by Amani Abdul-Hadi, Jordan
Covid-19 pandemic adversely affected various aspects of life throughout the world. Among those sectors that have been impacted is health care professionals, including speech and language pathology.
For instance, the only recognized form in delivering speech and language therapy sessions at the Hearing and Speech Clinic/ University of Jordan was face to face sessions inside the clinic. However, the quarantine imposed the disruption of such form of services.
Therefore, the staff has to develop several techniques and skills to ensure the continuity of delivering such services to the needy clients and patients, as well as keeping in touch with their progress.
Furthermore, it has been a necessity to pass such knowledge and techniques for future to be SLPs, in order to enhance their practical skills in various types and styles of therapy sessions, so that they can provide all possible ways to serve their clients.
One of the biggest challenges in delivering teletherapy sessions is to engage pediatric population via screens throughout the entire 45 minutes in order to achieve the planned therapy goals! This entails preparing an attractive interactive session. The following are effective tips and tricks, which we adapted in teletherapy sessions to make the sessions productive yet interesting:
- Varying activities has a great influence in keeping the child’s attention and focus throughout the entire session. This can be done using technological features including: green screen, power points, and internet resources in which worksheets as well as interactive games can be created.
- Varying intonation is highly important in attracting the child’s attention.
- Reinforcement, whether verbal praising, or playing electronic games prepared specially to reinforce the child once achieving the required task.
- Linking the target goals and the homeworks given to the child, as much as possible, with the educational requirements. In this way, generalization of the goals can be easily facilitated, as well as language and speech therapy sessions will not burden caregivers.
The attached video shows an example of how students of Hearing and Speech Sciences designed and applied creative activities to achieve therapy targets.
Amani A. Abdul-Hadi, M. Sc. SLP
Certified Speech Language Pathologist
Hearing and Speech Clinic / University of Jordan
Part time Lecturer at the Hearing and Speech Sciences Department / University of Jordan