Written by: Megan Smith / Treatment / March 2020

You may have already heard about one exciting recent development (of many!) at the Well Said: Toronto Speech Therapy clinic: that we are now affiliated with the University of Toronto’s graduate program in Speech-Language Pathology as a clinical internship site. As a result, two new temporary members (Jennifer and Michelle) joined our team under the supervision of our registered speech-language pathologists.

Jennifer and Michelle were with us from January 10th until the end of February. During that time, they worked with clients on voice, professional communication, sound pronunciation, stuttering/fluency, accent modification, and other areas of speech, language, and communication! If you were a client working with Melissa, Megan or Dain during the last few months, you may have met or worked with these students. You can read more about them in some of our recent past blog posts.

Over the course of the last few weeks, the students have progressed from observing our work with clients to running sessions together and even independently! They have become much more proficient at both the practical and administrative tasks associated with working as a speech-language pathologist. They have also developed more clinical confidence as their competence has grown.

We are very proud of the development that we have seen in the students to date!

Jennifer and Michelle will be returning to the University of Toronto shortly, to complete their final unit of coursework. Once this is completed, they will have one additional clinical internship before graduating with their Masters of Health Science and becoming eligible to be registered with the provincial college as Speech-Language Pathologists.

Our clinic director, Melissa James, has had experience in the past mentoring new speech-language pathology graduates (including current Level 2 clinician Megan when she first started working at the clinic!). However, supervising students was a new experience for her! Melissa has had to learn how to navigate the University of Toronto program as a supervising clinician, including how to negotiate a practicum contract on behalf of the clinic, and how to structure a student supervision program within a private practice.

For our clinicians Megan and Dain, this was a total new experience. Neither had worked with a student in the past, and learning to supervise the practice of another person was an exciting adventure. They developed their clinical supervision skills, including learning how to effectively provide feedback, how to learn to let go of some control to allow the students to grow, and how to jump in and help when needed.

Everyone involved in our new experience working with speech-language pathology students has been challenged by the administrative load associated with supervised practice, and we have had to become even more flexible and organized over the past few months than we have needed to be in the past. We have also appreciated the challenge of what feels like having to do double therapy: monitoring how our clients are doing (and feeling) as they progressed through their work, while also monitoring how the students are doing (and feeling) as they structure the clients’ work! 

We are not yet sure how our relationship with the University of Toronto’s Speech-Language Pathology program will develop over time, but we do know that we are looking forward to having students work with us again in the future. Exactly what that will look like is yet to be determined. Will we supervise students again in the future? Will the structure be the same, or will we take on a greater number of students? Have students full-time? Work with students who are closer to completing their programs? We don’t know yet, but we are excited to find out!

Working with our S-LP students has been a blast! We wish Jennifer and Michelle all the best in their continuing studies, and in their future clinical practice.

To learn more about future opportunities to work with speech-language pathology students, you can call the clinic or use the chatbox on our website. 

To speak with one of the speech-language pathologists at Well Said: Toronto Speech Therapy, schedule an initial consultation by clicking the link below or calling (647) 795-5277.