Hi friend!
Let's chat about providing feedback in your therapy sessions.
Feedback is a powerful teaching tool.
(Hattie &Timperley, 2007)
The best positive feedback you can provide is active listening (e.g. nodding along, smiling, facing the student) and recasting (Cleave et al., 2015).
If the student doesn't know the answer or their response is missing information, there are a variety of ways you can provide support:
💬 Corrective feedback
💬 Two-step prompting (read more here)
💬 Visuals cues
💬 Refer back to the text in the story
In this article, we'll be focusing on ✨ corrective feedback ✨
If the child is missing information or doesn't produce the desired response, a correction is needed. Effective corrective feedback has three main characteristics:
1️⃣ focus on what the student should do/say and minimize attention to the incorrect response
2️⃣ provide it immediately
3️⃣ be specific
Here's why - students need information about their response and what they can do to improve it. A successful correction leads to the child producing the correct response (Watkins & Slocum, 2004). We also want our feedback to be immediate because practiced errors are likely to continue. As soon as an error is made, a correction should follow. For example, if a child is retelling a story and skips the setting, the clinician should stop the student immediately and make an appropriate correction. It is important not to wait until the end of the story retell to provide the correction because when feedback is delayed, it's less effective than when it is delivered immediately (Archer & Hughes, 2011). Lastly, we want to provide specific feedback because hints/general prompting can confuse or frustrate the student, as well as decrease motivation.
Here's an example:
Student is retelling the beginning of a story using the story grammar main character, setting, initiating event as a framework. During the retell, they skip over the setting.
SLP: Let's pause and describe the setting. Where did the story happen and what holiday were they celebrating?
In this example, the SLP stopped the student immediately without drawing attention to the fact that they forgot to include it in their retell. They then provided the student with the specific information they needed to include
I hope this was helpful! 💛
References:
Spencer, T. & Peterson, B. (2020). Narrative Intervention: Principles to Practice. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 51(4). Read the article