The Connecting Dots Method
Learn to build an explanation that holds together.
The Connecting Dots Method teaches you to assess infant-feeding cases as an interconnected system, not a checklist of unrelated findings.
Join the waitlistGet early bird pricing and receive the complete module list and course details before public enrollment opens.
9 learning outcomes
- 01 Read a feed before assigning meaning to what you see
- 02 Hold oral function alongside body organization, tension, regulation, airway, and gut considerations
- 03 Interpret slow weight gain in the context of the whole feeding picture
- 04 Consider tethered oral tissues without making them the explanation for every case
- 05 Separate likely drivers from the adaptations a baby has developed to cope
- 06 Prioritize what needs to shift first
- 07 Build a plan that is realistic for a tired family to carry out
- 08 Use the recheck as evidence for, or against, the explanation you wrote
- 09 Refer with a focused clinical question for the dentist, ENT, IBCLC, pediatrician, or other provider
This is not a collection of isolated techniques. It is a way to think through the messy newborn and infant cases: the ones with several plausible findings, competing recommendations, and no obvious starting point.
Dana Evans Vickers, OTR/L
A method shaped in practice, then tested at the recheck.
Dana Evans Vickers is a pediatric occupational therapist, feeding specialist, and founder of Connecting Dots Therapy in West Monroe, Louisiana. She has practiced as an occupational therapist since 2009 and has worked with hundreds of families navigating breast- and bottle-feeding challenges.
Her training includes Feed the Peds, TOTS, and mentorship with Dr. Gigi at Milk Matters.
Dana came to this work as a mother whose own feeding experience was painful and took far too long to make sense of. That experience informs the way she listens: what a mother reports is not background noise. It is clinical information.
She also knows what it is like to have training, skill, and a full assessment—and still face a baby with six meaningful findings and no reliable way to rank them.
So she built the sequence she needed in her own practice: a way to connect the findings, identify what was most likely driving the pattern, make a plan, and let the recheck reveal whether that explanation held.
This course teaches that sequence in full.
Tell me about the baby you are still thinking about.
This course is being built around the cases feeding professionals actually get stuck on.
When you join the waitlist, you can share a brief description of the case that is still on your mind. Dana reads every submission. Selected cases may be worked through as anonymized teaching examples before the course opens, so you can see how the method approaches a complex case before making an enrollment decision.
Get on the list for:
Early bird pricing when enrollment opens.
- Access to the founding rate when enrollment opens
- Enrollment ahead of the public list
- Updates on continuing-education approval status as soon as they are available
- Early anonymized case-based teaching from the course framework
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