Interview with Diane Games, CCC-SLP, Coordinator of Fluency Friday Plus

Linda Schreiber: Diane, thank you for talking with me this morning about Fluency Friday Plus. You are a speech-language pathologist who is a Board Recognized Specialist in Fluency. Tell us more about your background. Diane Games: I am co-owner of a private practice, Tri-County Speech Associates, in

Linda Schreiber: Diane, thank you for talking with me this morning about Fluency Friday Plus. You are a speech-language pathologist who is a Board Recognized Specialist in Fluency. Tell us more about your background.

Diane Games: I am co-owner of a private practice, Tri-County Speech Associates, in the Cincinnati area. We have been in practice since 1984 and had started our practice with a pediatric focus and then branched out. I've always been interested in fluency intervention and as the years progressed, I started treating more children, teens, and adults who stutter. Now my caseload is probably 75% fluency cases.

Linda: So, in your private practice, you must have seen a need for providing resources in the area of fluency; a need to bring people together. Tell us about Fluency Friday Plus.

Diane: Well, Fluency Friday Plus (FFP) is an intensive day-and-a-half program of fluency treatment for kids and young adults (K-12) who stutter. Graduate students from Miami University and the University of Cincinnati conduct the therapy. They are supervised by speech-language pathologists (SLPs) who have experience treating this population. Irv Wollman [Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center & the University of Cincinnati] and I are Board Recognized Specialists in Fluency Disorders. Plus we have many professionals in the area who are experienced in fluency intervention who also supervise the graduate students.

FFP also provides an educational program for parents. So while their children are in intervention, the parents are receiving educational information from speakers such as Donna Cooperman from St. Rose College, Nina Reardon-Reeves from Texas, and Rod Gabel from Bowling Green University. My partner Patty Fisher has a key role in the development of the parent program.

Linda: What's the mission of this unique day and a half?

Diane: Well I think there are actually three things; one is the training piece. FFP helps graduate students actually experience this population. The letters and notes I receive from the students are amazing. Studying fluency/stuttering in a textbook versus actually seeing all of these kids, 55 of them [this year] who have different types of disfluency, ability levels, and socioeconomic differences is quite powerful. So that is one piece of it.

We also want our students who stutter, those we are treating in our practices, in hospitals, and in school settings, to know they are not alone. It has really, really made a difference for many of my clients to know that other kids are experiencing some of the same fears and anxieties over stuttering. And it has helped to somewhat "normalize" fluency problems since there are more people who stutter than there are people who do not stutter at FFP. That gives the students a powerful feeling!

Of course, we are also trying to help students who stutter to be fluent, our third mission. We set up different kinds of speaking tasks for them to experience. One unique program we have on Saturday morning is called Conversational Breakfast. The graduate students manage 10 different tables where there are different speaking tasks. The kids go from table to table practicing their targets and trying different speaking tasks that range from reading, to making phone calls, to being teased and learning how to respond. The students collect raffle tickets, which are used in a drawing to win donated prizes.

We also have group therapy for the students to work on attitudes and emotions. We have an open microphone at lunch where they can speak or tell jokes. We do skits by age level at the end of the first day. The students dress up and do an interactive skit related to a theme; this year it was the Pirates of the Caribbean. Some of the children talk and some do not. There is no pressure to speak, but often getting up in front of a group and participating is helpful to them.

Linda: It sounds like a lot of fun; multipurposed and meaningful for everyone.

Diane: Yeah, it's a complicated program to manage and yet the concepts are pretty simple. And all this didn't happen in one year; we have been at this since 2001 and we are going into our seventh year. So it's a work in progress. Each year we try to do something additional.

Linda: What is great is that it provides a safe environment for the kids and their parents to talk about an issue that maybe they don't share with others.

Diane: The parents learn so much. They learn from other parents and talk about situations and problems. In addition to having speakers who lead discussions and lecture for the parents, we have our teens come in at the end of the first day and talk to the parents about stuttering. It's very powerful to see these talented, smart, young people talking about feelings and things that helped them. It empowers the parents, especially the parents of the younger children, to see that their children can have a wonderful future.

And on the second day, we have adults who stutter share their experiences. We have different kinds of people, from custodians to computer engineers, who are willing to donate their time to talk about their experiences and how they have worked through this disorder. I think those two pieces are wonderful for our parents to have.

Linda: Is it a huge time and financial commitment?

Diane: It does take a lot of work and I do want to thank all the people in our community and the universities who support this project. If I did not have that support, this would not be as successful. Our state association has provided grant money to me almost every year. Our local association gave me a very large grant last year that funded the webpage. Nina Reardon-Reeves did a full-day workshop for our community and all of the proceeds from that workshop were donated to the project. It "takes a village" to do something like this. The end result is that I think we are all seeing parents who know a lot more about how to engage and respond to their child/teen who stutters, and we have kids who feel more comfortable with stuttering. Hopefully we also have kids who are making improvements in their fluency too.

Linda: You've mentioned you've gotten positive comments from the grad students and I'm guessing you're getting positive comments from the children and the parents who attend FFP.

Diane: That is correct. We do listen to what people tell us (we have feedback forms). Parents will suggest different kinds of things they would like us to do and one of the big things is to do this more than once a year.

Linda: You have a website that has additional materials and a little explanation of what Fluency Friday Plus is and that is www.fluencyfriday.org

Diane: Yes. The website has been developed for the training piece and for community professionals. We do a manual for every professional and graduate student who attends. The manual contains a lot of intervention ideas. It contains materials that we have developed for diagnosing stuttering and developing intervention objectives. We have handouts from various speakers who have attended FFP over the years.

We have links to many other wonderful websites on our site, like the Stuttering Homepage, the Stuttering Foundation, and the National Stuttering Association. Our website is a vehicle for helping both Irv and I teach and for helping community SLPs in their practices when they need quick access to information. So that's why I developed the website and will continue to expand it. We have a lot of intervention ideas that we are going to add this year.

Linda: Well I am so appreciative of learning about Fluency Friday Plus this morning. I hope that it spurs on SLPs to do something similar in their own communities. Our readers will be happy to know there is such a rich resource at your website too.

Diane: I love to talk about it!

Linda: Well thank you Diane.