Motor Mindset: Be a Present Practitioner

Full transcript

Hi, it's Nicole from the NYU Motor Speech Lab. Welcome back to the fall 2025 semester. We are so excited in the lab to be getting started again with our CAS treatment research, and I just wanted to come in very quickly with a tidbit for us clinicians, the treating therapists.

We ask our kids to engage in conscious practice in this therapy, right? We know how important that is: that they are paying attention while they're producing the targets and really listening to the feedback they're getting from us. Like Dr. Strand said, if it's not going through the cortex, there's no learning happening. So they must be engaging, or we are engaging them, in conscious practice.

But let's flip the switch a little bit and think about what we need to be doing as clinicians engaging in this therapy. We want to make sure, before we start our sessions, that we're in our motor mindset. And the first thing we need to do is make sure that we are present practitioners.

I say this from experience, especially from doing our fidelity framework and going back and looking over my own sessions. Sometimes we want so badly for the kid to do just as well with the target as they did yesterday that we miss errors when they're working with us. Or we know they got the target in the block we did two blocks ago, and when we revisit it, we miss a vowel error, because we're not fully present in that moment with what the child is producing. We're expecting that they're going to get it because they had it before.

So: motor mindset, present practitioner. Let's do this.