Speech-Language Therapist

I’m Brynlea Collin Stone, I’m a speech and language therapist and I work at Kimi Ora School.
Speech and language therapy is a real intersection of education and medicine, and that’s something I was looking for when I was leaving school.
One of my favourite things to do at Work is the session we’re doing this morning. That’s a time we spend with some of our students who are pre-intentional communicators. And that means that they don’t necessarily recognise that their behaviour can be interpreted by other people as communication. So we’re supporting them to develop their intentional communication skills.
So basically by us being really good communicators and spending time with them showing them responsively what being a good communicator is about – so that’s sharing space with them, maybe imitating them selectively, we only choose the things that we want to reinforce, that are good communication skills, then they learn that those things can connect them to other people.
One of the biggest challenges is actually sharing information with other staff members. So the work that I do will only make a difference for the students if they are able to be exposed to the kind of language input all day long through their day, so sharing information with the staff members and the families as well is one of the more difficult aspects
Working as a speech and language therapist has a huge variety of benefits, for a whole lot of different clients. The speech and language therapist is often the person who will spend the most time with a patient or a client, and one of the professionals who sees them first, both in the medical world and the educational world. And it’s a helping profession. Again, that’s something that’s important for me.