Curated by the Knowledge Team of ICS Career GPS
Education
Speech & language therapy education imperative for parents of children with learning disabilities
Excerpts from article by Smarica Pant, published in India Today
All children require love, encouragement and support, and for those with learning disabilities, such positive reinforcement can help them to arise with a strong sense of self-worth and shine academically. Children with learning disabilities often present a wide range of speech and language challenges, which if ignored, hinder their communication skills.
The Challenges
- Limited vocabulary
- Difficulty in forming grammatically correct sentences
- Understanding inferencing skills (predicting, comprehending abstract questions, use of contextual cues)
- Pronunciation of speech sounds
- Usage of appropriate tone /volume of voice during conversation
- Having frequent interruptions or repetitions while speaking
- Initiating, maintaining and ending a conversation with peers
- Narrating a story or event in a sequence and in context
- Following multiple instructions
Helping them cope
The ultimate goal of therapy is to help children develop communication skills so that they become confident individuals and better conversation partners in the outside world.
Assessment and treatment of children with communication difficulties involves a collaborative approach with all stakeholders – parents, teachers, psychologists, special educators and occupational therapists. This can help reap great results.
A speech language pathologist conducts an assessment with the help of a standardised test / parental checklist / rating scales in order to identify the weak areas and then work on them via therapy programmes.
Parents are vital during the assessment process since they have key information related to the personality of the child, their likes and dislikes, what motivates the child the most, and the most concerning areas.
Benefits of parental involvement
- Parents have deep insights about their child
- The child gets the requisite support for the therapy programme
- Parents can provide valuable feedback to the therapist regarding the child’s progress during intervention
- Therapy becomes more meaningful and fun
- Facilitates ‘Generalisation skills’ in children across different settings
- Motivates the child to perform better
Home intervention for goal-based learning
The speech therapist often asks parents to observe therapy sessions and then gives them home assignments, which can be given in the form of worksheets, exercises, reading books, word games and/or watching educational videos.
Language facilitation: Tips for parents
- Encourage the child to take lead in communicating in daily situations.
- Have a dedicated play time and use different board games to target different skills.
- Use open-ended questions for eliciting elaborate responses from the child. Let the child share his/her own thoughts and opinions.
- Organise planned playdates at home.
- Share jokes with them to develop their sense of humour.
Career
The Case for Creativity in Leadership
Excerpts from article by Keith Goudy, published in Leadership Vantage Point. Sourced from LinkedIn.com
Brené Brown is not afraid to admit when she’s wrong. On an episode of Elizabeth Gilbert’s Magic Lessons podcast, she shares: “If you asked me five years ago what creativity meant to me, I would have said, ‘Oh, that’s cute, that’s fun; I don’t really do a lot of A-R-T because I’ve got a J-O-B.’” As an academic and researcher, Brown initially dismissed the role of creativity in all forms of work—but has since come to realise its importance.
Today, most leaders would agree that creativity matters, and organisations value it as a top competency.
The benefits of creativity in the workplace are numerous, including enhanced performance and greater job satisfaction. Perhaps most relevant in today’s ever-changing world, generative thinking is the foundation for innovation and adaptability: keys to staying competitive in the marketplace.
This era has brought out the importance of creativity and adaptability. Organisations that think outside the box fared better during this challenging time. Novel ideas will continue to be instrumental as we set a strategy for 2021. Of course, innovative ideas carry inherent risks and not all of them will be hits; however, it’s riskier not to invest in creativity as a resource.
Creativity Killers
Despite recognising creativity as a competency for innovation and improvement, most workplaces don’t do all they can to foster it. This is especially true in times of crisis, when we shift our energy to short-term, practical solutions.
The most prevalent side effect of the pandemic has been individual burnout. A study found that 40% of surveyed employees experienced burnout last year alone. Three times as many reported poorer mental health than they did before the pandemic.
The pervasive fears of job loss and failure, as well as chronic stress, that have defined many workplaces for the past year are inherently prohibitive to risk-taking and divergent thinking. There’s evidence that the ongoing emotional strain narrows our perspective and limits our capacity to be strategic.
We have also largely been less exposed to the same degree of stimulation than we were pre-pandemic. Research has shown that creativity is enhanced when we are exposed to new situations and variety.
Workplace culture is another common barrier to creativity. Creativity requires the safety net of knowing that new ideas won’t be immediately shot down.
Creativity Enhancers
Leaders have had to adapt and the way we work has changed. This is an ideal time to reflect on how creativity is fostered in your organisation. Here are some practices that organisations can continue to leverage to encourage a more creative workforce:
- Re-prioritize, sacrifice low-priority work. We’ve established that nothing kills creativity as quickly as burnout and exhaustion. And burnout is caused by a perceived disparity between what we have to do and the resources we believe are available to us to accomplish these goals. If you want to make space for innovation, you simply have to make space — which may require sacrificing some low-priority work.
- Implement flexible vacation and paid time off policies. These help to prevent burnout and create a more focused, satisfied workforce. Given the widespread move to remote work, allowing employees continued flexibility with where they work can carry the unexpected perk of increased productivity and a more positive employee experience.
Individual leaders can also set the tone for more creative employees and teams:
- Cultivate an atmosphere that encourages “failing forward.” Research tells us that environments which foster psychological safety are more likely to encourage risk-taking and creativity.
- Consider modeling humility as a leadership quality. The hallmark of humble leadership is that it rejects rigid, top-down hierarchies and embraces vulnerability and transparency. They readily admit to mistakes, which shows that freedom to experiment is allowed.
- Encourage creative outlets, in and out of work. Job-crafting allows employees to re-organise work so that they spend the majority of their time on tasks that are meaningful and motivating to them. Leaders can model prioritizing hobbies and creative outlets, and create the expectation that after-work hours are for recharging.
(Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in the article mentioned above are those of the author(s). They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of ICS Career GPS or its staff.)
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