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Earn ASHA CEUs for listening to this episode and learn more at www.bethebrightest.com.
📌 Episode Summary:In this episode of Bright Conversations, Dr. Karen Dudek-Brannan, founder of Dr. Karen LLC, host of the DeFacto Leaders Podcast, and July 2026 SLP Summit presenter, joins us to rethink what executive function support can look like beyond planners, checklists, and isolated social skills groups.
Dr. Karen breaks executive functioning into five core areas: time perception, self-talk, future pacing, episodic memory, and encoding. She explains how these underlying skills influence a student’s ability to plan, initiate, self-regulate, problem-solve, and follow through, and why behaviors often labeled as “non-compliance” or “defiance” may signal something very different beneath the surface.
From explicit instruction and cognitive flexibility to assessment, IEP documentation, and team collaboration, this conversation offers practical ways to identify what students actually need, prioritize intervention targets, and build supports that can generalize beyond the therapy room.
👤 Guest Bio:
Dr. Karen Dudek-Brannan is the founder of Dr. Karen LLC and host of the DeFacto Leaders Podcast. Her work helps SLPs and other related service providers strengthen clinical practice, leadership, and executive function support within real-world school systems. Through her programs and resources, she focuses on helping clinicians build scalable frameworks that support students while strengthening collaboration across school teams.
💬 Quotable Moments:
“The observable behaviors might be ‘non-compliance’... but those are the external things you're seeing. It's why are they doing it?”
“It's really about changing the model.”
🔗 Resources & Links:
- School of Clinical Leadership: drkarendudekbrannan.com/clinicalleadership
- Language Therapy Advance Foundations: drkarenspeech.com/languagetherapy
- Task Execution and Planning Protocol: drkarendudekbrannan.com/taskexecution
- DeFacto Leaders Podcast: drkarendudekbrannan.com/blog
- Dr. Karen Executive Functioning Systems: YouTube
- Additional resources mentioned: Jill Fahy, Sarah Ward, Russell Barkley, TILLS, Test of Problem Solving, Social Language Development Test, and BRIEF
Earn ASHA CEUs for listening to this episode and learn more at www.bethebrightest.com.
