Fall Provider Learning Series - Session 1: Best Practices in Tele-Practice

Hello, welcome, welcome everyone. Thank you so much for joining us today for part 1 of our fall provider learning series. I have been waiting all summer for this to kick off, so I'm so excited to have you here. Thank you for taking the time during a very busy time of year for everybody. I'm Taylor Vealey. I'm Director of School Psychology and Mental Health Services here at Parallel, and I have a few quick housekeeping items to share with you before we jump right in. The first thing I would ask is that you drop all questions and comments you might have in the chat. I'll be taking a look at those throughout the webinar so that we can come back around and answer those during our question and answer session. The other thing I will ask is that you please stay on our webinar to the very end so we can announce our raffle winner, and it might be you. Hopefully, fingers crossed. The other thing I'd like to say before we move on and play a short video is that as providers here at Parallel, you are first and foremost in all the work that you do with our students, and we cannot do it without you. So a big round of applause for all of our providers, and thank you so much for the work that you're doing day in and day out at our schools. And we are ready to jump right in and explore that thought a little bit further with playing a short video. Um, called What Is Our Why?

My name is Jordan Wright, and I'm Chief Clinical Officer. As somebody with an ADHD brain myself, I was drawn to Parallel Learning because of its mission to provide quality services to as many kids as possible who need it to help remove roadblocks from them being successful at school. We're not just addressing academic challenges. We're helping empower students to embrace their unique strengths and abilities to ultimately succeed in every aspect of life. Hi, everyone.

I'm Susan Liu. I'm the Chief Operating Officer at Parallel. I love working at Parallel because as a first-generation immigrant, education and access to good quality education made such a big difference in my life and afforded me all the opportunities I have today. And I love coming to work and playing my part in making that a reality for others.

And I'm honored to be part of a team that's really shaping the landscape of education today. My name is Noah Lewis. I'm an account executive here at Parallel. I help support school districts in the Midwest. I joined Parallel a little over a year ago because I wanted to make a difference in education, and I really haven't looked back since. I really love supporting school districts and students and, and being a part of something that is going to last well into the future. I think that that's really cool.

Hi, I'm Shawna Beyer, Director of Speech-Language Pathology Services. At Parallel Learning, students' voices are amplified and communication is ensured to bridge that gap to success. Parallel Learning creates a motivating, fun, and engaging environment so students want to learn and grow. That's what attracted me about Parallel. And I am inspired by our dedication to make a lasting difference.

So you might have recognized some faces there, and I have the pleasure of introducing you to Dr. Jordan Wright, if you're not already familiar. This guy is our Chief Clinical Officer here at Parallel, and he might have done a few things in his time. He's the founding director of NYU Center for Counseling and Community Well-Being at New York University. He is a program director and clinical associate professor in the psychology PhD program at New York University, and he's conducted a large body of research around teleassessment and teleservices in children and the students that we're working with. The, the only book on the topic actually was authored by our own very, our very own Dr. Jordan Wright, Essentials of Psychological Tele-Assessment. So I have the honor of turning it over to Dr. Jordan to, to guide us through our webinar this evening.

Thank you so much, Taylor, and thank you for everybody for joining us. We're going to be talking about best practices. We're going to be talking about what works best, what Doesn't work. What we need to keep in mind when we're doing teleservices, and teleservices broadly construed. So I do a lot of teleassessment and telecounseling. I'm a psychologist, but we're talking about tele-SLP, tele-OT, tele-support, tele-executive function coaching, whatever it is you're doing. If you are thinking about doing it remotely, if you're thinking about doing it online, this is for you.

We're—

this is what we're aiming for, is to really think through What makes the best work in teleservices? I'm going to be talking in terms a lot of students, and I'm going to be talking about kids a lot. I work a lot with kids. I work in schools. But this— I also work in a clinic, and I also work with clients, and I work with patients, and it— everything that we're going to be talking about applies across the board. It's not just students in schools, but I'm going to be using those words a lot. So these are our learning objectives for today, our outcomes. What what I hope you gain from this presentation. And again, please do drop questions into the chat. We will have some time at the end where I'll answer some questions. Taylor will weed through them. She'll do the real work and find a few to pose to me, and we will discuss those at the end. So thank you for being here. This is the structure. This is what we're gonna go through. The first 4 sections are really what makes for the best use of tele- services of telework, of virtual work. Um, the 5th one, we're gonna talk about some common challenges and then we'll get to that Q&A, I promise. So we're gonna start with familiarity and comfort. So all of us who are providers, all of us who are clinicians went to graduate school and we got very, very comfortable doing the work that we were trained in, that in-person work. If you're a therapist, um, doing that counseling work in the room, We got comfortable being very uncomfortable with our clients, with our students. We got very familiar with sitting across the room from a kid, from a client, from a patient, and doing the work in that environment. But we weren't trained. I wasn't trained, at least. I'm a dinosaur, but I was not trained in telework. I wasn't trained to do virtual work. So when I started doing this, I had to become much more familiar and comfortable with where I was with the setting. And that first and foremost is the platform. Most of us got very comfortable with some of these platforms. We're on Zoom now. We got very comfortable during the lockdowns and during the pandemic with at least some features of platforms that we were working on. But you need to think about the platform that you're working on and all of its functionality. So many of us went to a lot of meetings or, or had sessions or whatever on a platform like this, but we were using it really just for the camera. We were really using it just to try and mimic being there in person. We weren't really thinking about all the different functionalities and all the different things we could do on the platform. And so we need to retrain ourselves. We need to really work hard to explore everything that whatever platform we're using has to offer. So that we are familiar and very comfortable navigating all of the different functions. The most important part of learning the platform and becoming familiar with all the functionality are transitions, right? When I'm working with kids in, in person in the room, sometimes I need to pivot and grab a Nerf basketball. Like, sometimes we're just like, okay, We need something else, or go grab a game from the closet. And that transition is natural. Like, oh, I'm gonna go over here, I'm gonna open the closet, I'm gonna grab it, and we're good to go. I can still talk while I'm doing it. I can multitask. So getting really familiar with your platform also means all of those transitions. If I'm using the platform to present something, to present a video, if I'm using a platform to play a game or share my screen, I really want to make sure that those transitions don't require a lot of the clunkiness of like, oh, just hold on a second, right? And me playing around and futzing around with it. We want to make sure that we're very, very comfortable with these platforms so that the transitions are less clunky. This will make the entire experience more comfortable for the kiddos that we're working with, right? We don't want to call attention to the fact that I'm a dinosaur and I'm not super good at, you know, working in this platform. I want to be seamless. So that we can focus on the content of what we're doing, not the, the silliness of me trying to figure out a function. The other thing is knowing where your face is. I know this sounds silly, but we need to know where our face is at all times. We've all been in meetings that look like this, right? We've all been in meetings where we have that person who was Somewhere in the screen. I will try not to mention my mother when she's on FaceTime, but it looks a lot like this. We've also been in sessions, we've been in meetings where people were just too not well lit enough, right? If you're backlit, you're gonna look like this. You're gonna look like a shadow. Now, I apologize for this one. This is terrifying. Sorry about this. We've also been in meetings where somebody is just way too close, and this is distracting. So we want to try and find that middle ground where we are in the center of the box, right? We don't want to be to one side or the other. That is distracting. Where we are well lit enough to where it can actually mimic an in-person interaction for this kid, for, for this client. We want to make sure that we know where our face is. This unfortunately sometimes means right now I am staring at myself. Right? But we do tend to do this. And in, in the tele world, we stare at ourselves. In a, in an in-person session, I don't see myself. I don't have a mirror sitting in front of me, but we do need to glance at ourselves at least every once in a while. Now, I don't have anyone else to play off of right now, so I'm gonna be looking at myself a lot during this presentation. We also need to be mindful of the space. We need to be mindful of the physical background. I am using a virtual background right now, and you can see it's very distracting. It's fine for a webinar. for my hand to go in and out and for me maybe to have ears and maybe not. And some, some angles I'm bald and sometimes I'm almost bald. So we need to be aware and, and I would caution about the use of virtual backgrounds when you're doing this. Try them out, test them out and make sure that it's not distracting. But also, this is not a— this is not my office, but this is not far from the way my actual office looks. We need to be mindful that this is also very, very distracting, right? A face in the middle of all this clutter is not going to be able to focus on the content, focus on the work that you are doing. So we need to be very mindful of how we are coming across to our clients, to our students, to our kiddos with the physical space around us, including these virtual backgrounds. Backgrounds. All of this has to do with familiarity. You need to practice, you need to learn, you need to do some meetings with colleagues to figure out what looks funny, what doesn't look funny, what is distracting, what is not distracting. I'll be honest, sometimes I find a completely blank background a little bit distracting too. If it looks like you have like a green screen or just a white blank wall, I find that a little bit weird because it's not anywhere close to the real world. All right. So once you're familiar, we need to think about what activities are we going to do in teleservices? What can we leverage technology to do for us in this work, in this teleservice work? Too often we're just assuming things aren't possible. Too often we're thinking that, yeah, we could— if I were in person, I would print out this worksheet and hand it to a kid and we would work on it together. But it's just not feasible in a teleservice world. We're really just using the cameras. But in actuality, we can do handouts, right? We can do handouts, we can do presentations, we can share screen like I'm doing now to illustrate all these points. Now, handouts are static. Handouts could be printable. They could be PDFs that are printable that a kid can take and bring home to their parents and work with, with their parents, or Uh, a, an adult client could print out and have as a reminder on their refrigerator. Um, these are really, really good and a very good use of the teleservice world, of the telehealth world, because we can call them up immediately, right?

In—

if I have them up on my screen, if I have a bunch of different options ready to go, I can just share my screen and put this handout right on the screen. I can build it into the session in a seamless way. Now, depending on your platform, you can also use worksheets. Worksheets are a little bit different than handouts because they're not static. These are things that a kid and I can work on together to reinforce. It can be an emotion skills worksheet where we're identifying some skills to calm myself down, some coping skills. It could be a speech worksheet where I'm identifying words that are more difficult for me to articulate than other words, and we could work on it together. You need to work it within your platform to see what is possible, right? So some platforms are more sophisticated than others, and they will have this functionality where you can bring up a worksheet and both of you can write on the worksheet, maybe in different colors or different fonts or something like that. Others won't. Others won't have quite that level of functionality. But when we can do this, when we use a platform that allows for us to do this, it really can serve to solidify skills, to solidify ideas and thoughts and things that come up during a session. It helps me take notes later. If we've written it out, I can just sort of copy that into my case notes and, use it for the pushing forward of the work that we're doing. The one that not enough people really think about are games. If you work with kids, you probably have some games in your physical office if you do physical office work. I always used to use Connect Four. I had one kid that I was working with in a school, and over a 3-month period, we played a single game of Battleship. Right? We, we ran out of time each time, and it was like this epic game of Battleship, and I would take it exactly where it was and put it in the closet and bring it out the next week when I saw this kiddo. And this serves to build rapport. It is helpful for engagement. It can be used for the actual work as well. I'm thinking about speech therapy and how much you need to articulate if you're talking about the game. How much you need to interact and do the pragmatic interaction and social pragmatic language use if you're talking through a game. But it also serves another purpose. When I was doing this in person mostly, it allowed a separate external focus for both of us. If I'm asking a kid to talk about something like being bullied or something really emotional or rough, or if I'm having them practice some articulation skills and they're just not getting it and getting really frustrated, it's very vulnerable to just ask them to stare at my face, stare in my eyes, and talk about this hard stuff. Kids are much, much more amenable to talking about tough stuff if they're otherwise occupied. So these games can be really useful, and we don't think enough about them in the tele-world, but there are tons of interactive games online that we can pull up and play together. There are games that you can tailor specifically for the work that you're doing. Teachers have been doing this for years now, right? Creating little Quizlets and turn— and gamifying some of that learning. We can do that too, and we can call it up within the platform and play those games interactively during a session. We do not need to write off all of those functions that we can do much more easily and we're more comfortable with in person just because we're online. We need to again become familiar with the platform so that we know how to do these games, how to call them up, how to use them in our sessions seamlessly. I put a little demonstration here, but one of the things that actually sets teleservices apart from in-person services is the ability to use self-view. So your platform may allow you to control it. It may require the kid or the client to control it. But in normal sessions, in normal therapy sessions, we don't tend to have like a mirror right there and say, look at your mouth. I'm thinking about speech therapy again, where sometimes we may want a kid to really focus on what their mouth is doing and watch themselves trying to articulate something, trying to say something, trying to move their mouth or their tongue in a certain way. I do this in therapy and counseling when I am trying to get a kiddo to convey something to me, or they're not seeing the emotion that they're showing me on their face. And I'm asking them about their emotional experience. I'm like, look at yourself. I want you to see how your face looks right now. And I will show it to them. We also have the opportunity in telework to record a snippet of this to show them next week if we have a little win, if they've done something amazing and we can record it and show it over and over and over. Of course, we have to be a little careful with recordings and we'll talk a little bit about privacy later because they might become part of the student record or the medical record depending on your setting. So we have to be careful about what we're recording and how we're using it and how we're storing it. But we do have this function. So it's something that we as a field need to start thinking through. How can we leverage some of the things that actually can't be done easily in person unless you bring a camcorder in? All right. So those are some discrete activities that you can use within a teleservice. We're going to talk now about the structure. Originally, when we were doing telework, when we were doing teletherapy, which was sort of the earliest type of telework, and it grew out from there, what we were trying to do was mimic in-person work. That's all we were trying to do is how can we make this as much like in-person work as possible? And largely that's still true. Right? There are some principles that we know to be true in, in the, the in-person therapy world, the, the live in the same room type of therapy, like consistency. Consistency is really important. Having a frame is really important. Knowing when a session starts and when it's going to end is really important. That's all part of consistency, and that is true in the tele world as much as it is In the traditional in-person services world, so there are some aspects we want to make sure we're keeping the same. We're keeping it similar because we don't need to rock the boat. It works. Counseling helps. Speech therapy works. OT works. The executive function coaching works. So we don't want to rock the boat so much that we are no longer looking anything like the. Decades and century of amassed evidence for these things. So we want to, we want to try and keep some of it fairly similar to in-person work. At the same time, we do need to recognize that there are some differences. One of the biggest differences is we really want to start thinking about whenever possible, having more frequent but shorter sessions, because this tends to improve engagement in the entire process. In online work, in teleservice work. Online fatigue is real, right? Staring at a screen, working on a screen is exhausting. It hurts. It weighs on the eyes as much as it weighs on you emotionally, as much as it weighs on you physically, everything. This fatigue is real. And so we want to honor that. We want to always understand that we're aiming for quality, not just quantity. Just because those of you who are in a private practice therapy setting, we are wedded to a 45 or 50-minute therapy hour, right? We just— that's how we trained. That's how it works. That's how all the research works. If you're in a school, very often you will get a kid for a period, however long that period is, 37 minutes, 44 minutes. I think my daughter's periods are— they're always random amounts of time. 44 minutes. Doing a session for 44 straight minutes might be too much. You might see the quality of the work, the quality of engagement especially, go down after an amount of time. So whenever possible, we might want to think about instead of a single 44-minute session, maybe we do 2 22-minute sessions a week. Right? So we get in there, we keep you engaged. We don't fall prey to this online fatigue. That is a, again, a very, very real thing, and we've studied it and we've researched it. But we get the same quality, right? We're still meeting your minutes. We're still doing the same amount of work, but we're actually improving the quality. The key here is we do not want to sacrifice quality Just to fit the frame that we think is best, because that's the way we've always done it. We may need to alter the frame to maintain the quality that we would expect in, in traditional in-person services. We want to ensure that our students, our clients, our kiddos have a quiet, private space, preferably with headphones. Now I'm going to talk about these 2 things actually separately. A private space is extremely important. We know this. We know this from all of our graduate work and all of our ethics and all that kind of stuff. But when we're working in a tele world, we don't always know what's happening on the other side. We don't know. You don't know what's happening behind me when I have this virtual background on. I could have people running around like crazy, right? We want to make sure that there is privacy. Privacy is super important in teleservices. That goes for having a private space. That goes for privacy of data and information. We need to be very, very vigilant about privacy. Headphones can help with this. Certainly, we've all worked in places in schools or in clinics where the soundproofing was— they tried, but it wasn't ideal, and you kind of hear what was going on. Murmurs, probably not the content. We can't control that. If you have headphones, though, you can at least control that others can't hear your half of the conversation, even if they can hear little bits and pieces of what the kiddo is saying. If they have headphones on, no one will hear the questions that they're answering, right? I ask, I ask a question, and that's only going into their ears. Separate from that, we wanna make sure that their space is quiet. Again, headphones can really help with this. But we wanna try and ensure as quiet a space as possible. This is aspirational, right? We've all been in sessions where sirens go and That happens in the real in-person traditional services as well. It just happens in the real world. We have distractions, but we want to try to aim for as quiet a space as possible. And we want to have a backup plan. There are technical difficulties that happen, so you should have a way to contact the client, the school, the helper, the parent, whoever you need to contact. You need to make sure you have a backup plan. And the other way around goes as well. You know how to contact them. You need to make sure they know how to contact you. If something goes wrong and they're starting to freak out and you're nowhere to be found on the screen, they don't know if something really horrible happened or if it was just a glitch in the internet. So they need a way to contact you. And then finally, you need to know how to contact them. during that session time so that you can go to that backup plan, so that there is some way, some fallback to do what you need to do. All right, this is my favorite part. We're going to talk about engagement. This is how do we make sure that the kiddos we're working with remain engaged in the services When we're not physically in the same room. First, I want to talk about eye contact. Eye contact is extremely tough to maintain, especially if the student's face is nowhere near the camera, right? Ideally, if their video is right up next to the webcam, then you're looking at them and it kind of looks like you're looking. This whole webinar I've been kind of looking at myself. I should be looking here at the camera. To trick you into thinking that I'm making direct eye contact with you. But I don't do that. There are some platforms. I saw one platform that has a virtual correction for eyes. So even if I'm looking this way, your eyeballs are always toward the camera. It's a little creepy and kind of fascinating. But most of them don't do that. So you just need to be a little bit vigilant about where your eye contact is. This is hard in group sessions because, you know, you're kind of looking here and then looking here. I teach groups of graduate students, and it's really hard because I'm like, I'm talking to you, but they don't know I'm talking to you because they don't know where they are on your screen. It's also very, very difficult to tell where a student is actually looking or what they're looking at. Again, some platforms have some built-in safeguards if If they go to a different browser or to a different tab in the browser, some platforms will tell you that and say the kid is not looking at your room right now, so that you can remain vigilant. She's gonna hear me because she's in the other room. But my daughter, when the lockdown happened, she was in 3rd grade, and she learned pretty quickly that she could be in a class with 30 other kids online and watch Netflix. At the same time and, and got away with it for probably too long. It's really hard to tell. This is especially true in groups. So we need to be pretty vigilant to make sure that we are looking at a kid. We are monitoring where they are likely looking, our clients are likely looking. And you can do this by looking at their reactions. If you're talking to them, are they reacting in a way that kind of makes sense and means that they're likely looking at you and really engaged? This is my favorite one. Hand movement. I obviously am a hand talker. Usually I have a pen in my hand so that I don't do this. Kids and clients and patients can really quickly and easily learn that you are just a head. The more you use your hands, the more of a real full person you become. Person you are. So this is all part of being animated, is trying to use your hands not in a distracting way, right? We don't wanna do this like, ah, but in a way that is deliberate and shows emphasis when we are talking, just so they know you are a whole human being. You are not just a head. It's easier to, uh, write off just a head. than it is to write off a real person. So we want to be as much of a real person as possible, and that means gestures. Voice modulation and articulation. You can probably tell from this webinar I'm naturally kind of a Muppet. Some of us are more Muppety than others, and when we are trying to engage kids, we need to be a bit more Muppety. We need to go up and down in our tone. There are therapists out there, wonderful, wonderful therapists out there who are much more calm and serene, and that is wonderful in person. It can be very calming for kids. It can be very relaxing for kids. It can be regulating for them. And these are the kind— like, that's the kind of therapist I want, is someone who is much calmer than I am online. We are much more worried about keeping kids engaged, and so we—I naturally am a little muppety. We have to turn the volume up on our muppetiness. If you are one of these wonderful clinicians who is much more calm and serene than I have a colleague who is so serene, I always say that walking into her office is like walking into a hug. She needs to when she. works online, be a bit more Muppety, a little bit more up and down in her voice so that there is more grab your attention-ness. And this goes for general enthusiasm as well. This is the real Muppetiness, right? We wanna make sure that we are engaging. I am metaphorically and right now literally kind of leaning forward. So that, you know, I am engaging you. I want you to listen to me because I'm leaning forward. If I just sort of chill back here and talk very quietly, right, it's too easy to lose the focus and attention of our clients, of our kiddos, of our students. Nonverbals. So part of the Muppetiness is, is all this nonverbal stuff, but we also need to monitor kids' nonverbals. We often think about in teleservices the things we lose. One of the big things we lose is behavioral observations below the shoulders, right? So I am tapping my foot right now and you don't know that. I just started tapping. If a kid is tapping their foot, we might think, ooh, a little bit of anxiety. What's going on? The flip side of that though is working in the tele world means we are forced to focus entirely on the face where we convey the overwhelming majority of nonverbal communication. You are forced to look at that kid's face and notice things that maybe you would be distracted into not noticing, right? If you're looking at their foot tapping, you might not notice a little bead of sweat coming down. So we actually gain something here too. So we want to make sure we're capitalizing on that and monitoring those nonverbal cues vigilantly. All right, common challenges. I'm gonna focus on 2 pretty common challenges and some suggestions, some best practices for dealing with those challenges. When you write in your Q&A, I'm sure you're gonna have more challenges and asking how to solve those, and I welcome that. So the first one that happens is lost connection. Lost connection can happen for tech reasons. Because your internet is unstable, or their internet is unstable, or the platform glitches, or sometimes my computer just decides to shut down for no reason. It just happens. I think, I think it has a ghost in it or something. But also sometimes kids, clients just leave, or just like, nope, and they close the laptop or they X out. I can remember one of my very first in-person clients got very angry with me during one session and walked out. This happens, right? Hopefully not often, but it does happen. And kids sometimes get a little dysregulated and just leave. This can happen when we lose the connection between us and our client. First and foremost, we need to have a lot of knowledge about what is around. We need to know where that kid is, where, if there are adults nearby, how to contact them, and also what other resources are available. Like, do I need to call if it's a school? Do I need to call an onsite Vice principal and say, I lost connection with this kid. Can you just go make sure they're okay? If I think that they're in danger, right? If a kid is suicidal and I lose connection with that kid, I may need to know what resources are around there. Is there a mobile crisis near their home or wherever they are that I need to be able to call just like that? We don't have the luxury of kind of trapping them in our office. Or running after them down the hall like we would if we were in person. So we need to have a lot of knowledge about what their situation looks like so that I know what I can do. With that knowledge, I need to plan ahead. You need to think through, if this happens, how am I going to respond? What's it going to look like? If you're working with a school, you need to make that explicit with the school. I want you to know that if I lose connection, I'm going to call this para. I'm going to call this helper. I'm going to call this vice principal. If something happens and I lose connection during our session, this is what I'm going to do. If you're working direct to home in counseling or something like that, you might describe it to the client themselves and say, if we lose connection, here's what's going to happen. Here's the next step. And then do your best to reconnect or connect with a responsible adult, with the kiddo themself, with any necessary services. Do what you need to do within the frame of that session to connect to resources, to connect to grown-ups, to connect to the kid, to your client. Find a way to reconnect, even if it is not in your platform, even if it is not In the most ideal way where you're both on video, find a way to connect and make sure things are okay. Make sure that you have a plan to move forward. Now, working with kids, for any of you who work with kids, you know this. It's probably adults too. I work with adults as well, and sometimes they get oppositional and distracted and overwhelmed and all sorts of things. But this is especially true. I got asked a lot. I get asked a lot, like, how in the world do you work with a kid with, like, real ADHD, just like behavioral dysregulated, impulsive, hyperactive ADHD? And what we've learned over the years is actually they love sitting on a screen like they love playing games. They love engaging in multiple ways. But there are kids who are oppositional, right? There are kids who are like, I'm not doing that. I'm not, I'm not, uh, I'm not playing your game. I'm not gonna do the, the thing that you want me to do in this instance. Um, and that happens, and that's okay. That happens in in-person services plenty. It happens. I, I had a, um, my very first adolescent client ever. Um, she came to our clinic. Um, she came every single week for her 45-minute session and for about 9 months said nothing. Nothing. We sat in silence for about 9 months, but she kept coming. I wasn't sure why. And then after about 9 months, we both cracked up laughing and, and it became our, our own joke. So when you have oppositional or disruptive or distracted behaviors, first and foremost, clarify the expectations. We're not in the business of punishing, right? We are not deans of discipline that say, you did something wrong, I'm going to punish you. That is not going to be our role. That's not going to be our job ever. Our job is to clarify what we expect of our clients, of the kids, in order to be successful in our work together, and then to positively reinforce, whether it's With a big Muppety wave or a good job, a virtual pat on the back, or a, you know, some sort of like 5 extra minutes of gameplay at the end of a session. However you're going to do it, you want to clarify expectations and reward and positively reinforce that positive, pro-social, engaged behavior. Doesn't always work. We know that. But you want to engage them however you can. With understanding, with empathy, with patience, right? We all know, we are all clinicians. We all know that there are moments in whatever work you're doing. A teacher knows this in working with kids, even not talking about emotional stuff or working through difficult stuff. There are moments where kids just get silenced. They just, they just get so overwhelmed. They don't want to engage in that moment. In that moment, you can empathize. Like, I know this is a hard topic. Let's, let's pause that. Like, let's, let's— I, because I know this is difficult. Let's take a little time to sit silently or play this game. We don't have to keep continue talking about it. Engage them however you can, though. We want to make sure that we are not shutting down communication. Which we all lose our temper. We all have a short fuse at moments in our lives, even with our clients. And sometimes we find ourselves being like, oh, come on, or rolling our eyes at a kid. We will repair that. That's okay. But we want to really work hard to engage them with understanding and with patience. And finally, pivot. Pivot to something else, right? This is dangling the shiny keys. If this is not working, if talking about your feelings is not working, or If doing this worksheet on articulation is not working, try something else. Like, okay, I don't like this. I don't like this worksheet today. Let's play a game instead and pull up a game. And this is going to come full circle back to being comfortable in your platform. Have those games in your pocket ready to go. Know exactly how to access them. Know exactly where they are. Know where some extra worksheets are. Know how to navigate your platform seamlessly so that you don't lose 5 minutes where a kid is struggling, and you have to be figuring out how to do the platform and find some other activity. Be able to pivot as seamlessly and easily as possible. With that, I am going to invite Taylor back and open it up to some Q&A. And, and again, I want to thank you for being here.

Thank you, Jordan. That was awesome. Learn so much every time I hear you speak about it. I would like to start with a question from one of our participants here. You mentioned that students with ADHD or kiddos with ADHD or even adults sometimes find this actually more engaging. So what resources might you point us to about how to engage students in this modality that who do have challenges with ADHD, or, you know, I'm kind of picturing some of our Bouncy Troncier students that really probably would appreciate the Muppety, the Muppetiness of the session. What would you point us to in that direction?

Yeah. So just like with any therapy, there's not going to be a one-size-fits-all for every kiddo or adult with ADHD like me. So some of it is going to be trial and error, right? Some of it is going to be go online and find some of these games, find some of the things. If you have a kid who is particularly interested, I have a— one of my daughter's friends is ADHD and really, really fascinated and interested in fashion. This little— he just absolutely loves fashion. So I might choose a very different set of activities and games for that kid. And I can go online and find millions of things where we can dress up someone together or laugh about, you know, why mom jeans are coming back into fashion. My daughter's going to kill me for saying that. And we, you know, we can find different ways. The 2 biggest points of recommendation here are, one, find activities, find activities that make sense for the individual you're working with. And 2, practice the Muppettiness. Honestly, you need to do a one-on-one Zoom session with a colleague, with a spouse, a significant other, do a couple of sessions where you actually work on being more animated, more Muppety. This is the way to really engage those, the bounciest of kids.

I love that. Be a Muppet. That should be our takeaway. Next, and probably the last question is, what do we do with students who desperately want to engage with us, but maybe they are somewhat limited by some communication challenges they might have, or maybe they even feel very self-conscious about being in a virtual setting, being on video, being face-to-face in this way with someone on the other side. What could we do with those kinds of situations?

Absolutely. There, there, I have different responses for each of those scenarios, right? So for kids with communication difficulties, if they have actual expressive language problems, the online setting is actually made for them, right? We can turn on closed captioning. We can type together. We can find alternative technologies to plug into our platform to give them options for how they want to engage with you in a way that's much harder In person, right, in the room. When it comes to kids who are nervous being in a virtual setting, fewer and fewer are, right, because it's just more normal in our world. But there are kids who, who don't really feel comfortable. This goes back to patience and understanding. So I believe it is absolutely fine to start off a therapeutic relationship Where the kid is a little bit off camera, right? Doesn't need— the kid doesn't need to be straight on and staring at you in the face the entire time. But the more we know, the magical ingredient for all therapies, we know it, right? It's the relationship. This is why we are at least a little bit AI-proof, right? We need humans. We need human connection. And the human connection is what's going to help any kid who's anxious, nervous, reticent to engage, if you can be a little patient and a little kinder to them and say they're, they're probably used to teachers saying, nope, you have to raise your hand, like you have to engage, you've got to do this. Not all teachers, but they're, they're probably, they probably have had that experience. So the more you can be kind and say, you know what, today if you want to have your camera off, For 40 of the 45 minutes. Why don't we try that? Talk to me with the camera off. It's gonna be weird for me. I'm gonna be looking at, at a blank space. I'm gonna imagine you as like these little thought bubbles with smiley faces on the screen right now. That's what I'm gonna do. But it's okay, right? We need to always fall back on remembering that our engagement, our relationship with these kiddos, with our clients, adults, whoever we're working with. is the most important thing, and it's going to be way better than if they don't show up.

Right. It always comes back to connection for sure. We are getting some questions wanting more specific research around why teleservices work for students with ADHD and also just ideas for games, interactive materials to use, worksheets. I think everyone really appreciated the way that we highlighted the different ways that we can engage with kids in an online setting. So Jordan, I don't know if you have anything you want to share about that, but I certainly think that we could probably post some ideas and some research on our LinkedIn. So if everyone, if you're not already, if you want to follow Parallel Learning on LinkedIn, we do a lot of great posts and have a lot of good information there and, and, um, blogs as well.

Yeah. And we've got, we've got a white paper on tele-SLP services. We've got, um, and, and if this is a, a big ask, like what do we do with ADHD kids? We've got our next white paper to write. There is research out there. I've got access to all that research and we can absolutely put it together, aggregate it, and put it out to the provider community, the, the clinician community.

Yeah, I really appreciate everybody highlighting what they'd like to see more of. That's a huge help to us here at Parallel Learning, and I'm going to go ahead and have our colleague Shawna, uh, Beyer come on screen and have her introduce herself and take us through to conclude our webinar tonight. Thank you so much, Dr. Jordan.

Thank you, Taylor. So I'm Shawna Beyer. I am the Director of Speech-Language Pathology Services, and I want to just take this time to have a special thank you and appreciation for our Parallel providers and for all that you do to support our students and for joining us today. And of course, thank you to everyone else that took the time to join us today. So you can tell we have a lot of fun here at Parallel, and you may be asking yourself, why Parallel? Any teletherapy company can offer you flexibility, but we're, we're really building a community with a mission, and we want you to become the best in your field, giving you those tools and resources. And we're always thinking outside the box, like Dr. Jordan indicated. Oh, that's our next white paper. What else can we do to help support you? And we know that you chose education, and it's a challenging profession, and one It's often too overlooked, and we want to change that. And we— our ultimate goal is really to build the best team of providers and to learn from the very best, like Dr. Jordan. But we also learn from one another, and we have an open-door policy, and you have that opportunity to engage with our experienced clinical leaders, for guidance and support and an opportunity to collaborate among the entire parallel team. We have dedicated programs like cross-licensing and our new school-based provider training program, and it's a mentoring program for SLPs that maybe have minimal experience in schools, but they have experience with kids, and they they want to do more in the schools. So we're here to support your growth and your development, and we want to guide you and encourage you along the way. So we want you to come and join our amazing team. If you're interested in becoming a part of Pearlels community of providers, please send in your resume and, you know, our hiring team will reach out to you. We also have up to a $500 referral for anyone that you might be thinking could be interested besides yourself. And yeah, come, come grow with us. And before we leave tonight, I have a couple of more announcements. And the first is, I know we have a raffle, so let me check out who the winner Is, and that would be Jean Powers. So Jean, if you're— hopefully you're here on the call with us tonight, and you are the winner of a $100 Amazon gift card. So yay, Jean! And Jean is one of our amazing parallel providers, SLPs. So. Congratulations, Jeanne. And last but not least, we want you to save the date. We have our sessions 2 and 3 with Taylor Vealey and myself. So please mark the calendar, and we hope to see you very soon. Thank you so much for coming.

Thank you for being here.