The Teletherapy Playbook: Proven Strategies for Faster Progress in Virtual Speech Sessions
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Why did teletherapy usage explode during the pandemic and what does the data show?
It's no secret that teletherapy speech-language services soared during the pandemic. Telepractice use among SLPs jumped from just 3.9% before the pandemic to 88% in 2021. And while teletherapy services are not quite as prevalent now as they were at the height of the turn to teletherapy for its convenience and its accessibility. And for good reason, we are also seeing a huge increase in the number of children needing services. One analysis found a 110% increase in speech disorder diagnoses in children aged 0 to 12 in... 2022 compared to pre-pandemic. So we are seeing all of these children needing services. And when our families and schools are struggling to find enough local SLPs to serve their needs, then teletherapy is a viable option to serve those gaps.
I'm speech language pathologist, Carrie Clark. And in today's episode of the Speech and Language Kids podcast, We are going to dive into exactly how to make the most of virtual speech therapy sessions so we can work on closing those gaps one child at a time. So welcome to the podcast. If you are new here, this is a weekly podcast that I do. I also record these live inside my membership site, The Hub, which is where you can find access to our discussion board where we have conversations and we support each other. And also all of our therapy materials are in there, all of our therapy plans and pathways. And we'll be talking about some of that today as well. Hey, Suzanne, welcome. This was kind of a surprise recording.
Usually I do these in the afternoons, but my husband is homesick today and I'm taking him to the doctor later. So I wanted to jump in now and get this recorded. So Welcome, Suzanne. If you have any questions, you can stick those in the chat as we go along. All right, so I'm going to start off today with a story about how not to do teletherapy. And this is a cautionary tale for you from my own experiences. So when I had my private practice right after leaving the public school system, One of the things that I did to get more clients and to fill out my caseload was to do teletherapy and I did it through a big company, a big organization, and I was insecure about my teletherapy skills and I wanted to just kind of prove that I could do it.
So what I tried to do is I tried to go it alone without getting support, without asking for help, and without trying to really make a connection with the school that I was working with. So I'm in Missouri. I was working with a school in California. So obviously not something I'm going to go visit in person, but I didn't want to bother anyone, right? I just wanted to get in there, do my job and be done and not have to bother the teachers or the staff or put more work on them. And so what I did was I had several kids that I was working with, with varying degrees of success. Some of them went really well. Some of them just kind of sat there staring at the screen and I didn't have... a person sitting, an adult sitting there with them to help.
And so I would just kind of talk at them and nothing would really get done. And it was not effective therapy, let me tell you. But I had this one kid who was doing really, really well. And I can't remember... what skills we were working on. But I remember I was just working on what was in the IEP. And I remember getting him to the point where I was ready to dismiss. And I felt so good about the fact that I had helped this child and solved all his problems all on my own. Good for me. Little baby speech therapist, Carrie. And so I emailed the teacher and I said, hey, I'm ready to dismiss. He's doing great. Let's schedule the meeting. And the teacher replied back, well, what about his lisp? And I kid you not guys, I didn't know he had one.
And so this is not entirely on me. It is, but it's not entirely on me because the lisp was not in the IEP. So they gave me an IEP that didn't include the fact that he had a lisp. And also the connection between us was not good. The audio quality was terrible. And so I couldn't hear that he was lisping. There was no way for me to know, but the part that is on me is that I didn't reach out and try to get that connection with the teacher and to ask questions and to build a relationship at the beginning so that, you know, maybe I would have known that he had a lisp.
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