Have you ever started a therapy session and asked yourself, what are we going to do today? If you're answering yes to this question, you are not alone, and you're not lazy, you're just overloaded. So when something has to give in a school-based SLP's workload, it's almost always therapy planning, and it's heartbreaking because therapy planning is what makes therapy more effective. And I've heard a lot of SLPs talk about the immense workload that we have as school-based SLPs and the things that we sacrifice when the workload does become impossible. So we sacrifice session planning, data analysis, adjusting goals based on progress. We sacrifice smaller strategic groups. We just group as many as we can to make it work. With the schedule we sacrifice programming AAC devices, collaborating with teachers, communicating with parents, coaching paraeducators, and even just taking the time to communicate with our students. It makes sense we're prioritizing the things that we'll get in trouble for not doing. So we make sure that our IEPs are done, our evaluations are done, our Medicaid billing is done. but thoughtful data-driven therapy planning, maybe if there's time. No one is going to ding us if we don't have the perfect therapy plan in most cases.
But when we are making these decisions, a lot of SLPs are saying, I'm winging my sessions. I feel guilty. I question if students are making progress. I feel like I'm not being data driven. And I'm seeing groups of four to five students across three grade levels. And a lot of us are asking ourselves, am I a bad therapist?
Are my students making progress? If I were more organized, I'd do better. And planning takes time. Reviewing data takes time. Prepping materials takes time. Cognitive bandwidth takes time. And that's not a character flaw, it's just math. We only have so many hours in our workday, and those hours are filled. However, planning does matter and when we have clear targets for our students, they make faster progress.
When we have structured sessions, we see better behavior. When we have intentional scaffolding of skills, we see real generalization. When we have aligned groups, we see more effective sessions. and if we are regularly reviewing our data and making data-based decisions, we get to adjust our approach and help our students make more progress.
And the irony is that the thing that we sacrifice first is the thing that makes our therapy more efficient. So now let's chat about this a little bit. Like how can we plan when we have no time to plan? So if therapy planning feels overwhelming, it's usually because you're trying to reinvent the wheel every week, and there's really just four core things that need to be in place.
So the first thing that we need is a predictable session structure, and you don't need new activities every week. You just need a repeatable flow. And I teach a five step session structure in the Academy of SLP Now. You can access this course for free, but I'll give you a quick primer here. I looked at the literature in speech therapy as well as special education and other therapies to help me build a structure for my sessions that is evidence-based and repeatable and predictable for students, and that helps them make more progress.
So the five steps for this session structure. Check in, assess, teach, practice, and wrap up. I'll go through each of the five steps.
So one check in. This is where we connect with our students and get set up for the session. For me, this looks like students reviewing their goals. I like to have little goal cards. We review their goals. We pick one goal to focus on in the session, and we make sure that they have the visuals to support them with that goal. And this helps keep me organized because even if I have four or five students, even three can be tricky. But if I have multiple students in a group, each student has that visual and that serves as a place mat for me and for them so that we know exactly what goal each student is working on.
And it gives me easy access to the scaffolds and supports that we might need throughout the session.
Then step two is to assess. You can obviously modify the structure a little bit. but I like to collect a quick probe so that I know where students are coming into the session. And so that I have an idea of what types of support I'll need to provide, or if we're ready to work more towards generalization or if we need to target a different goal depending on how the data comes out. So then two is assess.
Three is teach. So especially if they have lower accuracy on that initial probe, then I'll do some explicit instruction or some modeling before we dive into step four, which is practice. And this is where literacy based therapy comes in or thematic units, but we provide an engaging activity to give students the opportunity to practice the target skill.
And then the fifth step is to wrap up, so we reflect and review on the session. This is where I do my documentation. And this is where I plan for the next session. So I do my best planning in my therapy sessions. I'm super fresh on what we targeted, how the students did, what was helpful, what wasn't. I just jot a note to my future self of what would be helpful for each of the students.
I'm able to do this all in the session, but if you want to go through these steps in more detail, you can head to slpnow.com/pod. We send you to sign up for a free trial at SLP Now you can click on the Academy, and the first course on that page is Session Structure.
It's super short and sweet, but it gives you a more detailed overview of these five steps and it also gives you some resources to help you implement this. So highly recommend that if you're wanting to learn more about this flow. When our session structure is consistent, your cognitive load drops dramatically.
And because you're not asking, what are we doing today, you're just plugging goals into a familiar framework. And as a bonus, this also helps our students know what to expect and it reduces their cognitive load and it helps them make more progress.
Structure is freedom in this case.
That brings us to the second thing that we need. We want to make sure that we have a library of goal specific materials that are ready to go. So planning feels really hard when our materials aren't aligned to our students' goals. So the most time consuming part of planning isn't the idea, it's creating the probes, the visuals, and the teaching supports from scratch.
When we have those ready to go, our session planning becomes immensely easier. When we write a new goal for a student, we want to make sure that we have a quick probe or a progress monitoring tool. We want to make sure that we have clear teaching visuals so that we can actually break down that skill for the student.
And then we also want to have some contextualized activities that we can use to target that skill. And if you had goal specific supports ready at the click of a button, planning would stop being a creative marathon. You could get it done in a matter of minutes and save yourself a lot of that time and energy and cognitive load so you can focus more on your students.
And there are tons and tons of resources out there, where you can download progress monitoring tools and visuals. You can create your own. If you want support with that, again, the SLP Now trial has all of this organized for you.
Especially if you're writing a new IEP, we have tools to help you identify your student's goals and we'll automatically create those probes and recommend a set of visuals for each goal that you're creating. So all you have to do is click and print and you have everything that you need within a matter of seconds.
And we also have resources that you can download for existing goals. But if you want the easy button to get these goal specific materials ready, SLP Now is a great resource for you, and I would love to help you with that.
Now the third thing that we need is thematic units to reduce our decision fatigue.
If you're picking a brand new activity for every group, every time you see them, your brain is doing so much additional work that it doesn't have to do. I recommend splitting your caseload into segments. For example, if you have a preschool through fifth grade caseload, your preschoolers are one segment, your K through two students are another segment, and your third through fifth graders are another segment. And then you choose one thematic unit per segment. So for my preschoolers, I tend to like to use a simple picture book. And then for my k through two students, I use a picture book. And then for my third through fifth graders, I might use, a fiction article.
The materials are catered to the details of those specific segments. You could also have an AAC segment. You could have, segments for the older students. Instead of making 50 therapy plans, I can come up with three and use them across all of my groups.
My thematic units cover a month of therapy, so once a month, I'm literally just selecting three units to use across my caseload, and that significantly makes the therapy planning much easier. And I have a whole course in the Academy about the research behind this, why I use this approach, how it improves student progress and all of the benefits of that.
You can go to slpnow.com/pod. Sign up for the free trial. You can go to the Academy and check out the Thematic Units course. It's the second one on the Academy page and it'll walk you through all of the details. This course is short and sweet, and it has a workbook and it gives you all of the resources that you need to implement this with confidence.
It is the most practical PD you will do. When you are in in SLP Now, we also have hundreds of pre-made units, and when your unit is pre-made and adaptable across goals, planning just becomes a matter of plugging in targets and not endlessly searching for materials and dishing out money every time you need a quick activity.
You're not having to do a ton of prep, printing a ton of materials last minute. Everything is just easy to access, ready to go, click and go, and significantly reducing that planning time and the cognitive load behind it.
And now our fourth strategy is to plan your next session before you end the group.
And this is an incredibly simple habit that doesn't take additional time. It's just using your time in the session, but it is an incredibly powerful shift. So the best time to plan your next session is at the end of the current one because the data is fresh. You know what worked, you know what didn't work, and it takes 30 seconds, not 20 minutes.
At the end of the session. I plug in the data, I use SLP Now to generate my therapy note, and then I have a space to jot down notes for next time. And in SLP Now I attach the thematic unit to my session, so I check off the steps as I complete them, so I know exactly where I'm going to pick up just in terms of where we are in the unit.
If we worked on categories today and we're making really great progress and I wanted to make sure that I pick up with that next time, I can jot that down. We did this with categories, do this next time. Or if we worked on categories, but we were really struggling with past tense verbs, I just might make a note.
Okay. We really wanna cycle in the past tense verbs goal next time. I can jot down any supports that were helpful, any like specific ideas that I had of like, oh, I would really like to use this activity to target this goal. So it's just a quick note. You get really good ideas when you're in it with your students.
Your future you will thank the present you for taking those 30 seconds to jot that down. And by doing this, planning becomes much more proactive instead of reactive.
So those were my four strategies for therapy planning when you don't have time to therapy plan and notice, none of this requires hours of prep.
It just requires structured, aligned materials and reduced decision fatigue, and just a simple habit at the end of your session. So when those four pieces are in place, planning stops being the thing that you constantly sacrifice. It's the thing that protects your effectiveness and that you have baked into your routine and it protects your effectiveness.
So you're not feeling guilty. You're not wondering if you're a horrible therapist. You're not doubting that your students are making progress. If you're trying to do all of these four strategies from scratch, it might feel impossible, but if you have systems that support you, it becomes much more sustainable.
And so I would absolutely love to support you in this and making it possible to plan when you don't have any therapy planning time. I'd love to invite you to sign up for a free trial in SLP Now to give you access to all of the tools and resources that you need to make this happen.