Welcome to Week 5 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 5 Speech Therapy Makeover Task: Workbook writing tasks

The Challenge: Workbook activities can be overstructured, and improvement with workbooks doesn’t always correlate to improving everyday life. Pre-made writing tasks may also not hold meaning and may not elicit words that the Person wants/needs to use. Research has shown that the most efficient way to gain back language is to practice the language someone needs to use. We are most likely to make a difference in someone’s everyday life if we use/practice/demonstrate/model with the actual words the Person we treat wants and needs to use.  So instead of using workbook writing tasks, why not adjust this task to be person-centered?

Person-Centered Ideas: Practice writing skills and strategies using material that your person wants/needs to write, and then assign the same meaningful, relevant writing for a home program. The more I understand what my People want/need to write, the more I am pulling in texting, social media, and computer use. Here are some ideas that I’ve used with people for different levels of writing:

*Single words: Grocery list, Family names, Fast food choices, Texting (CART has a cool application for this if this is a priority for the Person)

*Phrase and sentences: Cards, social media phrases (for Facebook), to-do list, phone calendar, sentences to use in Script Training

*Paragraphs and more: Emails, work reports or policies (Lots of ideas on how to structure this in the Back To Work Series)

Setting Goals: Instead of writing a generic goal (“The patient will write sentence level tasks with 90% acc”), I am working on writing more person-centered goals this year (“The patient will improve written expression to be able to type a 4-sentence email and send independently” or “The patient will improve word level written expression by texting wife pick-up location on 5 occasions, reported by pt/family”).

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].