Narrative Language Intervention: Interview with Douglas Petersen Part Two - Ep. 024

Tune in to hear the rest of our interview with narrative language guru Doug Petersen, co-creator of Story Champs. Doug describes how Story Champs grew organically from the research they did, what comes in the Story Champs kit, and how to use it. The progress monitoring tools that come with Story Champs check comprehension, inferences, language structures, phonemic awareness and decoding—simply and quickly!

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Free Download: Connecting Words Bingo
Language Dynamics Group - Story Champs

Music: Simple Gifts performed by Ted Yoder, used with permission

Transcript

Douglas: The demand got to a point where we had to take our research, this is key, right? We had to take our research and turn it into something that individuals could use on the ground.

Denise: Hi, I'm Denise Stratton, pediatric speech-language pathologist. And welcome to The Mindful SLP, the show that explores simple tools for powerful outcomes. Today, we're continuing our discussion on narrative language with my guest, Douglas Petersen. We're going to replay just a minute or two of where we ended the podcast last week. We're coming in just as Doug is describing why he and Trina Spencer created Story Champs.

Douglas: Trina Spencer and I did not start out thinking we're going to make Story Champs. It was instead this process of where we are going to research narrative based narrative language intervention, expository language intervention, and then we started finding really strong results. And of course we did this in collaboration with many other researchers as well, including the Gillums, then we started reporting the results and presenting the results. And so then speech language pathologists and educators, because this is a multi-tiered system of support. This is Story Champs is designed to be used for large classrooms, small group, individual, and so forth. The demand got to a point where we had to take our research, this is key, right? We had to take our research and turn it into something that individuals could use on the ground. And so that's really where Story Champs came from. And I was very fortunate too, to be married to someone who is a phenomenal graphic designer and knows marketing. And, uh, and so of course, really that's how all of this happened.

Denise: So what came out of it was a Story Champ kit. So let's talk about what's in the Story Champ kit and, and online resources too. So that's what I love, especially when I was doing teletherapy last year, I had your online resources, which was great, but what's in the kit?

Douglas: Yeah. Sure. So, um, in the kit you have several master lesson plans that will walk you through how to work with children in the large group setting, in, in a tier one setting, how to help children in a small group and even how to do individualized instruction, step-by-step instructions, um, semi scripted and individuals who know what they're doing in language intervention, abandoned that script very quickly as they should. But it's scripted there for some individuals who have much less experience with language intervention, like some, uh, general education teachers, paraprofessionals. Um, so you have those master lesson plans. You also have several stories that are constructed with different levels of complexity within each story. So a level A story targets just the very basic story grammar. A level C story starts to embed causal terms and a level D story embeds temporal terms and so forth.

And then things start to get really, really ratchet up in the complexity, to where you get to a level I story, which has the whole kitchen sink in there, adverbs, adjectives, everything. So you have the, those sets of stories along with the master lesson plans, and then you have icons which represent the story grammar elements. So the setting, the initiating event, or a problem, the attempt consequence so forth, and then also in the kit are things that are, are designed to help maintain the attention of children, especially in uh, small group for one, children can play games like bingo. And while one child is telling the story, the other children are playing the game to keep them active.

There are things called champ checks, which is what's used at the large group level where even though the teacher has, you know, 15 to 30 students in front of them, the children still have the opportunity through peer mentoring to talk, to tell the story to each other. And that's a key ingredient as I've mentioned, right. But in addition to that, we have lots of online resources. Story Champs is digital. You can do it distance, vocabulary expository, fictional narration. There are materials to support all, all of those things.

Denise: And when I was doing digital, so your stories were online, which was great. And then for their own stories I found, open up the whiteboard on zoom or whatever, draw your five boxes, use their stamps and use their pencil to draw a little character down there, a heart, a star, right, everything, and then you just have to kind of get good with a pencil and draw their story and you save it.

And then you can erase those parts. So they're doing the scaffolding, retell of their own story. It looks, it worked really, really well. I was so grateful for it. You know, when I had to teletherapy.

Douglas: I love it. I love it. And it's okay that you're, uh, if you're a horrible artist, it doesn't matter. Right? Like, so when a child, when a child is making up their own story, you're supposed to draw something fairly quickly so that the focus is not on the drawing. Really, that's just another icon essentially to sort of represent that part.

Denise: I'm all about stick figures, but yes, but earlier this week a little boy was telling me about how his, he was waiting for his father to come home. It was his tell, kind of like the grandma's story, um, his retell um, his dad was like, he finally got home and they got to play horsey and trying to draw him on his dad's back. And his dad on his head. I do something like a tent with a beard. And it was really, I gave him the post-it and I gave him the pencil and said, you try it, and he did, and it looked better than mine. So, you know, there you go. Give the pencil to the child if you can't do it.

Douglas: Yeah. And just be careful with that though, right. Because then they will really want to try to make that, that picture beautiful. And they'll spend so much time.

Denise: Oh yeah. He didn't care about that, but some kids do. And you do have to watch that you've got your born artists who will take for ever. Yeah. Yeah. It's knowing your client. Exactly. And the writing resources, I have used those so much. So you've got one, it's just got the basic rough draft and it's got the little icons there. So as the child writes a story or their story, or even summarizing a book, they don't get lost.

Douglas: Right, yeah. And we, we thought originally when we started doing research on writing outcomes, we thought the writing outcome would be this distal measure. Like we, we thought, oh, we'll probably get some sort of growth in writing through oral narrative language intervention, but we weren't sure what we would get.

And we were really shocked to see just how tightly connected those two things were at least for the studies that we've done so far with young children. So when you improve their ability to produce oral language, That seems to at least, now it's preliminary of course, but it sure seems to transfer to their writing very quickly and almost directly.

So like you asked them to retell a story and then as long as they've got the mechanics of writing down, you ask them to write that story down, they can write as well as they talk. It seems to be the case that it's hard for them to write beyond their ability to talk, at least the young ones. Right? Yeah.

So, um, so the relationship there is so tight that that's been a lot of fun to see.

Denise: I love using that resource. So last but not least. So with the purchase of Story Champs, there was a little folder there where you get the, your online download with a screener called cubed phonemic awareness, I think is what you're calling it screen. And there's so many, we got phonological awareness, phonemic awareness, phonological processing all these terms, but what is that all about?

Douglas: Yeah, that's great. That's that's such a great question. Um, so, so Story Champs is just part of the puzzle, you need to also monitor progress every time and make sure that what you're doing is effective.

And so in conjunction with Story Champs, there is a progress monitoring tool called the cubed and the cubed has two major subtests. It has one that measures decoding or code related skills and the other measures language related skills, like comprehension. So one's called the DDM, the dynamic decoding measures, and the other sub test is called NLM, the narrative language measures.

So what happens is, is you the, the cubed is designed to directly inform instruction. So you administer the narrative language measures to children. For example, you ask them to retell a story model a story. They tell it back to you and it's designed so that you score it in real time, as they're telling you the story. So it's incredibly efficient. It takes just a couple of minutes or so to do, and it gives you information on their ability to include story grammar, elements, and some important language complexity features. And we also have comprehension questions in there, we also measure a child's ability to infer the meaning of tier two words, words that are particularly complex or unusual.

So we get that information. And then also on the side, what you were talking about, we have the dynamic decoding measures, which does assess phonemic awareness. It assesses a child's ability to identify letter sounds and irregular words. And we're not talking about irregular words, like, can they memorize these words, but instead how well can they decode these words that are, that are well spelled irregularly.

And then also in the DDM sub test, there is a dynamic assessment of decoding where you measure a child's ability to decode, or I should say recode nonsense words. And then at any point it's hard for them, you teach them how to read those words and then you do a post-test and you measure not just what they know, but how difficult it is for them to learn, to read at that particular level.

So that gives you information, both static, like what they can read, and it also gives you information on their response to intervention. And so the all of those things combine, to give you an idea of both sides of the coin of reading, of decoding and comprehension and what specifically needs to be targeted. And I just want to add one more thing. It is designed to meet the requirements of a multi-tiered system of support, incredibly efficient, reliable, valid, easy to administer and score and so forth.

Denise: And it pulls out of that piece of how well can they listen to sounds and manipulate them in their head, which Dr. David Kilpatrick writes about in his book which I love, Equipped For Reading Success, is the program that I use actually in conjunction with some other things I do. Equipped For Reading Success starts higher than a lot of my clients can't access, but once they are ready for that, I use that.

But yeah, I've been amazed at how poor some children are at remembering sounds and being able to retain them in their mind and be able to manipulate them, so I love that you address that also, because there are lots of parts to this reading and writing.

Douglas: Oh, absolutely. And I think that, I think it's fairly well established that a core characteristic of an individual with developmental language disorder is a phonological processing disorder. Right. Whether you're a procedural deficit hypothesis person or whatever it might be, we do know it goes back to the brain to this, this work, this working memory, phonological loop, phonological processing factor. We are finding that when it comes to language, going in and targeting. Uh, directly this, this phonological processing doesn't seem to work nearly as well as targeting it through a contextualized approach, right, like through narratives. I'm not suggesting that's the case though for phonemic awareness, which allows you to manipulate the individual sounds, right, that you hear. But as far as language is concerned, the programs that seem to decontextualize things and have children just focus on processing sounds that the evidence is not out there to support that for improving oral language.

Denise: But nursery rhymes and things like that, those are contextualized.

Douglas: Well, right, and it's within that umbrella of phonological awareness, right? So you start out with rhyming, which doesn't necessarily have a very strong connection to literacy development, believe it or not, it seems to be those precursor though, to phonemic awareness, right? This phonological, more bigger umbrella, which then you start focusing on phonemic awareness as quickly as you can. This is from what I understand, as I read through the literature.

Denise: IF you have phonemic awareness, certain level, you can rhyme. So if a child can't rhyme, I'm always thinking, hey, well why not?

Douglas: Yes. No harm at all in learning how to rhyme. No, that develops the phonological awareness. There's no doubt.

Denise: Yeah. So it seems to me that there's a, there's a real memory thing there with sounds. Yeah. Thank you so much for telling us all this about narrative language. Um, just take a minute and talk about how people can find Story Champs.

Douglas: Sure. Yes. So you can find Story Champs at language dynamics group.com. This language dynamics group.com website, it disseminates Story Champs, the cubed assessment is free to download, that doesn't cost anything at all. On that website, you can access all of the research that we've been doing with, with all of these things related to narratives, expository progress monitoring, and tiered interventions.

Denise: So the theme of this podcast, which I call The Mindful SLP, is when you master the simple, the complex takes care of itself. And it seems to me that the Story Champs is one of the best examples of the truth of that statement, stripping stories down to their simplest format, teaching this structure and gradually adding complexity, you end up not needing to directly teach a lot of things that kind of take care of themselves.

Story champs is worth. Every penny I spent, you might look at other language programs out there and think, ah, Story Champs sounds a little bit spendy compared to that, but it is so worth it. And some of the other things I bought, like I say, like Granny's Candies, languish in the closet. For those of you listeners out there, I highly recommend get Story Champs.

Well, this wraps up our podcast for today. So thank you for joining us in April, which is Autism Awareness Month, one of the subjects I'll be talking about is how I use Story Champs with clients who have autism. I'm super excited to share the results I've seen with you SLPs who are listening. Until next time, remember when you master the simple, the complex takes care of itself.

Before we sign off today. I want to give Doug a huge thank you for taking time to talk to us. I also want to mention a couple of resources I have for storytelling. There are a couple of critical language structures in storytelling that really take your clients to the next level.

One is conjunctions or connecting words as I like to call them. The other is mental verbs. Yeah, in case you're wondering what in the world is a mental verb, mental verbs are those words that describe internal thoughts, like decided, wanted, remembered, and so on. Can you imagine how your client's stories would level up in complexity with mental verbs?

Sometimes all they need is a reminder of which mental verbs to use and more practice. That's why I love to use Mental Verbs Bingo. And if you head over to my free resource library, you can get a copy. You can also get a copy of the Connecting Words Bingo I put up last week. You'll find both of those at slpproadvisor.com slash free, that's SLP proadvisor.com/free.

Dan: Thank you for listening to The Mindful SLP. We hope you found some simple tools that will have optimal outcomes in your practice. This podcast is sponsored by SLP pro-advisor. Visit SLP pro-advisor dot com for more. Including Impossible R Made Possible, Denise's highly effective course for treating those troublesome Rs.

A link is in the show notes. If you enjoyed this podcast, please give us a five-star rating and tell your fellow SLPs. And please let us know what you think. Join the conversation at SLP pro-advisor.com.