You Can Too!)
Just like in my speech therapy approach section, these are just tips and tricks I've learned for working with underserved populations that I wanted to share with others. When I started having therapists contact me saying "Thank you so much for your assessment advice, today went so much better since I knew how to ask those questions!" and parents telling me that just from the way I conducted my assessment, they actually had hope that I'd be able to help their child despite many prior failures, I knew I had to share how to do this.
Don't want to become a client, but still want to discuss these ideas more? I do paid training and coaching sessions for caregivers and therapists. (See rates.) I'm happy to help answer any questions you might have and give you ideas to help with your specific needs!
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Working with Kids with "Big Behaviors"
PDA, autism, opposition defiance disorder, reactive attachment disorder, intermittent explosive disorder, fetal alcohol spectrum disorders, mental health disorders, trauma, SO many different disorders/disabilities are associated with struggles to meet behavioral expectations. And yet we so often just stop at the diagnosis. We need to dig deeper!
Kids do well if they can. They want to do well! Think how much easier their lives would be if they met behavioral expectations? Think how much praise and positive reactions they would get if they would just follow "simple" rules of behavior? And yet, they aren't meeting these seemingly basic expectations. So as soon as we see a child with struggles to meet behavioral expectations, our immediate question needs to be WHY.
Answers like "because he's autistic" or "because she wants to get her way" aren't enough. When there is a failure to meet a behavioral expectation, there is a skills struggle somewhere. We need to identify those specific skills, and drill drill drill until we've found the full breadth and depth of them. In this section I'm going to teach you how I do it. Because you can't treat something you don't know is there.
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Complex Communication Disorders
This section is coming soon!