Speech Therapy Pensieve: Part 1

A few days ago I came across two excellent blog posts from Ruth Morgan at Chapel Hill Snippets explaining how she uses Google forms to track student therapy contacts. As a literacy coach, I used Google forms to create my own digital conferring notebook and was itching to use the same approach with my speech therapy students. Ruth created an individual Google doc for each of her students which allowed her to display all therapy notes on a comprehensive spreadsheet. I liked this idea and may end up following Ruth's model but I also wanted to experiment with a single form that could capture all of my therapy notes for all of my students. Below is a screenshot of the live form I'm playing with as well as what the spreadsheet looks like. I will probably enter some dummy data to get a feel for how it will work or not work.

This is what the form will look like on my iPad.

This shot shows the headings for the data I want to collect.

Whenever I create a form in Google docs, I start with what information I will need and how I want it to look in the spreadsheet. In other words, I don't start by creating a form. I begin with sketching out a spreadsheet on paper, then go from there. I want my form to be simple, quick, and flexible. And I want the columns to fit across one sheet of paper in a landscape view. I usually do a test print of what the spreadsheet will look like before I finalize the questions on the form. In the future, when I need to print the information I have collected, I want it to be in a useful format. Please follow the links for the live form and the spreadsheet to take a look, ask any questions, and provide any suggestions or comments.

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Reading, Writing, Languaging

I know languaging isn't a word, but maybe it should be. As a literacy coach, I thought of reading and writing as processes and assisting students to be successful included assessing and observing these processes in action. I was never a big DIBELS fan, mostly because of how the tool was used, not because of the tool itself. I observed DIBELS being administered to waves of students and discrete DIBELS-like tasks used as learning targets for RtI. Troubling to say the least. I found using running records and writing samples to be superior to DIBELS for creating meaningful instruction. I admit that as a speech therapist I struggled with identifying therapy targets based on standardized assessment tools. I also think I over-relied on programs and worksheets. I didn't really have much of a clue about curriculum or instructional models such as workshop. Now I do. I've spent many years observing the positive impact that quality literacy instruction, where process is emphasized over tiny tasks, has on students with language learning difficulties. My hope is that I can meld my experience and knowledge as both a literacy coach and speech therapist to point therapy toward pertinent curricular objectives rather than discrete assessment tasks that may or may not impact a child's languaging process or academic achievement. Wow, that's quite a mouthful. It is easy to get preachy in June. I wonder if I'll feel the same way come December.

This Tagxedo was created with text from Wallach's July 2011 LSHSS article,
 Peeling the Onion of Auditory Processing Disorder: A Language/Curricular-
Based Perspective. Peeling the onion refers to the idea that we need to be
 cautious about focusing on outer layers, such as discrete assessment tasks,
rather than examining curricular performance, which is at the core.