In this episode, Ayelet Marinovich and Jess Burchiel discuss the importance of communicative intent and access to communication as a human right. Jess, a speech-language pathologist, shares her experiences working with children, emphasizing the value of responsive parenting and the challenges parents face in recognizing their children’s communicative actions.

We talk about:

• Communicative intent and Early Intervention
  
  
• Challenges in recognizing communicative intent
  
  
• The importance of slowing down and noticing each other, valuing all forms of communication
  
  
• How communicative intent is connected to broader social issues, and communication as a human right
  
  
• The impact of cultural differences, societal pressures, and trauma on communication

We look forward to hearing the ways in which this conversation sparked your curiosity, and what new questions arise from listening!

Learn With Less® Podcast episode: Assuming Intentionality – How to Respond to Early Communication

Connect Learn Play – Digital / Printable infant, toddler, and pre-school aged ideas to provide simple, enriching ways to support early development through play, language, music, and movement – using everyday items – helping you Learn With Less®!

The Learn With Less® Infant/Toddler Development Blueprint

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Book recommendation: How to Talk so Little Kids Will Listen: A Survival Guide to Life With Children Ages 2 – 7, by Joanna Faber

Donate to Operation Olive Branch, a direct aid fund for families on the ground in Gaza

Support Palestinian Liberation by learning more about the BDS or Boycott, Divest, Sanction movement which has strategic boycott targets for consumers

Learn more about the root causes of violence in Palestine, we recommend you watch this short history video or read The Hundreds Year War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi

Ayelet: Facebook / Instagram / Pinterest

Jess: Facebook / Instagram

Ayelet: Welcome to another episode of Learn With Less®. I’m here today with Jess Burchiel. Jess just told me that a great way to remember how to pronounce her last name is: it rhymes with Churchill. Hahaha. Jess, would you like to introduce folks a little bit to you & to the kind of work that you do?

Jess: I would love that. Thank you. Hi. Good afternoon from the west coast. My pronouns are she/her, I live in Bellingham, Washington, on occupied Salish and Nooksack and lami territory. I’m a speech-language pathologist here at a private clinic. I’ve been working with kids young as 2, and as old as 25, for about four years here. For years before that, I worked at a small community hospital in the county. I don’t know, I love cats, and I really like my job! I really like doing what I do, what we do, which has been so wonderful to continue to know.

Ayelet: Yeah, that’s awesome. Well, I’m really happy to have you for this recorded conversation. You and I have been in touch over the last year and a half or so, mostly over social media. More recently, we’ve been in actual conversation with synchronous face to face contact, which is lovely. It’s been about a number of topics. These are including and not limited to: communicative intent, access to communication, the fact that everyone deserves access to communication, communication as a human right, human rights in general.

We’re both Jewish or Jewish adjacent, and quite outspoken within the movement for Palestinian Liberation and what is happening in Gaza and The West Bank. Really looking at how we communicate, what is being communicated, communicative intent, looking at the full spectrum of communication here, from both a political lens and a education lens. And as we all know, everything is political at the end of the day. So with that all said, let’s start there, right?

Jess: Let’s start there. I really gravitate to people who have a passion for what we do, for people who are internally curious about we do and how we do it. In particular now in the last year & a half, for people who are willing to speak up and say hard things. I think that is required of us, and I’m really excited to ask you some questions about communicative intent today. What do you think?

Ayelet: I love it. I want to start just because before we hit the record button, we were doing a nice little grounding practice. As we sit here recording, it’s spring break. I have kids at home. They’re in the other room doing “video game camp” in the living room. And it’s been a day, it’s been a week. Let’s get on the same page here. Let’s ground ourselves. And Jess, you were introducing this lovely exercise, and I was wondering if we could just start with that, as well.

Jess: A quick note, this is a grounding exercises, very new for me. It’s very much something I don’t want to do, which is why I’m trying to lean into it. I borrowed it directly from my therapist, who’s very much grounded in Buddhist teaching.

As people who’re very busy and often disconnected, one of the hardest things is just to slow down and stop. We’re going to do that by, me and you & everyone who’s listening, taking a second, truly, to put your feet on the ground. Feel your feet on the ground, and take a couple deep breaths.

Maybe I’m going to ask myself and you to identify a sensation in your body, and I’ll do the same. I will name mine as my heart is racing a little bit. I can taste the cupcake that a kid gave me this morning in the back of my mouth. Yeah. How about you?

Ayelet: I’m feeling some congestion in my nose and throat. I have celebrated a birthday of one of my children this weekend. I had a nine year old literally fall directly into my face while coughing. Oh yeah, it’s very cute. I’m just feeling some tightness in my back, looking forward to just getting to connect and talk today. So some ease in my belly and openness in my solar plexus. Jess, thank you.

So you had emailed me and you had asked about resources, thoughts, ideas around communicative intent. I’m going to open up this email, if that’s alright with you, as I read it out loud. So you had said, “I’m sure you’ve spoken about this countless times. Along with our mental health therapist, I am co-leading a support group for families with autistic kids. Something that came up last meeting was the concept that everything kids do has a communicative value. I think this is a really simple concept, but it seemed more challenging to go into depth about this with parents”. You’d said, “I’m wondering if there is a specific resource or podcast episode of yours that might help explain this concept to parents.”

I had shared with you that, yes, in fact, I do I have a podcast episode about this. It’s called Assuming Intentionality, Responding to Early Communication. And of course, so much of what I focus on here at Learn With Less® is with early intervention… Those earliest years of infancy and toddlerhood, zero to three. A lot is focused on parent education. Also educators and or therapists who are serving that population. This is both in a family centered approach or just the kids or just the parents. That was the nuts & bolts focus of that episode, but I want to hear anything that was helpful around listening.

Before we started recording, we started talking about how so much of looking at communicative intent and assuming intentionality, assuming that there is intent behind any action, essentially, is that it actually doesn’t matter what age the child is. You and I share a lot of experience, having worked with autistic kids. We’ve both worked with assistive technology, specifically augmentative & alternative communication.

Utilizing assistive technology within the realm of communication might look like a speech generating device that’s high tech. It might look like a picture based or visual communication system. You and I have both utilized things like that within our work. I want to hear what was helpful for you, specifically with your work, looking at the episode that I directed you to. Also, what else do you want to talk about?

Jess: Oh, man. Okay, so my favorite takeaway was that there is an evidence base for responsive parenting. I love being able to say, “this is what the science says” when parents are asking me questions about how to help their kids talk more. And that’s not something I’ve read into! I know that more responsive parents tend… I’ve just seen that that they tend, their children tend to communicate more.

That almost seems self evident, but to know that that is what the evidence shows was really good. I was like, Okay, I can look at this. I can be able to say that confidently, even if it seems obvious. This brings me to my questions that I want to talk about with you. Would you agree that it seems pretty obvious that responsive parents have more communication coming out of their kids? Does that seem to you an obvious thing, or was it a surprise to you? Or do you even agree with that?

Ayelet: In my own personal experiences, both as a mother & in my professional experiences as a speech language therapist. Yes, I have, I have found that to be the case. I think primarily the reason is because joint attention& and communicating for a social purpose of any kind… Turn taking begets more turn taking! Once we have that skill, we see that oh, I say something. You say something. I look at something. You look at something. I reach out for something. You name it. I hand it to you. You say, thank you.

It’s a continuous response, whether those responses are verbal or not. I think that is the piece. What I have found is that when any human feels heard, feels acknowledged and seen and supported, then they’re going to continue along that path. They’re they’re going to continue to have those attempts to to want more, because that is an innate human need.

Jess: Yeah, so here’s my question. Well, maybe it’s another question. My experience… all of that resonates with me. It feels very natural. It feels very human, like we are communicating to kids and validating what they communicate back.

What I’ve seen be a challenge is that sometimes… I feel like the challenge there is shifting the mindset of parents. And I’m wondering if my questions circle around that, specifically. What do you think gets in the way or prevents us, caregivers, parents, from recognizing that all communication has value. Recognizing that there is communicative intent happening. Like, what do you think gets in the way?

Ayelet: That is, what a great question.

Jess: Yeah, I thought, Okay, so why… that’s my pathology brain. Like, okay, we see a problem. Why?

Ayelet: Right? What is getting in the way? I love that. I think that could be the title of our episode!

Jess: Yes, what gets in the way? What prevents us from recognizing the communicative intent of children?

Ayelet: Yeah, well, many things. First of all, I think in many ways, a lot of it comes down to time, energy, effort, education, understanding. Not just about child development, but about actually sitting with and being with and recognizing, again, basic human needs. And I think that some of this is because we are very busy as humans, right?

We’re “keeping up with the Joneses,” whether or not we’ve opted out of multiple things. We are often trying to manage a home and a family. Maybe a co-parent or caregiver, and at least a job and all of the things. We want to feel like we have enough in a society that is built around needing to be more, do more, & buy more. So here’s the easy answer, we’re not going to be perfect. It’s impossible, right? This is a supremacist ideology.

I think that’s part of it. I also think a big part of it has to do with what we are told is communication. What is valid and valuable. There’s so much pressure on many parents and caregivers to be raising the best child possible. So many people in our society value academic language, politeness markers. I think that’s a big part of it, too.

So how that comes out often can be in the form of parents and caregivers sometimes sort of getting into that stuckness, of the interrogation: What’s this? What’s that, what’s this, what’s that? For the specific purpose of labeling, for this sort of performance: show me what you know. This, again, you’re not a bad parent for doing that. None of us are. I’ve done it!

Jess: I do it all the time!

Ayelet: We do it because we want our kids, our clients, to show us what they’re able to do, & to feel successful. Also, we want to make sure that we’re not just communicating for one specific purpose. We want to give our little people, or not so little people, in some cases, the opportunities to engage in communicative acts for a variety of purposes. Sometimes to protest, to request a social routine. Sometimes to greet, sometimes to acknowledge, sometimes to request an object – so many different pieces!

I think what’s really important is to recognize that all of those (and so many more!) communicative acts can be done without speaking a single actual word.

Jess: Absolutely.

Ayelet: That is an attuning, I think. For many parents & caregivers who are not thinking about how their often pre or non-speaking child is communicating. For an educator how their student, for instance, is communicating. They’re looking at a particular piece & not taking the time to ground themselves. Not taking the time to really look at all of the whole environment, themselves. At them as the respondent, what the setting is, what’s happening around them, what the child might be interested in.

I have an example, a memory that I have from when my own eldest was about a year old. I remember my mom was visiting. We had gone out to a meal, just the three of us. Myself, my child, and my mom. My kid was, at that time, very early stages, making one word utterances. He was reaching out, sort of pointing. Looking at somebody over in the restaurant. He said, “tah!” And I was like, oh, okay, yep, there’s a person over there. That’s their head, cool. And my mom, it was my mom, who realized, is he saying “hat?”

The person was not actually wearing hat, they were wearing a head scarf. It was just so interesting because, as you may know, my go to with anything is: anything can be a hat, right? So then we grab the napkin from the table. We’re putting it around our heads & saying, Oh, is this a hat? This is like a hat. It’s a scarf. And he said “tah!” again. He repeated his word! He’s switching the consonants, but he was saying it. He was saying hat.

Anyway, it just it was one of those experiences that you’re like, oh, wow, cool. This is a child who is absolutely paying attention to what’s happening. Is actually assigning a a symbolic language, a word. It’s a matter of looking at the environment, looking at the setting. Looking at what’s interesting to the child, looking at where the child is gesturing. Looking at how they’re doing it, what they might be commenting on.

Deducing, “detectiveing,” investigating what is happening here, and only then might you notice. And then we had a whole conversation about it, and we played with the napkin, and we… Yeah, it just like, what a what a lovely thing. And if my mom hadn’t been there, I would have missed it, right? So we’re never going to be able to get it all the time. That’s an important thing to say as well.

Jess: Yeah, I suppose, that perfectionism like, “Oh no, I missed it, It’s my fault.” One of my favorite books is “How to Talk So Kids Will Listen and Listen so Kids Will Talk.” There’s one for littles and one for older kids. That is one of their things. The best thing about being a parent is you have a million chances to do it again. You will never run out of chances to try again and do better.

I am not a parent. Sometimes, I think that’s a good perspective to have, because it makes me have more questions about parenting. But that’s absolutely true. I think that it’s really funny, actually. We started out today by slowing down and noticing. I think that is actually what the answer to my question is, to some degree. We got there. It honestly took only about 10 minutes to get to! We all live under a supremacist capitalist system that puts pressures on us. External pressures that we are all subject to, and it is challenging.

I really want to validate that to parents. It’s challenging to slow down and notice because you don’t always know! There’s a lot of that external pressure. One thing that I’ll do with parents, that I just started doing… I will have them playing with their kid. Playing in the way that (we know that it’s so much more than that), but also just play.

And I’ll just sit them down. I’ll give them a piece of paper & say: I just want you to write down what you notice. Just as a practice. Even then, parents are like, Oh no, it’s a test. I’m like, nope, not a test. This is just practicing noticing. It is a hard thing to do.

Ayelet: So hard, especially if you are not practiced in this.

Jess: Another thing that that came up for me in my “noticing practice,” which is also very new… If it’s hard, then find the smallest step that’s easy that you can do. If noticing is hard, maybe just trying to slow down for a millisecond, that’s all you can do. That’s fine. Again. It’s not about perfection.

Ayelet: It’s such an important piece of what we do. That slowing down, having dedicated time doing being in a practice of doing these things. It might be through play, through adding more language, just verbalizing, narrating, asking questions, answering your own rhetorical questions. Through musicality, whether it’s a rhythm or a nursery rhyme or a chant. Or play, or something you’re making up on the fly. Or whether it’s through movement, practicing visual awareness, perceptual awareness, practicing gross movement. Whether it’s a child with motor challenges. Or whether it’s a teeny tiny baby who is literally just trying to figure out where their body begins & ends in space. Whether it’s anybody in between.

All of these pillars within the context of Learn With Less® of play, talk, sing, move, are, to me, those kinds of interactions that really give the opportunity for parents and caregivers. Also for educators and therapists, to do that work. To slow down, to attend, to acknowledge, to investigate, to pay attention. For instance, in a Learn With Less® class, that is the majority of what a class is, for caregivers & babies.

Whether it’s happening through a song activity, it’s literally just the activity. Often it’s, all right, here’s a tune. You may be familiar with it. Now we’re going to just input a word for what you see your child doing. Maybe what you are doing, what the object is, what’s happening. Mabye how it feels, whatever it is. Find a word that is in the context of this. Those are the words you’re going to sing on or chant on.

That is such a major part of what myself and other Learn With Less® facilitators do. It gives that dynamic opportunity for caregivers to notice. To do that work, of purposefully engaging in that way. Of course, you can do that in a therapy session. You can do that with your own child. You can do that in a educational setting, whatever it is. But yeah, just as an example having that practice of slowing down. Being intentional as a caregiver or practitioner so that a child can know that that is valued here.

Jess: The words that come out of our mouth tell our kids what is valuable to us. I often… what I think… I don’t know how much time we have, and have so much I want to say about this! But I’ll just say that I find that one of the things I say over & over & over again when I talk to parents is… I want you to be thinking about directing their attention to where their child’s attention is.

I’m often working with kids who are older, non-speaking. We’re working on the same things. Trying to engage together and validate all communication. I have to work pretty hard to sometimes get parents to attend to what their child’s attending to. To join in, rather than pull their child away to something else. I started describing it as… I want you to imagine that your kid has a minor’s headlamp and it’s on whatever they’re focusing on.

Ayelet: I love that visual!

Jess: They’re wearing that hat. And any word coming out of your mouth, it better be about what’s in that light. I want you to fill their world with words that show that you are attending to what they’re attending to. For kids when we say they don’t pay attention, or they’re not coming over to play. I’m like, okay, that’s fine. Our job right now, going back to that investigator, detective is to know what they’re focusing on. To know where their attention is. To attend to that with the phenomenal blessing that is our language skills as mature adults. I say that a lot!

I think we’re already talking about the second question. What are the challenges that we have in shifting parent perspectives on this? We’re raised as we’re raised. We have our own experiences and expectations and different pressures on us from the world. A lot of valid fear from parents that if their kid doesn’t measure up, they will be subject to discrimination, harassment, violence.

Especially if, I mean, I’m white. Marginalized families absolutely have more reason to be worried about what might happen. To want their child to meet certain expectations. But I’ve had success in saying, what are they looking at? Only talk about that as simple as that, that’s our practice for today.

Ayelet: Yes! Also, parents ask all the time, how do I build my child’s attention skills?

Jess: Oh, I could talk about attention for days.

Ayelet: And that is, that’s how.

Jess: Oh my gosh, that’s how. That’s how. Guess what? Sorry, you’ve got to talk about cars. Sorry, it’s boring! You want to build your child’s attention skills. Shout out to anybody out there saying that you can’t do that with anything other than attending to things that you like… Because that’s how it works. But, yeah, you gotta, maybe you gotta talk about minions forever.

That’s how you build attention skills. I would say many of, if not most of the kids that I see. From a year and a half, all the way up to the oldest that I’ve seen… Attention is a component of it. That connects everything that we’re talking about today. When we talk about slowing down and noticing we are talking about resting our attention away from the million things out in the world and putting it on ourselves.

And that’s that’s hard, that’s really hard. But when we’re supporting that with our kids, with our language, we’re helping them have the language to do that for themselves.

Ayelet: Does that feel complete, Jess? I mean, for now?

Jess: We could talk about all this stuff that I want to talk about. I feel like that’s yeah, that specific note, anyway, yeah, for sure, yeah.

Ayelet: I want to talk about the fact that every one deserves a communication as a human right. Everyone deserves access to communication… To being heard. Whether that is your literal words, whether that is your viewpoints. Whether that is your narrative, what you are experiencing in the world.

I think when we as healthcare, educational professionals are talking about the importance of this and not speaking out about those who are not receiving access to that, whose whose narratives, whose stories are not being told or are not being heard or are being gaslit, then we are doing a real disservice. You and I started to engage and interact one on one together through work around collective liberation and Palestinian human rights. I wonder, how can we connect these two things? Because they are absolutely related.

Jess: Yeah, a couple of things. A, it is our job to as as much for our patients and our clients and our families. It is our job to be informed and be able to connect the dots for them.

It is our job as people who live in the West, people who have privilege, to educate ourselves so that we can connect the dots. We have access to so much information, I believe we are required to do that. To lean in to when we notice that there’s perhaps a gap in our knowledge. Perhaps a disconnect between our values and our actions. That gets into real discomfort. I think that that’s probably something we’ve all experienced to a small degree.

But when you practice medicine, as we do… If you work in education, if you work, gosh, in so many different areas, you swear to some values in medicine. We say that those values are universal. Like you said, communication is a human right.

We have to be able to step back and be able to recognize that if we have these values and yet, we are able to look away from people whose rights are being violated in ways as horrific as genocide… We have to be able to introspect about why that is, and understand what that might tell us about us.

Not that it makes us awful, bad, nasty people. It makes us people who live in a world, and work on that. I believe that’s required of us, as well. It’s not fun. And another thing that I’ll share with you that’s just directly read from my therapy. Speaking up and doing the right things, speaking up for rights, for human rights, for communication, for health care, for access to food and water, for the right to simply tell your own story. Doing the right thing doesn’t get you claps. It doesn’t get you cookies.

Ayelet: And often comes at a cost.

Jess: It often does. I was raised in a church, Protestant. I grew up with the mythology of Jesus who did all the right things. The mythology of what happened to that person. We have a very good example here in Christian culture. I’m atheist now, but that’s something most of us know.

And yet I think that we think that it should be easy to connect the dots. To notice those uncomfortable things. To have those uncomfortable conversations, and it’s not. And that’s okay, and it’s okay, like you said, to not be perfect with it. I think that’s maybe another really important one.

Ayelet: One of the things that is just feeling very alive in me, and that’s coming up from what you’re talking about, too, that very much connects all of this, is the idea of dehumanization. The idea of all communication being valid, all bodies being valid.

When we only value certain people, certain neurotypes, certain bodies, certain lineages, certain ethnicities, certain identities, that is how we dehumanize others. And unless we understand that, in the case of a child who is either pre verbal or non speaking, that all of that is valid. There is value in all of those humans and all of those modes and modalities of communication.

When we prioritize one over another, or only value one over another, that is how we end up in hierarchy. In systematic oppression and oppressive tendencies. And so until we are doing that work of understanding that base level of, “what is the ideology? What do we believe about certain people versus certain others?” Unless we’ve done that hard work, then we’re never going to see even the level of dehumanization that’s possible.

Jess: That is a really good point, that all of these ideologies come from somewhere. None of them are natural. They’re learned. They’re all learned. And that undoing that starts with the relationships we have around each other. What more important relationship than when you have with your family and your children?

Ayelet: Yeah, your community.

Jess: It’s really hard to talk about. I find it really hard to talk about what I do and how I’m trying to help families without talking about big stuff. I think that that means that I’m doing it right. Even if it feels like I don’t quite know where it’s going. Sometimes I feel like… I don’t know if I said it already today, but that we’re pathologists for a reason.

Our job is to figure out what is the source of the problems… Rather than spot treating like what’s the root cause of what we’re seeing. And that’s a lot, and if we work on that, it’s a lot more efficient. Yes, and that applies to the culture we live in and the world we’re in.

Ayelet: Absolutely. What else would you like to talk about here today, Jess?

Jess: I’ve got one more metaphor for you, if you want it, that I use a lot. Let’s see, the questions that I wrote down, we pretty much covered.

In shifting parents framework, another thing that has been helpful is to talk about what speech therapy for articulation is, which is what we often people think of as speech therapy. Get them to say it right, which is a thing that I do and do quite well.

But that’s quite different than communication therapy, if you want to call it that. And I describe them as different in that working on sounds is like kind of being a car mechanic. They got some… not broken pieces, but pieces that aren’t working quite right and need a little jiggle, tinkering. With the right approach, I can reach in and just fix it, six months or so.

I can do that versus supporting a child’s language development, which is a wholly different thing. And I describe that as gardening, because can you pull a plant out of the ground? Can you force it to grow? No, you have plants, and maybe a certain plant is struggling. If you want it to grow, you have to make that ground be as fertile as humanly possible.

Ayelet: You have to shift the environment. Tend to the environment. Make sure it’s in the right setting. Look at the context for everything. Give it the right amount of attention for it to thrive. And you are good with these metaphors!

Jess: Another thing I was going to ask you about. So we’re talking about recognizing communicative intent and all of this stuff that ties back into like culture and expectations. I lived in the Pacific Northwest for my whole life. White English speaking, European ancestors. Very much like a monoculture here.

I had a parent tell me when I was talking about some of this. Talking about descriptive language or something like that, parallel narrative talk and all that stuff. And she was like, Oh yeah, that’s what we do all the time. We’re Japanese. And I realized, I don’t know how much of this is just particular to my culture! I’m wondering if there are cultural differences, or, I mean, cultures that do this differently or better, or maybe we don’t know at all.

Ayelet: I mean, I think what I tend to look at, or what I’ve noticed the most, are different kinds of patterns more around… Well, okay, a couple things. One is, I look a lot around at what kinds of caregiver relationships there are available to a child. Whether it’s just a nuclear family, or an extended family where you have lots of different adult and child or peer relationships. That’s something that I think you find often with more immigrant experiences. Or folks who are closer to an immigrant experience, regardless of, for instance, where family is from.

And then another piece is looking at trauma! What is available to a caregiver in terms of how much of themselves can be present and attentive. I mean, that is a huge piece. It can come out in some moments and not others. But definitely is connected to the ways that we watch family dynamics play out.

Jess: That’s actually, it’s maybe that’s a nice button. That’s making me think of the reason that I reached out to you about communicative intent. It’s what you just said about trauma, because my clinic, we’re very small, but we got a grant. We’re able to pay ourselves and some childcare folks to do a support group for families of autistic kids. They can come and bring their kids. We put them in one corner of the building. Everybody else hangs out.

We turn the lights off when everybody gets to sit on the squishy pillows. It’s great, and it’s led by a mental health therapist. I wasn’t quite sure what it was going to look like. It is basically an hour of stress management techniques, just basics.

Ayelet: That’s great.

Jess: It is. And I’m thinking about what you just said about trauma and again, root causes. If we’re trying to work on what’s the root cause of difficulty, being able to slow it down or having the time to notice that’s a huge part. Not everybody has access to the support for that. But that is why we’re talking today.

Ayelet: Yeah. And that absolutely is something that, number one can get in the way. It has the potential to get in the way of that connection, of seeing the communication in of itself. Also just gets in the way in general, between humans. When we don’t have access to the tools to reconcile, repair, heal, face traumatic experiences in our own lives… We are essentially bound to either get into similar experiences. We are bound to repeat them on ourselves, or enact them on others. Heavy stuff, heavy stuff, the stuff of life.

Jess: The stuff of life. It is the human experience.

Ayelet: Thanks so much. Jess, what a great conversation. I can’t wait to hear what other folks are taking away from this.

Jess: Oh my gosh, this is like giving me so many other good questions and food for thought, too. Thank you.

Ayelet: I love connecting with other professionals and listening to how they explain similar concepts! There’s always another little key ingredient that we can take away from each other. There’s so much value in having that sort of network of support listening to each other.

Jess: We get so siloed, it’s the classic speech pathologist thing. I really appreciate this. This has been wonderful!

Ayelet: Thank you for sharing so much of yourself here.

Jess: You too!

Ayelet: Yeah, thanks. All right, let’s leave it there.

The post What Gets In The Way of Recognizing That All Communication Has Value? An episode with Jess Burchiel, M.A., CCC-SLP appeared first on Learn With Less.