I’m always looking for ways to improve myself as a person and as an SLP. This year, I’m going to focus on health. I will try to eat more vegetables, less meat and less night time snacks. I’m going to try to walk my dogs every day. I’m also going to continue a my focus from last year – a better work/life balance. 2016 was all about finding the right job for me. I’m feeling more balanced than ever and wanted to share a few of my work related New Year’s Resolutions. Maybe you can join me on some of them!
1) Work less than 42 hours a week. This means I have 2 “extra hours” to use as flex time outside of my contracted hours. I will work towards using them more efficiently and effectively so that I don’t need to spend so much time outside of school working on school things.
2) Keep up with PD videos on speechpathology.com. My district pays for our subscription and I definitely neglect keeping up with interesting PD topics! This year, I want to watch at least one every month to help me be the best, educated SLP I can be.
3) Increase parent communication. I try to contact every parent every month as a general goal but sometime even that is hard to do! I want to continue striving to do this because parent communication is just oh so important!
4) Keep better data and progress monitoring information. About a month ago I signed up for SLP Toolkit and it is AMAZING. I hope to finish entering all of my students and their goals in the next week and get some “baseline” information. I cannot wait to save time using this site for the rest of the school year.
5) Purge!! My husband and I recently purchased a new house and are downsizing quite a bit. I have way too many speech toys/games/materials and need to purge. PS: Watch the documentary Minimalism on Netflix if you haven’t yet. It’s so good and inspired me to stop buying so many silly things and get rid of tons of stuff I don’t need or use.
6) Stay positive! This has also been a big focus of mine in the past year and I want to continue to get better at training my brain to always look for the good and be more flexible. I’d love to meditate more often which I think will help too!
7) Get better and learn more about collaborating with teachers and doing “push in” therapy. This style of therapy is very new to me but is about 50% of my therapy time in a week so I hope to increase my knowledge about how to be most effective.
8) Come up with a faster process for evaluations. They take me wayyyyy longer than they should! Something has got to change. I’d love to hear ideas if you have any!
9) Organize my books. I need a better way to catalogue and sort my books so I know what books target certain skills or have specific themes.
10) Leave my desk space clean on Fridays. I’ve found that Mondays are 100x better when I stay after a bit on Friday to clean my desk and prep a bit.
What are your New Year’s Resolutions? I’d love to hear!
{thanks for reading}
I started using SLP Toolkit last winter and I’ve used it so much this year–I just LOVE it! Definitely makes keeping up with assessments and progress much easier!
Me too!!! I wish I hadn’t gone this long without it! Easily the best way to do informal assessments and progress monitoring!
I can’t wait to hear what you come up with for a faster process for evaluations!
Thank you!! Me too 😉