4 Goals to Target Self-Monitoring in Speech Therapy

You’ve got older students, and you’ve been working with these kids for a while.

You’ve probably made a ton of progress.

You may have even started years ago with a sound in isolation, or single words with models.

And here you are, working on conversation or reading.

Congrats! You’re a rockstar!

Wait, what’s that? Your progress has plateaued? 

You’ve been stuck at this level for too long?

Sound familiar?

In my experience, one of the biggest roadblocks to that last leg of therapy is the skills of self-monitoring.

Because when they’re with you by themselves or in a small group and you’re working on “speech,” they’re at 99% accuracy. But as soon as they leave, or as soon as they are given a distraction, their accuracy PLUMMETS. 

Now, one aspect of this is their mindset, which is why I like to target a growth mindset with my students (more on that here), and how to use problem-solving to stay in a growth mindset. 

But the other aspect is self-monitoring. In order to get through that last leg of the speech therapy race to mastery, they just have to be able to hear and correct any errors without the help of their trusted and very-valued SLP.

Goal #1 for self-monitoring

When provided with a grade-level reading passage, Students will highlight words that contain their target sound with 90% accuracy before reading out loud

This sounds simple, but kids LOVE to just run through and highlight all the letters that correspond with their sounds. Depending on the target, you may need to work with them on listening for their sound and not just highlighting letters. (A student should highlight the word “nation” for an SH sound, for example, but may need to be reminded that this contains their sound even though they don’t see the letters SH).

Goal #2 for self-monitoring

While reading aloud from a grade-level passage, Students will mark any sounds produced in error with 90% accuracy.

The most efficient way I have found to work on this goal is by giving the student the opportunity to use a good, juicy marker and asking them simply to put a dot over any words they’d like to “go back and fix” as they read. This is a way that they can make these judgments “live” without disrupting the flow of their reading too much.

If this level for this goal feels too difficult, there is another way I target a similar skill. This goal could even be used as an STO for the one above.

Goal #3 for self-monitoring

After reading a sentence out loud, Students will accurately identify the most and least accurate productions of their target sound, with 80% accuracy.

When I work on this goal, I word it as most and least “favorite” productions, and we may start with a short sentence and then work our way up to a paragraph. This task requires slightly less effort throughout than how it’s written in goal #2, above, but still gets at the same concept, which is for students to be able to notice errored productions as they happen. The inclusion of “most favorite” productions is also a way to keep the session positive.

Goal #4 for self-monitoring

During the conversation, Students will self-monitor productions of their target speech sound to make an accurate estimate of overall accuracy, judged by being within 15% of SLP-collected data, in 2 out of 3 trials, measured over three consecutive data-collection sessions. 

Here’s how a task targeting this goal might work. Likely, you might want to give the student a heads up that you’ll be listening for their speech sound, and that they should too. Then, after a conversational speech sample, during which you have collected data, you might ask the student, “What percentage of those [sounds] do you think were correct?” Then, you’d compare their answer to the data you collected.

Of course, a student’s availability to give a percentage will vary widely. So you could adapt this goal in many ways:

With younger students I might simply ask them to rank accuracy as:

• almost none, just some, about half, most, almost all

With slightly older students, I may show them a number line with 0%, 25%, 50%, 75%, and 100% on it, and ask them to indicate their accuracy on the line.

You can also loosen up the “15%” number in the goal itself if needed.

Hopefully, these ideas and this goal bank can help you work these higher-level goals into your sessions and IEPs as needed!