Ashleigh is a Speech Language Pathologist with the Wilson School District near Reading, PA. Dividing her time between two middle schools in the district, she diagnoses and treats students with speech and language impairments. Treatments can include things such as tongue positioning exercises or even basic communication exercises such as how to classify various objects. Find out how to turn a passion for speech pathology and education into a rewarding career!
Transcript
All right, so my name is Ashley Morella, and I am a speech-language pathologist in two middle schools in the Wilson School District located in Reading, Pennsylvania. So as a speech pathologist, I diagnose and treat students with speech and language impairments. And so I typically work with students who are, as you say, typically developing, but they may have a fluency disorder, maybe they're a student who stutters or maybe they have articulation needs, maybe they can't say their R sounds. Then I also work with students who may be on the Autism spectrum, have Down Syndrome, have other health impairments that kind of inhibit their speech and language skills. And so then I identify the needs that they have and then I provide treatment to them. So if I'm working on articulation with a student, I will have them kind of practice certain words that have their targets in them. For example if they have difficulty with R, I'll have them work on words that have er in them, such as soccer. We'll go over those words, make sure they understand where they need to put their tongue, and so on and so forth. We go through a continuum. We start at words, we go to sentences, reading out loud, and then hopefully back and forth conversation is the main goal. If it's language, maybe they have difficulty explaining and describing different things. So I'll give them a picture of, let's say a dog. And I say, okay, what group does a dog go in or what category? And hopefully they tell me pets or animals. And try and help them kind of, in their file folder in their mind, come up with different words to describe a dog. This helps with storytelling and writing and being able to kind of get their thoughts out into words. And so every day is kind of different, but I see students starting at 7:30 in the morning to about 2:40 in the afternoon. And so it depends. Sometimes I have a heavy-loaded schedule. Some days I might be able to pull kids for evaluations or for paperwork. So every day for me is kind of different, which I enjoy. You just have to be able to time manage and remember which school you're supposed to be at and things like that, so, it's fun though, I enjoy it.
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