NC SLP Institute Part 2

I haven't forgotten about my promise to write my thoughts from the second half of the SLP Institute. It was just put on the back burner so I could spend as much time with Serena as possible before her big vet. trip.

The second half of the Institute was spent in the company of about 30 School Psychologists. Dr. Andrew Shanock from the College of St. Rose presented on the importance of collaboration between SLPs and SPs. Honestly, I really did not know what to expect when we started this session as I haven't spent a great deal of time conversing with the School Psychologist who serves students at my school. He's split between several buildings and spends most of his time at the other schools that he serves. 

The majority of Dr. Shanock's presentation focused on the similarities between our assessment tools. There is no way I will be able to do much justice to the way he presented the material in person, but it is very astonishing information. We are making our students do many of the same tasks to get our respected scores. We never learned about the tests School Psychologists give in graduate school (beyond needing to look at their scores for similarities) so I was really surprised. Collaboration between our professions could reduce some of this redundancy and unnecessary pressure on the students. However, this collaboration will not happen over night. You have to build good working relationships with the members of your IEP team and make time to compare notes during every evaluation/re-evaluation process. Dr. Shanock's suggestion is to start by reviewing previous evaluations and then start collaborative testing on re-evaluations.

 I made this very simple table based off of the information we were given as a little reminder of the similarities between our assessment tools.

It will be a very time consuming process to develop this level of collaboration. (It will be well worth it, but very time consuming.)