November 28, 2023 · 2:02 · Practice · Making the shift
Key Elements of Practice, Part 1: Structured Practice
The first in a series on the key elements of practice developed by the Case Speech Lab and the NYU Motor Speech Lab: what structured practice looks like in a session.
Full transcript
Hi, it's Nicole coming in from the NYU Motor Speech Lab. We are just so invigorated after this year's ASHA conference, and how amazing to see so many of you in person.
Over the next series of videos, I wanted to quickly talk to you all about the key elements of practice that the Case Speech Lab and the NYU Motor Speech Lab came up with, so that we can all speak the same language about making the shift to motor speech therapy. We love this term, "making the shift," because it is very different from traditional therapy.
The key elements we have identified, which change the approach to treatment, are: structured practice; conscious practice; using multimodal cues that really focus on movement; practicing prosody from the start; not engaging in negative practice, so always doing positive practice; and really engaging the child in the actual practice.
Today I'm just going to talk about the first topic, which is structured practice. So what does this look like in practice? We do make these sessions joyful, I want to say that. But the focus really is on getting the repetitions of the target word, because that's where progress happens: in those repetitions, and with the feedback from you.
So we have minimal distractions in the room. We always have a reinforcement that the child is working toward, but the reinforcement comes after the block, not in the middle of the block. In the middle, we are structured and we are working.
The other thing to consider is that, in order for motor learning to really happen, we use a varied practice schedule. So we have modified blocks: of your five target words, you might have a smaller block of five to ten repetitions and then a longer block of 20, and this is all done very purposefully.
