The Invisible Workload of School-Based Speech-Language Pathologists Who Identify as Overwhelmed: A Grounded Theory Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
PURPOSE: This qualitative study investigated the lived experience of school-based speech-language pathologists (SLPs) who self-identify as overwhelmed. The goal was to devise a formal explanation of the reasons for such overwhelm. METHOD: Seven elementary and five secondary school SLPs in two separate focus groups discussed the following questions: (a) How are you advocating for your needs as an SLP? (b) Do you know how to advocate for yourself? (c) How confident are you in advocating for your needs? (d) Do you feel safe to advocate for your needs? Data were analyzed according to the tenets of grounded theory, resulting in a formal theoretical model. RESULTS: Participants indicated an invisible workload for school-based SLPs consisting of three major factors. One, involved parties (teachers, administrators, parents, etc.) do not understand SLPs' roles and responsibilities; as a result, SLPs have to advocate for themselves relentlessly. Two, organizational structure all but ensures that their advocacy is unsuccessful. Three, SLP culture, consisting of perfectionism and a tendency to lack boundaries, exacerbates the situation. A mitigating factor was also identified. SLPs who set boundaries firmly and advocate collectively fare better than SLPs who do not. However, even they are often ineffectual in the face of structural barriers. CONCLUSIONS: Results indicated a direction for future research. A survey instrument that captures the dimensions of SLP overwhelm identified in this study should be deployed to assess the prevalence and severity of these issues. Also, it is argued that top-down action by systems-level players is paramount to addressing school-based SLP overwhelm.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".