Welcome to Week 6 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 6 Speech Therapy Makeover Task: Workbook Listening (Auditory Comprehension) Tasks 

The Challenge: Workbook activities can be overstructured, and improvement with workbooks doesn’t always correlate to improving everyday life. This was clear to me when someone I loved had a stroke and proceeded through the traditional workbook listening hierarchy (1, 2, 3-step directions, short paragraphs, long paragraphs, etc), only to be sent home and be blown away by the difficulty of listening in real-life situations: At doctor’s appointments, over voicemails, or in conversation in a family setting. We need to practice listening skills in a way that will be most likely to make a difference in someone’s everyday life, and so we should consider practice/demonstration/modeling with the actual words and listening situations the Person we treat wants and needs to use.

Person-Centered Ideas: Practice listening/comprehension skills and strategies using material or situations that your person wants to do, and then assign the same meaningful, relevant situation for a home program. For example, if listening to phone voicemails is a goal, practice it in therapy and determine how to best use skills/strategies, and then assign voicemails to be listened to during the week (enlist family/friends to leave voicemails if you need to create the situation!).

*Consider ESL websites for short, realistic scenarios (2 minutes or less). ESL-Lab.com is a favorite and includes comprehension questions for realistic scenarios such as Restaurant Orders, Fake Voicemails, or Hotel Reservations.

*Use Phone Calls in therapy to practice comprehension in context (without isolating it from the necessary expression component). Check out Answering Phone Calls and Making Low Pressure Phone Calls from my blog.

*For higher-level listening, use meeting or interview content (see Back To Work Series), or pull up relevant topics on TED Talks (samples here!) or YouTube.

Setting Goals: Our patients are each unique, and their goals in therapy may be unique! Instead of writing a generic goal (“The patient will follow 3-step directions with 80% acc.”), I am working on writing more person-centered goals this year (“The patient will improve auditory comprehension to relay 4 pieces of information from personal phone calls (doctor’s office, friends, etc)” or “The patient will improve auditory comprehension of work-related presentation (10+ minutes in duration) to 90% acc when reviewed with open-ended questions”).

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].