Conscious Practice and Blocked Practice in Pediatric Motor Speech Therapy

Full transcript

Guest SLP: My name is Laura [last name to confirm]. I'm a speech-language pathologist who specializes in speech sound disorders. Have you ever thought, "I would love to chat with a researcher, those who are in the lab conducting research to move our field forward, to ask them what we should move away from in our clinical practice and what we should move toward in order to be more effective, more efficient"? Me too. So let's do it.

Nicole: Hi, it's Nicole coming in from the NYU Motor Speech Lab. I am the lead treating speech-language pathologist at the lab, which is directed by Dr. Maria Grigos. For the past six years, we have been looking at the Dynamic Temporal and Tactile Cueing technique, or DTTC, developed by Dr. Edythe Strand, and whether it is an efficacious treatment approach for children diagnosed with childhood apraxia of speech. We are hopeful to get funding for another study. More news to come on that, hopefully soon, and that would be in the fall.

I did my undergrad at NYU, and I did my master's, believe it or not, I graduated in '99, at Columbia, and Dr. Grigos was my professor there. So we have had a really long relationship, and it's been awesome.

So one thing we are always talking about at the NYU Motor Speech Lab in pediatric motor speech therapy is conscious practice. And I am all for this therapy being fun and joyful. But what we have to remember is that if the child is engaged in play, maybe they're looking at a toy or they're at a table and their attention is not on you, and they're saying the target, that is not conscious practice.

It is okay for you to have fun in your sessions. But just remember, when you want to be working on your target, you want to have the child be looking at you and really focused on your multisensory cueing, so that they can really be thinking about what their articulators are doing, so that we really can ensure that they're learning.

We talk a lot at NYU about making the shift to pediatric motor speech therapy, because it can be very different than your traditional therapy. And one of the things that I thought was a little weird in the beginning, and felt a little bit uncomfortable with, was the idea of blocked practice, or practicing the same target repetitively, over and over again in a block, for, let's say, 10 to 20 repetitions. That felt really strange to me when I first started, you know, the study as the treating clinician. And years later now, there's real brilliance to that, because this blocked practice is really where the learning is happening.

So if there's one little tidbit that I could tell you right now about organizing your sessions, it's to take some of your targets and work on them in blocked practice.