Difficult Conversations

>> Amy Natho:  I would like to welcome you to the SpeechPathology.com virtual conference on Topics in Supervision.  We are honored to have Carol Dudding serving as our guest editor week and she rounded up a really great group of speakers.  Today's seminar is by Nancy Alarcon and it is called “Difficult Conversations With Our Students” and it is the last in our week-long series of seminars. My name is Amy Natho and I'm doing the introductions today and at this time it is a great pleasure to introduce Nancy.  Nancy is a speech-language pathologist and serves as Senior Lecturer and Clinic Director in the Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences at the University of Washington.  She is a clinical supervisor and has mentored over 300 graduate students during the past 23 years at the UW.  Nancy has lectured extensively on a range of aspects of clinical education and coordinates the annual UW Summer Institute on Supervision.  She is Board Certified in Adult Neurologic Communication Disorders, is a Fellow of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association and she currently serves on the ASHA Board of Directors asChair of the Speech-language Pathology Advisory Council.  So welcome Nancy.  We're so excited to have you here today.

[Applause]

>> Nancy Alarcon:  Well, thank you, Amy.  Thank you.  It is a pleasure to be with everyone today.  I sure appreciate this great opportunity.  As Amy mentioned just a moment ago it has been an especially powerful week for us for those who supervise to be able to have a designated virtual conference on this topic.  Carol Dudding we really appreciate her leadership as editor for the virtual conference and especially a thanks to SpeechPathology.com for hosting us.  I do want to acknowledge the contributions of Carol and Lisa and Vicki and Wren who provided amazing nuggets of gold in each of their presentations.  If you have not had the opportunity, as Amy mentioned, you will definitely want to go back to the lectures.  I know I'm looking forward to going back to the content.  I'll make some references today as I go along to the key things that were brought up. 

Overview

Well, let's begin and start off today to talk a little bit about identifying and utilizing a range of strategies that will really help us to begin to address what might at times be some of the most uncomfortable topics or conversations that come up in the course of supervising graduate clinicians.  I'm going to begin rather broadly but then weave in some examples of audiology and speech-language pathology supervision.  To get a sense of who is in this today I would really love to do a quick little survey with you.  First if you would tell me who is an audiologist with us today?  How many audiologists might be onboard?  So we have a few colleagues in audiology.  That is great.  I work very intimately with my colleagues in the Audiology Department and we share lots of interesting challenges and strategies across in our day-to-day operations so it is really key to be able to talk about what do our friends in audiology experience?  I'm speaking from a speech-language pathology perspective and I'm going to assume many of you are speech-language pathologists.

So now, the first question to you then about supervising is how many have been supervisors in the past 12 months?  Wow, great.  So we're hitting probably over 25, 30 folks in the group.  That is terrific.  How many are new to supervising?  How many are brand new to supervising?  I have to applaud you.  Wow, that is great to see.  For everybody listening we have got about eight or nine folks that are brand new to supervising. I would think that most of us in the group here who are currently supervising or have supervised in the past year would say this is an amazing opportunity to have these types of offerings for short courses, whether it's, you know, something that you're attending in a workshop or in this case this virtual conference because for the most part we often learn by the ‘seat of our pants’ - on-the-job training.  It is terrific to have a dedicated time to be able to talk about issues that are really near and dear to us and are living on a day-to-day basis.  So we're going to talk about some key factors that I think will really speak to you about what is difficult in a conversation for each of us, particular triggers and then I hope to address a bit of a framework that will help you and I both think about planning when we need to have a difficult conversation.  Again specifically today we're thinking about students in a clinical rotation.  But at the very end what I hope to emphasize - and I'll give you very personal examples - is how could we apply this in our daily lives, in our personal relationships, our work with our co-workers, in all aspects of our lives. You and I have certainly recognized challenging conversations can present themselves unexpectedly or we may be walking into one that we expect is going to happen.  We're going to talk about a framework for planning and then when we're in the midst of one that we didn't account for or plan for what can we do to be as successful and effective as possible?  We'll think about some tools and strategies for managing in the clinical learning environment as well. 

I want to highlight a few key references that I'll mention repeatedly today.  There is an exceptional book that is in your reference list called, “Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most” by Douglas Stone and colleagues. It is out of the hard inventoried professional project a consortium of resources and expertise that I would certainly encourage you to go to after this presentation today - especially to grab that book.  It was printed in 1999, but it is just amazing.  One of those that I think you'll go back to many times.  Secondly I would highlight Triad Consulting.  It is in the online resource out of the Harvard Negotiation Project and many additional tools that might spur you on to doing small group activities possibly in your work setting or in your personal life.