SLP Productivity 101: Evaluations

Speaker 1: Hello there and welcome to the SLP Now Podcast, where we share practical therapy tips and ideas for busy speech language pathologists. Grab your favorite beverage and sit back as we dive into this week's episode.

Speaker 1: Hey there and welcome to the SLP Now Podcast. This month, we are diving into some of my favorite productivity strategies for SLPs, so let's just dive right in and I hope you enjoy these tips.

Speaker 1: This week, we are chatting about strategies to streamline evaluations, so an SLPs favorite, favorite activity. We love our paperwork, don't we? Let's just dive right in and get through some of these strategies. The first thing that I like to do, we'll get super tactical in this episode, is to create a checklist. Over the years, I've used different strategies for this. At first, I would use a printed checklist. You can print them, and I have some templates that I can share, but I would just print off these checklists. You can print them on colorful paper so that they stand out and they're easy to find. I also started laminating my checklist and I would just use a expo marker or a wet erase marker on the laminated checklist. I like doing this because I printed it on super colorful paper. It was laminated, so it was sturdy and durable and it was easy to find in a stack of papers.

Speaker 1: It was a little more environmentally friendly because I could just reuse them over and over and over and over again. That's a nice option. Over the years, I've shifted towards more digital systems. Although I love my checklists and I know that those are still a great fit for many SLPs, I really enjoy using digital task management systems because it just helps. It's a little bit more streamlined and it makes it easier to plan out my workload and I'm doing pretty much all of the documentation on my computer anyway, so it makes sense to just have it all there. But I won't go into a ton of detail, but I will share a blog post where I talk about how to use Asana, and that's A-S-A-N-A, that is a task management software and you can sign up for a free account. You can use it with other people on your team, if you can convince everyone to get on board. That was what I was using at the time.

Speaker 1: Another option, if you look at Asana and you're like, "No, not for me," I also really enjoy ClickUp and you can use the same kind of templates and everything that I share in the Asana blog post. That's the first thing though, to create a checklist, and I should have introduced what we're including on that checklist, but I just get excited about the system sometimes. Picturing pretty checklists, whether they're printed or digital, is always a little fun for me. But anyway, in terms of what's actually on the checklist, this is something that is crucial and so incredibly helpful. If you're new to a district and you are unsure of the process, this will make a huge difference when it comes to navigating evaluations or really paperwork in general, if you can jot down everything that you need to do to complete an evaluation.

Speaker 1: There may be different types. You will probably have different tasks if it's a speech only evaluation, so you'll have to get parent consent and you'll have to schedule the meeting and do all of those things. Whereas, if it's someone else is case manager, you'll have a different task list. I would recommend breaking that down. Maybe you want to split it up by what you do for speech sound disorders versus language or whatever makes the most sense to you, but I would recommend not getting too complicated and just keeping it simple. That's one strategy is just to brainstorm all of the different steps, maybe run it by another SLP in your district or an administrator. It's like, "Does this cover everything that you expect me to do?"

Speaker 1: You'll also learn through trial and error. If you forgot something on your checklist the first time around, it's a living breathing document and you'll kind of make those adjustments and that's super helpful. That way, if you put the checklist on top of all of the paperwork or just clip it in the student's folder or have it pulled up digitally when you're working on that, then it's really easy to just jump back into the report writing process. It's like, "Okay, I got these pieces, this is next on the list. This is what I'm going to do," and it takes some of the guesswork and it also takes some of the overwhelm off of it because you don't have to be like, "Oh, wait, I need to remember to do this." No, you have your checklist, you have your set time to work on your paperwork. And if you don't have a paperwork block, I highly recommend it. If you are working on kind of digging yourself out of a super crazy workload, even taking a little bit of time before school can be helpful in just your sanity.

Speaker 1: Hopefully, that's not a strategy that you have to use forever, but hopefully that can help you streamline the workload or give you some time and space as you continue streamlining the rest of your workload with all of the different topics we're talking about this month. That is my number one strategy is to, A, create a checklist and then set it up in a way that's easy and fun and that makes it so that you don't have to do all of that thinking so you're not waking up in the middle of the night like, "Oh, I need to remember to do that." No, it's out of your brain, it's on the paper and you have a process to knock out those tasks. You'll be good to go. Step one, checklist. Step two, create some templates for yourself. There's kind of a common theme here in working smarter and not harder and mapping things out for yourself so you don't have to reinvent the wheel every single time.

Speaker 1: So for the test templates, there's tests that we give over and over and over again and you probably have written hundreds or thousands of evaluations at this point, so you can go back to your old IEPs and just copy what you wrote for those students for all of the different tests that you've administered and just start to build a little bit of a bank. When I first started doing this, I just plugged everything into a Google doc. Of course, you remove student information. And I like to use, I'll dive into this a little bit more later, but a strategy to make it easy to fill in the templates so you can just start building your own bank and use what you have from previous evaluations. This would be a great project for the SLP team because everyone has strengths in different areas. If everyone can bring like some of the templates that they're most proud of, you can build a shared document and, oh, that would be so incredible. I feel like that would just step up everyone's writing and evaluations and all of that, but that is super helpful. Just make some templates.

Speaker 1: And if you are brand new and you don't have your own or you're not able to work with a SLP team, you can Google some test descriptions or templates like Home Speech Home. I'll link that the show notes, you can find those details there. So to recap, we, one, make a checklist, two, make some templates. Now, I have two more techy strategies. Like I said, I think it makes a lot of sense to start in a Google doc, especially if you're working with other SLPs. You could even just set up the doc and have them paste in all of their evaluation stuff and then you guys can work through it together. That would be super streamlined. But my little cheat sheet or template document got very, very lengthy and it was just hard to navigate through it, so I found a tool called a text expander. And I've used a lot of different tools over the years. I'll go ahead and share a blog post that dives into a little bit more detail on the logistics, but that has been super helpful.

Speaker 1: So basically, what it is, is you come up with shortcuts, so like if I type in .GFTA, which I would use if I administered the GFTA and needed to do like a test description for that, I would type .GFTA in the evaluation report and then it would expand into my whole template. So it would say like, "Goldman-Fristoe Test of Articulation is blah, blah, blah, blah," and it would include the description and all of that. This is stuff that you would program this in yourself. And by program, I mean you would just copy and paste your template into the app and then it does it for you, but that is a game changer. I would just have like a little cheat sheet. I mean, it's pretty obvious. Like for the test, you can just use the acronym and that is a great way to remember those, but I also created templates like that for the different parts of the valuation.

Speaker 1: And at first, it can be a little hard to remember all of your shortcuts, so try to make shortcuts that are easy to remember. And if you have trouble, you can just print off a little cheat sheet for yourself for the different sections of the evaluation and the shortcut you're using and that's super helpful. Whether you're using a text expander or you're using a Google doc or a Word doc, using the find and replace tool is a game changer. Just come up with like some symbols that make sense for you. So if I want to use the student's name, I use three asterisks. So in the template, it would just say, "***Will blah, blah, blah," or, "achieved whatever accuracy," or whatever the thing is. So everywhere there should be a student's name, I plug that in. I just do Control or Command F, search for the three asterisks and put the student's name in the box and then it'll replace their name. I use two asterisks for regular pronouns and then subjective pronouns. For possessive pronouns, I use just one asterisk. That prevents me from using the incorrect pronoun when I'm writing these reports because those are very easy to miss.

Speaker 1: One thing. If you're using pronouns, if you have that at the beginning of a sentence, you might want to use a capital or you might want to use something different, but I try to set it up where I just use a student's name at the beginning of the sentence and then pronouns in the middle of the sentences, but just think about that so you don't have weird kind of typos in your reports. The next tip is to keep your paperwork organized. I really liked using an accordion... like a hanging organizer. I'll share a link to it in the show notes. I believe it has five different pockets and then it also has a place to like put a calendar so you can map out when your evaluations are due and reverse engineer. We'll talk more about that when we talk about IEPs next week. But the hanging organizers have a set number of folders, which I love, and I would just have... However many pockets you have in your organizer is how many reports you work on at a time.

Speaker 1: I love the analogy of trying to like kick soccer balls down the field. If we have 50 soccer balls that we're trying to get into the goal and we just kick each one a little bit each time, we're not going to make any goals anytime soon. But if we just focus on a couple or a handful, we'll start to make those goals much sooner. It just feels much better. We can't possibly keep track of a bazillion evaluations at the same time anyway, so might as well just focus, get them done quickly and filter them through that way. So yeah, those are my tips for streamlining evaluations. Build a checklist, use test templates, use a text expander, find and replace using asterisks and keep your paperwork organized. That's what we've got for today. We'll see you next week.

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