This class has taught me a lot about the intricacies of being a clinician. There are so many things I never thought about when it came to treating clients, but now I know how important those seemingly small components really are to effective patient care. I will take all these things I’ve learned with me to become a culturally sensitive and competent clinician.
LU 1: ASHA Code Of Ethics
CBP: Ethical Dilemma
This video explores an ethical dilemma my group mates and I came up with, and resolved following ASHA guidelines. It describes a situation where a clinicians supervisor does not accept AAVE as proper language and is both disrespectful to the client, and wastes valuable therapy time that could have been used to target pathological speech. The clinician asks a fellow SLP for advice on what to do. This assignment was very eye opening because cultural sensitivity wasn’t something I thought a lot about when I thought about treating speech disorders. However, after reading through the code of ethics and thinking through situations like these, it’s clear to me that cultural sensitivity is an extremely important part of our practice. It’s something that I have to keep in mind every single time I interact with a patient if I am going to render effective and compassionate therapy.
I was very satisfied with our finished video. I felt that it was professional, informative, and clearly outlined the scenario. We demonstrated how to apply the code of ethics to determine what the SLP’s duty was in this situation. I thought that the final product reflected all the hard work and discussion that went into producing this video. The only thing that I wish I could change is the volume of the skit at the beginning of the video, but I lack the technical prowess to do this.
LU 2: Tests and Measures
CBP: How to Make a Number Meaningful
I learned a lot from this unit, and not just about how to interpret the assessment scores. I also learned that there is a lot to consider when looking at a child’s test scores. There are many factors that can complicate matters like bilingualism, and being adopted from a different country. Overall, tests are extremely helpful in deciding the existence and severity of a child’s disorder, but they cannot be the only factor taken into consideration when diagnosing speech and language disorders. I really liked how our infographic came out. It’s well organized, easy to navigate, and pretty to look at. I love the flow of the infographic. It starts with the test scores and what they they mean, then it goes down to her case history. Finally it ends with instructions for SLPs in the steps they should take to evaluate Rose further. I like this because it does exactly what the title says. It takes numbers and applies them to a person and her unique life situation. When you get to the second part it’s no longer a child who scored average in one category, it’s Rose, a little girl from China. We fit as much information on the graphic as we could without it turning into an essay. I think if we added any more it would be too much, and any less would take away from Rose and her story. For these reasons I chose not to change it after reviewing it again.
LU 3: Case History
CBP: Risk Factors
This assignment was the first time I ever made a meme, and I thought it was really fun. This article was particularly challenging for me, but I felt like I learned a lot, not only about the study itself, but also about how to read and analyize literature in the field. Since reading and summarizing this article, it’s become much easier for me to read through journals and understand the content. I edited my meme to be more concise and understandable. I focused more on the overall message rather than weighing it down with specific facts. I think my new meme is a more accurate representation of the studies conclusions than my first one was.
LU 4: School Age ASD
CBP: Jacob’s goals
I thought this assignment would be easy since I assumed it would be just like a soapnote, and mostly it was. However, structuring the goals so that they lead into eachother and led towards the longterm goal was trickier than I thought it would be. I also found it hard to decide my therapy target from such a short video. I was expecting to get all this information like with the case history LU, but I realized I really didn’t need it. Once I got out of my own way, and stopped freaking out about the lack of information I realized all I had to do was decide which sound affected his intelligibility the most. In my opinion it was his /n/ sounds. I chose that as my target and made goals that targeted the /n/ sound. After reading through my goals again I thought that they were nearly there, but I think I made the amount of sessions for each short term goal too short. For the first goal I said he would be able to produce the /n/ sound in isolation with 70% accuracy given verbal and visual cues across 20 attempts over 3 sessions. After rereading this, I thought that might not be enough time to learn how to make that sound, let alone with that percent of accuracy. Instead I changed it to 5 sessions, and increased the amount of sessions for the other short term goals as well. This could still not be enough time for the sound, but with my inexperience it’s quite hard to judge.
Aside from the therapy plan I also learned a lot about approaches to treating children with ASD. They have many unique and varied challenges that can seriously hinder them from making the progress they could. I really loved the master clinician video we watched for this unit because the clinician was very sensitive to the sensory issues Morgan faced, and took steps to soothe them. In the beginning of the session she made a schedule and had Morgan put it up on the wall to give the session some structure and take away any anxiety Morgan might be feeling about not knowing what comes next. The articles we read were also very powerful. Reading about what it’s like to live with sensory issues is valuable to me as a future clinician as I can better understand what might be happening when an autistic client begins to behave in unusual ways. I know to look out for these times, not as bad behavior, but as compensatory behavior to deal with the extremely uncomfortable sensory overload they are experiencing.
LU 5: Preschool Language
CBP: Language Facilitation Video
I found the language stimulation strategies to be extremely interesting. I thought it was neat that things that parents do naturally every day fit the ABC structure of a clinical setting so well. I think that speaks to the efficacy of therapy structure because that’s how we all learn to speak with our parents. Upon reviewing my original video, I decided that I should redo it. I had tried to make it somewhat light hearted and entertaining, but in the end it came across as unprofessional. I made a new video using a website called animaker and I’m very pleased with the outcome. While I was rewriting the script I realized that in my original video I didn’t use one of the goals I wrote for Tessa so I fixed that as well.