What are some of the most common related services used in schools?

Transcript: Judy Rudebusch, EdD – Service Delivery Options

There are two main things that a speech pathologist should consider when selecting service delivery options or models, and that is least-restrictive environment and the other is what is going to be the most functional context for the child to learn the language or speech skills that they need in order to make progress in their IEP and therefore make progress in the general curriculum. Everybody that we work with is in school, and so the main context for learning is the classroom, and the main context for improving communication skills becomes the language of schooling, the language of the curriculum, the language of the classroom, discourse of the classroom. We really want to move on a continuum from conversational interaction to literate formal language that you can handle either in written or verbal modes. You want to really push children towards that literate end. In terms of service delivery, if you’re really valuing the context where the children have to learn the skills, you will probably want to provide more than a pullout model, especially when there’s a language disorder.

Transcript: Judy Rudebusch, EdD – Working on a team

In an ideal situation, there’s a multidisciplinary team of assessment professionals that get together and look over a referral. When there are speech or language concerns listed in the referral, the speech pathologist is included in the multidisciplinary team that conducts the comprehensive evaluation to look at whether or not there’s a need for specially designed instruction, special education, and related services. So from the outset the speech pathologist can and should be part of a multidisciplinary team. In terms of the IEP, after you have the evaluation and you go to the IEP team meeting to consider eligibility and if the child meets the eligibility criteria, then an individual program is developed to help the child meet grade-level standards through the special education or specially designed instruction and related services. The speech pathologist becomes one of the group of educators sitting around the table with the family, and possibly the student, considering what services are needed in order to help them meet grade-level or course expectations. Depending on the student, the speech pathologist may have more of a primary role—if most of the concerns for the student relate to communication skills, speech and language skills—or maybe a little bit more in the background, if there are other disability conditions that take up more of the discussion. But always a member of the team, always giving input, bearing in mind communication skills and how important speech and language skills are for developing literacy and making it through school.

Transcript: Judy Rudebusch, EdD – Working with Students Who Have Language-Learning Problems

We have speech pathologists who do some remarkable work with children who have language-learning disabilities. They receive specially designed instruction through special education for a learning disability. Usually that’s with an inclusion teacher in the general ed classroom, but they also receive speech-pathology services because of a language disorder. The student is in fourth grade and really struggling more than he struggled in third grade because the reading level, the textbooks, and the instruction changes so much in the curriculum at fourth grade. So the related services that the speech pathologist provides is like in a pre-teach and review model. Working with the special education inclusion teacher and the fourth-grade teacher to look at what’s coming up next in terms of a unit and the vocabulary, the sentence structure, the concepts, and the questions that are going to come up, the speech pathologist does a pull-out with the student, to do a pre-teach, so that when the classroom gets to the content or the material the child knows some answers and can participate in class. Then the teach piece goes on, and the student still struggles to keep pace, and so the speech pathologist then comes back and does a sort of a re-teach session in a pull-out or a pulled-to-the-side during small-group instruction. I think it’s really exciting with students who also language disorders to combine service delivery models to get the best effect. So you can do a pull-out. You can leave the inclusion teacher, the special education teacher, and the classroom teacher to do the co-teaching and then come in during small-group instruction. Just make sure that student is in the speech pathologist’s group to go over it and do a re-teach.

Transcript: Susan Karr, MS, CCC-SLP

Speech-language pathologists are an integral part of the education team. They can support teachers in helping students with communication disorders, in particular literacy issues, speech and language disorders related to reading, spelling, and writing. Many academic problems have an underlying language basis to them, and teachers can really benefit by the training and skills that speech-language pathologists have. I would say to utilize their skills and training and work together collaboratively to be able to help students succeed in schools, teachers have their perspective and speech-language pathologists have their unique perspective, so together they can really contribute to helping students’ success.