Don MacLennan is Chief of the Speech Pathology Section at the Minneapolis VA Health Care System. He has provided cognitive rehabilitation across the continuum of care for people with brain injury for over 30 years. He has published in the areas of assessment of pragmatic communication, return to college after brain injury, and staff development for polytrauma treatment programs. He served as consultant with the Department of Defense regarding cognitive rehabilitation for mild TBI. In 2008 he received the Rick L Bollinger Clinician of the Year award for clinical excellence in his work with veterans experiencing blast injury and Polytrauma.
SLP-Seminars taught by Don MacLennan, MA, CCC-SLP
Cognitive Rehabilitation and the Road to College
This workshop will summarize six different approaches to providing cognitive rehabilitation and how each can be applied to major areas of cognitive rehabilitation frequently addressed by speech-language pathologists: attention, memory, executive functions, and pragmatic and social communication. Treatment is presented in the context of a coaching approach in which the therapist guides people with brain injury through a process of strategy identification, implementation and evaluation, with an overarching goal of fostering self-coaching skills that facilitate self-regulation. This approach will be contrasted with a traditional treatment approach. Direct and compensatory cognitive rehabilitation treatments will be described and illustrated with functional application to assistive technology for cognition (ATC) and return to school.
Objectives/learner outcomes: Participants will be able to...
- identify six different approaches to cognitive rehabilitation
- apply the six approaches to cognitive rehabilitation to each of the most common cognitive-linguistic challenges associated with TBI (attention, memory, executive functions, pragmatic communication).
- describe a coaching approach to cognitive rehabilitation and how it differs from traditional cognitive rehabilitation treatment.
- describe the process of a needs based assessment for assistive technology for cognition (ATC) that matches the appropriate technology to the person
- apply principles of experience-dependent neuroplasticity to inform instructional methodologies when training people to use ATC
- identify specific examples of how to apply cognitive rehabilitation strategies to people returning to college.
Contact us for detailed overviews, hourly agendas, and learning objectives - OR let us custom-design a workshop specifically for your needs. Email us at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..