Speak Out October 2020 DIGITAL EDITION FINAL

Collaborating with Confidence by WMA Speech Pathology Working Group, DET Victoria SP Week 2020

It nearly slipped through the cracks because of you know what, but we speech pathologists at the Department of Education and Training, Western Melbourne Area, dedicated a working group to plan Speech Pathology Week. We, including Elizabeth Beilby, Melissa Murphy, Jane Wong, Rachael Read and Kim Knight, pondered the theme Communicating with Confidence and came up with our own take: Collaborating with Confidence! And not just as a workplace iteration of the theme, but to foreground how professionals connect with one another. For us this week was about more than educating the public on our role, but about how we communicate with our education and allied health colleagues, and about how our clients win when we do this. We planned a week packed with colourful graphics, fun activities and information, but wanted people to see it. So we devised a strategy to create as much area exposure as we could, using bright daily email flyers to boost the message. These flyers were the springboard for all the week’s activities: competitions with attractive prizes to encourage engagement, links to our website with resources and blog posts, and a daily grammar joke. We leveraged Slack to bolster exposure, leading to a series of posts with strings of never-ending hashtags. Then bringing it home, we capped the week with a trivia night. Being resourceful To start we renovated the website created last year, dressing it up in this year’s theme, then set about bringing in other elements, poking around backstage in Wix, re- remembering how to upload resources and create links. We dedicated a page to web-based resources as well as ones created by the group including a reimagined SPA Children’s Book of the Year list coupled with blurbs and summaries and prettied-up with some book cover images. The site featured links to Education resources for understanding, supporting and promoting Koori English to make good on our Acknowledgement of Country featured on each page. We made the most of Speech Pathology Australia Fact Sheets and distributed some with the daily themed emails. Our Education speech pathologists contributed their own clinical resources to daily emails too. It was incredible how our speechies could stretch Boardmaker, extending

it beyond producing articulation cards and AAC, to create resources to support Zones of Regulation, sentence scaffolding, and the 5 ‘L’s of Listening. The group’s generosity was huge. They were generous with their time and creativity and willing to share their hard work with other professionals. And our collaborative approach paid-off. The area responded, complimenting the range and quality of resources, some reporting they’d already put them to use. Cryptic questions Did you know that 'a distorted reality can lead to reading and writing’? Or that ‘this bad levy builds important structures’? These were just some of the cryptic clues shared in each daily email around the day’s theme. Over the course of the week we saw cryptic novices transform into master solvers. Congratulations go to Leora Jaye, Speech Pathologist in the Hobsons Bay Network, who was the winner of the 2019 SPA Children’s Book of the Year, The Oo in Uluru. (by the way, Leora was also kind enough to contribute a blog interview on collaboration for our website). Thanks again to Rachael Read for donating the prize. And for those still pondering the above clues, we’ll put you out of your misery: The solutions are ‘literacy’ and ‘syntax’. Friday night triviality On Friday evening, our colleagues from different fields; psychologists, professional practice leaders, speech pathologists, community liaison officers, social workers and more, joined us for end-of-work trivia. There were four rounds; two general knowledge, two speechie themed. The prize, a $50 dollar gift card, courtesy of pooled funds from our working group members. Answering the speech pathology questions required problem solving and explicit clinical knowledge, and the number of non-speech pathologists with high scores on speechie questions attests to the tremendous collaboration that already occurs between professionals within the Department. From participants losing connection, to our hosts finding skilful ways to keep colleagues from our dear friend Google, we were kept on our toes. We even improvised some musical interlude while our scorers frantically tallied results. After the trivia, our working group hung around in the WebEx space, excitedly recollecting the highs and lows (and collecting our breath)—it’s an

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October 2020 | Speak Out