I started preparing more formal lesson plans primarily for two reasons:  (1) If I said that it was important (indeed, required!),  for the graduate student clinicians to have thought through their instruction, I felt I had to seriously reflect on what messages I conveyed if I then didn’t; and (2) If I wanted to complete the grading rubric with integrity, I needed to know for certain that they had been taught the targeted skills at some point.  Otherwise, it just felt like I was judging/critiquing them on things unfairly.  So that lead to the third point:  (3) it was a chance to model what features of a lesson plan I would be looking for from them — an opportunity to discuss the process.

When we have the first conversation and review my initial lesson plan, I do talk about how being a clinical practicum instructor doesn’t precisely map onto the kinds of teaching involved with being a clinician, so it isn’t a 1:1 example.  I also disclose that I rarely did these kinds of plans when I worked in the schools — it was partially more intuitive at that point, but also a matter of basic survival given the time I had for planning.  I did do a fair amount of thinking about teaching-learning as part of developing or preparing my materials of instruction though.  Regardless, I say to the students that the argument that the lesson plans required by our clinic are not “real world” may be true but is, in any case, irrelevant to me insofar as it serves an entirely different purpose/function which is fundamentally critical to our experience here and now.  The lesson plan (and other required documentation procedures), are a platform for the dialogue we share about the client, about SLP generally, learning approaches, research foundations, etc.  It is my window into their thought process.

With more experienced clinicians, I typically fade out the requirement of written lesson plans being submitted to me over the course of the semester (unless I have concerns).   I feel like it’s in the same vein as Shapiro’s 1985 research around contracts between supervisors and supervisees — with findings of an inverse relationship between the level of experience and completing commitments when written documentation was involved.  Two, I want to be conscientious and responsive to their stress level at that point in their academic programs; if I already have a sense of their process, and they can verbally discuss their plan, I do not want lesson plans to be “busy work.”

To again reference McCrea & Brasseur, The Supervisory Process in Speech-Language Pathology and Audiology (2003), goes into specific details about the nature of planning in Chapter 5, and highlight:  “Professional growth for all participants comes as a result of careful, systematic, fourfold planning:  for the client, for the clinician, the supervise, and the supervisor.  In other words, it is not enough to plan the clinical process, the process through which the client learns; the supervisory process, through which the supervisee and supervisor learn, must also be planned if maximum growth is to be achieved.” (p. 106).

So far, I have specific lesson plans for the Clinical Practicum Instruction around the  following topics:

– getting started (first meeting, review of what a lesson plan looks like, expectations),

– documentation (word choice, structure),

– writing goals (word choice, structure, design of instruction, prognosis),

– session structure (transition, introduction, instruction, directions, guided practice, wrap-up), and

– engaging in learning (the rationale for why it is important  and how to invest in continued learning after the University setting with conferences, web resources, text-learning, etc).

These are all available under Resources (password = “m4ter14ls”), and should be easily accessed by searching under Lesson Plans.

End blip.