So Many IEP Goals,
So Little Time...

In 2017, after having worked as a speech-language pathologist in schools for over 15 years, I hit a wall.  I was writing mid-year progress reports for my students and, as I referred back to their IEP goals, I got that sinking feeling: I had not gotten around to targeting some of my students’ IEP goals.  I felt like I was dropping the ball on the most important part of my job – helping my students learn what they needed to in therapy so that they could be more successful in their classrooms.

 

But I knew why I was falling short; as a school-based SLP, I had so many other responsibilities – meetings, paperwork, consultations, professional development, and what felt like a million other tasks that must get done.  The sad truth is that all these other responsibilities eclipsed most of my planning time.  This resulted in therapy that was reactive, lacked cohesion, and, quite frankly, fell far short of what I wanted to do for my students.  As speech-language pathologists, our primary passion and purpose is to help the people we work with, and it can be so demoralizing when our other obligations limit our ability to do this.

 

For a while, I had been drawn to graphic organizers and their power to support language.  I also loved using storybooks in my therapy sessions.  The concept of StoryWhys hit me like a ton of bricks one day: What if I combined these powerful graphic organizers with the storybooks kids (and educators) love?  Six years later, I have developed, trialed, and fine-tuned my StoryWhys book companion system.  And guess what? It works!  My planning time has gone way down, my therapy feels fun and effective, my students love our StoryWhys sessions, I no longer stress about mixed language groups, and, when it comes time to write those progress reports, there’s so much to write about!

 

If you are a speech-language pathologist who is looking for ways to ...

• maximize the effectiveness of your therapy

• minimize planning time

• provide cohesive therapy for your individual and mixed language groups

 

... you are in the right place!