AI Tricks Versus Real Workflows: Building Neuroaffirming Activities, Visuals, and Goals Without Losing Your Clinical Judgment

In this session, speech-language pathologist Chris Wenger, known online as the Speech Dude, joins host Greg Santucci to talk about what AI is good for in a school-based practice, and where it has to stop. Chris has worked with neurodivergent students for nearly 25 years, taught before he became an SLP, and has been building technology into his work since his classroom got a SMART Board in 2005.

He draws a line between a cool AI trick, one prompt and one output, and a workflow that chains prompts together: an activity built around a student's interest, then AAC modeling examples for it, then a visual or a game the student helps create. He walks through the field-trip menu, the Dracula Mad Lib, and the Would You Rather list imported into a game platform in under a minute. He is direct about the problem underneath all of it, that AI's starting point is a deficit-based, compliance-based lens, and shares the exact words he adds to a prompt to steer it toward autonomy and away from quizzing. Goals and data, he says, stay human-written, with AI used only to fine-tune and identifying information never entered. He also names the one dictation tool that changed his workday.

Therapists, educators, and parents will come away with prompts they can try the same afternoon, a simple rule for keeping their clinical judgment in charge of the output, and a modeling approach that gives teachers and aides a starting point with AAC devices. Grounded in Chris's years in high school classrooms and his own lived experience as a neurodivergent professional, this session is practical, funny, and clear about what the tools are really for: giving time back so the work can be about connection and belonging.