This is part of a continuing series of posts on therapy ideas to support assistants (SLPAs) and paraprofessionals in the schools in their work with students and their supervising SLPs.
How do you plan for your therapy sessions? Whether you are using classroom materials, working through a published curriculum, or using seasonal themes for content, there are a couple of important pieces that should be consistent across therapy models.
Using a lesson plan can help document all those pieces and support effective (and efficient!) collaboration with your supervising SLP!
Plan the Activity for the session
For example:
- Students will create a list of words associated with December.
- Students will listen to a story and complete the associated project.
- Students will use the textbook's glossary to learn new vocabulary words.
IEP goals being addressed
This might be different for each student in your group, but it is important for you to remember what you are targeting and to be able to tell your students why they are doing what they are doing. This makes therapy more effective - even with young children! In any of our examples of sessions from the section above a variety of goals could be targeted:
- Correct production of /s/ and /z/ in words
- Naming categories and items in categories
- Maintaining on-topic conversation
- Practice strategies for identifying and remembering important information
Materials You Will Need
Having them all listed in one place makes it easy to get materials together in the 5 minutes between groups on a busy day!
Results and Data
What kind of data do you expect to collect from the session? This could be plus/minuses tallied throughout the session, or it could be an evaluation of the finished “product” of the session (e.g. Did the student follow your 2-step directions?). Would it work to run through your word list at the beginning of the session, and again at the end? Or maybe your data is taken at the beginning of the next session, based on information retained? Again, planning ahead will ensure that you leave yourself time and opportunity to collect the data you need.
Possible Adaptations
Make a note about how you might adapt the lesson, if necessary. As you gain experience in the field, and get to know your individual students better, this will come more naturally. But even the most experienced among us find ourselves scrambling for materials if we haven’t planned carefully. Students surprise us every day by needing more support than we expected or surpassing our expectations!
SLPAs and paraprofessionals should always operate within the scope defined by state and national licensing organizations and should only conduct allowable tasks under the supervision of a speech-language pathologist.
