Cognitive Orientation to Daily Occupational Performance (CO-OP) Approach

• Have you ever treated a student/patient that just didn’t seem to understand how to make their bodies do what they wanted?
• Even with great effort they could not coordinate their movements, produce the correct amount of force, or perform familiar activities fluidly?
• Ever dealt with frustration when your student/patient does not seem to listen to or understand a single instruction you give?
• Ever felt like working on balance, strength, and coordination just didn’t seem to make the big functional improvement you were hoping for?

It’s time to shift gears from instructing how to do things to working collaboratively with clients to help them acquire new skills and develop effective strategies to problem-solve functional deficits they may experience throughout their lives. The Cognitive Orientation to daily Occupational Performance (CO-OP) is a performance-based treatment approach for children and adults who experience difficulties completing the skills they want to, need to, or are expected to perform. CO-OP is a specifically tailored, active, client-centered approach that
engages the individual at the meta-cognitive level to solve performance problems. Focused on enabling success, the CO-OP Approach employs collaborative goal setting, dynamic performance analysis, cognitive strategy use, guided discovery, and enabling principles.  

The Cognitive Orientation to daily Occupational Performance Approach was developed to provide therapists with an evidence-based approach to enabling performance success in an effective and efficient way.  CO-OP is not only supported by a broad research base but is also
embedded in an evidence framework.  Originally designed for children with Developmental Co-ordination Disorder, that is children with motor-based performance problems, it has demonstrated efficacy in helping children and adults with a variety of diagnoses acquire skills
and experience success in performing everyday activities that are important to them.

The goal of the Cognitive Orientation to daily Occupational Performance Approach is to enable individuals with performance difficulties, be they physical, cognitive, or other, to succeed in performing the everyday tasks and activities that are important to them. CO-OP uses a process of guided discovery to enable the identification of the specific strategies that will support performance success. In CO-OP individuals learn how to talk themselves through performance problems.

This interactive 2-day course provides learners with thorough background on fundamentals of Cognitive Orientation to daily Occupational Performance (CO-OP; the CO-OP Approach), as well as allowing clinicians to practice CO-OP techniques in an interactive environment. Participants will leave the course with the skills needed to successfully initiate use of the CO-OP Approach in practice immediately.

Course Objectives

• Identify 3 populations of clients well-served by the Cognitive Orientation to daily Occupational Performance (CO-OP) approach
• List the 7 key features of CO-OP
• Use the Performance Quality Rating Scale (PQRS) to rate baseline performance on a given case study
• Implement the global strategy of Goal-Plan-Do-Check in a therapy activity with a partner
• Implement 2 domain-specific strategies to facilitate creation of a motor plan for a client’s goal with a partner
• Outline an action plan to use CO-OP in clinical practice

Speaker Bios
Erin Iverson PT, DPT, PCS is a pediatric physical therapist at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center (CCHMC). She earned her DPT from Ohio University in 2010 and became a Board-Certified Clinical Specialist in Pediatric Physical Therapy in 2015. Erin was a contributing author of the APTA’s Clinical Practice Guideline for Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD, author of the APTA’s DCD Fact Sheet,
and is a national and international speaker on DCD and CO-OP. She has a strong passion for spreading awareness of DCD to practitioners and caregivers in hopes of providing treatment to this under-diagnosed and under-served population.

Patti Sharp, OTD, MS, OTR/L is an occupational therapist with 20 years of pediatric experience and works in outpatient at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center (CCHMC). She received her Master’s in occupational therapy from Washington University in St. Louis in 2001 and her Doctorate from Rocky Mountain University of Health Professions in 2012. She previously worked in burns and neurorehabilitation, but now focuses on enhancing care in the developmental world. Patti is also an adjunct instructor at the University of Cincinnati and has a contagious passion for evidence-based practice that she aims to share with students and peers.

Together, Erin and Patti lead the Developmental Coordination Disorder Translating Research And Clinical Knowledge Team, otherwise known as the DCD TRACK Team at Cincinnati Children’s. They are certified as Cognitive Orientation to daily Occupational Performance (CO-OP) therapists and are two of the few Certified CO-OP Instructors in the United States.

Approved for 17 PT CEUs