Marisha

#132: Strategies You Can Use: Narratives

August 23, 2022 by Marisha Leave a Comment

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We are continuing with our new podcast series, Strategies You Can Use! I’ve been sharing different evidence-based strategies to help target specific skills.

Today I’ll discuss different strategies on how to target narratives!

4 Strategies to Target Narratives

✨Before we dive into the 4 strategies, I wanted to provide some evidence to get you excited about targeting narratives✨

✓Teaching story grammar has been found to improve comprehension from elementary students with learning disabilities to high school students (e.g., Gurney et al., 1990)

Gurney, D., Gersten, R., Dimino, J., & Carnine, D. (1990). Story grammar: Effective literature instruction for high school students with learning disabilities. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 23(6), 335–342.

✓ Explicit instruction on these elements provides children a framework (Hayward, Gillam, & Lien, 2007; Lynch et al., 2008).

✓ This helps “make language-learning tasks less demanding, more meaningful, and more authentic” (Tomasello, 2003).

1. Provide visual supports.

“Narrative instruction should include explicit teaching of story grammar elements” using graphic organizers and/or visual cues (Gillam et al., 2014).

Gillam, S. L., Olszewski, A., Fargo, J., & Gillam, R. B. (2014). Classroom-based narrative and vocabulary instruction: Results of an early-stage, nonrandomized comparison study. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 45, 204–219.

🍎 Use the SLP Now Story grammar elements! This is included in your SLP Now Membership.

✓The use of visuals and graphic organizers also enhances student comprehension (Paris & Paris, 2007).

Paris, A. H., & Paris, S. G. (2007). Teaching narrative comprehension strategies to first graders. Cognition and Instruction, 25(1), 1–44.

🍎 Use the SLP Now graphic organizer! This is included in your SLP Now Membership.

2. Identify story grammar elements.

Students can then identify story grammar elements in stories, which has been shown to yield improvements in complexity and content of oral narratives (Hayward & Schneider, 2000).

Hayward, D., & Schneider, P. (2000). Effectiveness of teaching story grammar knowledge to pre-school children with language impairment: An exploratory study. Child Language Teaching and Therapy, 16, 255–284.

Teaching story grammar also enhances student comprehension (Paris & Paris, 2007).

3. Identify missing elements.

Hayward & Schneider (2000) also found that identifying missing elements in stories yielded improvements in student narratives.

✓Try modeling the story and leave elements off so the student can correct you.

4. Use an authentic context.

Teaching story grammar in the context of authentic stories (e.g., books, fiction articles) yielded clinically significant improvements in students’ oral narratives (Swanson, Fey, Mills, & Hood, 2005).

Swanson, L. A., Fey, M. E., Mills, C. E., & Hood, L. S. (2005). Use of narrative-based language intervention with children who have specific language impairment. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 14, 131–143.

✨ Putting it Together (Ukrainetz, 2007)✨

✓ Brainstorm parts of the story, and assess initial knowledge of story grammar (What do you need the beginning/middle/end?)

✓Introduce terminology for the story grammar elements using the graphic organizer

✓ Introduce the book (show the cover, read the title)

✓ Students guess what the story might be about + fill in the organizer

✓ Read the story + fill in the organizer

✓Compare predicted story + actual story

✓ Retell the story

Ukrainetz, T.A. (2007). Assessment and intervention within a contextualized skill framework. In T.A. Ukrainetz (Ed.), Contextualized language intervention: Scaffolding preK-12 literacy achievement (pp. 59-94). Austin, TX: PRO-ED.

Need goal ideas for targeting Narratives?

🎯 Check out SLP Now Goal-bank for some inspiration

Additional Links

Interested in any of the materials mentioned in this podcast? Join our Free 14 day SLP Now Trial Your first 5 downloads are on us!

Narrative Bundle – Story Grammar Icons + Graphic Organizer – Included in the SLP Now Membership

Next Up in this Pod Series

7/5/22 Strategies You Can Use: Following Directions
7/12/22 Strategies You Can Use: Grammar
7/19/22 Strategies You Can Use: Syntax
8/2/22 Strategies You Can Use: Basic Concepts
8/9/22 Strategies You Can Use: Basic Concepts
8/16/22 Strategies You Can Use: Affixes
8/23/22 Strategies You Can Use: Narratives
8/30/22 Strategies You Can Use: Summarizing

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Transcript

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Marisha: Hello there and welcome to the SLP Now Podcast, where we share practical therapy tips and ideas for busy speech language pathologists. Grab your favorite beverage and sit back as we dive into this week's episode.

Marisha: Hey, there it's Marisha and welcome to the SLP Now Podcast. This summer we are doing a series called, Strategies You Can Use and we picked different goal areas, and we're going to do a blitz of three evidence backed strategies that you can use when targeting those specific skills. So these are mostly strategies that have come from the literature, and we're just pulling out the ones that are most practical, that might help you if you're feeling stuck or just wanting to try some new strategies when targeting some of our most common goals. So without further ado, lets dive right in.

Marisha: Today's episode is all about narratives and I've done a lot of research on narrative-based therapy over the years and so I have a lot of different references that I am pulling together, that have really informed how I approach this. So it's a little different than the other episodes, but I hope it'll be jam packed with tons and tons of information that you can use, including those practical strategies to target those goals in therapy.

Marisha: So first, before we dive into the specific strategies, I think it's helpful to talk about why we even want to teach story grammar in terms of narrative-based intervention and there's some really cool studies out there. So teaching story grammar has been found to improve comprehension and they've found this with elementary students who have learning disabilities and even with high school students. So there's an article by Gurney et al. in 1990, that looks at using this as an approach with high school students who have learning disabilities and how it even improves comprehension of a lecture. So it can really help with that generalization and impact students in the real world, in their context of the classroom and all of that.

Marisha: By teaching story grammar elements explicitly, it provides children with a framework and that's why they're able to generalize that. So they have that framework on how to analyze the information and how to make sense of that information that they're taking in, which in turn can help comprehension. The framework also helps make language learning tasks less demanding, more meaningful, and more authentic, and that comes from Thomas Ello in 2003. So, like I said, I'm just mentioning a couple of the citations here, but feel free to check out the show notes for this episode for the full reference list. You can find that at SLPnow.com/132. So, SLPnow.com/132.

Marisha: Now that we have a little bit of a framework in terms of why we even want to target this, I have a couple of strategies. So I'm going to share four evidence-backed strategies that we can use and then we're going to wrap things up and share what this could look like in terms of a whole unit or in a progression of a session. So the first strategy is to provide visual supports. So Gillan et al. in 2014 had a really nice article in the language speech and hearing services in schools journal. They say that narrative instruction should include explicit teaching of story grammar elements, and we can use graphic organizers and/or visual cues to do that. There are studies showing that the use of visuals and graphic organizers enhances student comprehension. So one example is that is from Paris and Paris in 2007.

Marisha: So for me, this includes some of the visuals that I use. I have some laminated story grammar icons, so I just have one icon on a laminated card. And so there's a set of seven icons and the back is blank. So I can use just the icons as cues, or if students need more support, we can use dry erase marker to do quick pictography for each element on the back. And then as we're practicing retelling the story, we can work on sequencing it, or I can just show them the icon when they're retelling, if they need some more support, I can flip the card around. It's a really fun activity and we can use those cards to identify story grammar elements. We'll give more examples of that going forward.

Marisha: And then my other go to support is a graphic organizer that also has the icons on it. Mine is also dry erase laminated. And I think this is nice when we're first teaching it because students can see that progression. And I feel like that's the most scaffolded way to do it. And then as they become more independent, we can just queue with individual cards. But those are two examples of visual supports that I like to use. The next strategy is to identify story grammar elements. I talked about this in the previous step, but we can do this in conjunction with visuals or not, but having students identify story grammar elements in stories has shown to yield improvements in the complexity and the content of oral narratives.

Marisha: One specific citation is from Hayward and Schneider in 2000 and they looked at the effectiveness of teaching story grammar knowledge to preschool children. So we've touched on articles from preschool, elementary, secondary. So this is a very worthwhile skill to target across the age ranges. So by teaching them to identify those story grammar elements, if we're going through a story, we can use the icons to identify the characters. And if we look at the first page, we can have the character icon and then identify, oh, who's the character. And then the next icon card is the setting, when and where does the story happen? And we can point to that and use the icons as a support as we're going through the book. Or we can fill in a graphic organizer as we're reading the book and identifying the parts of the story that way. So that is step two, identifying story grammar elements.

Marisha: The third strategy is to identify missing elements. So that same study by Hayward and Schneider in 2000 also found that identifying missing elements in stories yielded improvements in student narratives. So when I use this, I might model retelling a story and have the students make sure that I have all the elements and as they get more familiar with it, and as they get better at identifying the elements, I might leave elements off on purpose. And there are also a lot of stories that don't have all of the elements so we can work on identifying them that way as well. And then it can be a fun activity to do if you're working with a group of students. We can identify if our peers are leaving off elements, but we definitely want to have set that up appropriately to make sure that is done in a safe way.

Marisha: The fourth and last strategy is to use an authentic context. So we want to be teaching story grammar in the context of authentic stories, whether it's books or fiction articles or in terms of their own narratives. In the context of those authentic stories, we see a lot more clinically significant improvements. And this is from Swanson et al. in 2005. And they looked at the use of narrative-based language intervention with children who have SLI. So having that authentic context can really help with that generalization and make this a more meaningful activity.

Marisha: So just to recap the four strategies, really quick. One, we want to provide visual supports. The examples that I shared are the story grammar icon cards with one icon on each card or a story grammar organizer that has all of the story grammar elements in sequence so that they can view that. Then another activity is to identify story grammar elements when we're reading. The third strategy is to work on identifying missing elements in stories or retells. And then the fourth strategy is to use an authentic context. So using authentic stories from books or fiction articles, things that are relevant to the curriculum or narratives from their own lives.

Marisha: So, that's a recap of the four strategies. Dr. Ukrainetz has a fabulous textbook on contextualized language intervention and her chapter detailing how this could all be put together was really helpful. So what she shares is that first we brainstorm the parts of the story. So we might just look at the cover and a couple pages and then talk about who the characters might be, what the setting might be, and do a little bit of an inferencing activity. And if this is more towards the beginning, we can use this as a way to assess initial knowledge of story grammar.

Marisha: Do the students know what the parts of a story are? And what does that look like? And if they're not familiar with that, we can introduce the terminology for those story grammar elements, like using the icons or the graphic organizer. And I think if I was starting off, I would just use the graphic organizer because it helps keep the sequence straight. That's one less thing that they have to remember. But then once we introduce the terminology, we would introduce the book, look at the cover, read the title. And then we work on filling in that organizer, as the students are guessing what the story might be about and then reread the story and fill in the organizer with what actually happened. And if you have multiple organizers, that can be a really nice way to compare and contrast. So we can look at the predicted story and the actual story, and then we can work on retelling the story. So that's just an example of what a sequence could look like and putting those different strategies together. And yeah, that's a wrap.

Marisha: So join us next week for strategies on how to target summarizing, super excited to dive into that skill. As we move from narrative text to expository text, which is super relevant for our older students, as we move through the curriculum. We're reading expository texts even from early elementary. If your students are rocking narrative intervention, and they've got their story grammar elements down, this is a really, really great area to explore as well. So we'll see you next week.

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

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#131: Strategies You Can Use: Affixes

August 16, 2022 by Marisha Leave a Comment

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We are continuing with our new podcast series, Strategies You Can Use! I’ve been sharing different evidence-based strategies to help target specific skills.

Today I’ll discuss different strategies on how to target affixes! We will focus on an article by Zoski, J.L. et al., 2018. It is all about using morphological strategies to help students decode, spell and comprehend big words.

🤓 Let’s nerd out as we dive into the strategies we can use to target affixes in therapy.

3 Strategies to Target Affixes

Zoski, J. L., Nellenbach, K. M., & Erickson, K. A. (2018). Using Morphological Strategies to Help Adolescents Decode, Spell, and Comprehend Big Words in Science. Communication Disorders Quarterly.

1. Teach in the context of rich vocabulary instruction (for learning and generalization).

2. Provide purposeful, authentic, and repeated opportunities.

3. Deliver instruction in a systematic and explicit manner.

This is the structure on how to implement these strategies:

🍎 Introduction/Purpose

“Today we are going to learn about a strategy to help you read and understand new and complex big words…”

🍎 Introduce Words

Write them on the board. Brainstorm strategies.

🍎 Affix and Root Dissection Activity

Compares and contrasts two-word study strategies: syllabification and morphological problem solving

Most big words have clues in them that will help you read them. Let’s look at the word, myocardial.

✓ Break apart this word into syllables
✓ Learn the meaning of the prefixes, suffixes, and root (morphemes)
✓ Share other words that have the same parts and add it to a vocabulary journal

🍎 Wrap Up

“We learned some strategies to power up your vocabulary. Knowing how to use the suffixes we learned will help you understand the words we talked about–and so many more. There are more than 400 words that end with -al!”

Need goal ideas for Affixes?

🎯 Check out SLP Now Goal-bank for some inspiration

Additional Links

Zoski, J. L., Nellenbach, K. M., & Erickson, K. A. (2018). Using Morphological Strategies to Help Adolescents Decode, Spell, and Comprehend Big Words in Science. Communication Disorders Quarterly.

Free 14 day SLP Now Trial Your first 5 downloads are on us!

SLP Now Affixes Bundle which is included in SLP Now Membership

Next Up in this Pod Series

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Transcript

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Marisha: Hello there. And welcome to the SLP Now Podcast, where we share practical therapy tips and ideas for busy speech, language pathologists. Grab your favorite beverage and sit back as we dive into this week's episode.

Marisha: Hey, there it's Marisha and welcome to the SLP Now Podcast. This summer, we are doing a series called strategies you can use, and we picked different goal areas. And we're going to do a blitz of three evidence back strategies that you can use when targeting those specific skills. So these are mostly strategies that have come from the literature, and we're just pulling out the ones that are most practical that might help you if you're feeling stuck or just wanting to try some new strategies when targeting some of our most common goals. So without further ado, let's dive right in.

Marisha: Okay. So now let's dive into some strategies on how to target affixes in therapy. Today's podcast episode is inspired by an article by Zoski at all in 2018. And it's all about using morphological strategies to help adolescents decode, spell, and comprehend big words and there are focuses in science. But we're going to take some strategies and use that to give us some things to try when targeting affixes with our students. And if you're curious about this article, I will share a citation and a link in the show notes. You can grab that at slpnow.com/131. I'll link any other resources that we share in the show notes as well. But for our three strategies, some of the takeaways that I had for targeting affixes is where one, teaching in the context of rich vocabulary instruction. This is really important for learning and generalization. So we want to provide like meaningful instruction, have rich vocabulary instruction.

Marisha: Like we're going to pull all of these strategies together and talk about what that could look like. But that's one thing that we want to think about, teaching in the context of rich vocabulary instruction. Then the second strategy is to provide purposeful, authentic, and repeated opportunities. If you listen to the episode last week, we talked about multiple meaningful exposures. This also applies when we're working on affixes. And then the third strategy is to deliver instruction in a systematic and explicit manner. And like this episode is structured a little differently. So I give you the three strategies right off the top, but I want to talk about what this could look like when we are targeting affixes specifically. So here we go. And then again, this is from the Zoski at all article and I love articles that are practical and relevant and give us lots of tips. And this one, it did the trick perfectly.

Marisha: So in terms of what this could all look like, they shared exactly how they structured the intervention. So first we kind of want to dive into the introduction and the purpose. So how they introduced this was today we are going to learn about a strategy to help you read and understand new and complex big words. And so they dove into the instruction about actually teaching the skill. Then two, they introduced the target words. They wrote them on the board, they started brainstorming strategies. Like how can we figure out what these words mean?

Marisha: Then they dove into an affix and root dissection activity. So they talked about using syllabication, so breaking the word into syllables, as well as kind of morphological problem solving. And they talked about that words have clues in them that will help us read them. And so one of the examples that they gave was looking at the word myocardial, and so we could break it into syllable. So they can count the syllables, which there's five in myocardial. That helps us read the word and put the parts together, but that doesn't really help us figure out what it means necessarily.

Marisha: So we can try it a different way. Instead of looking at syllables, we can look at the prefix, the suffix, and the root. Each of these have, they're called morphemes and they have meaning. And so then we talk about, okay, so the prefix is at the beginning of the word. What's the prefix in myocardial? So that we know that myo is the prefix. We know that cardi is the root word. And then al at the end of the word is the suffix. So we can talk about if we know what myo or cardi or the al at the end means. And sometimes like the students will have that knowledge because we've talked about those word parts before, or those morphemes before, or they know other words that have that in it. And maybe they know that a cardiac arrest or cardiology, or maybe they know that that is related to the heart.

Marisha: And so they can use that knowledge to break down the word. And as we work on this in therapy, they'll get more and more familiar with the different parts of the word. So then in the rest of the instruction, they give multiple words that have some of the same parts. So like if we're looking at myo cardio, we can look at cardiology, cardiograph, all of those different words. They can use a vocabulary notebook to kind of document the words that they're learning and the different parts, and really help them build that strategy. And it's cool too because in the article they gave like specific numbers of how many words have the certain prefix or suffix. And so they ended the lesson talking about how there are more than 400 words that end with AL so that can really empower students like, okay, so you've learned what myo means.

Marisha: There is this many words that have that as a prefix. They can use that to figure out the meaning of that many hundreds of words. I don't actually know how many words start with myo, but that is such a powerful strategy. So if we can teach the students to like break down the words and learn the meaning of the prefix, the root word or the suffix and, or they can learn to use that strategy to break down words in the future, like especially in science, like that's huge. If they can get a good foundation with some prefixes, suffixes, and root words, can make a huge difference. So I just really liked how this article laid out their instruction and definitely check out the actual paper for more of the details. But I just thought it was like really cool overview. And like, if you're feeling stuck with how to start teaching affixes, this can be a fabulous resource.

Marisha: So then just to recap the strategies we want to teach in the context of rich vocabulary instruction. So for me, this looks like teaching the words, like pulling some of their science texts, or their social studies text, or whatever book they're reading in the classroom and identifying words from there and breaking them down and giving that meaningful context, especially for older students. For younger students, I might have it be a little bit more play based, but just teaching in meaningful context and then providing repeated opportunities, giving multiple exposures to the word as we're reading and as we are practicing. I love literacy based therapy because it gives us like multiple opportunities to target the words in a variety of activities. So that's a really good one. And then we want to deliver instruction in a systematic and explicit manner. And I think the article shared a really nice way of doing that.

Marisha: They had explicit instruction of like the skill as a whole. They gave them really structured practice in breaking down words. And then they put that into context. And I love the idea of adding to a vocabulary journal for the different prefixes, suffixes, and root words so that they can continue to build on that. And yeah, like such cool stuff. So many little things that we can implement. And as always, it doesn't have to be a massive revamp of everything that you're doing. Like, can you use one of the strategies that we shared to help students start to navigate affixes and stepping up what we're doing when we're targeting that as a goal. So yeah, that is a wrap. Join us next week. We're going to be talking all about narrative intervention, one of my absolute favorites. So yeah. Hope you have a fabulous week and we'll see you soon. Thanks for listening to the SLP Now Podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please share with your SLP friends and don't forget to subscribe to the podcast to get the latest episode sent directly to you. See you next time.

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#130: Strategies You Can Use: Vocabulary

August 9, 2022 by Marisha Leave a Comment

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This Week’s Episode: Evidence-based Strategies for Vocabulary Goals

We are continuing with our new podcast series, Strategies You Can Use! I’ve been sharing different evidence-based strategies to help target specific skills.

Today I’ll discuss different strategies on how to target vocabulary goals!

Let’s dive into the strategies we can use to target vocabulary growth.

3 Strategies to Target Vocabulary Goals (growth)

Hadley, E. B., Dickinson, D. K., Hirsch-Pasek, K., & Golinkoff, R. M. (2018). Building semantic networks: The impact of a vocabulary intervention on preschoolers’ depth of word knowledge. Reading Research Quarterly.

This study used shared book reading and guided play methods to teach words in conceptually linked categories (taxonomy or themes)

🍎 8 days of intervention
📚 10 minutes of reading
▶️ 10 minutes of book-related, adult-guided play

1. Multiple exposures to words.

Teach words in multiple activities.
✓ shared book reading
✓ play-based activities

2. Explicit instruction about the meaning of words.

✓ Ask the student to repeat words
✓Give a definition of the word and ask the student to provide the word

3. Relating words in a taxonomy.

Children showed more growth when taught taxonomies vs. themes

✓ Taxonomy names
✓ Taxonomy memberships

Pinkham, Kaefer, and Neuman (2014) compared two conditions: (1) children who heard target words as part of a researcher-created storybook in which the text provides support for the words’ taxonomic category (e.g., “a faroe [type of bird] lays eggs because it is a bird”; p. 3) and (2) children who heard the same target words as part of a traditional, researcher-created storybook in which the text introduces target words as part of a thematic grouping (e.g., “a faroe has a sofa and lives in a house”; p. 4). Children in the taxonomic storybook condition knew significantly more words at posttest than those in the traditional storybook condition.

“The preschoolers in this study showed large gains in word knowledge from relatively short daily periods of instruction.”

Need Vocabulary goal ideas?

🎯 Check out SLP Now Goal-bank for some inspiration

Additional Links

SLP Now Planting a Rainbow therapy materials are included int he SLP Now Membership

Pinkham, Kaefer, and Neuman (2014)

Free 14 day SLP Now Trial

Next Up in this Pod Series

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Transcript

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Marisha Mets: Hello there and welcome to The SLP Now Podcast, where we share practical therapy tips and ideas for busy speech language pathologists, grab your favorite beverage and sit back as we dive into this week's episode. Hey, there it's Marisha and welcome to The SLP Now Podcast. This summer, we are doing a series called strategies you can use, and we picked different goal areas and we're going to do a blitz of three evidence back strategies that you can use when targeting those specific skills. So these are mostly strategies that have come from the literature, and we're just pulling out the ones that are most practical that might help you if you're feeling stuck or just wanting to try some new strategies when targeting some of our most common goals. So without further ado, let's dive right in

Marisha Mets: This week, we are diving into strategies for vocabulary growth. As always, I have three strategies for you. And this episode is inspired by an article by Hadley Hall. It was published in 2018, and it's all about building semantic networks. This article has lots of gems and resources in it. So if you want to check it out, I will include the citation as well as a link in the show notes. And you can access those at slpnow.com/130. So slpnow.com/130. So the reason that I picked this article, because like I said, it's got some gems in it, but it includes an intervention that we could absolutely implement in the schools. And it gives us a lot of really great inspiration and tips and activity ideas that we can use to structure our own therapy. So it's a good one, but what they did in this article was they structured a vocabulary intervention and it was used with preschoolers, but I think we can apply it especially to early elementary students and maybe even beyond that, but what they did was they used shared book reading and guided play methods to teach words in conceptually linked categories.

Marisha Mets: So they looked at taxonomies,, as well as themes. And the cool thing is they did eight days of intervention. They provided 10 minutes of reading in each session, as well as 10 minutes of book-related adult guided play. So 20 minutes for eight days, each was pretty doable and pretty replicable in the school setting. So that's exciting. So, like I said, I have three strategies that I pulled from this article and the first two are strategies that I've seen across a lot of vocabulary research. So these can definitely be applied across the age ranges and all of that, and just include good general strategies. And then the third one is one that is a little bit newer to me, and that I'm personally experimenting with a little bit more. So I'm excited to dive into that too. But the first strategy is to provide multiple exposures to words.

Marisha Mets: So pretty much any presentation that you attend on vocabulary will probably share research about how many exposures it takes for different students to learn a word. And these numbers are all over the board. It depends on a number of factors, but the common theme is that it takes a lot more exposures than we might think or than we might guess. And that is one of the key components that we want to think about when we are doing vocabulary intervention. So we might be doing thematic units where we teach vocabulary using a book. If we read the book and wrap it up in one session and give the students maybe two exposures to the five words that we selected, like that's not enough for them to learn that word. And I like that the authors of this article gave an example. So they used two books across the intervention and they detailed exactly how they gave multiple exposures and what that looked like.

Marisha Mets: They gave tons of suggestions and ideas. I won't go into all of the details here, but really cool stuff in that article. But they had multiple sessions using the same book. And I think it was helpful that they alternated between the book reading and then the related play for the book. So one of the books was about flowers and it was called Planting A Rainbow by Lois Alert. And they had play-based activities where the students got to pretend to plant flowers. And I love it too, because they had a little bit of sabotage in the play to add some drama to it. So a storm came in and blew out all the seeds or whatever kind of drama we can include in that. So I really like that. Because you might be thinking we can't use the same book for four sessions they'll get bored.

Marisha Mets: But it seems like they kept up the pace by alternating the activities, which is really cool. So the second tip is to provide explicit instruction about the meaning of words. I really like how the article describes how they did this. So they picked a book and they picked eight words for each book. So they strategically were like, okay, we're going to target these eight words very strategically. So for example, for the flower book, they selected the taxonomy name or the category. So for the flower book, that would be flowers. And then they selected five words for taxonomy members. And don't worry, we're going to talk about theme versus taxonomy and all of this stuff in the next section. But just to summarize the first, they selected the taxonomy name flowers, then five words for taxonomy membership. So the names of all the different flowers like Tiger Lily, and then they also selected two theme words that were thematically, but not taxonomically related.

Marisha Mets: So they had five different types of flowers, so those are all in the taxonomy and then the thematically related, but not taxonomy related words were like peddles. So peddles are related to the theme of flowers, but they're not part of the flower taxonomy. And then they had two of those and then they also selected general... So they had a flower unit and a vegetable unit and there were five additional words that they targeted across both books so that students could compare and contrast and like start to build that relationship because flowers and vegetables, which was the other theme are both related, but the larger taxonomy for flowers and vegetables is living things. And under that related vocabulary was like roots and stems and seeds. So those words were related to both taxonomies or like both books. And so they included five additional words there.

Marisha Mets: I just thought that was interesting. Like I'm working on analyzing my books to decide which words I want to target and thinking about all of that. But in terms of how they provided definitions, there were a number of ways that they did that. So they pointed to pictures in the book. So identifying the different flowers, like, oh, here's the Tiger Lily and pointing out the different examples. Here's a Tiger Lily in a vase. Here's a Tiger Lily growing in the ground. They also provided definition information, which is what we're talking about now in terms of the explicit instruction. So they talked about taxonomy membership. So a Tiger Lily is a flower or taxonomy non-membership. So a Tiger Lily is not a vegetable or we don't eat Tiger Lily's so they're not a food or they're not a vegetable. And then another example could be how the word relates to the larger themes.

Marisha Mets: So we can talk about something about related to flowers. The example that they give for radishes was that some vegetables grow on vines. So just giving additional information and then also talking about the perceptual features. So like this flower is yellow on the inside and white on the outside. And then another thing could be to give conceptual information, talking about how the seeds grow into a flower. And then another example is object function. So what we use flowers for? We can get flowers as a gift, we can smell flowers, that's what they did. And then in terms of that instruction, they also encouraged children to repeat the word, to reinforce the phonological representation. So we can do that by saying, can you say Tiger Lily? And then in later readings, they were given a definition. So like what's the vegetable that grows underground and is right on the outside and white on the inside?

Marisha Mets: And so then they should be able to say radish. So they had different types of activities to make sure that the students were practicing and engaged with the words and building that phonological representation. And then in the play activity, they strategically use the words throughout the activity. And so that's another way to, again, going back to 0.1, providing multiple exposures, but then they also embedded some of that explicit instruction within the play activity as well. So the third tip, which is a little bit newer for me is relating words in a taxonomy. Most books are structured to talk about themes. That's how we plan our instruction. We work around a theme and our books are very theme-based and the authors don't advocate for completely getting rid of that theme based approach. I think it's still very relevant and helpful in a way to build that vocabulary, but they also encourage us to consider relating words in a taxonomy as we're teaching too.

Marisha Mets: So with the example of flowers, they taught flower as the main taxonomy and then all the five different types of flowers as that taxonomy membership. And so it's basically working in categories and a more colloquial way to say it. And considering with the next book that you read, if you want to implement this as a strategy, you can still teach the theme based words. Like if you're reading a book about spring, you can talk about like the rain and the umbrella and all of that, but maybe pick one category to focus on. So if we're doing spring, there's a lot of clothing changes that happen there. So maybe our taxonomy could be clothing and we could talk about the coat and pants and shirt and all of those different taxonomy members that belong to clothing. So just strategically selecting our words.

Marisha Mets: The reason we want to do this is that students learned both types of words, but they just had more depth of understanding and just made larger growth with the taxonomy-related words versus the theme-based words. So it can just be a strategy that we use to help students really deepen their knowledge of vocabulary and to help them acquire more of those words. So those are the main takeaways here, but using these strategies showed large gains in word knowledge from pretty short periods of instruction. So these strategies can be very helpful and there's lots of little things that we can incorporate. So you don't have to revamp your whole instruction and throw away everything that you've been using. If you're looking to step things up, some things that we can do. So just to recap, so one, we talked about multiple exposures to words.

Marisha Mets: So maybe pick the six words that you want to target throughout the book unit, use a book over multiple sessions as something you could do, and then brainstorm some ways like, okay, what's the taxonomy? What are some perceptual features I can highlight? Challenge yourself to give as many exposures to that word as possible. So that is number one. So number two is that explicit instruction, which links really nicely with step one is just giving that explicit instruction, including some of those questions. So in the first and second reading, we can ask the student to repeat the word, and then in later readings, like in the article they did this in readings three and four, you can give a definition of the word and then ask the student to provide the word and that just helps to build that chronological representation and also build that vocabulary knowledge.

Marisha Mets: Then the third tip was relating words in a taxonomy. So identifying a category, whether it's vegetable, bird, fruit, flower, clothing, whatever the category is, we can identify that and some taxonomy members and address those words throughout the reading. We can still throw in our theme-based words, that's still beneficial. But yeah, so those are the main takeaways and some quick strategies that you can incorporate in your session. I'd love to hear how this goes for you. We do some recap posts and stuff on Instagram. So if you want to check that out and then just share what you've tried or how it's going, we'd love to hear from you. Next week we're diving into some more advanced vocabulary strategies all about ethics which I absolutely love. And we're going to nerd out about this. We'll see you next week. Have a good one. Thanks for listening to The SLP Now Podcast, if you enjoyed this episode, please share with your SLP friends and don't forget to subscribe to the podcast to get the latest episode sent directly to you. See you next time.

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#129: Strategies You Can Use: Basic Concepts

August 2, 2022 by Marisha Leave a Comment

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This Week’s Episode: Evidence-based Strategies for Basic Concepts

We are continuing with our new podcast series, Strategies You Can Use! I’ve been sharing different evidence-based strategies to help target specific skills.

Today I’ll discuss different strategies on how to target Basic Concepts!

I hope you’re enjoying this series so far and finding it useful and applicable to your therapy sessions. Let’s dive into the strategies we can use to target vocabulary, specifically, basic concepts.

3 Strategies to Target Basic Concepts

The strategies that I’m sharing will be coming from 3 articles that had very interesting approaches. You will see the articles listed below the strategies for basic concepts.

1. Strategically teach basic concepts.

🍎 Circle time is a great opportunity to include some basic concepts teaching.

🍎 Strategies from Seifert & Schwarz, 1991
1️⃣ Direct Instruction (15 minutes) on two target concepts
✓ Provide examples of the two target concepts

2️⃣ Interactive Instruction (15 minutes)
✓ Art, drama, or game activities that are specifically designed to incorporate the target concept.

3️⃣ Incidental Instruction (Throughout the week)
✓ Teachers used concepts in natural contexts.

2. Modifications for Our Kiddos

🍏 If you’re working with a child who has low overall language or receptive vocabulary skills, trying to show the meaning of a preposition with a bunch of different words and objects might be confusing or distracting.

Instead, you might limit the variety of the objects you use to show what it means, as well as what you call them (Nicholas, Alt, & Hauwiller, 2019).

🍏 Using iconic gestures (looks like what it means) can help 3- to 4-year-olds learn new words. Non-representational gestures weren’t helpful (Vogt & Kauschke, 2017).

Activity Ideas
Containers (Boxes, Buckets)
Dollhouse/Toy Farm
Pretend Food
Wind Up Toys
Toca Boca Apps

3. Co-Treat

🍎 Five different concept words were targeted by the SLP only, the adapted PE teacher only, or both in a co-treatment condition

30-minute large group lessons, 4 days per week for 9 weeks

“Out of the ten children, four learned more concepts in co-treatment weeks as compared to weeks when the SLP or PE teacher worked alone.”

Lund, E., Young, A., & Yarbrough, R. (2019). The effects of co-treatment on concept development in children with Down Syndrome. Communication Disorders Quarterly.

Need Basics Concept goal ideas?

🎯 Check out SLP Now Goal-bank for some inspiration

Additional Links

Seifert, H. (1991). Treatment effectiveness of large group basic concept instruction with Head Start students. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 22, 60-64.

Nicholas, K., Alt, M., & Hauwiller, E. (2019). Variability of input in preposition learning by preschoolers with developmental language disorder and typically-developing language. Child Language Teaching and Therapy.

Vogt, S., & Kauschke, C. (2017). Observing iconic gestures enhances word learning in typically developing children and children with specific language impairment. Journal of Child Language. Advance online publication.

Lund, E., Young, A., & Yarbrough, R. (2019). The effects of co-treatment on concept development in children with Down Syndrome. Communication Disorders Quarterly.

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SLP Now Material Basic Concepts

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Marisha: Hello there and welcome to the SLP Now podcast, where we share practical therapy, tips and ideas for busy speech language pathologists. Grab your favorite beverage and sit back as we dive into this week's episode.

Marisha: Hey, there it's Marisha and welcome to the SLP Now podcast. This summer, we are doing a series called Strategies You Can Use, and we picked different goal areas and we're going to do a blitz of three evidence backed strategies that you can use when targeting those specific skills. These are mostly strategies that have come from the literature, and we're just pulling out the ones that are most practical that might help you if you're feeling stuck or just wanting to try some new strategies when targeting some of our most common goals. So without further ado, let's dive right in.

Marisha: This week, we are sharing strategies to target basic concepts and the strategies come from three different articles that had very interesting approaches. Our first one is touching on how we can strategically teach basic concepts, and this comes from Cipher and Schwartz, and it is a 1991 article, but I love the studies that include really clear protocols. Even if they are a little bit older, they can give us some practical tips and inspiration on how we can structure our therapy, and of course, using the whole EBP triangle to make those decisions.

Marisha: But they had three elements of their treatment protocol. The first was direct instructions. They spent about 15 minutes every week providing examples of two target concepts. Head to the show notes at SLPnow.com/129 to check out the article for all of the details on how they selected the targets, exactly what everything looked like. They have some really amazing resources in the article that detail all of the things, but the main takeaway here is that they provided 15 minutes of direct instruction on two target concepts.

Marisha: Then they had 15 minutes of interactive instruction where they had art activities or games specifically designed to incorporate the target concept. One of the games that they talked about was throwing bean bags, where they worked on. There's lots of concepts that could be included in throwing bean bags. It could be far or loud or quiet or short. Lots of things that they can work on there. And then they also included incidental instruction where they did this with head start students, so in preschool, and they provided incidental instruction throughout the week. They worked on that generalization, made sure that the teachers were aware of the concepts, and gave them the support that they needed to be able to provide that incidental instruction throughout the week.

Marisha: It's really cool to see those strategies and feel like those are three things that we could easily incorporate into our sessions. In the SLP Now membership, we totally revamped our basic concepts instruction and the direct instruction that activities that we have are inspired by this article, and we also have different ideas for the interactive instruction and all of that. That's a great resource if you're feeling a little bit overwhelmed diving into this, but the article, like I said, does a really great job if you want to dive into that for some easy inspiration as well.

Marisha: Another article by Nicholas Alt and [inaudible 00:04:03] from 2019, a little bit more recent. This was also with preschoolers and they gave some strategies or some modifications that we can make, like a more generic approach for our students. If we are working with a child who has low overall language or receptive vocabulary skills, trying to show the meaning of a preposition with a bunch of different words and objects might be confusing or distracting. We might want to teach the target concept with less activities. Maybe we want to work on teaching it just with a farm animal around the barn. Instead of showing it with the farm animals, all the farm animals and balls and bean bags and all of the things, we might want to limit, the variety of objects that we use initially. We decrease the variability of that input and that can be a helpful strategy.

Marisha: One other strategy and possible modification that we can use for our kiddos, this was again done with three to four year olds and they found that iconic gestures, where they look like what it means. For on, we can make a fist and put our other hand on, if you can imagine what I mean, that is very iconic and that can help our students learn. We can pair that with our instructions so we can teach them on and under by making a fist and putting our other hand under the fist. So on versus under using those iconic gestures can be really helpful. Whereas non-representational gestures weren't as helpful. If we were to just make up a random symbol for on, that wouldn't be as helpful for our students, but that is a way to help them learn more of those words. That was our number two strategy and just some ideas for additional supports.

Marisha: Then our third strategy, this is an article by Lend It All in 2019, and they looked at co-treatment of concept development, and this is in children with down syndrome. The study setup was really interesting. They had three conditions. In one group, they taught five different concept words in three different conditions. It was either by the SLP only, by the adopted PE teacher only, or in a co-treatment condition. SLP, PE, or co-treatment, and they had 30 minute large group lessons four days a week for nine weeks. Not totally out of the norm of what we would be able to provide our students.

Marisha: There were 10 children in the study, four of the children learned more concepts in co-treatment weeks compared to weeks when the SLP or the PE teacher worked alone. That co-treatment was really helpful in empowering the students to learn those concepts, which was really interesting and I think that's a great. How fun would that be to go work with a PE teacher, build some community at this school and help our students learn more concepts? That sounds really epic. Again, that was from Lend It All in 2019.

Marisha: Quick recap, our first strategy is to strategically teach our basic concepts. To build a structure for ourselves, Cipher and Schwartz provides great inspiration on how to do that in terms of selecting the words and the specific activities throughout the week. And so it really is 30 minutes of instruction time, and then empowering the teachers to provide incidental instruction throughout the week, totally doable in terms of a model.

Marisha: Then the second strategy was ideas for modifications. Limiting the variability of the input when we're teaching those basic concepts, and then also considering using iconic gestures to help kids learn those words. And then our third strategy was to co-treat and consider working with a PE teacher or another teacher to implement some of that basic concepts instruction, and I think that the layout from Cipher and Schwartz that I mentioned in strategy one could be really helpful.

Marisha: These all kind of tie together and are just some strategies that we can consider when targeting basic concepts with our students and setting them up for success. That's a wrap on our ideas and quick blitz of strategies for basic concepts. Next week, we'll be back with more strategies on vocabulary growth in general. We'll see you then and have a great week in the meantime.

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

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#128: Strategies You Can Use: Syntax

July 19, 2022 by Marisha 2 Comments

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This Week’s Episode: Evidence-based Strategies for Syntax Goals

We are continuing with our new podcast series, Strategies You Can Use! I’ve been sharing different evidence-based strategies to help target specific skills.

Today I’ll discuss different strategies on how to target syntax goals!

I hope you’re enjoying this series so far. Let’s dive into the strategies we can use to target syntax goals like compound and complex sentences, passive voice, and relative clauses.

3 Strategies to Target Syntax Goals

Review episode 127 for an overall strategy. It was more focused on basic grammar but some of the principles will be applicable here.

1. Combining Sentences

Provide students with two or more sentences and prompt them to create a single, longer sentence (Strong, 1986)

🍎 Cued Combining: The therapist underlines components to be combined and/or gives students to use (e.g., conjunctions).

Example: I sometimes wonder SOMETHING. Superheroes do exist. (WHETHER) –> I sometimes wonder whether superheroes do exist.

🍏 Open Combining: The therapist doesn’t give specific instructions and allows the student to creatively combine the sentence.

Example: I like to eat cereal. I watch TV. –> I like to eat cereal before I watch TV.

2. Sentence Expansion

Students can also be prompted to expand sentences (Gould, 2001).

🍎 Sentence Expansion: The therapist gives the student a simple sentence to start with and has the student build the sentence by increasing the length and complexity.

Example: I saw a monkey. –> I saw a silly monkey eating bananas at the zoo.

3. Embedded Practice (Using Reading Passages)

Examples:
✓ Add or replace words and phrases in a text
✓ Sentence Games
✓ Pull sentences from a text and create compound/complex sentences.

Need Syntax goal ideas?

🎯 Check out SLP Now Goal-bank for some inspiration

Additional Links

Strong, W. (1986). Creative approaches to sentence combining. ERIC Clearinghouse on Reading and Communication Skills.

Gould, B. W. (2001). Written Language Disorders: Theory into Practice. University of Virginia: Pro Ed

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Transcript

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Marisha: Hello there, and welcome to the SLP Now podcast, where we share practical therapy tips and ideas for busy speech language pathologists. Grab your favorite beverage and sit back as we dive into this week's episode.

Marisha: Hey there, it's Marisha, and welcome to the SLP Now podcast. This summer, we are doing a series called Strategies You Can Use and we picked different goal areas and we're going to do a blitz of three evidence-backed strategies that you can use when targeting those specific skills. So these are mostly strategies that have come from the literature and we're just pulling out the ones that are most practical that might help you if you're feeling stuck or just wanting to try some new strategies when targeting some of our most common goals. So without further ado, let's dive right in.

Marisha: Today, we are diving into strategies that we can use when targeting syntax goals. So this could be looking at compound and complex sentences, passive voice, relative clauses, all of that good stuff. If you didn't listen in last week, I would highly recommend reviewing Episode 127 for an overall strategy. It was more focused on basic grammar structures, but some of the principles will still apply here, so Episode 127 gives you a great overview there. Let's not waste any time and dive right into the strategies that we can use to target more complex sentences.

Marisha: So the first strategy that we can use is to work on combining sentences. So this is detailed by Strong 1986 in the article Creative Approaches to Sentence Combining ... Or it's actually a book, but I'll give you a great overview here, but that is a great reference to use. You can find it in the show notes at slpnow.com/128. Combining sentences is what it sounds. We provide students with two or more sentences, and then prompt them to create a single longer sentence. So this is a great way to work on syntax and we can have them combine the sentence in a way that elicits whatever structure we're trying to target, and there's two types of combining. So we have cued combining, where the therapist underlines the components that need to be combined or gives the students elements to use, like a conjunction for example. So an example of this is like we say, "I sometimes wonder something," that's the first sentence, and the second sentence is, "Superheroes do exist," and we provide the student with a conjunction whether. And then they work on combining that sentence. So then they could say, "I sometimes wonder whether superheroes do exist." So we're using the conjunction whether and replacing something with superheroes do exist.

Marisha: So that's cued combining. We also have open combining, where we don't give the students specific instructions and we allow them to creatively combine the sentence. So if we give them I like to eat cereal and I like to watch TV, they could create a number of sentences with that. It could be I like to eat cereal before I watch TV, I like to eat cereal while I watch TV. There's a number of ways that they can combine that sentence. That is the first strategy that we can use when targeting sentence. We can help students combine sentences and we can either cue them or have it be open, and we can have this be like a regular drill activity where we give them two sentences, or we can pull sentences from a book that we're reading or an article that we're reading and have them combine the sentences there.

Marisha: Another strategy that we can use, number two, is sentence expansion. So Gould 2001 gives a great overview of this. Again, it will be linked in the show notes, but this is when the SLP gives the student a simple sentence to start with and gives a student the opportunity to build the sentence by increasing its length and complexity. So this is a great way, if we're teaching them whether it's relative clauses or anything like that. We can do initial teaching of what that looks like and then we can practice by expanding sentences, whether it's just like a drill-based activity and we're giving them those sentences or if it's done in more context, like if we're taking one of their narratives or one of their writing samples or if we're reading an article or a book and we're expanding the sentences there. An example of sentence expansion, if the book has a sentence that says, "I saw a monkey," we can expand that and say, "I saw a monkey eating bananas at the zoo." So we can just include whatever target structures that we want to give students that meaningful practice and it is a little bit more drill-based in this case but some practice using their target structures.

Marisha: Then the third tip, which was also in Episode 127, this is so important and it will be a constant theme throughout all of these episodes, but we want to provide students with embedded practice. So I already gave some ideas on how we can embed sentence combination and sentence expansion in a variety of activities, whether we're taking the student's work sample, articles that we're reading, or sentences that we're using in conversation, we can also do that embedded practice. And some other ideas to do that is that we can again look at the text and add or replace words and phrases or expand the sentences and then we can also play games. It's a game where we're pulling those sentences and making them more complex and using those strategies.

Marisha: So that is a wrap on our strategies for syntax intervention. Just a quick recap, we can work on combining sentences, we can work on expanding sentences, which is strategy one and two. Head to the show notes for details on a little bit of like the protocol around that strategy and then the third strategy again is to use embedded practice and complete these activities using meaningful context. So that is a wrap on our syntax episode. We will be taking a break next week because it's the SLP Summit, but the following week, we are diving into all things basic concepts. So can't wait to see you then, I hope you're having a fabulous week.

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#127: Strategies You Can Use: Grammar

July 11, 2022 by Marisha Leave a Comment

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This Week’s Episode: Evidence-based Strategies to Target Grammar Goals

I’m excited to share a new podcast series, Strategies You Can Use! In these next few podcasts, I’ll be sharing different evidence-based strategies to help target specific skills.

Today I’ll discuss different strategies on how to target grammar goals!

Let’s get to it!

3 Strategies to Target Grammar Goals

The basic goal of all grammatical interventions should be to help the child to achieve greater facility in the comprehension and use of syntax and morphology in the service of conversation, narration, exposition, and other textual genres in both written and oral modalities (Fey, Long, & Finestack, 2013).

Authenticity is crucial. Students must have a reason for doing the things that lead them to learn and use grammar so that they can read, write, and speak better (Eisenberg, 2007).

1. Provide focused stimulation.

✓ Frequent models and recasts in a variety of activities.

Model: Highlight the features naturally in conversation
Recast: Correct what the child says or modify the modality (e.g., turn a statement into a question)

2. Try imitating contrasting sentences (Connell, 1982).

✓ The child imitates both the target and a contrasting form that is semantically and/or grammatically related to the target.

Drill-based Activity Example:
Pronouns: The boy is walking. He is walking.
Past Tense Verbs: He is eating. He ate.
Auxiliary Verbs: He will eat. He is eating.

Connell (1982) also includes a step-by-step training procedure.

Connell, P. J. (1982). On training language rules. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 13, 231-240.

“The most effective timing of the imitation drill is immediately prior to an activity that involves contextual use of the same structure” (Eisenberg, 2007).

3. Provide embedded practice.

We can manipulate the context to create more opportunities for the student to use the target.

✓Carefully selecting activities, books, conversation topics, etc. When you’re deciding which activities to use in therapy, think about how you can modify them for this purpose!

Embedded Practice Ideas

>Repetitive Books
> High-intensity modeling of a concept
> Describe the Picture
> Opportunities to use a target structure
> Strategic Questions
> Ask questions designed to elicit a target structure
> Modified Mad Libs
> Remove words from a reading passage.
> Fill in the appropriate noun, verb, adjective, conjunction, etc

✨ Bonus: Strategically structure your practice ✨

Different activity types might best be used in a complementary way within our therapy sessions, using high-structure drills to highlight and prime linguistic features and then immediately incorporating those features into embedded activities (Eisenberg, S. (2014).

The use of discrete skill instruction [e.g., grammar analysis, modeling, imitation drills, error detection, and sentence combining] as the sole intervention approach, without embedding use of newly acquired structures in meaningful activities, is not recommended (Eisenberg, 2007).

Students shouldn’t imitate sentences (2) until they’ve heard several examples of the grammar target (1).

(Eisenberg, S. (2014) also recommends doing quick drill (2) before jumping into embedded practice (3).

Need Grammar Goal Ideas?

🎯 Check out the SLP Now Goal-bank for some inspiration

Additional Links

Fey, Long, & Finestack, 2003. Grammar Intervention.Content and Procedures for Facilitating Children’s Language Development.

Connell, P. J. (1982). On training language rules. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 13, 231-240.

Eisenberg, 2007

Eisenberg, S. (2014). What works in therapy: Further thoughts on improving clinical practice for children with language disorders. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 45, 117–126.

SLP Now Membership

Next Up in this Pod Series

7/05/22 Strategies You Can Use: Following Directions
7/12/22 Strategies You Can Use: Grammar
7/19/22 Strategies You Can Use: Syntax
8/02/22 Strategies You Can Use: Basic Concepts
8/09/22 Strategies You Can Use: Basic Concepts
8/16/22 Strategies You Can Use: Affixes
8/23/22 Strategies You Can Use: Narratives
8/30/22 Strategies You Can Use: Summarizing

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Transcript

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Marisha: Hey there. It's Marisha and welcome to the SLP Now Podcast. This summer, we are doing a series called Strategies You Can Use, and we picked different goal areas. And we're going to do a blitz of three evidence-backed strategies that you can use when targeting those specific skills. These are mostly strategies that have come from the literature, and we're just pulling out the ones that are most practical that might help you if you're feeling stuck or just wanting to try some new strategies when targeting some of our most common goals. Without further ado, let's dive right in.

Marisha: This week, we are sharing strategies to target grammar goals. And I wanted to start with a bird's-eye view of what we're looking at. We are going to share a number of research studies. And they're really, really great references. They give some really great practical strategies. We're just going to touch on a few of them today. If you want to get easy access to the articles, head to the show notes. Those are at slpnow.com slash 127. S-L-P N-O-W.com slash 127. And just to get us started, Fey, Long, and Finestack, from 2013, have a really great article with a lot of different strategies for grammar intervention. So, if you're loving this podcast, definitely check out that article.

Marisha: But I love how they talk about grammatical intervention. They said that, "The basic goal of all grammatical intervention should be to help the child achieve greater facility in the comprehension and use of syntax and morphology."

Marisha: And so, that's a direct quote there. But the goal of grammar intervention is not to be able to complete a task and fill in blanks and sentences. We want them to be able to use these grammatical structures in conversation, when they're telling stories and when they're in the classroom, when there's talking with peers. This can have a really big impact on their ability to be understood and to communicate their thoughts and feelings. That's a little bit of the "why" behind that grammar intervention because I know that this is a topic that can get some groans from time to time. It's not always our favorite. And I love what Eisenberg says about authenticity. She says, quote, unquote, "Authenticity is crucial. Students must have a reason for doing the things that lead them to learn and use grammar, so that they can read, write, and speak better.

Marisha: So, we want to be using authentic context in our intervention. And we'll circle back to that. But first, we have a couple quick strategies that we can use when targeting these goals. We've got three of them for you today. The first strategy is to provide focused stimulation. Focused stimulation is when we provide students with frequent models and recaps in a variety of activities.

Marisha: A model is when we highlight the feature naturally in conversation. For example, if we're reading a book, and we know that the student has a goal to work on past tense verbs, or if we're working on auxiliary verbs, whatever it might be, we can highlight that naturally in conversation and maybe just place a little bit of emphasis on it. Then in a recast, we can correct what the child says or modify the modality. So, if the student says, "The dog run to the store," then we can say, "Yeah, the dog ran to the store."

Marisha: Or if we modify the modality, we can turn a statement into the question like, "Did the dog run to the store?" That is one strategy that can be really helpful. And at the end, I'll give a bonus tip on how to structure all of this. But there is support in the literature for using the focused stimulation as a strategy. And we can do this throughout. If you're using literacy-based therapy, there's plenty and plenty of opportunities to provide that focused stimulation throughout the unit.

Marisha: Then, our second strategy is to use a strategy called imitating contrasting sentences. And this is an older article, Connell, 1982. But it includes a lovely step-by-step training procedure that is free to access. So, I would highly recommend checking that out. And consider giving the strategy a try, especially if you're feeling stuck with a grammar goal, like if you've tried everything and the student just isn't making progress.

Marisha: What this is is we're imitating contrasting sentences. It's a lot like what it sounds, but the child imitates the target sentence as well as a contrasting sentence that's semantically or grammatically related. And we typically use picture cards with this. And like I said, the article lays out a really nice protocol on how we would do this, but we would give the student some picture cards or whatnot. And then we can say, "The boy is walking." And then, a contrasting form for that could be, "He is walking." So then the student imitates the target as well as the contrasting form. And it's a drill-based activity that gives us some great practice with imitation. And adding the contrast there is meant to be very helpful. An example with past tense verbs is we would have a picture: "He is eating." And then we have a picture where the boy is done. So we can say, "He ate. He is eating. He ate." That's that contrast. And that's a great way to work on past tense verbs or auxiliary verbs as well.

Marisha: Eisenberg 2007 says that, "The most effective timing of imitation drill is immediately prior to an activity that involves contextual use of that same structure." That brings us to step three: while it is super helpful, we need to teach the student these structures and give them some targeted practice, we want to be able to use these skills in context as quickly as possible.

Marisha: Because like we said, at the beginning, it doesn't matter if we can fill in blanks with grammatical structures with a hundred percent accuracy if we're not using those structures when we're telling our friends a story on the playground, for example. We need to be able to use the skill in context to really have an impact.

Marisha: There's a lot of different ways that we can provide that embedded practice. We can manipulate the context of the therapy session to create more opportunities for the student to use that target. We can do this by carefully selecting activities that we're using in therapy. We can use books, set up certain conversation topics. And then we can really provide embedded in practice using a huge variety of activities. We just need to take advantage of that opportunity and think about how we can do slight modifications to allow this to work for our students. Some great embedded activities are to work on describing pictures. We can select activities. If we're reading a book, we can describe the picture in the book and try to elicit the target structure in that way. We can ask strategic questions. And this is really great for mixed groups.

Marisha: The describing the picture activity, if we're reading a book and we're doing an extension activity with that book, we're looking at the pictures in the book. And student A is working on past tense verbs, so that student can make sentences telling what happened in the story. If another student is working on answering wh questions, we can ask the question, and the student can respond. If we're working on describing, the student can describe the attributes of the different objects in the book, for example. So, this one activity can be used to target a number of goals. And it can be really beneficial in working towards that embedded context. So it's a win-win-win scenario there. Those are our three tips; one providing focused stimulation, which we can do while reading a book or engaging in conversation, whatever language-rich activity we're using.

Marisha: Then the second strategy is to use a drill-based activity called imitating contrasting sentences. This gives us a little bit of an extra leg up in our progress. Just imitating sentences doesn't give us quite as much bang for our buck. But if we have those contrasting sentences, that can be a strategy to help students move the needle a little bit more quickly, leading to our third tip. We don't want to spend all of our time in drills, so we do want to provide students with that embedded practice.

Marisha: The bonus tip today is how we can strategically structure our practice. And this is from Eisenberg 2014. She did a really great article on what works in therapy for their thoughts on improving clinical practice for children with language disorders. That'll also be linked in the show notes, slpnow.com/127. But she says that different activity types can be used in a complimentary way within our therapy sessions.

Marisha: We're using high structure drill to highlight and prime those linguistic features. And then, we're immediately incorporating those features into embedded practice. We're imitating the contrasting sentences, and then we're diving into that activity where we're describing pictures in the book. And then, this is also from Eisenberg, but she says that, "The use of discrete skill instruction, without embedding the use of those newly acquired structures in a meaningful activity, is not recommended. So, if all we're doing is modeling or imitation, and we're not embedding those structures in a meaningful context, Dr. Eisenberg doesn't recommend that.

Marisha: And some other guidelines that she shares are that students should not imitate sentences until they've heard several examples of the grammar target. An ideal structure would be: we read the book. We give students lots and lots of models. And we maybe do some pre-story knowledge activation where the students have the opportunity to engage in conversation, and we're recasting those structures.

Marisha: They're given lots of models. They're hearing lots of recasts. They've heard several examples of the target. And then, they might be ready to imitate those sentences. They've gotten enough exposure. And this will be different for each student. There are some students who might need weeks of that modeling and recasting before it starts to click and they're ready to imitate. Some students might just need a few minutes, and then they'll be ready to imitate sentences. We get to use our clinical judgment here to decide what makes sense. But according to Dr. Eisenberg, she recommends first, modeling, recasting and then having students imitate. And doing that imitation or whatever type of drill before we jump into embedded practice. We want to give the students the opportunity to hear the target, then imitate the target, and then jump into that embedded practice where they use it in a meaningful context.

Marisha: Model, recast, then drill, then embedded practice. That is a wrap on our blitz of strategies for grammar. I'm looking forward to seeing you all next week, where we dive into strategies for syntax; working on compound and complex sentences, passive voice, relative clauses, all of that good stuff. Hope you have a great week, and we'll see you soon. Thanks for listening to the SLP Now Podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please share with your SLP friends. And don't forget to subscribe to the podcast to get the latest episodes sent directly to you. See you next time.

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#126: Strategies You Can Use: Following Directions

July 5, 2022 by Marisha Leave a Comment

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This Week’s Episode: Evidence-based Strategies for Following Directions

I’m excited to share a new podcast series – Strategies you can use! In these next few podcasts, I’ll be sharing different evidence-based strategies to help target specific skills.

The goal area we are going to start out with is following directions!

Grab your favorite beverage, a note pad and let’s get to it!

3 Strategies for Following Directions

1. Assess the root cause.

Wallach (2007) encourages SLPs to identify skills that the student needs to be successful in the classroom. Students should practice these skills during classroom and/or similar activities.

✓ Break down that skill in the classroom
✓Why do they struggle with following directions?
✓Is it a vocabulary issue? Struggle with basic concepts? Instructional verbs?
✓Is it a syntax issue? Do they not understand conditional directions (e.g. “if”) or reverals (e.g., “Before you —, do —”). Do they not understand post noun elaborations (e.g., “Touch that one that is green.)? Do they not understand negation (e.g., “Do not touch the green one.”)
✓Is it a working memory issue?
✓Are they not attending?
✓Complete an assessment that can help tease apart the different root causes.

✨Bonus points if you can observe in the classroom✨

2. Address the root issue.

Research suggests that quickly moving to embedded therapy activities (e.g., classroom activities, games, crafts, etc.) yields positive results (Eisenberg et al., 2013; Fey, Long, & Finestack, 2003).

✓ Teach the vocabulary/syntax/strategies necessary.
✓ Instructional verbs study
✓ If kids don’t understand what teachers are asking them to do, it can affect their engagement, their learning, and their success.
✓ They used interactive book reading activities to teach 12 instructional verbs to preschoolers–match, sort, select (the summer before kindergarten).
✓ Consider incorporating ongoing direct teaching of instructional verbs into your repertoire

Lowman, J., Stone, L. T., & Guo, J. (2018). Effects of interactive book reading for increasing children’s knowledge of instructional verbs. Communication Disorders Quarterly.

Stay Tuned: We’ll be diving into syntax strategies in episode 128 and vocabulary strategies in episode 129.

3. Share strategies with the child’s family and teachers to promote generalization and support the student.

🎒 Student🎒

✓Ask for repetition.
✓Visualize the direction.
✓Repeat the direction.

🍏 Teacher 🍏

✓Make sure the student is attending before sharing directions.
✓Use visuals.
✓Check for understanding.

Need goal ideas for Following Directions?

🎯 Check out SLP Now Goal-bank for some inspiration

Additional Links

SLP Now Membership

SLP Now Following Directions Assessment included in the SLP Now Membership

SLP Now Following Directions Bundle included in the SLP Now Membership

References

Wallach, G. P. (2014). Improving clinical practice: A school-age and school-based perspective. Language, Speech & Hearing Services in Schools, 45, 127–136.

Eisenberg, S. L. (2013). Grammar intervention: Content and procedures for facilitating children’s language development. Topics in Language Disorders, 33(2), 165–178.

Eisenberg, S. (2014). What works in therapy: Further thoughts on improving clinical practice for children with language disorders. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 45, 117–126.

Fey, M. E., Long, S. H., & Finestack, L. H. (2003). Ten principles of grammar facilitation for children with specific language impairments. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 12, 3–15.

Lowman, J., Stone, L. T., & Guo, J. (2018). Effects of interactive book reading for increasing children’s knowledge of instructional verbs. Communication Disorders Quarterly.

Next Up in this Pod Series

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Marisha: Hello there, and welcome to the SLPNow Podcast, where we share practical therapy tips and ideas for busy speech language pathologists. Grab your favorite beverage and sit back as we dive into this week's episode.

Marisha: Hey, there. It's Marisha, and welcome to the SLPNow Podcast. This summer, we are doing a series called Strategies You Can Use. And we picked different goal areas and we're going to do a blitz of three evidence-backed strategies that you can use when targeting those specific skills. So these are mostly strategies that have come from the literature. And we're just pulling out the ones that are most practical, that might help you if you're feeling stuck or just wanting to try some new strategies when targeting some of our most common goals. So without further ado, let's dive right in.

Marisha: The goal area that we're focusing on this week is following directions. And let's dive straight into our three strategies. So the first strategy is to assess the root cause. So Wallach 2007, encourages SLPs to identify skills that the student needs to be successful in the classroom. And we can do this by breaking down the different skills that the students need to be able to complete that activity in the classroom. So we don't really care if a student can follow 50 step directions in the therapy room if it's not generalizing, and if they're not able to use those skills needed to follow directions in the classroom.

Marisha: So when it comes to following directions, there are a lot of skills that are involved in that goal area. A quick brainstorm of different things that we might look at, like is it a vocabulary issue? Does the student struggle with basic concepts or instructional verbs? Or is it a syntax issue? Does the student not understand those conditional directions like, "If the ball is red, touch the dog," for example? That's not the most practical example for the classroom, but that's an example of that conditional direction like, "If it's raining, we will have recess inside."

Marisha: Some other complex syntax is if there's those reversals. So before you turn in your assignment, write your name on the top. Or do they have difficulty understanding that post-noun elaboration? So, "Touch the one that is green," that's another example of more of that understanding syntax. Or do they struggle to understand negation like, "Do not turn in your homework today," or something like that. So beyond syntax, it could also be a working memory issue. Are they struggling to attend and process the information in the direction? Do they need some strategies?

Marisha: The way that we can piece this apart and kind of start to make our hypotheses and identify those skills that students need support with, we can do a little bit of an assessment. So I've made a little protocol for myself. If you are an SLPNow member, you can grab this in the membership. Or if you're not, we do offer a free trial, so you can sign up and just download that assessment for free, no strings attached. But I will also describe the assessment, so you can create it on your own. But I built a little assessment where I go through and it starts more simple. So I've got one step directions, two step directions, three step directions.

Marisha: And then I include directions that will help me piece if the student struggles with the conditional directions, or the reversals, or the post noun elaboration, or if it's the basic concepts. So it's basically a little screener of all of those different skills. And then I can assess the skills in more depth, depending on what shows up. So how it's structured is it's increasing in complexity, based on the number of directions. And then I also make sure to include some basic concepts in the directions. And I can easily check off what the student seemed to struggle with.

Marisha: So if the direction was, "Before you sit down, touch the big ball." So if the student, they follow their direction and demonstrate understanding of the syntax by touching their head before they do that, but they touch the wrong object, because they didn't understand the basic concept, I would put a check next to the basic concept box. And if I got enough of those, or even if I just get one or two, I might do a basic concept screener to dive into that in a little bit more detail, to figure out where they're struggling. They didn't demonstrate difficulty with the syntax, but they did demonstrate difficulty with that vocabulary, or the basic concept.

Marisha: If we strategically include directions that include the different vocabulary targets, the different syntax, it gives us a really good baseline and it helps us determine what we might want to assess further. And by doing that further assessment, and this can all be informal, but if we identify that basic concepts or the area that they're struggling with, we do further assessment and we find which concepts they haven't mastered yet. Then that will bring us to number two, which is addressing the root issue.

Marisha: So if we do that thorough assessment, thorough doesn't mean that it has to take a long time. It'll actually save us time in the long run, because if we are writing a generic goal just to follow directions and we're not addressing that root issue, so to speak, the student won't make optimal progress and all of that. So taking a little bit of time to do that assessment can really set up for success. And then we have a really clear picture of what we need to work on, and it can be very targeted. We can give this example that I gave for the student with following directions. We can give them really targeted support to work on learning those concepts and then being able to follow directions using those concepts. So demonstrating that mastery in the therapy room and in the classroom.

Marisha: So yeah, we're addressing the root issue. So if we identify that it is that vocabulary issue, we're targeting those basic concepts. If it is a syntax issue, we are doing some of that very structured practice to support the student in learning those syntactical structures and being able to follow directions. And research suggests that quickly moving to embedded therapy activities, whether it's following directions in the classroom, or following directions in the context of a functional activity, that that yields really positive results.

Marisha: So we can teach those components skills like the root issue kind of thing, and then work on integrating those as quickly as possible. So that's a little bit of a bonus strategy. And I wanted to share this study by Lowman, Stone and Gao in 2018. And I will link to all of the studies that we mention and all of the references in putting this together in the show notes. So you can go to SLPNow.com/126 to grab them for this episode. So that's SLPNow.com/126. But the study by Lowman, et al, in 2018 was really cool. They looked at teaching students instructional verbs, and their rationale was that if kids don't understand what teachers are asking them to do, it can really affect their engagement, their learning, their success.

Marisha: And I think this can be a really great example to get some inspiration from. If we do identify that the students really struggle with those instructional verbs and that's why they're struggling to follow those directions, so this gives a really great example of what that could look like. So the researchers used interactive book reading activities to teach 12 instructional verbs, and they did this with preschoolers. It was before they went into kindergarten, they worked with the teachers to identify these instructional verbs.

Marisha: I love how they set up this study. It's so functional. We're teaching them really high value vocabulary in an embedded way. They used interactive book reading, and we could take it a step further. If we identify the need to work on instructional verbs, we can take it a step further and support students in being able to follow those directions in the classroom and all of that. So I will link to that article in the show notes, if you want to take a closer look, but that's a great one to dive into for just some inspiration on how we could set that up.

Marisha: We are going to dive into strategies for syntax in episode 128. And we'll share more vocabulary strategies and episode 129. So definitely stay tuned. We've got lots more specific strategies. But the takeaway here is just to work on addressing that root issue and then roll that back into the overall goal of being able to follow directions in the classroom. The third strategy is to teach the student strategies. But we can also share those with family and teachers to promote generalization and also just to support the student, especially if they are struggling with working memory or attending to the direction.

Marisha: Some things that we can do are to teach the student strategy, so we can encourage them to ask for repetition as needed. So to advocate for themselves. We can teach them to visualize the direction as it's being spoken, so that they can rehearse it. Or when they hear a direction, they can repeat it to kind of verify that they understood correctly. So if the teacher gives the direction, they can raise their hand, "Okay, so you want us to do this and this." And then sharing the strategies that the student is working on with the team can help everyone involved, just kind of support that progress.

Marisha: And then some things that a teacher can do, they can make sure to get the student's attention before giving a direction. They can use different cues or just support them, "Okay, now is a really important time to pay attention, because I'm going to give a direction." And just building a support to make that clear. The teacher can also use visuals like visual schedules can be helpful, and then also checking for understanding. So once they give a series of direction, they can check in with the student to make sure that they know what they're doing.

Marisha: And we have a lot more strategies. We have handouts for students with visuals, as well as a cheat sheet of different strategies to share with the teachers and family inside of the membership. If you're looking for additional support, you can definitely access those. So a recap of the strategies for following directions. First, we want to assess the root cause. So what is the component skill that students are struggling with? Is it vocabulary? Is it syntax? Is it working memory? Or a combination of all the above or something else? And we can tease that apart by doing like an informal assessment, to look at the complexity of different directions and where we demonstrate issues. And it can also be extremely helpful to observe in the classroom or gather data from the teachers to kind of see that in context, as well.

Marisha: Then the second strategy is to address the root issue. So we talked about an example study by Lowman, et al, in 2018, on how they taught instructional verbs. And we're going to share more strategies for syntax and vocabulary in future episodes. So stay tuned for that. And then the third strategy is to work on strategies. So whether we're working on strategies with the student or the family or the teacher, that can be a really great way to support students in being able to follow directions successfully.

Marisha: So that's a wrap on our episode on following directions. Next week, we are diving into more of our grammar goals. So stay tuned for that. And yeah, hope you have a great week.

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

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#125: How to Start Using Smarter Scheduling for School-Based SLPs

June 28, 2022 by Marisha Leave a Comment

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This Week’s Episode: How to Start Using Smarter Scheduling for School-Based SLPs

This month, I’ve had the pleasure of speaking with BeckyAnn Harker all about service delivery, tips, and strategies to help us schedule smarter in the schools. BeckyAnn is a school-based SLP near Youngstown, Ohio, and she has 24 years of clinic and school-based experience. She is currently a doctoral student in special education at Kent State University, and she’s very interested in caseload management and vocabulary intervention. For this podseries, we will be focusing on her caseload management expertise!

So far in this pod series, we’ve discussed a brief intro to smarter scheduling for school-based SLPs, a review of different service delivery options like RTI, and last week BeckyAnn shared some tips on how to navigate scheduling and different service delivery models to better manage our own workload and also better serve our students.

This is our last podcast of the series with BeckyAnn and today we will be continuing our conversation about smarter scheduling but we will be diving into some more nitty-gritty details on how to get started.

Let’s jump on in!

Key Takeaways + Topics Covered

✓ Start small: Start by implementing 10-minute articulation drills with your students who have speech-sound goals, including those you are seeing through a multi-tiered system of supports (MTSS) or response-to-intervention (RTI).

✓ Talk with your administrators, teachers, and parents.

✓Assure all stakeholders that shorter, individual sessions are more efficient and effective, allowing students to make progress more quickly.

✓ Find out the best blocks of time when you can see each teacher’s students. You can have several teachers within one larger block for more flexibility.

✓Adjust IEP minutes in a new IEP or amend the current one. Fewer minutes will be needed to meet your goals and can help with caseload management. Write your time as minutes per month, as possible, to accommodate block scheduling and 3:1 schedule

Additional Links

Next Up in this Pod Series

6/7/22: An Intro to Smarter Scheduling for School-Based SLps
6/14/22: A Quick Review of Service Delivery Options for School-Based SLPs
6/21/22: How to Navigate Alternative Scheduling for School-Based SLPs
6/28/22: How to Start Using Smarter Scheduling for School-Based SLPs

Subscribe & Review on iTunes

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Transcript

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Speaker 1: Hello there and welcome to the SLP Now podcast, where we share practical therapy tips and ideas for busy speech language pathologists. Grab your favorite beverage and sit back as we dive into this weeks episode.

Speaker 1: This week, we are continuing our conversation with BeckyAnn about smarter scheduling in the schools and just navigating different service delivery models to better manage our own workload and also better serve our students. And so the past three episodes, BeckyAnn has shared tons and tons of tips to kind of help us rethink how we do service delivery as SLPs in the schools. And today we get to dive into some more nitty gritty details on how to get started. So , where do you think SLP should start? Like if they're listening to these episodes and they're looking at their caseload and their schedule and was like, "Oh, I'm seeing all of my students in 30 minute groups." What would you suggest to those SLPs if they're looking to make a change?

BeckyAnn: So I can imagine it would be very hard to start in the middle of the school year, but I am also okay with starting stuff in the middle of the school year. It's do what you can when you can. Right? It's overwhelming and it really takes a paradigm shift. You get so stuck in understanding your schedule. You have been working in 30 minute blocks for your entire professional life. And so I think it is hard maybe to figure out maybe a little scary to step outside of that box a bit. I think the first place you can start is with your new referrals, really looking at using RTI to seeing those kids do your interventions, especially if it's just like articulation so start there. Start with the brand new ones. And like I said, if you need to go to an evaluation because it's really significant or it's really impacting their education by all means do that, but also know that you can be doing those five minute articulation drills or 10 minute articulation drills and even for some of the kids that just have some grammar issues, you can be doing those interventions and I would start there.

BeckyAnn: Then as your IEPs come due and you're meeting for your IEPs, I really suggest trying to reduce your minutes. And I say that, and people are cringing and people are going to say, "Oh my God, my parents are going to freak out and my administration's going to freak out." And they might, and I know there are some parents even that just hold onto somehow your 90 minutes, 120 minutes, like that's golden. I have reduced minutes.

BeckyAnn: Now I'm going to say this did happen during the pandemic is when I really started making the switch. And I used COVID to my benefit because I did have to see kids individually. We were in person and remote, but for the in person, kids, I really was trying to see those kids individually, which is how I wanted to do it anyway. But the only way to do that was really to reduce minutes. But every parent that I talked to and presented this to, I told them that it makes a lot more sense that I can see your child individually for less time and get better therapy than keeping them for this magical 30 minutes in a group with other kids and not meeting their goals. And I have not had one parent complain. I haven't had one administrator complain.

Speaker 1: Yeah. And you have those beautiful research articles that show that students can make rapid progress in less time and they're missing less time in the classroom. This is to benefit the students. It's not just because we don't want to work. We want to do what's best for students.

BeckyAnn: Right.

Speaker 1: So sharing those articles, which again are linked in the show notes, I think is a really great resource to share if parents are questioning or if administrators are questioning.

BeckyAnn: And I think like we had said earlier, just simple math. I can see your kid in a group of three for 30 minutes. That's 10 minutes that your kid is going to get to talk. That's simple math. And that's not even, like I said, with the activities and all the other things, even the hi how are yous, all of that stuff that takes extra minutes, your child is getting less than 10 minutes when I see them for 30. And that means they're missing 20 extra minutes out of the classroom.

Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. Do you have any other tips when it comes to presenting this to administrators or teachers or parents?

BeckyAnn: So, and I think this is thinking about like that block schedule that we were talking about, you need to talk to your teachers first. And how I presented this to my teachers was that I was going to try to do some more in class therapy was really, really my goal. I try this every year. I need to be listening to podcasts and talking to people about how to really do good in class intervention because I feel like I don't do a good job of that. I try. And I presented all my teachers this. So if I come in during your language arts block and I am there during these times and this way I can help, if you need help, I can be there and do therapy within the classroom or I can pull them out. And they're like, "Oh yeah, yeah, sure." And so they were really open to me just coming in and they'd feel comfortable with me just popping in. And sometimes it just means I'm standing in the back of the room watching what's happening, but sometimes I'm also helping and sometimes I'm taking the kids.

BeckyAnn: So getting the teachers on board from that way, just understanding that we're going to be really flexible, that we're not just going to be taking kids at this prescribed time because I can't tell you how many times I felt like I was imposing on the teacher or they just kind of look at me and go, "Okay." because they know that's their time, but they were in the middle of something. And I feel like if we can have that flexibility and we can respect their time, they will also respect ours because you might be at a time like, "I really need to see this kid. He's been absent three weeks." And whatever and I really need them. And even if they're teaching, they might be, "That's fine. That's fine. I know you do."

BeckyAnn: So to kind of make that connection with your teachers. And you may need to talk to your administrators too, especially if you're planning on reducing minutes. That might put their hairs up too and they're worried about, I don't know, lawsuits or something, but like you said, we do have the research to back that and we are trying to do what's best for the kids. So make sure you talk to them. And then along when you're talking to the teachers it's just really trying to talk to them about when their best time in the day is, and really try to work around that. I have some flexibility. This year has been great. I've been in one school three and a half days. I usually jump between schools. So there's a little less flexibility if you're only in a school building one day, but really trying to work with those teachers and find their best time and it's really to make friends and understand that you're all on the same page.

Speaker 1: And I feel like this approach would be more conducive to building those relationships because you have that flexibility to be in the classroom and to kind of adjust depending on the students needs and all of that. And yeah, I think like just being present and being visible versus popping in at the scheduled time to take the student and then them walking back by themselves, there's a lot more interaction with that and opportunity for collaboration.

BeckyAnn: And I think just understanding what the students are doing. I've been amazed sometimes now that I'm in the classroom. I'm like, "Whoa, you're really making them do that. That's amazing." Or I'll take whatever they're working on and help them with their writing assignment. Even if it's in my speech room, I may take them, pull them out and still work on those skills or use the book that they're reading and ask questions. And so I can just kind of understand what they're working on, their standards and their curriculum instead of living in my little office, my little cave. I feel like I'm kind of part of the school more and more involved with the kids' lives.

Speaker 1: And I feel like that would help with our own job satisfaction too.

BeckyAnn: I am the happiest this year that I've been, and this is where I'm in full force doing all of these things. I know.

Speaker 1: Wow. That's impressive. Because I feel like a lot of SLPs, I feel like the pulse is at an all time low. The fact that you are the happiest you've been after how many, 24 years?

BeckyAnn: And this is my 10th year in the district and yes, my numbers are a little lower this year. I still I've been around 60 to 65 all year and that's workload. So that's including my RTI kids. Right? But that's still 65 little humans that I'm working with. I do feel better. I know I shouldn't say that out loud because there are a lot of people that are like, "This is the worst year of my life." And I feel bad for them, but maybe, maybe doing some of these things and trying to take control of your own schedule. You can only control what you can control. And these are some of the things that I could do within the parameters of this school day. And I am the happiest I've been.

Speaker 1: Yeah. And I love that you're sharing that. It's not meant to be like, "I'm happiest and you're not."

BeckyAnn: Right.

Speaker 1: It gives hope. It's like, "Okay, so there's this SLP who's implementing trying some strategies to help with her scheduling and her caseload management and she's the happiest she's been." Even if you are that SLP who is at the lowest, there's hope there. There's a way to make it better. And maybe even to make it the best it's ever been, which is, I don't know. I think that's incredible. Cause you said something about three and a half days. Are you seeing that many students in three and a half days?

BeckyAnn: I also am at the high school. The high school I can't do the fancy scheduling, but they're already kind of fancy scheduled. Right? I see kids during their period that I can see them. But even then I keep them for often half of the period. They used to split the period up, like around the lunch times it would be split. And I don't know, I just kind of got into that habit. So I think if I see you for about half the time, but sometimes it's less, usually it's more, it's just whatever the kid needs for that day.

Speaker 1: Yeah. I love that. And I think the overarching trend is just what's best for our kids.

BeckyAnn: Right.

Speaker 1: How can we get them best possible services?

BeckyAnn: Get them dismissed if we can.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Get them back into the classroom. That's the ultimate goal. That's where we want them to be.

BeckyAnn: That's right.

Speaker 1: Okay. So let's just do a quick recap of the different strategies that we touched on during this episode. So you mentioned starting small. So if you get a new student, if you're new to RTI, maybe diving into that a little bit and doing some quick artic with those potential students. As renewals come up, we can look at shifting our service delivery times and working with them. If there's that kiddo, who's still on your caseload and just needing to wrap up his R we can try the strategy of 10 minute articulation drills. You shared so many wonderful strategies about getting administrators, teachers and parents on board. I won't recap all of that. You can listen back if you want that. And we talked about sharing that evidence to show that students can make rapid progress with those shorter sessions. Yeah. I think that's like a good recap of the strategies. There's a lot that goes into that communication piece. So I have one more question, Becky.

BeckyAnn: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Speaker 1: Is this something that your whole district has started to adopt or are you kind of the...

BeckyAnn: Pioneer?

Speaker 1: Yeah. The pioneer for making these types of changes.

BeckyAnn: So I have talked about it with my colleagues. I don't know that they're doing this yet. RTI, I think a little more, I've been kind of spouting about that for a few years. So I think that they're definitely trying to do RTI a little bit more. I'm not sure about the scheduling, but I will have them come listen to this. And if they can hear all the wonderful things that they should be doing instead of just from me, it'll be on a podcast. So maybe it gives it more credence. I don't know.

Speaker 1: It's so official. After the [asher 00:12:25] leader and the SLP podcast. Come on.

BeckyAnn: Right.

Speaker 1: No, I love that. I think that can give SLPs hope too. You're able to implement this without having a massive district overhaul and policy change. There are other SLPs could be the pioneers in their are districts to start implementing this.

BeckyAnn: Do what's right for you really. That's what it comes down to. This is what has worked for me. And maybe not all of it will work for everybody else. And every state is different. Every school district is different. Every special ed director is different and administrators, but do what you can. Take control of what you can take control of. And so if you can reduce the minutes so that you don't have to see that kid more, but know that you're going to see them better. I think that's going to be the key and we're trying to make progress and you might be able to show, "Well, look, I've been able to get this many kids off my schedule." Which is also our plan, right, to manage our own workloads.

Speaker 1: And it benefits them because they should be in the classroom.

BeckyAnn: Correct.

Speaker 1: That's a win, win, win. Yeah. I love that. I am super excited for SLPs to hear all of these amazing tips and strategies. Is there anything else that you'd like to share Becky on as we wrap things up?

BeckyAnn: I'd like people to be able to try this. I don't know how I'd be able to get some feedback to see if it works for people or if it doesn't work, but try it. Maybe you too can have a good year after these terrible pandemic years and whatnot.

Speaker 1: Yeah. I would love that. That is my goal. And what I set out to do, because I've been in the just locking myself in my therapy room, shedding some tears, all of that. I don't want other people to experience that. So that's why I started sharing different resources and tips and it sounds like you're doing the exact same thing, BeckyAnn, so very, very grateful. And hopefully this inspires a couple SLPs and hopefully they can have their best years ever too. Thank you for your time.

BeckyAnn: Well, thank you so much for allowing me to do this, to share. This is great.

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

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#124: How to Navigate Alternative Scheduling for School-Based SLPs

June 21, 2022 by Marisha Leave a Comment

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This Week’s Episode: How to Navigate Alternative Scheduling for School-Based SLPs

So far in this pod series, we’ve discussed a brief intro to smarter scheduling for school-based SLPs, a review of different service delivery options like RTI, and today BeckyAnn will share some of her tips on how to navigate scheduling.

Key Takeaways + Topics Covered

✓ 3:1 model of scheduling: 3 weeks of direct service and 1 week of indirect.
That 1 week of indirect service gives BeckyAnn the flexibility of missing one session per week.

✓Block scheduling: This is a school-wide schedule of alternating subjects for Math, English, etc. For BeckyAnn it is scheduling blocks of time for each teacher, and not scheduled by the student.

🗓 What does Block Scheduling look like? 🗓

✓ Could be during a Language Arts block, or during stations, or an intervention time block

✓ I started by telling the teachers I wanted to be able to work with them/around them during that block. If they are in the middle of something when I get there, I will push in to help my students within the classroom. Otherwise, I will pull them out.

✓ My schedule looks like-colored blocks of time.
9:00-9:45 – I am with one teacher, and I have 3 students there.
9:45- 10:50 – I am with a different teacher and his 4 students.
During their half-hour intervention time, I have 2 teachers scheduled, each with one student with articulation needs.
I usually see them individually, but sometimes I will see them together. It’s flexible!

Tips to implement

✨ Schedule the teachers and not the student. The block will be longer if that teacher has more students in their class.
✨ Be flexible!
✨ Maybe there are classes that have similar schedules and only one kid each- you can put them together in a block. Maybe one class is in the middle of something today- you can take the other student first.

Additional Links

ASHA Leader: BeckyAnn Harker Can We Break From 30-Minute Group Sessions in Schools?
ASHA Leader: Jennifer Taps RTI Services for Children With Mild Articulation Needs: Four Years of Data
SPEEDY SPEECH: Efficient Service Delivery for Articulation Errors (Kuhn, 2006)
Laurel Bruce A Team Approach to Response to Intervention for Speech Sound Errors in the School Setting
Plant et al., (2019) Treatment Efficiency.
BeckyAnn’s Minutes Log Example
Minutes Log Template

Next Up in this Pod Series

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Transcript

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Speaker 1: Hello there and welcome to the SLP Now podcast, where we share practical therapy, tips, and ideas for busy speech language pathologists. Grab your favorite beverage and sit back as we dive into this week's episode.

Speaker 1: Welcome back to our series on smarter scheduling, all about service delivery with BeckyAnn. Today, we're diving into one of the big questions, which is how to navigate scheduling. BeckyAnn, I'm just going to let you take it away, but I'd love to just focus on what tips you might have to navigate scheduling when using this alternative scheduling approach.

BeckyAnn: Well, I think I want to start first by talking a little bit about the three-to-one model. I use it, but don't use it. We plan our minutes per month... when we're making our IEPs, we have to put our minutes per month... and we do have that idea of the three-to-one model, where you have three weeks of direct service and one week of indirect. I have never had an entire week of indirect service. But what I do have is some flexibility of when I see my students. You might have your best plan, all your students are scheduled, but then you'll have an IEP meeting that might take over. And then now you can't see those kids. So I can see them sometime later.

BeckyAnn: I like to see my kids, especially the articulation, and even most of my students actually, I actually do try to see twice a week. But I have some flexibility. So if something comes up... We had state testing this week, for example. We had an assembly this week, and I can't see my kids, but I'm not stressed about it because I still have the next week that I can see those kids. So it's this week buffer. I don't use it as one whole week of indirect services, but I use it as a buffer to make up those minutes. That already, I guess, from looking at monthly minutes, that reduces those minutes a little bit to give us some flexibility.

Speaker 1: Just to confirm, you're writing your minutes per month?

BeckyAnn: We write them per month.

Speaker 1: Okay, awesome.

BeckyAnn: So that's one thing that I think, depending on what program your district uses, sometimes they make you put in two times per week, one time per week. I'm not sure how to get around that because I don't have to. We have frequency. So we have minutes per whatever. So you can say per week, per month. You could do per quarter if you really wanted to be fancy schmancy or give yourself a little extra time, or maybe those kids are weaning off of services. So maybe you do only need to see them 60 minutes a quarter just to check in. So yes, we were able to do that.

BeckyAnn: The other thing that I have started doing... And I am really happy with this, and this has been what drove me to write the article for the ASHA Leader... is my version of block scheduling. So block scheduling, it's out there. There have been several articles that talk about block scheduling. And it has more to do with how schools will block their schedules. So they might do a 90-minute language, arts block and a 45-minute social studies block. My own daughter's middle school did that, but it was on this rotating basis. It was an hour and a half of one subject one day and then an hour and a half of another one another day. That would've driven me crazy.

BeckyAnn: But how I do it is I look at my schedule and I don't schedule my kids. I schedule the teachers. You do that anyway. You may have a classroom that has three students in it, but you might make that 30-minute group with those three students. Instead, I am going to maybe schedule that teacher in this 45-minute block where I know that that teacher should be available. But like I said, sometimes they're not. So you'll walk in and they're in the middle of a lesson. And so you have to be flexible. You can go do it, see a different teacher, or you can stay and help or just see what they're doing. But I will schedule these teachers in blocks.

BeckyAnn: And so I know that at this time, maybe right before lunch, this teacher is a really good time for that teacher. So I will know maybe on Mondays and Thursdays, I can go into that classroom and I can pick any number of those kids. And sometimes I'll put them in groups, and sometimes I don't put them in groups, but I know I've got this 45-minute block where I can see that teacher's students, if that makes sense.

Speaker 1: That totally makes sense. And that's perfect because if you schedule by students and Johnny is scheduled for Monday, but he's absent on Monday, then he just doesn't get services that week. But if you're in that teacher's classroom two days, you're like, "Oh, I miss Johnny on Monday. I'll see him on Thursday."

BeckyAnn: Right. I do that all the time.

Speaker 1: No, I love that because you started talking about what it looks like during those blocks of time. But could you dive into a little bit more detail? What happens in those blocks?

BeckyAnn: So I do run around the school a tiny little bit because sometimes I will come. I have a teacher block maybe from say, I don't know, 9:30 to 10:15. And so I will go into that classroom. And I usually have in mind the student that I want to take, or sometimes students, maybe I've got this activity that I think would be really good for these two students, but not that one because that one has to work on articulation, but these two are doing some listen comprehension. I've got this great story. So I will go into the classroom, and I lurk in the doorway a little bit. And I will ask the teachers because I want to be respectful to the teachers and what they're trying to teach at that time, and I don't want to just pull them out in the middle of their lesson.

BeckyAnn: So I'll listen or I'll just tell them, "Just finish what you're doing." And then as soon as they're done talking and I'll say, "Well, can I take these two students now?" And I always ask. I might take those two students back to my room to do that story activity that I wanted to do. And then whenever we are done because we have read the story and we've answered all the questions that I wanted to answer or did the activity that I wanted to do, if that took 20 minutes or 35 minutes, that's what it takes. And then I will walk them back to class and maybe take the other student, and we'll drill some articulation for 10 minutes. And that might be in the room just around the corner. There's an empty space. I'll just work with them there. I couldn't even work with them in the class. I just really don't working on articulation drills. I think it's uncomfortable for the students. There's a lot of other nosy students who are paying attention to what you're doing. So I usually do pull them out then.

BeckyAnn: Sometimes I'm in there for the whole time because they're doing this really great writing activity that's really language-heavy. Or of course, a lot of our students will struggle with that as well. So I do look a little bit like a tutor in those moments, and I will leave that day thinking this is a great activity, and then I have no good data to put on my sheets because we didn't actually work on their language goals. But honestly, we are there as related service. So as long as I have a balance, I will for sure get to their goals the next time. But it's all about being flexible.

Speaker 1: Yeah. And I think for our language students, if they have those grammar goals, vocabulary, I feel like with a good language-rich activity, I mean, that's prime therapy content right there. And it's so relevant to what they're working on. Being able to scaffold and support that skill in the context of something they're actually doing is just... It's so powerful. I think that's really awesome.

BeckyAnn: It's what we're supposed to be doing. But then-

Speaker 1: Right?

BeckyAnn: Right. But then sometimes, because we've written our goals a little separate from that, so it doesn't always match. But in the end, we are doing what's best for the student at that time, and we are there to support their education. So if we have to take a step back and help them because this was what they're working on in class, then I think that that is okay.

Speaker 1: Yeah. No, I love that. Just to recap, you're shifting to a three-to-one schedule, it sounds like, so you're shooting for a certain number of minutes every week, and you plan out those minutes just to give yourself a little bit of buffer in case there are those extenuating circumstances, which there always are.

BeckyAnn: Correct.

Speaker 1: And then you use a block scheduling approach. So you'll schedule sounds like usually 45 hour-long blocks.

BeckyAnn: So it depends because if there's only one student in that block and it's in our classroom and he is in articulation again, so within this half an hour, I might take one kid from this class and one kid from this class. So I made a little block for only 30 minutes with those two teachers. In one class, I had seven kids, which was a lot. Well, and actually what I did, I didn't block in two and a half solid hours there, but I broke that up over the week. I'm in that classroom four times a week, and it may only be for half an hour, just to get that one kid that I didn't get on Monday, and maybe I can pick them up on Tuesday and then their second time. So I can mix and match the kids based on what I'm doing or what they're doing.

Speaker 1: I bet most often, there's not that many students in one class where you're in the classroom four times throughout the week. But does that get hard to track how many services the student has received? Because I feel like once you get a hold of the schedule, it's probably pretty easy to mentally keep track of like, "Oh yeah, I know I didn't see Johnny yet." But do you find that is tricky at all?

BeckyAnn: I have a tracking sheet that I use. And if you have a place, I will be happy to share with you. You can post this as well. I make a grid. I just use an Excel spreadsheet and I grid by five-minute increments. So maybe some kid I'm going to see 120 minutes a month. That's the most that I can fit on this page. So if you are going more than that, you might need two lines. But I see the kid for 15 minutes, and I draw a little line across three of those little squares, and I use different color ink every day or every week at least, just for myself, for my own reading purposes. But I'll cross out three of those little blocks and I'll put, "Today's date was 3:30. I saw them for 15 minutes. I saw them for 30 minutes."

BeckyAnn: So I can see I still owe this kid 25 minutes. It's the last week of the month. I owe them for 25 minutes. So I am going to try to make sure I have a longer activity that day. So it is a lot of flexible thinking, flexible scheduling. And it does sound like a lot, I guess, as I say it out loud, but I felt like I was doing this all the time anyway. Even back in that 30 minutes, my brain hurt from just trying to keep track of who I had to see when and where and who. But within those blocks of kids, I'm like, I know I get to see them sometime this week. And if you get to the end of the month because of the assemblies and everything else, maybe you have to go to that classroom on a day that wasn't originally scheduled. But you know that that's the time slot that that teacher's available. So you're more likely to be able to work with them.

Speaker 1: Yeah. And I think that it's a lot less scheduling Tetris because those blocks will stay the same and you're just focusing on, "Okay, how can I like get these students seen?" versus trying to manipulate your whole schedule and all of that. So yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me.

Speaker 1: And then in the article, I'll link to the article in the show notes too, but you had a beautiful graphic of what your block schedule looks like for those of us who are more visual learners. You can find an example of that in the article as well. Okay. Awesome. I love the scheduling tips, thinking about a three-to-one model, planning minutes per month or quarter. One of my districts used to do minutes per year, which is uber, uber flexible. Using this approach, it might be easier to work by month just to make sure you're on track.

BeckyAnn: Yeah. I can't even figure out how many minutes. Those are more minutes that I could probably deal with at a time. It would be nice for flexibility, though.

Speaker 1: Yeah. And then the block scheduling approach, that all sounds awesome. And so next week, we will chat about just some tips to get started and starting to navigate this process. So we hope to see you again.

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

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123: A Quick Review of Service Delivery Options for School-Based SLPs

June 14, 2022 by Marisha Leave a Comment

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This Week’s Episode: Service Delivery Options for School-Based SLPs

In last week’s episode, BeckyAnn and I discussed a brief intro to smarter scheduling for school-based SLPs and today we are going to be reviewing different service delivery options. We ended our discussion last week chatting about RTI or response to intervention. BeckyAnn will tell us a little bit more about what RTI is and what that could look like.

Let’s get to it!

Key Takeaways + Topics Covered

Shift to adopt RTI
✓ If SLPs do RTI it can save 6-10 hours of paperwork

Shift service time
✓About the quality of the minutes, you have with the kids. Not the amount of time.
✓ Students don’t miss as much class.

Articulation
✨ Shifting service time! Speedy Speech or 5-minute artic drills (Kuhn, 2006)
✨ 150 repetitions in 15-20 minute INDIVIDUAL sessions- remediated in 6 hours of tx. (Bruce et al., 2018)
✨ For those who needed an IEP (more severe), remediated in 53 hours, less than the district average of 83 hours which is 3 years! (Bruce et al., 2018)

Grammar
✨ Plante et al. (2019) found no difference b/w 15 and 30 minutes if 24 exemplars were used.
✨ The number of repetitions matters when remediating speech sounds and other errors and is more important than the number of minutes spent in a session.

Shift service setting (e.g., in classroom)
✓ The student doesn’t lose as much time in the classroom

Shift group size
✓ You can be flexible

Additional Links

Next Up in this Pod Series

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Transcript

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Speaker 1:BeckyAnn

Hello there and welcome to the SLP Now podcast, where we share practical therapy tips and ideas for busy speech language pathologists. Grab your favorite beverage and sit back as we dive into this episode. Welcome back to the podcast. We are going to continue the service delivery discussion with BeckyAnn Harker. If you missed our episode last week, definitely head to the previous episode so that you can get caught up on our discussion. And today we are going to be reviewing different service delivery options. So we ended our discussion last week, chatting about RTI or response to intervention, BeckyAnn, can you tell us a little bit more about what RTI is and what that could look like?

BeckyAnn Harker: Sure. So most schools should be doing RTI or response to intervention as part of their academic and behavioral interventions with PBIS, positive behavior interventions and support. And I know in my district, we were told we had to follow RTI, we had to follow the process, but nobody ever told us what that meant or how we fit into that because we don't fit in quite the same way. There's no tutors doing the interventions for us. And so I've been really trying to figure out how to make this work in my head. I actually end up doing the interventions, the teacher has some concerns about a kid or in kindergarten we screen all of these children. And so we are often the first ones to find some issues, but I will do some interventions on my own and then sometimes those kids have bigger issues and so they get academic testing and then we will also follow along with that, do our testing. Or I just will make the decision, I guess, to go to further testing if we need to.

BeckyAnn Harker: But honestly, the kids that just have some speech sound errors, I will just see them usually individually, sometimes in very small groups to just drill some sounds, some things I had found, because I've done some research looking into RTI for speech pathologists and there are some things that have come up like the amount of paperwork that it actually saves us if we do RTI. Someone had said six to 10 hours of paperwork that it would save us. Now think about, even if that's five kids that you have in RTI, that could be 50 hours of paperwork through the whole ETR process, IEP process, progress reports, all of the stuff that goes with that. So just saving that many hours sounds really good to me.

BeckyAnn Harker: So that's a big push for me. And the other thing that we had talked about in the last episode is just that these kids may not actually meet the qualifications for therapy yet they still need it. And so this is a way that it eases my mind. Yes, it does happen sometimes that if things get really, really busy, we're doing state testing this week, for example, and I have been helping to do state testing. The kids in RTI are probably not going to be the first ones I make sure I see this week, but it's okay. It's okay because they're getting help throughout and as I have said, nobody's ever died from not having one week of speech therapy. They'll probably be okay for the week.

Speaker 1: Yeah. I love the idea of using five minute sessions to work on articulation for our RTI students. Can you tell us a little bit more about what that would look like?

BeckyAnn Harker: Yes. And so I'm also a big fan of this five minute artic drill. So it's been called speedy speech. It's been called five minute artic drills. It's been called all kinds of things and for the articulation kids, especially... So really in five minutes I usually do 10, I'm not going to lie. I feel guilty, five minutes just doesn't seem like enough. And kids still will come and talk to you and so we waste a few minutes of chit chat and making friends, but then you can just drill sounds. And if you can get 50, 100 repetitions within 10 minutes, then send them back to class. It's no longer than a bathroom break. They're not missing a ton of class. I call it drill and kill and go back to class and you see improvements that way. You're not having to juggle between those groups of those other kids with other language needs perhaps.

BeckyAnn Harker: so within that five or 10 minutes, you can really get the kid to meet their goals a lot faster. There's some statistics too on how the five minutes drills can save... One study had them remediated their sounds in six hours of therapy. So that's kind of the RTI, don't put them on your caseload and have an ETR and an IEP and all these minutes you have to do, if you can actually fix it in six hours. And another study, even with kids who were more severe and they were put on an IEP and they had more sound issues. It still took less time. It took like 53 hours over time to remediate those sounds versus their district average of 83 hours, which is three years that you're having a kid on an IEP to work on sounds. It's kind of a long time in my opinion.

Speaker 1: Yeah. So that's 30 hours saved, that's like getting those kids off of your caseload, back into the classroom, back into least restrictive environment a year sooner.

BeckyAnn Harker: Correct.

Speaker 1: That's incredible.

BeckyAnn Harker: Right. But we should be doing this. That's what I think.

Speaker 1: Yeah. And we'll share the citations for those articles in the show notes. I think that particular article was from Bruce et al. 2018.

BeckyAnn Harker: That was, yes.

Speaker 1: Okay. So that was an example for articulation where the RTI students who had those shorter individual sessions remediated much more quickly. And then for the students who were more severe and needed that IEP, we saved 30 hours of treatment time using that approach. Have you seen studies outside of articulation? Does this apply to other areas?

BeckyAnn Harker: So Plant et al. in 2019 also found that there's no difference between 15 and 30 minutes of therapy. This was for grammar when they're working on morpho-syntax, they did 24 exemplars. So they practiced 24 times, they were able to... Or 24 different words and they were able to do the exact same amount of good in half the time. So I don't know why we have this magic number of 30 minutes. It's in our head, it's in our psyche. I think it comes from the medical model. And if you think about it, if you're going to take your kid to a clinic to be seen, you're not going to just sit there for 10 minutes and then turn around and go home and do that every week.

BeckyAnn Harker: So that 30 minute, doctors seem to block in 30 minutes. I think some people will bill in 30 minute increments. And so I don't know, that's just gotten into our psyche, but if you can do it in half the time, if you can treat grammar in 15 minutes, if you can treat articulation in five or 10 minutes, then I am all on board with that.

Speaker 1: So it sounds like the takeaway is that with the grammar study, if we got those exemplars, it doesn't matter if it's in 15 versus 30 minutes, just like the number of targets that matters, not the amount of time.

BeckyAnn Harker: Correct. And how I schedule my life right now is I'm thinking more about getting the activity done, the amount of repetitions done. So that could take a half an hour. I'm not going to say I never see kids for a half an hour. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it takes longer depending on what the activity is and what we're doing, but it should be about the quality and not the quantity. I hate watching that clock.

Speaker 1: Yeah, like what can we do to fill in these extra minutes?

BeckyAnn Harker: Right. What if you're done in 20 minutes, you're like, I still got 10 minutes to go. And now you're just wasting time or you start another activity, which then isn't done in time. So it's all about the quality of the minutes that you do have with those kids.

Speaker 1: Yeah. And I think that one of the benefits that I saw to using these shorter sessions, I love what you said about the students don't have to miss as much class. It doesn't have as much of an impact. And we don't need a lot of fluff when we're doing these shorter sessions. A student can attend for five to 10 minutes without needing extra reinforcers and a ton of behavior management. They can focus for that amount of time and we can just get super high quality therapy with lots and lots of repetitions and little to no fluff.

BeckyAnn Harker: Right, I will bring a blank worksheet that has little pictures, whatever on it. And in the session we're choosing our targets, we're practicing, we're saying them in words and sentence and I will be writing those words down. So then they have homework within that 10 minutes. It's individualized for them, for what they needed, what they were working on. And they're kind of watching, sometimes I'll have the kids write it and so they have the homework to take home with them from what they were just practicing with me.

Speaker 1: Wow. Double whamy. I love it.

BeckyAnn Harker: Yeah.

Speaker 1: Make their homework during the super short session.

BeckyAnn Harker: Yes. Be efficient.

Speaker 1: Yeah. I love it. So what does this look like in terms of the logistics? So next week, we'll chat more about how to navigate scheduling, but if the sessions are so short, do you go to the speech room? What does your setting look like? Are you in the classroom, in the hallway? Can you just paint the picture of the basics?

BeckyAnn Harker: Sure. it's flexible. So I guess my theme, I just try to be flexible, flexible in my group size, flexible in the amount of minutes that I spend, flexible in what I do. So we will be talking about how I do block scheduling. So I kind of block by teacher and then I will go to that classroom. So during that time, if they're in the middle of an activity, I'm not going to pull a kid. How many times do you go to the classroom, even though they know that their time is at 10:30, but they're hardcore in the middle of a language lesson or a math lesson, but it's your time and so you take them and pull them from that. So I don't do that. I try to find a time within that block.

BeckyAnn Harker: So I'll go to the classroom, if they are in the middle of a project or a thing, I will stand there and I will help. I'll help my students. Sometimes it's a little bit of a waste of time because I'm... Kind of, I'm just listening and seeing what the teacher's doing, but I also know what's going on in that classroom. So then I can reinforce that if I end up pulling the students out, but sometimes I work right there. Sometimes we'll go in the hallway. I'm fortunate to have a couple of work rooms. So I have my office, but there's also a workroom on the other end of the hallway, the other wing. So I'll just pull a kid in there and practice for 10 minutes and then send them back. So it's kind of all of the above.

Speaker 1: Yeah. That's perfect. I love it. Thank you so much for helping us picture what that would look like a little bit more. And I think that's a really good overview of some of the different service delivery options that we might have available to us. And when we're getting strategic and helping students make more rapid progress and giving ourselves less paperwork. And so in the next episode, we'll dive into one of the biggest questions I think that we get is how do we actually navigate scheduling with this? Thanks for listening to the SLP Now podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please share with your SLP friends and don't forget to subscribe to the podcast to get the latest episode sent directly to you. See you next time.

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#122: An Intro to Smarter Scheduling for School-Based SLPs

June 7, 2022 by Marisha Leave a Comment

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This Week’s Episode: An Intro on How to Schedule Smarter for School-Based SLPs

This month, we are diving into all things service delivery and tips and strategies to help us schedule smarter in the schools.

I am so happy to be having this conversation with BeckyAnn Harker. She is a school-based SLP near Youngstown, Ohio, and she has 24 years of clinic and school-based experience. She is currently a doctoral student in special education at Kent State University, and she’s very interested in caseload management and vocabulary intervention. For this podseries we will be focusing on her caseload management expertise!

I am just super excited to dive into this conversation. So let’s get to it!

Key Takeaways

Why BeckyAnn Changed her Service Delivery Method

✓ 100+ kids on caseload and felt like running through the motions
✓ Needed a new way to manage a caseload in the double digits
✓ RTI or Responsive to Intervention was the start of that solution

Why 30-minute group sessions aren’t best for the student

✓ Mixed Groups – Needs don’t get met
✓ Behavior management
✓ Activities take extra time

Why 30-minute group sessions aren’t best for our workload

✓The student is on our caseload longer
✓Causes extra stress, rigid groups, no flex for meetings
✓Extra paperwork

Additional Links

ASHA Leader: BeckyAnn Harker Can We Break From 30-Minute Group Sessions in Schools?

Next Up in this Pod Series

6/7/22: An Intro to Smarter Scheduling for School-Based SLPs
6/14/22: A Quick Review of Service Delivery Options for School-Based SLPs
6/21/22: How to Navigate Alternative Scheduling for School-Based SLPs
6/28/22: How to Start Using Smarter Scheduling for School-Based SLPs

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Speaker 1: Hello there, and welcome to the SLP Now Podcast, where we share practical therapy, tips and ideas for busy speech language pathologists. Grab your favorite beverage and sit back as we dive into this week's episode.

Speaker 1: Hello there and welcome to the SLP Now Podcast. This month, we are diving into all things service delivery and tips and strategies to help us schedule smarter in the schools. And I am so excited to be having this conversation with BeckyAnn Harker. She is a school-based SLP near Youngstown, Ohio, and she has 24 years of clinic and school-based experience. She is currently a doctoral student in special education at Kent State University, and she's very interested in caseload management and vocabulary intervention. So today we'll be focusing all on caseload management. I found out about BeckyAnne in the ASHA Leader, so we'll link to that article as well. But I am just super excited to dive into this conversation. So hello, BeckyAnn.

BeckyAnn Harker: Hello. Thank you for having me here.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Thank you so much for taking the time to share your wisdom and expertise. Yeah, I'm really excited. And so I'm curious, can you tell us a little bit more about your story? How did you end up pursuing a doctoral degree and what got you to focus on caseload management?

BeckyAnn Harker: So my doctoral degree is probably mostly going to focus on vocabulary, which is not what we're talking about today, but that's okay. I work as a speech language pathologist, as you said, and I'm in the schools. I have worked in clinics and I've been in the school district a couple different times. I worked in Indiana many, many moons ago where I had 100 kids on my caseload and it was ridiculous. It was stressful. I would get to the end of the day and I would have no idea what I did that day. It was terrible. And I kept thinking then that something has to be better. There has to be some other way, but we were very locked into this 30 minutes, two times a week with 100 kids. It was insane and unreasonable as far as I was concerned.

BeckyAnn Harker: But since then I've worked back in the clinic and then I'm back in the schools. And I have often felt, and I think living in both of those worlds, that working in the school, you really cannot be the best therapist that you are. I have felt with all of the constraints, the time constraints, all the IEPs, all the minutes, all the kids that you have, I cannot do my best work there like I did in the clinic, where you have those children, one on one, you get to work with the families. I want to make it better. I want to make a difference.

BeckyAnn Harker: And so I ended up going back to school and it's in special education, mostly because that's the world I live in right now. And it's special ed law that we have to work under. And so I'd like to make things better just for kids all around, all of the kids, but especially my kids, and working on caseload management is just something that I've been trying to do forever just for myself. And so I feel like I've come up with maybe something that works. And so I thought maybe I would share that. And that's why I wrote that little article in the ASHA Leader. I was just trying to share some ideas.

Speaker 1: Wow. I love that story. And just sharing that was really special, so thank you. And I'm right there with you. I also had a caseload in the triple digits and yeah, it's really hard to operate at the top of our license when we're working within those constraints, you're absolutely right. And I'm so excited to see what you do with this.

Speaker 1: So let's start chatting a little bit about the ideas that you've had so far to start addressing this and start improving caseload management strategies in the schools. I think it makes sense to just chat about what the standard is at this point. So you mentioned that most of us are seeing our students, 30 minutes once a week, maybe twice a week, in groups. It gets pretty obvious that that would be difficult with a caseload of 100 students because our groups would get very, very large. Let's dig into some of the cons of using that approach.

BeckyAnn Harker: I am just not a fan of the group approach, and I'm not saying that I never see kids in groups, because I will sometimes. But the model I used to work from, was you would go to a classroom, that classroom might have three students that are mine. I will take those three students. One has articulation errors. One has language errors. One's working on all of the different things, right? And so I felt that by the end of my 30 minutes, sometimes those kids maybe practiced six times. And maybe that was me, but I just felt very ineffective. There were so many things that having the mixed group, even in that amount of time, you just couldn't get to all of them. One kid needed a little more time to work on his goal. And then the other one maybe did their sound and like two seconds, that's great, but the other one just took longer.

BeckyAnn Harker: So that was a problem. Behavior management becomes a problem, because now you've got three or four kids that you're trying to work with. And one, they get squirrly, they have to wait. They don't like to wait for that one. And then also you need some kind of game or activity. So then you think within that 30 minutes, even if you have three kids in that 30 minutes, that's 10 minutes per kid and you need to explain the game, make sure they're taking turns correctly, deal with it when somebody loses a turn or whatever happens. And then at the end, if you really gave that kid five good minutes of your time, that's probably stretching it. So I was very frustrated by that.

BeckyAnn Harker: And so some of the things I had looked into... So RTI was really where I started was trying to harness RTI. I saw Jennifer Taps speak at a conference one time. She's kind of the big RTI guru, so shout out to her. But I really liked the thought of that, you're still seeing students. And I think we have to be careful because there is a chance too, you could just do RTI and not give kids services if they really need them, and I am not saying to do that. Obviously, if a kid needs services, they need services. But think of your articulation caseload and how many of them are the R sound? How many of them are maybe just one or two articulation sounds, that when you really look at it and you weigh all the options, all the criteria to qualify for services, is it really a disability? Is it really impacting their academics or their education? And sometimes it does. And then for sure, those kids might need an IEP.

BeckyAnn Harker: But I still feel like this is our job to help these kids because we also don't want these kids graduating from high school with R sounds that are not correct, if we can help it. So RTI is one way that these kids are not on our caseload, but they're on our workload. And so there's that whole workload caseload thing that we're supposed to all be doing. But from what I have read, I think 70% of us are not doing that, really looking at our workload, instead of our caseload. So those kids count as your workload, but really that will get your numbers down, and then you don't have all of the extra paperwork that goes with writing IEPs and ETRs and those dreaded progress reports, so that's kind of where I had started.

Speaker 1: Yeah. So just to recap, if we're seeing more students, in RTI, we have less of that paperwork up front and throughout the whole process. It's possible that some of these students, I've done this before, where I was getting a bunch of referrals, so I was trying to move through things quickly and I qualified some students and there's one student in particular that stands out to me. We started therapy and he just blew through his goals so quickly and its like this could've absolutely been an RTI student. And yet, I spent all of this time on the paperwork, it's going to take more paperwork and more time out of the classroom to get him out, and in the meantime, he has a special education label. That's not benefiting anyone.

BeckyAnn Harker: I've seen that happen, even with some language kids too. You see those kids sometimes once, to get your testing done. And then you're like, "Well, he didn't score so well," and then you qualify them. And then, a few months into this, you're like, "Yeah, this was really not a language disorder." And then you kind of have this kid, at least until the end of the IEP and maybe longer. So I believe in trying to utilize... Our schools have this system set up, we should be using it, in my opinion.

Speaker 1: Yeah. And there's absolutely ways to do that. When I saw that happening, I was like, "Wait, no, that was a huge red light." And so I started looking into RTI more and we worked on building the team at the school where they had to document different interventions. We don't have enough time to dive into all of that in this chat, that might be a really fun follow up. But there's absolutely things that we can do so that it benefits our workload and caseload management, but then also it's better for our students. So yeah, I love it.

Speaker 1: So to wrap up this initial discussion, because we talked about how we typically schedule students, why that's not best, necessarily. And then, we also touched on why it's not best for our workload because of the paperwork. Is there anything else that you would add there in terms of how that impacts our workload, when we're using that approach?

BeckyAnn Harker: The RTI approach?

Speaker 1: When we're doing the traditional 30 minutes once a week in groups.

BeckyAnn Harker: So I think the other thing is just about scheduling and I know, this has just happened, right? So you have back to back, 30 minute sessions all day long, it looks great on paper that you can get all these kids seen. And then how many IEP meetings do we have, that we then have to cancel those kids? And then you're scrambling for minutes and you're scrambling for time and schools don't run as smoothly as it looks like on paper. So I think just trying to come up with some other ways to handle our schedule, to handle the minutes that we see our kids, RTI is certainly one way, but there's other ways too, because we're still left with a whole bunch of kids on our caseload. I try to come up with some other ways to manage the time that I have with those kids.

Speaker 1: Perfect. So I think this is the perfect introduction to what we're going to be spending the next several weeks talking about. So stay tuned for next week's episode, where we dive into a review of the different service delivery options and what it could look like to actually start navigating this. Thanks for listening to the SLP Now Podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please share with your SLP friends and don't forget to subscribe to the podcast to get the latest episode sent directly to you. See you next time.

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#121: A Crash Course in Sensory Strategies for the SLP: The Optimal Learning Zone

May 24, 2022 by Marisha Leave a Comment

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This Week’s Episode: How to Find the Optimal Learning Zone

This month I have had the pleasure of chatting with Jessie Ginsburg. Jessie is the founder of Pediatric Therapy Playhouse, a multidisciplinary clinic in Los Angeles. She has shared so many good tips on a topic that she is so passionate about: Sensory Strategies for SLPs.

Jessie set us up with the importance of why SLPs should understand sensory processing in the speech room. Then we dove into the importance of the SLP’s role in sensory processing in the speech room and how we can help regulate our students and make them comfortable with us. Last week we discussed the different levels of arousals.

Today our crash course in sensory strategies for SLPs comes to an end. As we wrap up, Jessie will talk to us about the optimal learning zone and then we will recap our month’s discussion.

In Jessie’s recap, everything comes together nicely and we hope that some of these tips inspire you to implement sensory strategies in your therapy sessions.

Let’s dive in!

Key Takeaways + Topics Covered

Strategies for bringing your clients into their optimal learning zone (37m)

✓Identify the child’s level of arousal
✓ Identify your own level of arousal
✓ Co-regulation is important – put out your own energy (the opposite of where your student is)

Touch – tickling is more alerting than rubbing back softly
Vestibular – moving slowly/rhythmically (calm) vs. spinning
Auditory – sing hello (quietly/slow if high arousal with deep hug, sing fun and loud and silly with spaghetti arms)
Lights – sensitivity to light can cause dysregulation

Additional Links

Jessie Ginsburg on Instagram: @jessieginsburg.slp
STAR institute (sensory-related trainings)
Jessie’s Sensory Certificate Program

Next Up in this Pod Series

5/3/22: A Crash Course in Sensory Strategies for the SLP: The Why
5/10/22: A Crash Course in Sensory Strategies for the SLP: Our Role
5/17/22: A Crash Course in Sensory Strategies for the SLP: Levels of Arousal
5/24/22: Crash Course in Sensory Strategies for the SLP: The Optimal Learning Zone

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Transcript

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Speaker 1: Hello there and welcome to the SLP Now Podcast, where we share practical therapy, tips and ideas for busy speech language pathologists. Grab your favorite beverage and sit back as we dive into this week's episode. So let's dive into some strategies that we can use to bring our clients into the optimal learning zone. And I assume it'll be a combination of noticing their level of arousal and reacting accordingly. But you're the expert here. So what do we think about when we start looking into strategies?

Speaker 2: I think that some of the most important things to think about are of course, like you said, identifying the child's level of arousal and where they are. And the step after that is identifying your own level of arousal. Because as we know, co-regulation is so important. We always expect the kids are going to be able to self-regulate. Like, "You go take care of that problem on your own and come back when you're calm." The world doesn't work like that. We need people to help us regulate.

Speaker 2: So when we come into a session and we are already stressed, or we already have a high level of arousal, and we're overwhelmed, we cannot regulate a child when we are not regulated. This is true in all situations. It could just be at parenting. If you're a parent you've been there, where you're so frustrated with your kids and you know that you need to go take a breath before you go and you talk to them any further because you need to regulate yourself.

Speaker 2: So if we have a kid who comes in with a high level of arousal, we're overwhelmed and anxious and our level of arousal is high, we really need to get ourselves in check, figure out what you can do. And for me, I think what works best is just figuring out how to take the pressure off. Because I think a lot of our heightened anxiety, I guess you could say, comes from putting a lot of pressure on ourselves to have the perfect session or do the perfect thing, or have all the answers or get everything done we wanted to get done. So I think for me, if there's times where I'm really stressed in a session, I just have to tell myself, "My goal here and getting back to what we talked about initially is how can I connect with this kid? How can I get this kid see-saw balanced?" And once you really put that in the forefront of your mind and as your primary goal in therapy, I think that helps us regulate. At least that's something that would help me.

Speaker 1: Yeah. I love that as a strategy to help us regulate, because I think that's so true that if we're stressed and if we're dysregulated, we won't be able to help our students regulate.

Speaker 2: Yeah. And energy's contagious. It's like... I don't know, are you into sports?

Speaker 1: My fiance is, so I guess I am, by proxy, a little bit.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Okay. So I am not at all. I'll go to games so that I can get a soft pretzel. That's my level of enthusiasm.

Speaker 1: Yes. I love it.

Speaker 2: But it's like, you might go to a basketball game or a football game and the home team scores and everyone's on their feet cheering and all of a sudden I'm up cheering too. And I'm like, "Yeah, we got this." And it's not even that I care. It's just, energy's contagious. So when we go into those situations with that high level of energy, we end up there as well. And the opposite's true too. Like if you walk into work on a Monday morning and your coworkers are sitting around just like miserable talking about how horrible their weekend was, pretty soon you're going to feel pretty bad too. So I think just keeping in mind that the approach is very counterintuitive so that when we do have a kid who comes in with a high level of arousal, our job is to really calm them versus having a kid who comes in with a low level of arousal, our job is to give them more alerting input.

Speaker 2: And this could be done, like we've talked about, through the energy that we're putting out ourselves, but it can also be done through sensory activities. So just some really easy, I guess you could say rule of thumb for those of you who want to learn more about integrating sensory strategies, in general, when we're thinking about different sensory systems and we want to figure out, can this activity be calming or can it be alerting? You can think about the level of intensity of the sensation. So if we're looking at tactile input, which is touch, something that's going to be alerting is going to be a more intense tactile input. So whether that means like textures that are sticky or rough, or just have a higher degree of stimulation just by nature, or it could be something like tickling is going to be a more intense type of tactile input than rubbing someone's back softly.

Speaker 2: And you could really start to go through all of the different sensory system to think about, "How could I use this type of input in a calming way versus how can I use it in an alerting way?" So if we're looking at vestibular input and we're trying to use movement, if we are moving a child slowly and rhythmically, that is going to be a more calming and less intense type of vestibular movement than spinning the child with auditory input.

Speaker 2: If we are singing Hello, that's my favorite time to start working on either calming or learning input is just from the second the kid gets in the room, we've got the Hello song, that's the perfect time. So if we have a kid who's high arousal, we might sing the Hello song really quietly. We might even whisper it. We might sing it really slow and rhythmically while giving a child big, deep calming hugs or something like that, or squeezes on their arms.

Speaker 2: Versus if we have a kid who comes in, who has really low arousal, we might sing the song really fun and loud and silly. And I don't know if you know what spaghetti arms are, but that's like my go-to or you take the child's hands and you kind of give them a shake, like little spaghetti noodles. I think that's one of the easiest, but also trickiest things about sensory is that all the activities we do, they could almost all be done in a calming or in alerting way just by how they're done.

Speaker 1: Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. And do you ever do anything with lights or have you found that to be a helpful strategy?

Speaker 2: Absolutely. The funny thing about lights... I don't know funny is the right word, interesting thing I guess is that, if kids have sensitivity to light, that could be something that is causing them to be dysregulated, that is something that you may not even and have realized. They might come into the room and the lights might be so bright, but it's not something that you've even thought about. And it may not be something that they even realize is so dysregulating for them either. So they can't tell you.

Speaker 2: But in our office, we've got these magnetic light covers and it's like a cloth that you can put on top of the lights to soften them, which we really love. But we also will often turn off the lights completely in order to help kids calm. Or if kids really love lights and they love that visual input, then really using a lot of toys or activities that have lights in them. So it could be the opposite as well.

Speaker 1: It's such a cool way to think about this, because like you said, any activity can be modified. Like I love the example that you gave with a Hello song. We can easily modify that. And I feel like after practicing this a little bit over time, I'm sure you just automatically you start to make those adjustments without even thinking about it.

Speaker 2: Definitely. It's something that, I think with anything else... Like I've had a business coach tell me, "You can't always work in your business. You always have to make time to work on your business." Have you heard that?

Speaker 1: Mm-hmm (affirmative) Yep.

Speaker 2: So it's the same thing as our therapy. It's like, we're always in the weeds of our therapy, but if we don't sit back and take time to really work on our therapy, then the, in our therapy part is never going to be easier or better. One of my favorite things, which I know probably most of us hate to do is videotape my sessions because that's where I get to see things that I would've never noticed. I love to watch them back and there's things that you will see when you video yourself that you just did not realize when you were in the moment. So being able to go back, review that, look at a child's sensory profile, go through each of the sensory system, make a plan for things you can try. And it's fun.

Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. And I think with video, modeling can be... it's a little different. Like I've used that with some social groups and just like letting them see themselves on video, they're like, "Oh, I do that?" And it's just like a huge light bulb moment and it changes a lot of things. But I feel like I've had that exact same experience, like seeing myself on video and even just seeing the session through a different lens because there's so much going on in this session. We might miss the little cues that clue us into, "Oh, maybe they are sensitive to lights and that's what's causing that dysregulation." There's those types of things that we start to see that we might otherwise miss.

Speaker 2: Yeah. And it's so funny, for those of us who work in early intervention, I think that that strategy is really common. Ask parents at least to take videos of themselves at home. I know in certain programs like [inaudible 00:10:23], it takes two to talk. That's a really big piece of it. It's funny because we go and we make these requests from parents and then many of us shy away from doing that ourselves.

Speaker 1: Yeah, definitely. If you're not used to doing it is a little bit being your own observer, I guess, getting an observation from an admin or something.

Speaker 2: And you know what's funny is I look back on videos where in the past long time ago I would've taken videos and if it wasn't demonstrating exactly what I wanted to demonstrate, I wouldn't even keep the video. I would just go, "Oh, I'll try next session to get that." But now going and presenting and trying to train SLPs, I'm like, "I wish I had all of those epic fail videos. Those are so valuable. There's so much to teach from them." In fact, I have a video I use when I present of me as an SLPA, just like the most embarrassing video of all time. I'm making a fool out of myself and just not able to get this little guy engaged at all. But I feel like it's those videos that are the ones that we truly learn from.

Speaker 1: Yeah, no, that's so powerful. I love that.

Speaker 2: Yeah. There's a lot to learn always.

Speaker 1: And we'll never be done learning. It'll be a lifelong journey.

Speaker 2: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Speaker 1: Let's do a quick recap of kind of where we went through this little series. So we started off talking about why SLPs need to understand sensory processing. And I love how you shared about The Whole-Brain Child. That book as a resource and the downstairs and upstairs brain and kind of setting the stage for helping our students feel safe and secure. And just taking the pressure off and helping them get regulated so that we can engage in all of the cool language stuff and all of that. So is there anything that you would add there or highlight?

Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that's the most important thing at the end is that really getting them in a place where they're regulated and just being able to explain that to parents and teachers and everyone that we're working with.

Speaker 1: Yeah. So that little summary kind of loops really nicely into the SLP's role because we can always make a referral to OT if we're seeing a student who is dysregulated, but if we have tools that allow student to access this session and participate and really engage with us, then I don't see why I would not do that. I feel like that's just a pretty clear reason. So yeah, I think that helped me to wrap my head around the SLP's role and you shared some really great resources that we can use to learn more. But I'm super excited about your sensory certificate program. I feel like that's such a cool way to guide SLPs into where we need to go for that.

Speaker 2: Yeah. I honestly had no idea if it was going to be a need for people. And I was just blown away by how many people wanted to learn more. And I felt like that's really what validated the idea for me is all these people coming out from literally all over the world we've had people trained in this program now. And it's really cool because it's so much greater than just how can we make a difference in our sessions and how can we better engage and help our kids learn language?

Speaker 2: This is so much more about how can we very slowly but greater changes in how therapists are doing therapy all over the world so that our autistic kids are not only getting the best services, but getting access to all these resources about how they can feel comfortable in their own body and know what their needs and how to get their needs met and be able to advocate for themselves and trying to open the world to more neurodiversity affirming therapy approaches.

Speaker 1: Yeah. There's a much bigger context than just participating in whatever book activity we have planned for the day. Yeah, I think that's super empowering and really exciting to get to be a part of.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot I think we can all do to do our part. Spread the word.

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

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Marisha

✓ This helps “make language-learning tasks less demanding, more meaningful, and more authentic” (Tomasello, 2003).

1. Provide visual supports.

3. Identify missing elements.

4. Use an authentic context.

✨ Putting it Together (Ukrainetz, 2007)✨

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3 Strategies to Target Affixes

Need goal ideas for Affixes?

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This Week’s Episode: Evidence-based Strategies for Vocabulary Goals

3 Strategies to Target Vocabulary Goals (growth)

Need Vocabulary goal ideas?

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This Week’s Episode: Evidence-based Strategies for Basic Concepts

3 Strategies to Target Basic Concepts

Need Basics Concept goal ideas?

Additional Links

Seifert, H. (1991). Treatment effectiveness of large group basic concept instruction with Head Start students. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 22, 60-64.

Nicholas, K., Alt, M., & Hauwiller, E. (2019). Variability of input in preposition learning by preschoolers with developmental language disorder and typically-developing language. Child Language Teaching and Therapy.

Vogt, S., & Kauschke, C. (2017). Observing iconic gestures enhances word learning in typically developing children and children with specific language impairment. Journal of Child Language. Advance online publication.

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This Week’s Episode: Evidence-based Strategies for Syntax Goals

3 Strategies to Target Syntax Goals

1. Combining Sentences

2. Sentence Expansion

3. Embedded Practice (Using Reading Passages)

Need Syntax goal ideas?

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This Week’s Episode: Evidence-based Strategies to Target Grammar Goals

3 Strategies to Target Grammar Goals

Need Grammar Goal Ideas?

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This Week’s Episode: Evidence-based Strategies for Following Directions

3 Strategies for Following Directions

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This Week’s Episode: How to Start Using Smarter Scheduling for School-Based SLPs

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This Week’s Episode: How to Navigate Alternative Scheduling for School-Based SLPs

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This Week’s Episode: Service Delivery Options for School-Based SLPs