Welcome to Week 4 in the Speech Therapy Makeover series! I’m challenging myself to “make over” some traditional therapy tasks so they will be more person-centered (functional, meaningful, and relevant for the people we work with). We know that person-centered care offers the best results across the board for outcomes, patient satisfaction, and efficiency of meeting goals.

Week 4 Speech Therapy Makeover Task: Workbook reading tasks

The Challenge: Workbook activities can be overstructured, and improvement with workbooks doesn’t always correlate to improving everyday life. Also, the pre-made reading tasks are not always meaningful and relevant topics for the people we work with (a bored or unmotivated Person translates to less carry-over to everyday life). Our aim is to enter into our Person’s world (not bring them into the SLP world), so why not use Person-centered reading materials to practice skills and strategies for comprehension?

Person-Centered Ideas: Use reading material your Person already owns and has used in the past. This can range in complexity from simple (reading nutrition labels, instructions, garden seeds, menus, cookbooks, etc) to more complex (magazines, newspapers, books of the Person’s choosing, work materials, etc). I often give an assignment for someone to bring in their own reading material so we can practice in therapy–and then assign how that skill will be practiced over the coming week at home. Because of the variety of goals my People have had, we have used anything from People Magazine to research journal articles to work policies. It may be that using a workbook task is best for teaching a skill or strategy, but that should always be followed by applying to the reading material that is Person-centered.

Setting Goals: Instead of writing a generic goal (“Reading comprehension for paragraph-length tasks will improve to 80% acc.”), I am working on writing more person-centered goals this year (“The patient will improve reading comprehension to be able to follow 4-step recipe using strategies independently” or “The patient will improve reading comprehension speed and understanding by reading 100 pages in his chosen book over 30 days, using note-taking independently to enhance comprehension”).

Thanks for reading! If you would like more person-centered therapy ideas, please check out the Home Sweet Home Series and the Back To Work Series. Be sure to follow on Facebook or Pinterest, or sign up for email updates to receive the series right in your inbox. If you have any ideas of speech therapy tasks you think need a “makeover”, email me at [email protected].