Hallway conversations

I recently had a conversation with a SPED teacher in the hallway which led to me wanting to provide an inservice for the teachers at my school. Will I actually do this? NO. However, the list of things that I wish I could present to teachers keeps growing, for example:

1. I can actually treat LANGUAGE not just speech!
2. Written language counts too.
3. I can use and I want to use your curriculum to support my language interventions (take that GPS!).
4. What is a disorder vs a difference? Having an accent does not qualify you for speech.
5. Puh-lease don't send me your Kindergarteners with a misarticulated /r/, I promise it's ok.
6. But, if you just can't take it, you can be a speech therapist too and here's how!

Today's topic was: Speech disorders can, in fact, affect reading. I have a student in Tier 3 who, to the average listener, has a speech disorder. He is extremely difficult to understand. However, he does not have an "articulation" disorder like most people would think of when they think of speech. An example of an articulation disorder would be a kid who physically can't make the sound correctly (i.e. lisping an /s/). Instead, I believe that this student has a phonological disorder, which means he does not use his system of sounds correctly. For example, he may be fronting, which means he replaces all of his back sounds with front sounds (cat becomes tat, and dog becomes dod).

His teacher began telling me about how, "I think he can't hear, I think there's a hearing issue. I wonder if his hearing has been checked? When he's working on sounds, he just really can't hear them. He doesn't know they're different" Now, this could be an accurate assumption, and always something to rule out. However, older brother is on my caseload and does not have a hearing issue, he has a phonological disorder. Thus, it is more likely that this is a phonological disorder. He really doesn't know the difference between a /g/ and a /d/. It's possible that his hearing perception is completely fine but he can't discriminate these sounds when he hears them. This makes sense since he can't differentiate these sounds when he says them. So of course, reading is an extreme challenge for him. I did take some time to explain what I thought was going on with him and how this was affecting his reading. And, once placed in speech, I would likely implement some phonological awareness goals with his speech goals in order to help bridge the gap a bit. I hope that I was able to leave the teacher with a little better understanding of the true issue, but I am not sure.

There is so much that I wish that I could truly help the teachers understand as far as speech and language therapy goes. I feel like they think I just take their students away to play games and practice sounds. I wish that there was a more open dialogue between everyone, because I think we would all learn a lot from each other. It would be great to be able to share differing perspectives, but who wants to listen to a first year SLP?