Technology

The article discussed this month interested me in particular because, although in private practice and university settings currently, I have a long history as a school-based SLP. As my caseload grew, I found huge value in forging partnerships with teachers to deliver a portion of services in their classrooms with co-led lessons, or simply taking the lead for 30 minutes a week. The teachers appreciated my efforts to tie in with curriculum topics and also providing them with tangible strategies they could carry over with students to support their language development.

In my work with students, I have become particularly interested in incorporating that beautiful thought bubble icon on Story Grammar Marker®. I find it an elegant icon, serving to scaffold both complex language (I remembered that it was the last week of school contains an embedded clause) and perspective taking, a skill endorsed by advocates of neurodiversity affirming approaches. For this month’s post, I traced a source through Anna Vagin’s work, as she has also provided many resources on working with mental state verbs (MSVs)...

SLP and social educator Anna Vagin has provided a wealth of resources that overlap wonderfully with MindWing’s methodologies in narrative language development. Through her website workshops, and terrific FREE mailing list, she shares connections to fostering conversational language, using engaging contexts such as games and animations to build social cognition, and recently, a new perspective on using visually supportive cognitive/emotional scales. Scales are a tried-and-tested tool for expanding thinking, linked to counseling approaches such as Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), and Motivational Interviewing (MI)...

I almost dislike writing about gratitude at Thanksgiving time, as it is a practice that is self-regulating all year round. It is well documented that regularly steering our thinking toward gratitude helps override our brain’s negativity bias and train ourselves to notice positive elements of life, with influence on our mood, and therefore our executive functioning. Recent discourse around gratitude has created the term “glimmers,” serving as the opposite of “triggers.” Glimmers are small observations that help calm our nervous systems....

A thought balloon is a very valuable tool. It provides a visual scaffold that opens doors to that “landscape of consciousness” that is characteristic of the later stages of the narrative developmental sequence (stages 4-7). As such, it’s the gateway to perspective-taking! I’ve become enamored with Story Grammar Marker’s thought balloon icon, accessed among other ways through MindWing’s Digital Icons Set and The Critical Thinking Triangle in Action. Working with neurodiverse clients, this icon provides a key cue toward using mental state verbs and adeptness with reading others’ thoughts and intents...

The American Speech‑Language‑Hearing Association (ASHA)’s CRISP Committee (Clinical Research, Implementation Science, and Evidence-Based Practice) has developed a series of nine modules on evidence‑based and best practices assessment, which would serve as a great self-guided study activity as we think about the fall! The site, hosted on ASHA’s Teaching, Learning & Research (TLR) Hub, grabbed my eye since it relates to narrative as a critical aspect of any speech-language assessment, and in particular, MindWing’s tools for supporting these processes, including Story Grammar Marker®...