Moving from the Outside to the Inside

We rethink what it means to belong as a school-based SLP and why the pull-out, referral-driven cycle keeps us feeling like outsiders. We connect curriculum, embedded systems like MTSS, and day-to-day collaboration to bring back purpose, equity, and joy in our work. 
• reframing curriculum as an inclusive map for where to show up 
• using classroom texts, routines, and activities as shared therapy resources 
• partnering with teachers through questions about their goals and plans 
• moving from reactive referrals to proactive, tiered supports in MTSS 
• shifting the SLP role toward coaching, collaboration, and advocacy 
• naming leadership as essential for protecting proactive service delivery 
• noticing how embedded work changes job satisfaction and sustainability 
• building trust with the question “What can I do today to help you?” 

If this episode resonated with you, I'd love to hear about it. Share your experiments, your questions, your aha moments, because your experience matters and maybe exactly what another SLP needs to hear.

https://www.facebook.com/InclusiveSchooling

https://www.youtube.com/c/FiveMooreMinutes

https://sarahdowlingschoolslpcoaching.com

Music: Daniel Chui

Transcript

From Clinical Island To Belonging

Sarah 0:02

Welcome back to the Aligned SLP. I'm Sarah Dowling. If you're new here, this is where school-based SLPs stop being clinical islands and start being collaborative partners. We're ditching the impossible caseload, embracing the workload approach, and reclaiming our joy as professionals aligned with the education world. When did you last feel like you truly belonged in the schools you work in? Not like a visitor, not like someone parachuting in to pull a student out of a lesson and then disappearing again, but genuinely deeply part of the place, part of the rhythm of the day, part of what learning looks like for the kids in that building. For some of you, that feeling might be familiar. For others, it might feel like something just out of reach, something you've been working towards, or something you didn't even know you were missing until just now. Today we are going to explore three ideas about belonging. I've been thinking a lot about these three ideas that keep coming up in conversations with SLPs who are doing this work differently. SLPs who have found a way to work that feels more connected, more purposeful, and consequently more joyful. And I want to share those ideas with you today. The first is about the curriculum, what the teachers are already focused on. The second is about what it really means to be embedded in a school system, not just attached to one. And the third is something I think we don't talk about enough. What happens to the joy in this job when the model shifts? These three ideas are connected, and by the end of this episode I think you'll feel that connection too.

Curriculum As A Compass

Sarah 1:56

So let's start with the curriculum. I know for some of us, the curriculum can feel like something else to learn about, like it belongs to classroom teachers, and our job is to work around it or alongside it or in spite of it. We have our own goals, our own frameworks, our own approaches. The curriculum is over there. But what have we been thinking about this the wrong way? Here's what I mean. In many provinces, states and countries, the curriculum is actually designed to be inclusive. It's built around the idea that every child can access learning. The curriculum isn't a barrier to inclusive practice, it's an invitation to it, it's designed for it. You don't accommodate, differentiate, have a separate program from the typical curriculum for the average student. You design the curriculum for all students so that all students have a place in the classroom. There are many people who talk about this, but two that I know of are the inclusive schooling Facebook page and Shelley Moore's Five More Minutes. So what changes when we start looking to the curriculum? Not as something to work around, but as a map, as the document that tells us where to show up and why. Suddenly the goals we've been working on in isolation start to have a home. Vocabulary development, narrative structure, executive functioning. These aren't separate from what's happening in the classroom. They're woven right through it. The curriculum includes them, even if it doesn't always use our SLP language. And there's something else that happens when we work from the curriculum. The resources the teacher is already using, the texts, the routines, the activities, become our resources too. We're not bringing in something separate. We're working with what the students already know, what they're already embedded in. That's not a compromise, that's actually really smart practice. And we do all this by collaborating with the class teacher about their curricular goals. We don't have to learn the curriculum and then advise how they should be using it. We ask them about their plans and their goals. This is being a respectful, curious, equal partner in supporting the students we are both interested in. The curriculum points you towards the classroom, and the classroom is where the learning is, it's where the students are, it's where you belong.

From Referral Cycle To MTSS

Sarah 4:48

So following that point, let's talk about the second idea, the system, and what it actually means to be part of one. There's a version of our role that a lot of us were trained for. You get a referral, you assess, you write goals, you schedule sessions, you pull the student, you discharge, you repeat. It's a model that makes sense in a particular context, a medical context, a clinical context, but it doesn't translate cleanly into a school. That model is reactive. It waits for a student to fail before it responds. It puts the responsibility for communication squarely on the SLP. It positions us outside the daily life of the school rather than inside it. The referral demands that the school tell you what's wrong and what's not working. We know we feel stressed and unhappy in this model, but often don't know how to change it. A multi-tiered system of supports model asks us to think differently. It asks, what if we got ahead of the failure? What if before any student reached the point of needing intensive support, we had already built the conditions for success at a whole school level. It's a preventative, inclusion-oriented model. It wants to build evidence-based ideas into the classroom to support all the students. In practice, that means the SLP becomes something different. You're not just the person who works with individual students, you're a collaborator, a coach, an advocate. You're working alongside classroom teachers, not separately from them. You're helping to design the environment so that communication is everyone's responsibility, not something that happens in a separate room with a separate person on a separate schedule. And critically, you're discovering and increasing the voices of students with speech, language and communication needs. That's advocacy work, that's social justice work, because universal access to learning also leads to the student being part of the greater school community. It's about being heard, being understood, being included in the full life of the classroom. What makes this possible is leadership, strong committed leadership at the district and school level that understands what this model is and why it matters. Leadership that protects the SLP's capacity to do proactive work. Leadership that treats the service design as a roadmap. Something predictable, equitable, and built for the whole school, not just the loudest referral. This is flexible and creative, supporting the classroom teacher to be the best they can be for all their students. This type of classroom is the gold standard of the education system, not pull-out, isolated interventions, disconnected from the classroom and the curriculum. When that leadership is in place, something remarkable happens. The SLP becomes part of the system, not attached to it, not hovering around the edges of it, actually genuinely inside it.

Why Embedded Work Feels Lighter

Sarah 8:18

The third idea is about how I talk about how this approach is more joyful and creative. We talk about models and frameworks and evidence-based practice, all of which matter enormously, but we don't always talk about what it feels like to do this work. And for a lot of SLPs right now, what it feels like is heavy, overwhelming, unsustainable. Caseloads are high, time is short, the paperwork is relentless, and there can be this creeping sense that you're always playing catch-up, always responding to crises, always on the outside of something looking in. We have surveys and studies about the stress of a school-based SLP's job. But I keep hearing from SLPs who have made the shift to a more embedded, collaborative model. It's more fun. I don't mean that lightly, I mean they describe a qualitively different experience of their work. They talk about being in the classroom and seeing things, seeing the richness of what's happening, seeing students in context, seeing the connections between what a child can do in a therapy room and what they can do when they're surrounded by their peers and their teacher and their actual learning environment. SLPs enjoy coaching and enjoy working alongside an educational assistant or a classroom teacher and sharing what they know and then watching that person take it and run with it. That kind of ripple effect, where your expertise spreads throughout the whole team, is deeply satisfying in a way that individual sessions alone often aren't. SLPs share about the workload feeling more creative, more manageable. Not because there's less to do, there's always plenty to do, but because the work has a different shape. Change is never smooth. Helping colleagues understand the shift, that communication is now everyone's responsibility, that the SLP's role looks different, that strategies live inside the classroom rather than outside it, that takes time. It takes patience, empathy, and a willingness to celebrate, small wins without waiting for the big transformation. But those small wins build momentum. And the question that seems to drive the whole thing is a beautifully simple one. What can I do today to help you? Not here is what I've determined you need. Not here are some website links. Not I need to do an assessment before I can give you some recommendations. Just what can I do today to help you? That posture of genuine practical helpfulness changes the whole dynamic. It builds trust, it opens doors, and slowly, steadily, teachers and educational assistants start asking for specific things, asking for the SLP to come in, to co-plan, to share research, to be part of what they're already doing. That's when you know it's working, when the people around you start pulling you in instead of you having to knock on the door.

The One Question That Builds Trust

Sarah 12:05

So let me bring these three ideas back together to show how they interlink. The curriculum gives you direction. It tells you what learning is happening and how and where it's happening. It's not a constraint, it's a compass. It points towards the classroom, towards the student, towards a work that already matters to the people around you. It's the structure that drives the education system and is the main focus for the classroom teacher. The system gives you a place to coexist. When you're genuinely embedded, when the model is proactive and tiered and rooted in equity, you're not a visitor to the school, you're part of its architecture. Your role has structure and predictability and purpose that goes beyond any single student or any single session. And the joy, the joy comes from both of those things working together, from being inside the learning and not outside it, from sharing your knowledge in ways that multiply rather than just add, from doing work that feels connected to something larger than a caseload. You bring your SLP expertise and your SLP brain to support the class teachers who support the students. I believe that this approach enables us to really impact evidence-based practice in the school system for our students. None of this happens overnight and it doesn't happen alone. It takes the right leadership, the right relationships, and the right willingness to sit with the discomfort of doing things differently. But it's possible people are doing it and they want to tell others about it because they don't want this to be a secret. My goal is to interview some of those practitioners to keep inspiring you to move into a way of working that will align with the education system and create a more fulfilling job for yourself. So, what would it look like in your school for communication to be everyone's responsibility? And for you to be at the centre of making that happen.

Key Takeaways And Next Steps

Sarah 14:10

Think about it and re-listen to the previous episode with Zoë Watt, where we go deeper into these ideas in conversation with her. She has been living them out in a new model of service delivery, day by day in a rural school district, with remarkable results. Thank you for spending time with me today. Here's what I want you to take away. You're not failing. The system is asking you to do the impossible, and you're doing the best with what you have. But there is a different way. And remember, you're not alone in this. We're building something new together. One conversation, one collaboration, and one small change at a time. If this episode resonated with you, I'd love to hear about it. Share your experiments, your questions, your a ha moments, because your experience matters and maybe exactly what another SLP needs to hear. Until next time, stay curious and be kind to yourself. I'm Sarah Dowling, and this has been the Aligned SLP.