Reporting and monitoring

We’re finally at the end of the school year! It’s that time of year when I evaluate and consider who really needs to continue speech-language services. When possible, I try to exit students before middle school. But when IS it time to let them go?  Throughout my 20 years as an SLP, I’ve provided services covering the lifespan. One of the best (and probably most rewarding) parts of being a...

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ASHA has a great article on dynamic assessment which gives a clear definition of dynamic assessment:  “Dynamic assessment (DA) is a method of conducting a language assessment which seeks to identify the skills that an individual child possesses as well as their learning potential. The dynamic assessment procedure emphasizes the learning process and accounts for the amount and nature of exa...

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Did you know that SALT is a great tool to use when assessing very young children?  Many users think of SALT as a tool for school-aged children. While SALT does offer several databases for school-aged children, language sample analysis should also be in every clinician’s toolbox when assessing the very young and preschool-aged children as well!  Taking a language sample with very young chi...

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Should I include pauses in my transcript? The Awkward Pause! We’ve all been there. Maybe the awkward pause was during a casual conversation with a friend, or when you were talking to someone new at a party and ran out of interesting things to say. Pragmatically, we feel compelled to fill that pause with something! Part of learning to take great language samples is overcoming our fear of the aw...

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Last November at ASHA we decided to focus our efforts on documenting progress in our talk, “Documenting Language Therapy Progress in School Settings.” It was exciting (and a bit nerve wracking) to present to a packed room, but we were so grateful for everyone who attended! Judging by the number of SLPs who showed up, it’s fair to say that the demand to demonstrate accountability as a school-bas...

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We just wrapped up the second trimester at school and I finished writing out progress notes for nearly 60 kids on caseload, all of whom have multiple goals on which to report. Every trimester I’m a little daunted by the fact that I have to write progress notes on top of managing therapy sessions, evals and IEPs - it’s another thing to get done. I need to be pretty focused if I’m going to ever g...

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As school-based SLPs head back to school this fall, we no doubt will be thinking about impending IEPs.  All of those before and after school meetings are an essential part of our job.  Most IEP meetings go off without a hitch and we walk away feeling confident that we are making a difference in the student’s education.  Other IEPs can be more litigious with debates over services,...

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In the first installment of this article we discussed the case of Brendan Dassey, a young man with language disorder who was tried and convicted of murder despite profoundly problematic police interrogation methods. Brendan was a minor at the time. Brendan’s case was both tragic and fascinating. It was even the focus of a Netflix documentary, Making a Murderer. More importantly, it raises big q...

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So there is this odd thing that happens once in a while when you are using SALT: a measure comes back with a seemingly nonsensical standard deviation (SD) value. We’ve seen them come in as low as 21 SDs below the mean. And it’s not a mistake. Why does this happen? Is there anything valuable you can learn from this result? How can you report this result (for example on an IEP report) in a meanin...

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