What’s the best way to prepare for a group therapy session? Learn how to prepare, start and run a group therapy session with these 5 tips from eLuma Speech-Language Pathologist, Kendra Fark!
How To Run A Group Therapy Session
1. Start with age, grade, class, and goals then prepare the teachers, parents, and students that you may make adjustments in the first few weeks based on group dynamics for students’ benefit.
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- Spend the first sessions honing in on student personalities, interests, preferences, academic skills and levels of performance, motivating factors, and other factors contributing to success- then adjust.
2. Flexibility! We want the schedule to be perfect from the start, and no one likes the extra work of making changes, but flexibility is key. It is OK to make changes when needed.
3. Don’t feel like goal areas are the only requirement for groups. Sometimes interests, personalities, academic level, skills, etc., are more significant in facilitating successful sessions.
- Social skills groups: Sometimes I have found it beneficial to group a student working on social skills with a student who is not. I have had groups with two students working on social skills struggle to engage and participate despite my best efforts, but once they have a natural peer model of communication skills being targeted or even a peer they were already familiar with and liked, they open up and are more receptive to engaging.
- Relationships: Especially in Middle School and High School students can be involved in social drama and conflict with each other that can interfere with sessions. Sometimes pairing males/females either together or separately can help groups work better.
- Cultural Competence: Be alert of the students’ linguistic, cultural, and other unique factors that would impact the session.
4. Engagement. Strategize how all the students can be engaged in the session.
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- Games: Preparing individualized cards/questions paired with a board game.
- Cooperative Games: Play games in which the group has to “win” a challenge together.
- Shared Text: Design literacy-based sessions on a shared text while targeting individual goals.
- Combined Responses: Have both students answer questions and engage in the activity, and then take data on students’ individual goals in the last couple minutes of the session.
- Support: Encouraging students to help one another with responses if appropriate.
- Model: Model acceptance, encouragement, celebration of strengths, and respect for all.
- Focus Tasks: Have a paper/pencil task for the students to work on when it’s not their “turn” (i.e., drawing pictures of items with their sounds, filling in a chart for their accuracy, articulation coloring page, seek and find, underlining- simple and quick items to maintain focus on session and goal).
5. Privacy. Let parents/guardians/students know that if they would like to discuss specific aspects of their therapy (i.e., goals, progress, etc.), that you will meet separately with them due to privacy needs. Offer to stay on after the other student leaves, meet a few minutes early, or set up a separate time.
It’s important to remember these 5 tips when training your teams on how to facilitate a group therapy session.
Interested in learning more? Check out our recommendations below and learn how eLuma can help your team and students with our online mental health services, school psychology services, speech therapy services and more.
Kendra Fark is a Speech-Language Pathologist in her third year with eLuma Online Therapy. She enjoys quality time with her family, spending time outdoors, and learning new things.