This text-based course is a transcript of the webinar, “Creative Treatment for Children who Stutter: Community-Centered Assessment and Intervention,” presented by Craig Coleman, M.A., CCC-SLP, BCS-F.
>> Craig Coleman: Today’s topic has been my clinical focus for last few years. I am also starting to get an opportunity with some of my graduate students to research this area now, and I will talk a bit about that toward the end. I want to discuss community-centered stuttering intervention. We are going to start with some background on what community-centered intervention is and then go through some case studies about how to apply that to stuttering for both a preschool child and an older school-age child.
Disclosures include my financial relationships with Pearson, as I get royalties from the OASES. I am also the owner of the Virtual Stuttering Center, and along with my colleague Mary Weidner, we run MC Speech Books, where we have co-authored children's books on stuttering. For nonfinancial relationships, I am currently the associate coordinator of ASHA’s SIG-4, which is fluency disorders, a member of the ASHA Scientific and Professional Education Board and am the current past president of the Pennsylvania Speech Language Hearing Association, even though I live in West Virginia.
Where We Have Been
In terms of some of the historical perspective on this, where we have been in our field and where we are going, from a treatment standpoint we started off many years ago as a clinician-directed therapy. That was our main focus. Under clinician-directed treatment, the therapist would select the goals. The therapist with select the treatment activities and the client would participate. We have shifted a great deal in that respect and moved into a more patient-centered treatment philosophy. Under this approach, the client has some say, not only in terms of treatment activities, but also the goals and the functional outcomes that you are working toward. This becomes important because when we are talking about children, for example, we are not just talking about the client having a say in treatment but we are also talking about the parents.
Over the past 10 years or so, we moved into a more family-centered treatment approach to address those issues. We look at it and said, “Okay, we are working with the patient. We are allowing them to have a say in their goals and this is great, but that is not really enough.” When we work with children, we are involving the parents in the process. When we work with adults, we are involving other members of the family in the process. We have moved into more of a family-centered approach.
My colleague, Scott Yaruss, and I studied this about eight or nine years ago in terms of preschool stuttering, and found some good results on working with the parents. There is another webinar on SpeechPathology.com, which is the family-focused treatment approach that we have for the preschool children (Video 5071, TXT 5171, Audio 5076) ADD in LINKS . What I have found over the past few years is that I am not really sure that viewing things from a family-centered standpoint is even enough.
