Difficult Conversations

>> Amy Natho:  I would like to welcome you to the 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.