SLP Productivity 101: IEPs

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

Speaker 1: This week, we are continuing on the paperwork train and talking about IEPs, more fun documentation and paperwork. So now I'll just share some of my strategies that I use to kind of better navigate or streamline the process of paperwork in general. One of the things that I think is incredibly important is just our mindset around paperwork in general. Because if we're feeling a lot of anxiety or we're frustrated with the process, or we don't see the value in it, it's really, really, really hard to be productive and get these things done. If we so strongly dislike the work, it's hard to get things done that we really don't enjoy. This has been a game changer for me in just finding the value in the things that we do.

Speaker 1: I think that evaluations open the door for a student who has a need to receive services. I mean, it's really incredible, the fact that we have a team of people, whether it's you and the parents and the student, or you and the parents and the student and the PT and the OT and the special education teacher and the teachers, we've got this team, all on the student's side, trying to work together and set the student up for success.

Speaker 1: The same goes for the IEP. The value will be different for me than it will be for you. But hopefully, these give you some ideas. Are there any parts of the evaluation or the IEP that you enjoy and that you can celebrate and focus on when you are filling in the 5 million boxes to complete the paperwork, and you're using software that might be super clunky or hard to use or glitchy? Find something that helps overshadow that, and try to focus on the good that comes out of this process.

Speaker 1: That's the first step, just shifting our mindset and thinking about the value in what we're doing. And you are absolutely needed, especially if you're a school-based SLP, but any speech therapist listening to this. You are needed and you provide such value to your students and your clients and your patients. And this is an opportunity for us to really show up and break things down for parents, and educate them, and get the whole team on board, and share strategies and all of that good stuff. So that is number one. It's just how we approach this task, and looking at it as an opportunity to serve our students.

Speaker 1: Then in terms of more of the tactical kinds of things, one thing that I really like to do for evaluations or IEPs is to map out my due dates. So I use SLP Now and I have my caseload in there and I can see when my students' evaluations are due, and I can see when their IEPs are due, and I can sort by date. If I click that sort button, I can see how many evaluations I have coming up each month, and how many IEPs I have coming each month. And I can just work backwards based on those dates.

Speaker 1: So if I don't have any due in August, but I have 20 due in September, I'm going to work ahead a little bit in August to make my job a little bit easier in September. So if I'm going to have 20 IEP meetings in September, I'm probably going to use August to do most of that paperwork so that the workload is a little bit better distributed. That's how I use the due date strategy. And I just set a goal. I just map it out and make sure that I have enough time, which bring me to another action step or strategy. Number three is to schedule time to work on paperwork. Sometimes, especially if we're working on streamlining our workload and we're trying a bunch of things, we might feel like we're running around like headless chickens, and we don't have time to sit down and work on paperwork.

Speaker 1: Maybe our days are just jam packed full of sessions, and we don't have a time right now. And so first of all, just continue working on it. You can figure it out. And it'll be a mix of advocating for support if your caseload is too high, it'll be implementing strategies to streamline your therapy planning, using creative service delivery strategies, all of these things. There is hope. There is a way to make the workload a little bit more manageable. And that strategy, you have the best concept, I think, of which strategy makes sense for you and your caseload. But schedule in some time to work on that paperwork. I had a caseload in the triple digits, and I did not do the best job at managing my time around work, but I think it can be incredibly powerful.

Speaker 1: I made the decision for my mental health and just sanity throughout the school day to come in a little bit early, just so I had some uninterrupted time, and I just had a little bit of a paperwork block. And you can have it just be like 15, 20, 30 minutes, first thing in the morning. Or if you just want to do it one day a week or two days a week, whatever. And you'll get a good idea once you see how many IEPs you have due, and once you kind of figure out your workflow. Use the strategies I shared in the last episode to make the process that much quicker. You might only need one 15-minute block a week. Who knows? If you get it super streamlined.

Speaker 1: But yeah, so my strategy personally was to come in a little bit early, because my school day was just super chaotic. And I just sat down, knocked that out. No one was bugging me. I was just in the zone. I got paperwork done while my brain was still fresh and not super tired. And so by spending a little bit of time before school, I didn't have to bring home my laptop and be working on reports until midnight. I had a steady routine and that's just when I got the paperwork done. Hopefully you can work towards having actual paperwork time during the school day. And I was able to work towards this, so I think you can too. But some things you can do are to put up a do not disturb sign. So you can just say testing. You can use your testing in progress sign or decide what you want the label to be. You can just have it be do not disturb, and that's all you do.

Speaker 1: Another helpful strategy is to bring noise canceling headphones, or even just any kind of headphones, and maybe you can play some focus music from YouTube or whatever your favorite playlist is. People are less likely to interrupt too if you're focusing. And you're not going to be doing this for like hours and hours every day. I don't think we need to feel guilty about trying to give ourselves some uninterrupted focus time. So that's what we've got there. And just kind of create your ideal schedule. When you want to get your paperwork done,, it's something that we have to do. And hopefully with our mindset shift, it's something that we see value in and something we can maybe be a little excited about. Yeah, so just map that out and stick to it.

Speaker 1: I will link to a blog post about how to write goals if that's something that you're struggling with, but you can build a little bit of a bank for yourself as well to help kind of work through the goal writing process. And if you have a strong process like a checklist for evaluation and/or your IEP, that'll make goal writing a lot easier as well. But I will link to a blog post with more details on that since we are running short on time.

Speaker 1: The last two tips that I have... And I highly recommend adding these to your IEP checklist so that they're part of what you do because it'll help streamline your entire workload overall. So I recommend gathering some handouts that you can use at the meeting. So this can be more of a one-time task potentially. And I'll link to the blog post so that you can see pictures and you can have access to links to my favorite handouts. But there are some really great handouts and forms that you can use for teacher referrals and explaining what an SLP actually is, because there's nothing worse than working with the student for years and years, and parents not really understanding what we do.

Speaker 1: Like if we have a student who was just evaluated for the first time, it can be really helpful to explain what an SLP does, just to give them context before we dive into all of the areas that we evaluated. There's a really nice bell curve visual that I use when explaining results. And there's some really nice handouts on Teachers Pay Teachers as well that break down specific skills. So lots and lots of really good resources. And I just put these in a binder, in sheet protectors, and I put yellow highlighter on my original, because if you put yellow highlighter through the copy machine, it won't copy. And then I also know not to give that handout away. So I just put these in a binder, in sheet protectors.

Speaker 1: I have multiple copies of each one, and I just put the highlighted sheet in the back of the sheet protector. So then I can easily flip through and just grab what I need. I just grab this binder when I go to an IEP meeting, and I kind of have a mental list of what handouts would be helpful based on whether it's an eval or an IEP or what we're working on. But we throw so much information at parents at these meetings. Some of them may not read or look at the handouts. But for the parents who are wanting to understand who are just super overwhelmed, I think sharing these handouts is really powerful and really helps make them more a part of the team.

Speaker 1: And then the last strategy that I have, so when you write a goal, make sure you have a way to assess it. So as you're writing the goal, think about, okay, what am I going to use to assess this? And then we'll talk more about organizing that next month in our data collection month. And then how am I going to teach this? And if I need a visual to teach a skill, I might just quickly put that together. Or can you do a mental check... Okay. I have this [inaudible 00:12:00] visual that I can use to teach it. So we're good to go with teaching. And then also, do you know how to teach that skill? Do you have evidence-backed strategies that you can use when navigating this?

Speaker 1: We might not have time to dive into a course right away, but it's just a nice check. And then just to kind of check in with yourself and make sure that you're prepared to start working on these goals, and that'll really set you up for success in the IEP meeting as well, if there's any questions or anything like that. So that's a wrap. We'll see you next month. 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.