How to Make Speech Fun: Tips from a Speech-Language Pathologist
Jun 23, 2025
We are aware of the isolation that comes with working in the extremely specialized field of visual impairments. Regardless of whether you work as an orientation and mobility specialist (O&M specialist) or as a teacher of students with visual impairments (TVI), you are all too familiar with the feeling of being on a "lonely island".
We are frequently the only specialists in our districts, and our positions are usually misinterpreted or reduced to oversimplified terms.
However, in the vast ocean of special education, we aren’t the only ones who have felt sitting on a lone island. As a matter of fact, there is another group of dedicated, and often-misunderstood professionals whose work is not just parallel to ours, but profoundly intertwined: the Speech-Language Pathologist (SLP).
In our episode of A Step Forward Podcast, we invited Hallie Sherman, SLP, to talk about how and what we can do to help our students with visual impairments acquire the strong speech and communication abilities they will need to move confidently and independently through the world.
Parallel Worlds: The Misunderstood Roles in Special Education
Hallie instantly addressed a widespread misconception about her line of work to start the conversation. "People believe that we spend our entire day practicing the R sound," she said, "but our role is so much more than that."
The knowing sigh from our community is almost audible. How many times has the term "cane teacher" been used to describe an orientation and mobility specialist? How frequently is a TVI's knowledge distilled down to becoming the "Braille lady"? The first bridge connecting our fields is our common experience of oversimplifying our work.
A speech-language pathologist's scope is vast and has a direct effect on the students they work with. Among their domains are:
- Language comprehension is the capacity to comprehend difficult sentence patterns, follow instructions, and to understand words. It is an essential component of safety and education for a visually impaired student learning a new route from an O&M Specialist.
- Putting thoughts into words, including through writing, is known as expressive language. Whether a student is writing a Braille report or verbally describing their environment, this is a fundamental part of the Expanded Core Curriculum's (ECC).
- For social skills, there is a lot of overlap in this area. SLPs practice self-advocacy, social cue interpretation, and conversational navigation. This is similar to the ECC where our VI students learn different types of communication while not having the advantage of facial expressions and body language.
- AAC, or augmentative and alternative communication, uses a variety of techniques, from powerful speech-generating gadgets to simple graphic boards. This is almost the same with the ECC Area’s Assistive Technology that we incorporate to our VI students education.
For VI students, each of these topics is essential. Working with "speech students" isn't the only thing the SLP does, they are also laying the foundation for communication, which forms the basis of all other learning activities.
From Fruit Salad to Fruit Juice: A Model for True Collaboration
We need to go beyond traditional patterns of collaboration if we are to fully realize the potential of team collaboration. There's an interesting metaphor for Special Education team models that illustrates this collaboration process:
- The Multi-Disciplinary Model (The Fruit Platter): This is the most basic level of teamwork. Professionals, like different fruits on a platter, are separate. The SLP, the TVI, the O&M Specialist, and the classroom teacher all have their own roles and only come together for formal events like an IEP meeting. Their work is siloed, and the student is responsible for piecing together the separate instructions.
- The Inter-Disciplinary Model (The Fruit Salad): This is a step up. The professionals are now in the same bowl, perhaps co-treating in the same classroom. However, their contributions, like chunks of fruit in a salad, remain distinct. The SLP might be working on articulation with a student in one corner while the TVI works on Braille literacy in another. They are sharing space, but their goals and teaching strategies may not be fully integrated.
- The Trans-Disciplinary Model (The Fruit Juice): This is the gold standard we should all be striving for. Here, the expertise is completely blended. It’s impossible to tell where one professional’s contribution ends and another’s begins because everyone is working toward a single, unified, and functional goal for the student.
Actionable SLP Teaching Strategies for Your VI Caseload
In our conversation with Hallie, she gave us useful teaching tips and strategies that we could use in supporting our students with visual impairments in the eyes of a speech-language pathologist.
- Conquer Cognitive Overwhelm with Simplified Language
Hallie stressed the need to "reduce the cognitive overwhelm and the language overwhelm." For students with visual impairment, who rely heavily on auditory processing to make sense of the world, this is crucial. A busy school hallway or a noisy downtown street corner presents an immense cognitive load.
- During O&M lessons or in chaotic environments, consciously simplify your language. Use shorter sentences. Prioritize the most critical information. Then, and this is key, check for understanding. Don't just ask, “Got it?” Ask them to repeat the core instruction back to you. “Okay, so tell me the first thing you’re going to listen for before we cross.” This ensures the message has been received and processed.
- Creating Fail-Safe Communication
A scenario for an Orientation and Mobility Specialist: a student asks a bus driver to announce their stop, and the driver forgets. This is a failure of communication with real-world consequences. The SLP solution is to equip students with explicit scripts for self-advocacy.
- Your Action Plan: Work with your students to develop and practice "fail-safe" scripts. Break it down into three parts:
- Initiate & Inform: "Hi, I have a visual impairment and I need some help. Could you please let me know when we get to the corner of Oak and Main?"
- Confirm: "Thank you. Just to be sure, you'll be able to tell me when we get to Oak and Main?"
- Position & Remind: "I'll be sitting right here in the front so you can find me."
What happens is a passive request is changed into an assertive, controlled engagement by this structured technique, which also helps students become more independent and improves their speaking and communication skills.
- Understanding the Auditory Social Cues.
"Body language is so language rich," Hallie noted, and it's a richness our students don’t often have access to. However, sound also contains profound social information. Understanding these auditory cues is a specialty of a speech-language pathologist.
- Work with an SLP to develop tone of voice interpretation lessons. Audio snippets from podcasts, TV series, and films can be used. Ask pupils to pinpoint the meaning or feeling that the phrases convey. Is the speaker joking, sarcastic, angry, or happy? This is a straightforward and interesting method of teaching an important ECC social skills. Pitch, cadence, and loudness are linguistic features that the SLP may examine, and the TVI can assist the student in applying what they have learned to social settings in real life.
- The "Goldilocks" Principle: Creating an enjoyable and appropriate learning environment.
For many VI students, and indeed many speech students, learning is a constant reminder of their challenges. Hallie advocates utilizing engaging resources to make learning become rewarding. In order to encourage confidence, a task should be just the appropriate amount of difficult and easy, according to her "Goldilocks" approach.
- Your Action Plan: Make use of captivating, non-visual content. A TVI can describe a nonverbal Pixar short in real time as the SLP stops the video to pose inferential questions to the learner based on the sound effects and music. "What do you think that character is feeling now? How did the music tell you that?" Learning is dynamic and rewarding with this mixed strategy.
Your Next Step: Dissolve the Island
The ultimate message of this vital conversation is that collaboration isn't a luxury; it is the most effective and compassionate way to serve our students. Hallie’s final piece of advice serves as a mantra for all of us in Special Education:
"Don't be so hard on yourself. Just laugh, even if, like a lesson went flat, didn't go as planned, student, laugh at your joke a paper, you know, whatever it might be, just brush it off and don't take yourself too seriously. Just Just have fun. Remember. You'll always remember your why, why you came back, and why you went into this field, and your purpose."
Part of remembering our "why" is recognizing that our purpose is magnified through partnership. Connection is the remedy for the "lonely island" feeling we've been stuck with.
But this doesn’t mean that we limit our collaboration with just our SLPs, check in with your other team members. Start with a conversation. Don't wait for the next IEP meeting. Walk up to them and say, "I listened to this great podcast, and it made me realize we should talk. Could I get you a coffee and ask you some questions regarding [Student Name]??"
To go one step further, consider immersing yourself in their world speech and language. Virtual retreats led by Hallie Sherman are intended to motivate and develop connections among SLPs. A day spent immersed in her retreat might inspire amazing new teaching techniques for your own practice.
Check out Hallie’s Retreat: https://www.speechretreat.com
Let’s make a collective choice to step off our islands, build these essential bridges with our team members, and create a seamless, supportive, learning for our students with visual impairments.
Get to know Hallie!
Related Articles:
- A VI Specialist’s Guide: Training Teacher and Paraprofessional Teams
- Making the Expanded Core Curriculum Work: A Practical Guide for Every Educator
- IEP Fundamentals: What is Present Level of Academic Achievement and Functional Performance (PLAAFP)?
Topics covered: Building a collaborative team in
