4: The One With Maureen From The Speech Bubble SLP

Listen to the episode hereReleased August 1, 2018IntroductionThis episode features a very special guest, Maureen Wilson of The Speech Bubble SLP. Maureen is a speech-language pathologist with a passion for creating functional materials and empowering other professionals through her blog. She is the ultimate SLP role model and strives to remind SLPs why they fell in love with this field in the first place, or better yet, why they should never outgrow bubbles. We seriously had the best time speaking with Maureen, or Mo for short! Her energy is contagious and we look forward to speaking with her again! Below are some of the excerpts from our conversation. Note: Some of the transcript was altered to make it easier to read.Q&AWhat goes in to running a successful blog? Oh my gosh, a lot of it's been such a learning process for me. But along the way, I'm like, you have to have dedication to it. And consistency. If you want to produce things that are actually going to help people and that can be a source they can rely on. They need to know that your content is going to be there for them. And it's going to be there in a consistent way. So making posts and sharing on a consistent basis, but having that heart behind it, it's one thing to just type in some words and click Post and publish. But if you aren't invested in what you're saying, and you don't have that heart behind what you're saying, I don't think it's going to resonate that much with people reading it. They want to know that you are sharing it, because you've been there and you understand and you want to help. So I think you have to be consistent, but you have to have that heart in what you're sharing about.Why did you create the Who curriculum and what was the process of creation like?It's been this little, you know, baby of mine for the past few months. And I'm just so happy to hear the feedback from it from everyone. It kind of started how all of my resources start. And that's like, I need something for my kids. That's where any of us kind of start from really. But I was working with some of my students in a more self contained setting. And the resources I had weren't enough. And I'm working on who questions in there, and they're putting the right person with the right occupation. And I'm like, Yes, they're getting it. This is awesome. Then we read three sentences of a little story, and they cannot answer the question. And there's even a nice picture and everything! And I'm like, Where did I go wrong?So I was sitting and pondering, and just like beating my head against the wall, about what I missed. And when I kind of scaffold it back to it. I'm just like, well, maybe they don't understand the question word enough. Maybe I didn't spend enough time on it. And when I started to break down all the things I would need to do to just explain that I realized this is a huge part that I've been missing.So I went digging into research, I think my husband thought I lost it! I had probably 10 articles printed out and highlighted all in our spare bedroom that I kind of claimed as my office. And he knows to just kind of walk tiptoe around it. But everything that I was reading was kind of pointing towards scaffolding about making sure they're understanding the question part and how to do that. So I started looking around, because if something's already out there, I'm not going to invest two hours to create it. But there was nothing there. So I was like, all right, time to buckle down and get this made. And I did the Who one. Then I did the What curriculum and Where curriculum. When and Why are kind of in the process and should be done before the end of the year.We often see you collaborate with other SLPs, like the gals from Speech Retreat. What is the secret to successful collaboration? I think when you collaborate with other professionals, you need to,  just be open about the questions you have, and be open about sharing what you know. A lot of times, I think collaboration can kind of break down when people are not forthcoming with everything, because you're either withholding information that could help or you're withholding questions that you have. And then you're going to leave without your answers. What I've been super fortunate to find through this whole kind of blogging experience and journey has been a group of phenomenal, positive, competent, strong SLPs that we can just kind of collaborate with and chat with and be open about questions and open about giving answers and information.What has the process looked like from starting Speech Retreat to where it is now?  Oh my gosh! It was probably started a bit of more organized chaos and is now just organized, but we had  just been chatting over time, myself and then Hallie from Speech Time Fun and Natalie Snyders and Felice Clark from The Dabbling Speechie. We had just kind of been chatting because we go to our state conventions and ASHA and we're like, yes, the sessions are nice, but like, very rarely do I attend one where I can go back to work on Monday and put in to practice what I learned. We were like, man, wouldn't that be nice? We should just do it! And we all happened to be attending the TPT conference in Anaheim that summer, and were like, let's see if the hotel has space and it turned out that they did the day after the convention. And it was a lot of Google Hangouts and chatting back and forth and collaborating. Two Truths And a Lie Game:I was born a redhead. I am allergic to beer. And I was a figure skater for eight years.Which one do you think is the lie? You'll have to listen to the episode to discover the answer!