Clinical Training Opportunities
Practicums through the University of Wisconsin Speech and Hearing Clinic (UWSHC)
Medical Site Practicums
Public School Practicums
Clinical opportunities through UWSHC
Evaluation Practicum: Aural (Re)habilitation
Experiences include:
- Designing and executing assessment protocols for clients who range in age from birth to late adulthood and who have congenital or acquired hearing losses.
- Interacting with individuals who rely on spoken, signed, or simultaneous communication modes
- Contributing to the administration, scoring, interpretation and the reporting of findings to family, members, teachers, physicians and/or employers.
Evaluation Practicum: Language-based Learning Disabilities
Experiences include:
- Designing and executing assessment protocols for children, adolescents,and adults, with an emphasis on oral and written language and a focus on the impact that language-learning disabilities have on social, academic, or employment performance.
- Interpreting findings, reporting results, counseling, making recommendations and referrals, and interacting with other professionals.
Evaluation Practicum: Diagnostic Clinic for Speech and Language Assessment
Experiences include:
- Reviewing client records, developing an assessment protocol, interviewing clients and significant interaction partners, administering protocols specific to various disorder areas, interpreting results, conferencing, report writing, making recommendations and referrals, and interacting with family members and other professionals.
Speech, Language and Audiology Screening: Dane County Head Start
Experiences include:
- Screening of children who are enrolled in Dane County Head Start for speech, language, and hearing disorders.
- This activity is a service-project for the community.
Evaluation and Management Practicum: Articulation/Phonology Clinics
Experiences include:
- Assessment and individualized treatment of child speech-disorders of known and unknown origin, in the Phonology Clinic, at the Waisman Center.
- Assessment and individualized treatment of articulation/phonology in pre- and school-age children at UWSHC.
- On-going parent conferencing to facilitate parent involvement in the children’s treatment programs.
- On-going consultation with other service providers for coordination of services.
Evaluation and Management Practicum: Fluency Disorders
Experiences include:
- Assessment and individualized treatment of developmental stuttering and language-based disfluency/cluttering across the age span.
- Use of an integrated approach to enhance fluency, and as needed, to modify fluency breakdowns.
- Counseling of parents and other caregivers regarding children’s fluency issues.
- On-going parent conferencing to facilitate parent involvement in the children’s treatment programs.
- On-going consultation with other service provides for coordination of services.
Evaluation and Management Practicum: Neurogenic Communication and Related Disorders
Experiences include:
- Assessment and management of adults and children with neurogenic communication disorders, resulting from developmental or acquired deficits.
- Opportunities to work with a range of disorders, including motor speech disorders (e.g., dysarthria, apraxia), language disorders (e.g., aphasia), and cognitive disorders that affect communication, as well as academic, social and organizational abilities.
- Clinic, home, and community-based service opportunities
Evaluation and Management Practicum: Populations with Severe Expressive Communication Impairments
Experiences include:
- Diagnostic therapy and management experiences involving persons needing augmentative and alternative communication system support (i.e., communication books and boards, computerized systems with speech output, alternate computer interface methods for writing).
- Opportunities to work with clients across the age span who have a wide variety of disabling conditions including autism, developmental apraxia, traumatic brain injury and severe cognitive disabilities.
- Clinic, home, school, community, recreational, and job-based service opportunities.
- Opportunities to 1) design and construct communication aids, 2) provide systematic instruction on the effective use of an augmentative system to enhance the client’s language (receptive and expressive) and social interaction skills, 3) provide in-service training to key team members, 4) conduct informal and formal analyses of social environments followed by consultative services, and 5) provide multi disciplinary intervention and consultation for comprehensive support of the client.
- On-going collaboration with staff in the Communication Development Program and the Communication Aids and Systems Clinic in the TRACE Center, for clients who are also receiving services in these clinical programs.
Evaluation and Management Practicum: Voice Disorders
Experiences include:
- Assessment and management of a broad range of voice disorders, primarily with adults.
- Opportunities to design and use a variety of treatment approaches.
- Opportunities to use various forms of instrumentation, both for treatment and for data collection.
Management Practicum: Aural Habilitation
Experiences include:
- Assessment and management of children from birth-to-adolescence, whose communication proficiency in the home, daycare, school or social environments are at risk due to the impact of hearing loss
- Opportunities for working individually with the child and/or in a parent-child and/or peer group format
- Opportunities to provide 1) auditory training, 2) facilitate receptive and expressive language development (including spoken and signed language), speech production, social development, and literacy skill development, and 3) parent education
- Collaboration with other agencies who serve families and educators
Management Practicum: Language-Learning Disabilities
Experiences include:
- Designing treatment programs that provide clients with exposure to school curriculum content and strategies for language-learning.
- Opportunities to address both comprehension and production of spoken language in school-age children, adolescents, and adults with language-learning disabilities.
- Opportunities to relate oral communication skills to abilities that are inherent in reading and in written language.
Clinical opportunities at Medical Sites
You will have the opportunity to work, under the guidance of a Speech-Language Pathologist, in excellent and diverse medical site practicums. Sites include:
- Hospital/acute care facilities - pediatric communication evaluation and treatment
- Hospital/acute care facilities - adult speech and communication evaluation and treatment
- Inpatient rehabilitation settings– adults communication
- Outpatient pediatric and adult communication clinics
- Skilled nursing facilities - swallowing and communication
- Acute care and outpatient swallowing clinics
- Specialty clinics at University Hospitals and the Waisman Center, which focus on voice issues, developmental disabilities, Fetal Alcohol Syndrom (FAS), Cerebral palsy, Alternative and augmentative communication (AAC), and Craniofacial anomalies (CFA).
Clinical opportunities in the Public Schools
You will have the opportunity to work, under the guidance of a Speech-Language Pathologist, in excellent and diverse school settings, for a minimum of 20-hours per week.
- Settings include early childhood programs, classroom-based phonology programs, as well as elementary- middle- and high-schools.
- Opportunities include: 1) assessment and treatment services, in pull-out and inclusive settings, within individual, as well as small and large group contexts, 2) IEP team work, and 3) collaboration with parents, regular education teachers, special education teachers, physical therapists, occupational therapists, school psychologists, social workers, other staff and educators, administrators, and community resource personnel.