Why You’re Reinventing the Wheel Every Session (and the Fix)

[00:00:00] Today we're going to chat about why you might feel like you're [00:00:05] reinventing the wheel every session and what to do about it. A lot of [00:00:10] times the root cause of feeling like we're having to reinvent the wheel [00:00:15] every single session is that we don't have a repeatable routine. We're scrambling [00:00:20] before every session.
Even if our sessions go fairly well, we might feel a [00:00:25] lot of decision fatigue, making a million decisions within every [00:00:30] session. Our sessions might look really inconsistent, and students might have a hard time [00:00:35] anticipating what's coming next.
And when you [00:00:40] have a large caseload, which I would argue basically every school-based SLP [00:00:45] qualifies as having a large caseload, we aren't able to [00:00:50] plan unique activities for every single student, every single session. It's just [00:00:55] not sustainable, and it's not necessary to provide high-quality [00:01:00] therapy. So we are going to be diving into a framework that [00:01:05] we can use to help structure our sessions, and this [00:01:10] will help us see students make more progress.
It'll help our sessions [00:01:15] feel easier, and they'll flow better. It'll make it easy [00:01:20] to explain what's happening and how students are making progress.
And you don't have to [00:01:25] be the most creative person on the planet. You just need a better structure and a repeatable [00:01:30] framework, and that means that you have to spend way less time planning, and your [00:01:35] sessions are actually better.
The structure that I'm going to share with you is [00:01:40] infused with evidence-based practices. So when I was managing my [00:01:45] caseload in the triple digits, I was really struggling. I was starting sessions and [00:01:50] trying to piece together activities because I just didn't have [00:01:55] the time or the bandwidth or the resources to plan ahead of [00:02:00] time, and I sure did try.
But there were sessions where students walked in, and I was figuring out [00:02:05] what we were going to do, and especially as a newer SLP, we had a lot of things to figure [00:02:10] out. I was exhausted from making a million different decisions.
[00:02:15] I would just jump into whatever activity I had planned [00:02:20] or I pulled out last minute, and I didn't take time to [00:02:25] see where my students were at or take time to teach an actual skill.
I would just [00:02:30] dive into the activity and kind of flounder and try and figure out [00:02:35] how to support the students in the moment versus having it be a little bit more systematic. [00:02:40] I would often skip that really important assessment in teaching. And [00:02:45] so we are going to dive into way more detail in the framework [00:02:50] in the next episode
But just a quick overview. [00:02:55] There are five steps. We start with Check-in, and then [00:03:00] Assess, Teach, Practice, and then Wrap Up. [00:03:05] And these steps work for any group, any grade, any goal. And the [00:03:10] cool thing about the framework is that you can still modify it to meet your students' [00:03:15] needs. It's not rigid.
It's infused with evidence-based practices that we can [00:03:20] use to set up our sessions, and we can modify it to [00:03:25] fit the different types of students that we might be working with, and [00:03:30] significantly reduce our decision fatigue and make our [00:03:35] lives a lot easier and better support our students. So that is sneak peek [00:03:40] at the framework.