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Think Beyond You: Activate the Power of Your School Treatment Team

2019; American Speech–Language–Hearing Association; Volume: 24; Issue: 8 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1044/leader.ftr1.24082019.46

1085-9586

Kimberly A. Murza,

Language Development and Disorders

You have accessThe ASHA LeaderFeature1 Aug 2019Think Beyond You: Activate the Power of Your School Treatment TeamTap into your creativity to help your team make the biggest possible difference to the most students' speech and language. Kim MurzaPhD, CCC-SLP Kim Murza Google Scholar , PhD, CCC-SLP https://doi.org/10.1044/leader.FTR1.24082019.46 SectionsAboutPDF ToolsAdd to favorites ShareFacebookTwitterLinked In It's probably not a professional skill you saw yourself learning in graduate school. It's likely not even one you see yourself applying in your daily work with students and other professionals. But, chances are, it's a skill mentioned at least once on your resume—maybe even more than that. And I'm betting you draw on that skill just about every minute of every workday. Come on, colleagues. What skill am I talking about? I'm talking about creativity—essential to realizing our charge to provide students individualized, evidence-based services in the least restrictive environment. School-based speech-language pathologists are some of the most creative people I know. It isn't all we need, though. SLPs in schools face an array of challenges: high workloads and caseloads, limited time for collaboration, and seemingly never-ending paperwork. There's no one-size-fits-all solution to these challenges (see "Overloaded With Tasks? Show Them the Numbers" on page 56), but we can take steps toward tapping into that creativity to enhance services for our students. Delivering expert services requires us to make student-centered decisions, collaborate with colleagues and parents, and actively advocate for each child on our caseload. It's hard—but not impossible. All it takes is time, knowledge, skills, relationships, compromise, commitment, organization, and, of course, creativity. No wonder we're tired! Our jobs are tough, but there's nothing quite like the moment when you see a student independently use—outside the speech room—the knowledge, skills, or strategies you taught him. These victories might seem small for us as we focus on big-picture goals. For the students we help—and their families—those small victories can change lives. So, how do we enable more victories, while balancing all the demands of working in schools? It's not possible to clone ourselves or add more hours to the day, but it is possible to be more strategic in our work approach. I suggest we consider playing three specific work roles more frequently: coach, independence facilitator, and advocate. Before exploring what that looks like, let's consider what's likely your current reality. Rotating hats I challenge you to step back and consider the many hats you wear in your current role: Interventionist Scientist Diagnostician Learner Independence facilitator Collaborator Mentor Coach Compliance officer Administrator Educator Record keeper Supervisor Advocate Motivator Which three hats dominate your time? Which three hats would you like to wear more often? Do all the hats allow you to work "at the top of your license"? SLPs bring a set of skills and expertise unique to schools. We also worked hard to call ourselves SLPs (remember graduate school?). If you think about the reasons you devoted your career to helping students communicate, it was likely not to experience lunchroom duty. No one thinks it's easy to balance working at the top of the license with the realities of limited school resources and the need to pitch in for the common good. But if you can see how tackling lunchroom duty to show you're a team player is worthwhile, then try these strategies to help find that balance. An issue of dosage Working at the top of the license certainly includes direct and indirect services. But is the direct work we do with students enough? Consider the importance of generalization and independent use of knowledge, skills, and strategies they learn with us. Think about the students on your caseload. Are you able to make sure the services you provide are the right services provided in the right way for each student? Let's consider a typical week for many students receiving speech-language services in school. Many students spend 30 minutes, twice a week, in a pull-out setting. If the student attends school for seven hours a day, five days a week, this means spending about 3% of their week receiving our services. Is this enough? Wearing all the different hats allows us increase dosage for our students, but something needs to give. Yes, school SLPs get pulled in many directions, but your creativity—with a touch of optimism—can prevent becoming overwhelmed or burning out. Reimagining service delivery in schools requires a reimagining of ourselves as school SLPs. To increase dosage, I suggest we consider wearing three hats more frequently: coach, independence facilitator, and advocate. Coach Educators see firsthand how a communication disorder affects educational access. In early intervention, substantial evidence supports the value of coaching families of young children with developmental disorders. Pro-coaching research also extends to communication-partner training for students who use augmentative and alternative communication. Wearing the coaching hat in schools can increase dosage for the students we serve. You will need to tap into your creativity for this. Communication—specifically language—acts as the foundation of education. So, combining efforts around speech or language goals can potentially reach well beyond the student's speech and/or language IEP goals. Helping teachers, families, and other school staff understand the importance of communication goals means wearing our advocate hat (see below) before our coach hat. Before jumping into coaching, it helps to understand several key principles. For instance, you may need to cultivate the IEP team's collective efficacy: the capacity of educators to collaboratively plan and execute required actions to improve student outcomes. Research indicates that schools with high collective efficacy can see bigger increases in student achievement (see sources). What's exciting here is malleability: SLPs can powerfully shape the collective efficacy of their school team by sharing stories of student achievements. Detailing these experiences and the strategies used to reach them can increase the likelihood of successful collaborative efforts. This requires some forethought and an understanding of collaboration principles. SLPs can take the first step by highlighting the small wins of your colleagues. Celebrating success can do a lot to increase understanding of one another's work and belief in one another's competency. As language professionals, we also want to heed the words we use. The more we speak in terms of the team instead of the individual, the more we encourage our colleagues to think like a team and interact with one another. Consider shifting from using "speech-language goals" to "the student's goals." This supports the notion that the IEP team is responsible for the IEP. Members of the IEP team should understand and support all the student's IEP goals. Members of the IEP team—including family members, general education teachers, special education teachers, para-professionals, and other related service providers—often spend a lot more time with our students than we do. This gives them many opportunities to build on SLPs' direct work with students. Embracing a few principles can make this happen: Recognize our colleagues' expertise understanding their students SLPs helping other educators see themselves as communication partners and independence facilitators (see below) can truly change the game. For example, during this past school year, I worked with a school district that experienced high turnover of their special education teachers. Their paraprofessionals, however, are for the most part veterans. Many worked with the same students for several years and knew them well, while the teachers quickly tried to get up to speed. Empowering the veteran paraeducators as experts and educators made them excited to try new things. Explore the Appreciative Inquiry model of coaching Appreciative Inquiry (see sources) supports a variety of coaching approaches, including the Cognitive Coaching approach many districts use. Certification in Cognitive Coaching requires an eight-day workshop conducted over 18 to 24 months. This certification requires a significant commitment, but extensive research supports the method (see sources). Results do show increased student achievement and positive change in the behavior of educators. The beauty of this framework is that the coach doesn't need to know the answers. Instead, by appreciating what already works in your school team and building on those strengths, SLPs help colleagues answer their own questions about how to grow in their role as extenders of your work. To coach co-workers in a way that helps them support your work with students, try using the "4D" cycle. First, ask questions to help them discover the strengths they bring to the table. Next, work together to dream, or imagine how the team can collaborate best. Then, support their critical thinking by asking questions used to design a plan for making their dream a reality. Finally, support your colleagues in executing the plan: destiny. Independence facilitator Not only is it powerful for the paraprofessionals we work with to think of themselves as independence facilitators, we owe it to our students to plan for independence from the start. SLPs can consider several principles when wearing their independence-facilitator hat: backward design, attribution theory, and student ownership of goals. Backward design The educational approach of backward design involves setting benchmarks and choosing instructional techniques with the end goals in mind (see sources). The method helps us more effectively support our students to reach independence. As the name implies, using backward design means thinking about generalization from the start. Because SLPs are master scaffolders, it's sometimes difficult to "count" our supports. Sometimes we don't even know we're prompting students! To get to independence, though, we need to recognize the scaffolds we use and build in time to hand over the role of prompter to the student. I challenge you to think about the communication partner, environment, and SLP supports currently used with each student. How can you plan now for the fading of those supports? Attribution theory (or growth mindset) According to attribution theory, people attribute their successes and failures to four basic factors: ability, task difficulty, luck, and effort (see sources). Successful, confident people tend to attribute success to internal factors (ability and effort), while those who are unsuccessful with low confidence tend to focus on external factors (task difficulty and luck) to explain their successes and failures. Building on this theory, educators with a growth mindset believe academic ability in any area for any student is not fixed. Achieving this proficiency, however, calls for effective instruction, enough time for improvement, and student effort. Our challenge as independence facilitators is to help our students understand attribution theory and develop their own growth mindset. We can teach them what it means and how to exert that effective effort, give them good instruction/intervention, and make them feel known and valued. Student ownership of IEP goals The bottom line is that SLPs who involve our students in—and let them lead—the goal-planning process support a growth mindset and can build more confidence in students. They're the most important members of the IEP team. By including their opinions in the process, we focus on the right things in the right way. Students who drive the process from the start also gain more motivation to participate in the treatment process than those who don't understand their own goals or why they receive services. Independence facilitators spend time building buy-in from their students and continue to provide opportunities for student feedback in the process. If we begin with the end in mind, we also must plan for handing over prompting to the student. To get to this level of generalization, students should understand each of their IEP goals to the extent they can collect data on their own progress. Helping students become more meta-cognitive about their own growth helps shift external explanations of success and failure to the internal explanations. This approach also helps students realize that with effort, they can achieve their goals. Advocate SLPs automatically act as advocates for our students. However, we often put less energy into advocating for our profession and ourselves. After spending two grueling years in a master's program learning everything speech, language, and feeding/swallowing, I started my clinical fellowship year surprised by how little my educator colleagues and administrators knew about SLP roles and responsibilities. Helping others understand our role wasn't something I was prepared to take on. But I soon realized if I wanted to improve my work life—reduce workload and increase time for collaboration—my administrators and colleagues needed to understand and value what I brought to the school. What's key, here, is to show colleagues your value by letting them see you in action. For your colleagues to believe in the power of the team, they must understand what you do and celebrate your victories with you. To get started, consider wearing your independence facilitator and advocate hats at the same time. When a student achieves a goal with a growth mindset, they can rely on those experiences to show themselves when you work hard you can improve. Celebrate and share this. Why not support your students by sharing their accomplishments with teachers and administrators? This not only shows how you value your students, but also helps your colleagues see the results of your efforts. In turn, celebrating these victories strengthens the collective efficacy of your team and can help secure the support of administrators. Also be ready to advocate for what you need to do your job well. Remember, before considering what could be, consider what is. In other words, before you ask your administrator for more time for collaboration, for example, understand—and be prepared to clearly explain—your current workload. For help with this, try using ASHA's new workload calculator (see page 56). A thorough workload analysis can give you the data you need to advocate for this change. However, data isn't typically enough; so once again, we must rely on our creativity! In 2016, Sam Horn gave the keynote at ASHA Connect in Minneapolis. Horn—an author and executive coach—spoke about her book, "Got Your Attention." For me, her ideas about creating intrigue and persuading people opened my eyes. SLPs don't typically study public communications or sales, so a lot of what she said was new to me. To apply some of her ideas in your school setting, consider what your administrator values most. Is it student test scores? Is it teacher retention? Is it a positive school culture? Think about how added time for collaboration—or whatever you want to ask for—can support that value. Then, consider using Horn's framework of: "Did you know …, Imagine if … ," and, "You don't have to imagine, I've figured it out/created it." If you can grab your administrator's attention with this framework, you can keep it going through engaging dialogue rather than a one-sided monologue: "Did you know more than half of students with disabilities have a specific learning disability or a speech or language disorder? Did you know language is the foundation of learning in school? Imagine if we could support language learning for these students regardless of their labels? You don't have to imagine! With an increase in only 3% of collaboration time for special education teams, I could use my language expertise to coach my colleagues in how to increase their support of language learning for all students!" Can't you just see the administrator reassigning your lunch duty on the spot? Okay, it might entail a little more effort, but at least you increased awareness of the issue. Of course, there is no one-size-fits-all solution for the challenges SLPs face in the schools. But fortunately, we are a creative bunch. And by reading this article, you took the first step. In the meantime, I hope we continue to imagine more for our students and our field, while remembering what Maya Angelou once said, "You can't use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have." Sources Batt, E. G. (2010). Cognitive coaching: A critical phase in professional development to implement sheltered instruction.Teaching and Teacher Education, 26, 997–1005. doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2009.10.042 CrossrefGoogle Scholar Cooperrider, D. L., & Whitney, D. (2001). A positive revolution in change.In D. L. Cooperrider, P. Sorenson, D. Whitney, & T. Yeager, T. (Eds.) Appreciative inquiry: An emerging direction for organization development, pp.9–29. Champaign, IL: Stipes. Google Scholar Donohoo, J. (2017). Collective efficacy: How educators' beliefs impact student learning. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin. Google Scholar Edwards, J. (2016). Cognitive CoachingSM: A synthesis of the research, 12th edition. Highlands Ranch, CO: Thinking Collaborative. Google Scholar Hattie, J. (2012). Visible learning for teachers: Maximizing impact on learning. New York, NY: Routledge CrossrefGoogle Scholar Horn, S. (2015). Got your attention? How to create intrigue and connect with anyone. Oakland, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc. Google Scholar Saphier, J. (2017). High expectations teaching: How we persuade students to believe and act on "smart is something you can get. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin. Google Scholar Wiggins, G., & McTighe, J. (1998). Understanding by design. Arlington, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. Google Scholar Weiner, B. (1974). Achievement motivation and attribution theory. Morristown, NJ: General Learning Press. Google Scholar Author Notes Kim Murza, PhD, CCC-SLP, is an associate professor of speech-language pathology at the University of Northern Colorado. She is an affiliate of ASHA Special Interest Groups 1, Language Learning and Education; 10, Issues in Higher Education; and 16, School-Based Issues. [email protected] Advertising Disclaimer | Advertise With Us Advertising Disclaimer | Advertise With Us Additional Resources FiguresSourcesRelatedDetailsCited byPerspectives of the ASHA Special Interest Groups5:1 (290-303)21 Feb 2020Perceptions of a Collaborative Professional Learning Program: Seeing the "Bigger Picture"P. Charlie Buckley, Kimberly A. Murza and Tami Cassel Volume 24Issue 8August 2019 Get Permissions Add to your Mendeley library History Published in print: Aug 1, 2019 Metrics Current downloads: 3,209 Topicsleader_do_tagasha-article-typesleader-topicsCopyright & Permissions© 2019 American Speech-Language-Hearing AssociationPDF downloadLoading ...