Shannon and Mary chat with speech therapist Dr. Karen Dudek Brannan about the overlaps between speech, reading, and language. Dr. Karen helps us understand the challenges facing students with language impairments. From this episode, teachers can understand the perspective of a speech therapist to better understand speech and language challenges. After listening, you should walk away with ideas about conversations to have with the speech therapist in your building and an awareness of language challenges your students may face within your curriculum.
RECOMMENDED RESOURCES AND ONES MENTIONED DURING THE EPISODE
Shannon and Mary chat with speech therapist Dr. Karen Dudek Brannan about the overlaps between speech, reading, and language. Dr. Karen helps us understand the challenges facing students with language impairments. From this episode, teachers can understand the perspective of a speech therapist to better understand speech and language challenges. After listening, you should walk away with ideas about conversations to have with the speech therapist in your building and an awareness of language challenges your students may face within your curriculum.
RECOMMENDED RESOURCES AND ONES MENTIONED DURING THE EPISODE
6.13 the Intersection of Reading, Speech, and Language with Dr. Karen Dudek-Brannan
Shannon Betts: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Reading Teachers Lounge. Come join the conversation with other curious teachers as they discover teaching strategies and resources to reach all of their learners. I'm Shannon.
Mary Saghafi: And I'm Mary. And together, we bring an honest and experienced point of view to the topics we cover to shed light on best practices.
Whether you're a new teacher seeking guidance, a seasoned pro looking for fresh ideas, or a curious parent, Our community offers something for everyone. So grab your favorite cup of coffee or tea and cozy up in the virtual lounge with us and eavesdrop on our professional conversations.
Shannon Betts: Listen, learn, and immediately add to your bag of teaching tricks.
Find what works for your students with us in the Reading Teachers Lounge.
Mary Saghafi: Hello, welcome to the Reading Teachers Lounge. We have a guest today. Shannon and I are with Dr. Karen Dudek Brannan and she is the founder and the owner operator of Dr. Karen LLC. [00:01:00] That's her brand and you might see her as Dr. Karen Speech if you're following on any of the socials.
She is focused on empowering therapists, specifically speech therapists, but also educators to design interventions that support language, literacy, and executive functioning. So I'm sure all of our listener ears are perking up and. They're saying, Mary, all your dreams are coming true right now.
So Dr. Karen has her doctorate in special education and director of special education and assistive technology credentials brought and So she has spent 14 years in school systems and held various roles in leadership and higher education. She also is the host of the de facto leaders podcast, and she shares evidence based practices, her own experiences and guest expert interviews on topics that are all related to education and healthcare reform.
So Dr. Karen, welcome. We're so happy to have you.
Dr. Karen Dudek-Brannan: I'm so happy to be here. Thank you. Huh.
Mary Saghafi: We're so excited [00:02:00] to talk with you today about the intersection of reading and speech and language because they all kind of overlap in a Venn diagram. And I have said on several occasions on our podcast that for me I love making friends with the speech therapist at schools.
They are always my go to buddy. It's a person that when I'm kind of pondering or need to kind of untangle some student behaviors, they're usually the person that I want to go to and say, Hey, what do you see about this? What do you notice is working in your speech therapy practice? And sometimes they see this student and sometimes they don't see this student, but I just need a thought partner to kind of untangle this with.
So. We're really happy to have you to come and share some expertise today.
Dr. Karen Dudek-Brannan: Yeah. With, with I'm happy to do it.
Shannon Betts: Yeah. So welcome to the Reading Teachers Lounge. Welcome.
Mary Saghafi: Yeah. If you don't mind, go ahead Shannon.
Shannon Betts: No. Just tell us a little bit more about your experience and, [00:03:00] yeah, where you're currently working.
I'm guessing your speech therapist.
Dr. Karen Dudek-Brannan: Mm-Hmm. , so all the things yeah, so the elevator pitch, which is really, you know, longer than an elevator pitch, but I did spend. Again, the first 14 years of my career was, was in the schools. My primary role was I was a school SLP and really was, was in the schools when we were switching from the discrepancy model of identifying students with learning disabilities and switching over to RTI.
So I was really involved in my team with just switching that over. Not just with identifying students who had the label of speech and language, but also the students who had. Other eligibility categories, especially SLD, and was also involved with training some of the staff in the benchmark screenings and was doing a number of different things.
I've always got a number of different side projects like adjunct work or self employed work, but I left the schools in 2018 and [00:04:00] started it. To you know, I, I actually started this work before then, but I officially went full time in my business in 2018 and was really focused on helping SLPs and other related service providers design their intervention.
The first thing that I focused on was helping SLPs have a framework for language therapy, because I always felt like I did not understand how I fit into the literacy puzzle as an SLP. A lot of SLPs tell me, I understand what my role is for fluency and articulation and voice, but I don't understand what to do with language because it's so broad.
And so that was really the foundation of my doctoral work. I did a lot with language and metacognition and executive functioning. And so I also, in the last few years, started Really expanding to the other parts of the team, because when you, you have the language piece, but then when you start to talk about executive functioning, which is part [00:05:00] of good language therapy, but there's way more to it than that.
You really have to pull in all of the other people. And then on top of that, recently, I went back to work as an administrator in child welfare and am involved with Okay. The area of the agency that puts preventative services in place to try to help families stay together and hopefully, in some cases, prevent kids from having to go into foster care.
So that's a whole other system, but it's really about the, like, where I see this is that. As you say, in special ed, you can't necessarily fix a tier three problem without thinking about tier one. And so it works similarly in in other agencies as well. So it's a lot about prevention, but also kind of giving that continuum of services.
So, yeah, I like to have my hands in a lot of different things at once and really understand how pieces fit together.
Shannon Betts: I think that's
great because we have a lot of reading teachers. You're listening, and [00:06:00] I am a reading teacher. I was mostly a, you know, a classroom teacher or a support role. I'm not in the special ed background like Mary.
And so, you know, I want to understand speech and language from a tier one perspective because unless I had a student who had articulation problems, maybe was stuttering or something, I wouldn't have necessarily thought they had a speech issue and we needed a speech referral, but we're learning that there's so much more.
to it with all the different language you know, deficiencies that could be.
Dr. Karen Dudek-Brannan: Yeah, absolutely. So, and that was where I felt like I had to do the most education, both for myself to really be solid in my role, but also to talk to other people. So they knew when to make a referral, because again, if you, the language issues can be so pervasive and a lot of times those students need more than what's on their IEPs, or maybe they don't have IEPs because they didn't qualify for some of the other things.
So it's really important.
Mary Saghafi: I totally agree. [00:07:00] And I'm seeing this you know, in my advocacy work and some of even the private tutoring that I'm doing. So this kind of coincided at a really good time. I came across your podcast and I started listening to a particular episode that you have. It's called no kids do not learn to read and write naturally.
And that's a great one. Melanie breath hour was your guest on that show. And she's a special ed teacher as well. You had so many. Parallels to kind of the journey that I feel like I found myself on when I was teaching and with Melanie as well as Melanie is a special ed teacher currently working in a resource room.
So I do really recommend your podcast de facto leader leaders talk podcast, because not only do you talk about, you know, similar concepts to what we have, but also as you I think you have such a great way of teaching others to step into a leadership role very naturally and sharing. How can you share this information?
It, in a very [00:08:00] professional, very inclusive way. So it helps people come and join along with you and educate them along. And so I think that you're such a natural fit for the reading teachers lounge podcast for that reason. So I. We'll send a link in our notes so that you can listen to that podcast as well.
I want to make sure we do that because I think that this is a, this is kind of critical and it's definitely a piece of that reading and writing rope and language is a part of it. And I, as. Many teachers didn't feel like they got a really good grasp on phonics. I think that there's even less known about the language pieces that are really required mentally as the progression goes through for reading skills.
And those reading skills really tie into comprehension skills. So Shannon and I have been doing a ton of work lately on understanding the science of reading and writing, and we've just finished a number of episodes about comprehension. And so I think that this it gives a really good [00:09:00] capstone to what another piece is that our teachers might be missing.
So I would love to kind of talk about that a little bit. And and you know, what, what can you share maybe that would help us sort of start this conversation off? As, as if you had a teacher come to you, what would be you know, something that would kind of start a conversation that you would want to.
You know, jump off from,
Dr. Karen Dudek-Brannan: yeah, that's a good question. So a lot of people, when they find me, it is. Relating to some of my information on syntax. I, as you said before, some teachers and a lot of teachers felt like they didn't really get what they needed as far as the, the word decoding. So there's the more, the phonology, the morphology, the phonics, the orthography, all those things that go in to that.
Puzzled there. If you are going to separate it out into the simple view of reading, which isn't [00:10:00] that simple, which we all know you have the, the word decoding and you have the language comprehension. And so the way that I teach it to SLPs and really it's, I made it for SLPs, but I welcome anybody who wants to come in and learn about language.
I know I've had reading specialists read my, my book. My information and come into the program as well. But I teach it from a lens of five components and I lump put it under this umbrella of vocabulary. So all of the things that support vocabulary and I'm not talking about naming and identifying words, which is what a lot of standardized vocabulary.
Tests measure, because that has really good reliability and good iterator. You know, when I, if I give the test and then you give the test, there's a good chance that what we give is going to be the same, that's part of the reason why those tests are designed that way. But we know that vocabulary is way more than that.
So you have the orthography, [00:11:00] morphology, phenology, semantics, and syntax. And those are the five. Pillars that I teach that will support language comprehension, but also we're going to pull in some of those things that are going to support the word decoding. Now, what I do, I don't see it as something that's a replacement for reading curriculum, but rather something that Is going to enhance it.
So it does need to go with along with but but I see what the wording coding, you know, again, you really do have the orthography phonology and morphology that kind of fit under that lens. But then it's the semantics and syntax where a lot of the SLPS that I work with, you know, again, you have to figure out what's going on with your team.
But I always tell them, those are going to be the places that you probably are going to find the biggest gaps, and the syntax one stands out a lot for SLPs, and I have also had some people who are reading specialists that are trying to figure out how to [00:12:00] put some tier one interventions in place, because it's just something that It's, it's not being addressed as often as it should be, even with this huge push with the science of reading, which is great, but it's just really hard to understand scope and sequence of syntax, because that's what we think about when we think about curriculum.
And so I
Shannon Betts: Before you even talk about scope and sequence, can you, even for me, define the difference between syntax and semantics? Because I get those confused a lot.
Dr. Karen Dudek-Brannan: Yeah. Sorry.
Shannon Betts: I'll admit my ignorance. I'll admit my ignorance. Like I get the, I'm like, they have to do with how the words function in sentences.
That would be my like working definition, but I don't know which was which.
Dr. Karen Dudek-Brannan: Yeah. So I can go, like, I can even do all five of the areas. So obviously phonology is you're thinking about the sound system of words. And a lot of times we think about that in the context of speech and speech sound disorders, like you have to understand how to pronounce a [00:13:00] word, but also your concept of those sounds and how they go together and how they're sequenced and your ability to recognize a word like that when you hear it, that is part of vocabulary.
So it's speech, but it's also language. Then you have orthography, your understanding of spelling and patterns and how those spellings impact word meetings, morphology, the things like prefixes and suffixes and those bigger linguistic units, which. Impacts decoding, but also impacts vocabulary because it tells you about meaning, and then we have semantics, which is really about the defining features of words.
So if I were going to say the word dog, you immediately have associations about it. A dog you think like it's fuzzy and you, you can have a picture of it in your mind and you can think of contexts and situations where you have experienced dogs before you might be able to tell me, you know, it's fuzzy and you can take it for a walk and these are some kinds of dogs and this is what it looks like.
So. All of [00:14:00] those features and aspects of words that help you have a really rich understanding and meaning of the word, that's semantics. And all those different attributes are semantic features. So that's important to know because the way that you build vocabulary is by building people's awareness of semantic features.
So semantics is really just that solid understanding of, of word meanings in those terms. features and how we store it in our minds. And then syntax is more about the structure of language. So I like to say semantics is kind of about what words mean. And syntax is about what words do, because when we think about like the structure of a sentence in the different kinds of words, you have the content words, like nouns, verbs, adjectives.
And then you have the function words, like the prepositions or the conjunctions and the articles and those other things that are doing something. And if you ask somebody, what does this word mean? You can't really say what it means. You have to say what [00:15:00] it's doing there. Like it's connecting something, or it's saying how these different parts of the sentence relate to each other, or when something happened, or, Why something happened.
So it's giving you that other information. So those are really the two pieces that are kind of the distinction between the two. And that's why I put those two under vocabulary because They support your ability to use words, which builds your, your word knowledge, but also they give you context for what words mean.
And so I think that a lot of times vocabulary people just think meaning, but, but no syntax is part of vocabulary too. And so I think that that can be really something that is kind of a bridge for. If you're thinking about tier one and how we can start integrating things that are going to support comprehension, that's a good area to start.
And then I can go along down a rabbit hole about executive functioning too and syntax, which maybe we'll get to.
Mary Saghafi: Yeah, no, [00:16:00] I think that this is a really good start. And I do think that like the semantics and syntax is really complicated for teachers because that's not something that we're like inventing to teach our students.
It's usually something that's embedded within whatever curriculum provided to us. And so I think that that gets really tricky. And I think that what I might do is like share an example of something that happened to me today. So I was working with one of my students and we were doing a maze test which is what part of the dibbles assessment.
And so maze tests, we're doing a close sentence. The topic was. This is kind of odd, but we were talking about secret deserts was the title of it, and it started talking about a pine forest. And so the sentence that she really tripped up on was my feet made no and then there's a blank. Your choices are pain, sound, taste, my feet made no blank on the thick carpet of brown burr pine [00:17:00] tower needles.
So if you're wondering. This gives really good insight as to what her reading skills are. And if she's predicting the comprehension, but she's missing the the semantics, it seems like of what this evergreen forest would be and how, and she didn't understand that needles were the ends of the branches of a tree.
And she was thinking sewing needles. So that's the semantics, but then yeah. the syntax of the sentence where she has to add in the different answers. She just was totally confused. She wasn't sure why the feet were making a sound. Feet don't make sounds. Feet don't make a taste. And then there's a thick carpet.
Why are we talking about carpet? So I think that this is an example of both where she's struggling. But then as far as defining it, I can define it, but I don't know why [00:18:00] and what to do next. And so this is an example of how I would probably come to a speech, an SLP in the building and say. What do I do with this?
Yeah. What's next?
Dr. Karen Dudek-Brannan: Well, I love that you're thinking about that because again, like, as I said before, a lot of times it's, Oh, this student can't say R and that's an obvious referral, but then things like this, you've got to, you know, kind of use your spidey senses and really have good critical thinking and understanding of language.
Shannon Betts: But yeah, you could just think it was a comprehension breakdown. You know, like you could just summarize that as, oh, okay, the student has trouble comprehension. Let's do some comprehension intervention or something. I wouldn't have necessarily immediately thought, oh, this is a language issue.
Dr. Karen Dudek-Brannan: Well, and I think with the comprehension, there could be different reasons why comprehension is an issue.
If it truly is an inferencing issue, why is it an inferencing issue? Is there a comprehension breakdown? Because the student [00:19:00] is resorting so many resources to thinking about how this sentence is put together. Because the student doesn't have a solid sense of syntax, because that is a comprehension issue, it's, it's less about is it a comprehension issue and more about what do we do about it, and what's the root cause of it, but I also love that the student was aware and asking questions like why is, why are, why is this happening or that doesn't make sense because to me that shows me that they're, they're Engaging in some internal dialogue.
So I see some executive functioning there. So that's just, there's a lot you can work with there. The fact that the student has enough awareness of where they're confused to be able to say that is, I mean, that's, that's great.
Mary Saghafi: So that's something that I think is really, I talk about it a lot, but those are the types of questions that I often share.
And the beauty of working one on one with a student is that you can have those conversations. But I might [00:20:00] say something to her, like, when you're reading, do you feel like, like, tell me if this is true or not you're reading. And it feels like your brain is focusing so much on the words that it's hard to make a picture in your head.
And she said, Sometimes that's true. So that, that, like, that kind of triggers another idea in me when I'm observing her to see, okay, is this a vocabulary issue? Is this more of an executive functioning focusing issue? Is this more of a, you know, the attention issue? Or is she really not understanding the structure of the sentence and some of these words that are broken down?
So, you know, You know, I think that what I would really hope that our teachers can take away from this conversation is what should teachers look for when observing students in this way, how can we you know, impart some knowledge about how to observe students, maybe through the lens of an SLP or.
Dr. Karen Dudek-Brannan: Yeah, so I know I and [00:21:00] I don't know that I fully answered your question, which because you said, What do I do?
The question is, what do I do? Yeah, so there's a couple things that obviously comprehension strategies are useful. So for that particular student. You could remind them to, you know, like, think of something, a picture in your head as you're reading, or like, where does your focus need to be? Where do you need to be paying attention?
Those things are all great things to do, but sometimes you need to get more specific than that. Students who Are struggling maybe because they just need to have more attention to detail and engage in more of that, like, you know, where is my focus? Where is my attention? A lot of times they can benefit from those comprehension strategies, but if it's really a language issue, they need more direct work on syntax and vocabulary.
And where I usually focus is that I. focus on [00:22:00] these big structural things that are going to make the biggest impact. So things like when you're talking about grammar, like verb tenses or pronouns or things like that, all of that's fine to embed in some of the work that you're doing. But I focus more on the bigger structural things that are going to impact comprehension because sometimes that can It helps students to have more of an awareness of how sentences are structured and what kind of words to expect, and that kind of helps them develop that automaticity if there are some of those working memory issues.
So there are, I do have a sentence structure guide where I go through four sentence types. There was a really good article by Dr. Richard Zappoli where he outlined four sentence types that tend to be difficult for students with memory issues. For example, developmental language disorder, ADHD, even people who [00:23:00] are learning English, they tend to be difficult because of syntactic complexity.
So if you had to focus on certain sentence types, that would be where you're going to make the biggest bang for your buck. So it's the, the four types were sentences with passive voice. Sentences with temporal or causal conjunctions sentences with center embedded relative clauses and then sentences with three or more clauses.
But if I had to pick one of those things. For people to focus on, I would say the temporal and causal conjunctions and those complex sentences are really an area where you can make the biggest impact. And so what teachers can do if they have a situation where, let's say that you have a You're doing a comprehension passage and you're not really sure, is the student just not with me?
Do I need to give him more of a general comprehension strategy or is it a language issue? Really pay [00:24:00] attention to the amount of complex sentences or sentences with multiple clauses in that passage. And then you can even maybe draw their attention towards those specific sentences, or maybe strategically, instead of asking a question about the big main idea of this whole paragraph, maybe you ask them a detailed question about something that is, you know, some information that's given in one of those sentences that has a a clause in it or something like that.
And I even have some specific. Strategies that I give to my speech pathologist, and this is something that that teachers could do as well, where we're directly working on combining sentences, deconstructing sentences and helping kids to look for those words, because that way, if you are. Working on a strategy for students and saying, Where is your attention?
You can go even deeper and say, Oh, like, what words can you look at in this sentence? And you have some additional things you can discuss with them. And you can talk about those clauses and [00:25:00] the different parts of the sentence. So it kind of helps you break it down a little bit more. And and get get more specific.
Mary Saghafi: I think this is, this is helpful. So like I'm, I wanted to make sure that I had an example. So an example of a sentence would be like, after he had said this, he walked out the door. Perfect. Yeah. But after he had said, this is the part that you really need the kids to understand, your students to understand this, the timing and place of this is important to make sense of, of the rest of the sentence, that first response.
So, okay. So that makes a lot of sense to me. And I like. The idea of using these varied sentence types and a lot of times my students, especially with working memory issues, writing issues. students who are still working on making more complex sentences in their writing, especially starting second, third, fourth grade.
The ones who are still writing, I do, and we do this. [00:26:00] They do this. I do everything. I do usually write a goal in that talks about how they need to practice writing these varied sentence structures in their writing. So sometimes we do that with sentence starters and they can have a starter and giving them sort of that scaffolding to start.
We also have lots of like graphic organizers and things that. You know, can kind of help with this, but I think that that bridge between the verbal language, the oral language, if you're noticing your students aren't using it orally, they're definitely not going to be writing it. So we need to make sure that they are one, understanding it orally, saying it orally, and then also trying to get it on paper or into the point where they're dictating it because you, you want to at least get them to the point where They can communicate it to that level of expectation grade level.
Yeah. Yeah. That's really helpful. And I really like how [00:27:00] in all of the things that you teach, you teach this smarter, not harder concept. Like let's get the most bang for the buck, you know, so there are these four varied sentence types. This is really important, but if you were going to. You know, share this with a teacher.
Okay, teachers, this is where I think you can really make the most difference with your students. And so I like using the, the temporal clausal conjunctions. I think that that really helps teachers know where to focus on their students. So that's super helpful. I really appreciate that.
Dr. Karen Dudek-Brannan: Well, one of the things that with comprehension as well, and this is something that comes up for SLPs who have goals for WH questions and that comes up for teachers too, because a lot of times there's different questions that you're asking when you're working on comprehension, or even just in a classroom, you call on a student and you say, why did this happen?
And they give you an answer to a question that's Sort of in the ballpark of what you asked, but not really what you asked. And you can, you're not, you're not sure if they [00:28:00] didn't answer the, understand the question or were they not following you? Do they have it in their head and they can't express it?
Where's the breakdown happening? If you don't know how to use temporal and causal conjunctions, it makes you difficult or it makes it difficult for you to answer why and when questions. And those are probably the. Well, how questions are difficult as well, but why questions tend to be really difficult for students with language issues, because think about how you answer a why question.
You start with the word because. If I don't have a sense of syntax and know how to answer that question the right way, I won't know how to structure my answer. And I might just sort of pull something out that's kind of what you asked, but not really. And so there's some retrieval issues there.
Understanding the right structure can help you with retrieval as well. And then that's going to impact semantics [00:29:00] and your ability to just pull things out because it gives you a structure. It helps to make things more, more automatic for you. Which could have been going on with your student as well, but that also sounded like there might be something with.
Where verbs and adjectives should be placed as well. And they just extract vocabulary too. She
Mary Saghafi: well, yeah. And the thing is, is I think where I get frustrated, we literally just had a meeting for her and she tested out of speech and I can see this impacting her in so many different areas and yet the focus for the school was articulation.
And I think that a common cause, and I'm sure you can. I'm gonna talk about this is that speech teachers are pulled very thin. They are in high demand that their time is super valuable and they spend a lot of time on articulation.
Shannon Betts: There's like a social [00:30:00] kind of stigma, you know, like if a student stuttering or messing up some sounds at an older age, I can see what that would get a high priority,
you know, to sure, you
know, but then, but then, yeah, we don't want the
language.
Yeah. You know, I think the language is to fall to the wayside. It's harder to detect. And so it's
Dr. Karen Dudek-Brannan: absolutely it.
Mary Saghafi: Even with parents. And I know that parents are typically my best resource as a teacher to go to and see what are they working on at home? If they have private speech therapy, you know, how can I have, how can I support that?
I always ask that. So if you do know of some Students in your classroom who have private speech, make sure you have that conversation with the parents because you want to be supporting. If they're working on why questions, then daily ask a why question in it. It can be in an informal way. It can be in a group setting or maybe in a small group setting, but it's really important and powerful for the generalization [00:31:00] to happen and it can happen so quickly.
I think that's the other like Amazing thing about speech services. It's the impact can happen really quickly. And it's really great. As long as the structures are in place to support that student all the way through
Shannon Betts: Mary, what I think is so interesting is she's showing that like. The breakdown is happening at the sentence level, right?
I think sometimes we just assume it's happening, maybe at the vocabulary level, you know, maybe they just didn't understand the words of their English language learners, or maybe they're breaking it down by the passage or the background knowledge, but. You are so right that it's a lot of times happening at the sentence level, like just in the last two weeks in my resource practice I've worked on parts of speech with second graders, fifth graders and seventh graders.
And it's about the same breakdowns, no matter the grade level, that my seventh graders having a problem with diagramming sentences
Dr. Karen Dudek-Brannan: yeah, it's really interesting with those types of things to embed across [00:32:00] areas, because when SLPs ask me about, I think it makes sense for teachers to be doing that. You want to give them that vocabulary, but I don't recommend that for my SLPs.
I don't have them. Teach parts of speech in a separate lesson. What I have them do is I have them work on semantic feature analysis and study, and then that gives you the opportunity because you would use different semantic features if you're describing a noun versus a verb versus an adjective. So there's an opportunity where you can say, well, okay, so this is a thing.
So here's the kind of information we'd be asking ourselves to come up with ideas about describing this word. And I like to embed it that way, because that way it, again, that generalization piece, maybe you did, they did go over it with their teacher. And now we can pull this in here and embedded into another context.
And I think that, you know, as you're saying with, you know, The, the articulation versus the language. I think the [00:33:00] fear sometimes with SLPs is yes, that we are spread thin, but I think that with the students who have language issues, my fear was always, well, they're still going to be seen as a speech only student and I'm going to be expected in 30 minutes.
To wave my magic wand and work my magic with when I really know they need a more comprehensive plan. And I was all about the language when I was in schools, but I would also very adamant about them fully going through the evaluation process with the whole team, because sometimes they needed more than speech and sometimes maybe they did just qualify under speech and language.
But they needed special support in place as well besides me and I wanted to make sure that was on the IEP and there were a couple times where it was an artic only IEP and we had to like dismiss and start over from scratch and kind of put them through the process again and I had some teachers who were frustrated but I was like, I want to make sure that they have the right things in place and I don't want to just start slapping things [00:34:00] on the IEP haphazardly because then it's going to be questioned and that could be problematic further down the line.
Mary Saghafi: I am going through that exact same process right now. And and I think that, yeah, especially it when third grade hits because the articulation problems are not so important. Well, I, I don't want to say important because they are very, all of these issues are important. If they are being addressed by a therapist, they're very important.
So I don't want to label it that way. However, sometimes it masks other issues that are the language underliers. And so then when that happens, then you really do need to dig a lot deeper to find out. Why is the comprehension suffering so much? Or what is it that, that this student still needs some more explicit instruction in?
And that's it. That's, it's filling the gaps of the foundation. The foundation is not solid and we need to know why is the foundation not solid? And [00:35:00] so I really appreciate your work on this. I think that you bring up this really interesting point that I know I came across in my schools and that's like what's the delineation between the SLP.
Yeah, teacher, and it's a very gray area. And so, for me, I can like very diplomatically say, make best friends with the SLP. Yeah, doesn't matter what your role is. I think that we have a lot that we can contribute to one another because sometimes, even with behavioral issues, I could speak about something that was going on with one of my kids, which wasn't really behavioral, it was probably more attention based and executive functioning based or something that they were doing, but how do you get the hook in those kids?
So, I don't know, you can zoom out and see a much bigger picture, but. Is there anything specific that you see people coming to you? You know, so we can kind of bridge that gap. What, what [00:36:00] are the SLPs saying that they wish that teachers knew more about SLPs?
Dr. Karen Dudek-Brannan: So I think that there's this the confusion about the role.
And so sometimes there are people who are kind of like, Like, why, why am I expected to do this when I only have 30 minutes, so there are some people who feel that way, but then there are some people who are the opposite, where they, they're saying, why don't people understand that this is within my scope, and I can help with this, and I think that a big part of that is relating to literacy, relating to things like executive functioning, and obviously language would be in there.
You know, with those things as well, the executive functioning piece is, is even harder because I have had SLPs tell me that people are like, get out of, you know, stay in your lane, you know, you shouldn't be involved in this and an SLPs training. I got my initial [00:37:00] training in executive functioning in my traumatic brain injury course, we're trained in rehab and to understand cognition and the brain and language.
So we come at it from from that perspective of really understanding the brain and I think where we can overlap and get support from the teachers is that some of our training is a little more medical, and you need to figure out how to make that work within the school, because you have to think about curriculum alignment so you have you do have to.
As you said, sort of bridge together. So that is the biggest, one of the bigger pain points that I see for SLPs. And I actually think when you're talking about. All the issues that are going on in schools right now with there's like this push and pull between core curriculum and then mental health. The framework is kind of similar across all the areas because what I tell people is you need to know your content area really well.[00:38:00]
If you're a reading teacher, you need to understand scope and sequence of the reading curriculum. If you're a math teacher, you need to understand math. If you're social studies, you need to understand social studies. And I see a lot of times it's like all these other things are getting dumped on teachers.
And it's like, We need to let people get really comfortable in their area first. So in SLP, I'm like, get comfortable with your pullout method of articulation and fluency and voice. And then usually the one area where they don't feel comfortable is in language. And so I, the first thing that I have them do, if it's an overwhelmed school SLP, is help them to get really clear in that role in language.
Because then once they feel confident in themselves, that's where they can kind of. Start to emerge as a leader and start to address some of those other things as executive functioning. And I see that as everybody's role, but I see that as something where you have your content area and you can pull some executive functioning into it.[00:39:00]
But then once you're really confident in your Your, your main thing that you're doing that is your role that most people expect you to do. You can kind of start bigger picture and that's where I see the, the whole concept of emerging into a leader. And so for SLPs and related service providers, I say, get comfortable in your discipline.
And once you do that, Then you need, then you can start thinking about other service delivery models and it's so hard for me to be like, this is what the SLP should do. And this is the teacher and but if you have an understanding of the framework for what kids need to comprehend to be, you know, mentally healthy, you know, To just manage impulses and think into the future and read situations and interact with peers and comprehend what they're reading and all of these things.
If you understand what all those pieces are, you might know that it makes sense for somebody else to do one thing and you do this. And you work together, but if [00:40:00] you understand the big picture, then I think that that helps to answer those questions where, where we kind of live as teachers and therapists, where it's like, what are my lesson plans?
What are my therapy materials? And I think that you do have to kind of like start here. In the, in the micro and then kind of go to the macro, but be able to toggle back and forth. And I know that I just sort of like, no, I, I really remember what your original question was, but that's just about things. So, no, I think
Shannon Betts: that and, and we as reading teachers, though, I think do need to take on the role of understanding language
better.
Yeah, you
know, because. It is breaking down in this, you know, you know, it doesn't matter if we teach grammar or not, which there's not, if you're, you're lucky if you even
have a grammar curriculum, you know,
well, but even like when I was working with the students this week, they were doing a grammar lesson and they had some grammar curriculum.
But they [00:41:00] still were just frozen with sentences that were pretty simple sentences trying to decide if it was an adjective or an adverb. And so I, and I guess what I did is I went to the syntax and semantics, like you were saying, but I'm going to ask you if this is correct or not, but I had them find, I always just have students, no matter what's happening in a part of speech, I just say, let's find the subject and the verb.
Who's the who? Who's the sentence about? And what do they do? Just find the subject and verb, even if the task isn't about finding subject and verb. And so I had the students do that, and then I had them label the nouns and verbs. And then start asking questions. What kind? How many? Are we describing anything in this sentence?
And then they were able to find the adjective step. But, is that the right route to go? What else should we be doing, even as a Tier 1? Because, like, I'm asking this because, like, we, I think, do need to be better at Tier 1, at teaching this language, so that we can It doesn't get [00:42:00] to the level where they, I mean, I think, I think there's a lot of students out there and we have, I have a lot of English language learners that have language issues that might necessarily be a speech issue, but you know, speech language like disorder, but it's still trouble understanding how language works.
Dr. Karen Dudek-Brannan: Yeah, so I think like when you think about the curriculum, it should be, you know, we know that a lot of kids will learn certain things implicitly, and the standard curriculum is going to be okay for, in theory, 80%. And obviously, if you have Less than that, then then you know that you have a tier one issue.
But I think when you use the the building blocks of making sure that in those early years we have that students are able to decode and they have that solid understanding of You know, just, just being able to be able to sound out words, understand the language structure of [00:43:00] words and just have that solid foundation and really just what the curriculum is intended to do, where, again, by that late elementary school, kids are able to decode and kids are able to comprehend, then I think that that's I mean, it's typically what we expect across scope and sequence of curriculum.
It's difficult to answer questions about, like, should I be doing this for this group of students and that type of thing, because sometimes it's like, like, you almost need to look at what else is going on with those particular students. So, I don't know, I mean, to answer your question, I guess, with all of that, I don't really know, but,
Shannon Betts: Simple sentences, but when you said 80 percent if it's working or not, I'm telling you the entire class Yeah, and you know as a new teacher and I was actually telling her like look like we're gonna take time and we're gonna teach them how to do this because it's [00:44:00] really important in later years like I'm seeing a fifth graders of a seventh graders The functions of these words and sentences and so we were trying different things out with this one With the group to see, and maybe they weren't strong enough finding the nouns and verbs and maybe weren't ready for adjectives and adverbs, maybe that's what it was, but I guess I'm just trying to ask, like, what, what is our role as a, as a, you know, just the general, if you're a second grade teacher, third grade teacher, fourth grade teacher, like, of just helping students understand sentences.
Dr. Karen Dudek-Brannan: So, with those types of things, you know, obviously there are curricular materials that have you identify nouns, verbs, adjectives. I think where, if you, where you can make the biggest bank for your buck is more in the use of those words rather than identifying them. So sometimes you might have to mention, is it a noun?
Does it make sense to use this word here? But I [00:45:00] would be paying attention more to how they're using the words. So you know, for example, if you are working with students who are having a hard time identifying Is it a noun? Is it a verb or is it an adjective? I'd be curious what, like, what their comprehension is like and what their ability to create sentences, you know, are they able to create complex sentences?
What does their writing look like? And looking more at the, at the use rather than the identification of the words. So, because sometimes, like, when you think about just being very meta about language. When I am working with some of the professionals, sometimes they're like, wait, is this a verb? Is this an adjective?
And they can't even just off the top of their head be able to name, like, what's a causal conjunction and all of those things. So you don't always need to be able to specifically identify those words, but you need to have that information in your head. To know how to use [00:46:00] it. So that's where I kind of go when people feel like, well, they can't identify if it's a noun or a verb, but I'd be curious, do they know how to describe a noun or a verb with appropriate attributes?
Can they use it in a sentence? If you ask them a question about a sentence with a noun in it, are they able to, Answer the question and assessing their comprehension, or even with that maze task that you gave, it sounded like that student didn't, didn't know where to expect the nouns and the verbs and the adjectives to be.
So those are kind of more of that, they're very explicit still, but they're that next level of being able to use the word. So I would kind of shift more to the use. Not that it isn't appropriate to sometimes say, like, is this a noun and what is a noun and a verb and an adjective, but I have had cases where students were able to kind of move on to the next stage of just application when they couldn't necessarily always articulate those things.
So, and, you know, with SLPs, I'm even less worried about that [00:47:00] because I'm like, you just, you've got to get to use even more quickly. So, and I know that teachers with the curriculum do have more specific guidelines that they sometimes have to have to be thinking about.
Mary Saghafi: So I think I can maybe bridge this conversation a little bit.
So I think what I'm hearing is you know, Shannon, you see this issue. You see that your students are having a hard time doing this. And I think the answer that Dr. Karen is sharing is, is yes. In building more vocabulary and strengthening the that vocabulary and in doing that, you might use something like creating super sentences.
So super sentences is a strategy. And we can link to something like it. But basically you use a vocabulary word and then you ask who is. Is in the sentence did what where and when and you're you as a class can come up with a really super sentence to support a vocabulary word and then you might have your students, you know, do the we do, [00:48:00] um, model then.
And, and create one together and then maybe some more independent work, but it could even just be an oral activity because you might see that through the oral activity, there are still kids who are really not quite getting that vocabulary word or not, you know, choosing the ending of an adverb appropriately.
I think that. Scaffolding it to make it a little bit easier and then making it a little bit more challenging. You can kind of see, but I think the basis is really in the oral language, because if they don't have the oral language for it, they're not going to be able to write it or identify it. I think that that's kind of the bridge.
So the super sentence strategy is something that I actually really like doing with my tutoring students, but I think that it's an easy, all full class I thing. And it could be one of those, you know sidetracked lesson part plans that you sometimes just have to do naturally in the moment. But it could be something that you could work on.
So I think that [00:49:00] that might be something that's helpful. I think that the other piece that I wanted to talk about is about the magic wand that people expect special education teachers or SLPs to have
because it
is really tricky and actually that might be a really good example this question that Shannon just asked.
Because there really isn't a good magic wand. There is like the best way that we always say to layer it in is to make it multi sensory, right? So how could we change Shannon's you know, identifying nouns and verbs activity and making it or adverbs, adjectives Making it a little multi sensory.
So that might be another way that we layer it in. And you may be able to get ideas from SLPs to do that. You may also just need to say like, my kids are not getting this. How can I make it more concrete? What's the scaffolding look like? So for me, I'm always seeing it through that special ed lens. And that's the [00:50:00] special ed lens, I would say.
Mm hmm. Yeah.
Shannon Betts: Hello, listeners. It's Shannon here, and I want to take a quick moment to tell you about one way I'm committing to my health this year. I've started making green chef meals again, and my family and I are loving them. The food is delicious and easy to prepare. There's tons of sauces and spices and other ways to add flavor to the meals.
There are also tons of gluten free options for me each week. I use the app a lot. It makes it easy to make changes to the menu choices and pause a week if needed. The great news is they've given me free boxes to give away. So if you're interested in trying Green Chef, head to the show notes for this episode to get the link.
Or you can visit www. readingteacherslounge. com backslash quicklinks and click on the button for Green Chef. Happy cooking! Watch our stories on Instagram to see [00:51:00] some of the meals I'm making.
Mary Saghafi: I don't know, are there any other magic wand things that you can share from the speech world?
Dr. Karen Dudek-Brannan: Yeah, so let me let me think of some of the things that we've covered so far.
So obviously, with with the scaffolding, that is something that that people ask about a lot. And we've talked about a handful of them. There's there's the sentence starters, something else that I think is kind of a common misconception about scaffolding was syntax specifically. Is that when we're having a hard time getting students to use longer sentences and use the right, you know, the words that we might expect them to use is that sentence repetition is actually a good way to scaffold.
You shouldn't do it all the time because you should give students an opportunity to generate sentences on their own. [00:52:00] If students don't have a solid sense of syntax, then they're not going to use the sentences and what you'll see is that if you were to say a complex sentence to a student and say, repeat this back to me, a lot of times they'll repeat it back the way that they would say it.
And so they don't actually repeat it back the way that you said it, you and your head think, well, I told them the answer, but really, in order for them to process that, you know, remember what you said, and then repeat it back to you, they actually have to have a good sentence of syntax. So sometimes when we're trying to get students to use sentences, in addition to sentence starters, in addition to asking them.
Probing questions or showing them pictures or giving them ideas. Sometimes you can actually just say, let's practice repeating this sentence and just have them repeat the sentence back to you. And that's a good way to assess syntax as well, because sometimes people don't realize that it's a, an issue with syntax [00:53:00] because they're not seeing their students making grammatical errors because students are not trying difficult sentences.
They're just sticking to those very, very simple. Basic sentence types. And so if you wait for students to make a mistake and then try to like model it back to them, they're not going to do it because they're just going to stick with what's comfortable. So that would be another scaffolding strategy that could be useful when you're thinking about use.
Mary Saghafi: I see that so often when I'm doing my dictation sentences when students are writing their sentences back and it's so interesting that you framed it like that because for such a long time I saw it as an attention issue that they were having a hard time attending to this sentence, but then now I'm reflecting back and some of them, it might be that, it might be.
Yeah, for sure. But I do also know for a lot of these. You know, double eligibility kids who have a speech and language issue, which often overlap on my caseload, especially with kids with [00:54:00] dyslexia. I see that a lot and I never thought of it at the sentence level as a syntax issue. And so. My other solution would be then chunking my dictation sentences for them and that might be more explicit instruction about here's, here's a pause.
The pause is, is it a comma or is it a period? Is it a question mark? And I might give them the punctuation at the, at that pause. Because they won't do it independently. I, that's missing the, the ability to put a period at the end of a sentence or at the end of a clause. And they have not figured that out yet.
So putting the comment is, is so important. I love that suggestion.
Shannon Betts: I want to make sure I'm understanding the suggestion. Right. So, like, if I said a sentence, like, throughout the years, my mom and I baked together. Right. And I asked the students to repeat it back to me. They might say my mom and I baked together throughout the years.
Dr. Karen Dudek-Brannan: So they might not even give you that much [00:55:00] detail. Like they could switch it back, but
you and your mom cooked or
something. Yeah. Like they might not even give you that much detail. But yeah they might just not repeat it back or they might say something that isn't. Like, the details weren't all there, or the message in the sentence is different, because they didn't, they didn't get the message the first time, so they can't necessarily repeat it back.
But yeah, that is a good example of a sentence that would be difficult because of the clauses. Well,
Shannon Betts: I mean, I've just told my students, I always tell my middle schoolers, like, literally, if you see a comma in front of a subject, like, literally, just put your finger over the whole phrase, like, that's around the comma.
Tell me the subject and then lift it up and then tell me what's in that clause. Like, I don't even care what's in that clause. It's extra information. That's what all those complex sentences are. It's extra information.
Yeah,
exactly. And a lot of times they don't even realize that. Like, when I, I mean, I was working with these middle schoolers.
They had [00:56:00] bombed the diagram quiz. And I said, I just feel like y'all just picked up words randomly from the sentence and stuck them on the top line. And they all like gave me the sheepish like,
yeah, well, I
call these big seventh grade boys are like, oops, we were caught because like they didn't really even like, just read the sentence and tell me what the sentence is about.
Like just summarize this before we even diagram it. Just tell me what the sentence is about and we redid them and they did a little bit better. But it's like, sometimes they just. I was telling the teacher, I'm like, I don't think they even understand what the functioning of diagramming is. I don't think they understand what the functions of these words are in the sentences and why the phrase is giving the information the way it's doing.
Dr. Karen Dudek-Brannan: Mm hmm. Even just asking them a question about a sentence.
Shannon Betts: I see a lot of syntax knowledge gaps with my students in all different grade levels.
Mary Saghafi: So I, I have a [00:57:00] parallel because I've kind of noticed this, especially when I was in the fifth grade classes when the math word problems get a little bit more complex and some of the vocabulary switches and they expect students to know these more specific type vocabulary words, and then they include them in the word problems.
It's, it's like the company, yeah,
Dr. Karen Dudek-Brannan: right.
Mary Saghafi: And I think that that is similar to the language that's used when you expect them to label people. specific words as adjectives or because they don't, it's kind of an obscure concept. It's, it's a label of something, but it doesn't really have something that you can hold in touch.
And I think that that gets really confusing as labeling a concept. And it's something that feels like it should be automatic and easy for a lot of kids to be able to do. And with adult practice, once you understand that, This is the label for this, and it can go into this category. It's really easy to do it.
But if you are a [00:58:00] person. You know, who hasn't had a lot of experience with language, and then you're asked to label and put things into categories specifically and quickly. That's a really developmentally challenging thing to do because you're doing lots of processes. You know, in a, in a brain function that may or may not be developed yet.
Dr. Karen Dudek-Brannan: Mm hmm. Yeah, the labeling and the use is, it's different. And I think that some adults don't even, they're, they're not even as aware of, of the labeling. And part of that is because it's happening so automatically.
Mary Saghafi: Yeah, well, I think this is something that I can relate to because Shannon, I too struggled with the even the concept of semantics and syntax, because it's kind of this thing that we we cover, but we don't really cover it.
It's not specifically labeled in our curriculum for the teacher to do this. So it does get kind of [00:59:00] difficult to understand. And I sort of felt that way about. The concept of phonology and also phonemic awareness you know, a number of years ago before I really had experience with it. And I think it has to do, and I don't want to blame college on this as much, but our teacher prep programs really didn't give us a whole lot of meat to understand this.
Core concept and something that we are expected to teach. And then the curriculum that we're using doesn't necessarily label and use it in the same way. So it's, it's a little bit different. So I think that it's another example of how we kind of have to dive in deep, just like you were saying. In understanding our subject area and being able to talk about it.
Well, and as teachers, when they change curriculum on you often, when, when things are, you know, it's out of your control. I think that that does make a lot of sense that teachers are really struggling with some of these concepts and then. [01:00:00] Imparting all of that knowledge to students is difficult to without that experience.
So that, that makes a lot of sense to me. And it's so funny because I think the parallels can be drawn like with labeling math problems, labeling these sentences. It's so hard to put it into the right category if you don't have a lot of experience with it yet.
Dr. Karen Dudek-Brannan: Yeah. And I mean, even just knowing scope and sequence, like that is just something that is so critical to a teacher's job.
And I, I feel like just, People are saying things about schools like we're being too, you know, focused on curriculum and, and all of that. And it's like, how do you not, how do you not do that? How do you not get alignment across the grade level and then from one grade level to another? And That's your job.
And that should be your thing. That's you have automaticity with
that so that you have the energy to focus on the problem solving of my students are [01:01:00] struggling with this. How do I scaffold for them? How do I help them critically think about it? I mean, you need that base knowledge so that you can have the bandwidth to critically think this is kids.
And this is the adults too. And so that's kind of how I, Okay. Think about it and, and I think that we do have a specific assigned role where you can define things, but you have to be flexible about it because sometimes it is kind of hard to say like. I, you know, I can't necessarily give a checklist to every school and say, this is what the SLP should do.
And this is what the reading teacher should do. But I can say, this is what kids need. And this is generally how everybody fits into the puzzle. And then once you get really clear on your area, you can. You know, talk to each other and work together and figure out how that looks for your, your student population and your specific students so that when you do have situations where, you know, they can't identify the parts of speech or they, they can't identify the right [01:02:00] words, you know, like what's, what's within your scope that you're pulling in from maybe the other disciplinary, disciplinary areas, or, and you also know who to ask for help.
To maybe help you troubleshoot kind of like what we're trying to do today.
Shannon Betts: Mary brought up coursework from college and I'm curious, like, what courses did you take? Yeah, so first I bet there's some that I wish that we had taken and been required to take as reading
Dr. Karen Dudek-Brannan: teachers. So I would Yeah, so I would say that you should blame college because college is what's supposed to prepare you for your job.
So that is a problem. I know that, you know, we don't want to be too negative, but you like teachers for reading curriculum. You should understand the pillars of the science of reading. You should understand how to do that. And now I think it is better that now we are starting to emphasize morphonics and phonemic awareness, but there's still a lot of people who are focused [01:03:00] on things that are not that, you know, like guess the word and, you know, like use the picture and things that we know don't work.
But what I, my courses were a lot focused on the, the rehab aspect. So when we are prepared as speech pathologists, we're not just focused on school, we're focused on the other things. So I had classes in dysphagia. aphasia, which is adult rehab for if, you know, people have strokes. I had a course in traumatic brain injury.
I had a, a trach invent horse. I had a let's see, we have a lot of anatomy. And then I, there are some that are relating to speech sound disorders, but the one that did address Some of these things relating to the science of reading was my school age language disorders course and after that course, I thought there is no way that I'm working in a school and I, I don't like this area, which is ironic because that's what I do for a living because it's [01:04:00] not, you can't get to it all in one course, but I did have my.
My professor, who actually ended up being a mentor to me and ended up being on my dissertation committee when I went back to that same university and get my doctorate in special ed, she did the, the, the national reading panel and area study. Like, she brought that into the course. So that's where I got it, even though I know that there were other areas where they were doing things that are not evidence based.
I got it in that course. So I'm really grateful for that. So I know that I don't know that, that all of the SLP programs are doing it that way, but I know that with, with the big push that that, that is definitely something that is being emphasized more and the, the courses that are addressing language and cognition.
Now, if you wanna talk about the executive functioning piece and how much I got there. There's definitely a lot of room for improvement in that area as well, because it wasn't talked about in the context of child language [01:05:00] and it, and it should have been, it's the,
Mary Saghafi: I think of it, that it's something that everyone is really seeking more information about right now, because yeah, So apparent and there's a big difference between being unavailable to do something and not wanting to do something.
And I think that more and more adults are respecting the fact that children are less available and more and not necessarily being defiant for defiance sake. They're defiant because they're frustrated because they are not wanting to get in trouble. They don't want to be seen as stupid or you know, not capable.
And I think that that is where we're really finding like, okay, we don't want to label kids like this. We don't want them falling behind. We see this behavior, but now what do we do about it? How do we teach our children to stay organized, to know how to get to the next thing. And I think the part that's really missing For a lot of people is that there's a huge developmental spectrum about [01:06:00] people's ability to have executive functioning skills.
All adults have a big variety of executive functioning skills and you hit your limit in your day and you're done. Yeah, that, and so, yeah, it's very individualized and I think that's, what's coming up on this conversation so much. Because speech is brain based, because dyslexia is brain based, because learning is brain based it is very individualized, and it's hard to just put a stamp on something and say, this is exactly how everybody needs to learn it in this progression, because that's not how all brains work.
It, you know, some develop it at different rates.
Dr. Karen Dudek-Brannan: Yeah. I mean, and that's, that's another, like you brought up earlier, just collaborating with the speech pathologist or the reading teacher or social worker, psychologist, or whoever it is to thinking about things, behavior issues. And I'm using that in big air [01:07:00] quotes, behavior issues, because a lot of times they, it could be related to language and executive functioning.
And I've had students where. They would they would refuse and it was like, Oh, he's just lazy. And it's like, well, look at the language in this or look at you know, the amount of support he had. And yes, they definitely did need some boundaries. Those, this one particular student that I'm thinking about but if you think about it in terms of just behavior, and you're just trying to give them a sticker and you're not teaching the skills, then of course, you're not going to see them improving.
Mary Saghafi: Right. Definitely. Well, we talk so much about, you know, why, why, why is it that students are misbehaving? Well, it's probably because there's something that we're asking them to do. That's very hard. And so that's, that's really what it comes down to. And, you know, somebody put me on the spot and asked me to sing right away and, you know, perform, which is really what speaking is and having a conversation.
I might not be [01:08:00] as confident either. So I like to kind of keep that in the back of my head when I'm, you know, asking kids to do challenging things. Yeah, it doesn't mean that they shouldn't improve. It doesn't mean we shouldn't still hold their hand and help get them there. Okay, this has been such a great conversation.
Thank you so much. Is there anything else that you think that reading teachers need to know about while we, you know, have you on air here? We've covered most of our topics we wanted today.
Dr. Karen Dudek-Brannan: Yeah, oh, my gosh. I mean, and I could have gone down so many other rabbit holes and I hope that I hope I didn't go down too many today, but I can share.
I know that teachers want like things that are really concrete and specific. And some of the things that I gave today were very Very high level. So some, some of the things that you can go to are places you can go to learn some more specific strategies just to supplement what I talked about today. Just, [01:09:00] you know, the concept of like, how do you figure out how to.
Really get good at, at working on syntax or, you know, understanding language and, and how it supports processing. I do have a sentence structure guide where I go through those sentence types and give some specific strategies for how to work on them. And also give some examples of what those different like examples of different sentence types, because it is hard to just remember it off the top of your head.
So that guide. You can download at drkarenspeech. com backslash sentence structure. Originally created it for SLP, so it says it's for SLPs, but it's absolutely appropriate for reading teachers and really any teachers who are wanting to work on language. And I do have, obviously, the DeFacto Leaders podcast where I talk about a lot of different topics relating to education and reform and how teams can work together.
Together. And then also I have an executive functioning [01:10:00] implementation guide where I talk about how everybody can think about their role in supporting executive functioning. And that guide is that Dr. Karen Dudek, brandon. com backslash EF schools.
Mary Saghafi: We'll make sure that we link to all of these in our show notes, so that's not a problem.
We're going to get the sentence
guide, like, immediately.
Dr. Karen Dudek-Brannan: Yeah, no, I'm really excited.
Mary Saghafi: I have to
recommend I did sit through the five component framework. There's a webinar that is a fantastic webinar. I have to commend you for this. It's really great, and it talks about those five areas. Mm hmm. Of vocabulary for language intervention.
And you break down a lot of the things, the, the things that we were talking about mostly to really drill down on vocabulary and how can you get the most bang for your buck in instruction. And so even though it's for SLPs, I do recommend I think it gives a lot of really good grounding background knowledge that would be really valuable for teachers.
So [01:11:00] if you're feeling. You know, a little like, Ooh, this sounds too high level for me. I think that listening again to a webinar that might help explain some of these terms again, can really help you in your practice and, and. You know, where you can notice it more within your curriculum framework and maybe how you can find a way to improve.
So I highly recommend that. And I think that all of these resources that you recommend are so great. So we can we can find you then to on social media. Are you on social media as well? Yeah.
Dr. Karen Dudek-Brannan: And so that presentation is that you just mentioned that one. The link for that is Dr. Karen speech. com backslash language.
So that is that free webinar. And again, I just go more in depth on the, the five areas I am on Instagram at, so it's at Dr. Karen speech language, and then I'm on Facebook. It's Dr. Karen speech and language. [01:12:00] And I actually have a couple of Facebook pages. I have a little bit of a. You know, a hoarding problem with Facebook pages and Facebook groups, but you can actually there there is there is some logic to some of that.
But that's my main one that I use. I do have a specific one for the podcast as well. But also if people want to just connect with me directly. I am on LinkedIn and you can just search my name and you can kind of see all the stuff that I've been doing, send me a message, send me a connection request.
And I do post, you know, podcast episodes and things like that on my LinkedIn profile too. So that's a good place to connect with me directly because I am pretty active on there.
Mary Saghafi: Great. Oh, you're a wealth of knowledge. I'm so grateful that you came to chat with us today. This is so helpful. Thank you. I am.
Dr. Karen Dudek-Brannan: Thank you for having me
Shannon Betts: from our conversation.
Thank you for letting me pick your brain.
Dr. Karen Dudek-Brannan: Sure.