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How I Mastered Narrative-Based Therapy for SLPs (And Built a Monthly Planning System)

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Quick Summary: Discover how one veteran therapist transitioned to a literacy-based approach, utilizing a reliable speech therapy planning system to prep an entire month of sessions in just one sitting.

I still remember watching it happen.

It was my master’s program. My roommate’s supervisor was running a full therapy session built around one picture book. Everything (the vocabulary, the grammar targets, the comprehension work) came from one book.

I stood there thinking… How does she do that?

Nobody had taught me a framework like that. I didn’t know where to start. And honestly, I walked away from that experience thinking narrative-based therapy for SLPs was something other therapists did. Not me.

Sound familiar?

Why Narrative-Based Therapy Feels So Hard to Start

There’s a reason so many SLPs avoid this approach, even when they know it works.

Grad school trains us to think in trials and data points. Trial, data, trial, data. That’s the model we learn. And it works, but it’s not the whole picture. What’s often missing is the teaching part: the framework, the visuals, and the intentional sequence of moving a student from exposure to a concept, through guided practice, toward independence.

Narrative therapy gives you all of that. But if no one ever modeled it for you, it can feel completely out of reach. That’s not a personal failure. That’s a gap in training. And it’s one a lot of SLPs are quietly carrying.

Finding a Speech Therapy Planning System That Clicked

When I joined SLP Now, I wasn’t looking for a quick fix. I was looking for the framework I never got.

I went through the Academy training. I read the guides. I watched a few videos. And slowly, the whole approach started to make sense. Not in a “now I know the theory” way, but in a “now I know how to actually do this on a Tuesday morning with a group of four kids and 25 minutes” way.

That’s the kind of learning that sticks.

The first time I tried it, I started small. One group. One book. One month. I told myself I’d just pilot this speech therapy planning system and see what happened. At the end of that month, I thought: why would I ever go back?

My Workflow for Monthly Therapy Planning (SLP Edition)

Here is what my monthly therapy planning SLP routine actually looks like now. It all happens in one sitting:

  • Select the Books: At the start of each month, I sit down with my schedule and pick one book per group tier. One book for my younger students, one for my older ones. That’s it.
  • Batch the Materials: I look at what I’ll need for the month—graphic organizers, vocabulary activities, comprehension questions, and book guides.
  • Print and Prep: I count my students, set the copies on the printer, and hit print. All at once. Done.

I don’t have to think about planning again until next month. No digging through folders. No searching for that one worksheet I swore I saved. No Sunday night scramble. Just one sitting at the start of the month, and I’m ready. If you’re spending multiple hours every week on planning, this is the shift that makes the difference.

SLP Therapy Planning Tips: Getting Started Without the Overwhelm

If this approach is new to you, here are the best SLP therapy planning tips I can offer to help you ease in:

  • Start with one group: Pick the group you feel most comfortable with.
  • Commit to one book: Try it for a month—start to finish—and go through the whole framework.
  • Give yourself grace: You don’t have to do it perfectly. The first time through, it’s going to feel a little awkward because you’re learning a new way of thinking about therapy.

By the second month, it starts to feel more natural. By the third, you’re anticipating the moves. You know what questions to ask, which steps to linger on, and when to be flexible.

Getting some training before you jump in helps too. If you can watch someone walk through a full unit with a book—explaining what they’re doing at each stage and why—that context makes everything easier. If you’re on SLP Now, the Academy training is right there. It’s not a six-hour course you’ll never finish. It’s clear, practical, and built around what actually happens in real school therapy rooms.

Becoming a Literacy-Based Therapy School SLP

My therapy looks different now. And not just because the materials are better. The biggest shift in becoming a literacy-based therapy school SLP is that I actually have a teaching phase.

Before, I was jumping straight into practice and data collection. But students need explicit instruction first. They need to see the skill demonstrated, hear the language modeled, and understand what you’re asking them to do. Now, I pull out the visual at the start of a session. We talk through the concept. We practice together. I may not even take data that day.

And I know—because I’ve read the research summaries in SLP Now—that the strategies I’m using are backed by evidence. That knowing changes things.

When my administrator walks in unannounced, I’m not worried. I’m not scrambling to explain what I’m doing or why. I’m already doing what good therapy looks like. Confidence like that doesn’t come from having the most materials. It comes from having a framework you trust.

One More Thing Worth Mentioning

A few years ago, I started taking undergrad and CF interns to supervise. One of the first things I do with every single one of them? I have them go through the same SLP Now training I used to learn narrative therapy.

Because I don’t want them to be standing at a whiteboard years from now, watching someone else do something they’ve never been taught, wondering how. I want them to walk in already knowing.

That’s what a good framework does. It doesn’t just change your practice. It changes what you pass on.

Ready to Try It?

If therapy planning is taking up evenings and weekends you’d rather have back, literacy-based therapy might be the shift you’re looking for. You don’t have to figure out the framework from scratch.

SLP Now’s Academy training, therapy plans, and full unit library are all there when you’re ready. Try it free for 14 days! No credit card required.

 

I’ve Been an SLP for 23 Years. Here’s What Finally Made Me Stop Dreading Language Therapy.

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Twenty-three years into this career, I did not expect to find something that changed how I work.

But then I talked to Robin.

Robin (M.A., CCC-SLP) is a school-based SLP in Tucson, Arizona. Pre-K through fifth grade. A caseload between 50 and 55 students, four days a week. Twenty-three years of experience across multiple states, districts, and settings.

She is not easily impressed. She has seen it all. And she had a very specific problem.

The Thing No One Talks About: Avoiding Goals You’re Not Comfortable With

Robin’s specialty has always been speech sound disorders. Articulation. Phonology. The artic world.

That’s where she felt confident. That’s where she felt at home.

But language goals? Those gave her anxiety.

So she did what a lot of SLPs do, quietly and without realizing it. She leaned into artic. And if a student had both artic and language goals, the language work would slide.

“God forbid a kid had both kinds of goals. I would focus on articulation, and then progress note time comes around and I’m like, oh my gosh, I have no data on language. What was I doing?” — Robin

This is not a character flaw. It is a systems problem. When you don’t have a clear framework for planning language sessions, when you’re also managing a bulky clipboard schedule and trying to prep for your SLPA and track Medicaid billing, you default to what feels manageable.

Language planning felt like one more thing to figure out from scratch.

What Changed When Robin Found a System That Actually Worked

Robin joined SLP Now primarily because she saw a colleague using the scheduling and caseload tools. She needed organization. That was the draw.

But what happened next surprised her.

The literacy-based therapy framework gave her structure for language planning that she hadn’t had before. Not just activities to download, but a way of thinking about sessions. A framework for how to approach language goals in a meaningful, contextual way.

“I’m having a lot less anxiety about planning for language therapy and I’m better at it and enjoying it more.” — Robin

After 23 years of leaning on articulation, she started actually enjoying the language side of her caseload.

That is a before/after transformation that no amount of marketing copy can manufacture.

How the Daily Schedule Tool Changed Her Whole Workflow

One of Robin’s most-used features is something that might surprise you: the daily schedule.

Before, she had a clipboard. Big, unwieldy, full of papers she had to flip through to remember where she was going and who she was seeing. Planning for her SLPA meant separate communication, separate prep.

Now she prints her schedule, knows exactly what she’s doing all day, and has a plan ready for her SLPA too.

“I know what I’m supposed to be doing all day and I don’t have to flip through my clipboard. I’ve got my day planned out and I can add things and I can have an SLPA who can help me and I have it planned out for her.” — Robin

This freed up mental bandwidth. And that bandwidth went somewhere good.

When Organization Frees Up Your Creativity

Robin is a creative SLP. She uses mini erasers, stampers, manipulables, artsy activities. Her hallway is full of student work. She loves bringing unexpected, multisensory moments into sessions.

But here is the thing about creativity: it requires energy. It requires margin.

When you’re scrambling to figure out your schedule, your goals, your data, and your billing, there is no room left for creative thinking. You default to whatever is close.

“I feel like I can do that because my time is freed up because I have SLP Now and I can just print my sheet.” — Robin

The system did not make her sessions more formulaic. It made her more free to be the kind of SLP she actually wanted to be.

The Imposter Syndrome Moment That Hit Close to Home

Robin mentioned something toward the end of our conversation that I want to sit with for a second.

There were times in her career, even with 20-plus years of experience, when a teacher would ask her to screen a student at a grade level she wasn’t as comfortable with. And the feeling that came up was imposter syndrome. A sense of “I shouldn’t even be here.”

The probes tool changed that. Having structured screening tools right there, ready to go, meant she could walk in prepared.

“You’ve got it all right there, literally.” — Robin

That is not a small thing. That is a veteran SLP feeling like a veteran SLP.

She Pays Out of Pocket. And She’d Do It Again.

Robin started using SLP Now as a contractor, when her company covered the cost. Now she’s a direct hire in a district without that budget.

She still pays for it herself.

“I pay for this out of pocket now because I’m no longer a contractor and I think it’s worth it.” — Robin

She also presented SLP Now to a whole team of SLPs at a neighboring district a couple of years ago. She showed them how she uses it, why it works, what it does for her day. That district later signed up.

She did that because she believed in it. Not because anyone asked her to.

What This Means for You

If you have been a school-based SLP for a while and you think SLP Now is for new grads or CFs, Robin’s story is for you.

If you have a strong specialty area and quietly avoid the stuff that makes you less confident, Robin’s story is for you.

If you are creative and fun and love your students but feel like the admin work is squeezing out the part of the job you actually love, Robin’s story is very much for you.

The system does not replace your clinical judgment or your personality. It gives you the structure that lets both of those things show up.

Ready to See If It Works for You?

Start with a free 14-day trial. No credit card required. Full access to the platform, including scheduling tools, caseload management, literacy-based therapy materials, and more.

You can even just poke around. See what Robin keeps talking about.

The floor is yours.

x Marisha

Why This 15-Year SLP Stopped Building Her Own Data System (And What She Uses Instead)

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I love it when I get to talk to SLPs who have been doing this for a long time.

Not because they need SLP Now less than newer SLPs do. If anything, the opposite is often true. Because after 10 or 15 years in the field, you know exactly what the job costs. You’ve been through the high caseload years. You’ve figured out workarounds. You’ve probably built a few systems yourself and watched them fall apart.

So when a veteran SLP says something changed the way they work, I take it seriously.

Chelsea has been a school-based SLP for 15 years. This year she walked into a caseload of nearly 100 students. A special needs preschool. A K-2 life skills class. A general ed population with more articulation caseload than she had ever seen. Going back-to-back from the first bell to the last, with almost no time to stop and document anything.

She knew she needed a system. So she did what a lot of SLPs do.

She opened Canva and started building one herself.

Why SLPs End Up Building Their Own Data Systems

If you have ever done this, you know exactly how it starts.

You need something specific. A data tracking form that connects to your billing system. A way to log sessions on your phone without sticky notes everywhere. A progress report that does not require you to decode your own handwriting from three months ago.

You look for something that already exists. You don’t find exactly what you need. So you open a blank spreadsheet or a Canva template and you start.

And then you realize: this is going to take forever.

Chelsea put it simply. She said it was going to take her days to build what she needed. Days of her own personal time, not work hours. Because she did not have free time during the school day to build anything. She was in sessions.

She knew that wasn’t sustainable. So she went to Google looking for something better. And that’s when she found SLP Now.

What She Actually Needed

Chelsea was clear about her priorities. She needed something that would:

Make data collection fast enough to do live during a session without losing her focus on the students.

Generate therapy notes automatically, or at least most of the way there.

Let her copy and paste directly into her district’s billing system at the end of the day.

Give her a visual of each student’s attendance and progress that she could pull up quickly.

That last one might sound like a small thing. But Chelsea said not having a reliable attendance and progress visual was one of the challenges she was dealing with before. She had no easy way to see at a glance whether a student was getting their minutes or trending in the right direction. It made IEP meetings harder. It made progress reports feel like guesswork.

She needed a system that gave her real data, organized in a way she could actually use.

How She Uses SLP Now With a 100-Student Caseload

Chelsea is practical. She did not overhaul everything at once. She started using SLP Now with her general ed students first, which is about two-thirds of her caseload. That’s roughly 65 kids.

During sessions, she keeps the app open and taps in data as she goes. She has groups as large as four students, and she has figured out how to structure those sessions so everyone is practicing while she tunes in to each student and collects data. With her older kids, she gives them independent work. With younger students, she takes turns. Either way, the data collection takes just a couple of taps. It does not pull her attention away from the room.

She also spent time early on setting up her note templates. She said there was a learning curve with that part, but once she got it dialed in, it made everything faster. The goal and goal stem shortcuts she built into her templates mean that most of her therapy notes generate automatically at the end of the day.

Her workflow now looks like this. Collect data during sessions. Add a quick note when she has a second. Generate notes at the end of the day. Copy and paste into billing.

Done.

She told me: “It’s really nice to just be able to click a couple of buttons in the session without taking too much attention away. And then at the end of the day, copy paste everything.”

The Safety Net She Did Not Expect

Here is something Chelsea mentioned that I want to highlight because I do not think it gets enough attention.

She said that a lot of times she will go back and realize she never pushed a session into billing. And then she said: “Oh thank goodness it’s here.”

Because it is. All of her session data stays in SLP Now even if she has not billed it yet. It is a backup. A record. A safety net for the days when things are moving too fast and something slips through.

For a school SLP managing nearly 100 students, that matters. Missing a session in billing means missing reimbursement. It can mean documentation gaps. It can mean problems at IEP time.

SLP Now keeps that from happening. Not because the system is perfect, but because the data does not disappear. It waits for you.

What Changed Her Confidence

I asked Chelsea if SLP Now had helped her feel more confident or supported in her role. She did not give me an emotional answer. She gave me a practical one.

She said she feels more confident because she is more organized and more accurate with her data. She is not piecing together information from sticky notes and loose data sheets at the end of the quarter. She has a clean record. She has graphs that show progress visually. She can pull up a student’s attendance or progress in seconds.

That might not sound like a big shift. But if you have ever gone into an IEP meeting and quietly hoped your data held up, you understand why organization and accuracy matter. Confidence comes from preparation. Chelsea has better preparation now.

She also told me something that made me smile. She said she has to hide what she is doing from her students when she marks something wrong on her tablet, because most of them get upset when they see it. Which means her data collection is so seamless that her students have started noticing. That is a good problem to have.

What She Would Tell Another SLP

When I asked Chelsea how she would explain SLP Now to a colleague who had never heard of it, she was straightforward.

She tells them she loves the data tracking system. She mentions the attendance visual and the graphs. She says she also has a lot of therapy materials to look through when she needs ideas. And then she says: “I’m honest. I tell them I pay this a month, but for me it’s worth it. So you have to decide.”

I appreciate that. She is not selling it. She is just being real about what it does for her.

And then she adds the thing I think matters most. She said: “It’s totally worth the time that it saves.”

Coming from someone who almost spent days of her own personal time building a system from scratch, that means something.

You Do Not Have to Build It Yourself

If you are an SLP with a big caseload and a billing system that does not make your life easier, I know the Canva spreadsheet temptation. I have been there. You think: I just need something specific, I’ll just make it real quick.

But you don’t have time for real quick. And whatever you build in Canva will probably not connect to your billing system, generate your therapy notes, or give you graphing charts for IEP season.

SLP Now does all of that.

Chelsea said it took a huge load off her shoulders. A 15-year SLP with almost 100 students. I think you can trust that.

If you want to see it for yourself, try SLP Now free for 14 days at slpnow.com. No credit card required. Just log in, explore, and see if it does for your caseload what it did for Chelsea’s.

April Feature Recap

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In April, we focused on site performance improvements and security enhancements. We also launched two new features and updated two of our existing features! Read below for more info 👇

View the last time you targeted each stem level and the previous data for each stem level with the new Stem Level dropdown in the Planner. Check out this article for the details!

Batch printing options for interventions now include descriptions of strategies for any goal bank goal being used.

Click through sessions in the Planner without exiting the screen.

Set a default Planner view in your settings.

Let us know what you think and what you’d like to see next!

How to Run a Group When Everyone Has Different Goals Using Targeted Visuals

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Let’s be real—running a mixed speech therapy group where every single student is working on a completely different goal can feel incredibly overwhelming. If you feel like you are doing mental gymnastics just to keep the session afloat, you are not alone! The most effective way to manage this without spending hours on extra prep is by shifting the heavy lifting. By providing each student with a dedicated, targeted visual support that matches their specific goal, you can encourage student independence, reduce wait time, and keep your session flowing beautifully.

The SLP Now Visuals Binder covers preschool through 12th grade with 95 pages of evidence-based visuals across early language, grammar, vocabulary, and later language skills. No prep required. Just open it and use it.

Not a member yet? When you upgrade to a monthly or yearly membership within 7 days of starting your trial, we’ll send you the full bundle.

Start your free trial: slpnow.com/pod

If you’ve ever sat down to plan a session for a group of four students with four completely different goals and thought, “I have no idea how I’m going to make this work,” you are not alone.

Mixed groups are the norm in school-based practice. You might have one student working on following directions, one on past tense verbs, one on WH questions, and one on inferencing. And somehow you’re supposed to run a session that serves all of them, at the same time, without losing your mind.

For a long time, I was doing a lot of mental gymnastics to make that work. Flipping between materials, trying to remember what each student was targeting, losing the thread of the session because I was too busy managing logistics. It wasn’t good for my students and it definitely wasn’t good for me.

So I started building something different.

Why Visuals Change Everything in a Group Session

The core problem in a mixed group isn’t the goals themselves. It’s the cognitive load of trying to hold all of them in your head at once. When you’re tracking five different students, five different targets, and trying to deliver quality therapy at the same time, something always slips.

Visuals solve this in a surprisingly simple way. When each student has the visual for their skill in front of them, you stop being the only person holding the session together. The student can reference it independently. They can cue themselves. They don’t have to wait for you to redirect them. The visual does that work.

I’ve been using the same laminated visuals for ten years. Some of them I’ve updated, but many are exactly as I made them because they work. Once you find the right visual for a skill, it becomes a tool you reach for every time. Zero thinking required.

What’s Inside the Visuals Binder

The SLP Now Visuals Binder is 95 pages of ready-to-use visuals that covers your preschool through 12th grade caseload. No prep. You open it, you use it.

It’s organized into four main sections: early vocabulary and early language, grammar, and later vocabulary and later language. Within each section, you’ll find individual skill sets. Basic concepts, categories, following directions, narratives, WH questions, past tense verbs, plural nouns, pronouns, compound and complex sentences, affixes, context clues, idioms, multiple meaning words, inferences, main idea, summarizing, and more.

The binder has interactive links, so you click on a skill and it jumps directly to the visuals for that skill. That alone saves a lot of time when you’re looking for something specific mid-session.

How to Start Using It (Even If You’re Mid-Year)

The most common barrier to setting up a new system is the setup itself. You know you need better materials, but the idea of printing, laminating, and organizing 95 pages of visuals when you’re already behind feels impossible.

The digital binder handles that. Save it to your iPad. Pull it up when you need it. You can test different visuals, see what resonates with your students, and start getting the benefits of evidence-based visual supports right away. No need to wait for a perfect setup day that may never come.

Once you find a visual that works for a specific student, that’s your cue to print it. Log into SLP Now, go to the Materials Library, search for the skill, and download. Laminate it if you can. That one visual will probably serve you for years.

The Place Mat Strategy

My favorite way to use printed visuals in a group session is what I think of as a place mat setup. Each student gets the visual for their specific goal placed in front of them, like a place mat, before the session starts.

If Elliot is working on categories and Nelson is working on past tense verbs, each one has their visual in front of them. They know what they’re working on. They can self-cue. They’re not waiting on me to redirect them. It’s less mental gymnastics for me because I’m not flipping between pages. Each student’s reference point is already there.

It also opens up opportunities for generalization. If a visual is really working for a student, they can bring it back to the classroom. You can create a mini version. The skill stops living only in your session and starts connecting to the wider day.

The Research Behind the Visual

I didn’t put this binder together because it seemed like a good idea. I built it because I was managing a triple-digit caseload and I needed it to work. That meant going through the research and pulling out evidence-backed strategies that I could infuse directly into the visual design.

The result is that when you use these visuals, you’re not just showing a student a picture. You’re delivering therapy that’s grounded in how language learning actually works. The evidence is in the design. You don’t have to understand every study behind it to use it well.

Inside SLP Now, there are also courses and strategy resources for every goal area if you want to go deeper. But the visuals get you a long way there with very little effort.

Getting Access

If you’re not yet a member, the binder is included as a special bonus if you sign up for a membership within 7 days of starting your trial.

Ready to see how it works for your caseload? Start your free trial at https://slpnow.com/pod.

Transcript

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Welcome back to the SLP Now podcast. The last two episodes we talked about streamlining your present levels for IEPs and evaluations. And then we talked about taking consistent data and having high student goal awareness and solid data for progress monitoring. And today we're talking about how to actually teach those skills.
So many of us have mixed groups. We have multiple students in a group. They all have different goals, and more often than not, there's zero overlap. We need to have tools to help our students know what they're working on. Also to have some built in queuing and just to help keep the session moving, especially if we have those mixed groups, multiple students, multiple goals, a lot of moving pieces.
So the Visuals Binder is a tool that is meant to make that process a little bit easier. The binder includes 95 pages of ready to use visuals and it'll cover your preschool through 12th grade caseload, zero prep. You just open it and you use it.
We have early vocabulary and early language, grammar, as well as later vocabulary and later language. For each section we have different skills, for example, basic concepts, and we have a lot of different resources there. And then we have categories, following directions, narratives, wh questions, a variety of different skills.
It moves through grammar, like past tense verbs, plural, nouns, pronouns, compound sentences, complex sentences, affixes, context clues, idioms, multiple meaning words, inferences, main ideas, summarizing, all of these great skills. There's interactive links so you click on the skill, and it'll jump to the visuals. You have a lot of things that you can test and try out. I personally really love having printed visuals, but if you are in the middle of the school year or you're just trying to get through, it can be challenging to get all of this set up, which is what the binder is meant to help you with.
You can, again, just save this on your iPad, have easy access to it. And then you can test out different visuals and see what works best for your students. And you might already have visuals that work really well, and you can just use this to fill in the holes. If you find a visual that you really like, you can print that out.
Log into SLP Now, go to the materials library, search for the skill, download that visual, and print it. I love laminating my visuals because I use them over and over and over. I've been using the same visuals for 10 years. I've made some additions and improvements, but some of them are just tried and true.
I created these visuals because I was managing a triple digits caseload. Honestly I was failing in the beginning, but I was determined to serve these students, because they deserve for me to be operating at the top of my license and giving them really high quality therapy.
So I dug through the research. I pulled out a bunch of evidence backed strategies, and I used these to inform how I put these visuals together. Inside of SLP Now, we also have strategies for every goal. We have courses to walk you through all of these evidence backed strategies that you can implement.
But these visuals get you a lot of the way there without a lot of effort. You just use the visuals and the evidence is infused in them. And of course, we are our best therapy tool and knowing the strategies and the evidence behind things makes it a lot easier. But this is surely a great way to get started.
You can use the digital binder to access the visuals that you need in a pinch. It is a great way to test out new visuals, see what works, and just get some quick, easy evidence-based strategies into your session right away.
Like I said, once you know what a student needs, I love using the visuals as a place mat, so then I know what each student is working on. And it's less mental gymnastics for me because flipping between a bunch of different pages does get a little confusing. So I do highly recommend printing them eventually.
If, Elliot is working on categories and Nelson is working on past tense verbs, each of the students has the visual for that skill in front of them. It's amazing because they can cue themselves independently. They don't have to rely on me as much. If it's helpful, they can bring the visual into the classroom, or we can make a mini version to help with generalization.
It makes things so much easier. That is our visuals binder and a quick overview of how you can use it and what's included.
If you want access to all of the binders in one nice little bundle, you can access that. If you are not yet a member, all you need to do is sign up for SLP Now.When you upgrade, we can send you that full bundle. So that is a wrap on this little series.

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How to Collect Probe Data for a Full Group in Under 5 Minutes

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Ever finish writing a goal and then realize you have no clear way to measure it at progress report time? You’re not alone, and this episode has a fix. Taking accurate data for a mixed speech therapy group doesn’t have to hijack your entire session. You can collect probe data for a full group in under five minutes by establishing a quick, independent routine at the very beginning of your session, using targeted probe questions, and utilizing streamlined tools. This combo keeps sessions moving, tells you exactly where each student is at, and makes progress reporting way less stressful.

Why the First 5 Minutes Are Crucial for Data Collection

There’s a specific kind of panic that hits at progress report time. You pull up a student’s goal and realize you haven’t been consistently collecting data. Or you have data, but it’s scattered, inconsistent, and hard to make sense of.

If you’ve been there, you’re not alone. I’ve been there too. And it’s part of why we built the Digital Probe Binder. But before I get into the binder itself, I want to talk about the system it lives inside. The combination that changed how I collect data is the goal card plus probe binder workflow. Together, they make it possible to run a quick, meaningful probe for every student in a group in under five minutes. Every single session.

The 5-Minute “Quick Probe” Routine

Here is exactly how to structure the first few minutes of your session to get reliable data without the stress:

  • Step 1: Set the Routine with Goal Cards. Goal cards are exactly what they sound like: a simple card that captures a student’s goal in student-friendly language. At the start of every session, each student reviews their goal cards. We pull them out, look at the goals, and pick one to focus on that day.
  • Step 2: Run Targeted Probes. That focus then drives which probe we run. I pull up the probe binder, go to the page number written on the card, and run through the probe. For three students, this takes a few minutes total.
  • Step 3: Let the Data Drive the Session. What I get from that quick probe is genuinely useful. If a student is below 80% accuracy, I know we need more direct teaching. At 80% or above, I shift to generalization. We’re not just going through the motions; the probe tells me what kind of session to run.

This is worth the upfront time. Students who understand their goals are more engaged. They know what they’re working on, and they have a stake in it.

Tools to Streamline Your Data Collection

The reason this combo is so effective isn’t just efficiency—it’s that both pieces are doing real clinical work. The Digital Probe Binder has nearly 2,300 pages of goal-aligned probes organized by skill area (articulation, phonological awareness, language, grammar, vocabulary, fluency, and functional communication), each with multiple levels so you can meet students exactly where they are.

Resources Mentioned:

If you’re already an SLP Now member, head to the academy and find the Data Collection course. Complete it and we’ll automatically send you the binder! If you’re not yet a member, sign up for a free trial to SLP Now. You’ll get access to the course, and once you complete it, the binder is yours.

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Transcript

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Hello there and welcome back to the podcast. Today we are continuing our mini series of some resources to make your job as an SLP just a little bit easier. And today's episode is perfect for the SLP who has ever written a goal and then realized at progress note time that they don't have a clear way to measure that goal.
If you have been in that boat, you're not alone. I have definitely been there too, and that's why we built the Digital Probe Binder. So this is a digital binder with nearly 2300 pages of goal aligned probes. And we have everything from articulation to phonological awareness, language, grammar, vocabulary, fluency, functional communication, a number of goal areas with different levels for all of them.
So for articulation, we have all of the phonemes as well as different variations of r and blends and, clusters. If you're trying to get data for one of your student's goals, you just click on the appropriate section and then browse through the goal library and select the goal that matches.
And then once you select a goal, we have different levels. Like for articulation, we might be working on isolation, syllables, initial, medial, final, or mixed positions of words, depending on where the student is at. There's interactive links in the PDF. I highly, highly recommend having this on your iPad, but you would just click on the appropriate goal, appropriate level, and then that would take you to the assessment. So the first page will just give you your prompts, and then if there are visuals associated with that probe, then the visuals will be on the following page. And so you could use this at progress report time. I use this to collect a quick probe at the beginning of every session, but this is a game changing resource. And one thing that I recommend for all SLPs is to create goal cards. Goal cards are a a great solution if you're feeling like students are not engaged in the session, you're seeing a lot of disengagement, students aren't excited about what they're doing in speech therapy. They don't know what they're working on. The goal cards are a solution to a lot of those types of problems. The easiest way to do this is grab a stack of index cards and go through your student's goals and have them write it in their own words or put it in student friendly terms, depending on the student's age and language abilities and all of that.
You can write out the goals for them and have them draw a little picture or they can write their own goal. What you'll want to do is have a discussion about their goals and talk about why the goals matter. Why are they important? How does it connect to their personal goals?
Do they want to become a famous YouTuber one day? How will this goal help them do that? This is a great opportunity to have these conversations and summarize that conversation in this little goal card. Use student friendly words, add in visuals and pictures, let the students draw if that is helpful.
This is something that you revisit every single session so you can keep these goal cards on a big binder ring or you can add them to the student's folder. Just find a way that makes sense to you to keep these cards organized.
I would highly recommend revisiting these cards at the beginning of every single session. So as kind of the introduction to the session, I have my students review their goals and we typically pick one goal to focus on. And when we pick that goal, we jump to the probe binder and we go to the appropriate page and run through that probe.
If I have three students in a group, we're focusing on one goal per student, and I'm able to run through their probe in just a few minutes. This gives me really, really, really important data to use throughout the session. If a student has low accuracy, I know that we need to spend a lot more time teaching. 80% accuracy or above tells me that we need to jump focus on generalization. I don't want to hinder their progress by not meeting them where they're at. This all starts with a probe binder because if you have the goal cards, you can figure out which probe makes the most sense and just jot down the page number that that probe is on. You can type in the page number and it'll jump to that probe. The goal card plus the binder combo is just like chef's kiss when it comes to session efficiency and progress for students. Jot down the page number of the probe that you want to use. You can just type that in. And then in future sessions, you'll know exactly where to pick up and you'll have the bonus of having the student's goal in student friendly words with their visual reminders of what the goal is, why it matters, and how it's going to help them and impact their lives. So that's what that looks like.
That's a tour of how goal cards fit in, how you can use the goal cards to connect with that binder and make it easy to collect solid data. I hope that this is super helpful and gives you some ideas and inspiration.
And then if you're wanting access to this binder. A top secret tip. If you sign up for a free trial, you can go to slpnow.com/pod. Or if you're already a member, go to the academy and take the Data Collection course. If you complete that course, we'll automatically send you the binder because then you'll be fully equipped to use it and get the most value out of it.
Go check out that course. If you are not yet an SLP Now member, just go to slpnow.com/pod and you'll get free access to the course. You can run through it. It's a short course. Then we'll send you this probe binder for you to use.
That's a wrap for today. I hope this was helpful, and we'll see you in the next one.

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Stop Scrambling for Screeners: How the SLP Assessment Binder Makes Evaluations Easier

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Are you tired of scrambling for speech therapy screeners before every evaluation? We’ve all been there—an eval is due, you’re digging through folders or physical binders, and valuable minutes are ticking by while you search for the right materials. The SLP Assessment Binder is your solution. It’s a 70-page digital resource that provides instant, no-print access to articulation, phonology, and grade-level language assessments directly on your iPad. Better yet, when paired with the SLP Now platform, it auto-generates your present levels and recommends goals, helping you work smarter, not harder.

The SLP Assessment Binder: Your No-Print Solution

There’s a very specific kind of stress that hits when you realize a re-eval was moved up and you don’t quite have what you need ready to go. You check Google Drive—nothing. You flip through a dusty physical binder hoping the right screener is in there somewhere. By the time you find it, you haven’t even seen the student yet.

We built The SLP Assessment Binder to eliminate exactly that kind of last-minute scramble. It’s intentionally organized to give you fast, easy access to exactly what you need:

  • Articulation Assessments: Quickly collect baseline data across all major speech sounds.
  • Phonology Assessments: Gain a structured, easy-to-read look at phonological patterns.
  • Grade-Level Language Assessments: Target vocabulary, grammar, and narratives based on actual curriculum expectations for each grade.

The best part? Zero printing. Simply save the digital binder to your iPad’s home screen. When a student walks in, pull it up, show them the visuals on your screen, and get straight to assessing.

How It Works Inside SLP Now

While the binder is an incredible standalone tool, it becomes an absolute game-changer when you pair it with the built-in assessment tools inside the SLP Now platform. Here is what your new, streamlined workflow looks like:

  1. Create the Student: Add the student to your SLP Now caseload and navigate to their Assessment tab.
  2. Run the Screener: Use your iPad to show the student the binder visuals while you simultaneously score their accuracy directly inside the platform.
  3. Auto-Generate Present Levels: As you enter data, SLP Now automatically generates a narrative summary of the student’s strengths, emerging areas, and areas of need.

No more drafting from scratch or trying to remember exactly what happened in the session. You just copy and paste the summary straight into your present levels statement!

From Assessment Data to Goals in One Connected Workflow

When you’re managing a massive caseload, every single minute counts. The SLP Assessment Binder doesn’t just give you a screener—it seamlessly connects your data directly to your therapy goals.

After you complete an assessment, SLP Now provides goal recommendations based on the student’s performance. For instance, if a student scores 0% accuracy on /k/ and /g/, the platform flags those as potential goal areas. From there, you can open a specific baseline probe directly in the platform to gather a concrete data point. SLP Now then auto-fills the baseline data and helps you generate the IEP goal instantly.

What used to take four or five separate steps—collecting data, writing present levels, identifying goals, hunting for baseline numbers, and setting up the IEP—now flows as one connected process.

Who Is This For?

We designed this system with the overwhelmed, school-based SLP in mind:

  • The SLP who has a brand-new student on the schedule and needs to run a screener fast.
  • The SLP updating an IEP who wants present levels that actually reflect the curriculum standards.
  • The SLP who is exhausted from recreating baseline documentation from scratch for every single evaluation.

You don’t need hours of setup or a complicated onboarding session to make this work. If you can save a PDF to your iPad, you are ready to go right now.

How to Get Access to Your Assessment Binder

Ready to stop scrambling? The SLP Assessment Binder is available as a special bonus inside the SLP Now membership.

Simply head to slpnow.com/pod and sign up for a free trial. Set up your first student, run through an assessment using the built-in tools, and send us a quick message inside the membership to let us know how it went. We will then send you the full 70-page binder to use for all your future assessments!

You should be spending your time helping students, not endlessly searching for screeners. Let’s make that a reality.

Transcript

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Hello there and welcome back to the SLP Now podcast. I am excited to be kicking off a new mini series throughout the rest of the month. We are going to be sharing some of our favorite resources, and first up is our Assessment Binder. So this is an incredible way for SLPs who are feeling overwhelmed and who don't quite have time to learn a new tool and who just need quick instant access to some good resources.
This is for the SLPs who have a new student, an evaluation is coming up, a re-eval is due tomorrow,and you're digging through your folders trying to find a good screener. And this type of scrambling is what this Assessment Binder is meant to eliminate.
So what this is is a 70 page digital resource that you can save straight to your iPad. And I love keeping these on my home screen. I'll do a quick little, tutorial on my Instagram about how to actually save a PDF to your home screen so that it's so, so easy to access. but this binder includes resources.
and if you're watching on YouTube or. Spotify, we'll upload the video there. You can kind of see what this looks like. But we have assessments for articulation and phonology as well as grade level assessments.
We have the articulation assessment and it'll help you go through the different speech sounds and get that baseline data. The same for Phonology. And then we have the grade level assessments and they will vary based on the grade level curriculum expectations.
We'll have assessments for different sub areas, so you can choose kinda what makes the most sense for you. So you have describing and grammar and narratives. We go into more advanced vocabulary. This is just a little preview of what that looks like.
This is a great way to get some baseline data, in terms of the curriculum based standards.
By using this assessment, you don't have to do any printing. You would just access the binder, show this to your students, and, inside SLP Now we have the assessments built in there. Let's say I have a screener coming up. I add Harry Potter and then I click into his profile.
I can go to the Assessment tab and click Collect New Assessment and we can do our articulation assessment or we can go into any of the grade level assessments as well. I have the visuals on my iPad, but then I can score his accuracy here. So I am automatically getting this data and I can make notes or make corrections, and do whatever I need to do.
Once I enter this data, I can view the recommendations. This is based on how the student responds. This will help you with generating goals, and it also makes a summary of the assessment so you can literally paste this into your present levels.
On a recent curriculum based measure, Harry Potter demonstrated the following strengths. And it'll list the skills that the student demonstrated strengths in. And it'll list emerging strengths too. And then it'll list the needs.
If you view the recommendations after that assessment, it will also give you access to baseline assessments. So if you complete your articulation assessment and the student scores, 0% accuracy on K and G, that might be a worthwhile goal. And we want to get a baseline.
So I might open up the probe for /k/ in word position and get a little bit more data to show me how the student is doing. So let's say, they're getting 0% accuracy, then I can hit Done, and I can create that as a goal and it'll automatically fill in all of that baseline data for me. And then I can repeat that with all of the goals that are being recommended.
So this is a really cool way to streamline your assessments. Whether you're updating an IEP or doing an eval or a reval, this is a good way to populate a really strong present levels statement that's pulling in curriculum-based assessments to Outline how students are doing. It can also help you with that goal creation process and just having access to the binder without having to dig for visuals or assessments.
Just having everything right at your fingertips. The students have access to the visuals that they need. It makes this process really easy and seamless. It makes your job a whole lot easier. So this binder is available as a bonus in SLP Now.
If you go to SLP now.com/pod, you can sign up for a free trial. If you create a student and start that assessment process, you can download the visuals for a specific assessment. But having the binder definitely makes it easier, so go set up your first student, administer that assessment, and then send us a message in the membership. Let us know how your first assessment went, and then we'd love to send you the full binder to use for all of your future assessments. That's a wrap on today's episode, and I'm excited to continue the series throughout the month.

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March New Features Recap

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Here’s a quick rundown of the new and updated features that we released in March:

Take a quick subjective note while logging data with the live data collection tool in the Planner. The note will auto-magically appear when you load your note template! This post shares more on how to do this.

Click through your students without exiting the caseload screen using the arrows and the dropdown menu to easily navigate. Check out this post for further info!

Quickly view the last time you targeted your students’ goals this IEP Period, the number of times the goal has been targeted within an IEP Period, and data points from the last session. This handy info is displayed in your sessions next to the goals in the Planner! Here’s the post that’ll give you all the details.

Big Groups, Mixed Goals, and ‘Winging It’: How to Run Effective Therapy When Time Is Tight

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If you’re managing a school-based caseload right now, you know the reality: perfectly matched, small therapy groups are rare. The good news? You can run highly effective mixed speech therapy groups without feeling like you’re just “winging it.” The secret to working smarter, not harder, lies in combining Language-Rich Thematic Units with a predictable session routine like The 5-Step Session Structure. By relying on a shared anchor activity, you can target diverse goals simultaneously, reduce your cognitive load, and foster peer modeling.

If you’d like help setting this up for your own caseload, you can explore the tools and units inside a free trial at slpnow.com/pod.

The Challenge of Big Groups and Mixed Goals

Picture this: It’s Tuesday morning. You have four students across two different grade levels. One is working on the /r/ sound, another on regular past tense verbs, a third on WH questions, and the fourth on social language. You have zero minutes between groups, high caseloads to manage, and progress reports looming. Sound familiar?

If this is you, know that you aren’t disorganized—you are simply trying to make the most of a demanding schedule. We often assume that small, homogenous groups are the gold standard, but unstructured sessions are the actual problem, not the mixed groups themselves. With the right strategies, mixed groups can become some of the most productive sessions in your day.

Why Mixed Groups Can Actually Be an Asset

While it might feel chaotic at first, research and clinical experience show us that mixed groups offer incredible, unique benefits:

  • Peer Modeling: Students naturally learn by observing and imitating peers who demonstrate effective communication strategies.
  • Real-Life Context: Group therapy mirrors natural conversation, giving students the chance to practice turn-taking, listening, and conversational repair.
  • Skill Generalization: Practicing targeted skills in a diverse group context encourages students to carry those skills over into the classroom and beyond.

4 Strategies to Run Effective Mixed Speech Therapy Groups

1. Segment Your Caseload

Instead of crafting 50 different intricate lesson plans, try grouping your caseload into segments. For example, you might have Segment 1 for early elementary language (PK-2), Segment 2 for upper elementary narrative (3-5), and Segment 3 for functional communication. Assign one Language-Rich Thematic Unit (like a picture book, a science experiment, or a nonfiction text) to each segment for an entire month. This one shift dramatically reduces your planning time and provides consistent repetition for the students.

2. Lean on The 5-Step Session Structure

A predictable routine does the heavy lifting for you. We recommend The 5-Step Session Structure to keep sessions focused and efficient:

  1. Check In: Review expectations and goals.
  2. Assess: Take quick probes or baseline data.
  3. Teach: Introduce the target skill using structured visuals.
  4. Practice: Students practice within the shared activity.
  5. Wrap Up: Reinforce what was practiced.

3. Let Students Build on Each Other

Use mixed groups as a collaborative language opportunity! If you’re reading a picture book:

  • Student A answers a WH comprehension question.
  • Student B repeats the answer using a target past tense verb.
  • Student C practices articulation within that same sentence.
  • Student D works on syntax by expanding the sentence with more details.

Everyone stays engaged, and you maximize repetitions for multiple goals using just one prompt.

4. Plan Inside the Session

Take 30 seconds at the end of your session to quickly jot down what worked, who needs more support, and where to start next time. This saves your future self a massive headache and prevents planning from bleeding into your after-school hours.

Stop Winging It and Start Streamlining

You don’t need perfect groups to be an effective therapist; you just need structure, clarity, and consistency. By utilizing shared thematic units, relying on strong visuals, and implementing predictable frameworks, you can provide evidence-based intervention without the burnout.

Explore Therapy Planning Tools for Mixed Groups

If you’d like support implementing these strategies, you can explore therapy units, progress monitoring tools, and visuals inside the SLP Now membership.

Transcript

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It is Tuesday morning. You're working with a group of four students across two grade levels. One student's working on R, others are regular past tense verbs, wh questions, social language, and you have zero minutes in between groups and you are thinking, we just have to make this work.
If that's you, you're not disorganized.
You are trying to make the most of a very full schedule, where you're trying to serve as many students as possible, keep up with your paperwork and billing and all of the other things that we have to do.
Today we're going to talk about how to make these sessions more effective, even if they're not ideal.
All school-based SLPs have mixed groups. Most groups are larger than we prefer, and most of us don't have 30 minutes to craft intricate lesson plans for each group. And we're doing the best that we can. And the goal is not perfect therapy. The goal is structured and efficient therapy.
Two episodes ago, we chatted about session structure, which I teach five different steps. So check in, assess, teach, practice, wrap up. I've taught this to thousands of SLPs at this point, and it's a game changer.
By having a repeatable, evidence backed structure that we can use in our sessions, it helps reduce our cognitive load. It helps us be more effective and efficient, and it also helps our students. They know what to expect and they're set up for success as well.
And mixed groups aren't the problem. It's unstructured mixed groups that are the problem. And when we're able to segment our caseload and choose strong language rich thematic units with a consistent session structure, mixed groups are actually incredibly effective.
Instead of having 63 random students on your caseload, you can segment your caseload. In the previous episode, I talked about a hypothetical preschool through fifth grade caseload. Let's pretend now that I am a secondary SLP and I'm seeing sixth through 12th grade, and I might segment by grade or based on the student's needs. So I might have a functional communication unit that I use with the students who would benefit from that type of support. I might have a nonfiction unit. And I might have a science experiment. Those three units will are designed to target different types of goals and support different types of students.
And so I can break up my groups and identify, okay, these groups would do best with the functional communication unit. This group would do best with the nonfiction unit. These groups would do best with the science experiment. And then I know that instead of planning 50 different therapy plans, I can just prep those three units and make my caseload planning much easier and more effective because now I'm not having to pick a different activity for every group or a different theme for every day. I can use these thematic units for a whole month of therapy. So I am only having to make three decisions once a month. Which unit am I using for segment one, two, and three?
And this is incredibly powerful because the units are made up of language rich activities that are a beautiful context for our students' goals. You may even be able to get away with less segments depending on what your caseload looks like.
That is a very effective strategy. And by doing that, we reduce our cognitive load. We simplify our planning. We also make it easier for our students to know what to expect. And that familiar context helps them to work on their skills more effectively. These are designed to help with generalization. There's so many benefits to having things set up in this way, and it allows us to be more systematic.
It's a great opportunity to make sure that we're getting adequate opportunities to target vocabulary and getting enough repetitions there. The evidence-based structure to the units also ensures that we're effectively scaffolding skills. A lot of these decisions that would take you hours and hours and hours to work through are automatically taken care of for you.
So that's the first step is just segmenting your caseload and picking those units for those different segments.
And then step two is kind of built into this, but this is when we use language rich activities to target numerous goals. We touched on this already, but we want to be intentional with the units that we're selecting to make sure that they're a rich context to target all of our students' goals.
For example, our K through two picture book, we're working on narrative retell, wh questions, describing, inferencing, vocabulary. These are language rich activities and we can target all of these types of skills. The same applies for older students. So if we're using the functional communication scenario, we have peer modeling videos inside SLP Now, and so you have the video and then you have a unit that goes with the video. And it gives students the opportunity to target their functional communication goals in the context of this activity. They get to see peer models and practice these skills in a really functional scenario.
Ordering a burger at a fast food restaurant. They're super fun and meaningful activities. When we are using these types of activities, we're able to target all of our students' goals.
And this third step is to let students build on each other. So instead of seeing mixed groups as a limitation, what if we looked at them as an asset?
We get to have mixed groups versus we have to. Mixed groups are a great opportunity to provide students with peer models, and students get to hear each other's responses. They build on each other, and language becomes collaborative. And we're thinking about generalization from the very start.
For example, if we are using a picture book unit, and we have four students in the group. The first student is working on wh questions. We can ask a question about something that happened in the book. So student A answers and they get to target their WH questions goal.
Let's say student B is working on past tense verbs. They can repeat the student's answer, but use the past tense. Then let's say student C is working on articulation. They can work on repeating the sentence using their target sound. And if student D is working on syntax, they can expand the sentence.
So we're using the same activity of answering a wh question, but we can target comprehension answering wh questions 'cause that's what the activity is. But we can also target grammar, vocabulary, syntax, all of these types of things. I know that mixed groups get a bad rap, but I think they can also be incredibly beneficial.
And let's figure out how to leverage the strengths of mixed groups instead of focusing on all the things that aren't ideal about them. And granted, there are some cons, and mixed groups aren't always the best scenario, but I do think more often than not, we can leverage some of the benefits of mixed groups and have them work for us a little bit better, given the circumstances, especially.
So now step four is to anchor everything in structure. So I chatted about the framework of check in, assess, teach, practice, wrap up. So the five steps for a session structure. The structure does the heavy lifting. Students know what goal they're targeting. We have supports ready to go, expectations are clear, and students know what to expect in terms of the activities and targets. When the structure is predictable for you and for your students, mixed groups and multiple goals feels a lot more manageable. The chaos disappears. We know the unit, we know the structure, and we know the students' targets. There's not a whole lot to like stress about anymore if we have all of those bases covered.
We often assume that smaller, perfectly matched groups are the gold standard. Small groups are great, and there's definitely some benefits, but mixed groups, we have more peer modeling. We get to target listening skills. We encourage flexible language use. We get to support generalization. We get to provide social language practice.
Big groups aren't always ideal, but mixed groups can still be effective, especially when they're designed intentionally.
So to wrap things up today, we talked about segmenting our caseload, choosing one language rich unit for each of the segments and using that for a month of therapy. When we add in a consistent session structure and give students the opportunity to build on each other's responses and take advantage of the benefits of having a mixed group. When those pieces are in place, you're no longer winging it and you're running structured, effective evidence backed therapy and. Winging it is when we don't have goal clarity and when we're just fine by the seat of our pants.
But with this framework, we have structured flexibility. We have clear goals and flexible materials, and we're able to reuse the same unit, the same story, the same activity across groups, and I argue run more effective and higher quality therapy than we would with our winging it strategy.
I know that many of us are worried that our students aren't getting enough repetition, that it's ineffective. Progress is too slow. But when we're using this five step framework of the check-in, assess, teach, practice, wrap up, we are intentionally progress monitoring. We have explicit goal focus. Students are getting really meaningful exposures and meaningful practice. In context, and we, so we are providing really high quality therapy and we're monitoring the data to make sure that things are working.
And progress isn't about perfection. It's about consistency, session after session after session. We will have that data to back us up. And if it's not working, we can reevaluate and reconsider. But more often than not, this strategy will do the trick.
So here are three practical tips that you can implement tomorrow.
They're just little tiny adjustments.
Option one is to pick your caseload segments and choose one unit for each of them. If you're feeling overwhelmed of like which segments are am I gonna choose and how am I gonna find these units?
If you go to slpnow.com/pod, sign up for the free trial. It'll ask you what grades you're working on, which goals you're targeting, and it'll recommend segments for you. And then if you click on those segments, you'll have a short list of recommended units. This could take you literally less than a minute to complete, and you would have a month of therapy planned out for you.
So you just sign up for a trial. Answer the question about your caseload. Go to the Therapy Plans tab, the segments will appear right there and just click through them. Pick one unit and you're done. That is the first strategy or tip that you can implement.
And then the second strategy is to do your planning in your session. So what worked in the session? What does a student need additional support with? What do you want to remember to do next time? So taking these few seconds at the end of the session is a huge favor to your future self. By taking this time within the session, it doesn't add any more to your workload.
You can wrap up with your students and come up with a game plan for the next session. This has been a game changer for me in revamping my planning. Having that end of session quick note to myself is a game changer.
The third thing that you can try is for your next group or whatever group feels like is giving you the most stress. Do you have progress monitoring tools for your students' goals in this group? And do you have visuals to teach their skills?
You more than likely have some materials ready to go, so just pull something that you can use for their progress monitoring and for their teaching visuals for each of their goals. It makes it easier to implement the five step framework that we talked about.
And if you need some support in finding the right progress monitoring tools and the right visuals, you're more than welcome to sign up for a free trial of SLP Now as well. Again, the link is slpnow.com/pod. We have a whole library of progress monitoring tools as well as teaching visuals.
You should be able to find whatever you need to support your students. You don't have to reinvent the wheel.
Those are three suggestions for things that you can do as an action step. Please feel free to choose the one that is most helpful for you.
You definitely don't have to do everything all at once. Just take one step at a time.
Our workload becomes dramatically easier when we're not creating probes and visuals from scratch and when we have goal aligned, supports ready to go. I highly encourage you to set that up, especially if you're feeling overwhelmed.
You don't need perfect groups to be an effective therapist. You just need structure, clarity, and consistency.
Even if you're feeling like you need more of that structure, the clarity, consistency, you're already doing meaningful work and I just want to help make it a little bit easier.

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How School-Based SLPs Can Reclaim 5 Hours a Week (Without Working Nights or Weekends)

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If you want to reclaim up to five hours a week as a school-based SLP, the most effective strategy is minimizing your “invisible work” through three core habits: reducing rework with a predictable therapy framework, batching your clinical decisions, and tracking your indirect service hours. By implementing these systems, you can streamline your workload and finally leave work at work.

If you had five completely protected hours this week—no IEP meetings, no endless progress reports, no emails—how would you spend them?

When we ask school-based speech-language pathologists this question, the answers are surprisingly consistent. You might say you’d plan smaller, more intentional mixed groups, analyze student data, collaborate with teachers, program AAC devices, or simply take a real lunch break. These answers reveal an important truth: SLPs want more time for clinical depth, not less work.

The gap we feel isn’t a competence problem; it’s a capacity problem. We want you to be able to work smarter, not harder. If therapy planning, paperwork, and prep are taking over your evenings and weekends, you can start your free trial at slpnow.com/pod to explore tools designed to help you streamline the process and get that time back.

The Capacity Gap in School-Based Speech Therapy

We all picture an ideal therapy session: calm, intentional, and data-driven, with engaged students and enough time to adjust instruction. However, the reality of high caseloads often involves rushing between meetings, frantically writing Medicaid billing notes, and planning therapy late at night.

Research confirms this disconnect. Workload demands—not clinical ability—are one of the biggest contributors to burnout for school-based SLPs (Marante et al., 2023).

Caseload vs. Workload

Districts often measure our capacity using a single number: our caseload. But as the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) points out, there is a distinct difference:

  • Caseload: The number of students receiving services.
  • Workload: All the activities required to support those students (evaluations, data collection, teacher collaboration, paperwork, etc.).

A 2024 ASHA survey found the median caseload for school-based SLPs is 50 students, while clinicians report a manageable caseload is closer to 40. This gap quickly translates into overloaded schedules and skipped lunches.

3 Practical Strategies to Reclaim Time

While we absolutely need systemic changes in special education, there are practical systems you can implement right now to reduce friction and take back your time.

1. Reduce Rework with Predictable Systems

One of the biggest time drains is reinventing the wheel every week. If you are constantly searching for new materials or manually organizing data for mixed groups, you are losing valuable hours.

Instead, try implementing The Reusable Therapy Framework. By building predictable, reusable systems, you eliminate redundant tasks. Focus on creating:

  • A go-to session structure that works for articulation and language goals alike.
  • Organized, grab-and-go material libraries.
  • Consistent, streamlined data collection systems.

2. Batch Your Decisions

Decision fatigue is very real when you are seeing dozens of groups each week. Instead of picking a brand-new activity for every single session, start batching your clinical decisions using The Thematic Therapy Approach.

  • Plan therapy activities across multiple groups at once using a single engaging book or theme.
  • Create a comprehensive goal bank to speed up IEP writing.
  • Develop standard evaluation templates.

When you reduce the mental load of constant decision-making, you free up energy to focus on what matters most: your students.

3. Make Your “Invisible Work” Visible

The “invisible work” of an SLP includes all those behind-the-scenes tasks that take hours but are rarely recognized: prepping materials, coordinating with teachers, and case management tasks (Palafox et al., 2025). The most powerful way to advocate for a manageable workload is to track where your time actually goes.

Document your indirect service activities, meeting times, and evaluation hours. The goal isn’t to complain—it’s to gather objective data to protect your contract hours and advocate for realistic expectations.

Tools That Help SLPs Reclaim Their Time

Reclaiming five hours might sound impossible, but even getting one hour back a week adds up to nearly an entire workweek reclaimed over the school year. School-based SLPs don’t need more pressure to “work harder”—we need systems that protect our time and support our clinical expertise.

SLP Now was designed specifically to support school-based SLPs with organized therapy materials, data collection systems, and caseload management tools so you can stop taking work home.

You can explore everything with a free trial here:
👉 https://slpnow.com/pod

References

American Speech-Language-Hearing Association. (n.d.). Caseload and workload in schools. Retrieved from https://www.asha.org/practice-portal/professional-issues/Caseload-and-Workload/

American Speech-Language-Hearing Association. (2024). 2024 schools survey: SLP caseload and workload characteristics. Retrieved from https://www.asha.org/siteassets/surveys/2024-schools-survey-slp-caseload.pdf

Marante, L., Hall-Mills, S., & Farquharson, K. (2023). School-based speech-language pathologists’ stress and burnout: A cross-sectional survey at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 54(2), 456–471.

Transcript

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If you had five extra hours this week, completely protected, no meetings, no paperwork, what would you do with the time?
I asked a handful of SLPs this question and some of the things that they said was to take a lunch break, plan smaller more intentional groups, actually program AAC devices, collaborate with the teacher, run an RTI rotation, analyze data more thoughtfully, talk to students instead of rushing them.
The answers to that question tell us what matters most and what is currently being squeezed out of our time.
SLPs actually want more time for clinical depth. Data-driven planning, reviewing student progress, adjusting instruction, providing therapy to smaller groups. They also want collaboration, communicating with teachers, communicating with parents, coaching paraeducators, having true team meetings versus just rushing through to check the boxes. We wanna be able to provide classroom instruction, educate the staff. We want to have more time for relationship based therapy, building rapport, reducing the pressure, and making therapy more joyful. And none of these are fluff. These are all of the things that make therapy more powerful. And we've already talked about in previous episodes why we don't have time for these things.
In the schools, they reward compliance, documentation, meeting minutes, hitting deadlines. They don't reward preventative services, collaboration, relationship building, more effective planning. It's a matter of checking the boxes in terms of did you submit your paperwork on time? Did you do your billing? Are you meeting the student's minutes?
And naturally speech therapists are shifting towards what gets monitored. We're focusing on completing our paperwork, doing our billing, and meeting our students' minutes.
The thing is, did we become speech therapists to sprint between IEP meetings and keeping up with billing? And when you picture yourself as a clinician, as the best clinician that you can be, what are you doing? I imagine calm effective sessions where I walk out feeling really great and students walk out feeling empowered and like they're like they enjoyed the session and that they learn something and that we have clear goals. Our instruction is really intentional. We have time to reflect on how students are doing and to refine our strategies.
The gap between who you are and how you're practicing isn't a competence gap. It's a capacity gap, and we need some strategies to actually reclaim those five hours without having to quit our jobs and without sacrificing quality.
There's three buckets that we're going to dive into.
The first bucket is reducing rework. So are you reinventing the wheel every week when it comes to your therapy materials? Are you manually organizing data? Are you reinventing your session structure? If you have systems in place to help you with your materials, your therapy planning, your data collection, your session structure, those systems reduce that rework so you don't have to reinvent the wheel every single week and spin your wheels on all of these things.
The second bucket is to batch our decisions. So instead of choosing a new activity for every single group every time we see them, try thematic units. Try building a goal bank and have a reusable framework that you can use to support you with your evaluations, your goal writing, your interventions. All of that can really reduce our decision fatigue.
The third bucket is to make the invisible work visible. So track your meeting time, track how long it takes you to complete an evaluation, track all of the indirect tasks that you're asked to do. And the purpose is not to complain, but to be able to understand and show other stakeholders where our time is actually going. We can use this to help ourselves identify how we can optimize and some time that we can cut. If we're stuck and we need support, being able to show our administrators this is where all of my time went this week. Can you help me? I think maybe I could try this or this. What do you think about that? What would you recommend?
If we can show them the data, brainstorm some solutions and bring those to them, and then give them the opportunity to give feedback, they can take it from there.
So if we had five more hours a week, we wouldn't waste them. We'd invest them in better therapy, better collaboration, better student outcomes, and we might invest them in taking care of ourselves if we're currently taking work home or not taking a lunch. Not doing those things can also impact how we show up as speech therapist.
And the goal is not to work more. The goal is to work intentionally and even reclaiming one hour changes how we show up because that's an hour that we save every single week.
In this episode we got to chat a little bit about the type of clinician that we want to be and how we can start to move closer to that.
If therapy planning and prepping materials and paperwork are eating up your mornings, evenings, weekends, that's something that we can fix, and you deserve the tools that help give you that time back. If you go to slpnow.com/pod, we have a free trial that you can sign up for. SLP Now includes a whole suite of tools to help you streamline your therapy planning and your paperwork and documentation, data collection, all the things. We also have mini courses to help you implement this really efficiently and effectively to get you that time back asap. So that's a wrap on today's episode. Thanks for joining me, and we'll see you in the next one.

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How to Plan Effective Speech Therapy Sessions When You Have No Time

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If you are struggling to find time to plan effective speech therapy sessions, the solution isn’t adding more hours to your day—it’s reducing your cognitive load through a predictable therapy framework, thematic units, and goal-aligned grab-and-go materials. By streamlining your decision-making, you can plan high-quality, data-driven sessions in a fraction of the time.

Have you ever started a therapy session and quietly asked yourself, “What are we going to do today?” If you are nodding your head, please know you are not alone, and you certainly aren’t unmotivated. You are simply overloaded.

When our workloads as school-based SLPs are overflowing with evaluations, IEP meetings, Medicaid billing, and compliance tasks, something has to give. Too often, therapy planning is the first thing we sacrifice. We end up prioritizing the paperwork we could get in trouble for missing, leaving us scrambling to throw together materials between groups.

But thoughtful planning is exactly what makes our therapy more efficient, effective, and sustainable. If you are ready to make therapy planning manageable again, you can start your free trial at slpnow.com/pod to put these time-saving systems into action.

Why Therapy Planning Feels So Hard

Planning doesn’t feel hard because you are disorganized. It feels impossible because your current system requires too many micro-decisions. When you reinvent your sessions every week, hunt for new materials from scratch, and plan a different activity for every mixed group, you drain the cognitive bandwidth you need for actual clinical work.

Instead of constantly starting over, we need to standardize the core elements of our therapy day.

4 Steps to a Research-Aligned Therapy Planning System

1. Implement a Predictable Session Structure

Effective instruction relies on consistent patterns. By using The 5-Step Session Framework, you reduce the mental load for both yourself and your students. When the structure stays the same, you only have to change the target goal, not the entire session layout.

  1. Check In: Review goals and set expectations.
  2. Assess: Use a quick probe to determine the student’s starting point.
  3. Teach: Provide explicit instruction and modeling.
  4. Practice: Engage in structured, contextualized application.
  5. Wrap Up: Reflect, document the data, and preview the next session.

2. Use Quick Probes to Guide Instruction

Data-based decision-making doesn’t have to be complicated. In fact, systematic progress monitoring is a cornerstone of effective intervention (Stecker et al., 2005). Using a Quick Probe Routine—just 5 targeted trials at the start of a session—tells you exactly what you need to know. Track the accuracy and level of support, then decide immediately if you need to reteach, increase independence, or push for generalization.

3. Build a Goal-Aligned “Grab and Go” Library

If you are spending hours creating new visuals or hunting for practice activities online, you are losing precious time. Instead, curate a comprehensive, goal-aligned library that includes:

  • A reusable, standard probe format for every goal.
  • Clear, easy-to-understand teaching visuals.
  • 2–3 highly repeatable practice activities.

4. Adopt The Thematic Therapy Approach

Instead of planning a unique activity for every single group on your caseload, segment your students (e.g., preschool, K–2, 3–5) and choose one engaging theme or book per segment each month. The Thematic Therapy Approach dramatically cuts decision fatigue, reduces your printing time, and embeds skills into meaningful literacy contexts (Justice, 2006).

The 30-Second Habit That Saves 20 Minutes Later

The absolute best time to plan your next session is during the last 30 seconds of your current one. The data is fresh, you know exactly what worked, and you can leave a quick note for your future self.

Writing a single sentence like, “Next time: reteach past tense using visual cue; accuracy 40% with moderate prompts,” eliminates the mental restart required when you sit down to plan days later. You shift from being reactive to being brilliantly proactive.

Tools to Make Planning Sustainable

Effective therapy planning shouldn’t require working nights and weekends. It just requires reliable structure, aligned materials, and tiny habits that compound over time.

If you want to stop reinventing the wheel and get access to a massive library of goal-aligned materials, evidence-based probes, and digital data collection tools, we’ve got you covered.

Start your free trial today and take your time back:
👉 https://slpnow.com/pod

References

Justice, L. M. (2006). Evidence-based practice, response to intervention, and the prevention of reading difficulties. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 37(4), 284–297.

National Center on Intensive Intervention. (2013). Data-based individualization: A framework for intensive intervention. U.S. Department of Education.

Rosenshine, B. (2012). Principles of instruction: Research-based strategies that all teachers should know. American Educator, 36(1), 12–19.

Stecker, P. M., Fuchs, L. S., & Fuchs, D. (2005). Using curriculum-based measurement to improve student achievement: Review of research. Psychology in the Schools, 42(8), 795–819.

Transcript

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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.

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You Are Not the Problem: SLP Caseload vs. Workload for School-Based SLPs

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If you feel like you are drowning in paperwork, meetings, and evaluations despite having a “manageable” caseload on paper, you are not the problem. The most effective way to address this overwhelm is by understanding the crucial difference between caseload and workload, protecting your contract hours, and using a simple time-tracking system to make your invisible work visible to administrators.

We’ve all been there: staring at a caseload number that says 63, while the reality of our day-to-day feels like 100. School-based speech-language pathologists juggle direct therapy, high-stakes evaluations, complex IEP meetings, Medicaid billing, AAC programming, and travel time between sites. Yet, our capacity is often measured by just one single number.

When the math doesn’t add up, it is incredibly easy to internalize the pressure and assume you just need to manage your time better. But the truth is, it isn’t a time-management problem—it’s a workload problem. If paperwork and therapy planning are consuming your evenings, you can explore tools designed to streamline your systems and reduce indirect workload demands by starting a free trial at slpnow.com/pod.

The Caseload vs. Workload Disconnect

Districts often measure SLP capacity using a caseload cap, but according to the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA), there is a distinct difference between the two terms:

  • Caseload: The total number of students receiving speech-language services.
  • Workload: All the necessary activities required to support those students, including indirect services, compliance responsibilities, paperwork, and collaboration.

Two SLPs can each have a caseload of 63 students and experience drastically different demands. A caseload that includes multiple AAC users, a high evaluation volume, litigious family systems, or complex case management requires a much heavier workload. Research confirms that workload manageability—not just caseload size—is a significant factor associated with stress and emotional exhaustion in school-based SLPs (Marante et al., 2023).

4 Principles to Manage Impossible Workloads

When the system demands more hours than you actually have in a day, these four principles can help you shift from internalizing the pressure to objectively addressing the reality of your schedule.

1. Protect Your Contract Hours

Unpaid overtime hides systemic problems. When clinicians routinely stay late, skip lunch, or work weekends to complete required duties, the workload appears completely manageable from an administrative perspective. Protecting your contract hours does not mean withholding effort; it means refusing to subsidize a broken system with your personal time.

2. Prioritize Legal Deadlines

One of the clearest examples of workload pressure is evaluation and IEP timelines. These legal deadlines do not adjust to your schedule. When push comes to shove, prioritize tasks that carry legal compliance weight, and communicate clearly when other tasks must be delayed to meet these requirements.

3. Document Required Tasks Neutrally

Neutral documentation serves three vital purposes: it protects the clinician, it clarifies patterns over time, and it provides objective data for staffing conversations. Instead of venting about being overwhelmed, neutrally document the exact demands taking up your time.

4. Make Your Workload Visible

We have to show administrators what it actually takes to do our jobs. ASHA has long recommended a workload analysis approach rather than relying solely on caseload caps. By tracking your tasks, you give administration the data they need to understand the true scope of your role.

The Workload Visibility Framework

You don’t have to track your time perfectly all year long. Instead, implement The Workload Visibility Framework to gather actionable data over a short period. The point is consistency, not perfection.

  1. Create Time Buckets: Track minutes spent in key categories like direct therapy, evaluation time (testing, scoring, report writing), IEP preparation/meetings, documentation/Medicaid billing, AAC support, and travel time.
  2. Track for 10 Contract Days: Two weeks is usually enough to reveal accurate patterns, such as an evaluation-heavy week or meeting-heavy days.
  3. Convert to “The Math”: At the end of two weeks, summarize the data. Compare the contract hours available to the actual hours required to complete your workload.

When the data proves that the “solution” is always just asking you to do more, you can approach administrators with objective questions: Which task should be deprioritized? What is the district-approved plan when evaluations take precedence? What support can we add to meet legal requirements and maintain service quality?

Streamline the Workload You Can Control

Advocating for systemic change takes time, but you can take immediate steps to reduce the workload demands within your control. Organized therapy materials, fast data collection systems, and streamlined caseload management tools can meaningfully reduce the hours spent on indirect tasks.

Stop reinventing the wheel and start taking your weekends back. Try SLP Now for free today:
👉 https://slpnow.com/pod

References

American Speech-Language-Hearing Association. (n.d.-a). Caseload and workload in schools. Retrieved from https://www.asha.org/practice-portal/professional-issues/Caseload-and-Workload/

American Speech-Language-Hearing Association. (2002). A workload analysis approach for establishing speech-language caseload standards in the schools: Guidelines.

Marante, L., Hall-Mills, S., & Farquharson, K. (2023). School-based speech-language pathologists’ stress and burnout: A cross-sectional survey at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 54(2), 456–471.

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You have a caseload of 63 students. You're in back to back groups all day every day. You have three IEPs and two evaluations due this week. Plus you have an advocate attending one of the meetings. Your Medicaid notes are under review. You need to program an AAC device, and you haven't even eaten lunch yet.
I want you to hear this very clearly. You are not the problem.
As school-based SLPs, we provide direct therapy minutes. We also do evaluations. We write reports. We attend meetings. We write progress notes. We do Medicaid billing. We communicate with parents and teachers. We program AAC devices. We support RTI. We travel between schools.
There are so many things that we do and our caseload number doesn't reflect that. The caseload versus the workload approach. There's so much more that goes into managing a caseload than just the number of students.
For example, if we have a caseload of 63 students with mild articulation versus a caseload of 63 students with ASD, AAC devices, a particularly litigious parent population. That can make a huge difference.
And a lot of us feel like we're failing and that our jobs aren't sustainable. I'm hearing so many SLPs saying, I feel like a crappy SLP. I'm burning the candle at both ends. I don't know what to document. I keep bringing my work home. I don't know how long I can do this anymore.
Something has to give. We may stay late. We may skip lunch. We may bring work home. We may wing it in therapy. We may carry a lot of guilt for the choices that we're making. We may be questioning our competence. The biggest thing that I hear is that speech therapists feel like they aren't able to impact their students and they're not making a difference.
Our brains assume that the failure is personal, when it is absolutely not the case, and we get caught into a compliance trap. We keep getting everything done, even if we are working late, bringing work home, skipping lunch, at our personal cost.
It's not a problem to the district. They don't mind that. An SLP voluntarily working outside of contract hours is not a problem in the eyes of a school district. A lot of us are trying to find ways to make it work, but I think realizing this is a big shift that we can consider in getting ourselves out of this.
And some of us are canceling sessions to make time for paperwork. It feels like that's the only way out in finding a balance and we're scared of getting in trouble and getting pushed back around that. So we wanna think of ways that we can show our administrators what's actually happening, because if everything is getting done, they're assuming that we have enough capacity and that it's all okay. And that's a system problem. It doesn't reflect anything on you. So what we wanna do when our workload feels impossible. I want to propose for principles.
We want to protect our contract hours. Working unpaid over time hides that problem. Last month we talked a lot about paperwork and I suggested that SLPs can come in a little bit early or stay a little bit later. And that is a means to an end, and it can be a way to collect data and to present a rational argument to our administrator.
So for example, if we implement the strategies from the paperwork podcast episodes last month, as well as some of the strategies that we're sharing this month. We can have documentation to share with our administrators. I implemented these strategies to increase my efficiency and I needed this amount of time to do an IEP and an evaluation, and I was working extra time to make this happen and this is the time that I needed.
So help me problem solve. I have this many hours of contract time. I have this many hours of therapy. I have this many hours of paperwork. And oftentimes the math isn't going to math. We don't have enough contract hours to get all of those things done.
And having that data, we can bring that to our administrators and say, okay, here's the amount of work that I'm expected to do. I propose that I cancel some sessions or propose some solutions and then they can look at the data too. And if they really don't want you canceling sessions, they can propose an alternate solution.
I think having that data and having those numbers in black and white can really help with that discussion. I am doing my very best. I'm investing in my professional development and I want to serve these students well. I need to be able to get my work done at work and recharge at home so I can show up as the best therapist.
Let's go back to our four principles.
The first one is protecting our contract hours.
The second is prioritizing legal deadlines. You can check with your administrator if they agree that that is the number one priority, but I would assume that most administrators want us to make sure that we're meeting our evaluation and IEP timelines and meeting, like being compliant in that way.
And then the third principle is to document our required tasks. So if sessions are canceled due to assessments or IEP meetings or other case management tasks, we can document that very clearly and neutrally.
And then the fourth principle is to make our workload visible. So instead of. Kinda hiding it and making it invisible by staying late, coming in early, working on the weekends, like bringing work home.
We can start tracking really clear metrics, like how many evaluations do we have to do every month? How many meetings are we in? What is the principal requiring me to attend? What is my travel time and how much time do I need to spend on devices, et cetera, et cetera.
I am making the most of my contract hours and this is where my time is going. And it's also helpful to be able to share with administrators as well.
So we became SLPs to provide thoughtful and effective therapy. We want to have an impact on our students and we didn't become speech therapists to sprint between crises and be spread so thin that we're just working to no end. So if you are feeling stretched thin, it's not because you don't care enough. That's just a lot that we're carrying and we want to acknowledge that and process that.
So in the next episode, we're going to talk about what gets sacrificed when the workload becomes impossible, and why that's usually the most important part of our job. And some strategies that we can implement to address that, but I'm hoping that the next episode helps you realize that you're not alone.
All school-based SLPs are dealing with this. And then we're going to talk about some strategies to work around it too. And if part of your overwhelm is paperwork or therapy planning, that's something that we can make easier. Like I said, last month we had a series all about paperwork.
We also have a lot of different episodes on therapy planning and as always, SLP Now has tools built in to help you streamline your paperwork and your therapy planning, all things caseload management. So if you are looking for some support and a hand in making your workload more manageable, head to slpnow.com/pod, and you can sign up for a free trial to check it out.
So that's a wrap for today and we'll see you real soon.

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