While our Toronto group is run entirely by people who stutter, we welcome speech - language pathologists who would like to attend meetings as observers, or wish to collaborate with us in organizing of practice sessions. However, we administer our group without direct input from speech professionals. Although being monitored is optional, at the start of each meeting we offer the opportunity for each person to identify the speech skills they would like to have monitored. People receive index cards with the skills being monitored written on them. If the speaker does not use an identified target or fluency skill, then everyone waves their cards as a reminder.
Monitoring can also take place in unstructured speaking situations including the coffee break.
Although each person is invited to talk about how the past few weeks have been in terms of their speech, it is not required that everyone speak. The leader for the day then introduces structured activities. One leader's favorite activities is to choose words at random from a newspaper, and write down each word on a piece of paper. We might then go around the room and ask for comments or questions from each participant, with an emphasis on positive comments. Following this, the person who spoke typically talks about how it felt to make the presentation, and reflects on the comments from all the listeners.