Session 2: Renew, Refresh, Reimagine: Spring Forward in Special Education

At Parallel, we take pride in nurturing our professional community as well as the broader community by offering innovative, high-quality programming for clinicians and educators alike. I have a few housekeeping items before we start. First and foremost, I want to sincerely thank each and every one of you for the incredible work you do as providers. You are at the forefront making a meaningful difference in the lives of students each and every day. This course is offered for 0.1 ASHA CEUs and 1 NASP-approved CPD credit. If you wish to have us report CEUs to ASHA or receive NASP CPD credit, um, please excuse me, sorry, I'm reading from a script, and/or receive a certificate of completion, please be sure to do the following. You will need to attend the live webinar, the entire webinar. Attendance will be tracked through Zoom reports. Be sure to join with the email address attached to your registration. No partial credit will be awarded. You will need to submit, complete and submit a self-assessment evaluation within 3 business days. And 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 that you will receive on Monday. Okay, I think I covered all of the housekeeping items. We love and encourage questions from our participants. If you have any questions, please feel free to drop them in the chat, and we will do our best to answer them during our Q&A at the end. You'll have the option to stay on for a few extra minutes to hear a little more about Parallel and how we are supporting districts across the US and hear a little bit about open provider positions. So I am excited to welcome Natalie Bianco, and we're lucky to have Natalie on Parallel's team. Natalie is a speech-language pathologist licensed in Illinois and Michigan. She holds both her bachelor's and master's degrees in speech and hearing sciences from the University of Illinois. As a Parallel provider, she works virtually to support schools while also running her own clinic in the Chicagoland area. She has a blog, podcast, and YouTube channel where she shares insights with families and professionals. Today she'll be sharing her expertise on SMART goals. Please join me in welcoming Natalie Bianco.

All right. Hello everyone. Thank you, Natalie H., for the warm welcome. Now, just for a little disclosure, again, I work for Parallel Learning, and I will be receiving an honorarium for this presentation. And then I am also a member of ASHA and the Special Interest Group 1, Language Learning and Education. Okay, so a couple learning objectives. By the end of this presentation, I hope for you to be able to describe the benefits of writing SMART goals. For personal and also vocational well-being. Apply these goal-writing strategies to things that align to you and your core values, and then indicate 2 executive functioning techniques to both execute and maintain your goals to make sure that you are living the life that you want to live. All right, again, introduction, benefits of SMART versus traditional, Brainstorming goals that align with your core values, then executive functioning, goal execution and maintenance, and then we will end, as Natalie said, with the Q&A. Okay, now I'm going to jump in right into the nitty-gritty. And let me preface, I'm a speech therapist. I work for Parallel. I also do my own thing. But if you're a speech— or if you are a social worker or a special education teacher, Sorry, these are very speech-related, but for our first goal, imagine opening up at the beginning of the school year and you read the long-term goal: student will produce developmentally normal phonemes and sentences. You don't know anything else about this student. You're lost. What are we targeting here? Are we looking at a frontal lisp? Are we looking at... 80% of sentences? Are we looking at in the initial position, the final position? I'm overwhelmed and I'm lost. I don't know where to go next. And then here's our second example of a goal that I've seen before. Now this isn't even a long-term goal, this is objective, so kind of like the sub-goal. Now by Date. Student will, with 75% accuracy, will define, compare, contrast targeted grade vocabulary, non-literal terms, synonyms and antonyms, and use them all appropriately in a grammatically correct sentence. And then within the same objective, blank will utilize comprehension strategies via context clues and graphic organizers to assist her. I might need a breath after that, guys. Okay, so based off this objective, this is telling the student that we need to be able to simultaneously do all 8 of these things at once. Now, okay, the last was overwhelming based on what I was telling myself, but this is overwhelming based on what I'm reading. So it's a lot to lesson plan and think about what we're going to do next. to actually reach this goal. All right, so why is it important to set these goals? Why do we write these out? Well, we want to understand the task objectives. What are we actually targeting here? We want to visualize the end product. So what does it look like when we actually meet this goal? And we want to organize the time and resources needed to complete this task. Now, okay, I'm going to get into again the nitty-gritty. We've all been here before when we're looking at personal and vocational well-being. Our New Year's resolution. Every January, this creeps up on us, and we get to sit down with our journal and think about, oh, What new thing do I want to bring to my life? How am I going to improve my everyday well-being? I want to spend more time with my family. I want to go on vacations. I want to eat healthy. And this is great to actually reflect on it, but think about that idea of when you go to the gym and everyone's at the gym for the first 2 weeks of the year. And then it starts to trickle down. We get into such an exciting momentum, but it doesn't last. This is because we don't really think about the strategies and the tools that we're going to incorporate that are realistic to our everyday routines. It's kind of like we write it down what we want to do, and then poof, it's gone. And This might not be everything. It's not— might not be everyone, but I know I'm guilty of that for sure. Now, the traditional goal setting kind of follows this. Looking back, especially that first one, it was vague. We didn't really know what we were targeting, and there's so much that we want to incorporate to reach that goal that we don't even know where to start. There's a lack of a timeline. How long is this going to take realistically? Are we looking at, oh, I'm gonna go on a trip in a year, or I'm gonna go on a trip at the end of the month? We also have this notion called planning fallacy, where sometimes we have this idea that we could only do so much in a year. We kind of underestimate or even overestimate all that we could do in a year. It's hard to take how— or it's hard to understand or picture how long it's going to take us to accomplish our goals. So this might lead us to overestimate or underestimate. Ultimately, it doesn't really get us to the end goal in maybe the timeline that we initially planned. We have unrealistic expectations, and this kind of goes hand in hand with that planning fallacy. Especially when we kind of think that we're not able to get this in time, or we think that this is going to be so easily obtainable. Think about like when you want to run a mile, but you haven't even gotten off the couch to take yourself to the gym, which I'm also guilty of. We also have no measurement criteria. Think about that 80% that I mentioned in that first goal. How will you actually tell yourself that you met your goal? What are you looking for? We have missing action steps. What are you going to take, or what steps are you going to do to get to the big goal? Because you can't immediately just jump right there. Sometimes it's good to break those down into small proactive steps to actually get to that end goal. And then the last one is no accountability measures. Think about like in the schools how we do frequent check-ins or how we do the progress reports to actually see how our students are progressing. And that's why it's important, because if we write down our goal and don't reflect on it, How are we supposed to keep tabs and tailor as needed? And the dead end is for emphasis. That's kind of where it leads us. Now here's a SMART goal: By February 27th, 2026, Natalie will produce /l/ in the initial position of words at the word level with 80% accuracy when given verbal A verbal model across 3 consecutive sessions. Now that is clear as day what we're targeting. If anything too, I would say, is this in structured activities, unstructured play? You could circle back on that. But here we are, we have SMART goals. The S is for specific. We have that she'll produce L in the initial position. Of words at the word level when given a prompt. We have measurable. It's quantifiable. We know exactly what we're looking for. And so when we're taking the data, we could say, oh, we're a little off. It's not quite that 80%. We should maybe target this in another position, or we should keep on drilling and providing a little bit more prompting and scaffold as needed. We also have— we're looking for 3 consecutive sessions to kind of ensure that consistency. We have achievable. Is this something that is actually realistic? Is it attainable? And that's why it's important to kind of reflect on the standardized assessments that we administer and just getting a holistic picture of our kids. And this is also where clinical judgment comes in. We have relevancy. Is this aligned with values? Is this important to the child? So when we're looking at some of these goals, it has an educational or a social impact, and that's why it's important to target these. And even in sessions, I'll remind kids, I hope you know this is why we're targeting it, and if you ever feel like you don't know why we're targeting something, I'm not doing my job right. And then the last, again, time-bound. We have a clear deadline of what we're looking for. So when we check back in after all those other small little check-in points at the end of the year, are whether it's your annual review by February 2026, and then you also have the progress notes quarterly. Now, that could be a mouthful. So let us do a little blast from the past to grad school poll. I will— I'll read this out for you guys and then you can answer. By May 2025, X will use context clues with 80% accuracy when given moderate verbal prompting questions, providing options or visuals. such as annotating cues. So which part of the SMART goal is missing? Which measurement? And if you can release that poll.

Okay.

So yes, you guys are correct. We don't have this specific piece of this. We have that they're looking for context clues, but In what context are we looking at it from? We're trying to find the unknown word. Is it in a paragraph format? Is it the sentence format? So this was a little tricky, guys. I'm sorry. All right, thank you for completing that with me. But yeah, we have the time-bound and we have the measurable.

Okay.

And it looks good. So let's keep on going. We're going to look at the baseline assessment. So right now I am in Michigan and we have this thing called the PLAAFP. So we're going to switch it up and make it for adults. The present level of vocational, physical, relational, personal, and spiritual and functional performance. Wow. So who are you currently? This is where we kind of begin the goal writing process. Sometimes I'll like ask myself some prompting questions of where am I in life and what is satisfying me, but what would I like to change? Where do I feel like I could improve on myself? And what is something that I've been really questioning about myself and my abilities? Another big journal prompt is what are you afraid of doing? Where are you afraid of change? And I find that that's the question that really kind of sparks this conversation of where am I going to put my energy into next?

Oops.

Okay, so there are a couple different core values assessments that I would recommend, but here are some of the big ideas that we are looking and assessing. So More questions. I'm so sorry, but where do I find I have a lot of time spent? Is it with my personal values? Is it with health and wellness? Do I find that more of my attention goes to financial objectives? Where do I wish to spend more time? Is it with relationships, my family and friends? Is it professional aspirations? But then also, I want you to look deep at what you feel resonates with you rather than what others are trying to tell you to do. And we have this idea called the shoulds in life. Now, I want you to really reflect on what people have told you you should do in your life and what you actually resonate with you. Or what you find actually resonates with you. I will say that I probably would not be speaking right now if I listened to all the shoulds in my life. So next we have a list of core values, and here is one example of what you can do to help kind of deep dive and dig to see what actually means a lot to you. Now this is a long list, and it's also from one of my Inspirations, Brené Brown. I will plug her, um, to the end of my life. She's great. But here we are, long list. What you're going to do is start by taking 10 words that really resonate with you. It could be optimism, it could be openness, caring, collaboration. And then sit from that 10 and you bring it back to 5. Out of those 5, which ones do you feel like fit even Closer to you. And then from that 5, you're going to bring it down to the final 3, and those 3 words are going to define your values. And you're going to see that when you do this in a big group, or maybe with your significant other, those look different, and it could be surprising. You're like, oh wow, you really take pride seriously, and I take patience. Or you could find someone takes patience and someone likes courage, and it's beautiful to actually kind of reflect and see like, wow, we really are very different in the way that we want to approach this thing that is life. Alongside this, from an individual perspective, we want to consider our strengths and weakness, and I find that this is something that when you are working in special education, it's actually really important to sit back and reflect on this. Because you can have children see that everyone has their strengths, everyone has their weaknesses, and that's something that maybe when all of us, whether we're millennials, we're older, younger, maybe we didn't get that in school. When you actually see like, oh, I'm so creative, but when it comes to time-bound assignments, I'm not so hot. You get to see where the loopholes are in your goals and kind of mediate and try to align your targets and what you wanna accomplish with those strengths and weaknesses. I'm gonna skip real quick. I realized that I put this. So here's something that I found in a research article, Meltzer et al., 2021, that kind of encouraged executive functioning skills with children that had language disorders, and it was very important to kind of know your strengths and weaknesses. So going back to circa 5th grade, building a Venn diagram, we have the strengths and then the area of difficulty, and you might not need this complete list of, oh, science is my weakness, I love math, but this is something you can also kind of bring to light if you look at Who am I now and who do I want to become? What are my strengths? What are my weaknesses? And do this and complete it as an adult. So give me one more second. There we go. Oh, okay. So for our next poll, which of the values resonate with you? If you were to select one, which of the following values resonates the most with you? So if you could submit that poll. And this is always interesting because you kind of see how people's answers may vary. So I'm kind of curious to see. I can't vote on this one. It's— ooh, okay, I like this. Okay, so if you are able to see the results, we have ethical conduct, that integrity and honesty, it's around a 19%. We have the interpersonal relationships with compassion, empathy, 38%, which, hey, come on, if we are working with special education, that is needed, especially for our kids. Oh. We have personal strength, social responsibility, both 11%, personal development, so that growth and wisdom, 13%, and the security and stability, 8%. So that's really awesome to see. And I think that this even more so highlights why we can't really rely on other people to tell us what we should do in life, because their core values might not line up with yours. And that's why it's important too to sit down with yourself and where you're going in life, because you might find my goals might not be actually aligned to me. Okay. Now we also want you to consider your needs. Again, kind of like looking back at the relevancy of the goals when it comes to special education. We have that educational and societal impact. Now, where do you find your needs are not met? Do you find that you don't feel like you belong in the community and you want to work more on relationships? Do you find that you want to focus on safety as a need, which is the second pillar? And you might want to work more on financial responsibility. This is something that I think is also really good to reflect on. This is from Maslow's hierarchy of needs, and he really talked about how there is kind of this psychological need or physiological need, then safety, belonging, self-esteem, and then up until self-actualization. And then on the right side, we have this whole person look that they all kind of interact with each other and can vary. But I did want to mention that on April 10th, 2025, for our 3rd presentation of the series, we will be having a speaker focusing on this. So definitely tune into that. Okay, so we also have that idea that when we make growth in one area in our lives, it often intersects with others. So someone may have mentioned that they want their primary goal to be aligned with the compassion and empathy. So this might sit more with that private life, but when we're working on ourselves and trying to be a more compassionate human, that also bleeds into how we interact with the community and society. And then it can also interact how we Or also affect the way that we interact with others in our occupation, with our work-life interactions. And I think this is such a cool diagram to kind of see because we may think like, oh, I'm solely focused on getting the body that I want and being healthy. But because you are fueling yourself and preparing yourself and getting enough sleep, That actually bleeds into all these different avenues, such as having enough energy to see friends and going out into your work environment and feeling confident to present. So I think that's something that I really wanted to highlight because goals are important.

Okay.

Now, when we kind of reflect and conduct all of these little questionnaires, these journal prompts, we can use this information to recall why you want to reach your goal. When we are thinking about like, oh, little Sally Sue is working on her L's. Well, the bigger picture of that is that we want little Sally Sue to feel confident when she's talking to friends and families and presenting in front of the class. We want her to— let's just say if she's not switching L for W in her writing, that would also be another target. I digress. But at the end of the day, having a why really helps us stay on focus and remember the relevance— relevancy of why we're targeting this. I also wanted to note that based on some properties, it is important to tie emotions in specific terms into your reasoning and reflect on them. So, um, one study too was actually that Meltzer et al., 2021, mentioned that when you tie these emotions to a goal, you're actually more likely to invest in that goal. And it also kind of Gets rid of that overwhelming feeling, and you want to actually take that action to accomplish it. Now, again, another journal prompt: What gaps are standing between who you currently are and where you want to be? In other words, what is the behavior you are trying to learn? Or the outcome you are trying to accomplish and the context you are trying to perform it in. This is just a very dragged-out way to say, what is your goal? What will your goal look like for it to be considered successful? Now, when you're writing your personal goals, Going back to the SMART goal format, there are 5 things we want to look at. Be specific. Define your desired outcome. You want to set clear timelines. Are you going to check in monthly, quarterly, weekly? Establish clear metrics. 4 out of 5 days? 4 days out of a full week? Are you going to do it morning and night? You You want to align with your core values and your personal needs, and then you want to determine support systems and create accountability measures.

Okay.

So, um, what I also wanted to highlight from here is what benchmarks are you going to assign to your goals to make it manageable? So when we're determining the support systems and creating accountability measures, are you going to track a planner? Are you going to use a buddy system? Now, here we have in the blue block, this is 1 year. And writing a goal for 1 year can actually seem very daunting. And going back to that planning fallacy, a lot can change in a year. We don't really account for unprecedented issues popping up. And so that's why sometimes, especially if you're in the business realm, we could break it up into quarters: Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4. And from an even smaller portion, we can also look at it from a monthly perspective. So we're going from 365 days, a daily check-in. Or one time in the 365 days to smaller, more manageable check-in points. So does that feel a little less overwhelming to you?

Okay.

Okay, so you want to reflect on your values and your why as often as you can. For example, when I'm at my check-in points at Q1 and Q2, I will also have my goals written in my planner or whatever tracking system you might use. I've also used Notion before, and this will also help me see like, oh, why was I targeting this again? Or why is it important? It seems kind of annoying to always close out all of my notes at the end of the day. It's because I want to make sure that I am a good clinician. And that was actually one of my good goals that I've tried to do. So progress monitoring on yourself, a good way to kind of build up that resilience to see how far you've come along. And keep up with that self-esteem is to actually see all the progress that you're doing, especially if you're taking the measures to accomplish what you want. Um, so you can use a journal to reflect on your progress at each benchmark, and this could be on a daily, on a weekly, or even on a monthly basis. So here I have actually my, um, other platform I really like to use. I call, um, Or not I call, it's called TickTick and it's a habit tracker. And so you could see open tools, whether this be open TickTick or Notion. I did that most of the week. Did I add my daily log and my sessions notes? Did that a couple days, didn't do it all. We're all human. And then, um, ESP is just another term that I use for journaling. Did I journal and reflect on that day? I had a 5-day streak, so go me. But why this is important is because you can actually visualize that progress, and you can also kind of like use it as an accountability system on yourself. Give yourself a pat on the back. Some other applications that I mentioned, I like Notion, TickTick, Todoist is another good one. Even having reminders to see how many To how many things you checked off on your to-do list can go a long way. We also have Habit Tracker and then Google Workspace, so you can use calendars or reminders on there. Not an exhaustive list. I'm sure there are plenty more that are brilliant and people incorporate every day. Okay, so The big idea, I kind of mentioned this in my last example, I want to practice work-life balance as a confident clinician. Now, this is kind of the big New Year's resolution goal I had for myself. And let's break it down into some smaller SMART goals. So the first is, I would be successful if I got all of my notes done by the end of the week. Now, to quantify this, I know that this means doing about 6 to 10 notes a day, 5 days a week. Now, let's just say I was not super on top of my notes. I was always trying to do them an hour after the school day. I relaxed. Took a second to breathe, and then I'm like, oh my goodness. So maybe I did that 1 to 2 times of the week to begin. My goal now that is realistic is to do it 4 out of the 5 days across a week. Why is this important? Because this will improve my self-esteem as a clinician and support my goal to conduct work-life balance. It's hard during these days sometimes. Now, how am I going to keep myself accountable is I will use my last block on Friday to check in with myself to see how I did this during the week. Was I on top of it? Did I need more support? And kind of like doing a little progress note on myself every week. And then alongside that, I will download a habit tracker to support the visual. Now, why I like to have this written out is because it actually helps me see and compartmentalize each piece of my goal. So I know exactly what I'm looking for. So I kind of wrote down my own personal SMART goal, um, and I've actually been doing this for some time. I know it might seem unrealistic, but for me it's actually really worked. So again, my big idea to practice work-life balance as a competent clinician. So my goal was over the next quarter, I will be proactive and establish positive work-life balance as evidenced by timely preparation and completion of documentation for sessions 80% of the time. She's a mouthful. But see underneath, I have 3 short-term goals of what to look for. So by April 2026, log in my data to the platform 8 out of 10 sessions out of my day across 4 consecutive days. We have what I'm doing, where I'm doing it, how many days, how many sessions, and then by April 2026. So I know too to Definitely check in with myself. Now, I want to be time conscious, so I'm not going to go through each and every one of these, but if you tune into the replay, it should be on YouTube, you will definitely be able to pause and kind of see where my mind was at when I wrote these up. Now, for this one, I will kind of be a little bit more vulnerable in this area. Now, um, I have mentioned this too, I think, in a previous blog post with Parallel. As you know, I am a parallel provider, um, plug-in. Um, I want to feel happy and healthy in my body. So I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease called mixed connective tissue disease. Um, beautiful, really pretty name. Why this is imperative is because I had to quit my job at that point, and I didn't have the energy I didn't have the muscle tension. I just, I digress. But my goal was that over the next 3 months or until my next follow-up appointment, I will have my labs show XXX. So I want to like, because I want to feel healthy. So underneath I had 3 different separations, 3 different sub-goals. The first is in 3 months, I will follow the autoimmune protocol diet In 80% of snacks/meals for 3 weeks in a row. The next is, in 3 months, I will move my body through walking or yoga in 5 out of 7 trials— that should be 5 out of 7 days— following a calendar or visual. And then, in 3 months' time, I will make the time to see the people I love at least once a week across 4 weeks. And based on all of these small lifestyle changes and just even documenting my progress and being able to reflect on it, I noticed that I had changes in my health and I was able to actually have my labs. And I'm not a medical practitioner, so I can't say that this will work for everyone, but it worked for me. And I find— I found that even before my labs were showing what I wanted to, it actually made me feel better in work. It made me feel better when I was hanging out with my friends. It made me feel better because I was able to do things in a different way. And because I had these goals to reflect on and feel good about myself from doing such little minute changes, I was able to kind of accelerate what I was trying to cultivate in my life. So how do you ensure progress in utilizing executive functioning skills? Oh, now this is from The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business. Any behavior that can be reduced to a routine is one less behavior that we must spend time and energy consciously thinking about and deciding upon. Essentially, our brain gets fried when we're trying to do too many things at once. Think about when you have a to-do list that starts from here and ends here. It's like a CVS receipt. That is because it is so difficult for you to kind of conceptualize, this is everything I have to do, and it leads to overwhelm, and it makes your brain not actually want to follow through with it. So one of the first strategies that I want to introduce, and you may know of this already, and there are similar ideas around in social media, it's called prospective memory. Now this incorporates just envisioning your future self completing the tasks. So essentially it's like a nice way of like you're remembering to perform your intention. Here's the example. After work, I'm going to make sure I finish any missing notes, any notes that I wasn't able to complete. This can be time-based, so at 3 PM on the dot, I'm going to spend 30 minutes on finishing notes. Or it could be situational-based, so going back, at the end of the day, I'm going to work on all of these. Another example is Before work, I'm going to go on a run. Or you could say, at 7 AM, I'm gonna go on a run. It's kind of keeping yourself accountable and allowing yourself to kind of be alert to a cue even amidst distractions. So you might have something in the background or something on your mind, but since you already carved out that time, You are going to set that attention to only focus on that. This prospective memory utilizes the idea of if blank, then blank. If I finish work at 2, then I finish my notes. There's also a similar idea. They're a little different, but I wanted to kind of include it. It's similar to the idea of habit stacking. Now, habit stacking is the idea where you're intentionally pairing something with another item. So an example, every morning when I wait for my coffee, I'm going to take my vitamins. That's another intention of tying those 2 things together. Why I like this is because it makes you focus on one Task, unless you're doing habit stacking. Going back to implementation intentions, you're intending to do that one thing, and it just requires your brain to focus on one thing instead of the other distractors. This is an executive functioning skill, especially if you have weaknesses in this area. What I will do is I will set a little sticky note on my desktop and reflect on that, what I'm supposed to be doing at this time. Or I will carve out on my calendar what I will do and set the timer for 25 minutes or 30 minutes, and I will just tell myself how good I'll feel after only doing that item. And this is from Jacobson and Ward 2022. The second idea is called Get Ready, Do. Done. Now, this is kind of like the idea where you have this big idea or big goal of yours that you want to accomplish. Think, I want to feel big and confident in being a clinician. So you have to first plan backward from a future end goal and picture what that task will look like when you're done with it. After you picture the done, you're going to identify the steps needed to achieve that visualized done goal. And what this author, Jacobson and Ward, also emphasized to do is visualize what it will look like and use temporal sequencing skills. And some of our kids with language disorder or language differences might have trouble with this. And I think sometimes adults might have it too. So this is where it really comes into play of first, then, after, using those benchmark goals to help you keep in tab. So example, if you're trying to run a marathon, which good for you, I could never. If you're trying to run a marathon and you're starting out with walking for 20 minutes, You're going to have to keep into check your next goal of maybe running for 8 minutes and then walking for 4 and working your way up and up to that end goal. And then the last is to determine the materials to get ready and complete the task based on the visualized done goal and the outlined steps. So we might find that there are little loopholes in between these ideas. We want to make sure that we have all that we need to be successful. And this is where sometimes I will like to incorporate those visuals like the habit tracker or set reminders of when I need to do things, or even come up with an accountability partner or ask a good friend to check in on me if I find that this is something I really want to do. And this way, When they do check-ins, I can actually be honest with myself about how I'm going. How is everything going? Am I on the right trajectory? Oh, here it is too. You can also use Goblin Tools or other AI platforms to help you kind of break down really big ideas into smaller objectives. So here I have, can you break down writing a book for me? My goal is to write it by 2026. And so here we have AI breaking it down for you by defining the genre, having the main plot, developing characters. And this is something that we could teach our students that we work with, whether they be middle schoolers, high schoolers, college kids, anyone, adults, because now we have these tools that can help us succeed in life. So going back to my positive work-life balance, first I have the idea of what I want to accomplish, and then I had to get clear with myself about what would the steps be. Okay, so for my last poll, what strategy do you hope to implement? Which ones do you think would be most feasible in your everyday routines? And if you could release the poll. Okay, let's see. Okay, all right, using time-based or situation-based intentions. I found that this is something that has really helped me out, especially when I'm Really working on vocational goals. Using visuals is another good one. I like those for lifestyle factors, especially when I'm like, oh, I got to make sure I get all my water in, or tracking meals. Reflecting on my why is another great one. All right, well, I hope you guys accomplish these goals. All right, and then you could check out my citations. If you're curious, you could reach out to me or look on the YouTube. Video on Parallels counts on YouTube, and I just want to say thank you. I hope everyone is doing well and has a good day. I am really honored that I got to be up here, and I'm going into finishing and finishing. I guess I've been here for like over two years now. I've really enjoyed my time with Parallel, so feel free. This is my blog information, my Instagram ins. information, and then you can reach out to me, natalie.bianco@parallellearning.com. We have an open house, and I know that we're gonna have some more information about it after we do the Q&A, but just in case you leave early, it is next Wednesday the 5th, and we'd love to see you there. Um, it has been a pleasure too, and I think it's really helped me work on some of my personal goals as well, being with the company. So on to our Q&A.

Thank you so much, Natalie. That was a great presentation. I have never heard of prospective memory, but my desk is covered in Post-it notes, so I don't know if that's helping me or not helping me get my things done, but I just loved, I loved hearing, hearing about it. We do have some Q&A, some, some questions from the audience. We did have a comment From Charlotte, she said, sometimes I feel like very specific goals aren't always adaptable or functional for carryover into the classroom or community settings. For tracking, sometimes I think it's more beneficial to keep a goal more broad so you can continue to track the goal through multiple classroom activities. Do you have an opinion or thoughts around that?

So for me personally, I think that's just difference in like clinical judgment, and I respect that. I think too it's something that might work for one clinician but might not work for another. I will say I'd be intrigued to see which setting you are coming from, if you're a speech therapist or if you are in high schoolers. I find that I do Or if you are focusing on individuals in the school setting versus if you're talking about adults in their daily life, it can also just be personal preference. But yeah, I think it could all just be upon clinical judgment. I found that for me as a clinician, I find that the best that works for me is really having specific goals. And then if I were to be broad, just making note of where the issue has been. So for example, going back to the idea of like going in the community versus in the classroom, if you want to see where the area of weakness is, that's when I like to kind of even hone in more and write that goal. Because we can miss a lot of information if we find that we keep it broad but don't denote where they had more of that struggle. That can also just be me being very meticulous when it comes to data tracking, why my notes take so long. But yeah, I think it's more just clinical judgment.

I agree with you. I'm not sure Charlotte didn't include if she's an SLP, an SLPA, what her setting is. But anyway, I think that was really good insight. Thank you so much for that. Ainsley commented, I'm curious about the rationale behind the use of 3 consecutive sessions, especially the consecutive aspect. This is a phrase I see often in school-based goals that I did not see often in outpatient.

Okay, so I am a school-based SLP, and that is, I think, also something that might be clinic-specific or versus school-specific. I, um, when I was in one of my graduate positions years ago— oh my goodness— um, I just remember asking one of my clinical supervisors, why not 5? How do we get to arbitrary number of 3? And why And this is something too, again, with clinical judgment based on what I've found has worked best for the kids that I've seen. How I picked up 3 was from her. I was like, I've always seen 5. I've always seen 5, and it makes sense. When she described it to me, we don't often get to see our kids as frequently as we might see them in a clinic setting, especially if we're looking at our tic Um, and I think that's something that it's easier to data track, that 3 to be consistent versus 5 you might not get. It's over a longer amount of period, and we come to progress monitoring, it might be harder to reflect. Does that make sense?

Yes, it does, and I agree with you. I've seen a lot of different things, um, and again As we probably— a lot of SLPs know, a lot of things depend. It depends. So, um, thank you. Charlotte did comment that she works in a high school and she pushes into a lot of classes with students, um, and she's an SLP. So I just wanted to include that as well. Okay.

Also say I haven't— I don't work typically with high schoolers, so that's good to know too. So Little discrepancy, but it's okay.

So many variations within the SLP field. Okay, so, um, here's the next question. How can I overcome the planning fallacy and set realistic timelines for my goals?

Okay, so this is a good one when it comes to reflecting on your strengths and weaknesses. Sometimes I have what I would refer to as time blindness. And I think that my goals take shorter amounts of time than they actually do. And so this is the time to really be honest with yourself and reflect on what has worked in the past. So if I am continuously seeing that it takes me significantly longer to do notes, I know I have to take the time to actually plan out More time and allocate more time to my notes going forward. It's a good self-reflection routine, and then it's something that you could do even through a visual system like time blocking, or even setting a timer to see how long you're working on these projects. And I think once you kind of gauge how long it takes, then you could go back and kind of refine that goal of yours. So It is a little bit more realistic than previously, but that is something very common. A lot of people underestimate just how much it takes, just how long it takes. So you always want to buffer and kind of err on the side of caution and give more time to account for any kind of delays or challenges.

That was a great answer. Thank you. Okay, we have time for one more question.

The last question will be, how might learning differences impact our ability to tackle Okay, this is a good one, especially when we're looking at individuals with learning differences in like the SPED, the special education world. We have that— it affects, again, going back to that planning fallacy, we have to look at our strengths and weaknesses and be honest with ourselves. For example, someone with ADHD, Might find it harder to plan and stay organized, and this can be important for reaching goals. Not to say that that's everyone. Sometimes it varies. Sometimes people have time blindness like me, or maybe they are good at sticking to time boundaries but don't have an idea of how to target their goals. So we want to make sure that we are writing out where our weaknesses lie. And seeing it through different materials. So if you are someone with ADHD and you notice you have time blindness with work, does it happen with other situations? Or if you find that you get tired at certain parts of the day, where can you customize and kind of curate your goal to actually fit your needs? And I think on top of it too, you really want to understand your strengths so you can serve yourself better and kind of still maintain that self-esteem even when you are met with some challenges that might kind of knock you on your feet. So kind of leading with that resilience, I think, is imperative.

Great, thank you. All right, so this concludes the educational portion of our webinar available for ASHA CEUs and NASP CPDs. As a reminder, you will be receiving a survey next week by email. Please be sure to answer all the questions and complete the survey by the deadline. Thank you again to Natalie, and before we end, we have a few more announcements. I'm going to hand it over to Blakely.

Hello, everyone. Thank you again, Natalie Bianco and Natalie Hortzman. We are really— thank you for hosting this. If we could just go to the next slide, Natalie. I thought today's presentation was amazing. I agree. If you can, before work, get a run in or even just a walk, it always gives a sense of clarity. So, I know we have a lot of our parallel providers on this call. Thank you for everything you do and the, you know, support. We know at Parallel you have a lot of options of where you can work, and at Parallel we really are a community. We really support each other. We have this whole clinical machine. We have incredible technology, and we all like to come together as one strong community. And so we'd love for you to kind of learn a little bit more about it. Next week we're hosting an open house, so you can hear a little bit more about Opportunities we have available next year. If you look in the chat, I have put in there the registration link for that. I encourage everyone to sign up, even if you're a parallel provider, like you're welcome to come, bring a friend. And, you know, we'd love to see you there next week. So please register for that. Please invite your friends. We know that a lot of people are feeling burnt out this time of year, and it's going to be an uplifting, fun, happy night. We always say you can come with a cocktail or a mocktail. And it'll be a great time. So next Wednesday, March 5th, 6:30 to 7:30. And then I think we have one more slide. We are on social. We're on LinkedIn, we're on Instagram, and we are also on YouTube. So all of our recordings get posted to YouTube, and we will share out the recording links after this webinar. But there's a lot of great content on there. So I encourage you to check out our YouTube. Um, follow us on Instagram, it's Join Parallel. Um, we always love new followers and we post a lot of exciting announcements there. And then we're also on LinkedIn if you're on there. So, um, I also wanted to highlight today we, um, did a provider spotlight. Our provider of the month was Tricia Ross. She's an SLP with us and she's amazing, um, as all of our providers are. And so you can find out fun things like that on our LinkedIn and Instagram. So thank you again for coming tonight. Thank you, Natalie. Thank you, Natalie H., Natalie B. And we will be in touch with the follow-up email and survey, which you will need to complete to get the certification. So everyone have a good rest of your day, and we'll be in touch. Do we have anything else? I think we're good, right? Okay, bye everyone.