Making Christmas Cards for Favorite Faculty and Staff!
Author: Madeline McKelvy | Major: Communication Sciences and Disorders | Semester: Fall 2024
Hi! My name is Maddy McKelvy. I am in the College of Education and Health Professions, majoring in Communication Sciences and Disorders with a minor in Human Development and Family Sciences. I have just finished my last fall semester and am soon to be in my last semester of college and research. Time truly has flown! My mentor is the wonderful Dr. Glade, and I am so grateful for the help that she has provided me throughout my honors experience at the University of Arkansas. When I began my honors work, I was quite clueless about where to start. I chose Dr. Glade as my mentor prior to meeting her because I had heard great things about her teaching and passion for the field and felt confident that she could positively guide me along the honors thesis process.
As the title suggests, my project’s purpose is to create an effective and engaging group intervention program for adolescents to learn and apply social skills to their everyday interactions with peers, future jobs, and careers. Dr. Glade introduced me to Amanda Carter, the speech-language pathologist at Farmington Junior High School. Mrs. Carter had led the social skills group for a few years before I joined her and previously had a few other honors student interns working with her to develop the curriculum. However, she felt as if the curriculum was lacking substance and organization. We set out to make a curriculum that would be beneficial, entertaining, and engaging for the students, while also making the group feel like a safe space for students to come and have fun yet, challenge themselves, and learn skills that would help them in the outside world. Some of the lessons created included an overview of communication, introductions, handshakes, and active listening. Soon after creating the curriculum, Mrs. Carter left the school, but the guidance counselor Courtney Howard was more than happy to fill in her position.
Throughout this past semester, Mrs. Howard and I held our group every Wednesday for thirty minutes at a time. To stay organized and timely, we presented a cumulative PowerPoint slideshow throughout the session. It followed a pattern consisting of slides with review of the previous week, information about the new topic for that week, practice of that topic, that week’s game, and reflection of what was learned during that session and how those skills can be applied in everyday life. Each week, the students noticeably became more comfortable with each other. Some rose to the occasion and assumed leadership positions, answering most of the reflective questions and helping with activities, while others fell into the shadows and chose not to participate. I began to pick up on patterns that each student would fall into during our activities; however, sometimes I would be surprised. It reminded me that learning social skills is not necessarily linear, and being a student in junior high post-pandemic significantly disrupts this learning process. While I may not have trouble with a certain topic, others might have different interests, communication styles, or aspects of their personal life that affect their willingness to interact during a session. Additionally, Mrs. Howard and I became keen on what activities the students enjoyed versus ones they did not, as we only had thirty minutes to complete an entire lesson. They were typically ones that involved a longer period of learning and talking about a topic without application and practice. We learned to adjust and edit that week’s lesson to improve it for it to be covered more efficiently the next year.
For the spring semester, Mrs. Howard and I are extremely excited to see our students use the skills they built upon in the first semester and apply them in the school. We will be creating a refreshment service to provide free snacks and hot drinks to the teachers of the junior high each week. The students will be split into groups, taking turns and rotating to a different wing of the school each week. The teachers will have filled out an online form prior, and the student deliverers will be required to utilize their skills learned during previous lessons to work together as a team, greet the teachers, and provide them with their chosen refreshments. Mrs. Howard and I will still hold the group on Wednesdays during scheduled time to help facilitate the group, but we aspire to eventually mold the group into a student-run operation!
I am so excited for what is to come in the next semester for my great group of students! I look forward to writing another blog post about our coffee cart and also to having a full and organized curriculum that another student intern can easily utilize after I graduate.