Clinical Skills Confidence: Record A Session

Even the thought of doing this now makes me cringe. It brings back the grad school days when we were watched all the time and evaluation days when you pray that the students behave and everything goes according to plan! I loathe hearing my voice on tape. But I decided to record one of my sessions anyway. I wanted to see what kind of feedback and prompts I usually give me kids as well as figure out how I could improve. The only way to do this? Record myself.

I decided to record the last 15 minutes of a session. When I was listening back, here’s what I was listening for:

• Prompts/Cues: What types of prompts/cues did I provide when my students were struggling?
• Student Responses: Did they “get” it? Were they engaged?
• Feedback: What type of feedback did I give (positive or negative)?
• Notes To Self: What can I do to improve?

So after I got over cringing because I hate how I sound on video (don’t we all?), this is what I noticed:

• Prompts/Cues: Prompts to talk in complete sentences, cues to look at the next bead (we were using the EET to describe items), reminded students to look at visuals
• Student Responses: Students respond well to multi sensory input (hello, EET!), responses were sometimes vague (I have a lot of ESOL students and I’ve noticed this a lot, though I don’t know if there’s a correlation), this group of students are good about waiting their turn
• Feedback: Positive reinforcement when student got something correct, gave correct term for something if the student didn’t know, repeated the answer if correct and added more information if necessary, giving example (ex. adjectives) to help students with describing if they got stuck, saying “I want to see how much you can do without my help” to give responsibility to the student
• Notes To Self: Backing up when students are having difficulty. Rephrasing questions if it’s not understood the first time (sometimes I just repeated the question, which didn’t always help). Moving more away from question/answer format all the time – this might be secondary to the little voice in my head that always screams, “DATA!!!”

So now I challenge you: record part of a session and REALLY LISTEN to it. Listen to your students’ responses. Listen to your feedback, prompts, and models. Figure out what works and what doesn’t. I think it’s a valuable tool to help you grow and improve as an SLP!