ASD Archives

Yet: A Small But Powerful Word To Change Mental Habits

October 17, 2018 Brad Hoffman Leave a Comment

Anxiety arises at the most inopportune moments. When it does, its message debilitates with a long list of negatives about our own potential. Mental habits need to be eased into new directions. Using the word “yet” offers a little crack in that storm. Adding that simple word at the end of your sentence can help you start to believe in what you don’t know how to do…yet.

For a long time in school, I would freeze with worries. I would get frustrated with all that I did not know and could not accomplish. One day, during a study session, a friend noticed and made a simple suggestion. Just add the word yet at the end of the sentence. My mental habits wouldn’t change overnight. That was too difficult, given my situation and state of mind. But, introducing “yet” could allow that some moment in the future might be less poignant, thus some relief from the pressure I felt.

I don’t know anything…yet.

I can’t…yet.

I won’t…yet.

I haven’t ever and can’t imagine…yet.

Over the next few months, I started including yet at the end of my sentences. Not aloud, but in my head. That little word opened a new expanse for me and can for you. Mental habits change one word at a time.

In the years since my own discovery of the word yet, I have recommended it to many as a simple but effective and powerful mental shift. I’ve seen it change how people approach homework, standardized test practice, graduate school prep, and even career development.

The word yet allows possibility, when ready. The pressure to know now, immediately, easily, without effort no longer applies. The moment will come. It will happen. Mental habits will shift and those new ways of thinking will transform what you believe you can do. The word “yet” reminds us that developing new mental habits takes continuous practice, slow advancement, and constant return to the place of struggle in order to get to that final place of success.

Fear of failure or success, past or current academic challenges, and personal stressors all contribute to anxiety. One of the great difficulties of dealing with anxiety is the way it does not respond to rational arguments. Some mental habits slime our emotional and intellectual space. Spreading across all parts of our lives, they becomes the lens through which we see the world. Anxiety often feels permanent, but that’s why “yet” helps.

“Yet” doesn’t try to fight anxiety. It acknowledges the immediate moment full with feelings of fear and failure. Rather than argue against them, “yet” gently suggests that this moment isn’t forever. There is a future in which things can be different. Your mental habits can also help you manage anxiety. To get there will take showing up here, where there is effort to be made, fears to face and, with that practice, success to be found. The mental habit of including “yet” at the end of the sentence is a simple contribution to managing anxiety.

I like that the word “yet” is “of obscure origin” according to the Oxford English Dictionary. Obscure origins somehow permit potentialities to flow into the obscure future. “Yet” allows us to look forward when all we want to do is look down. “Yet” encourages us to consider how to get to what we know nothing about, yet.

By Charlotte Kent, Private Tutor and Executive Function Coach

Evaluations and Related Services

June 4, 2018

My Learning Springboard professionals believe in working collaboratively with related service experts across many fields, as appropriate, to support an individual student. Collaboration may include working with psychologists, social workers, psychiatrists, pediatricians, speech and language therapists, occupational therapists, special education attorneys, or a variety of other specialists.

Psychologists, Social Workers, Pediatricians, and Psychiatrists

Depending on the need, we refer parents to appropriate specialists with the following expertise:

Therapy for children, adolescents, young adults, and adults, which may include play therapy, psychotherapy, CBT, DBT, ACT, or other modalities
Assessment of Overall Intellectual Functioning
Neuropsychological and Psychoeducational Testing
Learning Disability, ADHD, Autism Spectrum Evaluations
Psychological and/or Personality Assessment
Psychiatric evaluations
Medication management

Learn more about the most common formal assessments for educational evaluations.
Read about the value of a neuropsychological evaluation.

TRUSTED COLLEAGUES INCLUDE BUT ARE NOT LIMITED TO:

Child Mind Institute (mental health services) – New York, NY
Milestones Psychology (mental health services) – New York, NY
Heights Psychology Collective – Brooklyn, NY
The Yellin Center (pediatric and mental health services) – New York, NY
Dr. Jennifer Cohen (psychologist) – New York, NY
Dr. Concetta DeCaria (clinical neuropsychologist) – New York, NY
Soho Parenting (social workers and parent coaching) – New York, NY
Dr. Jennifer Cross (developmental pediatrician) – New York, NY
Dr. Maria Zimmitti (psychologist) – Washington, DC and Bethesda, MD
Rebecca Resnik and Associates (psychologists) – Bethesda, MD
Dr. Judith Ramos-Aronson (developmental pediatrician) – Coconut Creek, FL

Speech & Language

We refer parents to specialists who offer diagnosis and treatment of a wide range of communication and cognitive delays and disorders including:

Delays in development of language, speech, play, and learning skills in young children as young as 17 months.
Word retrieval and language organizational issues impacting communication, writing and learning skills in school age children and adolescents.
Auditory processing disorders impacting communication, learning, reading and other academic skills in children and adolescents.
Language processing and comprehension disorders impacting communication, learning, reading and other academic skills.
Oral–motor issues impacting development of clarity of speech and language.
Dysfluency disorders, including stuttering and cluttering (irregularities in organization, rate, and articulation of speech) impacting communication and emotional functioning and development in children, adolescents and adults.
Social language and communication issues impacting relations with others.

TRUSTED COLLEAGUES INCLUDE BUT ARE NOT LIMITED TO:

Dr. Lois Heymann – New York, NY
Dr. Pia Wikstrom – New York, NY
The Center for Hearing and Communication – New York, NY
The SMILE Center – New York, NY

Occupational Therapy

We refer parents to specialists who offer diagnosis and treatment in the following areas:

Fine and gross motor development.
Treating self-regulation and sensory-motor processing issues.
Expanding visual and perceptual motor skills.

TRUSTED COLLEAGUES INCLUDE BUT ARE NOT LIMITED TO:

The SMILE Center – New York, NY
Sensational Kids Therapy – Washington, DC

Special Education Attorneys

We refer parents to special education attorneys for the following support:

IEP or 504 planning.
Special education advocacy and support with due process.
Non public school placement and associated tuition reimbursement.

TRUSTED COLLEAGUES INCLUDE BUT ARE NOT LIMITED TO:

Regina Skyer and Associates – New York, NY
Diana M. Savit – Bethesda, MD

Please contact Brad Hoffman or Faya Hoffman to discuss your family’s needs in more detail.

Therapeutic School Planning

March 3, 2018 Brad Hoffman

For years, Faya and I have worked with families needing to consider therapeutic school planning for their child. More often than not, these cases come forward when a family is in total crisis. These crises are typically in one of two categories: 1) the student is in crisis at school and the administration has raised serious red flags and imposed academic probation or has just counseled the student out of their program, or 2) the student holds it together well enough at school but then regularly engages in risky behavior, presents a safety to risk to self or others, or unleashes fury on mom, dad, and/or siblings after school and weekends. There are plenty of instances where both school professionals and parents share similar observations, but often the emotional dysregulation plays out differently at school and at home. Similarly, we work on this planning for young adults needing supportive services too.

It’s very common to see hints of stress sensitivity, frustration intolerance, rigidity, or anxiety at younger grade levels that escalate considerably during the 7th, 8th and/or 9th grade years. At these ages, social pressures have increased as well as academic expectations and extracurriculars. Hormones are shifting and adolescence takes over, which brings challenges under the best of circumstances. When clinically significant mood disorders, anxiety, substance use, phone or gaming addiction, learning disabilities, and/or social pragmatic challenges are added to the picture, it creates the “perfect storm” often leading to therapeutic school planning.

While New York City has a wealth of resources and many of the best mental health professionals in the world, it is surprisingly limited on therapeutic school options. We do have several great institutions, but space is limited, and they’re not designed for all student profiles. Fortunately, there are incredible programs across the country offering gold standard, residential, therapeutically immersive intervention, but consideration of them requires casting a wider net and keeping a more open mind. For parents suffering a crisis situation, the idea of considering a therapeutic program in Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maine, Virginia, North Carolina, Utah, Idaho, Montana, Colorado, Hawaii or elsewhere seems unfathomable and terrifying. But for our families who have taken this brave step, it’s typically been the start to a positive and reparative family experience.

Annually, Faya and I consistently spend about 40% of our calendar year visiting and re-visiting programs across the country and attending professional conferences in addition to our local school visits. When we travel, we’re visiting a range of licensed and accredited programs from mainstream boarding schools to specialized boarding schools (for students with specific types of learning differences) to therapeutic environments. These therapeutic environments range from hospital settings to wilderness programs to residential treatment centers and therapeutic boarding schools. Our preferred programs have top-notch faculty, including Master’s level and PhD level clinicians, providing supervision and treatment. The treatment plan is informed by a thorough intake process, making use of comprehensive evaluations, and developed in collaboration with the stakeholders at home so that each student has an individualized plan. Like skillful educators are cross-trained in a variety of evidence-based instructional approaches, these faculties are cross-trained in a variety evidence based therapeutic modalities.

The lines can be a little blurry as you compare programs, and some outlier hybrid models exist, so it’s critical that families work with trusted educational consultants, which these programs strongly prefer. Ideally, your Educational Consultant should be a Professional Member of NATSAP and IECA with a therapeutic school placement designation. When parents attempt to find programs on their own they can be overwhelmed by the myriad beautiful websites all promising the same desired outcomes. The most effective Educational Consultants spend time visiting programs, connecting with clinical teams and school leadership, and learning about the finer points that differentiate each program. This “boots on the ground” approach puts us in a unique position to make a better match between program and student. In our case, we have professional designations for mainstream, specialized and therapeutic school planning, which is highly unusual and extremely advantageous for our families as they navigate different pathways and timelines for a specific child or siblings within a family.

In our experience, many families are perplexed about the location of these therapeutic programs and cannot imagine enrolling their child in a program so far away. But there’s good reason for these programs being located outside of New York City. First, there’s a history to consider within this industry that is deeply rooted in programming at Brigham Young University. As a result, many professionals in this space got their start in Utah or Idaho at groundbreaking, successful programs and then branched out from there. Second, a huge part of the therapeutic process makes use of the majestic scenery out west — and across our country — with easy access to nature for adventure and recreation therapy. Many children are better served in quieter parts of the country where they’re able to feel more grounded with less sensory stimulation and fewer transitions. Finally, it’s worth noting that New York City attracts a certain personality type that skews toward being more Type A and amped-up. When you spend time in quieter parts of the country, you can’t help but notice a considerable shift. It’s a stark contrast to New York City and the perfect opportunity for many students to access the time and space they need to find themselves, develop coping strategies, identify a purpose, and engage in goal-setting.

We appreciate that therapeutic residential settings are rarely a family’s first choice, and we support exhausting all local resources before making this sort of transition. But if it’s needed, we’re so fortunate to have such great options available. Enrolling a child in one of these programs is an incredible gift and can truly save a child’s life — a fact many students have explicitly shared with us as a result of their positive experiences. Choosing one of these programs isn’t about giving up on parenting or breaking up a family. Quite the opposite. When a family is bought into the process and a genuine partnership is established, the reparative experience and positive impact stands to be huge. So when is it time to consider therapeutic school planning? Here are several signs for parents:

• Your child is regularly engaged in school avoidance or refusal.
• You can’t seem to schedule enough time with your child’s therapeutic team in New York City (or your local area).
• You’re hemorrhaging resources (e.g. emotionally, financially, socially) on one child at the expense of other children in the family.
• You’re walking on eggshells to avoid triggering your child.
• You feel like you’re living with a Jekyll and Hyde personality.
• You do not feel like you can appropriately monitor your child’s safety.
• Your marriage or partnership is suffering.

If you’re concerned about your child’s trajectory and looking for therapeutic school planning support, please contact our office to discuss your family’s situation in more detail.

To access therapeutic program research, best practices, and historical detail, we suggest:

Outdoor Behavioral Healthcare Council
Association for Experiential Education
NATSAP Research
Stories From The Field,by Will White
All Kinds of Therapy, by Jenney Wilder

By Brad Hoffman, M.S.Ed. and Educational Consultant, My Learning Springboard

What Is The Value Of A Neuropsychological Evaluation?

June 15, 2017 Brad Hoffman

There are numerous reasons to consider having a comprehensive psychoeducational or neuropsychological evaluation completed, and the reasons may differ depending upon the age of the child being evaluated. A preschool child, for example, might be evaluated due to concerns about language acquisition, developmental disorders and/or Autism Spectrum Disorder, as well as concerns about behaviors at school or at home. Learning challenges often impact elementary school children and may include struggling with learning how to read, developing number sense, and managing multi-step or long term assignments. These challenges may be indications of a learning disorder, attentional issues, executive function challenges, or auditory processing disorder. Adolescents and teenagers may have additional challenges, such as performance anxiety, social-emotional issues, or managing transitions between school divisions or off to college as expectations increase. A comprehensive psychoeducational or neuropsychological evaluation can help to identify a child’s areas of strength and areas for growth. They also provide guideposts to develop a plan for addressing these areas to help ensure academic and social-emotional success and well-being.

Generally a psychoeducational evaluation is administered by a clinical psychologist, school psychologist, or neuropsychologist. A neuropsychological evaluation is administered by psychologists who have training in neuropsychology, which studies the interactions between behaviors, emotions, cognition, and brain function. However, neuropsychologists aren’t the only practitioners who administer neuropsychological tests, which can be confusing. Comprehensive test batteries can also be provided by experienced clinical psychologists, whereas school psychologists typically provide psychoeducational assessments. It’s necessary to seek out a neuropsychologist, specifically, if there is a more medically complex issue, such as traumatic brain injury, chronic illness, or seizures.

While there are distinct differences between a psychological assessment, a psychoeducational evaluation, and a neuropsychological evaluation, a comprehensive evaluation will cover the whole range of functions, which are customized to meet the needs of the individual, to answer the referral questions, to offer an understanding about underlying cognitive functions and to provide targeted recommendations for support. As educators, we’re typically most focused on comprehensive evaluations that include:

An observation of the child and a clinical interview.
A review of school and medical records.
Administration of assessments, which may address:
- Verbal and nonverbal reasoning and problem solving skills
- Visual and verbal memory
- Executive functions (attention, working memory, planning, organization, etc.)
- Auditory and visual processing
- Visual-spatial functioning
- Academic achievement
- Language processing
- Sensory-motor skills
- Fine motor development
- Social skills
- Emotional and personality development

The administration and interpretation of these subtests, along with input from other professionals, parents, and teachers, helps to guide the development of an action plan to address areas of weakness and concern while bolstering and enhancing areas of strength and interest.

Cognitive testing is almost always included in comprehensive psychoeducational and neuropsychological evaluations and more often than not, a Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC-V) is administered. The WISC-V is composed of five main areas, including subtests, which comprise the Full Scale IQ:

Verbal comprehension is the ability to use language for thinking and problem solving.
Visual spatial reasoning measures one’s ability to apply spatial reasoning and analyze visual details (synthesis of part-whole relationships, attentiveness to visual detail, and visual-motor integration).
Fluid reasoning measures the ability to obtain information from visual details, broad visual intelligence and conceptual thinking.
Working memory index is the ability to identify visual and auditory information, maintain it in short-term memory, and re-sequence it to be used to solve problems.
Processing speed index measures decision speed and graphomotor speed.

Academic achievement is assessed through the use of a variety of measures. Most often they will include at least one of the following if not more:

Woodcock Johnson Tests of Academic Achievement (WJ-III)
Wechsler Individual Achievement Test (WIAT)
Gray Oral (GORT) and Silent Reading Tests

The neuropsychological evaluations will also include measures of memory, visual-spatial and fine motor dexterity, language development, attention, executive function, adaptive functioning, and social-emotional well-being.

At My Learning Springboard we find quality psychoeducational or neuropsychological evaluations incredibly valuable as a guide to tailor our recommendations for intervention, test preparation or school placement. Evaluations can often be overwhelming documents for parents or educational professionals who don’t regularly read and interpret them. To help our families get the full value of an evaluation, our team creates a summary document in a user-friendly format that highlights the salient points of the assessment with an emphasis on instructional implications and strategies. These documents support instructional planning and are often used by teachers, learning specialists, executive function coaches, and parents.

The importance of a high quality, comprehensive evaluation, administered by a neuropsychologist or a clinical psychologist with neuropsychological training cannot be understated if there are developmental, learning, language, social-emotional and/or behavioral concerns. These assessments will provide critical information about how the brain is working and insight about what’s going on and why. The data set and narrative interpretation will assist all professionals involved in a child’s learning to develop a targeted, individualized plan. They also help professionals and parents to better identify the appropriate learning environment and necessary supports for academic success. Because the planning for the testing battery and the interpretation of these assessments becomes the keystone for managing interventions, services, and accommodations, it’s worth investing in an excellent and highly qualified psychologist. Not all reports are created equally, even if they’re called a psychoeducational or neuropsychological evaluation, so it’s important for a parent to seek counsel in choosing an evaluator. We can help with these recommendations.

By Brad Hoffman, Board Certified Educational Planner and Learning Specialist, and Laurie Gross, Educational Consultant and Reading Specialist.

Do You Know Where Your Child’s IEP Data Is?

May 1, 2017 Brad Hoffman

It surprising in this environment of data-driven education that teachers are still sometimes surprised to find out when their students are doing poorly at the end of the term, or that many IEP goals remain with little progress made. How can that be? What are we doing with all this collected data?

Surprisingly, the answer is sometimes we aren’t doing anything. We give a quiz, get frustrated the student isn’t doing well. It doesn’t really change anything. At most, there are times when the information is reviewed, but in the same fashion it was already taught. If our students didn’t get it the first time we taught something, chances are we need to do more than repeat it, we need to research it using different methods and engaging different senses.

I have spent time working in strict ABA environments and if there is one thing an ABA therapist does it is collect data! What is amazing is how sometimes this data is collected and no changes are made when it shows weeks of stagnation! Whether you administer quizzes or have more informal checks, you are collecting data about your students’ learning but that is meaningless if you don’t use it to change your approach.

It might take more than a small change too. It is not always enough to just cover a topic again, change what is motivating learning, etc. You may actually need to try a play perspective, an approach that is multisensory or moving away from the table to the natural environment.

You also need to make sure you taught all the precursors first. Think about it, if you were trying to teach a student calculus right after Algebra 1, chances are your data would show failure over and over no matter what approaches you apply! If you skip important steps your student will need to go back. If your data is showing a consistent failure to have success with new material, it is important to consider if your student needs to go back before they go forward.

Finally, it is important to look at data from more than one source. Data can be taken wrong.

I worked with a student with a lot of aggression. We were supposed to record every instance of aggression, while trying to manage the behaviors, teach targets and record progress on those targets. Even though as a team we kept reporting that this was impossible, and that instances of aggression were being underrepresented, the case supervisor still felt aggression was decreasing and would site our faulty data to prove it. Of course speech and OT reported seeing aggression at the same levels and this should have been a red flag for everyone to check their data and perceptions.

We all want to make sure what we are doing is working. There are many ways to measure progress. One way is test scores. Another is to look at student output (like essays) over time (like a semester) and see how they improve in structure, topicality, specific ness, grammar etc. No matter how we collect our data, or what measure we are interested in, we need to assure the data is accurately and fairly collected and that we do something or make modifications based off the results. Since students need new approaches and methods NOW, not after they don’t succeed, we owe it to our data to put it to use and not just leaving it collected and lying in a drawer! Our data is as useful as we utilize it to be!

Written by: Editorial Team, My Learning Springboard, Inc.

Yet: A Small But Powerful Word To Change Mental Habits

Evaluations and Related Services

Psychologists, Social Workers, Pediatricians, and Psychiatrists

Speech & Language

Occupational Therapy

Special Education Attorneys

Therapeutic School Planning

What Is The Value Of A Neuropsychological Evaluation?

Do You Know Where Your Child’s IEP Data Is?

Company Overview

School Planning

Private Tutoring

Test Preparation