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>> Amy: Welcome, everybody. Our title is “Innovative Approaches for Mentoring and Supervising for Today's Professionals: Focus on Technology.” My name is Amy Natho, and I will be moderating today.
Our speakers are Chuck Carlin and Carol Dudding. Carol is Director of Clinical Education and Assistant Professor at James Madison University, and principal investigator and program director of an online Master’s degree program in speech language pathology and a project exploring the use of telepractice in the public schools. She has published and presented internationally and nationally on the topics of clinical education and supervision, telepractice and e-supervision. Charles Carlin is Assistant Professor at the University of Akron in the School of Speech Language Pathology and Audiology. He is the principal investigator of a project that is exploring the use of e-supervision in rural and hard-to-fill school districts in Ohio. His research interests include supervision, classroom based service delivery models, and response to intervention models for students with speech or language impairments. Welcome Chuck and Carol. (applause)
>> Chuck: Thank you. I was wondering if I could get an idea of how many different roles our audience works in. Use the thumbs-up button if you are supervising or mentoring at the supervisory level? Okay. How about medical settings? And lastly how about school districts? Okay. We have a pretty diverse group of audience members here. Thank you.
I think that we have all experienced shortages in the different settings that we work in. It is no surprise that we experience that in our field. It’s not just the shortage issue. We also have people switching jobs, whether it is going from a medical setting or school setting. There are also changes that are part of any job in our field. If you can think back, whether it is starting a new job or changing a job, it is a very complex process and it can be very overwhelming, not just from a paperwork sense, but looking at a wide range of responsibilities that we have.
Objectives
Looking at the processes of supervision and mentoring, there are very important strategies that we can use to either guide our graduate students, to guide our employees or even to embark on ourselves. By the end of the session today, we're hoping that you will be able to identify factors that will help you decide the technologies that are needed for the different purposes you have. We're hoping that we’ll be able to describe the benefits and challenges of e-supervision and e-mentoring and discuss the issues that are involved. We're using technology, and security issues have to be considered. Then we also hope you will be able to identify the different technologies that are needed as well as the supports that are necessary in order to implement these.
Mentoring and Supervision
It is very difficult to do it by yourself in the beginning stages of this, so support systems are definitely necessary. Let's overview the concepts of mentoring and supervision. These terms are sometimes used interchangeably, but they're really not synonyms. They're not the same thing, but nonetheless there are commonalities between the two of them that involve leadership roles, certainly where you have a more experienced SLP assisting or mentoring or supervising an individual with lesser experience.
And these strategies, mentorship and supervision, can be used in various work settings; they are not specific, say, to the schools. When we look at supervision and mentoring, as I said before, they're both processes. But they differ not based just on the setting, but on the needs and the competencies of the individuals that are being mentored or supervised, the expectations they might have as they enter into the processes, as well as their philosophies.
The desired outcome isn't just to professionally develop the mentee or supervisee, but it is also to improve the outcomes for the clients that we're working with. We want to improve services. So the aim, certainly, is for professional development and professional growth, but we’re also looking at walking away from this process and leaving our mentees and supervisees with the ability to self-analyze and self-evaluate. We also want to give them those critical thinking skills and problem solving skills so that they're able to solve those clinical problems when we walk away. We want them to be as independent as possible.
