Narrative Intervention: Beyond "Cute" Stories and Lesson Plans (with Jane Gebers)

About this episode

The episode discusses the importance of structured storytelling in therapy and features an interview with Jane Gebers on narrative intervention techniques.

When you’re teaching storytelling with students, do your lessons feel kind of…random? I used to feel like this a lot when I was a school SLP, so if you’ve ever had a “throw spaghetti at the wall” therapy session that felt all over the place, I get it. The truth is, repetition and drill is not the enemy. If you ONLY focus on unstructured activities, you’re probably seeing students getting overwhelmed, not remembering to apply important language skills (like syntax, vocabulary words, etc). But if you ONLY stick with structured activities, kids never get the chance to apply and practice. That’s why leveraging books and story grammar as part of your “therapy toolkit” can be such a powerful tool to bridge this gap…even though many storytelling activities look like simple “cutesy” activities on the surface. (and if you understand the “why” it’s much easier to apply for older kids who are kind of over coming to therapy). In this second half of my interview with my colleague Jane Gebers, we talk about how to use tools like dynamic assessment and narrative intervention to make therapy structured , rigorous , and functional . Jane L. Gebers is the author of the popular resource, Books Are…

People in this episode

Host: Dr. Karen Dudek-Brannan

Guest: Jane Gebers

Topics covered

• storytelling
• narrative intervention
• speech-language pathology
• education
• therapy techniques

Keywords

• storytelling
• narrative intervention
• speech therapy
• language skills
• dynamic assessment

Mentioned in this episode

Books & works: Books Are for Talking, Too!

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