Chaya Wright is a full time Speech-Language Pathologist. When she’s not providing services to her students and patients, she enjoys being a social media influencer and content creator. Connect with her on Instagram @kurlyki_slp and check out cool new content. I’m excited that she was interested in an interview to discuss her role and experiences as a Speech-Language Pathologist.
Was the idea of being a speech language pathologist appealing to you at a young age?
It honestly started for me when I graduated high school and started looking into what careers I wanted to go into. My sister is deaf and so she went to a deaf school. She received rehab within the school but then she also actually went to a clinic. She went to that specific clinic and she received the services of a speech language pathologist once she received a cochlear implant. My sister went through the whole process of having surgery which is intense and was a hard path for her. My sister had zero speech and she went through speech therapy. She couldn’t communicate through speech alone, but it still piqued my interest to let me check out the field that showed amazing progress working with my sister.
What was the educational process like, and did you go through a typical certification?
For your undergraduate degree, you must go through the clinical courses, but you also have to have around 25 observation hours in undergrad. Then you apply to graduate school, where you need to take your GRE to get in. You take your clinical courses, but you must have a minimum of 400 clinical hours. Those clinical hours are basically where you’re doing therapy in different settings. You have different clinical rotations that can range from a school setting, hospital setting, or an outpatient setting. No matter the location, you’re basically doing therapy underneath the supervision of another licensed SLP. After the 400 clinical hours and your courses, you graduate the program and head to your national exam. This exam tests you on everything from the past two years that you studied in graduate school. There will be questions about your studies from pediatric knowledge to geriatric knowledge. It’s an intense test that you must take, and you must have a passing score to move forward. The next step is the clinical rotation where you must complete a minimum of 36 weeks practicing as your own SLP. You’re still under the guidance of a license SLP until you can get a professional certification that acknowledges your clinical competence.
Is it typical to specialize in one field or can someone work with both children and the elderly?
That’s exactly what I do as a licensed SLP. I work with school-based kids full-time during the day, after school I do some home health with pediatric kids, but then the next day I will see my adults. I chose to do both settings because I didn’t want to lose my skills with both, but some people may choose just to specialize in a specialty. We’ll have board certified specialist, who may specialize in fluency disorders, which is often a lot of stuttering or they may specialize in voice and that’s all they work on and they must take tests for that. They must make sure they’ve received their exams and stay up to date on the certifications for that as well to remain a board-certified specialist but I’m just an SLP that likes to just work in different settings.
What is the contract system like for your role and do SLPs work a typical 9-5?
You would get an annual contract. We still are considered under the pay rate of a teacher and just like how teachers must renew their contracts at the end of the school year, SLPs are on a yearly basis. Even though we’re technically special education, we still have to renew our contracts at the end of the school year, or if you choose not to come back, then you just don’t sign the contract and that’s how it works.
Is there a limit on the classroom sizes you work with and is there a size that’s most effective for learning?
There’s not necessarily a cap. But like you said, for it to remain effective, I keep my groups probably at a maximum of three. Everything varies by disorder and grade, but the therapy is usually based on the student’s individual needs. If the severity of the disability is severe, then I will sometimes choose to work one-on-one with that student so they can really get that intensive instruction in speech therapy.
Is there a common disorder you notice amongst the children you work with and are there any strategies to work with it?
The ones you mainly see are articulation and language disorders. I also serve students who stutter as well, and that’s starting to increase. On top of that, a lot of children are being identified with autism later instead of earlier. Autism can come with lot of social communication issues and I must help them out with understanding social cues. We teach something called fluency enhancing strategies or stuttering modification strategies. Those are the technical terms, but we’re teaching these children their speech tools that they will use to help to decrease their disfluent moments. We are transparent that in most cases the personal will stutter for life. It is a lifelong disability. However, as the SLP, I’m teaching you different strategies to help decrease those fluent moments and you have that choice if you have a disfluent moment to use those speech tools that I’m instructing you and teaching you. The stutterers have atypical disfluencies and so their disfluencies are going to be at a higher rate than ours, obviously.
What is the strategy helpings kids with autism?
A lot of times we are teaching those what are appropriate behaviors or about the perspective of other peers. I love to have group settings to go over this idea and may group one or two children with autism with another peer that doesn’t have autism, just so they can kind of see what the typical social communication is. For example, I like to start off my sessions by asking what they did for their weekend. Sometimes children with autism have difficulty asking follow-up questions and there’s just a long silence. Those nonverbal cues are something that need to be regularly talked about.
How bad was the effects of covid-19 for licensed SLPs and the children you work with?
It was a lot more difficult because they’re in the home. A lot of the times the lessons were geared towards interacting with your family. The kids would still take that opportunity where I would kind of just sit like I am and let the two students kind of converse with each other and still being able to kind of give them opportunities to ask follow-up questions and to initiate conversations. We had to do the best that we could during that time and that’s kind of how I geared it towards that.
Are there any noticeable differences going from the classroom to working with adults?
I would say with an adult, we must keep in mind that they are adults. Even if they have severe cognitive communication deficits, when they don’t want to participate in a session then you must respect that. If the child is having not the best day and they’re screaming, you can still encourage them into the activity. A huge factor with the elderly is dementia and CVAs strokes as well. Parkinson’s can occur, but the main two topics that I would say are strokes and dementia. A lot of the patients that I work with, or if they just have just a functional decline in their cognitive skills, just from whatever injury that they may have, they just having a functional decline and I also work with those individuals as well. Usually if there’s a cognitive decline, then there’s huge issues with safety, problem solving, and organization. And when we are working on the adult side, you want to make the speech therapy sessions more functional for the patient because it’s what affects their everyday life. If their goal is to go back home, you want to get them back to their prior level of functioning they were at when they’re at home. I may be working on pointing at the safety issues that they may have in the home and that they may need to get rid of.
Do you collaborate with psychologists or other professionals in your role?
I definitely work with many other talented professionals. On the pediatric side, I collaborate with occupational therapists, physical therapists, and the school psychologist quite often. The occupational therapist and I will be discussing certain sensory tasks to help basically calm down a child if they’re having a sensory moment where they’re not able to really regulate their body. I can consult with the OT to help me figure out strategies for that. Now, for the assessed school psychologist side, if they have behavioral issues, that’s when I’m working with the school psychologist to be able to identify what are some things that we can do again to deescalate those negative behaviors.
Has there been any stressful situations working with children as an SLP?
There’s been situations because a child with speech disorders can get frustrated because they can’t communicate what it is that they want and at the same time their body is not able to regulate itself. We must sometimes do deep pressure routines or pass out squeeze toys to destress everyone involved. Sometimes there can be some injures behavior, like physical harm, where they might want to hit you or hit themselves. It’s kind of typical, so I don’t think there’s anything that’s worse than what I’ve seen.
