Abstract
Children spend longer hours with early childhood development (ECD) practitioners who are well-placed to facilitate critical early language development. ECD classrooms include a growing number of children at risk for communication delays. Greater collaboration between speech-language therapists (SLTs) and ECD practitioners is needed. Research highlights that responsivity coaching improves communication development. Therefore, responsive communication coaching was identified as a possible approach to early communication development within the classroom. This clinical perspective serves as a reflection on the programme by examining ECD practitioners’ perceptions thereof. Responsive communication coaching was identified as a means to improve practitioner–student collaboration within classrooms. This reflection aimed to describe ECD practitioners’ perceptions of responsive communication coaching implemented by student SLTs. Early childhood development practitioners were recruited from three sites in low to middle socio-economic settings, where most children were English additional language learners. Coaching was presented to 15 practitioners via 16 sessions conducted by student SLTs under supervision. Practitioners completed a custom-designed survey regarding their skill development and experiences of the coaching. All practitioners expressed benefit from coaching. Half of the practitioners (50%) rated coaching as very helpful, while 37% perceived it as helpful. The remaining practitioners (13%), based at the special needs preschool, perceived coaching as quite helpful. Thematic analysis identified the following benefits: enhanced interaction, improvements in children’s communication and the use of responsive communication strategies. Speech-language therapists need to collaborate with and support ECD practitioners in novel ways. The exploratory findings suggest that ECD practitioners benefit from SLT student-led responsive communication coaching sessions.
Highlights
Undergraduate speech-language therapy (SLT) students at the University of Pretoria provide services in numerous early childhood development (ECD) settings as part of their clinical training
Clinical supervisors recognised that the SLT services were inadequately aligned to the International Classification of Functioning and Disability – Children and Youth (ICF-CY) guidelines (World Health Organization [WHO], 2007), which encourage a holistic view of children within their environments
Preliminary results of this study indicate that further research on responsive communication coaching for ECD in low- to middle-income countries (LMIC) practitioners is warranted
Summary
Undergraduate speech-language therapy (SLT) students at the University of Pretoria provide services in numerous early childhood development (ECD) settings as part of their clinical training. A traditional ‘pull-out’ approach to therapy was followed with minimal collaboration with ECD practitioners. Children showed benefits from the condition-centred intervention approach used; generalisation was limited because of poor ECD practitioner–student collaboration, and university examinations and holidays resulted in service delivery disruptions. The clinical supervisors wanted to explore a service delivery method that would enable ECD practitioners and SLT students to shift their focus towards common child-centred goals, to optimise resources and facilitate early communication development within the classroom (Sheridan, Edwards, Marvin, & Knoche, 2009). Considering situational challenges and recent literature (Archibald, 2017; Glover, McCormack, & Smith-Tamaray, 2015), responsive communication coaching was identified as a possible new approach to early communication development
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