6 Creative Ways to Support and Mentor New SLPs (or CFYs)

Dread filled me as I stared at the email.

I had a new client. A fluency client. But I had never dealt with stuttering before!

I was still in my Clinical Fellowship Year (CFY) and this was going to be my first fluency client. I barely remembered that class in grad school.

But fortunately for me (and that client), I had an amazing support team to turn to.

I asked my CF supervisor and she put me in touch with Christina who had worked with a ton of fluency kiddos.

She gave me the full run down of what to do and how to do it. I breathed a sigh of relief.

Let me put it bluntly: the world of speech-language pathology is vast. There’s no way to “learn it all” in grad school. We do our best but then we get out into the real world and it’s a lot of trial by fire.

And even established SLPs can find themselves struggling if they have been working with one population for a long time (for example, adults) and suddenly find themselves adapting to a new group (such as kids).

Clinical fellowship supervisors are an amazing built-in tool for supporting brand new SLPs, but adding additional supports can provide alternative ways for our new (or new-to-pediatrics) professionals to find their footing and gain confidence.

One of the best ways to learn how to do speech-language pathology is by watching someone else. That’s why we do so many observations during grad school!

But those observations can take on a whole other meaning once we have our own caseload. We can suddenly apply the things we’re seeing to real-life clients that we will see later that day.

Find opportunities for your new SLPs to shadow other therapists and observe some of their sessions. I guarantee they’ll pick up some tips and tricks to enhance their own therapy.

You can also pair them with complementary professionals for co-treating, such as physical therapists, occupational therapists, and behavioral specialists. I can’t tell you how much I learned from co-treating with other therapists.

This one sounds counterintuitive. We should pair new SLPs with experiences ones, right??

Sometimes, a new SLP will feel more comfortable talking to another new SLP rather than going to someone experienced. It can feel intimidating asking an experienced coworker for help with something that they worry is obvious or that they should have remembered from graduate school. Asking another new SLP can feel less intimidating and maybe that person has recently dealt with that or DOES remember from grad school.

Then, if neither of them know the answer or have any ideas, both will feel more confident going to their more experienced coworkers for help since they know it wasn’t an easy answer that just slipped their mind.

My friend Laura has a car named “The Sparkler”. It’s a magical place where therapy ideas abound and challenges that you’ve been stewing on for days can get solved in minutes.

You see, Laura and a few of her therapists will pile into The Sparkler and drive out to one of their rural school contracts. They divide up the kids and get them seen in a fraction of the time that it would take one person to see everyone. But getting them seen more quickly isn’t necessarily the point. The point of all going at once is that they also get the benefit of being in the car together.

Every time I’ve been in The Sparkler, that drive time became a collaborative time where we would talk about our tough cases, give each other ideas, and even just commiserate.

If you have traveling assignments, buddy up a new SLP with a more experienced one and have them drive together to visit those schools. Instead of having one SLP see each school individually, send a few together. They’ll get the kids seen in half the time and they’ll get to collaborate on the road.

Create your own Sparkler moments.

Promote a culture of asking for help. Establish regular “roundtable” meetings where everyone gets together and takes turns asking for help with tough cases. Then, encourage everyone to give supportive feedback and ideas and share materials or strategies that have worked well for them in the past.

This will help your newer SLPs by giving them a chance to ask about cases that they’re stumped on. But it will also help them by learning from other SLPs’ challenging cases and the strategies shared.

“If you want to teach people a new way of thinking, don’t bother trying to teach them. Instead, give them a tool, the use of which will lead to new ways of thinking.”

— Buckminster Fuller

The easiest way to boost a new SLPs confidence and improve their therapy is to give them tools and systems that guide them. No-prep therapy plans can lay out exactly how to treat a skill from start to finish. IEP checklists can save you hours on training a therapist on how to write one. And AI-powered tools can save a new SLP hours on wording their goals, writing session notes, and generating individualized therapy materials like word lists and social scenarios.

Our SLK Teams Program specializes in all of this. We’ve created a full therapy system with therapy plans, screening tools, progress monitoring tools, AI-powered tools, and much more. Having a start-to-finish system with built-in therapy materials will provide your new SLPs with support and resources at the touch of a button. And it makes the job of the supervisor that much easier as they can simply share a link to a training video and resource that explains the exact skill they need to teach.

The internet is an amazing tool. Thanks to resources like our SLK Teams Program, you can now purchase training, support, and even mentorship for your new SLPs with a click of a button. Our online platform, therapy plans, and curriculums can provide hours of support each week to new SLPs that you won’t have to provide internally.

We even have a new SLP group mentorship program that consists of a structured training program and yearlong support to help new SLPs feel confident in their therapy skills.

Click Here to Learn More about how our SLK Teams Program can provide your SLPs with the tools, training, and mentorship they need for a fraction of the cost of providing it all internally.