Marisha

Let's dive into some therapy planning ideas, making this happen with our caseload. And so before we dive into the actual therapy plans, I wanted to share, because when I present on curriculum based therapy, I get a lot of questions about the goals. And I was confused about this at first, because it's like, we're just targeting the student's goals in the context of in using the curriculum as the context, and so we could target essentially any goal with that. But I realized that some speech therapists were writing... they were approaching goal writing in a different way, and so it was harder for them to make that match. So I found that starting with thorough evaluation was incredibly helpful because some of these SLPs were writing goals based on formal language testing results, which is great. We definitely want to include formal testing in our evaluation.

It's oftentimes required, but we want to pull additional information and consider other pieces of data when we're writing our goals. We don't want to just write goals based on the self subtests or whatever assessment we decide to use. So some other things we can do are use curriculum based assessments. So I used to use ones from Nicole Alison, and then Maureen from The Speech Bubble had some that I used as well. Also the SLP toolkit has some good curriculum based assessments as well. So just find a set of assessments or build a small library of curriculum based assessments that you can use, because that can be incredibly informative, and those are nice. We do our formal testing typically every three years, but the curriculum based assessments are nice to readminister on a yearly basis and it gives us some information about... it helps inform our year to year goal writing as well as the overall goal writing.

And then another thing that's incredibly, incredibly important is a language sample or multiple language samples. If we have time at the end, I can share a quick overview of some time saving tips, but if you can't find them, just Google SLP now language sample and the first result that'll pop up will include an explanation of how I set that all up and how I make that happen without taking a ton of time, because language samples can be very time-consuming. But I found that the system that I set up saved me a lot of time. Some things that you can do, a conversation sample is one that I like to grab, just seeing what language they use interacting with peers. But the students use, or anyone really, uses different language in different contexts.

So I think it's incredibly interesting to get a conversation sample to see what their like informal speech is like, but we can also get a narrative sample, whether they're generating their own story or doing a retell, or an expository sample where they're summarizing a text. This is especially interesting for older students. Or persuasion, like having them persuade you on whether the school day should be five or 10 hours or whether summer break should be five months, whatever it is. I built a small set of language sample prompts, and then I was able to use those across students. There's not fabulous data to help us understand, especially as students get older, you can get some numerical data to pull from if you use [inaudible 00:04:39] or something like that, but there's just not a whole lot to pull from.

And so I found it really helpful to... I gave the same types of language samples across my caseload and then I'd also borrow some typical students to get an idea just to calibrate my understanding and help me decide what warranted goals and what didn't. So that was super helpful.

And then I'd observe in the classroom, that could be incredibly informative. I would ask parents and teachers for input because I want to know how the student is doing in the classroom and what they're noticing or what parents are noticing at home. I could connect with the students and see what their goals are, what do they want to be when they grow up and just getting that buy-in, at least trying to tie their goals to what their... tying their speech and language goals to their personal goals, if at all possible. And then of course reviewing past progress.

So I would pull all of those elements into the evaluation and that made it really easy to start figuring out which goals I wanted to target, because I started to see connections. So maybe I noticed... and it's interesting too, because it could help me rule in or rule out potential goal areas, or it would help me identify areas that I needed to probe a little bit more to figure out if it warranted a goal or not.

But for example, some students would bomb the grammar subtest, but when I gave them a language sample, expository and persuasive language samples, their grammar was beautiful. And so that told me that writing a grammar goal might not be the best option. It's something I definitely would want to look into why they didn't perform well on the grammar subtest of the formal language test. But if I'm observing them in the classroom, their grammar is great, and in the language samples, the work samples from the classroom, those all indicate that the student has appropriate grammar, then that the test... the result from that grammar subtest isn't necessarily very helpful.

Usually when I get all of these different results, I start mapping it out. I noticed this as an area of need and this as a strength, and then I just would write those out for each of the assessments that I gave, and then I could kind of start to draw parallels and figure out, okay, this is what's going to help the student most. These are the goals that I'm going to focus on. I'm going to support these things by providing these accommodations or whatever it may be. And it helped me come up with a really comprehensive plan of attack that I could stand behind and that I could explain well.

Then once that was all mapped out, we can look at that and we can decide, okay, story grammar is typically something that we can remediate pretty quickly. Students catch on to that and we can work through that quickly, so maybe that is something that I would prioritize, but maybe there's something that's really having a significant impact in the classroom and it's not as easy of a goal to target, but that's really, really important to that student because they want to be a newscaster when they grow up or whatever it is, and so we can use all of these factors to determine what's the highest priority, where are we going to focus our efforts, what are we going to offer supports for? And kind of move through the goals that way. I wish I had... Hopefully those general suggestions are helpful. I wish we had time to dive into a couple of full on case studies or whatnot, but that'll have to be another presentation.

So knowing what to target, we're going to compare data and select those appropriate targets like I talked about before, and then we can be strategic in what our target selection. So like I was saying, do we want something that we can remediate quickly or something that has a huge impact? What if there's... Like if there's something that is easy to remediate and has a significant impact, that'll be at the top of the list. And then if there's something that can be remediated quickly but doesn't have a significant impact, maybe that moves down the list a little bit, or if there's something that has a significant impact and can't be remediated quickly, maybe that goes up just below the thing that... so we can work through it that way.

So we know what we're targeting, we're solid on that. We've gotten feedback from the team. We have our multiple sources of data, and then we just need to start planning. So like I said, we want to share the goals with the teacher, decide which context we want to use, are we using those math word problems? Are we using the ReadWorks articles? Are we pulling from the social studies texts? Whatever it may be. So I would just work with the teachers, identify those areas, and get those organized.

So that is the context of the therapy, but I need to do a little bit of work as a speech therapist to make sure that I have everything that I need to set my students up for success. Because I do have that glue for the therapy, but I need something to actually support the student's skills. So what I like to do, I've mentioned this in pretty much every presentation, but I have a caseload at a glance sheet that I like to fill out, especially at the beginning of the year, and I go through all of my student's goals and add them to the caseload at a glance, and then I make sure to grab... So ideally we would pull an assessment or a probe for each goal when we write the goal, because when we write it, we should have a way to measure it. So in an ideal world, we would already have those all organized and ready to go. But the caseload at a glance is just a good way to inventory and make sure we have a good way to measure every student's goals.

And then we also want to have some teaching tools. So I strongly believe that we are our best therapy tool. We could have the most beautiful speech room in the world, the most beautiful materials, but if we don't have the evidence-based strategies and our clinical judgment and our knowledge to drive that therapy, it's still a train wreck, even if we have all of these beautiful things. So we are our best therapy tools.

I like the caseload at a glance because it helps me go through and make sure... it's a check for me. Like, do I know how to teach this? And so I might brush up on the evidence-based strategies that I can use to teach that skill. I also like to make sure we do want to use multiple modalities, but visuals are huge for me. I think they really benefit our students. And so that's something I want to make sure that I have a visual for each skill. Sometimes it's a fancy laminated visual from my membership site, but other times it's just something that we draw on a sticky note or on a piece of paper, and that ends up being the visual.

But I like that caseload at a glance because then that helps me prioritize. If there's 10 students working on categories and I don't feel like I have good visuals or good strategies to use to teach and support those skills, then I'm going to do some work on those, on that area instead of heavily focusing on a random goal that only one student has. And of course I want to be able to do all of the goals well, but when we're feeling overwhelmed, it's nice to be able to prioritize, and just by starting with the bigger impact chunks, it kind of just gives us that momentum to keep going through the rest of the list. So that's something that is huge and I make sure to grab those visuals and make them organize and just make sure my head is straight with all of my strategies.

And then the next thing that I want to do is just make sure to communicate progress with teachers. So that might be... and each teacher will have kind of different expectations or requests or just patience with the communication. So a lot of times it would just be I would just... during the whatever... and this is a little bit different with teletherapy I suppose, but I would just I think if I were doing teletherapy now, I would just be connecting with the teachers via email and we are problem solvers so we can figure out a good way to go over that progress.

I might just set up a monthly check-in or something, but when I was in the schools, I would just make a list of the teachers that I wanted to check in with and then I would just knock out a couple every week. I would just try and connect. You get into your communication rhythm. So like Mrs. Smith is always in the copy room on Monday morning, and maybe Monday morning's not a good time to connect, but we always run into each other and so we can just do a quick exchange there. Just kind of building that into the routines and making sure that we're communicating that regularly with teachers, and it was easy to share progress when something big happened, like a big success. I would just be motivated to share that with them, whether it's like a quick email or a quick call. Then if I was struggling, that was also a good indicator to check-in because then we can kind of work together and problem solve.

So that's what we've got there. And then we don't have a ton of time to dive into all of the therapy routine details, but my basic routine that ended up working well for curriculum-based therapy when I'm in the therapy room, it's a little different when I'm in the classroom, the routine changes, but when a student comes into my therapy room, I have them review their goals and so we just go through their goal cards. I just have them write their goal in their own words, and oftentimes they write why it's important to them. And then we just go through those. Then at the same time, I collect a quick probe, so that lets me know how the student is doing on one skill. Each student gets probed with one skill and then I can know how the student is coming into the session and it gives me an idea for how much support... or it gives me an idea of how much support the student will need to be successful with that skill.

So if we're working on categories and they scored like 0% accuracy, I am going to before diving into the category vocabulary journal, I'm going to take a step back, explain what the categories are, do some simple examples or whatever makes sense, and do some pre-teaching and all of that before we dive into the actual activity. So it just keeps me informed. But if the student is at 100% accuracy, I'm going to push them a little bit and see how they can do in context with less support. So that's just an example of how that would work.

And then I would just move through whatever materials we're using. If we're using a text, we would move through the literacy-based therapy framework and I have other courses that dive into that in more detail. Or the math word problem example, we would do whatever teaching we needed to do for specific skills or pre-teaching vocabulary, reteaching what the skill is, and then diving into that word problem and breaking it apart, and that's something that even that took several sessions to break down. So that's just a quick breakdown of what that therapy routine could look like.

Okay. And then just a quick breakdown, students come in, we review the goal cards, we pick one primary target. I personally like to collect a quick probe or just to see how the student is doing with that skill without any support. And then I grab the visuals that would be needed and make sure to do any pre-teaching or review as we dive into the unit. And then at the end of the session, I just wrap up and do a quick narrative summary of the supports that I provided. And then I enter the probe data in real time. So I have those accurate numbers.

And then the last thing we wanted to talk about is just being therapeutic in the context of therapy or curriculum-based therapy. I just have this quote to kind of drive this point home. It's by Dr. Erin and she says, "I have been advocating that SLPs engage in curriculum relevant therapy and that they use the curriculum as a context for language, but not try to teach the curriculum per se." Because we are, and this is me adding this in, but we are not tutors. We are focusing on the language processes and underpinnings. So that is our role. We are not trying to keep up with the classroom.

So if the teacher sends me like five word problems a week, I might do one every two weeks or three weeks, however much time I need to dive into the article, the word problem, whatever it may be. I go at the student's pace. I'm there for the students. I'm not trying to keep up with the curriculum. So that is one huge lesson. I remember trying to support... One of the teachers wanted me to support a book that they were reading. It was a chapter book and they read a crazy amount every day, or every week they had multiple reading assignments and I just could not keep up. I was trying to and it was frustrating, but we do not keep up. We go at the student's pace. We're teaching, we're using the materials as like the context for therapy, but we're not trying to keep up with the classroom. So we are trying to teach these skills, not completing assignments.

And then one framework that has been incredibly helpful in navigating this is Dr. [inaudible 00:20:57] framework. So I use this as a check for myself. If I feel like, "Ugh. I'm such a tutor. This was such a tutoring session." Or if I just am not feeling good about how the session went, I will take a deep breath first, and then I'll go through the framework and check and ask myself how the session went based on these four criteria.

So she says R stands for repeated opportunities. So in order to really be therapeutic and teach a skill, if we're working on categories and we're just completing a worksheet assignment, and there's one category question but the rest are something completely different, that's not enough repeated opportunities. If we're working on categories with a student, we need to give them multiple exemplars and really dive into that.

The I stands for intensive schedule. So this is something we decide when we write the IEP typically, but we want to make sure that the students are getting enough intensity. So whether it's 10 minutes three times a week or 30 minutes twice a week. Whatever they need, we can adjust that. This is typically if a student isn't making progress, it's something I might evaluate.

The other piece is systematic support and scaffolding. And last month we talked all about that, so if you want to check out last month's podcast episodes or last month's course, you'll find lots and lots and lots of examples there.

And then the E stands for explicit focus. So this is why I have goal cards for all of my students, because I want to make sure that they know what they're working on, and I just focus on one, typically just one goal a session. I might target other skills because I just can't turn it off with my modeling and all of that, vocabulary and recasting grammar and all of those strategies. But we have one main skill that we're focusing on. And then this allows us to... this gives the students the opportunity to internalize the strategies and skills instead of us just providing them with tons and tons of support and they never take ownership of it.

Let's talk about a little bit of a framework to make this possible and implement this with our students. Because this can be very overwhelming to tackle, especially given some unique changes in service delivery this year. So we'll kind of chat through that and go through some different ideas.

So we've got three components that we'll go through. The first one is teacher communication, because we need to access the curriculum in some way. Then we'll talk about how to organize our materials and plan for therapy. And then, one very, very common concern is, "I'm not a tutor. How am I going to be therapeutic using the curriculum?" We'll talk about some strategies and some little frameworks that we can use to set ourselves up for success in those areas.

First step is teacher communication. I've actually gotten a hand in the face from an educator. So I just want to share that it's not always ... It is going to be a challenge. Some teachers are easier to communicate with and collaborate with than others. We're all very busy. We're all very stressed. We all have huge workloads. If something is unknown, it can be scary. Sometimes we just don't want to give it the time of day. That's not a reason to give up though, because like I said before, we are in this for our students and we want to do what's best for them. So even if a teacher puts a hand in our face, or whatever hurdles we come across, we are problem solvers, and we can figure this out. It's not a reason to give up. Our students deserve our best. It's also a good opportunity for us to grow and just develop, further develop as professionals. Yes, it can be challenging. I've experienced it myself, and I've heard a lot of other SLPs share experiences, but we've got this. Even if they say no, even if they're rude, we have lots of tools that we can use to figure out what we ... to work around it and to really show up for our students.

Some things that we can do, and I'm throwing out a bunch of different ideas here, you get to decide what feels most comfortable for you, what seems to doable, and just start in a place that feels just maybe a little bit scary, and just step a little bit out of your comfort zone and then just build on that over time. I just started out. I don't know, I just started out big. The first thing that I did was, I guess I had a of couple experiences, like I told you about the visuals and things like that. So I dabbled one-on-one with some teachers. But after diving into this research and realizing how big of an impact it could have on my students, I just wanted to go all in and I wanted to make this happen as quickly as possible for as many students on my caseload as possible.

So I decided to present at a staff meeting, because it was the fastest way for me to access all of the teachers, share a consistent message, and just address everyone at once, let them know where I stood, what I had to offer, and then go from there. But I definitely was scared. I was not comfortable with public speaking, especially as a CF. I did not feel like an expert, but I got to fake it until I made it. I just, I prepared to the best of my ability. Even though my hands were shaking, I showed up, I did it, I shared my message with the teachers. Some of them responded and some of them didn't. But it set that foundation for me to work off of.

What I did, some things that I ... you can present, or if you just want to start off sharing what a speech therapist does, that's an option. When I went, I, because I had already done a little bit of ... I introduced myself. I shared what I can help with. So at this meeting, I just shared a couple, the examples of things that I was able to do. I said that I really wanted to provide better services, the best possible services for students, and that I needed the teachers' support, and that I would really like to use materials from the classroom, and just requesting that they share. I did go up to each teacher afterwards to come up with a plan, but I just asked them to start thinking about areas that I could support.

After that meeting, I followed up with the teachers and I printed ... My IEP system, both districts that I worked in, they gave me the option to print an IEP-at-a-glance. This became my routine. At the beginning of every school year, I would print off all of the IEP-at-a-glance sheets for all of my students. I would put them in a red folder, and then just marked it confidential. I created a little sign out form. So I went to the teacher with the IEP-at-a-glance, so they could know which students in their class were, one, receiving services, and what the students were working on. Then I would just quickly go through that, and I would just have the teacher sign it to let me ... and I would just tell them that this is confidential paperwork. It's really important that they keep good track of it. I told them that I would come collect it again at the beginning of the school year.

I did this because well, one, it is confidential and they did need to keep it secure, keep that information secure. But then also, I just wanted teachers to take ownership of that. Then it happened a couple times where the teachers said they had no idea what we were working on, or that they had no idea my students were even being seen for speech therapy services. So by doing this at the beginning of the year or whenever, like we're almost halfway through the school year now. The first time I did this, it was probably around this time that I did, I started sharing that IEP-at-a-glance. But just having them sign and putting it in that like stand-out type of folder, made a really big difference. It just flagged something in their brains of like, "This is important. She's telling me about this. I need to make sure I keep track of this." It didn't work for every single teacher, but it definitely made a notable difference, going through that process.

So I shared the student's goals. I would just give them a quick update of where the students were. Then this would be, this could be an opportunity for the teachers to let me know what the students were struggling with in the classroom. And then we could use that to determine what we wanted to focus on. With one teacher, I had several students in her class. I brought the IEP-at-a-glance sheets, and we went over them. The grade's professional goal was to work on math word problems. That was something, they had set a professional learning goal or whatever the goal, whatever their goal is called. They had to set a goal as a group, and they wanted their students to work on that.

So I was like, "Awesome. Let me support that." Because that's something that they were very motivated to work on. And the students that I was seeing were the ones that were most likely to bring down like their averages or whatever. So when I offered to help, they were like, all of the teachers were like, "Oh, okay. We're going to share these with you, and we're going to come up with a strategy to work on this together." So that's one tip that I have to share, is figure out if they have any personal or, well, professional goals, whether they're officially stated, like to the principal or whatnot, or if there's just something that they want to work on. Really tapping into what's important to them can make it a lot easier to set up that collaboration, because they have some skin in the game. If I'm just requesting materials and they don't have a good understanding of why, or if they don't feel like it'll benefit them, it's much more likely to get ... they just will not share it then.

So I think, I mean, they obviously care about the students. They want their students to be set up for success, and that's oftentimes enough. But if it's something that they're actively working for, and these teachers had to submit evidence showing that they collaborated and did things to work towards this goal. So I was helping them with that. Every week on the dot, they shared their word problems and we did send back and forth. We got to work on vocabulary, we got to work on, the board problems had W-H- questions in them. We got to work on that. It was very, very language-heavy. They had to explain their thinking. So it was, it happened to be the perfect activity to work on the student's goals.

Sometimes it just, it won't be a fit. Like if the student is working on idioms, that's their main goal, and they want us to do a math problem, that might not be a great fit. But a lot of times, these activities are very language-rich and we can, whether we're working on grammar, vocabulary, whatever it may be, we can make it fit the student's goal. Especially if it's something that they're struggling with, there is a way to make that link. So that's what I did.

So sharing that IEP-at-a-glance, asking the teachers for input, you can start that with just one teacher. If we're, like with teletherapy, we might not be presenting. Or with just the current state of things, we might not be presenting at an in-person staff meeting. But maybe they have Zoom meetings that we can borrow a couple of minutes from and talk to all the teachers there. Or, we can record a quick video and send it out, or just send out a quick email. Or, we can just ask to schedule a chat with one teacher and start that way. Whatever seems like a good first step, use your clinical judgment. Decide what you think feels doable, and maybe just a little out of your comfort zone, and then go from there.

Then one thing that's super important is just to maintain logs of all of the communication, so you can, one, remember what the teachers want, like what you decided to work on together. I just made a little sheet. I think I just made a copy of the sign-out log, or maybe even on the sign-out log, I made a comment. But I would just make notes of what we talked about and what I wanted to make sure I did. Then that's what I did then. Now, I use my own FLP Now web application and I document. I just pull out my phone and document in there, so I can just keep track of everything.

So that's what we've got in terms of opportunities and what we can do. With one of the schools that I was at, it was very challenging. Yeah. It was just a really challenging situation. I really had to convince the principal that it was worth ... that I wouldn't be wasting her time or the teachers' time. So I felt especially scared going into that meeting. I just brought some treats, because at least then the teachers would be happy. Even if I, like worst-case scenario, if I couldn't talk, at least they had a good treat. Yeah, I think they always appreciate that. So, those are kinds of strategies that I would use to start navigating that.

So here's a breakdown of what we could potentially do. So if you decided you wanted to start working on this next week, what I would suggest is, first, well, talk to the principals. See if you can schedule some time at a staff meeting and then go speak there. So if that's the route you want to go, just go all in. Speak at the staff meeting and then schedule a time to follow up with the teachers. The plan that I laid out in the slides is more of a beginning of the year kind of set-up, where I'd speak at the staff meeting, I'd set up my schedule and I grouped students by teacher. I know it's not possible, or it is possible, but probably not realistic or feasible or smart to totally change your schedule now.

But I found that when using this approach, it really benefited me to create a schedule and group students, at least by a grade, by teacher, if possible. Then I would just go through and make sure that I had baseline data for all of my students, so that I had a little bit of information to share. So then, when I do share the goal sheets with the teachers, I can come up with a good ... I can give a good update and be informed on how the student is doing and have my perspective on where the deficit is, or where they need support. Then I would work with the teacher to figure out which area we want to focus on. That was particularly helpful because then they wouldn't have that decision fatigue.

Because when I asked for materials from the classroom, some would send nothing. Some would send something super random that I had no idea what to do with. So by talking to the teacher, like with my second grade teacher, we did the math word problems. So she knew, every week she just got into the routine. She would make the copies for the class and she would give me, she would put a copy in my box, and that's what she did.

Another teacher, we decided to support the vocabulary, and I would pre-teach some of the vocabulary. It worked really well with my students' goals. And she just shared the vocabulary sheet that she copied for the students. She would just share that ahead of time with me. That was also a copy machine thing. The mailboxes were right there, and just share that.

With teletherapy, it's probably even easier if they can just share access to however they're sharing materials with the students, just loop you in on whatever you decide to share. But it was nice, because if for some reason the teacher forgot to share the vocabulary list, I could be like, "Hey Sandy, do you have this month's vocabulary list? I'd love to use it with our students," or whatever.

So by having a very specific request, like if I were to send them an email, like, "Please send me some materials from the classroom." You'd be like, "What in the world do I send?" So if we have that specific request, they're much more likely to follow through and it just makes it a lot easier for them to follow up with that. So, that's a recommendation that we have. Then as the teachers start sharing the materials, I upload them to the tool that I use to manage my caseload so that I have easy access to them. I just keep everything organized there. And then that just makes it really easy. I have easy access to everything. When I'm planning my therapy, I can just easily link that to my sessions, and I'm good to go.

Just a little bit of background on my story. So, let's just call this hypothetical but not so hypothetical student Johnny. And so, during my CF I had the student and I had this with all of my students but I got really, really excited when they were making progress. I was not beyond crying in my speech room just because I was so proud of the students for making progress towards their goals. I think I was not the most confident CF in the world for a variety of reasons and so it just felt so good. It was so incredibly rewarding when I saw a student understand something and just demonstrate mastery of a skill that especially if we had worked really hard on it or if I took 50 webinars to figure out how to successfully help the student. So, that happened a lot.

And this particular student was making really nice progress with WH questions. I had made this visual and it just it helped cause he was really struggling with understanding the question type and he would hear a question and he would just, he would pick up on a key word but it wasn't the question word. And he would just answer it with whatever came first. And so, I created a visual that helped us stop and process the question, identify which question word was being used so we can find the appropriate answer. And it just was working really well and he was rocking it in the therapy room. And so, I went to the IEP meeting and I was really, really excited to share this progress. But then the teacher was like, "That's one of his biggest weaknesses in the classroom. He's not able to answer questions." So yeah and she was more diplomatic about it but essentially I wasn't doing my job.

And so I ended up, I was like, "Okay, well we've got to find a way to work around this because the student has the ability to answer these questions." And so, I shared the visual with the teacher and she started using it with my student and that made a big difference. And then she also started sharing it with other students who needed support who had similar difficulties with responding to questions. And so it was just, it was really cool to, that experience wasn't very comfortable in a moment when I realized I made that mistake but I really, I learned a lot from that. And just the importance of first of all communicating with teachers and then sharing what we're doing with teachers and the teacher didn't have that in her skill set. She didn't think to use a visual to break down the different types of questions and to scaffold students in that way. And that was something that came really pretty naturally to me especially after all of those years of training.

And so, we really have so much to offer in terms of our expertise and we're doing a disservice to our students if like I always say this what happens in speech does not stay in speech, it should go out into the classroom. And we're doing our students a huge disservice if our therapy rooms are Vegas and if what happens in the speech room stays in the speech room because it shouldn't. Our job is to help our students reach access to curriculum and participate in the classroom to the best of their ability.

So for this hypothetical Johnny, let's get out of our comfort zones a little bit and make this happen for our students. So just as that, after we set the stage, we're going to back up a little bit and talk about what curriculum based therapy even is. I alluded to some examples of communicating with teachers, sharing our expertise with them, supporting in the classroom and all of that so we're just going to break it down a little bit more.

So in the literature, I found that curriculum based therapy is one we provide educationally relevant services. So we are supporting progress in the classroom and it can be we can deliver the services in the classroom or we can deliver them in the therapy room. Both can still be considered curriculum-based therapy and we get to use our clinical judgment to decide what makes the most sense.

And then another word that I come across a lot is contextualize [inaudible 00:05:16] When we provide explicit skill instruction in ways that are meaningful and purposeful for the student. And so, that is really important and it's just another way of thinking about what this is. And it doesn't always have to be the written curriculum because some of us are working with students on social language and everything like that. And we have an implicit curriculum that we can teach as well. Sometimes it's unwritten, unofficial and unintended lessons that students learn from interacting with peers. So, we don't have to pull from a textbook or something for it to be curriculum-based. There is that unwritten curriculum that we can support as well.

And so a couple of quotes to drive that home, Judy Montgomery is a huge inspiration for me but she says that language is a pervasive part of each life and SLPs can serve as the glue that unites a child with his or her environment. So, that is super powerful. We have some amazing skills that we can offer in the therapy room but also in the classroom. And we have a very unique lens and we play a crucial role in being able to empower our students to use language to really access that curriculum.

And then ASHA also has something to say about this. So, they say that individualized programs always relate to the schoolwork. And this is something that's been in the guidelines for years and years and years, it's nothing new. And they suggest that we take materials for treatment from or that they're directly related to content from the classroom. So this isn't just something that I think is a cool idea, it's something that ASHA recommends as well.

And so, we talked a little bit about some of the benefits in my setting the stage story but I thought it would be cool to dive into it a little bit more and I'll share just one more. I have just one more quick experience share to highlight how big of an impact this can have. Because we're all, every single speech therapist that I talk to emphasizes the importance of we do this for the students. We want to be there for our students. We want to have an impact on our students. That's why we do what we do. We don't do it for the paperwork. We don't do it for the fame or the money or anything like that. It's all about the students. And that's what every single SLP says.

So I was working with a group of sixth graders and I observed in the classroom a couple times and the teacher did a weekly article where they'd read the article and they did a bunch of activities with that article throughout the week. And when I observed my students in that classroom during this dedicated article time they were absolutely not engaged. They were daydreaming, doodling, anything but participating in discussion and the activities. And so, I thought this could be a really great... I was starting to dabble with curriculum based therapy and I was like, "Yes, this is how I can support." And I had no idea how big of an impact this could have. It was really incredible to see this in action.

But I asked the teacher for the article that was coming up and I knew that we would need a significant amount of time to prepare. And it wasn't something that, I wouldn't be able to keep up with an article a week. I'd been doing some literacy based therapy and I knew that I needed significant amount of time to really dive into the article and do it justice. So, I got the article a couple of weeks ahead of time. I read through it with my students. And so I was curious how they would respond to it. So we read through it and did a quick comprehension quiz and they bombed it. They absolutely bombed it. And then I looked at what might be happening and I realized that it was an issue with vocabulary. It ended up being a little bit of a dynamic assessment and then I taught the vocabulary and then redid the comprehension activity and it made a huge difference.

And then we just kept working through the article, breaking things down. And then I got a call from the teacher when they started the unit and actually started working through the article. She's like, "Marisha, you would not believe how the students did in class today. They participated for the first time. They were raising their hands. They did a great job." And so, taking that article and targeting, supporting the students ahead of time, made it possible for them to participate in a classroom activity for the first time all year.

They'd been checking out and not participating and then just taking that curriculum and bringing it into the speech room. Really targeting their skills and supporting them in the areas that they needed allowed them to actually participate in that classroom discussion. And the next time that I saw them they were just really excited. Because especially in sixth grade they were pretty far behind and the fact that they were able to participate with success and successfully answer questions and feel confident about what they were doing was huge. And granted, we weren't able to do that for every single article but I was teaching them strategies that they could use for the subsequent articles. And I was able to share some strategies with the teacher as well. So there's some really cool things that can come out of that.

So there we go and that's just the picture, it reminded me to tell that story. And then, so some other benefits like we've come up with a bunch of them already is just like we've seen that we're all about the students and this approach can really benefit our students. It can make it possible for them to access their curriculum when they might otherwise be checking out. And we're setting them up for success. We're really focusing on generalization from the start. So, when I was working with those sixth graders I got that article ahead of time. We worked on it for a couple of weeks and then they were able to apply those skills in the classroom and it was really clear. They didn't have to do any... They practiced their skills and they knew exactly what they needed to do because they had that familiar context.

We had worked on that specific article and they knew exactly what they needed to do with that article in the classroom. And then there's some other benefits to it as well. So it helps our students generalize and be more successful but it also is convenient for speech therapists. We get free materials from the curriculum. So we don't have to buy as much stuff and it also can mean less prep. Once we get into a rhythm with using these types of materials it's very minimal prep and we're good to go and we can use pretty much anything.

And then some other benefits in terms of where we are in the school, once I started doing that teachers started valuing me much more. They would reach out and this a double-edged sword but I was having so much more of an impact in the school. Teachers were coming to me with questions. I was able to work with them to troubleshoot and problem solve and support students on my caseload but then also other students. And I was able, like that example that I gave with the teacher the second grade teacher where I shared that visual, I was able to teach her some strategies that she used with my student and other students in the classroom. And potentially that's a type of RTI.

It's possible that some of those students might have ended up on my caseload but because I equipped the teacher with strategies to work on some of those skills and support some of those skills in the classroom they didn't have to come on my caseload. And that was least restrictive for the students and that's a strategy that she'll be able to carry forward for years to come in impacting hundreds of students. And so, I was appreciated, I was seen, I was not forgotten quite as much as I was before and teachers really understood what I had to offer. And of course it took some time of showing up and doing that consistently but with every example they got a better idea of what I had to offer and how important our role was is as a speech therapist.