Pre-Professional Training for Serving Children With ASD

Abstract

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often present with varied skill profiles and levels of severity making development and implementation of specialized school services challenging. Research indicates that school professionals require and desire additional ASD-specific professional development, both at the pre- and in-service levels. Speech–language pathologists (SLPs) are one member of a school-based team who frequently serve children with ASD. Due to broad graduate training requirements (across the life span), SLPs receive limited ASD-specific clinical education, which may affect their contributions on school-based intervention teams. Given these issues, this article aims to briefly describe an apprenticeship model of clinical supervision, which may be well suited to preparing SLPs to significantly contribute to school teams serving children with ASD; present a case illustration of the use of this model within university graduate program; and briefly discuss implications for pre- and post-professional education and development.