Hi there, I’m Karen Dudek-Brannan!

I’m a Professional Development Specialist, SLP, and founder/CEO of Dr. Karen, LLC, a company focused on empowering therapists and educators to design interventions that support language, literacy, and executive functioning. In my current role, I develop engaging professional development and products that help school teams work together to get better results.

On the De Facto Leaders Podcast, I share up-to-date evidence-based practices, my own experience, and guest interviews designed to help pediatric therapists, educators, and aspiring school leaders design services that support social, emotional, and academic growth and set kids up for success in adulthood. Whether you want to learn effective strategies for your therapy session or classroom, be an influential leader on your team, or find creative ways to use your skills to advance in your career, I’ve got you covered. You can listen to the De Facto Leaders podcast on most popular podcast directories, and can scroll through past episodes on this page here.

Latest Episodes

Making intentional decisions and leaning on the expertise of your team (with Dr. Jen Schwanke)

As a school leader, when is it best to make “top-down” decisions, and when should you make it a collaborative process?How can you tell which stakeholder input to prior...

How to support executive functioning with environmental scaffolding (self-talk, time-perception, planning)

Today, I wanted to share some FAQs that people ask about how to teach executive functioning. Some of those common questions are:How do you teach self-talk, time-percep...

What do administrators need from school therapists and teachers? (featuring Eric Makelky, Jalita Johnson, and Jethro Jones)

Almost every school leader that I know has said they didn’t realize what they were getting themselves into when they started their first administrative position. In th...

A framework for executive functioning intervention: Three shifts for school teams

As a professional field, we’re getting stuck in old ways of thinking when it comes to designing services for students experiencing executive dysfunction. When we think...

The role of syntax in supporting language processing and executive functioning

Language and executive functioning have a bidirectional relationship (Baron & Arbel, 2022; Larson, et al., 2019). This means that building language skills can impact e...

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