292: How to Manage a Large Caseload Without Working Nights
Show Notes:
This week on SLP Coffee Talk, Hallie is diving into a topic that every school-based SLP with a mile-long caseload needs—how to manage it all without burning the midnight oil. ☕📚 If you’ve ever lugged a backpack full of IEPs home (only to ignore it out of pure exhaustion), this episode is your reminder that you don’t have to sacrifice your evenings—or your sanity—to be a great SLP.
From simplifying prep with flexible resources to setting boundaries that actually stick, Hallie shares her tried-and-true strategies that let you leave work at work. Whether you’re sipping reheated coffee between sessions or catching this episode on your commute, get ready to feel seen, supported, and equipped with real-life tools that work. ✨
Save this one—it’s your caseload survival guide in podcast form!
Here's what we learned:
- Why working smarter (not harder) is the secret to thriving with 65+ students
- How one article, game, or video can hit multiple IEP goals
- The magic of no-prep, print-and-go resources (and why they’re not “lazy”)
- Leveraging goal banks + digital data tools for faster IEPs and reports
- Creating routines that honor your contract hours (and your peace of mind)
- Why protecting your time doesn’t make you a “bad SLP”—it makes you a sustainable one
RESOURCES
Learn more about Hallie Sherman and SLP Elevate:
🎧 Check out the Secondary Secret Podcast here!
JOKE OF THE WEEK:
Q: Why did the teacher wear sunglasses on the first day of school?
A: Because her students were so bright
Where We Can Connect:
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TRANSCRIPT
00:00:00 Hallie: Hey there, SLP. I have a quick question for you. What if you could have just one book on your shelf that actually gets the challenges of working with middle school and high school students? Well, it's here. Well, actually, the preorder is here, but, hey, I'm so excited to let you know that my brand new book, The Secondary SLP Guide, is available for preorder. And when you preorder, you get an exclusive bonus that you won't wanna miss. It is packed with real talk strategies, quick tips, and inspiration that you can use with your middle school and high school students or all year long.
00:00:40 Hallie: This is the perfect book for a book club, a grad student group, or just flipping through when you're stuck and in a IEP writing spiral. So head to speechtimefun.com/preorder, or head to my Instagram and send me a DM with the word preorder, and I will send you the link so you can preorder now. And I cannot wait for you to get your hands on this book in November, but the sooner you grab it, the better the bonus.
00:01:18 Hallie: Welcome to SLP Coffee Talk, the podcast designed exclusively for speech language pathologists who work with older students, grades four through 12. I am your host, Hallie Sherman, your SLP behind Speech Time Fun, the Speech Retreat Conference, and the SLP Elevate membership. And I'm thrilled to bring you conversations, strategies, and insights that will give you the jolt of inspiration that you need. Whether you're tuning in during your morning commute, on a break in between sessions, or even during a well deserved relaxation time, I am here for you each and every week. Let's do this SLPs
00:02:01 Hallie: Hey. Hey there, SLP friends. Welcome back to another episode of SLP Coffee Talk, the podcast that fuels you with real talk, practical tips, and that jolt of inspiration that you need to survive and thrive as a school based SLP. Today's episode is gonna hit probably close to home. How to manage a large caseload without working nights. Because if you ever ever left work with a backpack full of unfinished paperwork, IEPs, and progress monitoring forms, this one is for you. Support that coffee or maybe you reheat it for the third time, and let's talk about how we can lighten the load and keep our sanity this school year. Okay.
00:02:45 Hallie: So first things first. If you're juggling 50 plus students, I'm gonna stop there. I always stop my counting at 65. I usually ended my year around 70 something, but it got just depressing after that. So I stopped it. But I know many of you have caseloads of eighty, ninety, a 100, and you're juggling it all. Plus, combined with mixed groups, limited planning time, IEP meetings, writing the IEPs, faculty meetings. You are not alone. It is a lot. But here is what I learned after so many years in the school with a large caseload myself and two young kids at home. You can meet your students' goals and still have a life after 3PM or whatever your contractual time ends.
00:03:39 Hallie: Let's be real. The secret, it's not working harder. It is working smarter with systems and reusable materials and resources that will do the heavy lifting for you. So first things first, let's talk about using one resource for as many groups and goals as possible. This is my one utmost favorite ways to reduce the chaos. If you follow me on social media, what if you don't yet, go ahead and follow me on social at Speech Time Fun and all the things. But that's something I talk about all the time.
00:04:15 Hallie: One resource across multiple groups and multiple goals. I'm not saying you're targeting the same goal across all your groups or even every student in that group. Yes. Every student has a different IEP goal, and we must honor those. That doesn't mean you need a completely different materials for every session. You can base use the same base activity like a text passage, a video, a wordless picture book, a game, and you can target vocabulary, grammar, inferencing, WH questions, summarizing, articulation, social skills, whatever, all depending on what each individual student needs from that activity.
00:04:58 Hallie: It's just changing your questioning, changing your probing, and changing your strategy. What does each student need? Do they need a visual aid? Do they need chunking of information? Do they need repetition? Do they need a sentence strip, a carrier phrase to get started? Do they need it to be taught the strategy of context clues? Do they need a graphic organizer? What do they need? You can do it all with one activity. And you can even use one activity more than how it was intended. You can take a task card game from, like, inside of SLP Elevate. And it might be for summarizing.
00:05:35 Hallie: You can ask your student working on main idea, a main idea question. You can ask your student that's working on WH questions, a WH question. Even your articulation student can still participate in that activity. They can be the language model, and they can use passages bombarded with their sound. Okay. Inside SLP elevate, our monthly themes are built this way. Every single month, you get a brand new theme with a variety of activities that are easily adapted to be used for a variety of goals. Even our meeting passages come with those follow-up activities.
00:06:07 Hallie: You can do that one activity and give each student the graphic organizer that they need, the follow-up activity that they need. They could all work on their individual goal with that same article. And the task card games, again, you can easily adapt it to work on other goals. Each month, you get YouTube cheat sheets filled with prompts for the various goals. So you can just take one thing and use it. We have so much other things to worry about in our day. Don't let the materials overwhelm be something that holds you back and something that makes you have to take a ton of work home. Okay?
00:06:46 Hallie: Again, use one article, one task or game, and it can be flexed across grade levels, goal areas, make it easy to prep less, and still individualize your sessions. It doesn't make you a bad SLP using one resource all day long. Okay. So now, tip number one. Simplify your prep with no prep and tech tools. So here's the reality. Most of us only see our students, like, once or twice a week, and that's not a lot of time. So we don't need complicated plans. We just need effective ones. So focus on building a toolbox of no prep materials that are grab and go.
00:07:27 Hallie: Articles, graphic organizers, books that you can just grab off the shelf, digital activities that can work on any device. All you need is a Chromebook, tablet, if you're lucky to have a smart board, realizing videos, like YouTube videos and using Edpuzzle, games like Bamboozle, and Google activities, like Google slide activities. I have tons of them inside of SLP Elevate. Okay? Inside SLP Elevate, you get all of that done for you resources. You get graphic organizers, print and go articles, digital games, boomedex, database of ed puzzles. So you can just click open up a goal you want, click a video, and go. Okay? When your prep is simple and repeatable and tech friendly, you can save hours each week without sacrificing your students' progress.
00:08:15 Hallie: And also in between each session, you can actually go to the bathroom or jot down that Medicaid billing that you need to do instead of preparing the next sessions activity. You just use it with the next group as well. Alright. Step number two, save yourself time so you're not spending all your time at work. We're bringing a ton of work home. There's no reward for being the last car in the parking lot. Use a goal bank that you trust. You're writing a lot of IUPs, and I know that crafting goals can be a major time suck. Having a goal bank already aligned with, like, middle school and high school skills saves you hours.
00:08:49 Hallie: That's why inside of SLP elevate, we have and we have a goal bank that's upgraded by different, like, skill levels, skills, like social skills, our tech, life skills, AAC, things like that. So you can go there. Okay? They're functional. They're measurable. They're easy to track. They're and it'll save you time. It's a starting point. You don't have to use it as is. It'll give you that, like, I never thought of a goal like that. Let me sometimes it could be hard just to think of things. So use our goal bank as a starting point when you're not sure what to work on. Okay?
00:09:24 Hallie: And also when your goals are clear and achievable, progress monitoring becomes so much more straightforward, which brings me to the next tip is making progress monitoring easier and also coming up with the goal easier. A lot of times that is what takes so much time is, you know, doing evaluations and deciding how and monitoring that progress. But when we get more data, when we're evaluating our students, we can do a better job of coming up with appropriate goals for them, and then it makes it easier to monitor their progress. So inside of SLP Elevate, we have baseline tools.
00:10:00 Hallie: We have informal assessment tools. Okay? We have progress monitoring tools so that you can just use what we have, make more edge more confident decisions in what your students need. Spend less time trying to figure it out. And then you're gonna see the progress because we also have a digital data tool and paper data tools if you need. And then when it's some time for progress monitoring time, you know exactly how they are doing. You're not scrambling to try to figure it all out. You have that information there that you can utilize.
00:10:32 Hallie: When your goals are specific and measurable, like we just talked about, it's easier to know what you're looking for. So use SLP elevates quick assessment tools, data tracking tools, and, of course, the progress monitoring probes that makes things less stressful. Okay? It helps you stay organized and focused so you're not scrambling quarter to quarter. And tip number four, and this one's a serious one, setting boundaries. This is your friendly reminder. Your contract hours are there for a reason.
00:11:04 Hallie: Yes. Emergencies happen. IEP season sometimes hits hard. But if you're staying late every night or bringing home tons of work every single night, something has got to give. Set some boundaries around when you respond to emails. I don't respond to emails after three. I never put my work email on my phone. Nope. I only look at it while I'm at work. Set boundaries around when you're going to plan. Like, I I'm only gonna plan Monday mornings or Friday afternoons before I leave. Set that decision and stick with it. Set boundaries around when you're gonna walk away from the laptop.
00:11:44 Hallie: Set boundaries around, I'm gonna take lunch every single day and walk out of my therapy closet and go find who are the faculty in the room and have a conversation, go for a walk around the building. Get out and move your body and be social and enjoy going to work, not being just set and, glued to the computer. You don't need to be a superhero. You need smart systems, okay, reusable resources and the confidence to say that's enough for today. Okay?
00:12:16 Hallie: So let's recap. How are we gonna work smarter, not harder this school year. If you want to manage your caseload without living at compute your school or at your computer, Let's use one flexible resource for as many groups and goals as possible. That doesn't mean we're gonna target every goal with every student with the same goal. We can use one book, one wordless picture book, one article, one YouTube video, one game, one something, even if it was not how that goal was in that resource was intended to be using. Use. Simplify your prep.
00:12:5Hallie: How many can you utilize no prep activities such as even bamboozle, Edpuzzle, Boom Cards, Google Slide activities, print and go, resources. I like to just print out five copies of the article and put it in a dry erase sleeve, and I only need that, like, few copies. And the student just use a dry erase marker and done. Okay? How can we prep less? How can we use a goal bank to speed up IEP writing? How can we use tools such as progress monitoring tools, informal assessment tools, digital data tools that will help you gather the information that you need. So writing reports and progress reports will take less time and you'll be much more confident.
00:13:36 Hallie: And I'm gonna throw this one in here too. How can you use templates for your reports? Not saying you're copying and pasting every student together, but how can we kind of make some templates that allow you to just fill in the information that you need? There's nothing wrong with that. And last but not least, how can we protect our time with firm, kind boundaries? And remember, if you want support with all of that, make sure you check out SLP Elevate. It is your one stop shop for brand new fee high interest themes each month for grades four through 12.
00:14:13 Hallie: Themes such as anime, artificial intelligence, cell phones, natural disasters, all the things. And it comes with resources that are print and go, digital resources as well. Also, if you're a virtual therapist as well, it has all the virtual, boomedecks and things like that. Also comes with a goal bank, progress monitoring tools, and time saving planning supports. So no more starting from scratch. Just click. Just pick, click print, or click, and go. If you wanna learn more about SLP Elevate, you can head to slpelevate.com or on Instagram.
00:14:50 Hallie: Send me a message with the word “club,” and I will send you information there and answer any questions that you have. Alright. So hope you found this episode helpful. As always, I always, in my episodes with a joke. So here's one that maybe your students might actually laugh at. Why did the teacher wear sunglasses on the first day of school? Because her students were so bright. Alright. That is it for another week of SLP Coffee Talk.
00:15:20 Hallie: If this episode helped you breathe a little bit easier about the back to school chaos, share it with a fellow SLP who might need this reminder, you have got this. And remember, I am always here for you. If you wanna send me any questions you have on Instagram, I'm always here to support you. It is my mission. My goal is that SLPs love what they do each and every day and stay in the field because your students need us, and I'm here to support you. Okay? So until next week, everyone, don't forget, you're making a difference. Stay out of trouble.
00:16:00 Hallie: Thanks so much for tuning in to another episode of SLP Coffee Talk. It means the world to me that you're tuning in each and every week and getting the jolt of inspiration you need. You can find all of the links and information mentioned in this episode at my website, speechtimefun.com. Don't forget to follow the show so you don't miss any future episodes. And while you're there, it would mean the world to me if you would take a few seconds and leave me an honest review. See you next week with another episode full of fun and inspiration from one SLP to another. Have fun, guys.
00:16:41 Hallie: Hey there, SLP. I have a quick question for you. What if you could have just one book on your shelf that actually gets the challenges of working with middle school and high school students? Well, it's here. Well, actually, the preorder is here, but, hey, I'm so excited to let you know that my brand new book, The Secondary SLP Guide, is available for preorder. And when you preorder, you get an exclusive bonus that you won't wanna miss. It is packed with real talk strategies, quick tips, and inspiration that you can use with your middle school and high school students or all year long.
00:17:21 Hallie: This is the perfect book for a book club, a grad student group, or just flipping through when you're stuck and in a IEP writing spiral. So head to speechtimefun.com/preorder, or head to my Instagram and send me a DM with the word preorder, and I will send you the link so you can preorder now. And I cannot wait for you to get your hands on this book in November, but the sooner you grab it, the better the bonus.
