Meaningful Conversations: tool for older students

meaningful conversations, speech therapy, pragmatics, meaningful, teletherapy, social skills, connections

Updated 1/23

In speech therapy, what is the end goal is for social skills or pragmatics instruction? For me, an important one is meaningful conversations. While individual therapists may differ on some of the details, we want our students to be able to function successfully in jobs and social settings, right? This boils down to relationships and connections. After all, if our students check all of the pragmatic boxes for conversation skills (such as answer questions, maintain a conversation, don’t interrupt etc) after our social skills interventions but don’t make connections that result in friendships and relationships, their lives may not be as full as they could be. It is with this thought that I developed this conversation response point scale. I want to help my speech therapy students understand that their responses can go a step beyond simply providing an on topic response that maintains the conversation! A certain type of response can help them make a personal and meaningful connection! Using this scale in pragmatic or social skills interventions helps you to dig deeper with your students!

You mind find some of my other blog posts on conversation skills helpful:

Starting and Joining a Conversation

Conversation Reciprocity

This point scale is used to evaluate conversation responses, not the entire conversation.

coversation response point scale, social skills, speech therapy, meaningful conversations, older students, middle school, high school

0 Points: Fillers

A zero point response is one that is a sound or a filler, like “hmm, uh, huh, hmm.” Fillers do serve a purpose in our conversations but they do not qualify as a full-fledged stand-alone conversation response, but aren’t enough for meaningful conversations. For example, if I ask someone a question and they respond with “hmm,” I am left feeling uncertain about how interested this person is in having a conversation. However, if they follow that with a meaningful question or comment, then that moves the response up in point value. By themselves, fillers are zero points for zero effort! They leave the listener hanging and don’t contribute to building a connection. We want to bring students beyond zero points in our speech therapy or social skills sessions.

1 Point Responses: Contributions

One point responses show your communication partner a bit more respect than just a filler. I hear alot of one point responses in my speech therapy sessions. It does qualify as a contribution to the conversation. A one point response is typically just one word or perhaps a short phrase or sentence. An example would be just answering a question with a “yes” or “no” or offering a simple comment like “cool.” It can be the bare minimum. It often does not maintain the conversation, nor does it contribute to meaningful conversations, but it is a start. There is definitly a time and a place for one point responses but if students want to build connections with others, they should strive for 2 and 3 point responses in our speech therapy and social skills sessions.

Two Point Responses: Contribute + Maintain

A two point response serves two functions:

it contributes to the conversation, and
it maintains the conversation.

Two point responses not only offer a relevant contribution to the conversation, (like the one point responses), they take a step further and maintain the conversation for at least one more turn. For example, they may ask a question of their conversation partner to keep the conversation going. Two point responses are a solid achievement for many of our speech therapy and social skills students. However, they can keep us in the surface zone when it comes to conversation skills. While there is definitely a time and place for chit-chat and surface conversations, two point responses don’t necessarily help to build a personal connection with our conversation partner. With only two-point responses, we haven’t yet reached meaningful conversations.

Three Point Responses:

Contribute + Maintain + Meaningful Conversations!

conversation response point scale image, social skills, pragmatics, speech therapy

Three point responses are the trifecta of conversation responses. They put our students on the path to meaningful conversations!

They serve three functions:

to contribute to the conversation, (like the one point responses),
to maintain the conversation, (like the two point responses), and
to make a personal connection with the communication partner.

We achieve three point responses when we take things to a more personal level. Now, that doesn’t mean “uncomfortable” personal. I”m not advocating we teach out students to ask overly personal questions. It means you either offer a bit of personal information about yourself or your comment or question seeks to find out more about your communication partner. If you think your students might need a lesson on topic appropriateness and oversharing, check out this blog post. Three point responses help others get to know us and help us get to know others. Three point responses should be our ultimate goal for our speech therapy or social skills sessions. They take us towards meaningful conversations!

Examples of 0-3 Point Responses:

Let’s say I ask my communication partner if he/she had a good weekend. Check out the examples of 0-3 point responses:

0: mmm

1: Yes!

2. Yes, how about you?

3: Yes, I went biking. What did you do this weekend?

Which response leaves you feeling that your communication partner is interested in you and what you have to say?

Speech Therapy Applications:

I have developed Boom Card products related to this conversation response scale. Since I am a teletherapist, I now make many digital, no print products that can be used in brick and mortar on your device or during teletherapy. Check out this preview for a set of boom cards for middle and high school students on using the conversation response scale! It’s available here in my boom store! Don’t forget, Boom cards can be assigned in google classroom!

You can use the conversation response point scale to teach your pragmatics students about the shades of differences between possible conversation responses. Practice teaching them with manipulatives, such as blocks. No blocks for zero point responses, one block for one point responses and so on! Teletherapist? Use virtual stickers or checkmarks. You can access the conversation response point scale in pdf format in my subscriber’s library, when you subscribe to my newsletter.