Conference Review: Collaboration is Key at MSHA Convention

This post originally appeared in the March 2009 print version of Motivations.

This year, our speech pathologist invited me to attend the Annual Convention of the MD Speech-Language-Hearing Association (MSHA).   It’s a two day conference, but a parent’s life doesn’t stop easily for these things – still need to pick up my daughter from school, birthday parties remain a top priority.  I was able to join three sessions on the first day.  One strong theme emerged – collaboration.

 Melanie Upright, a speech-language pathologist (SLP) working in the public schools in Charles County, presented the first session on using the curriculum in language therapy.    Ms. Upright had us imagine an all too-common situation in IEP meetings:  one team member (in her case the SLP, but many parents have had the same experience) asserts the child has mastered a certain skill.   Then the classroom teacher says “No way.  That does not happen in the classroom.”  This is the issue that has been a focus in behavior analysis for decades – the problem of generalization of skills.

 Ms. Upright suggested that one piece of this problem is that weekly speech sessions can be too disconnected from the regular curricular work of the classroom.  Therapy may be entirely unrelated to the other lessons of the day.   She recommended SLPs collaborate with the school’s instructional leadership team (reading specialists and other resources) to get access to the curriculum materials and to the school’s “Pacing Guides” or “Standards Guides.”   These guides are documents that map the standards of the MD State Voluntary Curriculum to specific lessons teachers will use.


 When they have these materials, SLPs can use them in one of two ways.  Both take advantage of the idea of priming – exposing a learner to events so that future events require less effort to respond.   SLPs can work ahead of the curriculum, pre-priming lessons for the learner, or they can use speech sessions to reinforce skills that have already been primed by the classroom lesson.    In either case the speech session becomes more relevant to the overall learning environment of the school.  If this isn’t happening for your child, it could be a good suggestion in an upcoming IEP meeting.

 I also sat in on a session called “Advocacy Without Borders.”   Presented by the MSHA Public Policy Committee, it described the association’s efforts to lobby the MD General Assembly and regulatory agencies to preserve and improve access to speech services.   Here again, the presenters emphasized reaching out to collaborate with other disciplines.   In 2008, teachers, speech, physical and occupational therapists formed a Coalition of Educational Health Occupations Providers to more effectively advocate for their mutual interests.   I hope in the future this Coalition also reaches out to Board Certified Behavior Analysts practicing in public and MANSEF schools.

 For obvious reasons, I was most interested in the last session I could attend – “Parents as Partners in the Clinical Process.”    This was an encouraging session.   Tommie Robinson, PhD, a clinical director for language disorders at the Children’s National Medical Center in DC and a pediatrics professor at GWU, emphasized the vital role of parents in speech-language treatment.    He stressed that while the IDEA law has legally made parents partners at the decision-making table for SLPs who practice in the schools, this is not the most important reason to collaborate with parents.

 Dr. Robinson repeatedly stated that “parents are the architects of their children’s speech and language.”   In this light, parents are key partners – able to gather and solidify data about the child, including key case history information and able to use our great amount of time with our kids to advantage if given training and direction.  Of course, there can be barriers in this relationship, such as if a parent withholds key information for personal reasons before trust develops between parent and therapist.    A barrier identified by therapists in the audience was pediatricians who reassure parents that speech progress is OK when the SLP has diagnosed deficits.   Here again, the answer was collaboration – reaching out directly to the pediatrician to educate them on speech delays.

 Most importantly, Dr. Robinson cautioned therapists against building their own barriers by making assumptions about parents’ knowledge and understanding of speech and language development.   Equally often, therapists overwhelm parents with terminology and unfamiliar concepts on the one hand, and on the other under-inform them on the assumption they won’t understand.   Too often the assumption that certain parents understand everything or nothing is driven by socio-economic status or ethnicity.   The take-away was for the therapist to evaluate each parent’s knowledge as individually as they evaluate the patient.

 As parents, often we are in the role of coordinating all the separate advice from multiple, isolated service providers.    It was very heartening to see a professional association placing emphasis on coordinating between therapists of various kinds, teachers and parents.    Our kids are best served when these partnerships happen.