Today we’d like to introduce you to Karolina Claxton
Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
I started in education and quickly gravitated to groups of learners with barriers to their access to instruction – English Language Learners, students with special needs, kids who other teachers thought didn’t want to learn… I loved working with them. Then I started doing curriculum writing and professional development to help train teachers and help teachers exchange their best ideas with one another so we could reach the kids who didn’t always have their hands up.
I came to Los Angeles to complete a master’s degree and dove deeply into neurodiversity, fields that were then called things like special needs and abnormal child psychology. I participated in an advocacy clinic that was a partnership between the child psychology program and the law school at UCLA. I cobbled together a second master’s in special education to meet the requirements of the NYC Board of Education, thinking I would return to New York.
But I got married and someone I knew had suggested educational therapy and so I had slowly started to learn that work. I looked for courses and texts and quickly realized that most of what I would learn about ET would be from colleagues, not classes and books. I set up meetings with testing psychologists, psychiatrists, school administrators and asked them a million questions to start to amass knowledge and ideas for practice, and of course, more questions.
Windward School hired me to launch their program to accommodate learners with diverse needs and I later moved into their faculty think tank, the Center for Teaching and Learning. We conducted professional development for faculty using the lens of the brain’s interaction with a one-to-one environment (with iPads).
I went on to conduct PLCs (professional learning communities), as well as other forms of PD at various schools and other organizations, and maintained my private practice while pursuing my doctorate in educational psychology at USC.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
I don’t know what counts as a smooth road. There were times early on when I didn’t really know how to market the practice, and summers were dry. I worked as a substitute teacher and an office temp to supplement for a couple of years. (I actually think this kind of work ethic is critically important for entrepreneurs to have.)
There have also been moments in the practice that felt dark and upsetting, or even shameful. Once, an associate who was planning to go off on his own and start his own practice – with my blessing – left us in the middle of the night. He violated three agreements we had in place, took 17 clients with him (three of whom he was not qualified to treat without supervision, I felt.) and left us all an administrative mess, in addition to a lot of shock and hurt for us all. That stung on a very personal level for months.
We specialize in clients and family with complex needs and complex profiles, so we have encountered a few challenging situations in which someone would get angry with us about our policies. The subjects of this work are human and nothing is more personal than someone’s child or someone’s own mind, so I understand that when a personal connection is developed in a therapeutic relationship, it can be jarring to remember that it’s necessary to pay for their time and counsel. It’s also tough sometimes because there ARE other clinicians who will do more for free than we do. But over the years we have cultivated deep expertise and we work not only as clinicians, but also consultants. If I am working for a client without billing them, then I’m not spending time with my family or earning for my family; once we explain that, almost everyone understands that we deserve to be paid for our time and expertise.
As you know, we’re big fans of Perspectives Group. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about the brand?
We are a boutique consultation and educational therapy group. We work with people aged 6 and older to help them understand and improve the ways in which they process information and move through the world. In addition to ET, we do executive functioning work, language therapy, case management, and consultation with educational institutions. I also conduct trainings with schools and small businesses and provide expert testimony.
We specialize in neurodiversity writ large, complex neurotypes, executive functioning, language problems, and adults during and post-launch (aged 17-35).
We are known for our deep expertise, our many years of experience, our holistic approach, our dedication to a resourcefulness and thoroughness in our treatment planning, and (I also like to think) our balance of professionalism and real relationships with clients.
In terms of the brand, I am most proud of three things: (1) the cultivation of an effective model for diving deeply into understanding the barriers to healthy executive functioning; (2) the ability to conceptualize someone’s profile and needs by “trying on” several clinical lenses, rather than just using ours, in order to develop a multifactorial theory of the source of someone’s trouble; (3) our dedication to doing this work ethically, meaning that for individual clients, our goal is for clients to function as independently as possible and for schools, that we never stop chewing on new and seminal research and marrying it to our clinical experience to offer the most up-to-date, useful trainings we can.
What’s next?
I am working hard to organize what I’ve learned into a book proposal for adults struggling with executive dysfunction, as well as the loved ones and clinicians who work with people who struggle with EF who have tried the “tier 1” strategies about which they have read or heard. The book will propose: (1) my conceptualization of executive functioning; (2) my explanation for why some people with ADHD struggle so much more than others; and (3) an outline of the elements of our model of treatment that are reproducible by other coaches and therapists, and even to a degree, independently.
We are also in the process of revamping our website and when that is done, we hope to market more actively our services to people in need of executive functioning support and training in neurodiversity in other regions of the world.
Pricing:
- Trainings start at $1500 for a half day and $2500 for a full day
- Executive functioning therapy or educational therapy ranges from $225 – $300 hourly
- Expert testimony rates available upon request
Contact Info:
- Website: https://perspectivesgroup.co
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@LetsGetSomePerspective
Image Credits
Photos done by Trish Alison (owned by Perspectives Group)
