I need ideas!

Jul 6, 2016 by Teresa Sadowski MA CCC-SLP

Something about the end of the school year just sucks all my energy and creative juices. After some R & R, I’m ready to get back to work. Now I just need some ideas. Anyone have some interesting and possibly controversial topics for me to tackle?
One thing I have been doing during my down time is continuing to market my book, The School Speech Language Pathologist is an Administrator’s Guide to understanding the role of the SLP in schools along with strategies to aid staffing, workload management and student success. Most of my marketing takes place via twitter or Facebook. I sell a few copies here and there. Even in the field of speech language pathology my book is a niche book. I would love to sit at a booth during any conference and share/sell my book but the overall cost for something like that can be thousands. It is rather difficult to justify the cost when you literally make only a couple of dollars per copy anyway. Specific educational web sites won’t carry your book unless you self published through them. I imagine there are a few SLPs out there that might be in the same boat. My thought was that I could offer to split a table with several SLP authors at conferences. Anyone interested? Again, not sure with travel it would be profitable. I would probably have to find 10+ SLP/education authors to make this a go.
TPT is another resource I both contribute to and use. My products consists primarily of articles appropriate for school newsletters. (You can check out my TPT store here) I also have one product that focuses on inservice training for teaching assistants. As one of our smart goals the SLPs in my district put together some inservice training for teaching assistants on what SLPs do, the nature of students with SL difficulties and how assistants can support SL students in the classroom. I wish there was a speech and language branch of the TPT store. I feel that many of the SLP produced products get lost in the shuffle.
My principal has asked me to put together some more articles appropriate for school newsletters. While I have topics in mind again I would love ideas/suggestions.
Basically, I need some help getting my creative flow going. Has any pressing issue come to the forefront in your school setting? I’d love to hear about any unique situations positive or negative that have come up over the past year. I’m also sitting here waiting to see if ASHA will accept my presentation proposal. Since this was the first time I put a proposal together I am hopeful but realistic about getting accepted. If I do get and invitation to present I will just have to force that creative flow. That I will keep you updated on. Now how to work on all of this and still enjoy my summer?

Teresa