Getting your speech therapist and ABA team to work together (audio overview)

A free audio overview for families, derived from Special Learning's course "SLP and ABA Collaboration: Using Collaboration to Generate Best Outcomes, Quicker" (presented by Melanie Olson Giles, Jennifer Rumfola and Noor Syed, hosted by Karen Chung). It is a synthetic voice, not a person, summarizing one session of the course; it is not the session itself.

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Episode notes

• Free tools and guides, no account needed: special-learning.com/free-resources
• The ABCs of Autism guide, free and written for families: store.special-learning.com/free-abcs-of-autism.html
• The full session, and the rest of the series, is in Special Learning's Video CE Library, written for professionals: special-learning.com/for-behavior-analysts

Transcript

This is a free audio overview from Special Learning. It's a synthetic voice, not a person, and it's summarizing one session of a training course. It isn't the session itself.

The session is the first in a series on collaboration between speech-language pathology and applied behavior analysis. It's a panel, hosted by Special Learning's founder, Karen Chung, with three clinicians: Melanie Olson Giles and Jennifer Rumfola, who are each both speech-language pathologists and behavior analysts, and Noor Syed, a behavior analyst who directs a university autism clinic. It was recorded for professionals in both fields. This overview is for the family sitting between them, the parent who has a speech therapist on Tuesdays and an ABA team the rest of the week and wonders why they don't seem to talk to each other.

The session begins with that exact problem. Both professions, it says, have collaboration written into their own ethics codes. Both agree it matters. And in practice, the panelists say, it just isn't done much, and there's a territorial feeling between the fields that gets in the way. The host says she started the series because, looking from outside as someone who isn't a clinician, the overlap between speech and ABA is enormous when children are young, and the collaboration is not.

Much of the session is about why the two fields see a child differently, and this is the part that can make your own meetings make more sense. Speech-language pathologists, the panel explains, are trained in form. Sounds, grammar, the order in which language usually develops, how the mouth and body produce speech, the tools that let a child communicate without speaking. Their training tells them what to teach. Behavior analysts are trained in function. Why a behavior happens, what it gets the child, and how to set up the world so the child is motivated to communicate and gets something for it every time they do. Their training tells them how to make it happen. One panelist puts the whole session in five words near the end: function shapes form.

A second reason the fields talk past each other is that they use different words for the same things. The session spends time on this deliberately, and a parent can borrow the translation. What a speech therapist calls requesting, a behavior analyst calls manding. Imitating a sound is an echoic. Labeling something is tacting. Answering a question or holding a conversation is intraverbal. What a speech therapist calls pragmatics, the social use of language, the behavior analyst breaks into specific skills: does the child ask, comment, start an interaction, keep one going. The panelists say the overlap is real and the terminology is what gets in the way. If you've sat in two meetings and heard two vocabularies for one child, that is what you were hearing.

The session gives two examples of how the behavioral side thinks, and both are ordinary. A teacher hands a child a worksheet, the child rips it, and the work goes away. The panel's point is that what happens after the behavior is what keeps it going, and that it's hard for the adult in the room to see that, because they're in it. The plan starts by teaching the child a short way to get the same result, "I need a break," or "not ready yet," and then works on whatever made the worksheet hard in the first place. The second example is a small boy who cries to get things. Put something he loves in sight but out of reach, teach him to point or to say the word, and accept a sound that's only close, "C" for cookie, because the lesson is that communicating works. One panelist notes that speech therapists do something very like this and call it sabotaging the environment, without thinking of it as behavioral.

That leads to what collaboration actually looks like when it happens, and the session gives a concrete case. The behavior analyst has set up the moment and accepts any sound the child makes for the cookie. The speech therapist knows how to shape that sound toward the real word, and how to prompt the sounds the child can't yet make. Put together, the panel says, the child gets to the word sooner, and everyone gets to move on to the next thing. Take the two apart and you have one professional who knows what to teach and another who knows how to get the child to want to, working on different days in different rooms.

There's an honest section on data. Behavior analysts measure constantly and graph what they measure, so a trend is visible at a glance. Speech therapists, one of the dual-trained panelists says, are well trained in assessment and set criteria in their goals, but don't always track them over time, so it can be hard to know whether a goal is really being met or carrying over to other settings. She describes asking her speech colleagues to take data together in sessions, and calls that one of the easiest places to start collaborating.

The panel also spends time on how each profession is trained and supervised, and is candid that behavior analysis is a young and fast-growing field with more people needing services than professionals to provide them. That part is written for the professions themselves and this overview leaves it there, except for one thing a family may want to know. The panelists say a good behavior analyst and a good speech therapist each hold knowledge the other doesn't, and that neither field's training covers the whole child.

The session closes on the sentence families might most want their teams to hear. One panelist says plainly that this is not a turf battle, and that both professions have a lot to gain from each other. Speech therapists, she says, can learn from the behavioral focus on why a child communicates, and behavior analysts can learn from speech about how to shape the sounds themselves.

Systems for speech and behavioral services differ a great deal between countries, and the credentials the panel names are American ones. The problem the session describes is not. Wherever you are, if two people are working on your child's communication, it's fair to ask whether they are working on it together.

This is general information for families, not clinical advice, and not a treatment recommendation for any individual child.

If you want something to use today rather than something to buy, Special Learning's free tools and guides are at special-learning.com/free-resources, no account needed.

The full session, and the rest of the series, is in Special Learning's Video CE Library; the link is in the episode notes.

This has been a free audio overview from Special Learning.