#170: A Week of Therapy Plans for a New Semester

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.
Happy New Year. This episode is going live on January 2nd, and hopefully most of you are enjoying your holiday breaks, but I wanted to record an episode that you can listen to as you're heading back to school after the holidays and giving you some ideas to make your first week back a little bit easier. So I just want to share some of the things that I like to do at the beginning of a new semester or a new quarter after a nice long break for that first week of therapy to hopefully make things a little easier, like I said, and to get back into the swing of things and to help students do the same. So during those first sessions with students as they're coming back, I of course like to do a check-in, and this is really important for establishing rapport, but it's also a great opportunity to observe the students in terms of how they're using their language in context or in articulation, whatever goals are relevant for the student.
It's a really nice informal assessment. And again, just to establish rapport, we of course want to give students the opportunity to share what happened and what their favorite activities were. And if you head to the show notes, we'll have some quick activities that you can pull for that initial activity. So that is idea number one is to do a check-in. And then idea number two is to review students' goals. So the show notes will also include a little template that you can use to create goal cards for students. So if you haven't done this already, the first week back is a great way to do that. And I'll also link to a podcast episode that explains how I use these and how you can set them up, all of that good stuff. So you'll find the template and the podcast episode that goes into a lot more detail, but the short version of what reviewing goals looks like.
So I have my students make goal cards. So one goal card for each of their goals. I typically have them write the goal in their own words, and I create a little packet of cards for each student and they grab them as we start our speech therapy session. And then it's just the beginning of the session, we're reviewing those goals. It's really helpful for a number of reasons. It increases student goal awareness, which helps with our SLP PR I like to call it. So when teachers or parents ask students what they're working on in speech, if we are reviewing the goals on a regular basis, then they're able to share more often than not what they're actually working on. And they don't just say, "Can we play games," they're able to identify what they actually work on in speech and what they're there for. And when I do that, especially if students, maybe there's not quite the buy-in that we'd like, I make sure to facilitate a discussion with students about why the goals matter and how the goals can help them, and how it relates to their personal goals and aspirations.
And again, the podcast episode will go into more detail on that, but that is activity idea number two, to review student goals. And then I also like to collect some data. So in a typical session, I just collect data on one goal per session, but maybe for the first week back, you get to decide what makes sense for you and your caseload. But it might be good to see where students are at with all of their different goals. So with the check-in activity, I get kind of an informal assessment of their overall language and how they're communicating. But with a probe, I can look at their specific goals. And we have episode 159 goes into more detail on my data collection process and all of that. This will also be in the show notes, but check out episode 159, if you're curious what that looks like and what I even mean by collecting probes.
But it's the beginning of the semester again, is a great time to see where our students are at and making a game plan for the rest of the school year and trying to make sure that we're able to continue making progress on the student's goals. And if we're going on a road trip, we of course want to know the destination, but we want to know where we're starting as well. And that's why I think collecting probe data on all of the students' goals in that first week can be really helpful. And it gives us lots of nice data points to use when it comes to progress reporting and all of that as well. So just a recap of the three initial activities. One is to do a check-in with students. Again, the purpose of this is informal overall review of how they're communicating, but then also it's really helpful to establish rapport.
And activity number two is to review students' goals. Again, to increase that goal awareness, increase buy-in, and just make sure we're all on the same page. And then the third activity idea is to collect data on your student's goals. I call these probes. So I'll just do a little mini assessment of each of my students' goals and run through those real quick. And that's what I would do in my first week of a new semester. And then just to keep students busy while we're doing all of that, the check-in activity might have a little drawing activity or something so that we can manage behavior and expectations and all of that as well. So those are my ideas.
And again, to check out the resources that I mentioned, head to slpnow.com/170 and check us out on Instagram @slpnow. We'll have some content related to this episode going live there as well. And I'd love to hear your comments and feedback. Feel free to send me a DM on Instagram as well, sharing your activities or if you use these activities, how they went and any questions are also welcome. So I hope you had a fabulous winter break and that your first week of a new semester. That's a wrap, and we'll see you next week.
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