Graduate Clinician Observation

The first session I observed with my client, StewartM530 was on September 12th. The graduate clinician I am paired with, Laura Mitchell, showed many of the clinical skills we discussed in class. The client is around three years old and has childhood apraxia. The graduate clinician has shown her skills of planning and organization, execution, teaching strategies and data collection and analysis. My graduate clinician has shown a lot of skill in planning and organization. The goals for the client are quite clear and are appropriate to the client. The goals are: for phonemes currently in repertoire, produce CVC words in initial and final positions following a model with at least 80% accuracy; correct single words following a model at least 5 times a day, and; produce ‘core’ words independently given a visual prompt. All of these goals also contribute to the long-term goal of producing intelligible verbal communication in all contexts. All of these goals are written as behavioral objectives, using key words such as produce and correct.
The main teaching strategy she used was direct modeling. The client does not usually make utterances spontaneously. He will, however, imitate the clinician and say the word she is modeling most of the time. The clinician also uses shaping with the client. When the client will not say a word, the clinician will break it down into the different phonemes, since the words the client is focusing on are CVC words. The clinician will also use prompts. She will hold up and object and ask what it is, or if he is not responding, she will label it incorrectly, in hopes that the client will correct her. Unfortunately, if he is not interested in what she is holding, he will not respond to her. The clinician will also use expansion, and sometimes the client’s mother does this as well. The clinician also provides specific feedback to the client, such as “Good job! I heard your /f/