Rocky Mountain University of Health Professions (RMUoHP) has the mission to develop leaders skilled in clinical inquiry and prepared to affect healthcare change. Students and alumni of the Speech-Language Pathology program are doing just that.
Jodi LeGray, ClinScD, CCC-SLP, graduated from the Doctor of Speech-Language Pathology (SLPD) program at RMUoHP. While working as an autism coach for a school district in Colorado, Dr. LeGray was on the team that evaluated and determined eligibility for services for culturally- and linguistically-diverse students. With being responsible to both identify and establish interventions for children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and culturally- and linguistically-diverse children, Dr. LeGray felt “behind in the immense amounts of research for both responsibilities.” Determined to better prepare herself to face these responsibilities, she decided to further her education in speech-language pathology and pursue applied research in these populations.
Dr. LeGray came to RMUoHP and the SLPD program because of the focus on applied research and leadership and the program’s limited-residency model. With being unable to relocate to further her education, the SLPD program was a perfect fit with its mostly online courses and a few onsite visits.
“My biggest highlights from being a student at RMUoHP were the relationships we developed and working with professionals addressing cultural and linguistic differences in our field,” says Dr. LeGray. “As I got to know my fellow students, it shocked me how few degrees of separation there were from knowing common people in our field or areas of interest. I truly appreciated working with colleagues who represent some of the diversity of children I work with and I learned a lot from them about different ways to support students facing the challenges they too address.”
Dr. LeGray decided to focus her capstone on aspects related to her professional work. “My capstone was an investigation of the effects of coaching early childhood staff in strategies for expanding expressive language in young children with ASD. I was able to replicate the effects of the intervention of coaching across three strategies for expanding the expressive language of children with ASD.”
For Dr. LeGray, she wanted to help school-based speech-language pathologists provide the best support to the students they served. “The topic of coaching staff to implement communication strategies with children with ASD was important to me because of the unmet needs I saw daily for both staff and students. The unmet needs coupled with the time constraints of speech-language pathologists made me consider if a different service delivery model might be both more effective and more efficient.”
As Dr. LeGray was finishing up her capstone project, her university capstone committee encouraged her to submit the topic for presentation at the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) in 2017. She applied to present and her proposal was accepted. Her presentation was well attended and many people were interested in applying coaching to their clinical settings.
But it didn’t stop there. “One of my past colleagues was at ASHA and she was coordinating the Metro Speech-Language Symposium. She asked that I present my research, specifically the coaching process, at Metro,” says Dr. LeGray. “Speech-language pathologists were eager to hear about how to multiply their intervention time with children by coaching their staff members to implement the strategies that they used regularly.”
Her capstone project and the related conference presentations opened up many opportunities for Dr. LeGray to share her findings and effect change within her healthcare profession. With the feedback from the Metro Speech-Language Symposium, Dr. LeGray developed a three-hour workshop for speech-language pathologists and early-intervention providers in the Spokane Valley School District.
Furthermore, at her presentation in ASHA, the state speech-language pathologist for the Colorado Department of Education attended. Dr. LeGray explains, “She discussed with me that she felt this component of coaching adults to carry out the interventions we learn was potentially the missing piece of other workshops that the state had been doing.” She was asked to develop online modules on coaching that could be imbedded into different courses to help with implementation of the content from social skills in children with ASD to written language interventions.”
The capstone process in the ClinScD SLP program is rigorous; however, for Dr. LeGray, it was meaningful—“we were encouraged to answer a clinically applicable question we were facing in our work, which also makes the capstone process motivating and rewarding,” says Dr. LeGray.
“Much of the research in our field is done in clinical settings with pristine conditions that make it difficult to apply the outcomes of that research to our everyday messy complicated work settings,” says Dr. LeGray. “I appreciate the opportunities being created by RMUoHP to allow research to happen in the field that can be more easily applied to a variety of work settings, because the research is happening in a variety of work settings.”
Dr. LeGray has used her education to truly improve how speech-language pathologists are serving patients. She comments, “For those who are wanting to lead or supervise speech-language pathologists, become more effective at implementing evidence-based practices, and add to the applied research in our field, I found this program to highly support all of these objectives.”
For more information about the Doctor of Clinical Science in Speech-Language Pathology program at Rocky Mountain University of Health Professions, visit our website: https://rm.edu/academics/doctor-clinical-science-speech-language-pathology/.
