Interview between Speaker 1 (Meg) and Speaker 2 (Alexandria Zachos)
Episode 64: Gestalt Language Processing Q&A
[Introductory note]
Hey, Meg here. Here’s one of my pet peeves as an occupational therapist: it’s taking continuing education trainings that have absolutely no impact on my work. You know, the ones that give you a framework, but don’t tell you how to apply it? Or this is maybe even worse to me — the ones that just don’t say anything impactful at all. When I founded Learn Play Thrive, my goal wasn’t just to provide continuing education trainings, it was to provide trainings that leave therapists feeling really confident at using the new strategies in their actual work. And also, that help therapists feel empowered to work in a way that is more aligned with their values. The reception to this from the therapy community has been incredible, and Learn Play Thrive continues to grow. We have neurodiversity-affirming continuing education courses that are registered for AOTA and ASHA CEU’s. We continue to add to our course catalogue, and we have three free trainings. You can check out everything we have to offer at the Learn Play Thrive Education Hub, which you’ll find at learnplaythrive.com/trainings/. Thanks for being here.
[Introductory music]
Welcome to the Two Sides of the Spectrum Podcast. A place where we explore research, amplify autistic voices, and change the way we think about autism in life, and in our professional therapy practices. I’m Meg Proctor from learnplaythrive.com.
Meg:
Before we get started, a quick note on language. On this podcast, you’ll hear me and many of my guests use identity-affirming language. That means we say ‘autistic person’ rather than ‘person with autism’. What we’re hearing from the majority of autistic adults is that autism is a part of their identity that they don’t need to be separated from. Autism is not a disease, it’s a different way of thinking and learning. Join me in embracing the word ‘autistic’ to help reduce the stigma.
Welcome to Episode 64 with Alexandria Zachos. This episode is a follow up to Episode 40 on gestalt language processing. So, gestalt language processors are kids who learn language through delayed echolalia or scripting. If you missed Episode 40, where I initially interviewed Alex about supporting gestalt language processors, and you’ve never taken a training by Alex before, you’ll want to stop here and go back and listen to that one first. Because today, we’re going to build from that foundational content by having Alex answer listener questions on how we can support gestalt language processors.
I’ll tell you about Alexandria Zachos. She is a speech language pathologist who’s presented at ASHA and trained therapists all over the world on delayed echolalia and gestalt language processing. She owns a private practice in Illinois called Social Butterfly Speech Therapy and she runs Meaningful Speech where she has online courses on gestalt language processing, and she shares tons of absolutely transformative content on her social media sites. So, Alex has an online course on gestalt language processing, she has a brand-new course with SLP Laura Hayes on gestalt language processing and AAC, and she also has a handbook. Her courses are so good, and there’s a track for SLP’s and a different track for other professionals or parents. You can check it out at bit.ly/gestaltcourse — G-E-S-T-A-L-T — and I’ll also link to it on the show notes. Use coupon code ‘MEG’ if you decide to enroll, and you’ll get a bonus 5% off. Here is the interview with Alex answering your listener question and answers on gestalt language processing.
Hey, Alex, welcome back to the podcast!
Alex:
Hi, Meg.
Meg:
I’m really glad to be sitting down with you again. A lot, lot, lot of people listened to your last podcast episode. I think it’s our most listened to episode of all time. And what that means to me is that therapists really want to understand how their autistic clients are processing language, using language; they want to connect better with those clients, and that what you’re teaching is really helping them do that. So, thanks for coming back to answer some of our questions.
Alex:
Yeah. Thanks for having me. I actually love doing Q&A. So, this is perfect.
Meg:
Awesome. So, I said it in the intro but I’m just gonna say it again, that this episode is a follow up to the last time Alex Zachos was on the podcast, which was Episode 40. So, if you missed Episode 40, pause this right now and go back and listen, unless you caught Alex speaking in the OT Summit, or the SLP summit, or if you’ve taken one of her courses. But otherwise, we’re going to kind of start in the middle. So, if you’re not familiar with gestalt language processing, you’ll want to go back and get the basics down before we dive into this Q&A. So, Alex and I gathered some questions from y’all on Instagram, and Alex is here to help us dive even deeper in how to support our kids who communicate through delayed echolalia.
Alex:
Yes.
Meg:
So, Alex, here’s a question that we got, and I imagine it’s one you get a lot. It’s about goals. What kinds of goals do you usually write for your gestalt language processors? And I’m assuming this question is from an SLP. There’s kind of a mix of OT’s and SLP’s, and a few parent questions. But this is for, I think, speech language pathologists who are writing language-centered goals.
Alex:
Yeah. This is probably one of my most commonly asked questions. And for those of you that do follow me on Instagram, I do have a highlight titled ‘Writing goals‘ and then a couple of posts that you can look through my page for. But basically, what I tell people is you have to start by understanding the stages of gestalt language development. Once you understand the stages, goal writing feels a lot easier. So, the first stage, like we talked about in the last episode, is delayed echolalia. And then, we go to mitigated echolalia and partial gestalts, or trimmed-down gestalts. Then, we move to single words and two-word combinations, which is stage three. And then, stage four is beginning grammar. Five and six would be advanced and complex grammar. But those three, I sometimes lump together as grammar.
So, when you really understand those and figure out through lots of language samples where a child is, which stage they’re living in — because all kids have a main stage — we can then begin to write goals and objectives. Our ultimate goal for kids is that they can communicate anything that they want. So, wants, needs, thoughts, dreams; so, that would be original flexible language. So, an overall goal would be supporting the child in moving from echolalia to flexible, original language. And then, within that, let’s say we had a stage one gestalt language processor. The goal there is always to give them more gestalts, just like a kid who is an analytic language processor needs more words. Most SLP’s start there, “Oh, I don’t hear a lot of language. The kid needs more words.” But if the child is like a gestalt language processor, we don’t start there. We start with more gestalts.
Meg:
Thank you. And what about if somebody is working in the school setting and they’re writing IEP goals? Do you write specific goals about, I don’t know, a child learning new gestalts in an IEP?
Alex:
Yeah. So, I think there the key is to make it measurable. And I think a lot of school SLP’s are really concerned about collecting data. So, Dr. Lillian Stiegler, my friend and colleague, has said, “Language samples are our data.” So, that is where you are going to be able to track where a child is at. So, let’s look at stage one again. If my goal or objective is that the child is communicating with more gestalts, I might write it in a way, you know, “Three out of five, or 80%,” or whatever feels comfortable to the person. And then, how am I going to report on that during the quarter, I’m going to go look at my language sample. I’m going to score them using the stages, and then I’m going to take a percentage and report where the child’s at. We’re going to want to look at the types of gestalts the child is communicating with, so we might write an objective like, “Will communicate with gestalts to express shared joy, transition, help.” So, we want to look at all of those categories, which I go over in my course and I’ve also kind of covered some of them on my social media posts.
Meg:
Yeah, your course, we’ll talk about it more at the end. It’s so in depth, that folks really do leave with that sort of confident and detailed understanding of this progression that I think it sounds like is really essential for being able to write appropriate goals for a child in where they are, and also, to make them measurable.
Alex:
Yes, definitely.
Meg:
We’ll get back to the stages in just a minute, because we do have some more questions about that and supporting kids at different stages. But here’s a question from an OT. I’ve got a couple of these over the course of collecting these Q&A’s and also when you spoke in the recent OT Summit. And a number of OT’s are really excited to learn about gestalt language processing, and they’re working on teams with SLP’s who haven’t been exposed to it yet. And so, they’re kind of saying, how do I approach that? What’s my role here? How can I stay in my lane, but also get the team on the same page so that we can best support an autistic child who is a gestalt language processor?
Alex:
Yeah, so this can feel kind of tricky, I think. I’ve experienced this even recently myself, in my own clinic speaking with other professionals, I don’t want to step on anyone’s toes or make them feel like, “I don’t know what they’re doing,” or something like that. So, the way that I usually advise people to bring it up to other professionals is just like a curiosity thing. “Oh, I attended this like, Neurodiversity Summit. And I heard about gestalt language development, it was so interesting. Have you heard about that?” And, you know, I think you’ll be able to tell right away if the person is interested or not. “Oh, no”, “I kind of have”, “I don’t really know what it is. Where can I learn more?” or, “Yeah, I have, and I don’t want to know anymore.” Like, I think they’ll be pretty clear on it. And then, you know, if that person is curious, we have so many free resources and things. I think the first podcast I did with you, Meg, is just such a perfect starting point for a lot of people. So, even just sharing that episode. But I think just gently bringing it up like that, and see, are they curious to learn more? I think sometimes when we go in there and we’re like, “This is what I think is going on,” we don’t, you know, move forward with the person. And everybody’s kind of on their own learning journey.
Meg:
Yeah, that’s so true. I think the very, very rapid growth of your business and your Instagram shows that people are, generally speaking, very hungry for this knowledge if it’s presented in a way that doesn’t feel confrontational, just because that’s not how we learn. We don’t learn when we feel attacked or scared. One piece of advice that I often give to people that’s similar but scaled up a little bit when they’re trying to figure out how to change the culture of the place they work is that trainings are a familiar and non-confrontational, not directed at anybody way for everybody to learn something new at once. So, I don’t know if this happens to you, Alex. With at Learn Play Thrive, I have somebody say, “Hey, I just talked to my lead therapist, and we’re gonna enroll all of the OT’s and SLP’s in the department in your, you know, Authentic AAC course,” or whatever it is. And then, they have, everybody has access to the same information. And it’s not like, “Hey, you! Your stuff is out of date. Take this course,” it’s like a whole company training. Or even I have a friend locally, who is the lead OT a therapy company, and they’ll take a podcast episode and have all of their staff listen to it, and then discuss it at their next staff meeting. So, I think that’s another nice way that people can affect change on a larger scale without feeling like they’re stepping on toes.
Alex:
Absolutely. I love that. And I think a lot of people have done that. They have gone and approached their employers and their bosses after, you know, hearing the podcast or attending the summit and said, you know, “We need to bring this to the team. We need to learn more,” and we have had a lot of groups take the course together, which is just amazing. Because then, you’re bringing about that change in your entire workplace.
Meg:
That’s really the best way to do it, and then they have each other to collaborate and problem solve as they implement things. Yeah, I love that model. Okay, here’s another question. Somebody wants to know, can kids or people who are not autistic be gestalt language processors?
Alex:
Yes. This is another question that we get all the time. And a reason for it is that I do talk about autism a lot. So, let me get into that. So, gestalt language development is language development; it is a natural normal way to develop language. So, yes, you do not have to be autistic or neurodivergent to be a gestalt language processor. However, probably the majority of gestalt language processors that, let’s say, are typically developing, likely don’t need speech and language support. So, we are not always seeing those kids. They are naturally moving through the stages on their own. They are getting to flexible, original language on their own, just like we don’t see every analytic language processor out there because kids just develop language on their own, and they never end up on a speech and language caseload.
So, if you’re a GLP, that doesn’t automatically mean that you need sup — I think it’s confusing for people because I have been, you know, trying to teach, you know, on social media now for a couple of years about gestalt language development, and it’s the first time a lot of people have ever even heard about it. So, immediately, I think their mind goes to well, “If you’re this, you must need support.” But I’m kind of teaching two things. I’m saying this is a way to develop language naturally that you’ve probably never heard of. And also, if you’re developing language this way but not moving through the stages on your own, then you probably do need support, and here’s what we can do for those kids. And a lot of our autistic individuals do need support moving through the stages. And so, I do talk about that a lot. And I think if you were to talk to SLP’s that understand GLP now, they will say the majority of GLP’s on their caseload are autistic. Not all, but I would say the majority.
Meg:
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. We hear a number of autistic adults and young adults who are AAC users who were able to access a spoken language easily or at all talk about the sort of disconnect between their mind and their mouth. I had Ido Kadar in one of the early podcast episodes, and he was just like, “My body just wouldn’t do what I told it to do,” not just his mouth, his hands, you know. And he described how frustrating it was to have things to say and not be able to get them out. And this is pretty common for autistic learners. So, it makes a lot of sense that we would be seeing more of those folks needing support to move through the stages of speech development. And I’ve heard you say before that we don’t necessarily have penned down a statistic, but we believe that the majority of autistic people are gestalt language processors, right?
Alex:
Yes. And that is based on research from Dr. Barry Prizant and his team, Dr. Ann Peters, my mentor, Marge Blanc’s clinical longitudinal research, which is published in her ‘Natural Language Acquisition’ book. But currently, we do not have current research that gives us an exact percentage.
Meg:
So, the question specifically about kids who are not autistic being gestalt language processors, one of the questions that came through was, could a kid who has cerebral palsy, but isn’t autistic — is that a kind of kid you might see in speech therapy, and then start to think, “Wait, I think you’re a gestalt language processor.” They said, is that possible?
Alex:
Definitely. Anyone could be a gestalt language processor. I’m sure you have a million of them in your life. You just don’t realize it because they’re probably communicating with self-generated language. You know, some of the younger ones, a lot of times, are labelled ‘late talkers’ because, you know, they’re in stage one, and it sounds unintelligible. And they’re saying these long gestalts and people are saying, “Well, they don’t have words.” And then, it’s like, “Oh, well, they’re fine. They’re totally talking at four,” but you know, hey, maybe they were moving through the stages. So, a lot of times that happens. I don’t think I’ve heard of people asking me about downs, CP; I don’t really think any of that matters. We can just go in and look at the signs which I’ve shared in multiple documents and posts if you want to go back and look at that, and we’ll be able to figure out if the child is a gestalt language processor or not, and then we know what to do.
Meg:
Thank you. That is so helpful. And I love that you’re moving us away from thinking of this as pathology, and really just thinking of it as a learning style.
Alex:
Right.
Meg:
So, we have a few questions about kids who are at different levels. Again, if people aren’t familiar with this, you do talk about this in the previous podcast episode. It’s all over your social media, lots of places to learn it. But going a little bit deeper than we went last time. The first question is about supporting kids whose speech sounds are mainly unintelligible. And this therapist wants to know, for kids like that, should they mainly be working on supporting the kid to produce new speech sounds? And for those of us who are not SLP’s, unpack this question a little bit for us as well.
Alex:
Yeah. So, if a child sounds unintelligible, what that means is the majority of people listening don’t understand what is being said. And I think a lot of our young kids fall into this category that are gestalt language processors and have been misidentified. A lot of times what people are hearing they call ‘gibberish’, or ‘babble’, or ‘jargon’. And I actually have several videos of stage one GLP’s on my social media that people can look at to just, you know, get a visual, what I’m talking about right now. But basically, I think there’s a couple of issues here. So, if a child in stage one is communicating mainly with unintelligible utterances, it’s likely because their gestalts are so long, and a kid of that age is just not motorically caught up to say, let’s say a 14-word gestalt. So, we hear the intonation, but we’re not hearing any clear distinct words, or we might hear one or two clear distinct words within that and that’s also because they’re focused on intonation. So, both of those things. They may not be motorically caught up. And also, in stage one, they’re very focused on intonation. They don’t really focus on words as units until they’re at stage three. The other piece of this is if you’re dealing with a child who has mainly unintelligible language, and even if there are speech sound errors within there, we need to address language first. If there isn’t a lot of language there, we’re not really moving the needle forward by just, you know, pushing to get clear speech sounds. So, my number one piece of advice is language first. And then, as we get more of that and as the child moves through the stages, we can determine whether or not we actually need to address certain speech sounds.
Meg:
So, let me see if I’m saying this back right. Often, kids who are at the stage who are doing what we might call babbling or making unintelligible speech sounds, the traditional approach like for an analytical language learner is to focus on different sounds like, “B-uh! That’s a b-uh, ball!” right. We’re really trying to get them to start making those ‘ma-ma’ like, if it was a very young child or a baby. And you’re saying that for these kids that are producing these strings of unintelligible sounds, they are trying to say longer gestalts that they’re not motorically ready for. So, instead of focusing on sounds, you’re gonna think about the way this child learns language and support them in being exposed to new gestalts, potentially.
Alex:
Correct. And I say, for those kids, our focus is on two-to-three-word gestalts. So, shorter gestalt. A lot of these kids — and I believe you have a question about this coming up here, so maybe I’ll just tack it on. There’s a question about single words. So, a lot of these kids also might start producing a bunch of single words. And then, people are like, “Yay, they’re talking!” But the problem is, if you’re a stage one gestalt processor, those single words are quote-unquote ‘stuck’. They’re not going to go anywhere, because you’re processing them as a gestalt. So, when I say they’re not going anywhere, let’s say you have “Ball”, you’re not going to start hearing, “Blue ball,” or, “Big ball”. It’s going to be, “Ball, ball, ball,” because to them, that holds a larger meaning, it’s intonationally defined, it’s a gestalt for them.
And so, it’s really important when we’re working with these kids that we understand how they’re developing language so we don’t go down that analytic path and go, “Oh, I can’t understand them. I need to give them words, words, words.” And then, they get these single words because motorically they can do those single words, right? But then, we get a kid with a hundred single words and nothing else, nothing else is happening. So, I suggest modeling, you know, two-to-three-word gestalt like, “We did it!” you know, something like that. We are looking at all those categories I mentioned earlier, like commenting, shared joy, transitions, help, and we’re thinking, what can I model within those that motorically, they would be able to say? But they need gestalt, they don’t need single words in stage one.
Meg:
This is so helpful. I’m reflecting back on when I worked in a clinic just for autistic kids. And I would say, the speech goal I saw on everybody’s Early Intervention Plan or for older kids, just like their clinic treatments, was ‘Increasing the mean length of utterance’. Now, that’s sort of the traditional model, right? That doesn’t really take into account gestalts?
Alex:
Not at all and that’s really just looking at things through an analytic language lens. And, you know, if we think that’s the only way to develop language, then we have therapists who are going, okay, words. And then, two-to-three-word combination. And then, a longer sentence. So, like the goal is longer, longer, longer; let’s get to conversation.
Meg:
Yeah, I had to take out of my course a little piece that was in there for OT’s who tend to use too much language. I think a lot of us do, just talk and talk and talk and talk and talk. And our kids who process language more slowly might miss the meaning if we’re talking endlessly, but I had the very outdated ‘One plus’ rule in there of like, ‘If you’re working with a two-year-old who usually says one word, give them two-word phrases. And if they say two words, give them three-word phrases.’ And we had to just completely take that out as we’re learning about gestalt language processors, because this isn’t necessarily the right, very prescriptive advice.
Alex:
Yeah, and unfortunately, so many of our kids are being treated like disordered analytic processors, “Oh, you don’t have words? Well, you have a language disorder. So, I’m just gonna keep trying to give you words.” And then, we’ve got frustrated parents and frustrated therapists, and we’re looking at the kid like they’re the problem — “Well, something must be going on with this kid, because they’re just not moving forward.” And so, I think that a lot of therapists feel relief, learning about gestalt language development. Like, “Oh, this is what was going on with these kids. This is why we were stuck.” I definitely felt that when I learned about it,
Meg:
You know, I did too. And I’m an OT, but I reflected back on being told by a school psychologist to ignore a child’s scripting. I hate this. I even hate to repeat it. But I think this is familiar. I was told, “She’s using you as a cause-and-effect toy. Don’t respond.” And it never felt right. But I didn’t have another explanation. The child seemed really anxious. And she asked a question, the same question, over and over and over and over and never really seemed to get the comfort she was looking for through that question. And it does feel a lot better to get the advice, find the meaning.
Alex:
Acknowledge it.
Meg:
Yeah.
Alex:
She’s saying it over and over again. She wants somebody to acknowledge it. Like, “I heard you. Even if I don’t know why this is the question you keep saying, I’ve heard you.”
Meg:
Yeah, that feels so much better, so much more aligned with like the person-centered, caring, trauma-informed people who we want to be.
Alex:
Right, definitely. I mean, I think so many people listening probably have gotten that type of bad advice. And really, this really will resonate with a lot of people. I mean, I’ve shared many times, I was told to say, “No movie talk,” and trying to redirect kids, and looking at things like they were out of context. But they’re not; they’re very in context for them. We just need to figure out, like do the detective work or the investigative work, and figure out what that meaning is.
Meg:
Absolutely. We have a question that says, can you please talk a little bit more about how to support kids who are at stages three, four, and five?
Alex:
Definitely. So, I’ll start off by saying I probably don’t speak publicly about those stages as much because I think stages one and two are where a lot of the confusion lie because they’re almost kind of like extra stages that an analytic language processor doesn’t have. By the time a gestalt language processor is in stage three, I call that the magic stage because the light bulb goes off and they are processing words as units. So, that’s kind of like a starting point for our analytical language processors. And I feel like when a kid is at stages 3, 4, 5, and 6, most SLP’s then get it. They’re like, “Ah, okay, I get this.” We’re at single words, we’re at combinations. Now I’m hearing beginning grammar like, “I fall down.” Okay, gotta work on grammar now. So, that’s kind of why I don’t talk about it as much. I do go into it more in depth in the course. Marge Blanc goes into it super in-depth in her book and her courses. But I think the big thing to point out is, we can never change the way we’re processing language. So, I say once a gestalt language processor, always a gestalt language processor. But by the time they’re at stage three, they look quote-unquote ‘more like an analytic language processor’. So, what are you working on there? You are working on freeing a lot of those single words from the gestalt. Like, I’d say pulling them down or ungluing them and starting to look at words individually, and then words as combinations like, “Lamp. Bring lamp. Table. Hard table,” and we’re playing around with nouns and adjectives, the noun plus nouns in stage three.
Meg:
Thank you. Here’s an interesting question. Somebody had a question about kids who script in different languages that are not spoken in their home or school, like maybe something they’ve gotten from YouTube?
Alex:
Yeah, this is so, so common. I’m actually going to be talking about this on social media pretty soon. I don’t know when this episode airs. But gestalt language processors are attracted to tonal languages. And once you understand gestalt language development, I don’t think that’s as shocking, because it’s like, well, they are into intonation. They are quote-unquote ‘intonation babies’. So, they’re going to be attracted to that intonation, and that melody, and the prosody that come from tonal languages like Chinese. That’s a big one that a lot of kids are into; Ancient Greek, Russian. And a lot of people, I think, feel frustrated, because they’ll say, “Well, I don’t speak that language and they’re scripting in that language.” Well, what we want to do is just follow what we’ve been doing even with, you know, let’s say English gestalts. So, we want to acknowledge it. So, even if you can’t repeat that thing back in Chinese, you’re like, “Yeah, okay,” like, I heard you. I’m nodding and smiling. Do not feel you need to go out and learn Mandarin, because you can, you know, communicate and model gestalts in English. I think this a lot of times falls under a special or preferred interest. It’s just, they love the way it sounds. And so, when you love something, you’re gonna pick it up, it’s going to stick with you. So, it’s not surprising that a lot of gestalts have stuck with them in some of the things that they’re watching.
Meg:
I love that. It’s interesting, I often take questions that are about a specific child, and then broaden them out to make them relevant to more people who are listening. And in this case, the question was about Chinese, there was a child who was scripting in Chinese. And I love how you connect it to that child’s interest, their strong interest, their passion, because that is strength in that regard if they then have access to the right resources. If they’re interested in learning that language, then that sort of self-discovery of early exposure can lead them somewhere.
Alex:
Definitely. Mm-hmm.
Meg:
All right. Here’s a question from a parent and I am going to read it word for word. We don’t often — you know, the audience of the podcast is therapists. But I do imagine that therapists are getting this exact question. So, I’m wondering if you could help us figure out how to support families who feel this way. So, the question is, how do I know if my child needs AAC? I just want to keep working on real speech.
Alex:
Gosh, this is so common. First, I will say we do have an AAC GLP course coming out on February 3rd; it will be for sale to the public. And the whole reason that we created this course is because when a child is a gestalt language processor and they need ACC, people feel stuck because AAC was developed for analytic language processors. So, it starts with words. And a lot of the AAC literature and research and courses out there focus on things like core words, and fringe words, and words, words, words. And as I mentioned earlier, that is not where our gestalt language processors start. So, we’re going to be teaching people all about AAC, how to tweak AAC for the GLP. But back to this question, a lot of therapists feel stuck because they know that the child needs AAC, that the child could benefit from AAC, but a lot of parents aren’t interested in it. And I think the big myth out there and the reason that it is a problem with a lot of parents is because they feel like it’s going to hinder actual speech or mouth words. They’re very worried that the child is going to be reliant now on the AAC and they’re not going to be quote-unquote ‘motivated to actually talk’.
So, I’ll just say that we do have a lot of research in this area and we do cite a lot of it in the course. And there is so much research to back up the fact that AAC does not hinder the actual speech, mouth word development. And that, if anything, it can help it. So, I look at it as just another support. And when I am working with a GLP who is in stage one who has some communication frustration, who let’s say has a lot of unintelligible utterances, I immediately start to think about AAC as being another support. And when I’m modeling gestalts on the AAC, I’m also modeling them verbally. So, the child is getting both things. So, I feel like we just kind of have to keep repeating this, and encouraging parents, and reassuring them. And, you know, helping them understand that an ultimate goal here is to decrease communication frustration, and we just want to keep giving kids tools and support.
Meg:
Thank you, that’s so helpful to have that information and research in our back pockets to support parents who want — they want the same thing that we want for their kids, we just have to have the right information and the right tools to figure out the best way to support them to get there. Because I believe that all of us, when we’re really faced with it, want kids to be able to say — to use the language that Kate McLaughlin has used on the podcast that’s really aligned with what you’re saying — that we want them to be able to say what they want to say, when they want to say it.
Alex:
Right.
Meg:
We want to know them. We want to know their thoughts, their preferences, their needs, their experiences, and we want them to be able to be known in the world in a way that’s authentic and true to themselves. And I think families want that, too. So, it’s nice to be able to give them the information that will help get them there. It’s also exciting to see training changing, right? I know there’s this overhaul now in our trainings at Learn Play Thrive where we’re all like, we need to update everything to better consider gestalt language processing. You have your new training on AAC and get gestalt language processing. Hopefully, over time, we’ll see graduate level training change. There’s sort of this tidal wave happening now that hopefully will change the culture of how we approach gestalt language processors, and how we approach AAC, and how we blend them together.
Alex:
Yes, I’m very hopeful for that.
Meg:
I do want to ask you, Alex, can you tell us what you have available and where we can find you online?
Alex:
Yes, so we have our original gestalt language development course that is for speech language pathologists, related professionals, students, and parents. We have two different tracks. And that is 8 core modules and 17 bonus modules, so total of 25 CMH or PDH for SLP’s. And then, we have our handbook for coaching and education, which is a digital download and is extremely helpful for educating parents or staff on gestalt language development and topics related to gestalt language development. And our new product that came out February 3rd is our AAC and gestalt language processing course, which is a full course. It is, I believe, about 10 CMH, PDH for SLP’s. But it is also a two-track course, so it’s available for parents, and students, and related professionals as well. You can find everything on meaningfulspeech.com. And my handle on social media is @MeaningfulSpeech.
Meg:
And if folks want to check out Alex’s courses, they’re absolutely transforming people’s practices in terms of their confidence, and their skill, and their knowledge. We’ll put a link to it in the show notes and you can also So, use coupon code ‘MEG’ — M-E-G- — for 5% off of her trainings. Thank you so much, Alex. It’s such a pleasure to talk to you and I just love learning from you, and I know that folks listening do as well.
Alex:
Thank you for having me again, Meg.
[Ending music]
Thanks for listening to the Two Sides of the Spectrum podcast. Visit learnplaythrive.com/podcast for show notes, a transcript of the episode, and more. And if you learned something today, please share the episode with a friend or post it on your social media pages. Join me next time, where we will keep diving deep into autism.
