The MCIULearns Podcast
The MCIU Learns podcast is where education leaders, innovators, and experts share insights and best practices to elevate learning and empower schools. Each episode features thought-provoking conversations with thought leaders, presenters, and program directors from Montgomery County Intermediate Unit (MCIU) and beyond. Whether we’re discussing cutting-edge programs, professional development strategies, or the latest trends in education, our goal is to inspire and build capacity in educators, administrators, and all those passionate about improving student outcomes.
The MCIULearns Podcast
Unraveling the Intersection of Speech Pathology and Behavior Analysis with Dr. Barbara Esch
Dr. Barbara Esch, a trailblazer in the fields of speech pathology and behavior analysis, joins us to unravel her unique journey to becoming a distinguished expert in her field. Our discussion delves into the synergy between speech pathology and behavior analysis, highlighting her contributions alongside pioneers like Dr. Richard Sheffelbush and insights from her collaboration with Dr. Mark Sundberg.
We explore the impact of interdisciplinary collaboration, showcasing how integrating behavioral and speech pathology frameworks can yield powerful outcomes. Visit learn.mciu.org/esch24 and join us for a hands-on workshop with Dr. Barbara Esch as she introduces the Early Echoic Skills Assessment and Program Planner (EESAPP). Learn how to assess early speech skills, analyze syllable complexity, and use data to build effective speech acquisition programs.
how can we help ourselves figure out which priorities are the ones that are most likely to be beneficial to the learner?
Speaker 2:Hello Montgomery County, welcome to the MCIU Learns Podcast. My name is Brandon Langer. I'm the Director of Innovation and Strategic Partnerships at the Montgomery County Intermediate Unit in Norristown, pennsylvania. This is our conversation with ed leaders, thought leaders, people working in the space of education to improve outcomes on behalf of students and with students, and with families and communities. We have another awesome conversation to have today, an upcoming event to share with all of you that we hope you'll take part in. But before we do that, I want to give everybody an opportunity to introduce themselves, including my two colleagues from Organizational and Professional Learning, so I will hand it off and let them introduce themselves.
Speaker 3:Hi everyone. I'm Cassie Bruch. I'm a project consultant here at the Office of Organizational and Professional Learning and one of the many hats that I wear is the role of special education, specifically in the work of autism, and I'm joined by my autism counterpart.
Speaker 4:And hello everybody. I'm Keri Kessler and I'm also a project consultant in the area of autism. Today, we are so fortunate to be joined by Dr Barbara Esch, who is going to talk to us about some of her work and the upcoming event she's going to be doing at our MCIU building, barbara.
Speaker 1:Hi, well, thanks everybody for having me. I'm Barb Esch. I live in Kalamazoo, Michigan. We were just talking about what a great fall day it is at the time of today's podcast. I am primarily doing consulting now and lots of trainings. I was a speech pathologist and then got into behavior analysis. I think we'll talk a little bit about that. I am now sort of running around the countryside giving trainings on the ESAP, which is a test that I wrote, and we'll be talking about it today. I'm really excited also that we're going to be doing a training in Pennsylvania soon.
Speaker 2:So, barbara, I'll go ahead and get us started. You mentioned how your career started. How did you get rolling and what led you to become a speech pathologist, and what led you to become a speech pathologist?
Speaker 1:Well, I was sitting as an undergrad in a phys ed class one day and the gal sitting next to me I said what's your major? And she said speech pathology. And I said what's that? And so I ended up taking a class. It sounded pretty compelling and I really liked it. It was very detailed, things like phonetics and learning about the science of how people produce sound and how it kind of all fits together to turn into language. There was a lot of medical detail, a lot of interesting things to learn about the physiology of the body and the brain, and I found that really interesting. And then also there were just a ton of possibilities of where I could work. I could work with babies, children, adolescents, adults, older adults, and I have worked with all of those populations. But I think the thing that really got me hooked on speech pathology was that at the time and this was back in the previous century, previous century I was also taking classes here in Kalamazoo at Western Michigan University, where I was an undergrad, taking classes from the psych department, which was totally behavioral, almost totally behavioral, and you know I had a rat lab and I was learning really how to change behavior of some sort of an animal, sometimes human animals and sometimes non-human animals. And I found out that speech pathology at the time a lot of the treatments were based on behavior analysis. I really kind of like that marriage of those two. I really kind of like that marriage of those two.
Speaker 1:One excellent example is the Parsons Language Project that was subsequently did in language, language assessment and language teaching. So there was a speech pathologist at the University of Kansas named Dr Richard Sheffelbush. At the time he sort of proposed this outrageous plan to address the needs of people who at the time were called mentally retarded. And this was a real big deal because nobody, no profession at the time, thought that this population of people could learn to speak. And so he got this group of people together, including behavior analysts from KU. They started to collaborate and set up this Parsons Hospital, this language project to teach this population of people. I want to read you this from a newsletter at the time that I thought was kind of interesting time that I thought was kind of interesting. This is a quote from this newsletter at KU about Shufflebush and his work.
Speaker 1:The Kansas group contended that what they called the language behavior of children, which was after BF Skinner's 1957 book Verbal Behavior. They contended that this language behavior could be analyzed, measured and changed. I know it sounds crazy now, but it was a new thing at the time. In short, they were suggesting that it might be possible for children with even severe mental retardation and almost no language to learn to communicate if the precepts of behavioral psychology were applied correctly. I found that really interesting and, believe it or not, these two groups of people played nicely in the sandbox at the very beginning of what was really the beginning of both of these professions. I'm really encouraged to see that people are very interested in collaborating collaboration between speech pathologists and behavior analysts, as well as with a lot of other professions.
Speaker 4:Wow, that is some history. That's very cool. I always think it's like they talk about in the Marvel movies, these origin stories. Not that I watched that many of those movies, but nonetheless I think it's always interesting to hear how people got started, Kind of like when you're like how did you meet your significant other? So thank you for that. That gives us such a good another. So thank you for that. That gives us such a good link into that. So you touched on a little bit about the VB map work and getting involved with Dr Sundberg a little bit, but can you talk a little bit more about maybe that early ESA work, that early VB map and whatnot, and then feel free to pivot into the changes that you have created and now have the ESAP.
Speaker 1:At the time that my husband was getting his PhD in behavior analysis at Western Michigan University, mark Sundberg was still there. He was, I think, finishing up he may have already finished and was teaching some classes, but so I met Mark at the time because I tagged along with my husband, john, to a lot of his classes. I found them really interesting. It was fun to sit in on these wonderful classes, like Jack Michael's verbal behavior class and a class that at the time Jack Michael called Skinner's Recent Writings. Of course Skinner hasn't written anything recently so they don't call it that anymore, but it was really just an exciting, exciting place to be back in the 80s, early 80s, late 70s, and so at the time Mark was doing a lot, beginning to do a lot of language work. He was working at kind of setting up much of the beginnings of the Croydon Avenue school that serviced people with disabilities. So a lot of language research came from Croydon Avenue and from that whole project. Because I knew Mark, I started going to some of the talks that he was giving, some of the workshops, and I'm sure that I asked some irritating questions because at the time my background in speech pathology the conceptual theoretical basis for speech pathology is not behavioral. The treatments are often based on behavior analysis, but there is sort of this schism, this mismatch between the theoretical and conceptual basis, which is largely cognitive or structural or linguistic, and there's nothing wrong with that, but it doesn't easily follow. Treatments don't follow easily from that conceptual basis, and so Mark would talk about things in ways that to me seemed super simplified. You know, I was very interested in trying to make it work, but I was trying to sort of fit the square peg in a round hole, trying to fit these two models together. Because you know, as we know, from a behavioral perspective, behavior analysis has a theoretical perspective, a conceptual basis, and from that follows our treatments, our interventions. It's all pretty neat and clean. I had a lot to learn. I started talking to Mark and he was just as gracious as he could possibly be with me and patient with a lot of these questions, and so he was beginning somewhere along the line to write.
Speaker 1:Co-author the Ables. There was an echoic section in the Ables that I felt was too abbreviated and I voiced that opinion to Mark and he said, when he started working on the next iteration, which was the VB map, he said so you know how you felt that you know that this the ECHOIC section why don't you write an assessment specific to ECHOIC skills? And I was still in grad school at the time it was I don't know 2003, not like I didn't have anything to do, but I was so excited to be invited to participate on any kind of a project with Mark Sundberg so I really knuckled down and started trying to figure out, you know, what could we do to assess echoic skills? This was really at the beginning of a lot of the verbal behavior research. It was a little bit more difficult than it is now to try to figure out what to put in such an assessment, what to put in this test that might be what people needed and that might be user-friendly and not too, you know, speechy. Because I knew that the VB map was going to be targeted to behavior analysts primarily. I don't think that that's necessarily the case anymore. I know tons of speech pathologists that find it very useful. So here I'm pivoting.
Speaker 1:What appeared in the first ESA, the early ECHOIC skills assessment, in the VB MAP, was a one-page assessment of five groups of categories of things that I thought we could find out if people could echo, and the first three categories, or first three groups had to do with syllables and then the second two groups.
Speaker 1:Groups four and five had to do with prosody, sort of the music of language, not the consonants and the vowels, not the syllables, but the intonation, the loudness, the quietness, the syllable stress, so that we could find out whether or not people could echo information like prosodic, information that was sort of above or extra to the syllables themselves. So an example is if I say I flew in from Boston yesterday, that's a sentence with a bunch of consonants and vowels and it's a string of syllables, but if I emphasize one of those words, I'm giving you extra information. So if I say I flew in from Boston yesterday, I'm emphasizing the word flew and right away, without me giving any other information. You know that I didn't drive, and so that's what I was trying to get at with in that original one page ISA, in the original VB map.
Speaker 2:Can I ask a follow up question there, because you're describing this and I'm wondering why that matters so much.
Speaker 1:Well, that was the key point. I decided that it didn't matter right now. People started using the ESA and I was doing trainings on that first ESA I realized that the population of children or I call them early speech learners so they weren't always children, Sometimes they were people in their teens or twenties, but they were still an early speaker because they hadn't developed this fluent repertoire of stringing consonants and vowels together in long syllable strings. So I realized that that's what we really needed to know more about and focus on, and once a learner, an early speaker, could speak fluently, regardless of whether every consonant or vowel was perfect, it didn't seem to me that this prosody or emphasis and intonation and stress was a high priority. Anecdotally, that's what we see happening. We don't usually see monotone, robotic speech on the part of. They've learned to produce fluent strings of consonants and vowels, and so that's why I wanted to revise it and really expand it and teach clinicians about what I call syllable complexity. What I call syllable complexity that let's not worry about teaching one sound at a time, like buh, buh, buh, or say shh, or say ooh or something like that, because there's not a lot of stuff that you can reinforce functionally With early speakers, one of the first things that happens is that they develop this skill called co-articulation.
Speaker 1:It's kind of in the interest of maintaining speed, which our verbal community highly values, we give up a little bit of precision and so, for example, with the word education, it's not really education, it's ed-ucation, ed-ucation. But we don't say it that way, maybe in British English, but in American English it goes very, very fast and we are we a verbal community are really tolerant of sort of in imprecisions that are acceptable. They're not perfect, but they're acceptable in the interest of maintaining fluency and speed. This is something that I've been focusing on in a lot of the trainings trying to align the training that we're doing with early speakers with what typically developing speakers sound like, and nobody is spending their time with a typical toddler trying to teach them prosodic. You know, intonation or loudness or you know. It just sort of is part of what gets reinforced in the echoic episode.
Speaker 3:Thank you so much for all that background. I know this is making me very excited about the workshop that's coming up. I've learned so much from you already. Who do you think would benefit the most from attending this workshop?
Speaker 1:Anybody that feels responsible for teaching somebody to speak that's not speaking yet. You know, the question often comes up who owns the right to teach language? I don't know how analogous this is, but there are a lot of things that I know about a car. I have a driver's license and I've been trained to drive a car hire. But there are a lot of things about cars that I don't know and I would be remiss if I tried to sort of fix something that I don't know anything about. You know that those efforts are not likely to get reinforced. So I think it's on all of us to sort of check ourselves, figure out you know, what can I offer as part of an inter-collaborative team, an interdisciplinary team? What can I offer and what maybe do I need to beef up?
Speaker 3:Thank you so much for that. Registration is still open for our workshop with Dr Esch. It'll be two days, so the first day is a full day on October 29. And then the second day is a half day virtual, which will allow people to come and ask questions and just get some more coaching and information after they've had time to start to implement. This workshop is open to anybody. That is why we also have a virtual option for that full day, so if you cannot come to us in person that day, you can join us virtually for both sessions. It is free to our member districts. In addition to Act 48 credits, we are also offering ASHA CEUs. If you go to learnmciuorg, slash ESH24, so that's E-S-C-H-2-4, to learn more and to register, every Montgomery County School District that registers for this training will receive one set of materials for free.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thanks, Cassie, and thank you, Dr Esch, for I mean honestly, gosh, I want to pick your brain. Both of my students have gone through speech, One of them still involved, and were heavily involved. You asked you know who is responsible for teaching language and the conversations we've been having with my wife? You know about keeping my son on track and doing that. I'll definitely be stopping by, you know, for your session later this month, but, gosh, there's just so many questions that you so many different topics you touched on in that short period. I know the session is going to be awesome. I know there's going to be a lot to take away from that.
Speaker 2:I love what you called out there at the end, though, that this is a term that gets thrown around our office and our organization. A lot is interdependency, that this is not upon one person to do all of this. It's about leveraging where everybody's expertise and talents come into play in order to maximize an outcome for a student. I feel like that's what you're alluding to, and I really got a great picture of what you're doing with the ESA and how that fits into this equation in order to continue to make that outcome happen. So thank you so much for joining us today you so much for joining us today.
Speaker 1:Yes, thanks, I think those are really helpful. Yeah, what everybody does and how they do it, when you have different people with different theoretical and conceptual training, that can be problematic in terms of sort of everybody getting on the same page, and you know you can't wish this problem away. You have to figure out ways to come to some sort of a consensus. How can we help ourselves figure out which priorities are the ones that are most likely to be beneficial to the learner?
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely so. Once again, thanks for hopping on with us today. Thank you, carrie and Cassie, for bringing this awesome opportunity to the IU. Just to reiterate what Cassie said, that full session is still open for registration. For the October 29th session. You can go to learnmciuesh24. We'll put the link in the description of the podcast as well, if you haven't listened to our podcast before. Learnmciuorg is our MCIU Learning Network. There's a lot up there about all of our offerings other podcasts, conversations, blogs, everything that you could possibly imagine in terms of the world of education. The ever-e, ever evolving landscape is there for your open digestion, for anybody. Thank all three of you for joining me today, for today's conversation, and we'll look forward to seeing you later this month. Dr Ash, thank you.
Speaker 3:Thank you, thank you, thank you you.