I was removed from 2 kids caseloads. I have never been more embarrassed. How do I get over this?
Ive been a SLP for 7 years and work with school aged kids. I used to work in person but since having my last baby i stayed home and work very part time now for a telehealth company. I just started with 2 new students who I see in their head start (i have seen both kids 2/3 times, so really not a lot!) One kid was on my caseload since January, but he has been absent all year and just came back to school this week.
They are both in preschool and the director was their proctor. During the first session I told the teacher that the information I have for them is from a few months ago and I wanted to hear from her how they're doing in class. Apparently that wasnt appropriate because she told my boss I wasnt prepared. I have never been accused of that before. Their IEPs both have artic goals and goals like: "will use targeted grammatical markers including pronouns, regular plurals and/or copula/auxiliary am/is/are verbs to describe a picture or to answer “who,” what/what doing, and “where” questions in 4 out of 5 recorded observations.." or "x will produce present progressive verbs in 3-to-4-word utterances in 8 out of 10 trials." "student will produce pronouns in 3-to-4 word utterances in 8 out of 10 trials."
So the first 2 sessions I did an artic screener to see their errors, and also played games on pinkcatgames like wh questions, answering qs about objects like what is this etc. Both these kids were shy and took a long time to warm up. They always asked for breaks so I would say "ok lets finish this and then you can have a 2 min break" during the break I obviously dont just sit there, its play based and I also ask questions, talk. So for one of the kids he wanted to color so I said "ok sure, can you make a big circle for me"
My boss called me yesterday and was so nice about it but I started crying. The director sent him a long email saying how my goals and activites werent appropriate for their age, and asking a child to do a circle is inappropriate.ETA: She also said me having them do drills is "boring"- I usually have kids say 5 words, and then we switch to a diff thing, do anopther 2 rows of drills then switch. Or ill have them color a page after 5 words etc" How else can I work on their artic goals if I cant do drills? I wanted to say, it was during the kids break and after 1 min of him drawing we went back to boom cards... My boss told me he can zoom with me this week to go over materials with me and see what I am working on. He said its best if I am removed from their case and he will replace them for me.
I obviously am taking this to heart because I have imposter syndrome a lot of the times and maybe it wasnt the right materials. But I have never had a teacher complain about what I do with students. I want to be a good SLP but now I kind of feel like crap lol.
My issue is that when I see goals like above, what kind of activities do you choose to work on? And also I am annoyed at myself I cried on the phone to my boss