BONUS: Why Building Rapport is Everything in Secondary Speech Therapy

Show Notes:

In this bonus episode of SLP Coffee Talk, Hallie shares the moment that completely changed how she approached working with older students – when one small connection turned reluctant teens into willing participants. She dives into how that experience inspired Chapter 7 of her new book, The Secondary SLP Roadmap, and why building rapport isn’t extra… It’s EVERYTHING. If you’ve ever wondered how to get buy-in from your students or make therapy a space they actually look forward to, this one’s for you.

📘✨ Grab your copy of The Secondary SLP Roadmap here! https://www.speechtimefunpd.com/stf-book 

Here's what we learned:

  • Connection comes before correction – Rapport is the real starting point. 
  • Trust makes students more willing to try, fail, and try again. 
  • Small moments of authenticity build big buy-in. 
  • You can build relationships and meet goals… It’s not either/or. 
  • When students feel safe, real progress follows.

RESOURCES

Learn more about Hallie Sherman  and SLP Elevate: 

JOKE OF THE WEEK:

Q: Why did the student bring a ladder to school?

A: Because they were going to high school

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 pre-order is here, but hey, I'm so excited to let you know that my brand new book, The Secondary SLP Guide is available for pre-order. And when you pre-order, you get an exclusive bonus that you won't wanna miss.

00:00:31 Hallie: It is packed with real talk strategies, quick tips and inspiration that you can use with your middle school and high school students all year long. 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 pre-order and I will send you the link so you can pre-order 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.

00:01:17 Hallie: Welcome to SLP Coffee Talk, the podcast designed exclusively for speech language pathologists who work with older students, grades 4 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.

00:01:57 Hallie: Hey, hey, and welcome to another bonus episode of SLP Coffee Talk, your safe space for a caffeinated connection, practical tips, and speech therapy survival strategies for your middle school and high school students. And here is another bonus episode since my new book, The Secondary SLP Roadmap, is launching November 11th. I'm so, so, so excited for you to get your hands on it. So I'll be talking today all about a word that gets thrown around a lot, the word rapport.

00:02:28 Hallie: We all know it matters. We've heard we need to build rapport with our students. But what does it actually mean? And how do we build it with our students who've already decided that school and probably speech, or maybe the reverse, speech and maybe school, is not their thing? So today I'm gonna be diving into real life stories, strategies, and a few cringing moments that I go much more deeper into in chapter seven of my book, Secondary SLP Roadmap, which by the way again launches November 11th. Let's talk about how rapport can make or break our sessions and how to build it without giving up valuable therapy time.

00:03:07 Hallie: According to the dictionary, rapport means a close and harmonious relationship in which the people or groups concerned understand each other's feelings or ideas and communicate it well. Notice anything? Yup. The word communicate is right there in the definition. So we want our students to communicate with us, to take risks, to try new things, open up, answer our questions, we have to build relationships that feel safe, especially with our secondary students. These kids, they've been through some stuff, academic struggles, repeated failures, probably even years of speech therapy that didn't feel helpful, or even worse, felt embarrassing. And they learned how to mask, avoid, deflect, and shut down. Rapport is what gives them the permission to stop surviving and start participating.

00:04:07 Hallie: So I'm gonna tell you a brief story that I go much more deep in depth in chapter seven. About my first year working in a high school, I was in my early 20s, barely five feet tall, and I was constantly being asked for a hall pass because no one knew who I was because I was only in that school for three periods of the day and I look like a student and let's be real. No one in the building knew who I was and I was terrified. Okay. These students were much taller than me.

00:04:33 Hallie: Anyway, the students that came to my speech room, they were giving me major side eye. They didn't want to be there. They were thinking more about lunch and what they were eating and wanting to order their lunch and sneak away to the bathroom to do so. Anything but working with me. And then one day, one of the senior girls noticed my brand new engagement ring. She lit up. For the first time, she wanted to talk to me. So I stopped the boring worksheet I was forcing on them at the time and let them ask me questions. We talked. We laughed. And I promised them if we get through our work next time, you can ask me anything again. And it worked.

00:05:21 Hallie: And a quote from the book, “They were excited to learn more. I saw a shift in the way they came to the following session. That moment taught me something I'll never forget. If you want students to do hard things, they need to know that you care.” So there you have it guys, rapport first, goals second. Let's be honest, our students are working on things they often struggle with in front of their peers. That's vulnerable. That is hard.

00:05:51 Hallie: If we jump straight into goals and skip the connection, we're missing the whole foundation. We're basically saying to them, I need you to take a risk with someone you don't know or trust. Rapport is not just something you do in the beginning of the school year, those icebreakers. It's something you need to carry on and carry through throughout the entire duration of the time you're working with that student.

00:06:11 Hallie: Here's a quote from the book, “I get it. We need to work on goals and have to document them for billing purposes, but our students are more important. When your students feel safe with you, they'll be more willing to try, fail, and try again. Isn't that what coming to speech therapy is all about?” In the book, I actually, in chapter seven, I talk about a comfort contract. It's not a legal document. It's a conversation that you can have with your students to get them on board with working with you when things are tough, how to feel safe, what does respect look like, what they should do when they get something wrong or when a peer does something wrong. Okay?

00:06:56 Hallie: And the best part about it is you let them answer. You let them decide. And I go through a whole bunch of prompts that you can ask your students to build this contract with them together. And a quote that I wrote from the book, “They wrote it. So remind them of the benefits of sticking to it. So when things happen throughout the year, when they break the contract, you can remind them.” It's not just about setting the tone. You're giving them that ownership that builds trust, that builds buy-in, and that builds rapport.

00:07:28 Hallie: I talk about another story in the book about me bumping into a student that I had years later and he remembered me. And it just shows you that when you have that connection with your students, it's just an amazing feeling. Let's bust a myth. Rapport building is not a waste of time. If a session ends with 0% progress towards a goal, but that student felt safe, engaged and empowered, that is progress. You can't measure trust on a data sheet, but that's the bridge that will make therapy possible. Okay?

00:08:08 Hallie: I go in the book, I talk about different activities that you can use to work on speech goals at the same time, not to worry, but how to do so in a way that is easy to prep and easy to facilitate, such as a strength strand, talk about famous failures, activities to talk about growth mindset. Because remember, speech goals are baked right into these conversations, and you can turn any activity into a language or social skill opportunity. You'll get back to direct goals faster when your students trust you.

00:08:42 Hallie: So you can do these things throughout the year. If you ever see your students starting to shift a little bit or getting uneasy or less motivated or less willing to take risks, you can take a pause and do these things. And that's why I share so many ideas in the book. Rapport is more than just a beginning of the year icebreaker. It's not fluff, it's not a waste of time. It's the foundation for everything that we do, especially with those older students. I quote from the book, “When you take time to build that relationship, anything is possible. You can't force students to learn, but you can create a space where they want to.”

00:09:27 Hallie: So here's a friendly reminder, guys. If you love this episode and you want more real life stories, practical tools, ready use activities and strategies that you can use tomorrow, the next day, and have a place where you can keep this book on hand when you need it most, this is all things I share in chapter seven of Secondary SLP Roadmap. It's packed with just that. Mark your calendar. It launches November 11th. I go into more in depth in this. If you haven't checked out the other two previous bonus episodes on that, do so as well so you can learn more about some things that you can learn about in the book.

00:10:02 Hallie: But in the book, I also go into working with mixed groups, adapting materials for using, working on more than one goal with one activity, how to focus on connection over data collection, how to write goals, how to teach the skills, how to work on articulation and social skills and life skills, and all those things with older speech students so that they're motivated, willing to take risks, and of course, make tons and tons of progress.

00:10:29 Hallie: Alright, here's a bonus joke as always. Why did the student bring a ladder to school? Because they were going to high school. Thank you so much for tuning in again for this third bonus episode. Keep connecting, keep showing up, and remember, rapport is an extra. It is everything. And until next week, everyone, or until the next episode, I keep forgetting this is not a regular episode – stay out of trouble.

00:11:00 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.

00:11:42 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 pre-order is here, but hey, I'm so excited to let you know that my brand new book, The Secondary SLP Guide, is available for pre-order. And when you pre-order, you get an exclusive bonus that you won't wanna miss.

00:12:12 Hallie: It is packed with real talk strategies, quick tips and inspiration that you can use with your middle school and high school students all year long. 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 pre-order and I will send you the link so you can pre-order 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.

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