Our Speech Pathologists provide person centred, flexible and responsive services that value the important and essential role that families play in all aspects of their child's development.
Families are such a critical part of their child’s intervention so we encourage families to work in partnership with our Speech Pathologists to make key decisions about the goals and activities that their child works on to improve their communication skills.
Our Speech Pathologists place emphasis on paying careful attention to making sure that they understand each family's priorities and concerns when they are planning for intervention. A high degree of communication between the Speech Pathologist and the families ensures that planned interventions fit with the family’s needs, desires and priorities for their child.
Our Speech Pathologists work with families to help them learn how to develop meaningful learning opportunities within the home environment and to provide them with high quality teaching strategies to support speech, language and literacy development.
WORKING WITH SCHOOLS
INCLUSIVE EDUCATION | STUDENT SUCCESS | REASONABLE ADJUSTMENTS
SMART Spot Speech Pathologists are committed to working in partnership with classroom teachers to develop the oral language competence of students and to facilitate the development of foundational literacy skills.
The ability to communicate effectively and demonstrate adequate speech, language and communication skills is a key foundation to learning and social skill development. Children’s communication abilities strongly predict their later reading skills, with a significantly increased chance of reading problems for children with poor language skills.
Our Speech Pathologists work closely with the classroom teachers to promote and develop key areas of children’s language and literacy development such as vocabulary, comprehension, sentence structure, grammar, concepts and following directions, answering questions, text structure and organisation, punctuation, phonemic awareness and speech sounds.
To develop these skills in a sustainable way for schools, our Speech Pathologists practice within the Response to Intervention framework. This framework integrates assessment and intervention within a multi-level prevention system to maximise student achievement. Practising within this framework allows our Speech Pathologists to contribute to the school community in a diverse variety of ways, with less focus on traditional service delivery models and an increased focus on collaboration, shared workplace learning and inclusion.
