When SLP Summit Showed Up: The Courses That Changed Everything

July 2026 | SLP Summit Retrospective Series

There are conferences that inform you. And then there are the ones that change you.

Over nearly a decade of SLP Summit, a handful of courses have done more than share practical strategies. They've stopped people in their tracks, moved them to tears, and sent them back into their work seeing things differently. These are the sessions the founders still talk about when someone asks what made it all worth it.

Two of those courses came at exactly the right moment ... when the field needed them most.

A Room That Needed the Message

In 2020, the world stopped. Schools closed. SLPs everywhere scrambled to figure out what teletherapy looked like, how to serve students through a screen, and how to navigate a moment that felt completely unprecedented - personally and professionally.

SLP Summit showed up.

And in one of those sessions, so did Shontaye (Glover Jones) of Bright Ideas Media — as a presenter, not a host. The topic was pivotal. The timing was everything.

"That one in 2020 changed the direction of a lot for me," she reflected later. "I remember crying afterwards, too - knowing we were in the midst of a global pandemic and a reckoning of sorts. It was a pivotal moment. And then realizing so many eyes were on me, even though they weren't in the room with me. That was really incredible."

It was incredible on both sides of the screen.

SLP Summit founder Lisa Kathman remembered watching the response unfold in real time, then sitting down to do some math. She took the number of SLPs who attended and multiplied it by a typical school-based caseload. The result: a single one-hour course had the potential to impact over two million children.

Before the July 2020 Summit, there was SLP TeleCon

When the world shut down in March, the founders moved quickly. SLPs were isolated, overwhelmed, and navigating one of the hardest professional transitions of their careers. So Lisa, Sarah, and Marisha moved faster than traditional PD structures allowed. When they wanted to offer continuing education credits for timely sessions, they ran into bureaucratic pushback about submission deadlines. But Lisa would not take no for an answer. She created something that could help right then!

The moment illustrated something important: SLP Summit's ability to move fast, respond to what SLPs actually need right now, and not wait for permission is part of what makes it different.

The Courses You Remember Forever

All three SLP Summit founders — Lisa, Sarah Bevier, and Marisha Metz — were asked in a recent Bright Conversations episode to name the courses that stood out most across the years. Without hesitation, many names came up.

What these standout courses have in common isn't a particular topic or format. It's a quality of honesty ... someone in the field, doing the work, speaking directly to the people in the room about something that matters.

What Keeps People Coming Back

The presenters at SLP Summit don't get paid. They volunteer their time, prepare their sessions, show up for a live audience of thousands, and share everything they know ... because they care about this field and the people it serves.

That's not a small thing. It's the entire engine.

"These speakers speak up and volunteer their time, and give it their all to this audience that they don't know," Lisa reflected. "They're truly just giving back to this field that they love."

Nine years in, the sessions that left the biggest marks were the ones where someone trusted the audience enough to tell the truth about something hard, or demonstrate something real, or show up at a difficult moment and say: here's what I know, and I'm giving it to you.

That's what SLP Summit has always been. And it's what keeps people - presenters and attendees alike - coming back.

The next SLP Summit begins live July 27, 2026. Register now, and if a past SLP Summit course changed something for you, we'd love to hear about it!