Technology

MindWing’s Digital Icons were first created in the wake of the Covid-19 emergency in order to offer access to tech-based material creation while many professionals were struggling to implement teletherapy as best we could. As you may know, the icon sets offer easy copying and pasting of the icons (including Story Grammar Marker^®, Braidy the StoryBraid^® and Thememaker^®) into various “blank slate” resources. This allows us to use word processors (Google Docs/MS Word), presentation tools (Google Slides/PowerPoint) or whiteboard software (Smart Notebook) as powerful narrative and expository teaching tools.

In this, our last entry in 2021’s Summer Study Series, we’ll review a recent article from leaders in the field who present a very helpful set of 10 principles for narrative intervention that will guide you in this new school year. Additionally, several strategies for leveraging technology will also be described, as we can consider tech a useful tool, however your service delivery evolves in this unfortunately still-weird educational situation. Spencer and Peterson (2020) detail narrative intervention principles and practice tips in their ASHA-accessible article “Narrative Intervention: Principles to Practice.” I love the trend of incorporating the ever-readable web “listicle” as an element of our research literature...

In July’s entry for 2021’s Summer Study Series, we’ll be looking at the critical overlap between narrative and expository language and our students’ access to the academic curriculum. Meaux and Norris (2018) tackle this topic in a tutorial for Language, Speech and Hearing Services in Schools entitled “Curriculum-Based Language Interventions: What, Who, Why, Where, and How?” I have always appreciated ASHA publications’ “tutorial” articles as I have found them to provide the most functional and practical information to be useful in interventions. The other “functional” consideration with this article is that including a focus on curriculum has always seemed natural to me. There is so much inherent language in school curricula and, from a linguistic perspective, this potential gap in comprehension and expression is why students receive our services...

Continuing here with 2021’s Summer Study Series, this post will be a little different. Rather than focusing on analysis of one article for further learning, I’d like to point you in the direction of a few resources related to a theme: mental health and recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic. We’ve all heard and experienced it in some way, at this point almost a cliché; it was a school year like no other. Loss of a feeling of safety, of connection, of experiences, of freedoms, perhaps of health or people in our lives, these all pervade our memories of the past year. I’m of the mindset that every little bit of processing is potentially helpful. However, you may feel uncomfortable or unequipped to go into these topics in personal narrative with your students. For some support, I’d like to point you in a few directions...

Welcome to 2021’s Summer Study Series! From now through August we will be featuring digests of recently published articles that relate to assessment and intervention in narrative and expository language. This month we look at Investigating Adolescent Discourse in Critical Thinking: Monologic Responses to Stories Containing a Moral Dilemma (Wallis, Westerveld, Wallis & Snow, 2021). Notably published in ASHA’s Language, Speech and Hearing Services in Schools and characteristically practical, this one sure grabbed my eye! The investigators sought to assess older and younger adolescent language performance in response to a moral dilemma task...

Over the past months, I have been working with students online and finding new ways to use this Jamboard  tool...the sky’s the limit! One effective way is to integrate methodologies like Story Grammar Marker^® into the use of Jamboard as a visual support to elicit and scaffold language. Audiobooks from Epic! Audiobooks for Kids can be chosen for short segments or chapters that make for a zone-appropriate lesson blending auditory comprehension with narrative language intervention. You may not be willing to go to bathroom-humor-lengths to engage your students at this point, but I am! So, since they asked for Captain Underpants (Dav Pilkey), I checked it out, and delivered!...