NEWS-Line for Occupational Therapists & COTAs

Q&A with OT Toni Schulken

FEATURE STORY	04/01/2009
Author: Compiled by Rebecca Bryan
Toni M. Schulken, MS, OTR/L, earned her BA in child development—child mental health specialist option from California State University, Northridge in 1991 and her MS in occupational therapy—pediatric tract from Towson University in Towson, Maryland in 1995. She is certified in therapeutic listening, SIPT, interactive metronome, and an accredited continuing education provider through Motivations, Inc. She is also a "certified" mother of five children. She is the owner of Pathways for Learning, Inc., Pathways for Learning Products, Inc. and Pathways for Learning Consulting, LLC. "My passion is writing literacy," says Toni Schulken. "Literacy seems to have become ‘reading and reading.' It's not ‘reading and writing' anymore. When looking into University Programs, teacher curriculum, etc., it seems as if writing is significantly under emphasized. That's what my job is—to try and get writing back out there as the 50% of literacy that it is." As the owner of a pediatric OT clinic and a developer of writing literacy products for children, so far, Schulken has been very successful in "getting the writing back out there" on several levels. In 1998, she opened her private pediatric occupational therapy clinic and comprehensive learning center, Pathways for Learning, Inc., which focuses largely on writing literacy and sensory processing disorder. Her second company, Pathways for Learning Products, Inc., markets the writing literacy products she's created, such as a specialized pencil grip called Grotto Grip® and RediSpace® Transitional Notebook Paper, to smaller specialized stores, clinics and catalogs. She works with her husband, an art director, who helps design the products and packaging. On a larger scale, through Pathways for Learning Consulting, LLC she and her husband collaborate with MeadWestvaco to develop new products for the mass market. With all three of her companies, Schulken has put writing literacy on the map in both the therapy and mainstream markets. Here, she discusses her approach to therapy, why her family plays such a large role in her professional career and what her personal definition of success is. NL: What motivated you to become an occupational therapist? How did you decide you wanted to work with children? TS: Since I was very young, I knew I wanted to work with children in a very holistic way. I began babysitting when I was 12, volunteered and worked with a variety of populations from 13 through the end of college including child life at UCLA, group homes for adults with autism, juvenile delinquents, preschool children, children with physical challenges, etc. I saw all of the professionals working with these kids and wanted to have a career that I felt would have the most impact. I considered child advocacy law, medical school, physical therapy, psychology and then I found occupational therapy. I met these fabulous OTs at a developmental preschool through UCLA during my undergraduate internship. These OTs were helping these kids be successful in their daily lives whether it was developing motor skills, social interactions, activities of daily living or academics. I found it! I could use my child mental health specialist background and still work on the skill development! I knew I wanted to work with one child at a time and have an impact, as well as one day develop products or treatment techniques which would help many more children than I could touch alone. NL: How do you feel that your clinic may be different than some other pediatric OT clinics? TS: That's hard, since I have not had the opportunity to visit many of the other occupational therapy clinics in my area. I consider my practice very specialized and narrowly focused. When I explain it to parents, I usually say that many pediatric OT clinics are like a pediatrician's, where they see a multitude of diagnoses and a wide variety of populations. We are more like a gastroenterologist in that we are very narrowly focused. Because we see hundreds of kids with the same diagnosis, we've become experts in this area. I consider my practice a school-based practice in private practice. So, if a child is struggling in school, we have a highly trained, multi-disciplinary staff to uncover the child's barriers to learning as well as their learning strengths. We have the capability to do psychological educational assessments, tutoring, occupational therapy and speech therapy, and we collaborate very closely with an ophthalmologist who understands and supports oculomotor strengthening. I have developed what I call a School Performance Pyramid™ to explain to parents and other professionals how we start at the base of sensory processing, because it is hard to be successful if sensory input is not taken in appropriately. We then move to praxis which allows a child to problem solve, sequence and execute novel, multi-step tasks. We then move to skill components such as fine and perceptual motor skills, and finally we get to the typical referring complaint of difficulties with behavior or academics in school. So, I often have to explain to parents when they come in for handwriting, why I am asking them all of these questions about their child's reaction to sensory input, or why am I looking at how they walk across the balance beam or reproduce a motor pattern. Parents are very receptive to the concept of finding the underlying reasons behind their child's struggles. Most of our referrals come from teachers or administrators, or from psychologists doing school entry testing or psychological educational testing to assess learning challenges. We also get referrals from neurologists, speech therapists, and a lot from word of mouth. NL: I understand that the Grotto Grip® is going to be part of a research study. Can you tell me more about that? TS: One of the professors from the University of Puget Sound contacted me through my website. She said she had used the Grotto Grip® with a third grader, had a lot of success, and she wanted to conduct a research project. She is studying four classrooms in the Puget Sound area with three classroom using the Grotto Grip® at home and school and one classroom serving as a control. I'm really looking forward to seeing the results of the study. We describe the Grotto Grip® as a training tool, not as a pencil comfort grip. It actually targets and trains the muscles of the hands while the kids are writing. So after consistent use, the kids are able to hold a pencil correctly. NL: You also mentioned that you and your husband are working on a book series for children. What is it about? TS: These books are [designed] to develop idea flow, and idea generation at a young age through children's nightly reading. These skills are essential to developing the thought flow for beginning written expression. It's a unique book series and I'm hoping we are able to get it out there. The concept is something I've been doing with my kids since they've been born. NL: Do you have any new products coming out through your collaboration with MeadWestvaco? TS: We have helped to commercialize 18 products in the Mead® Writing Fundamentals line. Many of the products will hit Target for 2009 Back-to-School. We are currently working on two more products for 2010. We also have products in process with School Specialty for 2010 commercialization. NL: With three companies to maintain and new products and projects in the works, you must be extremely busy. How do you balance everything? I don't sleep a whole lot. I really only sleep about six hours a night and usually I come up with products and solutions when I'm sleeping. I tend to be a big dreamer. That's part of it. Part of it is that I work very closely with my husband. We run our household and our three companies together. So, we are able to maintain a hectic kind of balance. We only have a babysitter one day a week, so our kids are with their parents the rest of the time. Don't ask me how we do that, but we do because it is very important to us. We work late at night, we work in the morning. I do therapy at the clinician Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, but Thursday and Friday I am able to do more "mom" stuff. NL: Do you think being successful professionally involves making time for a personal life? TS: Absolutely. We love to travel as a family, and try to as often as we can. With such a big family, we tend to take a lot of road trips. When we are away from the house it is easier to relax and focus on the family. I also love to read, although I don't have as much time as I would like. My favorite memory from when I was a child is seeing all the castles on the Rhine River in Germany and I hope to be able to share that with my kids before they're grown and out of the house. When we aren't taking road trips, I just love the day-to-day of watching my kids grow and experience life. It's so funny to me because parents will say, "Gosh, I can't wait for my kids to go back to school," or "How do you do that? Isn't your house crazy with five kids?" My kids are really—[they're] my peace. I love being with them and with my husband. My favorite thing is to have all the kids sitting and watching a movie and eating popcorn, playing a board game or doing an art project and having everyone interested at different levels. We have family dinners every night. I think that's very important and I look forward to it every day. NL: What challenges to you face in owning three businesses? TS: My greatest challenge is to keep a balance between being a loving and attentive wife and mother, an available administrator, a mentor to training staff, a conscientious clinician, a creative consultant and an active marketer. Not to mention trying to eat less fast food and sleeping regularly! NL: What is the most rewarding part about your profession? TS: When a child's self-defeating attitude turns into, "I can do it." When my patients become confident enough that they can start taking risks and start to be more successful. I can be having a very hectic day with my mind on twenty different projects, but as soon as I walk in to a therapy session, I just get in a mode. And I just love it. I love every single little success. Still. Every little thing that a child is able to succeed with that they couldn't do before is still very exciting to me—very rewarding. NL: You consider the poem Success by Ralph Waldo Emerson, especially the line "To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived," to be very inspirational. Why is that? TS: Well, I think that was my whole goal, always: how can I help a child's life be easier? How can I make the most impact? I've always wanted to help kids one-on-one, and as mentioned before, I love doing therapy. But, I always envisioned myself as trying to have some kind of mass impact on kids in some way. This poem just gets down to the basics. NL: What is the most important thing you've learned throughout your career so far? TS: I guess exactly what I said before: never to lose sight of why I'm in it. I'm in it to help kids. That's the reason I became an occupational therapist and that should always be the reason. You know what I mean? People who go into helping professions go in for a reason. I think it's very, very important not to lose sight of that reason and I have found that even in my worst times, I can just help a child find some little success and I feel better. Also, it is very important to keep learning, keep an open mind, work well with others and always be ethical and moral in whatever I do.
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