338: Motivation in Secondary-Age Students with Speech Sound Disorders

Show Notes:

In this episode of SLP Coffee Talk, Hallie sits down with researchers Klaire Brumbaugh and Katy Cabbage, who are part of a team building a nationwide study around something secondary SLPs know all too well: the older student still working on that R who has zero interest in being in the speech room. They're developing tools to actually measure student motivation—so SLPs have real data behind decisions like when to keep kids on, when to discharge, and how to catch that window when a student is finally ready to do the work.

We had such an incredible turnout for our last FREE CF Bootcamp that we're bringing it back! 🎉 Join me for FREE CF Bootcamp on Wednesday, July 29th, 2–3:30 PM ET.

Here's what we learned:

  • When a student is intrinsically motivated, progress can happen in weeks—not years. 
  • Low motivation is already being used to dismiss kids from therapy, but there's no real way to measure or track it. 
  • Parents, teachers, and students often see the same speech sound disorder in completely different ways—and that gap can affect every decision you make. 
  • The best research ideas are already happening in school speech rooms. This whole study started because one SLP spoke up at a conference.

RESOURCES

🎉FREE CF Bootcamp on July 29th from 2:00 PM–3:30 PM!
https://speechtimefun.com/cfbootcamp2026

📘✨ Grab your copy of The Secondary SLP Roadmap here! https://www.speechtimefunpd.com/stf-book 

Learn more about Hallie Sherman  and SLP Elevate: 

Learn more about Klaire Brumbaugh & Katy Cabbage:

JOKE OF THE WEEK:

Q: Why did the computer go to art school? 

A: To improve its graphics.

Where We Can Connect: 

Subscribe & Review on Apple Podcasts

Are you subscribed to the podcast? If you’re not, I want to encourage you to subscribe today so you don’t miss any future episodes! I already have so many amazing guests and topics lined up, I would hate for you to miss a single one!  Click here to subscribe on Apple Podcasts.

Could I ask a big favor? If you are loving the podcast, I would LOVE it if you would leave me a review on Apple Podcasts. I read each and every review.  Plus, you get to pay it forward because it will allow other teachers like you to find the podcast! Wondering how to leave a review? Click here to review, then select “Ratings and Reviews” and “Write a Review”.  So easy and so appreciated! 

Do you have a question you would like me to answer on the podcast?

GREAT! CLICK HERE TO FILL OUT THE FORM! 

TRANSCRIPT

00:00:00 Hallie: Quick break SLPs, the Speech Retreat is back. It's the virtual professional development event that is actually fun. Think about it, raffles, laughs, a virtual photo booth and real world ideas that you can use the very next day for preschool through high school. Six different speakers that actually get it and are talking about topics that are relevant to you. Earn CEUs live, joy PDHs on replays and connect with the community of SLPs who love what they do. Don't miss it, learn about the next event, the date, the speakers and more at the speechretreat.com.

00:00:45 Hallie: Welcome to SLP Coffee Talk, the podcast designed exclusively for speech language pathologists who work with older students, grades four through 12. I am your host, Hallie Sherman, your SLP behind Speech Time Fun, the Speech Retreat Conference and the SLP Elevate Membership and I'm thrilled to bring you conversations, strategies and insights that will give you the jolt of inspiration that you need. Whether you're tuning in during your morning commute on a break in between sessions or even during a well-deserved relaxation time, I am here for you each and every week. Let's do this, SLPs. 

00:01:25 Hallie: Hey, hey and welcome to another episode of SLP Coffee Talk. Do you have students that are in middle school, high school and still working on those pesky speech sounds and maybe they are not so motivated? Well, I know you're gonna love the conversation we're gonna have here today with Klaire and Katy. Welcome to the show. 

[crosstalk]

00:01:49 Hallie: We'll start with Klaire and we'll go to you, Katy.Why don't you guys tell us a little bit about your background and your journey to what you are doing these days in the SLP world.

00:01:57 Claire: Yeah, so my name is Klaire Brumbaugh and I'm a program director of a speech language pathology doctorate program at Moravian University. And my research interests are in the area of speech sound disorders. I do think it's important to note that I've never practiced in the secondary setting as it relates to school-based practice, but I've been so inspired by clinicians that I've met along the way as I've been researching and exploring this area of the field that their observations are so critical and we need to formally explore those. And so we've developed quite a little research team of practicing clinicians that have experience in that setting with the knowledge of research and implementation science to try to tackle this topic.

00:02:41 Katy: Yeah, and I'm Katy Cabbage and I am an associate professor at Washington State University. And I do a lot of work related to speech and language deficits in children and how that relates to literacy development. And I am a former school-based speech pathologist. And when I was practicing in Washington State, I was kind of a typical run-of-the-mill school-based SLP. I had an assignment four days a week at an elementary school and then one day a week at the high school. So I had the chance to kind of experience, I really liked that. I loved the variety that I got. 

00:03:14 Katy: And my secondary caseload was quite wide variety. Several children I was seeing in self-contained classrooms, but then there were those other kids that were kind of those remaining R kids and that were having those persistent errors. I remember one kid in particular who had been working… he'd had been identified as late talker and had had speech therapy all the way – he was 15 and just had that lingering R. And I've thought a lot about him as we've done this project together.

00:03:43 Katy: So yes, as Klaire mentioned, we've partnered with some school-based clinicians and developed a really cool little research study where we're really looking at what information beyond speech production alone can we get from children and students to help inform their progress in therapy and their desire to attend therapy as well. So it's a complicated topic, but one that I think needs to be addressed. So anyway, that's just a little bit about me.

00:04:10 Hallie: I love that. And I'm sure from your experience, you saw the big difference in motivating a kindergarten first, second grader to then that 15 year old, who's been… they're still longer, more embarrassed by their deficits. And I think in general, no matter what their reasoning for being in speech is, they're more embarrassed. I think especially when those with the speech sound disorders, we have just that… it's just different. 

00:04:41 Katy: Yeah, well, I kind of consider speech sound disorders as one of the most quote unquote “visible communication disorders.” And to your point, Hallie, I think it's really interesting because what we're finding is there are some kids that don't appear to be embarrassed at all. And that's really driving some of their desire to be like, I don't wanna do this speech thing anymore. And others who are withdrawing from kind of social activities and new experiences and then everything in between, right? 

00:05:09 Katy: And so trying to figure out who is it that's a good candidate to continue speech therapy and who's not. And I think one of the benefits to me of working with older kids is you can have some frank conversations with them as well. And like, hey, what do you think about all this? And actually, I would love Klaire to kind of talk about kind of how we got partnered with these clinicians because it was really through Klaire that we made a connection with these clinicians, so.

00:05:35 Claire: Yeah, so I was attending a state conference. If you're not involved in your state conference as a practicing clinician, I strongly suggest you do that. There's so many great connections that can happen as a result of that, which is how we three years ago started this project. I was at a conference and there was a question by an attendee member in the audience. I was also just an audience member in that session about implementing – they had this big idea that they had this clinical – a colleague had this clinical observation in the secondary setting that motivation would wax and wane. And some kids that they had discharged would actually show back up at their speech room door, their junior and senior year and request additional speech therapy. And maybe these are the same students that were impossible to engage or motivate maybe in sixth, seventh, eighth grade. 

00:06:23 Claire: And so in their district, they'd started trying to track that. Where were these kids at? When were they discharged? And then doing some survey on their interest in continuing speech therapy and their concern with their speech. And the clinician in the audience had this really great plan of this… that clinical observation, they put something into practice, they measured it, but now they weren't sure what to do next because that impacts policy procedure, IDEA regulations. How do we go from conceptualization to implementation? 

00:06:56 Claire: And so that's where I met up with that SLP immediately after that session. I was like, I think that we could work together on this. I'm very interested in speech tone disorders. I have colleagues who are very interested in speech tone disorders and the experience in secondary populations and with that implementation science lens. And so since then, we have been partnering with this group of SLPs and we are actually in the process of expanding the project outside of any one district to a nationwide investigation. So we will be doing a lot more exploration and data collection in the coming years.

00:07:31 Hallie: Love that. Love links to everything of how people can get ahold of you because I'm sure a lot of listeners here are like me, me, me, me, me. So what are some things that you're starting to look for or notice as you're gathering some data here?

00:07:45 Katy: Yeah, I can speak a little to that. So one of the things we wanted to just really kind of give voice to the kids, right? And just give them an opportunity. And where it started was just really kind of like, how is this impacting you personally? Do you feel like it is impacting you personally? But then we kind of broke it down into multiple types of interactions with different conversational partners and different settings. And just to really kind of tease out, like there are kids who, as I mentioned, it really is like a spectrum, like kids who are totally comfortable with their speech with familiar partners, but then they start to climb up around unfamiliar partners. And so really kind of teasing that out. Klaire, what would you add to that?

00:08:24 Claire: Yeah, definitely we're going down that path. We're also wanting to track this over time. So it will be a longitudinal study. So we will get feedback from these students. They can enroll anytime from 6th to 12th grade. So if they're enrolling as a sixth grader, we'll be able to follow them for up to six years or until they discharge from our study. So we'll be able to be collecting data throughout the year on how that motivation increases or decreases. And then we'll also be doing some assessment. We'll be taking speech samples from them. And so we'll be able to do some observation of does that increase or decrease based on person's consonant correct or intelligibility measures. So we can have a pretty well-rounded data set of the clinical observations and the student experience.

00:09:12 Hallie: And I'm assuming there's probably a lot of Rs there, but are there any other sounds or phonological processes and things like that that you've been noticing that are in this pool of candidates even? 

00:09:24 Katy: No, in our small samples so far, it's just, is there a speech sound production error and looking at kind of what's typical for secondary kids, Rs? But think about other kind of like, kind of those persistent errors like lateralization errors that can be persistent and difficult to correct. We don't have specific data for in terms of like phonological patterns, that's not super common for older kids. 

00:09:47 Katy: And this way the study is designed now, children have to be able to independently read and complete the survey. And so that does rule out some children who may have an intellectual disability that may not have the reading skills they need. And that's kind of where the population might see some of those more phonological errors. But yeah, we're really excited to kind of get a wide swath of kids from around the country to kind of see what does this look like. 

00:10:14 Katy: The other piece of this like longitudinal aspects, so kind of seeing how does this change over time, I'm thinking about where this idea originated with this practicing SLP. And she talked about this student who showed up at her door totally randomly and said, hey, are you the speech teacher? Can you help me? And this was not a student that the SLP knew, had not worked with her before, but the student disclosed that she had had speech when she was younger.

00:10:40 Katy: And one of the things that this SLP noticed was first of all, like, obviously the students coming to her, like there's this inherent motivation, right? And we know that there's a connection between intrinsic motivation and outcomes, right? And how you had mentioned earlier about what it takes to engage or motivate a kindergartner, right? Which, we often use extrinsic motivation to motivate kindergarten and that's effective, right? But in adolescence, it's totally normal for them to not be motivated extrinsically. 

00:11:11 Katy: And so this SLP talked about this student who showed up and said, hey, this is what I wanna do for my career and I'm worried that this is going… my speech is gonna impact this. So that was the first thing, she noticed right away this intrinsic motivation. But the second thing was, was how quickly that student remediated. So she said just within a matter of weeks, this student, you know, who clearly had had this speech sound disorder for a very long time had, you know, and not knowing that student's history in prior therapy, we don't know like how long was, you know, it was a particularly, this case, it wasn't our error.

00:11:43 Katy: We don't know how long was she working on that single R before she was dismissed. But I think that those two pieces of information have really informed this study actually, looking at, okay, so how do we get better at identifying where are kids intrinsically motivated? And does that impact the length of therapy time? And we suspect that it does. So I just think it's such a cool little example. And I think it's probably very intuitive to most secondary SLPs, like, well, yeah, when a kid is intrinsically motivated, my job is a lot easier, so. 

00:12:15 Hallie: Yeah, oftentimes it's a parent or the teacher coming to us. It's not the student, right? 

00:12:19 Katy: Yes, yeah.

00:12:21 Claire: Right, and one thing that we just hear, anecdotally, talking to a lot of SLPs is that this motivation is often used as a criteria for dismissal. And even ASHA lists low motivation, low student motivation as a potential reason for dismissal. But how do we measure that? And then how do we keep tracking that in case that changes or make sure that the student's aware of the resources in case that changes? So it's a multifaceted issue from keeping kids on, dismissing kids, provide, you know, increasing our intensity of therapy for a short burst when that motivation is just right. But first we have to be able to identify it.

00:12:59 Katy: Yeah, and can I add something to that? Sorry, Hallie, I'm just like… I'm now like, ooh, I'm in.

00:13:05 Hallie: I love it. Please do. 

00:13:06 Katy: But I think that part of it also is, part of our idea here is giving kids permission and a voice to say, I don't want to do this right now. And again, thinking about adolescent development and motivation and the importance of autonomy, right? And so to your point, Hallie, that often it's the parents saying, no, no, no, I want my kid to stay in. So, you know, in future iterations of this study, we want to get the parent perspective. We want to get a teacher's perspective and the kid's perspective and see, do we see alignment in how different populations are viewing this child's speech sound disorder? 

00:13:38 Katy: And other research suggests that those things may not be in alignment actually. So there's some studies that have been done with younger kids where – and some adolescent studies that have looked at what the parent perspective of the impact of a kid's speech sound disorder is versus the child's perspective. And most of the time, the child's like, it's fine. I'm not worried about it, but it's the parent. And I understand why the parent's concerned, right? Because the parent has much more perspective than the child does. But to Klaire's point, are these pieces of data that can help inform decisions that happen in the schools? Like how do we decide who is dismissed and do we have the data to back that up? So, okay, I'm gonna zip my lip for a minute. 

00:14:19 Hallie: Because especially we wanna be able to explain to parents like we're not dismissing because we're giving up on your child. We have this evidence that if they're not motivated, they're not gonna make progress, they're better off in the classroom. Or I need to explain to my administrator why this student has plateaued. But there is evidence that if we continue on a little bit, or there's evidence that the student might not need a full IEP in 10th grade, but I need room in my calendar schedule for these bursts of students so that we can do some remediation when necessary, so.

00:14:54 Katy: Yeah, and we don't have all the answers in terms of like, what does that look like, right? Because how do you… with the way that IDA works, obviously if the kid is not qualifying, they don't have an IEP. But like, is there a provision for… we continue to check in with this kid and will there come a time that the kid's like, I want to choose to be in speech therapy now, which is what happened with this student that showed up at this one SLP's door and just said, hey, can you help me? And it made such a difference for that SLP, for that, and that's just more fun for the SLP, it's better for the kid as well. So we're really excited to be doing this work to really kind of tease out how can we get better at quantifying this information to help support decision-making in the schools. 

00:15:38 Hallie: Are you just gathering information or are you also providing support for the clinicians on how to have those conversations with these students and parents and things like that?

00:15:50 Claire: That's a great question. Right now, we're just gathering the information. We're really trying to assess trends and some statistical backing for these types of conversations. There are lots of big plans for how the study will evolve in the future once we have a better grasp of… is the tool we've developed to measure motivation even sensitive to measure motivation? And so there's going to… I think that this is a whole area that's going to go in lots of different directions once we can get that initial database of information.

00:16:20 Hallie: Because I can imagine having some sort of approach to, hey, what do you want to be when you grow up? Hey, when you're like getting them to realize that they haven't realized it on their own, how it can impact them and how to pull out, like it's easy to bring in some extrinsic motivation. It's hard to teach intrinsic motivation and use this information.

00:16:43 Katy: Yeah, and so ultimately what we'd like to be able to do is to develop a tool that SLPs can use. And something that this team of SLPs that we've been working with have reported is the conversations that it's opened up with the kids themselves. So as they've talked with the kids about, hey, I saw that you mentioned this, tell me more about this. And coming to find out that, well, actually, I feel comfortable with this group, but I don't feel comfortable with this group or I want to be able to say these kinds of words. I want to appear confident. It's really opened some doors.

00:17:17 Katy: And so we'd like to help kind of figure out what are the right questions to be asking. So right now our survey is quite… it's pretty extensive. It's doable for kids, but I think it's around 50 questions, but really because you got to start there to figure out what are the important pieces to be asking about. And so once we kind of get all that information… we have some questions where they're just providing a rating for different situations, but then we do provide an option for some open-ended responses. Like, hey, is there anything else that we haven't asked you about? 

00:17:50 Katy: Now, we are also dealing with adolescents. So we don't know what kind of data we'll get. And we have some, as we've, so far we've got data in about 30 kids so far. And some kids are just, I'm only going to answer the rating questions. I'm not going to even bother with the other ones. So we're just kind of testing out what's the best way to gather this information. 

00:18:10 Katy: And is it different for middle schoolers than it is for high schoolers? Right now we have the same survey for 6 to 12 because we want to kind of follow them over time and see what additional information we get. So we're definitely in the exploration phase is what I would call it right now. And that will help inform kind of the next steps. But ultimately what we care about is getting tools in the hands of clinicians to be able to provide some evidence for the decisions that they're making. 

00:18:37 Hallie: I love that. And that's going to be so, so helpful. And I'm curious in future, once you have some more data, do you plan on – or maybe I'm bringing this up to you guys and I have the idea too, looking back on the K to 6… those that were more motivated, those that were less motivated, those that were like more likely to come back. Were there any indications sort of?

00:19:02 Claire: One thing that we're doing to try to capture that is we are requesting IEPs or past IEPs from the parent. Of course that might not include all the information that we're looking for, but we'll at least be able to see the trend of the type of goals that they worked on, the service delivery models. And so we can't fully go retrospectively the way that the studies design now, but that might be a future direction as we enroll new kids into the investigation that we want to do some more retrospective investigation as well.

00:19:34 Hallie: Awesome. Those that are listening that are like, I want to help, where can they learn more about how they can participate or follow along or be notified when things are released? 

00:19:47 Katy: Well, yes, we can help with that. So we're actually, our study is going under what's called IRB review right now. So it's being reviewed by the university ethics board to make sure that… so the study is completely designed. It's the surveys ready to go. And as soon as we get that approval, we will be doing social media blasts and we'll happily share this with you Hallie as well, and links to how SLPs can share this information. They would just need to share it with their families that have kids that might be eligible. And so, yeah, so we're in the process of getting the final approvals. We're on our last final round of revisions. So yeah, it will be coming out very soon. 

00:20:23 Katy: So, and then once it's out there, literally anywhere around the country can participate. It's all done remotely. And we did that intentionally because we want to have representation from a wide swath of states and districts. And we started in one single district and we got some good information about working with that particular district, but realized we knew from the beginning, we wanted it to go much bigger than that to see what are the different things that are important across different states.

00:20:53 Hallie: Awesome. Well, when you have that information, definitely send it to me. I will share it with the SLP Elevate community since we have thousands of SLPs in there that are working with your clientele that you're looking for. So, and then everyone listening, if you want to reach out to me, I can get you guys in contact if you want more information on how you can be a part of it when it is ready for more participants. So thank you, guys so, so much. And anything last that you want to share or how people can learn more about what's going on?

00:21:23 Claire: I just don't want to give the shout out to the practicing SLPs. I think that – well, I know that practicing SLPs have these great ideas every day. I just want to encourage them to follow their gut, to reach out, to collaborate. I know that time is a commodity that we don't have enough of, but these ideas, when we can originate these ideas in clinical practice, really good things can happen. And so I just want to encourage SLPs to keep doing the good work, keep sharing the good work and the hard work so we can work together and solve some of these bigger issues or at least inform some of these bigger issues.

00:21:57 Katy: Absolutely. I would just echo Klaire. And this started with one single SLP in her little room in a high school and she just started doing this. And then she shared it with her SLP team in her district. And it was a colleague of hers that happened to be at the state conference. And I just… I love the origin story for this because it just really showcases – I'm a huge champion for school-based practitioners. I think that that is where the good work and hard work of our field is happening with all children who need services, regardless of their – you know, we just serve every kid who comes through the door. And I just am so proud of school-based practitioners and the work they do. And I would just echo Klaire, like keep doing the good work we notice and we want us to be able to support what's happening there. 

00:22:45 Hallie: And you never know speaking up at a conference, what it can lead to. 

00:22:49 Katy: That's right. That's right. 

00:22:51 Hallie: And realizing that you're not alone. [inaudible] she spoke up and like, oh my goodness, this is something everyone's dealing with. And we want to help, so. 

00:22:58 Katy: Yeah, yeah. And I will say, as we've talked about this and we've presented this information at a couple of national conferences now and this over and over and over again, we hear from secondary SLPs, oh my goodness, yes, yes, this is a problem. This is… I'm not really sure what to do with it. And so we're really excited to be able to help. 

00:23:16 Hallie: I'm excited for you guys. And I can't wait to see what comes out of this research. So I always end my episodes with a joke since jokes build rapport. So I thought this one, since you know that we're being a science experiment, science is here. Why did the computer go to art school? 

00:23:33 Katy: I don't know. Why did the computer go there?

00:23:36 Hallie: To improve its graphics. I think it's that one has computer, art.

00:23:43 Katy: Yep, yep. We've got lots of good practice words.

00:23:46 Hallie: So there was some artwork in graphics with some R's in there. So I figured, you know, everyone listening with their pesky R sound can use it with their students as well. 

00:23:54 Katy: Well, Hallie, thank you for the invitation to come and chat about work that we just, we love and we care deeply about. So thank you for allowing us to talk. 

00:24:01 Hallie: And thank you for everything you guys are doing. And thank you for spending precious time sharing with the SLP Coffee Talk community and everyone here. So thank you so, so much. And we'll be in touch. And until next week, everyone, stay out of trouble.

00:24:18 Hallie: Thanks so much for tuning in to another episode of SLP Coffee Talk. It means the world to me that you're tuning in each and every week and getting the jolt of inspiration you need. You can find all of the links and information mentioned in this episode at my website, speechtimefun.com. Don't forget to follow the show so you don't miss any future episodes. And while you're there, it would mean the world to me if you would take a few seconds and leave me an honest review. See you next week with another episode full of fun and inspiration from one SLP to another. Have fun, guys.

Similar Posts