Hardest-to-Reach” Students in Virtual Services + Provider Open House

Hello, everybody. Welcome to this webinar. Thank you so much for joining us. We're going to start in just a few seconds here. We'll give everybody a chance to get in by 6 o'clock Eastern. All right. My name is Dr. Jordan Wright. I am the Chief Clinical Officer here at Parallel. Thank you for joining us this evening. I'm going to be your guide today. I'm going to be yapping at you for a little while. I already pre-apologize for how much you're going to have to listen to me tonight. But before I get started, I am going to read through a little bit of housekeeping. So first and foremost, thank you. For spending the next hour with us. At Parallel, we do take pride in nurturing our professional community as well as the broader community by offering innovative, high-quality programming for clinicians and educators alike. Here are a few housekeeping items to highlight before we begin our presentation. This course is being offered for 0.1 ASHA CEUs and 1 NASP-approved CPD credit. If you wish to have us report CEUs to ASHA and/or receive a certificate of completion to obtain a record for your NASP CPD, please be sure to do the following things. One, attend the entire live webinar. Your attendance will be tracked through Zoom reports and no partial credit is allowed to be awarded. Be sure that you have joined with the email address attached to your registration. Complete and submit a self-assessment evaluation within 3 business days of today's presentation. That'll be Tuesday, July 28th. You are going to receive an email with the survey and extra resources by around tomorrow, end of day, around maybe 48 hours. If you have not received an email by Monday, please feel free to reach out, but please do not feel the need to reach out before then. We have a lot of participants. It takes a while for us to get through everything. So please wait to find out if you have received an email by Monday, and do check your spam email because sometimes it goes there. For ASHA CEUs, be sure to indicate that you want to receive ASHA CEUs and provide your ASHA ID number in the post-webinar survey in addition to your name and email address. We do love and encourage questions from our participants. If you have any questions as we go along, please feel free to drop them in the Q&A. If you don't see the Q&A button at the bottom of your Zoom screen, it may be where there are 3 dots. Sometimes it's just an extra little button. Our chat is closed, but you can feel free to comment in the Q&A. We expect our educational content to last about an hour and would love for you to stay for the Q&A toward the end of that. And for anyone who may be interested in virtual positions at Parallel for the upcoming school year, please stay after the PD portion is complete for a provider open house and a chance to hear what it's like to be a Parallel provider. All right, I think that's all the housekeeping that I have for now. So again, my name is Dr. Jordan Wright. I am going to be talking you through the research and what it says about working with the, in air quotes, hardest-to-reach students in virtual school services across education, clinical work, speech therapy, all of these things. A quick note, this is based on a white paper That I wrote and have recently published. At the end of the presentation, there will be a QR code to get to the white paper, and I encourage all of you to get it. It's free. It's just a resource that we put out. We put out white papers as resources for the larger community. What is important is that I am not going to be citing all of the research as we go through. I'm not going to be putting all the references. Every single one of them is in the white paper, though. So if you want to know what the research says, where I got the research, To back up all of the assertions that I'm going to be talking about, they are all cited in the white paper. So I encourage all of the fellow nerds out there like me to download the white paper to see where the research pointed to the findings that we're going to be talking about today. The other thing you're going to see in the presentation today are 4 of our clinical leaders who are going to be joining me to help illustrate and bring to life some of the techniques that the research has shown are effective for working with certain types of students as we go through. So our learning objectives today, we are going to talk about some of the myths, some of the reality, but some of the myths that there are certain types of kids that don't engage well in virtual learning and virtual services. We're going to talk about ways to engage very young learners, sort of the, the youngest kiddos, and those with attention and executive functioning difficulties. Sometimes they look developmentally somewhat similar. And then also strategies to engage minimally verbal and nonverbal students, as well as emotionally complex learners.

That's—

these are the big populations we're going to be talking about today. So before we start, I am going to talk about what I mean by hardest-to-reach students, again in air quotes, because this is not a deficit inherent within a kid. This is not, I'm not doing well with you in teletherapy or virtual education, and that's your fault. There's something wrong with you that you're not engaging with this. It is really the acknowledgment that when we transition from an in-person service, an in-person education to a virtual environment, we do sacrifice certain things. We also gain others, right? There are gives and takes. I, one quick example, I'm a clinical psychologist. I do teletherapy among other things. And one of the things I always love about the virtual environment is that I get to focus so much on the face. And I learn a lot about the emotional world of people that I work with, the kids that I work with, by looking at very subtle facial expressions, changes in the face. And I am not distracted. By the other fidgets, the other toe tapping and that stuff. What I sacrifice is all of the other, like, below the shoulders. I do sacrifice that. I do lose some of that body language that I would be able to see in person. But what I gain is a much clearer picture of what is going on, on, on, on their face, in their emotional world of their face. So we do sacrifice certain things. We do gain others, and we have to acknowledge the reality of that. And there is a reduction in the self-regulation that happens in the online environment. We just have less control over the broader environment when we are virtual, when we are in a telehealth or teletherapy or teleeducation environment or situation. We do not control The box that I control in my office. When I have a kiddo in my office, I control the walls. I control what's going on around me. I control— I can reduce the stimulation. And that means that I may, in the virtual environment, need to be a little bit more actively engaging. I often, with my supervisees, with my team, with my students that I train and supervise, I talk about Muppetiness. Like, we sometimes we have to be a little bit more Muppety in a virtual environment. I say that because I'm very Muppety, in order to maintain engagement even with a very neurotypical learner or somebody who is not in one of these populations that are known to be a little bit more difficult to engage in this environment. So what we're talking about with these hardest-to-reach students is just a mismatch between all those sacrifices And the way the student needs their services presented to them. There is just sometimes a mismatch between what we have to sacrifice and give up in the virtual environment and what kids need. And those are the hardest-to-reach populations or communities of students that we're going to be talking about. And I've broken it down into 4 overarching populations. So we are going to start with very young kiddos, very, very young kids. So let us start with why are they hard to engage, hard to reach in this virtual environment? They have limited attention spans. I have limited attention span. You can probably already tell that. I have been diagnosed with ADHD. I definitely have an ADHD brain. But very young kids, Notoriously have limited attention spans in general, overall. Not every single one, but in general, you know, kids, 3, 4-year-old kids have limitations to how much they can maintain focus on any one thing at any one time. They also, by definition, right, their prefrontal cortexes are very much still developing, so they don't self-regulate all that well. Their self-regulation skills, their ability to stay in their seat— if they get a little bit bored, they're the first ones to jump up or take their laptop and start closing it or play with something on the side or whatever. They do not have a very well-developed self-regulation system yet. Developmentally, they're not meant to. work with young kids, education, telehealth therapies tend to rely very heavily on play-based, very sensory, and very social-mediated learning. The most effective types of therapy and education for these young kids are very, very interactive and play-based, and they look to us to demonstrate in very real, concrete ways what they're meant to be doing. If you look at this little picture, this kid has some blocks, but there are also blocks on the screen. That's not the same thing as me sitting next to them with my blocks and helping them with their blocks, right? There is a big difference, and they tend to rely heavily on that socially mediated engagement. And ultimately, they have a high need for adult support for engagement and task completion. They just, they need a lot of caregiver support. We— it is very difficult in teletherapy. I'll speak for my work in teletherapy to engage a kid on a platform if we say goodbye to a parent for 45 minutes and I just have that 4-year-old sitting there. It may work sometimes. It rarely works all the time. I very often need to engage a parent, caregiver, or some other helper on, on their side to help focus them, to help steer them toward engaging in the task that I am working on, even under the best of circumstances. Young kids just do not respond well to passive engagement. So anything that is just like throwing up a video, Or modules that don't have an interactive component where you're just— it's like a talking head, like I'm asking you to do right now. Hopefully we don't have very young kids out there because they will flail. They're just having to listen to me talk, talk at you for too long, and young children just don't respond well to this. The research has shown that over and over and over. So what are the evidence-based engagement strategies to overcome these sacrifices that we've had to make, these shortcomings of the virtual environment. First, we want to try and make learning as multisensory and interactive as possible. We want to use sound, videos, games. We want to use as much interactivity as possible so that we can engage them and they are actively learning or growing whatever skills we want them to gain in the moment. Less videos where they're not engaged or not actively engaging, where they're just sort of watching, fewer of those, more activities where they are interacting with us and with the activity. Storytelling and narrative-based approaches have been shown to be extremely effective. This is especially shared storytelling where we, we tell a story together, where we co-develop a narrative. And tell a story together, regardless of what skill I'm trying to impart. I can use narrative or storytelling approaches to impart a lot of different types of skills. Real-time feedback is really important. So when they are engaged, champion them, right? Use those little buttons that have the interactive celebrations that happen in the platform. Use those adaptive learning. There's a lot of promise in platforms that are AI-enabled to help look at and evaluate how engaged a young kid is in the moment. So some of these AI approaches can see very subtle cues that a kid is losing interest even before we can with our sort of naked eyes. And they can alert you and make recommendations of pivots to make, or different activities to try, or different types of engagement in the moment. These have started showing real promise to keep kids, young kids, really engaged in the moment. We want to really try and partner and build involvement with the caregiver or adult. On the other side of the screen. We don't want to just call them in when we desperately need them. We want to champion and celebrate with our little, you know, celebration or confetti on the screen or whatever. But we also want to say, Mom, if a mom is helping out, Mom, wasn't that awesome? And let Mom or the caregiver or whoever celebrate them in the room as well and give them that hug in the moment if they can do that. The research is pretty clear with younger kids. Whenever it is possible to do individual sessions, do it. They, even small groups reduces effectiveness of interventions of education. So whenever possible, we want to try and engage younger kids in one-on-one sessions or lessons. Games and playful elements are what it is all about with these younger kids. We want to try to build more gamified, interactive, playful, engaging content whenever possible. And then we want to personalize the online work to the specific student. This is— you're gonna see this over and over with the different populations, but this has to do with the content of what we're doing, regardless of the skills. The skills are the process. If I'm trying to get a kid to articulate something in a certain way, or practice a self-regulation skill, or do some pre-literacy work or pre-numeracy work, whatever it is, whatever the skill is that I'm trying to do, trying to impart, trying to get them more competent with, the content of how I do that is limitless. So if I know a kid well and can remember what a kid is interested in, I want to try and personalize that online work to that specific kid. If they have loved a particular game in the past, I want to remember that and use that game as much as possible. All right, I'm going to invite Sandy, one of our clinical leads here, to talk about using some of these strategies in real practice.

Hi everybody, I'm Sandy Girard O'Connors. I'm a speech-language pathologist, and I'm going to try to do this subject justice in just a couple of minutes, even though I feel like I could talk for hours on engaging with very young kids who are my favorite to work with. I'm going to share a few stories from my clinical experience. If you have questions, I'll take a look at the Q&A after and see what I can do to help answer those. The first story I'd like to share is One of the reasons that I think this population is so difficult to work with virtually, and it starts with the adults that are in that child's life. This is a story that happens repeatedly for me when working with very young children. A decision-making adult in a child's life, whether that's a caregiver or a teacher, maybe a school administrator, will come to me and say, we're declining virtual services. So I approach this conversation with curiosity. And what I generally find is that they are either worried about screen time, or they say something along the lines of, this child doesn't even sit still for in-person learning. There's no way they're going to be able to do online learning. To which I say, you're right. Teletherapy is not a one-size-fits-all solution for every single student. However, I've worked with other kids who have a similar profile to this student, and I'd like to do a trial run. Let's just see how it goes for 2 sessions. And then we can talk about next steps after that. It's usually enough for me to get some buy-in, but now the clock is ticking. Now I have 2 sessions to get buy-in from the student so that I get buy-in from the adults so that that kid gets the support that they need and deserve. I was working with a lot of young kids when the COVID shutdowns happened, and there's this one student in particular who remains one of my favorites to this very day, but she hated virtual. She especially hated seeing her own face on the computer screen. And I stare at my own face all day long on a computer screen, so I completely understand where that's coming from. But she was refusing to participate in any live sessions with her teacher, with any of her support staff. So I called mom, and we were having a discussion trying to figure out what's the underlying issue. What was making this interface so unappealing to this kid? And we opted to try to use a Chromecast so that instead of seeing my session on a tiny little Google Chromebook screen at the kitchen table, my session was now displayed on the big screen TV in the living room, and the child set up shop at the coffee table. Now she could stand, she could sit, she could spin, she could rock, she could squat, and movement was very regulating for her. Also, her face was much further away from the screen. and her own camera view, and it no longer bothered her after that. After our first session with that setup, mom emailed me after a picture of this little girl, big smile on her face. We did a ton of green screen activities, had a blast with some music, and the kid said to mom after that it was the best TV show ever. So that's the feedback I'm aiming for every time I have a session with a young child. I'm trying to be the best TV show ever. How do you do that? How do you become the best TV show ever? I like to say that you channel your inner Miss Rachel and you embrace 3 essential components of an effective session. And I would like to argue that these are the components that make a session with a very young child effective, whether you're in person or virtual. You're going to be theatrical, you're going to be dynamic, and you're going to have to be flexible. So what does theatrical mean? What does that look like? You're doing all the voices. You're doing all the voices. You're doing all the sound effects.

You're big.

You're overexaggerating. You are putting on costumes. If you're on virtual, it's super easy because you're putting on filters. You're changing your backgrounds. You're experimenting with green screens. You're including music and rhyme and repetition. And all of those things are very theatrical and are very engaging. And I would venture to say not just for young students, but for anybody you're trying to teach. So let's talk about the dynamic piece. How do you keep things from being static? Like we were just mentioning, you don't want something that's just going to be flat on the screen. And I actually think this is where a lot of hesitation comes from the grown-ups in these kids' lives. They haven't necessarily engaged with material on a screen that is dynamic, that is interactive. So you're bringing in any kind of game, and it doesn't have to be high prep or super low prep. Prep supporters over here. So hide and seek, peekaboo, you are playing with distance from the camera. You're getting close, you're getting far, you're changing that, you're changing your facial expressions, you're using hands and gestures, animations, anything motion, animated storybooks, Pixar shorts can be really great for working with this population. But I think one of the most important things about the dynamic nature of a good session when you're working with young children is that what the child does influences what happens on the screen. That's where some of the dynamic nature of the session comes from. So one game I love to play with young students is that I'll give them a magic wand. It's a marker, you know, they have whatever they have on hand, and they have a certain phrase that's their magic phrase. SLPs, this is a great way to get lots of trials in for a certain sound you're working on. When they say that phrase, they get to control some part of what's going on on the screen. So they say, hocus pocus. You've turned me into an animal. You've turned me into a pig. Oh my gosh, turn me back. You just turned me into a pig. How dare you? Use your magic wand again.

Do it again.

Do it again.

And they'll do it again. And poof. Oh, gave me such a nice flower in my hair.

But wait.

Oh, I'm allergic.

Do it again.

Use your magic wand again. Change it back. Change it back. Lots of repetition, lots of fun, and I would venture to say the more fun you're having, the more fun the kid is having as well. Which will bring me to my last piece that I'll mention for the day, which is you're gonna have to be flexible. Be ready to pivot just like you would in an in-person session. Have your go-tos ready to go. In person, for me, this is bubbles, Play-Doh, a blanket, and a baby doll, but virtual sessions, it looks a little different. I will have music queued up, I will have a game queued up, and I always know I can rely on having a whiteboard ready to go and using whatever topics that kid is interested in to change what they see on the screen. So you want to be ready to pivot, and more than anything, you want to be child-centered. Figure out what they love and incorporate that, whether that's something you've ever used in a therapy session before or not. That's the flexible piece. So I'll wrap up with one last story. I was working with a little girl with Down syndrome, and she was tricky. She didn't fall for any of my usual tricks. She was really hard to engage, and we ended up making her my dog trainer. So we gave her a fringe vocabulary board that she could use together with her core vocabulary board that had things like sit, Beg, roll over, give the dog a treat. My dog loved these sessions. Um, so she got to be my dog trainer, and the dog got her own little camera. She was the star of the show, and we got so much engagement from this student, and we were able to lean more and more into that until we were doing what I wanted to be doing during these sessions. Getting that buy-in is the most important part. Do the work to make the connection with the student. And the rest of it will come. And with that, I'll pass it back over.

Thank you, Sandy. You are an amazing television show. And now I'm sorry, you have to go back to my television show. So we're going to pivot now to students with attention and executive functioning challenges, whether formally identified or diagnosed with ADHD or not. We all have worked with these kiddos who do have difficulties with attention and executive functioning. Including me. So why are they so hard to reach? They are— everything is so easily derailed, right? You can even see it in this picture, right? Again, we can't control what's happening on their side of the screen. So they may have other screens. They may have phone. They may have— I have a pen that I'm clicking. They may have other stuff that is really tempting for them. to move away from their focus on you. They also tend to have difficulty with follow-through and independent practice. So any downtime where you're like, try this on your own, which you might do with some other kiddo, doesn't work nearly as well when they have known challenges with attention and executive function. They tend to turn their cameras off a lot and tend to have higher rates of disengagement. Multiple ways of identifying disengagement in the research literature, but in general, they tend to lean back and look away and turn their camera off more than their peers. And in this medium, there's just less external structure and more opportunity for distraction in their environment wherever they are. If they're doing it from home, if they're doing it from an office in school, or in the corner of a classroom or wherever they're doing it, there's just more opportunity for distraction. So what does the research say about engaging these students? Some of these you're going to see some repeats. One is to make sure feedback and rewards are frequent and immediate. That means that if you have a 40-minute session and they've done really well over those 40 minutes, and so you're going to give them a reward for the last 5 minutes. They get to play Roblox with you or whatever it is that they really love doing. That's actually not as effective a strategy as giving rewards throughout a session, right? Having them engage for 35 minutes and have to engage for 35 minutes, and if they don't engage fully for those 35 minutes, they may not get that reward, is too taxing. That's too high a bar. So you want to make rewards, and these don't need to be tangible rewards. They can just be thumbs ups and confetti and, you know, virtual high fives or anything like that. But make sure that they are frequent and make sure that they happen immediately after the behavior that you want to reinforce. Increase structure and external scaffolding. This is actually one of the areas where being online in a platform is a benefit. Because you can actually have an agenda, a schedule, and even a visible timer in the corner of a screen that says, we're going to be working on this one thing, whatever it is, for the next 3 minutes.

Go.

And they can see that structure. They can see it happening in real time in a way that's actually harder to do in person. Whenever possible, shorten sessions and vary the activities frequently. This is aligned with the research that shows that brains like mine do better with more experiential learning that is short and, and has bursts of learning rather than a long lecture and then trying to ingest it and long periods of practice. Overuse. I use that phrase, that, that term on purpose. Interactive activities, gamification, and even virtual reality. So what I mean by overuse is it's okay if it goes overboard. I know Sandy mentioned some, sometimes parents are concerned with screen time. The research is pretty clear, even it's, it's a burgeoning field, but the research is pretty clear that screen time is not all equal, right? So passive and useless screen time, be worried about that. But interactive screen time that has a purpose, that has an educational component, that has a therapeutic component, is not harmful to kids, right? It is actually something we want to be championing. And the research has shown that kids with ADHD can focus just as well as their non-ADHD counterparts on games, on video games. And actually, they show an even higher preference for video games or immersive games than their counterparts. So we want to capitalize on that. We want to use it mindfully. Obviously, we want to use it for a purpose. So Sandy was talking about sneaking in some, uh, in speech therapy, if you're working on some articulation stuff, sneak in some of those words to repeat over and over and over to practice that articulation. If it's self-regulation skills, if it's reading skills, sneak it in. Make sure that you're using it for a purpose. But we want to exploit the fact that they tend to really love games. Reduce cognitive load and distractions. So there are, in an office, in in-person services, we want to do this. We want to like take stuff off the walls and we want to like make it a calming environment for these kiddos, right? In the virtual environment, we have to worry about 2 environments. We have to worry about what's going on in their physical space where they are. So are there a lot of sounds going on around them? Are there sirens? Headphones are great. Make sure that they have headphones. Make sure that they're in a reduced distraction environment there. But we also need to worry about the screen.

Right?

The environment of the online learning or online virtual therapy. So we don't want an overwhelming, you know, we don't want 35 things on a screen. Right? You can see even here, I've got a lot on the screen, but I'm, I'm letting them come up one by one so that you can focus where you need to focus when you need to focus there. So that at the end, if I just put all this up on the screen, you probably wouldn't listen to me. Right? You'd probably be like, oh, I need to read this, and it's all over the place. We don't want the virtual environment to be overwhelming, visually overstimulating. And then we want to use co-presence strategies. And just really quickly, what that means is I need to be very visibly present in the moment. I need my— my camera should be on. I should be Muppety or animated or engaged or whatever words you want to use for that, theatrical. But we want to make sure that we are there alongside them. So whenever you're doing an activity, we want to make sure that it is built in a way that we are doing it together toward a similar goal. We are doing this activity together for a shared purpose, for a shared goal. If you've got a small group of kids, Or even one-on-one, we want to metaphorically be sitting alongside them practicing what they need to practice, not just give them an assignment and say, you try it. Go.

Action.

That is not co-present. I want to be very, very visually, verbally, and engaged alongside them in what they're doing. And with that, I am going to invite Natalie to come and give a few minutes to bring this to life.

Thank you, Jordan. So I'm Natalie Horstman. I am also a speech-language pathologist, and my example focuses on testing a student rather than direct services. So what I've learned from working with these types of students is that I've been the most successful when I design the virtual environment around their interests While keeping the sessions, because we all know testing sessions can be really boring, keeping them engaging, interactive, and fun. So I have a really basic example of a student that I worked with. It was a first-grade student who was going through an initial evaluation for special education. So it involved multiple days of testing with different evaluators, lots and lots of testing for a young kiddo. So during his speech and language evaluation, every 30 seconds or so, I noticed that he would try to crawl under the table or spin in his chair or get up and wander around the room. He was in a room that was private and quiet with his facilitator, but still it was challenging for him to sit still during these testing sessions. And I was not the first evaluator to see him, so he had been through this before. So our first instinct as adults is often to try to get the student to sit still and pay attention.

Right.

But we realized pretty quickly that if we spent the entire evaluation redirecting him, it would be much harder to get meaningful data. And there was a possibility that he would begin to refuse and we wouldn't be able to get through testing. And that's just not an enjoyable experience for a student anyway. So before I began testing the student, I worked with the facilitator to build movement breaks into the evaluation rather than treating movement as a distraction from testing.

Mm-hmm.

So I shared, I created a simple visual schedule and shared it on the screen so he always knew where we were and what was coming next. I would go visual schedule, subtests from one of our evaluations, and then we would go into a fun activity. So instead of him seeing an entire morning of testing, he only had to focus on the next activity and I would guide him the rest of the way. Also, the facilitator sat right behind him rather than hovering over him, which gave him support when he needed it, but also still encouraged independence on his part. So this student really liked Pete the Cat, if anyone's familiar, and he loved Pete the Cat stories and songs. So once we completed a few subtests of an evaluation, I'd say something like, awesome job, you earned your Pete the Cat break. And I'd play a short Pete the Cat video on YouTube for him. There are plenty, lots of songs. So during the video, he was able to do whatever he wanted— stand up, dance, move around, and sing along— and we would sing together. And it was a fun little break in the middle of testing. And then once the video was over, I'd show him the visual schedule again, and we'd get back to work on a few more subtests until it was time to take another Pete the Cat break. So movement became part of the routine instead of a behavior we were constantly correcting, and it made the testing process a lot easier for him and I hope a little more fun. So instead of expecting him to adapt to a typical testing session, we adapted it to him and made it more engaging. So working with students who have attention and executive functioning challenges is about intentionally designing the visual the virtual environment around how they learn best. And we want to make expectations visible. We want to break tasks into manageable pieces. We want to provide that immediate feedback, immediate positive feedback that they're doing a great job. And we also want to build movement into the sessions rather than fighting it. We can also create— or excuse me, reduce cognitive load by creating structure, predictability, And opportunities for success. And what's unique about working in the virtual setting is that you have that in-person facilitator there to assist you, and you can work as a team to make sure you can support the student and make it the most positive experience for them. So yeah, that's my story.

Thank you so much, Natalie. As a side note, is there anything cuter than a wiggle break?

No, absolutely not. Absolutely not.

So it's a win-win. The kid gets a wiggle break, we get to enjoy a little wiggle break, a little movement break. Awesome. All right, we are going to now pivot to minimally verbal and nonverbal students. This one is— there's sort of a common sense to it that this, you know, these students would just be challenging to engage in a virtual environment. The common sense would also say they're just hard to engage in, in person as well. It can be very difficult, and certainly SLPs deal with this all the time. I think school psychologists, psychologists, educators maybe even have a tougher time with minimally verbal and nonverbal students because we're not fully trained to work with this population in the same way that SLPs are. So why are they hard to reach? One is we do lose some of the gesture and body language channels In this virtual environment. You do not have to. You could be further away, I guess, from the camera, and you could see more of the kid, but then it is, it is harder to engage when they are further away. So you do lose something in the virtual environment. We do require more caregiver or facilitator involvement. And then there is a burnout risk, and this is particularly true for Parents and caregivers who are constantly being asked to speak on behalf of their child, that they can get tired of doing this. And they probably have to do this through many hours of their life, through many hours of their day. And maybe, you know, don't want to do it for the professionals who are meant to be helping in this arena. So this becomes a challenge as well. There's limited hands-on verbally mediated assessment, right? The assessment in person, it's sometimes a little easier to sit next to a kid who's nonverbal and point together right next to each other rather than asking them to like move a cursor on a screen. And this is, when it comes down to it, is silence, especially for minimally verbal kids, can be really easily misinterpreted as resistance. Which is very frequently not the case. It is not that they are just being resistant to the work that you're doing with them, and so they've decided to be silent. Very often it has to do with overwhelm. Very often it has to do with frustration and frustration tolerance or many other factors. But it is not, it is not easy not to internalize that as a helper. Right? It's not easy to be like, oh, they were talking just a minute ago. I clearly did something wrong and they're not talking now. It can be very difficult for a provider or an educator. So what does the research say we should be doing to engage these students in a virtual environment? First and foremost, give the student a way to communicate. AAC first, always, right? Giving them an AAC and a device that can help them communicate in different ways. We don't want to think of this like a crutch, that it's not getting in the way of them gaining verbal ability or verbal skills. The research is pretty clear that it's actually removing barriers. I kind of think of it as if you've got speed bumps, we've all got barriers. It's giving them better tires to get over them. An AAC device and helping them use it effectively, teaching them and training them and co-facilitating it with them and a parent or caregiver or a facilitator or some other person in the room is actually just unlocking their communication. It is not getting in the way of them talking. Model, don't demand. What this means is when you are going through a task, when you are going through an activity with them, we want to narrate aloud as much as possible. Oh, I'm going to think to myself, what do I want to do here? I need to solve this puzzle.

Hmm.

Well, I look at that and I don't want to pick this one because this is the problem with that. We want to be overly modeling, not just demanding that they Pick the right choice. Or, you know, if it's a choose-your-own-adventure, choose which one you want. We want to narrate aloud as much as possible to model how they might go through it in their minds, not modeling what they should be saying, but how they should be engaging in the task or the activity that you're working on together. Partner as much as possible with caregivers and communication coaches. This is so important. Because you're going to be teaching some skills. You're going to be working in particular ways, in sessions, in lessons with them that you don't want to just live within those 40 minutes or however long you get with them at that time. You want to say, parent, caregiver back there, do you see what I did there? This is awesome. This kiddo really did an amazing job when we gave them the opportunity to blah, blah, blah, blah. Partner with them so that they can reinforce those same skills and same strategies outside of your sessions or lessons with that kid. Regulate first, then communicate. We are asking in our lessons and in our sessions with these kids, we're asking a lot of them. We're asking them to be vulnerable. We're asking them to take risks. We're asking them to try things that they are not good at. We are asking a lot of them. And so the research shows actually, if you take the first few minutes, it doesn't even take that much, the first few minutes of a session or a lesson to do some regulation, to do some breathing, to do some like— and you can, again, you can have a visual timer and say, we're going to use this and do this body calming exercise because we love it, and figure out what that kid likes doing. to self-regulate. You may have to do some trial and error to figure out what that particular kid likes. But if you do that at the beginning of any session or lesson, that means when they start to become a little bit overwhelmed throughout the lesson or session, you can hearken back to it. Oh, let's pause for a second and let's go back to our, our wiggle exercise or our progressive muscle relaxation or whatever it is we did at the beginning of the session. You have taught it to them. You have practiced it at the beginning of the session. You can hearken back to it super easily because you have done that practice, and you have regulated first and then started to communicate. Structure lessons and sessions tightly. This is again pretty similar to other populations, so I'm not going to belabor it. Use interaction, not conversation. What this means is that we can interact in many, many ways that are not just verbal conversation. So we want to capitalize on that. Build communication through choice and control. Whenever possible, give kids as many different ways and options if, how, and when to communicate as possible. Let them control when they use a multiple choice, when they articulate something with their words, when they nod or use a pointer. Let them choose how to communicate. And finally, remember and utilize students' personal interests. And just a quick note here, we talked about the students' interests. This is good for everybody, but there is something special about remembering it from session to session. There is something that is so connecting between a clinician, a provider, an educator, and a kid when you have remembered that they love Pete the Cat. Right? When you remember a week later, when you remember a month later, oh, you love Pete the Cat. Let's use Pete the Cat. So try remembering, give yourself, and platforms are great at reminding you. The more sophisticated platforms will remind you in a session along the side, say, just reminders of what this kid loves. Those are really helpful for, uh, um, helping you make good decisions in the moment. I'm going to invite Allison to come and talk for a few minutes.

Thank you for having me, Jordan. I'm one of the SLP clinical managers, and I've just started my timer to avoid talking for 47 years about this topic. Because the non-speakers and minimally speaking students are my absolute favorites. I loved the tip for using interaction, not conversation, because this is so key. If you consider how many people hate small talk, even like perfectly fluent mouth talkers, I'm included in this. It's like we're so programmed to start in with a complex conversation. What are the alternatives? Well, Sandy gave you a bunch. Any sort of early intervention shtick— pee-yoo, stinky feet, any variation on peekaboo, playing with proximity— all of those games are really fun to play, and they take the language formulation barrier and speech programming barriers off of the student. I wanted to give you some ideas for slightly older students. So my personal rule number 1 is I don't plan anything. And it's not because I'm lazy. My coworkers will tell you that. But it's because when you give them a plan, you're putting a demand. I've put some time in this. I'm going to be disappointed if you don't do it. And that energy, I don't like to bring that energy. Instead, I like to show up. I like to match affect. If I don't want to be somewhere, I am put off by someone being really bubbly. at me and being so glad and like effusive about how glad they are that I'm there. I find that to be weird. So I like to match affect. I experiment with mirroring. Some people love it, some kids hate it. Um, always like to experiment. I also like to collect clues to get hints about the child's interests. So what, what's on their shirt? Can I see their shoes? Do they have a water bottle with a character on it? Can I ask the teacher what the interests are? Rather than jumping straight to an interview. Now, let's pretend— well, actually, I'm gonna tell you, we don't have to pretend. I'm just gonna tell you something that happened. I had a kid once who was about 2nd grade, had Down syndrome, and he showed up to a session with 2 action figures, which he was slamming against each other in play fight. The para's instinct was to stop him from doing this, and I said, no, no, please do not. As he's having this, these fisticuffs with these action figures, I begin to make cartoon sound effects. Pow, pow, pow. Can't be afraid of making sound effects. Sometimes you have to make a fart noise in order to make progress on your IEP goals. That is an unwritten rule that they did not teach you in grad school, but remains true. So as, as I'm doing the sound effects, he starts imitating a couple of them, and I know I've got it. So then I start taking the role of the victimized action figure. And I start to do a script saying like, ow, my leg, ow, my leg, ow, my arm. And he starts noticing that I'm changing the body part that is hurt as he's going to different body parts. And so then we start doing this whole lesson on body parts. If I had come to him with a worksheet about body parts, he would have told me to hit the road without using his words. But as it stood, we had a really nice time. I also think it's really important to just go with mistakes. This is a really important Part of doing AAC therapy is treating every communication interaction as intentional. One example is I have a very non-compliant, super wayward and adorable 5th grader who, man, his intelligibility was very poor. And he accidentally on his AAC device said the word Japanese. And because he was so sassy, I delivered it in a very sassy affect. I was like, I cannot believe you actually know Japanese. prove it. And so this child began to pretend to speak Japanese. I shan't do an impression, but he— a lot of output came out. And it was the first time that he had talked to me in like a, you know, a structured way, because we were just getting to know each other. And then I was like, I bet you don't know anything else. And he went back to that language page and he was like, Yoruba. And so then he pretended to speak probably 20 different languages, modulating his voice in ways that nobody knew that you could do. I have additional examples. What I really want to get to before I run out of time is videos. So if you can't— if you weren't able to find any cues, you weren't able to accidentally land an interaction like the fighting action figures or whatever, I like to have in my back pocket an arsenal of crowd favorite videos. I don't know what'll work for you, but I have some that Blakely will put in the chat. These are mine, and they're in order of which videos are the most like basically foundationally accessible. I find that really repetitive videos that use common child interests are the best. Best. I made a plural. It's fine. I'm an SLP. Don't worry. So in just a second, Dr. Jordan is gonna show you a video that you wouldn't believe works for preschool to high school, but it does. And I love it because it's very stimmy. It's got really great sounds of balls clattering. It's colors. It's predictable. And I like to model the same phrase over and over and over and over and over again to make sure that they have enough repetitions before I start pulling back my cues. And then as I pull back my cues, almost always, if I've modeled enough times, the student will start to fill in our habitual script. And because the video is so soothing and pleasant and regulating, they feel empowered because they know what to expect to say what they need to say. So play away, Dr. Jordan.

Red.

And so now as this one's going, we're gonna say yay.

Red.

And then we'll say, come out, blue, or whatever, whatever level the kid is at.

Blue.

And it's just very, you know, locked and loaded. Yellow comes next, but you can guess. And so Blakely will send you, have in the chat the rest of the ones that I rely on again and again. But that predictability can really, really help with a minimally speaking student. And now I'll turn it back to Dr. Jordan.

Thank you so much. And I am gonna push us forward as quickly as possible because we are gonna run out of time. So students with trauma histories, high emotional needs, and problems with emotion regulation, why are they hard to reach? They have difficulty with trust. They can be dysregulated emotionally, and it can be hard to read those distress cues remotely. And anything that is not predictable can raise their alarms. And they can get frustrated easily and withdraw. Easily. If they don't feel connected and safe with you, and it is hard to feel connected and safe through the interwebs, right? Then they can withdraw easily. So what does the research say to engage this population? I'm not going to touch on all of the details of this, but incorporate trauma-informed practices. This has to do with understanding that anything that might be a symptom or a problem We want to reconceptualize this as a natural reaction to the traumas that they have experienced. Like, of course they are responding the way that they are responding. Of course they are. They have their red flag a little bit at the ready, ready to go because they are always on the lookout for potential dangers. So we want to reconceptualize through a trauma-informed lens. We want to leverage caregivers and school collaboration as much as possible. Use technology mindfully. This is actually where we don't want to overstimulate. So we want to make sure that we are using the technology in a way that is aligned with their particular needs and emotional needs, especially. Prioritize self-regulation and coping skills. Again, even if this is not the identified target on the IEP, start with self-regulation. Start with those coping skills at the beginning of every session, just like we talked about with the last population, so that you have that tool in your toolbox for when things go a little bit awry in session. Establish as much predictability and safety as possible. Enhance emotional connection and presence. This means go overboard in praising them and telling them how much you enjoyed what they just did. Like, oh, I loved when you engaged in this way. I loved when you did this. Use that language so that it is a connecting language, not just nice job, not just you did awesome. I really appreciated how well you did at this. And the, the real difficulty with this population, with especially a trauma population, is that there is no one-size-fits-all. You need to do a little trial and error. Every single kid is a guinea pig because the impact of trauma, the impact of invalidation, the impact of ACEs is different on every little munchkin, on every little human body. So we need to test out what communication is most effective for each kid that we see and use that as much as possible. And with that, I'm going to invite Amber to talk really quickly because I still have a little bit more to get through. And I apologize, Amber. But if you can do this quickly.

Yes.

So I am the— I'm Dr. Amber Israel, and I am a special ed teacher, and I'm the SDI clinical manager here. I'm going to share a quick story about a student that I had. He struggled with emotional dysregulation. So on this particular day when he hopped into our session, he immediately said, you know, I'm really angry and had the angry face. And I was like, okay, I need to stop and figure out You know, emotional presence, what's happening here. So I asked him, you know, why he was angry. Um, and he, um, I said, let's take some, a deep breath. And so we just stopped and he took some deep breaths. And then he told me why he was angry, um, having to do with his parent waking him up early. He didn't want to get up. And, you know, typical teenager. And this is a high school student. So, um, after he took some deep breaths, I just gave him space and I said, whenever you're ready, you know, just let me know.

We'll start.

And, um, so we, he calmed down a little bit and then after he was ready, he's, we, um, decided to talk through, you know, well, what could we have done different? Um, we talked about him, you know, gaining some more control over his morning routine. What can you do? And so he's talked about, we talked about setting alarms for himself instead of his mom having to wake him up, kind of moving into that, um, you know, taking more responsibility of his morning routine. And then, um, after that, um, he seemed to like even calm down a little bit more. And so then we went right into the lesson and I shared like, all right, here's the structure of the lesson. We're gonna go through, um, these things. So providing that predictable schedule for him. And then I even told him, hey, when you need a break, you know, we'll break. And, um, no, you know, there's no question asked. He's not a failure. Nothing's happening here. You can take a break. That's, you know, your right. And so he, um, we got through about 5 problems and then he was like, all right, all right, I'm feeling overwhelmed. And I was like, okay. I was like, all right, we'll end early. And so we ended early. And what I do for this kid is I send him resources after, um, the session. Um, I will do emails, phone calls. I've even given this particular student assessments over the phone, like transition assessments, because that's what made him feel comfortable. And even during our, um, you know, lessons, he has his camera off whenever he wants to. He'll use the chat. So I give him full flexibility, whatever makes him feel comfortable and safe and secure with me. And, um, that has led to increase where he will participate more with me. Sometimes he'll say, hey, can I just call you? And then, you know, um, then I, then we go jump on screen. I'm like, sure. So, you know, I've had to be much more flexible with this particular student, but what it has led to is like towards the end of the year, this particular student took ownership of his transition goals, his IEP goals, and he actually jumped into our session, our IEP team session at the end of our, the year, and he shared with everybody what he wanted to do and what his goals were and his dreams and ambitions. And those were the things that I incorporated into our lesson and my focus always is like, all right, well, what are we working towards? What are your goals? And so I use that also incorporated into the lesson. So overall, again, using these methods that Dr. Jordan has mentioned really supported the students. So just want to share a quick story.

Amazing. Thank you. And thank you for the rapid. So I do— no, I want to add one thing because overarching all of this and all these populations, is sharing feedback. Sharing progress is extremely effective at getting engagement. You can take a picture of this. You can read it. The idea is when kids can see their own growth, when they can see their own progress, they tend to reinvest in themselves. They tend to engage. So showing them their progress in very concrete terms, you can see a little chart here of progress, is extremely effective. And we're not gonna have time for Q&A, unfortunately. I have too much to say. We have too much to say about all of this. But I do want to encourage you to use this QR code to download the white paper. It is free. It is a resource for you. It goes through all of the research supporting these practices. As a reminder, you will receive a recording of this, the survey, the post-survey evaluation, All of it you will receive by Monday. If you want to claim credit for ASHA CEUs, CPD for NASP, please fill that out. If you do not receive anything from us, one, check your spam, and 2, by Monday, if you don't receive it by next Monday, feel free to reach out to us and we will make sure that you get what you need. And with that, I want to say a huge thank you for joining us. I want to say a huge thank you.

Thank you.

To the 4 clinical leaders that joined me today and brought the ideas to life with the very real-world clinical examples. And a reminder, if you are interested in learning more about Parallel, stick around for the next half hour or so, and we will give you a preview of what it is like to be a provider at Parallel. And with that, I will say a huge thank you and have a wonderful evening. And I think with that, I'm going to throw it over to Alicia, I think.

Yep. Thank you, Dr. Wright. Thank you to the entire clinical team. Good afternoon and good evening, everyone. It is a It's a pleasure to give you a very warm welcome to our Parallel Provider Open House now starting. Whether you are ready for a new professional chapter or simply curious about our clinical model, we're delighted that you've stayed on for extra time with us. You're going to hear Dr. Jordan Wright and I coordinating, exchanging slide changes. So, Dr. Wright, I'm ready for the next slide.

Okay.

Our mission is simple but profound. We partner with school districts to build the foundation for different thinkers and learners to thrive. Before we dive in, I'd love to know who's joining us today. Please feel free to drop your discipline and the state you're joining from into the Q&A feature of your toolbar below. And while we have those come in, I'm going to quickly introduce myself. My name is Alicia Bain. I lead the provider recruiting team here at Parallel, and I am joining you today from the very humid Savannah, Georgia. We'd love to make the most of our 30 minutes together. So as questions come up throughout today's session, don't feel like you have to wait until the end. Feel free to drop them into the Q&A whenever they come to mind. We'd love for this to be as interactive as possible and are happy to answer questions along the way for you. I'm joined today by a few of my recruiting partners and colleagues, Brittany, Sarah, and Lindsay. They're standing by in the Q&A to answer any questions that you have about the hiring process. And together, our recruiting team brings more than 50 years of combined experience across speech-language pathology, school psychology, special education, and social work. Because many of us have backgrounds in education or have worked closely with clinicians and educators, we understand that supporting students goes so much further beyond the therapy session and the classroom. We also have one of our fantastic providers joining us today, as well as members of our clinical leadership team who you've gotten to know earlier. Later in this session, they'll also walk you through the provider experience, our platform workflows, and clinical model. If you have questions for any of them along the way, they'll also be monitoring the Q&A and responding throughout the presentation. Okay, Dr. Wright, ready for the next slide? Okay, here's just a quick roadmap of what you can expect during our time together. We'll start with our story, the mission that fuels everything we do here at Parallel. Next, you'll hear directly from one of our providers, as we believe the best perspective comes from someone living the experience every day. Then our clinical leadership team will give you a behind-the-scenes look at our proprietary platform, Pathway. You'll get to see firsthand how we support our providers in the clinical setting. Finally, we'll walk through the next steps for joining our provider network for the upcoming school year. 30 minutes will fly by, so one more plug to utilize the Q&A as we go. Okay, Dr. Wright, I'm ready for the next slide. To understand what makes Parallel different, it helps to know where we started. Parallel was founded by our CEO, Diana Heldfond, whose own experience growing up with dyslexia and ADHD shaped the company's mission. She experienced firsthand the difference that the right educational resources can make and how difficult it can be for families to access. She created Parallel to change that, to build a better way of connecting students with the care that they need. Today, our mission is to help different thinkers turn their differences into strengths by equipping clinicians with the tech, the tools, and the guidance that they need to do their life's best work. That mission remains at the heart of everything that we do. So I'll pause here with a question that I have for the audience. What originally drew you into your profession? Feel free to share a few words into the Q&A while we move on to our next slide. Today we partner with more than 200 school districts nationwide, ensuring students receive the support that they deserve. We've reached more than 50,000 students through personalized strengths-based care, and during the 2024-2025 academic school year alone, 98% of those students either met or they exceeded their IEP goals. None of this would, would be possible without our incredible network of more than 300 providers who collectively hold over 700 active state licenses. And there's one statistic that I am especially proud of. More than 90% of our clinicians choose to stay with Parallel year after year. We believe that's because we invest in our providers, we protect their time, and we create a partnership where they feel truly valued and supported. Okay, next slide. So what is it that keeps providers choosing Parallel? When we ask that question, the same 3 trends come up again and again. First is flexibility. Whether you're looking for full-time or part-time work, we work with you to build a schedule that fits your life. Second, compensation. We know your expertise extends far beyond the time you're meeting with students. That's why we compensate providers for direct therapy, documentation, IEP prep, indirect work, as well as eligible student no-shows and short-notice cancellations. We value both your time and your expertise. And then finally, support. When you join Parallel, you're never practicing alone. Every provider is paired with a licensed clinical manager within their discipline, Providers also receive professional development opportunities. They gain access to curated therapy materials and become part of a collaborative community of peers. Our goal is simple: we remove as many administrative hurdles as possible so that you can focus on what matters most— your students. Okay, another question for the Q&A: which of those 3 themes resonates the most with you? Is it flexibility? Is it compensation? Or is it support? Or if it's something else, let us know that too. Okay, next slide. Beyond the day-to-day experience, another advantage of joining Parallel is the opportunity to grow your practice as we continue expanding across the country. This map highlights our growing partnerships with school districts nationwide. If you're already licensed in one of these states, that's wonderful. If you're interested in opportunities in a state where you're not yet licensed, Our in-house credentialing team can guide you through the entire licensing process and reimburse the cost of obtaining strategic licenses. We make expanding your opportunities as simple and supported as possible. Okay, next slide. All right, I'd love to now shift our conversation over to a very important voice, as the best perspective comes from someone who's living the parallel experience every single day. I'm excited to introduce Kristen Welling, one of our incredible speech-language pathologists. Kristen has been a part of the parallel provider community for the past 3 years, partnering with schools and supporting students while also building lasting relationships with families and the teams that she serves. Kristen is also a proud mom, and fun fact, she's the owner of Hank, a chocolate lab who is a highly trained police canine specializing in search and rescue and Explosives Detection. Whew, that was a mouthful. Kristen, thank you so much for joining us today and taking the time to share your experience.

Absolutely.

I'm happy to be here.

Wonderful. Okay, well, let's dive in. My first question for you today in the hot seat: what attracted you to Parallel and what keeps you here?

So while I was on maternity leave from my in-person job, I remember being so stressed about how I was going to make my day-to-day work and maintain that work-life balance as a new mom. I I was actually referred to Parallel by a friend who has 2 small kids of her own and works full-time for Parallel. She kept telling me about this work-life balance, how she is able to still live her life and be present for her kids. And that was just so appealing to me. Now that I'm living it, I can say it's true. I get to spend so much time with my family. I have breakfast with my toddler every single day because I have no commute. I have manageable job expectations. You know, I don't work on weekends or holiday breaks. And when I close my computer, I am home and I'm done and I can be there with my family. And it's just been the best thing. Um, as far as what keeps me here, there's a couple of things. I think one, the incredible support that I get from my clinical management and my peers. Um, I feel like my clinical manager, shout out to Tiffany, is my biggest cheerleader. She's there for me if I need advice on a student, if I have a clinical question, or just to kind of help me through a general concern that might come up. Second is Parallelo has this amazing behind-the-scenes support crew that answers live chats during our sessions if we need help. So if I have something come up, I can just look over, type something in, and someone will live chat me back with an answer of how to fix something on my screen, usually within minutes. And lastly, the platform, which I know we'll get to in a little bit, but the platform is amazing. I'm in a couple Facebook groups that I see people asking questions about how they share things over Zoom or Google Meet, but Parallel has its own platform called Pathway. It's amazing. Students can use their mouse to play games, It's easy, it's discreet to take data, so you don't feel like you're sitting there tallying in front of the student. Progress report information is plugged into a graph for you, so when it's time to make progress reports, they're actually easy to do. Standardized tests are embedded into the platform. We have a report writing tool. I feel like I could just go on and on, but those are a few things that definitely Wonderful, thank you.

Second question, what has it been like partnering with school districts through Parallel, and what stands out about those relationships?

Sure, so I've completed 2 school contracts with Parallel so far, and I've learned a lot from both. My first contract, I worked with a few other Parallel SLPs in the district. It was great because we were able to kind of navigate through the school year together, bounce ideas off of each other. And since that was my first time doing virtual therapy, it really helped to build my confidence. The second thing for this school year I would say is I was able to collaborate with some really, really wonderful SLPs, some wonderful case managers, special education teachers, principals, special education directors. That communication helped me to build relationships So I felt like we could carry things over from therapy into the classroom, and I could carry things from the classroom into therapy. So something that stands out is like, if I had Johnny come to therapy and I could ask him, oh, what did you choose for free time today in Ms. Smith's class? And he would look at me like, what do you mean? Were you there? How did you know that? So it's just been really great to kind of build those relationships with the on-the-ground staff in the school as well.

That's great.

I'm so happy to hear that. I think the relationships and the collaboration and just those small pieces and tidbits of information go so far. Great. Can you share a moment or experience that reminds you why you love doing this work at Parallel?

Sure. My caseload this year, it was a tough one, but I had students in a life skills classroom and they were mostly ages 15 to 21. So they were pretty challenging. Most of them were working on pragmatic skills. I had a kid at the very beginning of the year that would hardly look at me. He would answer in 1 to 2 word utterances, wasn't really interested in anything we were doing. I sold our time together as kind of like a break from class because he was able to take a computer, go in a different room, sit by himself with me for 30 minutes. We used the platform to make him feel comfortable. So We watched— I'm trying to think— like SpongeBob clips to kind of start communication. We found games that he enjoyed playing, and he was able to like use his mouse to click on things, so he wasn't just having to sit there and watch me do things on the computer. And I felt like I was able to build his confidence a little bit by discreetly scoring him and tallying his correct and incorrect responses, so he didn't feel that pressure. pressure or judgment whenever he's watching someone actually sit there and tally on paper. And their teacher actually told me that this was the first time that she had zero refusals for virtual therapy. So I feel like this says a lot about the platform that Parallel has to offer.

Yeah, wonderful. SpongeBob always, always wins too. Great. And then finally, the last question that I have for you today, if someone was thinking about joining Parallel, what would you want them to know?

First of all, do it. You won't regret it. Um, second thing, there's tons of support. I was worried about this a lot when I transitioned to the virtual setting because it was kind of like taking a leap of faith based off what my friend said. Um, but if I can be your friend for a minute, I would say just do it. Um, there is support and open communication every step of the way. It's not just like, here's your caseload, good luck. Parallel provides tons of support and networks, even for this big remote company. The provider monthly meeting that we have, I think, is a great tool also because you get to be in the same virtual room as your coworkers where we're sharing tips, resources, wins that we've had. The second thing I would say is definitely just show up with confidence. So for me, I know it can be intimidating Entering this virtual world and trying to be confident and connect with these teachers because you're kind of an outsider. But as clinicians, you know we don't know everything. So just go into it trusting your clinical skills and be willing to start that conversation with staff because I do feel like the strong communication can go a long way. So don't be afraid to reach out to teachers, to staff, to case managers. case managers, because ultimately the, those connections that you build will just make life a lot easier for everyone.

Absolutely.

Wonderful. Kristen, thank you so much for sharing your experience with us today. It's one thing to hear about Parallel from our recruiting team. We're talking with providers every day about the things that you're talking about, um, but it's really powerful and it's a completely different experience to hear it directly from someone who's doing the work every day. So thank you so much again for being here. To our audience, if you have any additional questions for Kristin, please feel free to drop them into the Q&A.

Thank you.

Now let's go ahead and build on that conversation by taking a closer look at the tools and clinical support that help make the provider experience possible. Natalie, I'll go ahead and turn it over to you.

Thank you, Alicia. So I just wanted to give a quick overview of our clinical team Here at Parallel, you've met some of them but not all of them. So we spent some time with Dr. Jordan during the webinar. He is our Chief Clinical Officer and one of the world's most preeminent psychological assessment experts and the leading research— leading researcher on virtual assessments. He's conducted research and published widely on the evidence base behind tele-assessment, including the only book on the topic, which is called The Essentials of psychological tele-assessment. So we're so happy to have Jordan leading our team. On this slide, you'll also see Stacy Quarter. She is the Director of Clinical Excellence and Behavior and Mental Health Services, and she's also a school psychologist. And then there's me. I'm the Director of Speech-Language Pathology here at Parallel, and I'm also an SLP. We can go to the next slide. And here are our clinical managers. So these are our providers. That's what we call our clinicians here at Parallel. They're partners in practice progress and problem solving. So we have Dr. Tiffany Williams, which Kristen very kindly shouted out, one of our clinical managers who is an SLP. Allison Reber, who we all heard from, who is also an SLP. And Sandy Connors, an SLP as well. Dr. Amber Israel, we've heard from as well. She is our SDI clinical manager. And Ali Largen, is a school psychologist, and she is also our school psychology clinical manager. We can go to the next slide. So Kristen mentioned this— thank you so much, Kristen— we wanted to talk a little bit more about our platform Pathway. I'm going to have Sandy assist me with showing the features within Pathway. So while they're getting set up, I wanted to share a little bit About the platform. So we have a really cool product and engineering team here at Parallel, which as an SLP was a brand new concept for me to work with a team to build a product that was made for clinicians and providers that work in the school setting. So we're going to show you some features of Pathway, and these are features that all of our providers have access to, to keep them organized, to keep them, keep their scheduling easier, and just to help them as they move through the school year. So, Sandy, are you ready?

I'm ready.

All right, let's do it.

Okay, so I'm just gonna give you a little tour here to get started. This is Pathway. When you first log in, you are greeted with your task list that helps you stay organized by what kinds of tasks you have coming up. You can see any kind of due dates that are coming up for your students. I can see that Razzle Dazzle, one of our test students here, has an IEP due coming up. There's a quick link so that I can easily schedule that meeting without needing to shuffle through a bunch of pages to navigate. I have an assessment coming up due for Jean-Luc Picard, some data cleanup to do, some payroll-related things that are going to be really important for me to do. I need to set my session statuses for things that have taken place or will be taking place soon. I can sort it by overdue, what's coming up due this week, what's due in a little while, and then the things that I've completed already. So that is what greets you, is the task list. And from there I can go check on how my compliance is doing with a compliance dashboard. So there's not a whole lot going on yet for the 26-27 school year. You see a lot of blanks on these test students. But once we hit the ground running in August or September, this information comes in very handy. So I can keep track of, is everybody who's supposed to be scheduled scheduled with me? Looking good so far. IEP delivery, I got one overdue, something to look into, probably for Razzle Dazzle. Testing sessions that are coming up or need to be scheduled. How many assessments have I completed? I can keep track of my minutes These students haven't been scheduled yet for the '26-'27 school year. Once they are, I have a place that I can go to see who's been underserved, who's looking just right, who maybe has gotten too many minutes and needs to skip a session, and I'll squeeze in an assessment during that time. We also do something called routine outcomes measures. So at the end of every session, students are asked to answer a couple of questions. I think it's 4 questions about their experience with that provider, their experience with that session, and you can monitor how they're doing. And this is really interesting sometimes that you'll get some feedback from students where you're thinking, I don't know if I really connected that well with that student, and then they'll give great feedback on their therapist, like, oh, it's going better than I thought. So that's really nice data to be able to look at. We also offer some at-a-glances for service delivery metrics, things like, are your IEP minutes looking on track for consult minutes? Or compensatory time. Again, that ROM data lives here as well. Attendance tracking. I can see at a glance, do I have a lot of cancellations, last-minute cancellations at a certain campus that I support? How can I work with that administration or my clinical manager to help address that? It's really nice to be able to see all of this information in one place for your entire caseload.

Um, We have a question in the chat that we can both answer together. So TJ asks, are you putting all this information in manually, or is this auto-populated from an assignment you have? Is it synced with another system? So please add anything that you'd like. But we work with a customer success manager as well. So you have a team of people at Parallel that support you on each assignment. The customer success manager is the person that liaises with the district, and your clinical manager is the one that helps you with clinical support. So the customer success manager works with the district to get all of your caseload information together, and then they are able to upload it into our Pathway system. It is your job to update goals and objectives as you go through the school year if you are seeing If you are an SLP or an SDI provider and you're seeing students that have goals and objectives, it is your responsibility at that point to keep the information updated, but we do help you get it into the system initially. Sandy, is there anything you want to add from there?

The only thing I think I would add is that it's, it's really kind of a mixture between the two. So there are some things you'll need to manually add, you'll need to manually take your data, but the summary for that data is automatically generated. So there's really a blend between the two. So we can take a look at Jean-Luc really quick. You can see that for a goal that was put in for Jean-Luc, we're going to be able to dive into looking at the progress of that over time by using the data that we enter in. And you can take it digitally during sessions. So it's not always— I've taken this data manually, now I'm going and putting it in somewhere new. I strongly recommend to all my clinicians that they do give it a try to do data collection digitally to help really streamline some of those workflows. I want my clinicians to have as much time to spend doing the work that they love, which is generally not the documentation. So I love talking with them and coaching them through different efficiency strategies and ways to try to take the, the less fun parts of what our day-to-day job looks like and make those as light as possible. So this is what the user page would look like for one of the students. You can see their information. I can see that I'm the case manager for this student. I can see that they have an assessment coming up and speech therapy services here, and then what their goals are. So if we go to the goals page, You can put in lots of different ways to measure accuracy depending on what the IEP goals are that you either write or inherit. You can mark things complete, you can copy things directly from an IEP, or you can upload an IEP, add new goals, and then you can monitor progress here as well. So I actually think I might have found a way to show this.

Perfect.

Is it working?

Yes, it looks great.

Yay.

Okay, so I will have manually entered in like the data from my session, number correct, number correct with prompting, number incorrect, and then the percentage for the accuracy is auto-calculated. And this little chart, this graph is automatically made for me that shows what's the trajectory looking like. I can see different sessions, have different performance metrics. And so that's a really nice feature to be able to have for when you're doing progress reports or when you're coming up on an annual IEP or a triennial IEP and you want to have that data. I think that might answer the question.

Yeah, thank you so much. Um, so we showed the student profile, some of the ways to track progress. Um, we have about 4 minutes left, so I'd like to move to District 101 really quickly, and then we'll show Report Writer, and then we'll, we'll wrap it up.

So this is what the District 101 looks like when you first land on it. This is a page where you can go and get information about the district that you're supporting. So whether it's a district that you've never supported before or it's one that you're returning to year after year, it's always nice to be able to go to one spot, find out when the first day of school is, the last day school, first day of service, last day of service, when can I do documentation, is it after the last day of school with students, those kinds of FAQ questions. FAQs, that's redundant if I say questions again, but this is a great spot to be able to go for it. Also contacts, my parallel contacts, my district contacts are all going to be listed here so that I can go figure out who I need to talk to just by loading the District 101 different links. Campus shortcodes live here, blackout dates, meaning dates that I can't see kids, dates that I can't bill for indirect time, and then additional information that helps me be as successful as possible at the district. Links to special education handbooks, links to training resources for Medicaid billing systems or student information systems or IEP software that you're needing to use. Any quirks about the scheduling that you need to know, certain schools will do all their IEPs on one day, that information will live here. So it's really nice to be able to go, especially if you've never worked at that district before, and have one place where you can go to get the getting started information that's going to help you be successful.

Awesome, thank you so much. You know, we had one more question in the chat about scheduling, so before Before just briefly showing Report Writer, will you show the calendar? Perfect.

Yeah, let's go to the calendar. So, um, this is what my calendar would look like, and I have the ability to add my availability, to add sessions, to add assessment sessions, to add breaks and focus time if I have a certain time of day that I like to set aside to get all of my progress notes done or all of my session notes done. I I also have this widget called Time Insights that allows me to take a look and see where am I at for the week? How much time have I done direct? What's my ratio for productivity looking like? How many students have I seen this week? How many campuses have I supported this week? So it's looking a little light here because I only have 4 test students. But when you have 60 students on your caseload and you're a full-time SLP, this is really nice to be able to look at this at a glance and get a sense of where you are with things. And then did you say report writer?

Yeah, just to, just to show it, to show that it's a feature within Pathways. So we also—

It's a real thing.

Yeah, we have a report writing feature. I'll let Sandy speak very quickly and then we will move on.

All right, so if I am working on a report— oh, let's see if it'll even let me do it with these test students.

It might.

Let's give it a try. Okay, so if I have a report and I need to write that, it's really nice to have all of those standard scores automatically put into my report for me. So I can upload just a score report from Q-global, which is where a lot of our standardized tests are scored through, and that information is automatically put into the document for me. So I will have placeholders for information, example language that I can use, sections that are required, um, so that you have a legally defensible IEP or evaluation report, and then some suggestions that are more optional. You can see here this one's an incomplete report because I'm not writing one for Billy Bob Test, but these red pills that you see are places where information is automatically injected into the report template for you. So I can email— these are all caregiver interview questions— I can email the caregiver, they fill out a form on an email, and it automatically goes into my report. My only job now is making sure I look at that, edit it, and understand what they said about the concerns they have for their child. And I don't need to do a bunch of copy and pasting. I don't need to send out any more forms for them. That's automatically put in. Same thing for teachers. We have that. And then we do have the information. So this is from the SELF Preschool, and you can see all of these red pills again are things that are going to be automatically put in for me. All of the standard scores, the description ratings, all of that is going to be popped in automatically, which is intended to be a time saver, and I think it's a really nice feature of the Report Writer interface.

Awesome. Thank you so much, Sandy, for Demoing the platform. There are a lot of other features, but those are the main ones we wanted to talk about today. If you continue to have questions about it, please feel free to reach out to a recruiter. I'm going to hand it over to Alicia to close us out for the night, but thank you so much for showing everyone the platform, Sandy.

I would like to just piggyback onto that. Thank you, Sandy. That was fantastic. Fantastic. Thank you so much to our clinical team for the entire overview. As you just saw, Pathway was designed with clinicians in mind with one goal: helping you spend less time navigating administrative work and more time doing what you do best— supporting students. I know I could personally stand to have a report writer in my personal life, so that's fantastic. Now let's talk about where you can put those tools to work. I know we're over time, so I'll quickly wrap us up, but we are actively hiring for the upcoming school year across all disciplines. Many of our fall placements are already beginning to fill. So if you've been thinking about making a move this school year, now is a great time to get the process started with us. Scan the QR code that's on your screen and schedule a one-on-one conversation with one of our clinical recruiters. During that conversation, we'll learn more about you, your experience, your licensure availability, and the type of schedule you're looking for. It's also a great opportunity for you to ask more in-depth questions of us in case we didn't get to all of your questions in this session this evening. Finally, if you'd rather reach out directly, you can also email hiring@parallellearning.com and we'll be happy to connect with you. And for our final slide tonight, go ahead and move to the next one. Okay, just like that, we are closing out. A sincere thank you to Kristen again for sharing her experience, to our incredible clinical leadership team for taking us behind the scenes, and most importantly, thank you, our important guests, for spending your evening with us. The work that you do every single day changes students' lives, and we never take for granted the opportunity to partner with professionals who are so passionate about making a difference. We hope tonight's session gave you a better understanding of what makes Parallel different and more importantly, what it feels like to be a part of our provider community. Once more, scan those QR codes Continue the conversation with us. Have a wonderful evening, and we look forward to speaking with you soon. Good night, everyone.

Hello.