ALICE KAHN INTRODUCTION TO WRITING ASSIGNMENTS SPA 623 Cleft Palate and Craniofacial Anomalies Topic: “Delivering Unpleasant Information”
I want to introduce written assignments in SPA 623 in order to let students explore a topic that I do not have time to address in lectures or ordinary course activities. The content of SPA graduate courses is partially dictated by our certifying agency-the American Speech Language and Hearing Association (ASHA). I want to use written assignments to allow students to move beyond the expected “ASHA Standards Skills and Outcomes” topics. Graduate student speech language pathologists (SLPs) take SPA 623 in the second year of their 2-year M.A. program. They simultaneously work at extern sites several days a week, treat clients in our clinic, attend classes, and write a department-required final paper or thesis. I believe that one long assignment would be unnecessarily stressful and would be viewed as a burden rather than a learning experience. Because the material for this class is difficult, and the students have limited time to spend on outside projects, I decided to prepare a sequence of assignments on the theme of “Delivering Unpleasant Information.” The assignments increase in level of difficulty as the semester progresses. I believe these assignments will:
SEQUENCED WRITING ASSIGNMENTS FOR STUDENTS GENERAL INSTRUCTIONS FOR STUDENTS During the semester you will complete three written assignments for a total of 100 points. These assignments will have the general focus of “delivering unpleasant information.” As SLPs, you learn to assist individuals to overcome communication disorders. Some students erroneously enter our profession believing that they will be helping clean, happy, attractive little children improve their ability to say /s/ and /r/ correctly. This is far from the case. In SPA 623 we will learn about patients who have birth anomalies, life-threatening illnesses, genetic syndromes, complications of disease processes, and communication disorders resulting from physical injuries. One of the first questions parents or guardians will ask you is “How soon will (child’s name) be speaking (or walking, eating, hearing, thinking or growing) normally?” For the types of patients we study in SPA 623 the answers we must give parents are often unpleasant or unwelcome. They might range from “your child may speak understandably after a series of operations” to “your child will never develop speech or language,” to “your child will probably not live to be old enough to learn to speak.” This means that we must be prepared to deliver unpleasant information and to assist parents and health care givers to act appropriately on this information. Purpose of the written assignments. (Why am I doing these?). The written assignments in this course will take you through a process of learning how to deliver unpleasant information honestly, compassionately, objectively, and accurately. Here is an overview of the specific topics you will write about:
What will I have to do? Each assignment will require you to:
Whenare these assignments due? I will prepare a semester outline with due dates for rough drafts, peer reviews, discussions and final papers, and place it in the Fall ’04 syllabus on Blackboard. How much credit are these assignments worth?
Assignment #1. Reflecting on your reactions to receiving unpleasant information.
Why am I doing this? In order to prepare to deliver unpleasant information, you need to understand your own attitudes and beliefs about receiving unpleasant information. This first writing assignment will allow you to develop awareness about how you accept unpleasant information when it is presented to you, how you react to it, what you do about it, and how you might want to change your reaction style. Writing Assignment: (What you are going to do?):
How can the ways you react to receiving unpleasant information help you learn to deliver unpleasant news to your clients? Think about a time you received unpleasant news. The degree of unpleasantness is unimportant. Examples of unpleasant news could include such things as learning that you were not selected to be on a team, have failed a test you thought you passed, have learned that your favorite pet has died, or have discovered that your boy/girlfriend is cheating on you. Any situation will do so long as you really viewed it as unpleasant and so long as the news was completely unexpected. Write a 3-5 page paper using the basic guidelines described above. You must include discussion of these basic ideas:
Also include information about how the news “might have been less unpleasant if…” What specific events could have changed your attitude to the initial reception of the news and to your long-term coping strategies? What parallels can you draw between the way you received unpleasant news and the way parents might receive unpleasant news from you? For example, suppose you need to tell a parent that you have tested their child’s hearing, and the child is deaf. What specific coping strategies have you learned from receiving bad news that might be useful to you in telling a parent bad news? How will this assignment be graded? This assignment is worth 10 points. The emphasis for this assignment will be your ability to think critically about your past experiences, and on how you can use these experiences to your future advantage. For this assignment I am most interested in your ability to think critically. Therefore, I will use the Washington State Critical Thinking Rubric (see your syllabus for an example) to evaluate your writing. I will point out errors of grammar, organization and style in the first draft. I expect you to correct these in the final draft, but your score will depend on how well you meet the critical thinking guidelines in the rubric.
Assignment #2: Dual goals: To locate reliable information to help you learn how to deliver unpleasant information appropriately and to abstract information from professional resources.
Why am I doing this? In the previous paper you discussed your personal strategies for receiving and coping with unpleasant news. Your strategies may or may not have been effective, and may or may not be appropriate for presenting unpleasant news to parents. This knowledge may inspire you to take a course in counseling or to seek expert advice in other classes. In the meantime, you can use library resources –books and journal articles on the subject, to learn how to deliver unpleasant information. Your first goal is to devise a list of 25 professional sources of information on the subject of delivering unpleasant news to clients. THESE SOURCES OF INFORMATION MAY NOT BE WEBSITES. The sources may be articles in professional journals, or books in the fields of speech pathology, education, nursing, psychology, psychiatry, counseling, and similar health care professions. Your second goal is to learn to write an abstract of resource material. As SLPs you will often have to submit abstracts of proposals to professional organizations such as ASHA. Abstracts are highly organized, succinct, contain only core information, and are limited to a specific number of words (in this case 75 words per abstract). Use the word count feature on your computer to be sure you have the correct number of words.
Writing Assignment: What am I going to do?
How will this assignment be graded? This assignment is worth 25 points. The emphasis for this assignment will be on your ability to locate appropriate professional resources (NO WEB SITES), to list those resources in correct APA format, to rank and order the 5 most valuable resources, and to write a 75 word abstract for each of the 5 most valuable resources. For this assignment I am most interested in your ability to evaluate resources, abstract pertinent information, and follow APA guidelines for citing sources. 25 points will be awarded for a correct APA list of resources (1 pt per resource). 10 points will be awarded for each (total 50 points) abstract that meets the following guidelines:
Assignment #3: Conveying unpleasant written information to parents and physicians.
Why am I doing this? As SLPs you must report the results of your evaluations to parents and other professionals in a readable, professional writing style. The facts contained in such reports will be the same, but the style of writing will differ depending on your audience. You need to learn how to convey information in several writing styles. The American Speech-language and Hearing Association (ASHA) requires that you meet specific content and clinical goals and outcomes for this class. This assignment fulfills content area goals/outcomes B, C, and D (developing level); and clinical area goals/outcome D (developing level). After completing this assignment, you will be able to summarize a problem, recommend an appropriate course of action, and write your recommendations in a way that is appropriate for your reading audience. Writing assignment (What you are going to do?): Pretend that you have completed a speech, hearing and language evaluation with a 3-year-old boy. You found the following:
You believe that the child’s problems are genetic, and that the entire family needs genetic evaluation, genetic counseling, a craniofacial team evaluation, and otoacoustic emissions hearing testing. You must write a letter to the parents (Mr. & Mrs. Gomez) indicating what you have found and recommending a course of action. Mr. & Mrs. Gomez are bilingual, have high school educations, and work as roofers for a construction company in Hamilton. You must also write a letter to the physician (Dr. Kummer), who heads the craniofacial team at Children’s Hospital, indicating what you have found and why you are recommending that this family receive a team evaluation. How will I do this?
You will write your first draft of this letter during the last 15 minutes of class today. On Wednesday, we will exchange papers and do a peer review. Your final revised draft must be typed, double-spaced, and turned in at the beginning of class on Friday. What am I looking for/how will this be graded? This assignment is worth a total of 65 points (32.5 points per letter). Ask yourself the following questions before turning in your final draft:
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