 from Theatre Ensemble and we're on to our next panel which is Creative Communicators. I'm going to hand it over to Anna to introduce it. Awesome, so hi everybody I'm Anna Zembo. You may have seen me earlier talking about the Miracle Project but I'm here now as Spectrum's General Manager for Spectrum Theatre Ensemble and I'm really really excited to introduce our next guest for one of our featured programs so without further ado welcoming Mark Corallo who is the Program Director of Creative Communicators a New Jersey based creative arts program for people on the spectrum so welcome Mark. Thank you Anna so much. Again I really appreciate you guys having me and being able to talk about theatre arts and how it supports individuals on the spectrum. It's just a huge passion of mine so what I'm going to do is I'm going to share my screen with you so that I could give you all a PowerPoint presentation and talk about my background and what Creative Communicators is all about and then share a little video with you to show you what our kids are capable of doing along with our vision and mission but before I do that I just wanted to say that I have been a practicing speech language pathologist for over 20 something years and prior to that was an actor and just always believed in the integration of the arts and speech language therapy and it's just an amazing marriage and you can accomplish so many skills and so many goals through the arts and it's something that we really believe in at Creative Communicators so let me set this up for you and we will get started. Can everyone see it? Okay sure so as I mentioned we are Creative Communicators we are a 501c3 inclusive arts program for a neurodiverse and neurotypical learners and we are located in Somerset and East Brunswick, New Jersey. As I mentioned I've been a practicing SLP for over 20 years and the work that I specialize in in particular are social skills and running social skill groups, routine play-based activities, arts-based social groups and presentation skills and teamwork activities primarily for individuals on the spectrum or for other related communication disorders. So what's the vision and mission? So to give you a brief story we started this program I actually started out working with individuals who were deaf and hard of hearing and that's how I fell into this work and when I was working as I just began as a speech pathologist I immediately fell in love with the idea of bridging the arts and speech together and nothing was happening for individuals on the spectrum and it was at this point that I said it just makes sense to really support the language, the imagination, the social skills, the motivation, the interest and what strengths they have and we want to capitalize on that and that's what's most important. So our vision and our mission is we're an integrated arts-based program and we combine the principles of speech and language therapy and social skills through theater, through dance, and through other art mediums for children and adults with autism spectrum and other communication and language needs and the program goal is to help students develop meaningful peer relations and support their social emotional needs, communication and imagination in a safe and nurturing environment to assist in the development of functional skills needed for them to navigate the world around them. So we are open to all learners so we do not discriminate. As far as our intake process is concerned it's pretty loose. What we do is we really have individuals come in with their families and we meet with them as a group and what we look at depending on their level of language capabilities, it can go anywhere from a one-on-one interview to a language-based observation to discussing family goals and goals that are happening in the school and how we can bridge those goals between the school and the theater program and learning about the individual's motivation. That's the primary piece that we want to take away from the assessment is how motivated they are and what they're motivated by and then we're tapping into their skill strength and then by tapping into their skill strength we capitalize on what they are because that's what we want them to shine and show us throughout our theater arts productions. Our program is run by three speech language pathologists so it's myself and two other SLPs and we also have an art therapist working with us and what we may do depending on the type of learner that comes into the program some of our students start off in individual speech and language therapy because that's predominantly what they need at that point but then our goal is to move them from individual therapy into larger groups. So some kids come in and they go right into the theater program, some kids come in and they might go into smaller arts-based groups or smaller social skill groups because that's what they need. Some may start one-on-one but then eventually we introduce them all into being part of the theater community and of course you know what we do is we take the interests of the children the adults the teens and we develop goals based around those interests so to give you an example we had one individual on the spectrum with us who really loved to have conversations specifically about his interests but really wasn't interested in what others were talking about and so but he was super motivated in wanting to be a talk show host. So we created a whole show around him being a talk show host and the goal that we embedded in the talk show was that he had to initiate and ask questions about other people's interests and it was you know all evolved around him being the lead and he absolutely loved it and he did so amazing. So of course we look at turn-taking, we look at imitation of movements, conversation, comments, giving directions, understanding of theory of mind, vocabulary, reading and writing, nonverbal communication and voice and articulation. So all of these are speech and language goals that can be embedded into a theater arts program. And again we do not discriminate, we have siblings, we have school age peers, we have adult volunteers and we just have such a blast and we bring everybody in as part of the community who want to help and want to volunteer and want to be a part of our program. So so far all of the shows have been written by the individuals so what we do is we collectively take all of their thoughts and then we write a large show around what their thoughts and motivators are. So we might have some kids who are interested in outer space so there's we did one year social skills in space but then we incorporated all of the different motivations under the general theme of social skills in space. We just did our latest show which you'll see in the video which is Creative Communicators Got Talent. We actually ran it twice and in this particular show it gets to each individual gets to demonstrate what their skill strength is and we made it like a you know an America's Got Talent and they had such a blast. So again we're located in Somerset, New Jersey and in East Brunswick and if you'd like to email me or any of us for any information on the program our email is speechonstage at gmail.com and our website is creativecommunicators.net and I'm going to take you through the video. Some of our YouTube mentions are ABC we were featured on Be Kind Be Kind campaign from ABC and we're also on YouTube so if you type in East Brunswick television and there's a typo there, my apologies, at Creative Communicators you can check us out on YouTube and I'm going to place you now our video. Just to take us through a little bit of the history of why we do this we started this about 10 years ago in my private practice in a waiting room with six children. One of them is still with us here tonight and we did it with a book and my belief always was that you can teach so many skills through the arts and we literally put on a small production with about 10 parents in the waiting room and everybody just loved it and we had a blast and what we saw was that we were able to really tackle a variety of skills throughout the process. This included social skills, this included speech and language skills, this included reading, this included development of friendships and over time we luckily just grew and we have about 20 to 25 children that attend our community each week on Saturdays and each year it's a little different and what we love about what we do is that we really tap into the interests of the children and we use their strengths to capitalize on to show you what they are capable of doing. As everyone is trying to be here, I'm going to show a guest post, Mr. Chris Vaughn's guest. This is my 10th show with the creative communicators. This year they told me to come back again but this time I'm the emcee. But do we ever do anything alone at creative communicators? No. So it's not actors, dancers and musicians who find ways under a magic climate, right? A whole new world. That's the point of you. No one to tell us not to say no. Let's just wait. Thanks again. Yeah that's where you know the goal, there's a long term vision as well for creative communicators and those of you who know me and have worked with us for a really long time, you know our goal is just to provide an atmosphere that can provide functional skills for our kids and that is our long-term vision and what we hope for. And that is our presentation. I'm going to stop screen share and come back to you guys and that is creative communicators. Awesome thanks so much for sharing that Mark. It was great to learn a little bit more about what you do. I know I think we have a lot in common. I am also a speech therapist so it's awesome to see other practitioners integrating you know creative mediums for therapeutic intervention. So I've got some questions for you. Dan and I have some questions for you and the first that came to mind while you were speaking you talk a lot about how you know through your knowledge as a speech therapist and on the creative side you're able to integrate lots of goals and objectives and really you know work on skills skill building for your kids and so I'm wondering if you can talk about just some of the benefits that you've seen you know either in your groups or in individuals either in you know little achievements of objectives or larger larger functional outcomes. Absolutely and a great question. I think a lot of the times what what I experienced you know first off being a therapist in the school was and I think teachers experience this I think parents experience this I think a lot of it is you know generalization of skills and when I was working a lot of the time I was working you know at a table doing one-to-one intervention and I loved the work that I was doing but I was always thinking about how I could really tackle the skills in a much more natural environment and you know I think we all learn at our most maximum when we are highly motivated and having fun and I think that's what it's really all about and you know one of the things that I've gotten back from parents there's this one particular girl that comes to my mind who's in the program and you know she demonstrated some behaviors when she started and she was very rigid and she did if there was any sort of change in the programming whatsoever she had severe anxiety and there would be meltdowns and so what we worked on in the program with her was we would sort of prime her and say okay next week when you come to the theater program we're going to make this a little different all right so we want you to be prepared for that and her mom was just so thrilled with the fact that she was able to tolerate change over time without having a meltdown and having changes in her routine that she was so bought into the process and that's really where I think that's what it's more about the arts is what is what sort of drives the motivation and drives the fun but then you target the individual needs for each student that's part of that program i have other children who have come in who were not speaking as much who didn't have as many words in their vocabulary and parents were saying well we saw increases in their requesting skills or they're communicating more so it's been really great to see some of those goals that have you know been developed throughout the process that's great that's great to hear so hi mark i'm dan boil um i'm a person on the spectrum and also very much a member of the leadership team of speckham theater so i i know that as a group that does this sort of work there will be challenges that you encounter along the way so my question to you is my first question for you is what are some of the challenges that your program is encountered and have you worked to overcome them that's right that's a great question so one of the one of the issues that we do come across or that we have come across is certainly behaviors and there are times when parents do want the student to enter the theater program right away and what we have to be realistic about is that like any program you need to make sure that you have enough support there to be able to support the individual needs of certain learners and if that support is not there then we're not doing anything to support that learner and so our goal always is to offer something alternative in the event that we do not have what would be in the best interest of that student so that's where we would go back to either offering individual therapy or offering a small group or you know working more with a particular specialist before they enter the group the other thing that we do is if we're not a hundred percent sure then we offer a trial period and then offer the additional supports if needed so we have some kids and who really come in and surprise us you know like a parent might say they're really not motivated they demonstrate x y and z behaviors and i'll say okay look you know this is a goal that you want to see for your child and you know what they are motivated by some of the factors in our program why don't we see if the motivation is enough for them to participate and be a part of the program with minimal behaviors and we do have students that have some behaviors but they are managed they are able to be managed within the program and with redirection but if they're more severe that's when we would you know offer alternatives so that actually leads me into gives me an idea about another question that I had jotted down can you tell us a little bit about how you meet meet a diverse set of needs you know certainly there are kids who have you know it's a diverse population there's a lot of different needs that might crop up and kind of how you guys work as a team to address those yeah so you know it's been different each year and i you know i want to say we have a formula but i don't think we do i wish i did um each year i kind of rack my brain as to how to figure that out what i could say as a therapist is we as a team will we will target the learners who do need more supports to have that one on one intervention by providing visual supports for communication or um or what how they would best function in the group based on the number of staff members that we have so for example um if we have individuals who are or minimally verbal but they love to dance okay then what we want to do is then form that dance ensemble okay and what we want to do then is embed aspects of communication in that dance ensemble it might be as simple as one or two communicative skills but we then embed it into the dance ensemble so that there can be an integration of those skills within something that they're strong in so if it's easier for them to imitate gross motor movements if it's easier for them to follow directions if it's easier for them to verbally express one or two words then what we might do is something as simple as like let's say a dance game where um there's sort of this back and forth movement of like turn taking so they'll be doing an activity and then the dance stops and then they'll have to say like turn the music on and then the music will go back on and so then they're using their language but they are then engaged in a fun activity so that's one way we would meet the learner's needs if we have students who are I want to say have a higher grasp of language then we sort of facilitate that more and act more like coaches where we're then sort of coming off of the direct teaching model and just facilitating the communication amongst the kids so that we're truly fostering interaction amongst each one of them and then we really they kind of look at they don't look at me as a friend but they definitely look at I think because I'm the old guy but they look at the SLPs as as friends and who are part of part of the groups and so what we do is if you know we the main goal is to drive and to facilitate as much as possible amongst the kids and then sometimes what we do is we may take kids who do have um various areas of language that kids who may not have as much language and we will mix the groups up so that there's pure models amongst amongst the kids that we do have within the program so that that really kind of leads into a question that I was kind of thinking of um so I know through your video and that you had shown a number of different plays and whatnot and I was I was wondering if you if you could tell us more about the creative process in your program how you come up with the plays you decided to put on and all that you know yeah that's uh that's a lot of work um so again I wish there was it's a process it's always a process so we it's funny we'll start off with certain shows where we'll think we'll have the show down and then we're like oh my god this is not working we need to start again um we'll have you know we'll have a process where we'll have um kids that say they'll want to do one particular topic and then four weeks and they're like no we hate this we want to change it and then so we wind up changing the process um so I what I want to say is is that it's a collective process always around their interests the majority of the time what we do is we sort of make small vignettes out of and and then create one large theme integrating the small vignettes so that all of the interests are always kept so for example like we had one girl who was just obsessed with horror movies and she just wanted to be the screamer okay so what we would want to do here is so let's say we want to work on flexibility because she was very rigid so this is an example so we were like okay well our show you know we've all kind of agreed that our show is going to be social skills in space um there you know we could make a horror movement you know we could make a horror scene in there with aliens um or we can make it where you are the general screamer who gets rid of the aliens and every time you run across the stage your powers get rid of the alien you know and she was like oh I like that that's what I'll do you know so so it gave her choice and it gave her power of choice and then she had the option to do what she wanted so again it's very very individualized and somehow we always managed to pull it off and um you know we'll stress down to the last minute of thinking we are not going to make it and they always surprise us and we always surprise each other and it winds up being an amazing show every time we do it. Awesome that's beautiful and it sounds a lot like an experience that I have had I think a lot of people in in performing arts in general neurodiverse or not can identify with that absolutely yeah um so we've got just a few minutes left and I've been wanting to ask um a little bit about how you guys in uh address inclusion in your program I know you mentioned that you involve neurotypical peers siblings things like that but can you talk a little bit about how that works for you guys? Absolutely so we we um what we do in terms of inclusion is very similar to how we would offer um organizing peer models within the program in and of themselves so the way that we normally get students or volunteers is it's usually by word of mouth or siblings friends and they'll just say they want to come and they want to volunteer because they want to be a part of it and they have a blast doing it and we have um one girl in particular who's been with us and she's nine and she's now 16 and she's just having so much fun so I would say the the the majority of the time it's word of mouth um or you know or by schools because we've had the opportunity to present to schools and then when when we have gone in and done our performances for kids they see how much fun it is and then they want to be a part of it as well and you know what we also find for for uh kids because in terms of talking about if you want to say neurotypical you know there are kids who we have come across who are in general education but are struggling with self-esteem or their own anxieties and this is just such a great way for them also to be part of a safe space and for them to explore and to develop friendships and then to slowly become of the process and you know gain their own confidence so and they feel really really good about empowering others and we often call them the future social workers of America that's great um and that actually leads me to our last question Dan did you want to uh throw in our last question so yeah so obviously you have done a lot you've made plans you've got a live experience so my question my last question for you is what does the future hold for your program what do you hope to develop as you go along that's a great question the long-term vision for the program is really twofold so one is is to try to get into many school programs as possible I I mean I can't stress enough the importance of the arts and how you it's for anyone I mean there's just so many goals that can be accomplished through the arts whether it's self-esteem whether it's you know building imagination whether it's fostering friendships whether it's building your confidence whether it's um taking on things that you've never taken on before I mean our our goal is to continue to spread the awareness and the messaging of what individuals on the spectrum and other communicative needs are capable of doing through arts-based programming and to spread that awareness really one in schools and to develop more partnerships with schools and community-based agencies and two to have our own center where individuals come for speech and language therapy occupational therapy music therapy social skills and theater that's the long-term vision thank you thank you very much beautiful you got a lot of good information out there you've explained your program very well thank you very much you're very welcome thank you thanks so much mark quick me lana yeah um so we're gonna um throw it back over to clay um who's gonna wrap this up and lead us into our next segment all right thank you so much guys and thank you mark for sharing your amazing program with us you're very welcome thank you everyone have a good day you too um so we have about 20 minutes before our next segment uh just to tell you a little about it um we decided we were going to do just a preview reading of one of the ten minute plays that's being worked on but the cast and crew decided that it would be a great idea to maybe show a little bit of our process so at five ten p.m we'll be doing a sneak peek inside the rehearsal process of our ten minute play festival uh with the play respect by oscar cabrera um and his director and cast working together so um we'll take a break in just a minute and come back at five ten before we do though uh i just want to say thank you to all the participants that have been able to join us esi loves to share these kind of discussions uh with the community um and we hope that you share it with people that you know and people that you think might be interested both in autism advocacy and uh autism inclusion in the arts um along with that uh we do uh offer this for free to the public um but we also at the same time rely on public support for our programming so if you have uh the inclination and can donate uh please look check out our facebook page and our fundraiser event as well as our website www.stensemble.org where you can donate via paypal thank you so much guys and we'll be