SLP Productivity 101: Therapy Planning

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 your therapy planning so that you don't have to spend hours and hours a week pulling together therapy plans. I've found a way to streamline this and helped other SLPs streamline their planning into as little as 10 minutes a week. So it is absolutely possible.

Speaker 1: And we'll be chatting about just a basic structure for a therapy session, and how to build a routine and use that as a way to streamline your therapy planning. And then we'll also be talking a little bit about literacy-based therapy, because that is what has completely revolutionized my therapy and made things a lot easier for me. But also I've seen improved outcomes with my students. So we'll chat a little bit about that.

Speaker 1: So to get started, let's just talk about a therapy routine. There are 5 million different ways that you could structure your therapy sessions. A few years back, I did a bunch of research on therapy routines and I pulled from different areas just the different therapies and all of that. So there wasn't a ton specifically focused on speech therapy routines, but I looked at different disciplines in the educational literature too, and just kind of tried to pull some common threads in terms of the best way to schedule a therapy session, and what a typical therapy routine might look like, and what elements we might want to include.

Speaker 1: And I think this is also super helpful because I'm going to be sharing four different steps in the therapy routine, but this can be a really helpful framework if you're feeling like, man, that session was not super great. Or man, that session was incredible. You can look at the different parts of the routine, and maybe there wasn't much structure, or maybe there was too much structure, there's just different things that we can check in on and kind of use that to improve our practice.

Speaker 1: So the four steps super quick are, one, check in. Two, teach. Three, practice. And four, wrap up. So I will share a link to a little bit more detail on these. I've done some different courses that dive into this a lot more. But the basic premise is first, for step one, when we check in with our students, we don't want to just jump into the therapy session without seeing where our students are at.

Speaker 1: So are they ready to learn? And if not, is there something we can do to help get them ready to learn and participate in the session? And this is a great time to establish rapport, and we always hover therapy brains on. So even if we ask our students what they did over the weekend, or what they did this morning at school or whatever it may be, that is a language activity, and we are gathering data and information. But we can also just be present with the students during that process, and allow them to feel heard and seen and all of that.

Speaker 1: During the check-in, I also really like to collect some probe data. And like I alluded last week, we are going to be diving into a lot more detail on data collection next month. So I'll save that discussion for next month.

Speaker 1: Then step two is to teach the skill. And this is important, this is one that I often skipped as a newer clinician because I had my therapy activity planned, I had a beautiful activity prepped, and it's like, let's go do this. Let's jump right in.

Speaker 1: But sometimes we need to take a step back and actually take time to teach the skill at hand. I really like having some visuals on hand to do that. And the cool part about these steps is that I have had sessions where we spend almost all of our time on step one, or I've had sessions, if we're starting a brand new skill but we've got great rapport, the student is ready to learn, we might spend all of our time on step two.

Speaker 1: Or if we've got great rapport and the student is making great progress on this skill, we might spend almost all of our time in step three, in practice. So it's very dynamic. So as we go through the therapy process, we'll shift through the different steps, and just adjust the routine to fit our students needs. So it's not super rigid. It's meant to be a fluid, flexible process.

Speaker 1: So we talked about step two, teaching. And I mentioned, I love my visuals to introduce skills. But if you go through the research, there's some really interesting strategies on how to structure grammar intervention, specifically. I learned so much about providing focus stimulation, and giving the student multiple, meaningful exemplars before asking them to produce it. So this is a really great way to incorporate some evidence-based strategies as well.

Speaker 1: And if you're curious about those, we have lots of them in the SLP Now academy. So if you are an SLP Now member, you have access to all of those courses in your SLP Now account. And if you're not a member, you can go to SLP now.com/trial to sign up for a free trial. And you could take all of our courses in the free trial, and just get access to some really good information. So if your interest is piqued with those strategies, definitely check out those courses.

Speaker 1: Step three is to practice. So for me, a lot of this is done using literacy-based therapy, which we'll talk about in just a little bit. And then for step four, we have the wrap-up. Where we kind of reflect on the session, and this will obviously look very different depending on the student's age, but we might talk about what they're doing for homework.

Speaker 1: We might talk about their performance in terms how they did on the skill, or maybe do a quick behavior reflection or whatever it may be. But just kind of tying up the loose ends, whether we're talking about homework, or how this applies to what they're doing in the classroom or at home, it's a nice way to just wrap up the session and maybe kind of set expectations for the next one.

Speaker 1: Now we'll chat about literacy-based therapy and structuring that practice. Just kind of setting up literacy-based therapy. I mentioned this at the beginning of the podcast, but this has completely changed the game for me. I started out and this is how I was trained, and I think this is how many of us are trained. We do a lot of drill-based practice, and there is absolutely a time and a place for drill-based practice.

Speaker 1: But my therapy has evolved a lot over the years, and I used to rely heavily on flashcards, and board games, and just reinforcers. And like I said, there's always a time and a place for that, but that was almost exclusively what I did, or worksheets and drills. But it wasn't giving students a meaningful context for their skills.

Speaker 1: So they could do the work sheet, or they could do the following directions drill with really high accuracy in my therapy room. But I was struggling because these skills weren't generalizing, and progress was sometimes slow because they weren't really using the skills in a meaningful context and all of that. So once I started shifting towards literacy-based therapy, it made a huge shift for me. And it was really cool to see that happen, and to see students really master their skills, and empowering them to be able to use these skills in the classroom and in other settings. So it's been really amazing.

Speaker 1: And if you are new to literacy-based therapy, or if you've dabbled and you'd like a little bit more support in implementing that, we do have a free challenge at slpnow.com/challenge. We have a beautiful workbook, and we walk through the five steps over the course of a week, and we share a bunch of free resources to help you set that up. But we're going to take just a couple minutes to run through the five steps of the literacy-based therapy framework so that you can at least have a quick overview, and then we'll go from there.

Speaker 1: What I typically do is, I typically set up a month-long unit for a book. So I'll pick a book, and in the challenge we talk about how to select appropriate books, or for older students appropriate texts. And how to set your unit up for success.

Speaker 1: But just to kind of set the stage, these steps are very robust, and there's a lot of language that we can dive into. And there are tons and tons of opportunities to target virtually any student's goal, whether it's social language, or language, or vocabulary, or AAC, or whatever it may be. It's a really nice framework to work through the skills. And of course, there's no approach that's going to be perfect for every student, so we can do some trial and error and everything.

Speaker 1: But I found that I can pull at least some of the elements, depending on the student. But this works for the majority of my caseload. So without further ado, we'll start with step one, which is pre-story knowledge activation. Before we read the book, we do some different activities. For older students, I might pre-teach vocabulary. For younger students, we might do a book walk, and look at the cover, and kind of walk through some of the pages.

Speaker 1: For all ages, I love filling in a graphic organizer, either to summarize the article or retell the story. I use it as more of an [inferencing 00:11:41] activity. So, okay. We learned some of these vocabulary words, or we looked at the cover and some pages in the book, and this is what we know about the topic. Let's use that information to infer what's going to happen in the story or the article. It's a really fun activity to see how much students know about the topic, and whether they're set up for success to dive in. If that is really challenging for students, we might back up and do a virtual field trip or whatnot.

Speaker 1: But yeah, so we'll do that. And then we'll finally to be ready to dive into actually reading the book or the article. So that's step two, two is to read. And then for step three, we'll do-post story comprehension. This is where we fill in the organizer, whether they're summarizing or retelling. We'll answer some comprehension WH questions if that's appropriate, or we'll do higher-level questions, whatever makes sense for the student.

Speaker 1: Then for step four, we dive into skill-based practice and use the context of the book to really dive into all of our student's skills. I know this is a super quick overview, so I'll share some links to podcast episodes that go into more detail on skill-based practice.

Speaker 1: And then the fifth step is to create a parallel story. So this is where we integrate all of the skills that we've worked on all month long to create a really cool final project, where the students create their own story, or kind of a creative project if it's more of a expository text or nonfiction unit. Really, just pull together all of the skills that they worked on to create a final product.

Speaker 1: So yeah, that's an overview of literacy-based therapy. And those two, the therapy routine and the five steps of literacy-based therapy combined, really set me up for successful and streamlined therapy planning so that I no longer have students walking into my therapy room, and I'm wondering what we're going to do.

Speaker 1: Having this system has really helped. I'll also share a quick video in the show notes on what this looks like all put together. But yeah, that's a wrap for this week. And next week we'll be chatting about streamlining evaluations.

Speaker 1: Thanks for listening to the SLP Now podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please share with your SLP friends and don't forget to subscribe to the podcast to get the latest episode sent directly to you. See you next time.