Hello there and welcome to the SLP Now podcast. I'm really excited to be meeting with Tera Sumpter today. I've heard, well, she, several members of the SLP Now community have reached out to me over the years about Tera and the amazing work that she does. And I've been following her on Instagram where she has some really amazing content. And yeah, I'm really excited that we finally get to connect and chat about all things executive function. And then just a quick intro to Tera. She is a wife, mother of three, author. She's the founder of Seeds of Learning. And she is a speech language pathologist with specialized experience in the areas of reading, executive functioning, and learning disabilities. She's a presenter and she speaks all over the place.

Former adjunct professor as well. And she runs an amazing online educational community where she teaches SLPs, educators, parents, and allied professionals about executive function. So I, yeah, without further ado, let's dive in. So I gave you like a quick intro and it doesn't do you justice at all. So I'd love to hear from you first. Just tell us a little about about you and maybe a little bit of your story. Like how did you end up specializing in executive function and what has your SLP journey been like?

Well, thanks for having me. I want to start there. Appreciate being invited to be on your podcast. So thank you. And thanks to everybody who's listening or watching. Yeah, so how did I get here? What's my background? It's a little different. It's a little unconventional. My background was actually in math and French. So I was a major in math and French in undergrad.

I come with a really analytical background, but also a love of language, so in various languages. So that kind of has my brain a little, maybe wired a little bit differently. Let's see, in my mid-20s, I married my husband who's from Norway. And so we moved to Norway the first year that we were married. And then I learned Norwegian there. So I speak three languages.

Two weeks after landing back in the US, I started in a graduate program, actually post-bac program for speech language pathology. So the rest is kind of history. Now, what's interesting is that I had a kind of unconventional experience in graduate school. Having been someone with the background that I had, I also had work experience in my 20s. I was a little bit older going back to school. You know, I was definitely challenging a lot of what was being taught, a lot of what was being said.

a lot of my questions weren't always appreciated, but I was always seeing things a little bit differently. And I was very curious about other fields. I was very curious about the fields of neuroscience, cognitive psychology. And so in graduate school, I was reading a lot of that material already. So I was bringing that sort of fusion to what I was learning in graduate school. So, you know, fast forward, everybody sort of like survives. You sort of...

Survive graduate school, right? And I got out, graduated and started working with patients. worked inpatient. I was in a hospital setting. So I did, it was a medically based SLP working inpatient and outpatient with both adults and pediatrics. So I saw everything, did all of it from modified barium swallow studies to articulation. Like with kids, I was doing it all.

which was great because it helped me sort of figure out what I loved within our field. And I very quickly realized I loved working with children. And so that really kind of, you know, I started specializing more in pediatrics, drifting more to just pediatrics. And I started feeling pretty quickly that I was missing something. That's like the only way I can really describe how I was feeling. I felt like I was simply just missing

pieces of the puzzle. Like, I felt like I was band-aiding symptoms and not getting to the root of what was really going on with my students. I felt like I was making really surface level types of progress. And I just, wasn't feeling satisfied. You know, was, I went into this field to help people and I felt like I really wasn't doing what I knew I could do. I just felt like I was missing something.

So that set me on a long journey. We're talking 15, 16 years now that I started going to other fields for my continuing education. So the last 15, 16 years, I'm a product of spending 15 or 16 years learning from the fields of neuroscience, cognitive psychology. I spent probably two to three years in the field of occupational therapy, going to their seminars, conferences, learning from some great minds in that field.

And I would say the last three, four years for me, I've been really diving into the field of cognitive linguistics. So everything I was learning really predominantly from neuroscience and cognitive psychology was informing how I understood how kids learn speech and language and pragmatics and all those skills and literacy. So literacy is something that I love too. And so that started informing my therapy and I started shifting.

how I was doing therapy based off of what I was learning in those fields. So that's a short answer as to how I got here. People are always very confused. How did you end up doing this? And it's really just that I started learning from lots of other fields because there are so many fields that study speech and language. It is not just speech language pathologists. And there are many fields out there that have a much deeper

knowledge base just because they're older fields. You know, I think we forget a lot of times that the field of SLP, know, speech-language pathology is a relatively newer field in the big scheme of things that was born out of other fields. So there are, you know, lots of other fields that have this really, like, depth and breadth of their research body. And so, you know, I just kind of dove into those. And the rest is history.

Wow, I love that story. so cool. Yeah, I just love getting to hear everyone's journey, but yours has been especially interesting just with like kind of finding your way to speech language pathology and then also kind of expanding beyond that too. I love that. Okay, so I'm in, I can.

I really resonate with the feeling like something is missing. And I love that you sought out other resources to help kind of address that and come up with some great solutions. So I can't wait to dive in a little bit in terms of what that looks like. But I guess in all of your exploration, before we dive into what this could look like in therapy and all of that.

I'm curious, what is our role as SLPs? Because there's obviously a lot of other areas that come into play, but what is the role of the SLP when it comes to executive function?

Yeah, and that's a really good question. And I would start off by saying that executive function needs to be everyone's role that works with children because it's such a fundamental aspect of child development in child learning. you know, executive function is sort of this cognitive umbrella of skills that is responsible for pretty much all of our conscious learning. So from speech, language, literacy, right, anything academic.

So what this means is that the SLP needs to understand the role that executive function plays in speech and language development, but the literacy specialist also needs to understand the role that executive function plays in literacy development. The classroom teacher needs to understand the role that executive function plays in content learning and academic learning. The counselor needs to understand the role that executive function plays in emotional regulation, emotional development. it's something that it's a topic.

that's very complex, it's very broad, and it's very far reaching in terms of its impacts on child development. Now, as far as the role that it plays for SLPs and in speech and language development, it's the foundation. So it's the foundation for how a child orients themselves to their environment in order to learn from their environment. So we know that a child learns speech and language,

by observing models in their environment. Speech and language, they're just simply simple systems. Humans have created these simple systems to share what's meaningful to them. And so these simple systems are things not internal, but they are external from us. So we have to be connected externally in order to, and connected and oriented to our environment.

in order for us to learn from that. So what this looks like is this looks like baby and toddler have to be paying attention. They have to A, perceive, this is what we call perception, the most fundamental aspect of the whole executive function system being perception. We have to first perceive and be aware that the models are in our environment to learn from. We have to perceive that mom is there reading the book.

We have to perceive that the therapist is there that's modeling different types of language cues, right? Or language models of different kinds. So we have to be aware of all of the different stimuli in our environment, and then we have to be able to attend to it. So we have to be able to hold on to, know, hold the attention on that stimulus long enough to then be able to internalize and process the stimulus.

So this is where it gets exciting because the processing, when we think about what does it mean to be processing speech and language, this is actually my favorite part of the whole EF system, which is working memory. And the working memory system is an aspect of our executive function system. It's one component. And when we think about the role that working memory plays for speech and language development, it is absolutely fundamental because when the information comes in,

We're gonna hold sound within our verbal working memory, which that's gonna be all of our speech and ultimately our language. But then also we have to create meaning with our nonverbal working memory. And it's the pairing of the two of those that's gonna give birth to language, having internal meaning of something and internal representation for something and also sounds associated.

So for example, what this looks like for little kids is, you know, the toddlers playing in the house or babies, you know, on the floor and this fuzzy little animal with whiskers comes up and, you know, rubs all over the baby and the baby smiles and coos and is interacting, right, giggling with this little animal. And babies, nonverbal working memory.

is going to in a sense capture a picture, a mental representation with some sort of sensory experience. This gets into schema development a little bit beyond what we're talking about today. But it's gonna create this mental representation. So that's the non-verbal component. And then mom comes along and mom goes, kitty. And mom provides the verbal attachment.

So baby developing language is gonna pair the two together, and that would be the birth of language. When we have children who struggle with development in any of these areas, whether they're not perceiving the models in their environment, they're not attending long enough to process it, or their working memory system can't hold on to one of these components, whether it's the sound piece in the verbal or...

whether it's the conceptual piece within the nonverbal, there can be breakdowns anywhere within that foundation, and that will impact speech and language development critically.

Wow. I love that explanation. That was a really nice breakdown. I've done a little bit of learning on executive function, but I loved how you broke that down. yeah, I love that. so you told us how executive function can impact our speech and language development with that working memory, the nonverbal and the verbal. And this is...

it's not any one person's role to support students with executive function. This is across the board. So that was super helpful. And I'm curious. So we have this like, it definitely makes sense. like executive function is clearly having an impact on our kiddos across the board and we do have a role in it. But how can SLPs, like if they're new to learning about this,

What, how can they start thinking about, and obviously we have to do a lot of foundational background knowledge and learning before we jump in and start implementing this. but can we, like for those SLPs, can you give them a sneak preview maybe of what it could look like to like start incorporating this into our sessions and like, what would it look like? Just like a little bit of a preview of.

Yeah, wherever you think it makes sense to start, because we could think about assessment or just a preview of how we can support our kiddos, but I'll let you decide how you want to navigate that question.

Yeah.

Where I want to go with that? OK, so it's a huge question, right? That's a ginormous question. And so I'll try to offer some really practical tips. I think the first part, we could talk very, very briefly about assessment. Assessment, when it comes to executive function, the most effective assessment is dynamic assessment, where we're, I call this, doing POP. So we're looking for patterns of processing.

So we're trying to connect dots through patterns that we're seeing. So is the child struggling to perceive their environment in all of these different assessments that I'm giving? So when I'm doing my speech assessment, when I'm doing my language assessment, are they not even aware that I'm there, right? And then, so those would be like our domains of processing. We're gonna make connections through our own assessment that we're seeing. And then we wanna look at that across settings.

So do we see this in other settings than just the therapy room? Does the classroom teacher observe this? Does mom observe this? Does coach observe this? Whomever it is, right? So we wanna be trying to connect these dots and maybe if it's working memory, does the child have difficulty holding on to or following directions, have difficulty holding on to verbal information or written information, whatever this looks like? Do they have this difficulty across various domains

processing, and then do we see this across settings? So being able to try to answer those questions is the most effective form of assessment. All the big researchers in the field of executive function are very clear that standardized assessment is the absolute worst way to assess executive function. And the real reason for that is because

the nature of standardized assessment creates a very structured setting. And the structure of this setting with the examiner sets up a situation where the examiner can fill the role of the child's executive function system. So the examiner is going to become the person queuing instead of the executive function system of the student having to queue. So this is where

having like looking at Russell Barkley calls this the point of performance. We have to be assessing how they're doing at the point of performance in the classroom, on the playground, whatever the, know, test taking, whatever it is. But setting up a standardized measure becomes, you know, just very ineffective for actually getting a true measure of a student's executive function and also how the executive function is impacting their academics.

I'll add that Russell Barkley, if people aren't familiar with him, you should be. He's like the godfather of ADHD and executive function. And in his latest book, he talks about how standardized assessment is not only the worst way to assess executive function, that it's actually negligent. So I think that's some pretty powerful language. give us some more power to, as SLPs, love dynamic assessment, I think, but trying to push more towards that.

There was one other thing I was going to say and I forgot what that was. It was something about, I know, remember. So when we're doing assessments, so when we're doing our speech assessments, our language assessments, if you're an SLP who does literacy assessments, Whenever we give an assessment, we are always assessing executive function too.

There's no test that we can give a child where the child doesn't have to perceive the test, doesn't have to attend to the test, their working memory doesn't have to hold and operate on the information, the child doesn't have to inhibit, so inhibition's another foundational component of the executive function system, the child has to inhibit getting up and running out of your room because they hate being there with you, right?

So all of these things, they have to be self-monitoring, they have to be pacing themselves, all of these types of skills, the child has to be, and adults, right? This is something adults have to do all the time too. All of these skills are a part of every task, every assessment that we would give a student. So if we have a kiddo who bombs their language assessment, we have to make the determination,

of why did they bomb it? Did they do poorly because they weren't attending? Or was it because they didn't have the linguistic structures? Did they do poorly because their verbal working memory couldn't remember the words? Or did they do poorly because they didn't have the concept?

These are all the questions that to really understand what's going on with how a child is developing language become critical to our assessment process. You know, one of the examples I love to give and something in my educational community we talk a lot about, we really dive into assessment is, you know, the working memory, the word classes assessment on the self, where, you know, kids are given four words and they have to pick the two

that go together best, right? So we could have one group of kiddos that they can't remember the four words, right? They keep asking for repetitions. Those are the kids who keep asking, say them again, say them again, say them again, and they can't hold the four words. And the reason that they get a poor score is because they can't remember the four words. Then we have other kiddos who can remember the four words, but they don't have the internal concepts.

So they don't know which two match and which two go together. And they might also get a poor score. And these two kids, groups of kids, might get the same score and we're gonna provide the same intervention when they have two totally different reasons for why they got the same score. Does that make sense? So being able to look at how they completed that assessment.

Was it because of the verbal working memory couldn't hold onto the four words? Or was it because the nonverbal working memory isn't able to generate the concepts and see, you know, compare and contrast conceptually? Two totally different cognitive reasons for why a child might get the same, two children might get the same score on an assessment. So these are just some of the patterns that we have to be looking for because the intervention that we do will be different, should be different for both of these groups of kids.

even though they end up with the same score at the end on their language assessment, right? There was a second part to your question. I'll let you go.

Yeah. I'm, have a follow-up question here too. So this makes a lot of sense to me. And like for, like for the SLPs who are newer to this area too, like how would we go about like starting to build that skillset where we are able to start identifying like, this is like, this test is supposed to measure like word knowledge, but

the student's executive function is impacting their ability. Like how can we start to build our knowledge base so we can start to tease that apart? Like what have you seen to be like beneficial or a good path for SLPs who are wanting to explore this a little bit more?

Well, I mean, what I think is the best resource is obviously one of mine. You my educational community is really an incredible resource that I've created for SLPs, educators, and allied professionals. We spend a lot of time on this, looking at patterns and dissecting patterns of processing to try to see the connections between different types of domains of processing and where kiddos are breaking down within their executive function system and how it relates to.

Thanks.

how the children are developing speech and language and literacy because really literacy development also gives us a ton of insight into their EF system as well, along with math and writing, all of these end up being connected. But yeah, we can put together a whole picture and just connect the dots. Yeah.

Okay, so for the people listening, if you're like, my goodness, I can totally see some examples of this, but I'm not totally sure how I'd break it down. I'll share a link to Tera's community in the show notes for this episode too, so you have a place to go through, because this episode definitely won't cover everything that we need. We won't even get close to it.

Yeah, we're gonna, no, we're gonna barely scratch the surface today. Yeah, my community will reopen in December with our next cohort starting in January, but all that information, you can put some, know, in the notes, yeah.

Perfect. Yeah, and this episode will air just like a few weeks before I think the community will open. So it'll be perfect timing. Even for people who catch the episode maybe a little bit after it aired, like check the link in the show notes and hopefully it's the right timing. And then even if the community is not open yet, like following Tera on Instagram, I think is a great, like...

perfect. Okay.

perfect.

I remember seeing a reel that you had made about it related to what you were talking about with assessment, having how the test can kind of function as things that like help support the executive function, the standardized test. And you had in your reel, you had like little characters and then you had the, I'll share a link in the show notes. I'm not doing a good job explaining it, but.

Mm-hmm.

her Instagram content is a nice way to get some bite-sized pieces of that information to start familiarizing a little bit more so that, yeah, it just helps create a little bit more of that context. Okay, and then, so I know that this, like, we're barely going to be able to scratch the surface with this, but I think it'd be cool or helpful to kind of share.

maybe an example or two of what this could look like in practice. So let's say that we identified areas that we want to support in therapy. And obviously we're missing a lot of pieces of the puzzle here. But could you give us a little preview, maybe an example or two of kind of what it would look like, how you would implement this or apply this in your therapy sessions?

Yeah, so I'm going to give I'll give you a couple of examples. So the first one and probably the one I think the SLPs are already doing well that they may not realize that they're doing this and that it's supporting their child's executive function system is really using high interest items within therapy. So things that are of high preference or high interest to a student is going to support their perception. So it's really important. This is one of the easiest things that we can do.

is that when we're providing lots of great models, but we have to be able to discern whether or not the student, the child, is receiving the model. And if we find that the child isn't receiving the model, they're not perceiving it, they're not orienting to their environment, then we can support that perception by using high interest items that the children have. So if a kiddo loves dinosaurs,

I'm doing everything dinosaurs, right? I'm working that into absolutely everything in therapy. If a kiddo loves songs and is learning a lot of language through songs, I'm going to bring in all the songs, right? Because those are the things that are of high interest. And there's another component to this too, which is that it's supporting the child's sensory preferences. So how a child's sensory preferences are supported is also going

to impact their preferences and also then how they orient to their environment. So it's kind of this whole package. So that's really the easiest thing, just really being mindful of, is the child perceiving their environment and able to learn from it? And that includes you, that includes items that are in the environment. And so starting somewhere there where we're providing opportunities and really using high interest, high...

sensory preference type tasks and items to orient the child to their environment. So that's step one. Another thing that becomes really important, and this is one of the techniques that I talk a lot about and I share on social media a lot, is what is called reflexive questioning. And reflexive questioning is probably the most important thing that we can integrate into our therapy, because what reflexive questioning does

is it provides the child with an opportunity to self-direct. And I guess I didn't, you I should have said this earlier, but when we think about, you know, what is executive function? Executive function is self-direction or self-queuing from the inside out. So it's where a child's going to queue themselves, starting internally and working externally. So,

You know, this looks like a kiddo recognizing internally that I have this like heat in my body and that resonates with this thought that I'm really upset that this kid, you know, said this thing and then the action becomes that I want to slug the kid in the face, right? Like that would be that sequence of internal outward.

And so this executive function component becomes, okay, this is what I'm feeling in my body. Here's my thought process. How can I stop? How can I inhibit? What do I want the future outcome to be of this action, right? So that's the whole the whole process. So when we think about using reflexive questioning, we have to give our students we want to give our students an opportunity to practice this self directing.

And what we don't recognize is that far too often we're not providing that for students because we do the directing. We say, okay, let's come over here. It's time to clean up. It's time to come over here. Okay, it's time to sit down. Okay, now it's time to go jump on the trampoline. Now it's time, okay, pay attention, you all those things. And so we are the ones doing the directing and we're not providing the opportunity for the child to do their own directing. How does the brain and body get better at anything? By practice.

Right? So we have to give them practice. So what does this look like? So reflexive questioning might look like, you know, where should our thoughts be right now? If I have a kiddo who's distracted, right? And their thoughts are somewhere else, instead of directing them to pay attention and say, pay attention, I'm giving a directive, which by the way, directives are very passive forms of learning. They don't force the brain to engage as opposed to a question asks the

the participant to be the child to be a participant with you. Right? So you're asking them to engage in the process of, you know, fixing or whatever that looks like. So I might ask, you know, where are your thoughts right now? Or we could talk about how attention is like a flashlight. Where's my flashlight shining? Where should it be right now? You know, and then where should our thoughts be? Where should our flashlight be shining right now?

And what I'm doing is I'm giving the child the opportunity to refocus because that's the key. Nobody's paying attention all the time to everything. We're constantly going, wait, is that what I'm supposed to be doing? No, I gotta get myself back on track. So this ability to redirect and refocus. So that's what the reflexive questioning does is it gives the child the opportunity to go, is that what I'm supposed to be doing right now? What am I supposed to be doing right now?

yeah, okay, I'll go back and do that, right? So that's probably, that's the biggest game changer. Reflexive questioning is just an absolute game changer in your therapy, in your home, as a mom, in a classroom. It's just a completely game changer. The last thing I'll talk about very briefly that we can do is we can create really simple plans for our students.

And you can do it, I prefer to do it with my students if I can. So if the student's able to do the planning with me, that's my favorite. So here's what an example might look like. So in my therapy room, I might have the corners or these different locations in the room labeled. So if my kiddo loves dinosaurs, I'm gonna label the room with dinosaurs. So one corner has a brontosaurus, the other one has a...

Tyrannosaurus, the other one has a T-Rex, whatever they are. don't know, whatever they are. So I'm usually like blue dinosaur, red dinosaur, whatever. So we have it labeled. Or I'll keep it simple, one corner has a heart, one corner has a star, the other one has a smiley face, right? So the child comes in and I'm gonna say, okay, let's make a plan for, and I should back up a second, each one of these locations is gonna have some kind of a task.

or some kind of an activity or whatever my target is for therapy, right? So if I'm doing a speech activity, if I'm doing language activities, I'm gonna have those set up at these locations. So then Kitto comes into therapy and I'm gonna say, okay, here we have our dinosaurs. Which dinosaur do we wanna go to first? First, I wanna go to the T-Rex. So we're gonna make a little plan. We can write it on the board, we can write it on a piece of paper or whatever.

Listen, this is nothing fancy. I'm doing like stick figures, right? Or like the kiddo draw it. So step one, T-Rex. Okay, where do we wanna go second? Brontosaurus, okay, that's step two, three. And we make our plan for how we're gonna move through the therapy room for the session. Super simple, the child is leading this. So then the kiddo, I say, okay, where are we gonna start? I'm using reflexive questioning. Because I'm asking the child to direct themselves.

So where are we gonna start? Where do we see ourselves going first? I see myself going to the T-Rex. Okay, can we do that? Yep, and there we go. Maybe the kiddo gets distracted because the Brontosaurus game looks really fun, right? So he starts moving over in that direction. So what's happening here? Well, they're having difficulty inhibiting. That's what they're showing us is that they're having difficulty inhibiting this really fun preferred task over there.

And so at that point we can say, what's our plan? So we're gonna reflexively question back to the plan, right? And so I'm gonna say, what's our plan? What was the plan that you made? You made this really great plan. Where did we see ourselves going first? Can you show me that, right? Can we go there? And then we're gonna go together and we're gonna use the reflexive questioning in conjunction with the planning. And then, as they go through the plan,

Check it off. At the end, we're going to talk about how did we do? We're going to self-evaluate because we want to reflect. This becomes an important part of the executive function development is the self-reflection, self-evaluation. We're to go, how did we do? Did we follow our plan? Yeah, first we went to the T-Rex, then we went to the Brontosaurus. We checked it off. How did we do? We did great. Good job. That's it.

That's a really simple, easy way to take what you're already doing in therapy and just infusing it. You're just infusing your therapy with some executive function to help sort of increase the child's awareness around their environment, around what they're doing in their environment, right? Which is really what's important is the child having awareness around what they're doing in their environment. And then of course, all this can get applied to

to speech and language, for speech, what do you feel your mouth doing? Where do you feel your tongue? Does it match mine? All of these types of things can apply to what we do as well to increase that child's awareness. So those would be my quick and dirty EF tips.

Yeah, and thank you so much for humoring me with that question. I know it's really difficult because you have like such a wide breadth of knowledge and I'm asking you to cut a million corners. So thank you for humoring me with that. But yeah, you did a beautiful job illustrating some examples of what this could look like. And there's clearly a lot more education and learning and background information that we can fill in. And it sounds like

you have some really great resources put together. So like I said before, I will share a link to Tera's Instagram as well as her community. If you're interested in learning more and diving in, which I hope you are, because I feel like this could apply. Like you were saying, like we can use this at home with our kids, but I feel like it's applicable to almost everyone on our caseload.

Yes, yes, that's the yes. Yeah.

So we're all kiddos really any human being could benefit from this support. So I think it's a really

That's the number one feedback that I hear from SLPs who have either like, you know, I do trainings with or in my community, they all say this helps 100 % of my caseload because we have to be able to A, orient to our environment, inhibit distractions and be able to process with our working memory and planning and all of that, all the information that we're processing. And so many of the gaps that we're seeing with kiddos,

the breakdown ends up happening within how they're orienting to their environment and how they're processing the information. And so the sort of these disorders that we're seeing a lot of times are symptom deficits, right? The difficulty with the past tense verbs, the difficulty acquiring these sounds, these become like symptoms of something else breaking down cognitively. So.

We can patch all these symptoms, but we're not really getting to the root of what's going on, which doesn't set them up for independence in terms of learning, if we're just patching the holes. If we get into that system and really help create a strong foundation, we're going to set them up for much more success to be independent learners as they grow.

Yeah, absolutely. Cause we can target the past tense verbs and get that, get them to 80 % accuracy and using like eventually generalizing that. then what like we're not addressing all of those other skills. Whereas if we targeted that executive function and got to that root cause, the student would be able to help themselves address.

all of the other like little grammar things that might be happening too and everything in the future. So it's like a huge, it's a way to have like to, I'm all about working smarter, not harder. And that is a way to make like to really maximize our time in our sessions by like, yeah, like you said, getting to that foundation. I love that.

Yes, yes.

Yep. And that's been my experience throughout my career is that if I can, I don't, I don't have kids in therapy forever because we're, we're setting them up. We're strengthening a system so that they can become independent learners. And there are a couple of examples that I love to use in the community in my private, in my presentations where, you know, I have

Yeah.

know, members listening to before and after videos of kids. And one of the big things that they always notice is like, wow, their speech is so much better. And then I tell everybody I never once worked on speech. And they're like, what? Yeah, they're like, what? It's like, well, I oriented that child to their environment. So they started picking it up on their own. And they started self correcting on their own because they had improved awareness. Right. So they start. It's it's wild.

I love it.

and

But it is, like you said, it is working smarter. And it's just getting to the root. It's getting to the foundation. When children are showing us difficulties in development, they're showing us that there's a breakdown somewhere in how they're connecting to the environment and how they're processing their environment. And that's the level where we have to work. Working at this level of semantics, syntax, morphology, phenology, right? This is just how we've organized language. But

What does that mean when the brain processes semantics and morphology and phonology? Those are the questions that I've spent my career trying to answer from the literature that's out there. What does the brain have to do? And let me address that so that I don't have to teach every single little thing. I can strengthen the cognitive processing needed to acquire those skills.

Yeah, that's amazing. I love it. I love these episodes because I walk away feeling like super inspired and empowered and all of that. So thank you so much for being so incredibly generous with your time and your expertise. This was an absolute treat and I hope everyone else loves it just as much as I do.

Well...

Well, thank you. I really appreciate it. Thanks for having me. It's always an honor to be invited. So thank you.

Yeah. but yeah. And then, yeah. So the show notes will have the other resources. definitely check out Tera's Instagram and her community. Is there anything else that you wanted to, like anything else you wanted to share or point out before we officially wrap?

in terms of resources or anything. gosh. gosh. There's me. Well, I don't, that's a big question. Cause I think every thing related to executive function is important to what we're doing.

or just anything that you felt like you'd, I know, anything that you want. I just didn't wanna, I don't wanna forget anything important. So here's your chance. No pressure.

Yeah, so maybe that's it. We don't want to be here for 24 more hours, probably. Well, actually, I would love that, probably.

We'll be here forever. Yeah. No, think in term... It's fun. I love working with SLPs. No, I would just say, for people who are wanting to learn more, my community is absolutely the best resource that I have. It's the thing in my career I'm the most proud of. I do have a book, The Seeds of Learning that I published, and that is more of like a framework. It's looking at things in more of a cognitive way. It's not the intervention. So the intervention, everyone's like...

I want the intervention. That's the community. I have been working on a second book, which is the intervention book. It's been taking, I'm on year three of it and I'm just like, it's been a really hard project. One of these days it'll get done. But until then, until that's done, the intervention is found in my community. It's the only place where it can be found. Instagram, you're gonna find loads of free information. You know, I post almost every single day and it's...

The content I post is educational and if you want to see me and my kids, look at my stories. everything on my feed is educational. The only other resource I would recommend is my website. It has free articles that I've written that can be found there that are good resources. That's TeraSumpter.com. And there are also other resources in the shop like guides.

you know, thick guides that my team and I have put together. There's a big reflexive questioning guide for people who want to learn more about that. It's like we have like a 28 page guide that we put together that has been very popular. That's in the resources. There's all kinds of stuff in there. So that would be, and of course, you know, find me on social media. I'm on there. I like to chat.

Yeah, awesome. Well, thank you so much. And then I'll put the link to, like I said, Instagram community, the website, and then the link, I'll link to the book too, just so it's super easy to find. But yeah, so many amazing resources. We are so lucky to have you and helping us navigate this. But yeah, thank you again, Tera, and thank you to everyone who listened in.

Thanks. I appreciate that. Thank you.

And yeah, I'll see you next time.

Bye,