Let’s be honest…a lot of us don’t feel comfortable working with severe to profound students when we start out.
Yet there are some SLPs who seem to have it all figured out.
People listen to them and respect what they say. They have parents using AAC at home and teachers using it in their classrooms.
They become the “go-to” experts and people are always seeking them out for advice.
They don’t seem flustered by challenging cases; instead they welcome them and take them with ease.
Sometimes they may even have more job security, more professional opportunities, and better pay.
Attaining this “expert” status and experiencing this may seem like a distant unattainable goal…but it’s actually closer than you may think.
The ball is in your court; you can decide which way it’s going to go for you.
I’ll show you what I mean by sharing the stories of two different SLPs I know personally.
We’ll call the first one “Callie”.
Callie started out working in the school systems with students in elementary through secondary school.
She hates confrontation and doesn’t like talking about sensitive situations that come up; and takes a passive-aggressive approach with pretty much everyone she works with.
And I know about this because she’s regularly complaining about her coworkers on Facebook.
Actually, she’s regularly complaining about pretty much everything in her life (the weather sucks, her kid just barfed everywhere, she got stuck in traffic…blah, blah, blah).
She works with a handful of students who use AAC, but it never really goes beyond the therapy room. She’s not bad at doing therapy, but what she does never really clicks.
Her career really isn’t plagued with complete failure…but there’s a feeling of constant mediocrity.
Eventually she quits being an SLP because she feels no connection to the people she works with and doesn’t find it rewarding at all.
As they say…another one bites the dust.
Now let’s talk about the next SLP, who I’ll call “Lyndsay”.
Like pretty much all of us, she’s pretty freaked out about being an SLP when she first starts….but I mean…who isn’t?
But that doesn’t stop her from getting her hands dirty.
And I mean that literally, because she’s getting used to kids holding her hands after picking their noses…or sneezing and spraying her in the face.
Pretty soon, she realizes she doesn’t know all the answers.
She finds that if she’s going to truly make a difference in her student’s lives, she needs to continue investing in her own learning.
So that’s exactly what she does (even if it means doing some extra work up front or investing in something her district won’t reimburse).
Lyndsay takes every chance she gets to learn everything she needs to know about AAC; like how to work as a team to find the right system for the student.
This quickly elevates her to expert status.
Eventually she’s the go-to AAC expert in town. She’s in a pretty big school district, but she never gets bumped because she’s made herself indispensable in her current building.
Lyndsay ends up getting all the difficult cases that everyone else is afraid to take (another reason why the administration wouldn’t think of moving her).
She’s confident she’s doing exactly what her students need, and she gets teachers and parents to reinforce it throughout the day.
Lyndsay gets called to do speaking engagements and teach college courses so she ends up making more money that most of her peers.
She could even start her own private practice and charge competitive rates if she wanted to.
Who would you rather be?
If you’d rather be an “expert” like Lyndsay, I wanted to share this with you.
After through working through hundreds of cases as full-time SLP, I realized I would never reach my full potential alone.
I knew for a fact that I had huge knowledge gaps.
Especially when it came to the really challenging cases, like students who used AAC.
That’s exactly why I went back to school to get a doctorate in Special Education.
I never would have gotten through any of those challenges cases had I not had it not been for my mentors in that program.
Those mentors, who’d managed to refine their expertise, were the ticket to my students’ successes (and my sanity).
It’s hard to see our own blind spots when we come a cross a tricky case we’ve never seen before.
And we don’t have hours to spend digging through materials and strategies.
Nor do we have time to go digging through tons of research to find what’s relevant.
And I was able to cut through that clutter because every semester I was in school, I had an expert at my fingertips that could guide me through the challenges a long the way.
My way of getting mentorship was through a formal degree…but not everyone wants to go that route.
Let’s face it; most of us don’t have thousands of dollars to spare on another degree.
Nor do we want to spend tons of time and money on on travel, hotels, food, and gas when you travel to conferences expensive certifications.
The good news is that it’s possible to elevate yourself to expert status without investing thousands of dollars on another graduate degree.
You can even do it without missing time with your family and friends…and without leaving the house for that matter.
That’s why I’ve created SLP Learning Academy.
SLP Learning Academy is a coaching program for SLPs to give you a go-to place to go for working through your toughest case studies.
This past summer, we’ve had a couple tricky AAC cases we’ve worked through.
I wanted to share a segment of one of these exclusive member coaching calls so you can get a peak inside.
On this call we through a case of an elementary school with a handful of AAC users in secondary school.
We talked about:
👉How to get students using their devices across settings.
👉An evidence-based way to facilitate language growth.
👉The mindset shift we need to teach stakeholders so they buy-in to the process.
👉How to navigate logistics when you have multiple device users on your caseload.
👉How to build students’ language skills, without having to stop and program the device in the middle of a sentence.
You can check out the case study here.
AAC has been a trending topic this summer in SLP Learning Academy, but it’s just one of the topics we’ve covered in our member Q & A calls.
These past couple months, we’ve also covered how to:
✅Get teachers to buy-in to classroom accommodations/language facilitationtechniques.
✅Support literacy growth in young children with parents who don’t speak English.
✅Interview people in a way that motivates them to follow through on your recommendations.
✅Support secondary students with conditions like ADHD and ASD, including writing-goals.
✅Handle scheduling logistics so you can do more classroom-based therapy.
✅Navigate the RtI process with ease as an SLP supporting school-aged children.
Plus much more.
Click here to join us in SLP Learning Academy today.
