Clinical Requirements

The Communication Sciences & Disorders Department has a unique and comprehensive sequence of clinical field experiences starting in the first year and culminating with an integrated, clinical practice experience and seminar during the senior year. The sequence of clinical experiences includes:

• As a requirement of CSD 100, students will assist and observe a speech-language pathologist in a clinical setting for 15 hours.
• In CSD 109, students will be required to observe a speech-language pathologist for 15 hours in a public school. 
• Clinical Methods & Supervised Observation: In the third year of study, students will learn how to plan and implement speech and language services in a variety of clinical settings. Students complete 25 hours of observation of therapy and diagnostic sessions under the supervision of an ASHA-certified speech-language pathologist.
• Supervised Clinical Practice: In the final year of study, students will take part in a clinical experience that includes supervised assessment and treatment of clients with speech and language problems as well as typical communication development. Students share their clinical experiences with peers in a required seminar.

Clinical Philosophy

The Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders at The College of Saint Rose embraces a philosophy of clinical service delivery that is consistent with the ethical standards, scope of practice, and current standards of practice of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association and the Council of Academic Accreditation. It is our goal to serve individuals with communication disorders in the most effective and humane manner possible and to ensure that our students commit themselves to this fundamental clinical value. Achieving this goal requires acquisition of a large number of clinical skills and competencies, and their flexible application to meet varied clinical needs.

VALUES: In addition to teaching these basic skills and competencies, our campus clinic and clinical training program advocate and teach an approach to clinical service that is centered around the following values:

• Empowerment-Focused Intervention: Ultimately our goal as clinicians is to help clients and family members understand their strengths and needs, and take responsibility for their own growth as communicators.
• Collaboration: To meet the goal of client and family empowerment, clinicians attempt to create a working alliance with clients, family members, and possibly other significant people in the client’s life. Genuine collaboration requires engaging all of these individuals as much as possible in identifying and understanding strengths and needs, setting goals, identifying appropriate ways to achieve those goals, monitoring progress, expanding newly acquired skills into all natural communication environments, modifying intervention and supports as needed, and making decisions about termination of services. Although our primary partners in collaboration are our clients, we also collaborate with family members, teachers, other community professionals, paraprofessionals, and others who may be instrumental in facilitating improved communication in the individuals we serve.
• Contextualized/Functional Intervention: Knowing that skills that are taught outside of the functional contexts of people's lives are predictably not effectively integrated into those lives, intervention is designed to incorporate an appropriate sensitivity to the individual's real world. This includes using real-world interests and activities as the context of therapy as well as creating partnerships with real-world people so that intervention is integrated into that real world. 
• Focus on Strengths: Clinical intervention is not simply a process of identifying deficits and engaging the client in a program of exercises to remediate the identified deficits. Intervention focuses as much as possible on the individual’s strengths, because people are more than collections of deficits and also because strengths can be used to compensate for ongoing disability.
• Integration of Clinical and Academic Training: The Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders promotes integration of clinical and academic training by infusing a practical clinical orientation into the academic program and by facilitating the application of knowledge acquired in courses within clinical training experiences. To this end, all of the members of the academic faculty also supervise student clinicians and apply this clinical philosophy.
• Student Clinicians as Problem Solvers. The focus of the clinical training program is less to equip students with therapy programs and curricula, and more to train them in the skills of clinical analysis and critical thinking so that they will be in a position to flexibly create appropriately customized programs of intervention for the individuals they serve.
• Clinicians as Agents of Change in Human Development: Because of the pervasiveness and importance of communication in the lives of people, clinicians must see themselves in the broad context of promoting growth and maturation in the clients they serve. In its broadest terms, therapy for individuals with communication disorders implies an invitation to them to participate in the complete domain of life memberships.

ROLES: To implement all of the components of this clinical philosophy, student clinicians must acquire more than technical knowledge and clinical competencies; they must also perceive themselves as playing a variety of clinical roles and execute these roles skillfully. In addition to the traditional medical, educational and training roles associated with diagnosis of a communication impairment and symptom-oriented treatment of that impairment, clinicians must also creatively and flexibly play substantially different roles, including:

• Consultant: Clinicians serve as consultants to everyday people in the client’s life, and also to clients themselves, providing them with the technical assistance they may need to achieve their own goals and objectives;
• Coach: Because the clinical process extends beyond diagnosing an impairment and implementing a treatment program designed to remediate the impairment, clinicians must use the skills of a coach to inspire their clients to achieve lofty goals, to help their clients to identify their real-world obstacles, and to work with the clients to create a “game plan” that will enable them to achieve real-world success.
• Model Communicator: Clinicians show clients the way to improved communication in part by serving as models of exceptional communication, thereby inviting the client to serve an apprenticeship in communication with them.
• Counselor: The goals of empowerment and self-realization as communicators are achieved in part by clinicians using the skills of clinician-counselors, helping clients understand their strengths as well as their needs, the resources available to them to achieve their goals, and their responsibilities in achieving those goals.

These varied roles are played within the context of (a) flexible judgments about how best to serve individual clients and (b) commitment to the unique professional contributions made by each member of professional teams that serve individuals with communication disorders, possibly necessitating referral to other professionals or agencies.