Tool Tuesday: Tuning in to Whole-Class Instruction

How’s your July been? I was so embedded in summer, having about a month left of vacation here in the Northeast, that I almost forgot to check in with a post this month! Well, here’s our second Summer Study Series post, this time focusing on a recent study examining the value of in-class interventions.

The article below interested me in particular because, although in private practice and university settings currently, I have a long history as a school-based SLP. As my caseload grew, I found huge value in forging partnerships with teachers to deliver a portion of services in their classrooms with co-led lessons, or simply taking the lead for 30 minutes a week. The teachers appreciated my efforts to tie in with curriculum topics and also providing them with tangible strategies they could carry over with students to support their language development. These of course, included Story Grammar Marker^® and Thememaker^®. It was easy to obtain funding to at least give each teacher a Student SGM^® as a visual to extend the emphasis on story elements and icons while I was not in their classroom. Helping teachers to use these tools multiplied the impact of these services!

It was great to see this approach reinforced (not for the first time) with a recent study:

The Impact of Whole-Classroom Narrative Interventions
On Children's Narrative Language Development
(Israelsen-Augenstein, Moore, Brandel & Toman, 2026).

The study examined whether a whole-classroom narrative language intervention could improve oral narrative skills in first- and second-grade students compared with typical (“business-as-usual”) classroom instruction. The goal was to identify “scalable” intervention models that help address high rates of developmental language disorder (DLD) and increasing school SLP caseloads.

• Researchers studied the progress of 51 students (30 intervention, 21 control). The experimental group received lessons based on the SKILL (Supporting Knowledge in Language and Literacy) program, which targets both narrative macrostructure (story grammar, episodes, problem/solution) and microstructure (complex syntax, conjunctions, mental state verbs, elaborated language). SKILL is comparable to Story Grammar Marker in offering an icon-based approach to narrative instruction, and its scripted lessons can be synced using SGM’s memorable icons and unique features such as the Critical Thinking Triangle.
• Students received 24 sessions over 12 weeks (30 minutes twice weekly). Instruction was delivered collaboratively by the school SLP, classroom teacher, and teacher's aide.
• Students who participated in the intervention demonstrated significantly stronger narrative macrostructure than the control group. Their stories showed improvements in organization, number of story grammar elements included and greater overall coherence.
• The intervention also showed impacts on narrative microstructure, with students using richer language features in the form of coordinating and subordinating conjunctions, mental state verbs, as well as adverbs.
• The study demonstrated that classroom-wide narrative instruction can strengthen children's ability to produce well-formed, cohesive narratives even after accounting for baseline language and cognitive ability through pre- and post- assessments.
• The authors conclude that whole-classroom narrative intervention is a feasible and effective service delivery model that supports response to intervention (RTI) approaches, allows SLPs to collaborate directly with teachers, promotes prevention as well as intervention, and may help underserved schools provide language support to many more students.

As with all of our posts in these series, we hope you will check out the full article for more details! Some tips and thoughts I had about application:

• The article provides some supplementary lesson content. The lesson here suggests a dialogic approach, providing context and introducing story elements and their interactions one at a time. This path is certainly helpful in getting started in the classroom and can also extend to the microstructure aspects described here as targeted in the program (for example, targeting a different conjunction or mental state verb each week).
• The lesson material also suggests simple visual stimuli. This is always findable online but also can be created with generative AI tools such as Gemini.

Provided here is an example prompt to Gemini and the useful result:

Note that Gemini also offered to animate the images for me, which would make engaging stimuli in the classroom and elicit additional descriptive language!