Ep. 48: Five Ways to Presume Competence
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What is “presuming competence” and why does it matter for SLPs?
What's up everyone and welcome to Making the Shift.
We're an SLP couple from California with three boys and a passion for finding better ways to support autistic kids.
I'm Chris. You might know me as Speech Dude. I'm a neurodivergent high school SLP and the creator of the Dynamic Assessment of Social Emotional Learning and I specialize in crafting neurodiversity affirming IEPs through my online course.
And I'm Jessie, a sensory integration trained SLP, owner of a top-rated clinic in Los Angeles, and the creator of the Inside Out sensory communication programs for parents and therapists. Join us weekly to learn neurodiversity-affirming ways to support social-emotional development and regulation in autistic kids.
Are you ready to make the shift? Let's do it. Well, hello, everyone, and welcome to our live show. And our podcast, as you can probably see, Jesse's not with me on this. I am doing a solo show. We are going to jump in to a core principle that frames a neurodiversity-affirming IEP. Now, this core principle is also key to IEP. the way a therapist frames their goals, the way a psychologist might frame a report, the way a therapy approach might be at a private practice. So this is a really valuable one. I think you're going to love this episode. Before we jump into that though, fairly recently we had Easter and I hope that you all for that weekend had an enjoyable one. We had the children hunt down some Easter eggs and locate them in the back.
And the Easter bunny decided to leave some Easter poop on our lawn in the backyard. I was like, wait a minute. Way to go, Dad. I forgot to clean up the doggy poop the night before. And when we were out hunting, I was like, oh, shoot. That was the one thing I forgot to do. So... I don't know why I disclosed that to you, but now that you have more information than I should have given you. Anyway, let's dive into this episode. We are talking about one key component and one key concept and principle for a neurodiversity-affirming IEP. Okay, this one you might have heard of, but I really want to dive into what it means because it is so, so important. And as I talk about it, I'm going to give you five signs to keep an eye out for to see if that...
IEP is going down that direction or if that therapist is mindful of these things. So we're going to look and talk about it, but I also want to give you five signs to keep an eye out for. The core concept is this. The IEP should resume competence, okay? So another way I frame that to make a little bit more sense is that the report, the therapist, the IEP should assume capability. It should assume that, hey, you know what? Just because we have this standardized score that says this student or this child is in the far below average range or... whatever it might be, we're going to assume that they have, we presume that they have competence, that they're capable. But let's dive into specifically what that means in a variety of areas.
So we know, as we discuss neurodivergent brains, neurotypical brains, autistic brains, a neurodivergent brain functions or perceives the world and experiences the world differently, right? When it comes to problem solving, perspective taking, communication, experiencing sensory input, it's just different. Not better or worse, just different.
How does presuming competence change the way we write neurodiversity‑affirming IEPs?
But it's really important because we want to make sure that we presume competence and acknowledge that we're not trying to make an autistic child a neurotypical student, right? Because that leads to more harm than good, right? Our children are not broken neurotypicals. They are perfectly fine autistic. who they are, but we want to presume competence so we can build the right approach, the right therapy plan, the right goals. So let me give you a couple examples on that of what might be mistakenly equating to incompetence. An example, a child may prefer to communicate, maybe not with their voice. They might prefer in the moment gestures. They might be preferring pointing. They might be preferring using an alternative means to communicate.
But.
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Chapters
7 chapters
1
What is “presuming competence” and why does it matter for SLPs?
0:08–4:14
2
How does presuming competence change the way we write neurodiversity‑affirming IEPs?
4:14–9:43
3
What are common misconceptions that equate alternative communication with incompetence?
9:43–14:07
4
What are the five key signs that a therapist or IEP is truly presuming competence?
14:07–15:57
5
How does actively listening to a child demonstrate presuming competence?
15:57–17:41
6
Why is respecting a child’s preferred communication style essential?
17:41–19:00
7
How can we focus on a child’s strengths and potential instead of deficits?
19:00–19:41
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from The NeuroAffirm Podcast
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Ep. 124 Building Rapport Isn’t Enough...How Therapists Become Part of the Intervention
Ep. 123 Not Seeing Progress in Speech Therapy? Start Here.
Ep. 122 Screen Time Considerations for Autistic Kids
Ep. 121 The Biggest Sensory Mistakes SLPs Make
Ep. 120 Why Anxiety is So Common in Autism (And What Actually Helps)