Learning to Learn: The future of education (As I see it)

As SLPs, we went to school for a long time. Most of us don’t get our clinical certificate of competence until we are 24 or 25 years old. Even if we live until we are 100, that’s a quarter of our lives! For many, especially those who have career changes, it can take even longer. But it’s worth it, right? Four years of undergrad, two years of grad, and almost a year of fellowship give you the skills you need to thrive in healthcare. Right? Some may disagree. And I’m one of them. 

Speech pathology is an incredible field. While not as well-known as some of our professional counterparts, it is an area exploding with innovation, technology, research, and creativity. When I chose this career, I  had no idea what I was getting myself into. But I jumped in headfirst. And now I’m riding this crazy wave that has been slowly building year by year.

Med SLPs have a crucial responsibility. We are at an enormously important time in healthcare when the baby boomers are growing older and the need for high-quality healthcare services is growing by the year. The type of patients we see is going to change. Their wants and needs are going to change. Healthcare is going to change. And our field also needs to change in order to keep up. And so do we. 

Our field is so interesting because there are so many areas of expertise we can follow. In the medical field alone, we have diagnostics, rehab, research, a concentration in specific conditions (i.e. H&N CA, CVA, trach/vent, etc.), pediatrics, voice, speech/language, or cognition. You can be a jack of all trades or master of one. But what’s most important is that we are providing value to the field and are serving the needs of the patients. 

Does grad school prepare us for all of these concentrations? No. How could they? You’d need an eon of education just to scratch the surface. I’m not ragging on grad schools. They and the excellent and well-intentioned professors that comprise them are doing their best. But the system is not working. More is needed to prepare the future of speech-pathology to meet the growing need for its services.

Every year, more research is being published, new treatment methods are being developed, and innovative technologies are popping up left and right. Grad school can’t keep up with all of these changes. And they shouldn’t. It’s not the place of grad school to make us experts in any and all things. In fact, it’s not the responsibility of grad schools to make us experts at all. The role of grad schools is to make us better learners. To develop us as sponges for the consumption of new information and to instill a sense of flexibility that would allow us to adapt to an extremely dynamic field. Ultimately, grad school should provide us with an educational foundation that will help us learn to learn. 

From my conversations with other med SLPs, I have learned that the typical grad school experience involves studying and memorizing esoteric information (including, and many times focusing mostly on school-based pediatric topics) that are regurgitated onto an exam form only to vanish from the depths of the brain soon after (and never to be seen again). The most valuable parts of grad school are those that teach how to research, communicate, reason, think critically, and how to ask the right questions to the right people (or to the right search engine). 

Coursework on basic foundational concepts essential for the future SLP to build off of (i.e. basic A&P) should of course be incorporated but shouldn’t be the sole focus. We have all of the information mankind has acquired in its entire existence inside a small digital device that sits in our pockets at all times. We don’t need to spend most of our time memorizing anymore. We need reasoning, critical thinking, and to think creatively about the wide variety of problems that come our way in this fantastically diverse field. These “soft” skills are everything in the bumpy and winding landscape of speech pathology.

In future blogs, I will continue to focus on these kinds of skills to give you practical ways to learn about them and incorporate them into your clinical practice. We need these skills in order to be successful and even though grad school would have been the best time to incorporate them into our practice, it’s never too late to learn. Even though it would be nice to learn from the beginning, I plan on learning to learn until the very end. And I hope you’ll join me. 

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