Yap Sesh #10: Teachers Teaching Teachers

It's the last Yap Sesh of this season! Co-hosts and Professional Yappers Anna and Maurice discuss how they became teachers who teach teachers, which is why VoiceProEd exists today.

Maurice is also launching his private practice! Find Goodwin Voice and Speech, PLLC on the web at http://mauricegoodwin.com

Resources & Links
Explore VoiceProEd: www.voiceproed.com
Check out our available courses: www.voiceproed.com/courses
Theme music by haspockets983: https://www.pond5.com/artist/haspockets983

Join the Sesh!
Subscribe for future episodes, and let us know what topics you want to hear next! Connect with us at @voiceproed on Instagram and Facebook or email us at info@voiceproed.com.

Transcript

Anna: Welcome to Yap Sesh. We're your hosts–I'm Anna Diemer.

Maurice: And I'm Maurice Goodwin.

Anna: And it is summertime—hopefully slowing down, winding up.

Maurice: It's summer.

Anna: How is that going for you? Things have slowed down a little bit for me. How is that going?

Maurice: They've slowed down for you? That's—that's funny. Also, I will say someone reached out to me about how they laughed multiple times throughout our previous Yap Sesh episodes. And honestly, that's the best. That's the most that I think you and I can hope for: that people have a good time while listening to Yap Sesh. I'm pretty sure there are some episodes where we laugh more than we give valuable content—but this is good.

Anna: As we start out today with just laughing because...

Maurice: My life is both winding down and ramping up. I am only a few weeks away from leaving my job at the voice center that I've been at for six and a half years and really kind of built my identity around as a voice clinician. And I'm ramping up—starting private practice and launching everything and making sure it's all good to go. So Goodwin Voice & Speech is getting good.

Anna: That's great. Can—people will Google you. Should we link it in the show notes?

Maurice: Let's link it in the show notes. You can Google me. You can also head over to mauricegoodwin.com and kind of find out more information about voice therapy and singing voice lessons and what all of that looks like—working with me. I'm very excited. I have—because, you know, a majority of the folks listening to this are also some form of voice clinician—just getting the licensing in place, making sure the insurance checks out, the website and all the things... it’s so much work. When you work for someone else, it just happens, right? This is kind of why businesses form. So doing that has been good. It's scratched the right parts of my brain that like being in control. So it's fun.

Anna: When you're on the other side of that, we're gonna have to do an episode on setting up your private practice.

Maurice: Oh, yes, yes. Maybe we'll do like a Yap Series on the private practice of it all, because I think people want to know. I get a lot of questions about this.

Anna: I'm sure you do too. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Maurice: Well, cool.

Anna: I love that we have Yap Sesh, Yap Shorts, Yap Series—like, what more?

Maurice: We have the Yap Series. Oh, I was thinking of another one the other day. It wasn’t Yap Sesh or Yap Short—it was Yap... oh man, yeah. I’ll think about it as the episode goes on.

Anna: You’re just going to jump in in the middle of talking about something random like, "Oh, it’s—"

Maurice: Yes, yes. But it was another like SH sound that I care—Yap Shark? No, I care...

Anna: Yap Shark! Doo doo doo doo. (Jaws theme) That’s the Yap Shark that’s coming to get you!

Maurice: I know that you are still winding down from your being at the NATS internship. For anybody who has not listened to the last Yap Sesh with Anna and Meredith, go back and listen to that. It was great. I mean, it's awesome. I had heard about the NATS internship program while you were there, but then kind of hearing about it with the two of you talking was fantastic.

Anna: Yeah. Also, shout out to Ian Howell—that was one of my favorite Yap Sesh moments, getting tagged on Facebook by Ian Howell being like, "Hey, I listened to your episode and I want to send you a book. So, future NATS interns: you're welcome. Thank you, Ian. We love your work. I will read your book eventually, Ian Howell.

Maurice: Shout out to Ian Howell. And I can't fully commit to our fall schedule yet, but maybe we'll do an episode where we chat about the book. We chat about some books that we've enjoyed learning from and reading. So I'll dig into it this summer as well.

Anna: Yeah. Yap book club.

Maurice: Yeah, no more.

Anna: We have talked about this before. I know, I know. Maurice has to successfully transition into his new work. And then maybe we’ll have capacity for things—which related, right? Like, this program was so intense, so much that like, even though...

Anna: You know, I talked with Meredith about how we were, like, so excited to get into these pedagogical things again and get our brains sparked after just being teaching, teaching, teaching for so long—and I still am, like calming my brain down. Like, oh, this is something that I know I want to get back to and dig into. But I’m like, OK, returning to normal life, returning to normal schedule, breathing, seeing my regular clients again. So it’s definitely taking some time to adjust back, and will take more time to really like...

Maurice: Mm-hmm.

Anna: ...internalize some of the things that I’ve learned, because in something like that—it was so long and short, right? Like, every day was so long. But ten days is not a long time in the scheme of learning and the brain. So I know that I’ve just scratched the surface on a lot of things that I’m starting to try out with clients a little bit. But knowing like, oh man, I’ve just tried this exercise with someone, and I need to go marinate in this for a while so that I know how to really use this to its best capacity—how to scaffold and escalate that. So I am still... I’m ready for like vacation vacation. Going to Louisville was great. Definitely had a lot of bourbon. But vacation, when it comes, will be nice.

Maurice: Real vacation, yeah. Yeah, it reminds me of my—like, or I think this probably happened more frequently earlier on in my career. I can distinctly remember going to Voice Foundation and feeling so overwhelmed, because I was sitting in so many lectures and I knew nothing about what I was learning. It just felt like I was staring at people talking about something that I knew I wanted to be a part of, but I didn’t really know how to access or interact with. But then attending three years later, having more knowledge—understanding more of the terminology, understanding more of the science and the math and all of these things—now, attending eight or nine years into this career, I’m contributing. And I am participating, and I am understanding and drawing those connections. And so sometimes it does take the seed planting—and the things of like, "Oh yeah, these are maybe things that I haven’t interacted with before," or maybe they are. I just... yeah. Building all the connective tissue.

Anna: Yeah. And I think it’s hard—this actually gets us into our topic for today—it’s hard being a working clinician and having brain time and space for continuing professional development. And obviously, that is what VoiceProEd does. So I thought we could talk a little bit today about the work that we do teaching teachers—as a teacher, as a clinician who just went to a program for teaching teachers. I’ve been thinking a lot about that. And so I thought I would ask you some questions about that. Let’s get into it. Teachers teaching teachers—some worries when...

Maurice: Let’s get into it. Teachers teaching teachers. That’s the title of the ep. Title of the ep.

Anna: Teachers teaching teachers. I’ll say what I said last time—you heard it here first, except you already saw that before you clicked on it. OK. Anyway, Maurice, what got you started teaching teachers? Is it like a thing that you thought you wanted to do, or how did that come about?

Maurice: Yeah. From my experience in clinical training as a speech pathologist, it’s so integral that we have supervisors and clinical educators who guide you through the process of learning how to do the job. And then I had a very hands-on clinical fellowship where I not only had my clinical supervisor, but other clinical supervisors that I had access to—who could teach me in the moment. And that model was so, so impactful to my clinical career that I knew I wanted to teach earlier clinicians. And so I started off by taking graduate students that were close to me as soon as I could, because I knew the value in not only working with a younger clinician and helping them develop their clinical expertise, but it was then also through that experience that I learned how much it transformed me as a clinician, right? All the things that I learned by trying to teach someone else—all the things that I learned by someone asking me tough questions, and even learning from some of the things that I didn’t do well.

And that really turned into—I care about helping other clinicians feel confident and competent and ready to do this work. And I feel like that’s where you and I kind of took off in our own relationship. And you can listen to the very first episode of this podcast—we had written a blog about how we, you know, started off as teacher/student. And that really grew to—we were learning so much from each other that we also wanted to learn alongside people. How about you? What did that look like for you when it came to, "Oh, I am a teacher who wants..."

Anna: ...to help other teachers? Yeah, I think it happened pretty organically because the clients that I started bringing in were teachers. I’ve had choral directors. I had SLPs like yourself. And even other people who were teaching singing coming in, and those were always my favorite type of folks to work with. I love all of my clients, and it’s so cool—like you were saying—the way that we’re learning from each other, working together. It’s so wonderful when you speak and you already have a shared language together.

Which also is something that I enjoy about my clients that aren’t teachers—building that shared language, right? That’s something that we talk about all the time here, that I think about and care about a lot in my practice. But I just liked it. I liked that they wanted to know all of the inside thoughts, right? The pedagogy behind it. And so it was a really natural step forward for me when we started doing VoiceProEd stuff—like, "Oh, let’s make this official," because it’s already been something I’ve been doing for a while.

Maurice: I know for both of us, too, a motivation came from interacting with other clinicians and teachers. You and I had both invested a lot academically—right? Both getting master’s degrees and participating in things like NATS, and me with ASHA and some other groups or organizations. We were so involved and learning from academics that you and I both felt like there was a huge gap in clinicians learning from clinicians. And that sort of feedback and giveback to clinicians from the perspective of clinicians—that, I thought, was an important motivation for us, and probably my very favorite part of teachers teaching teachers.

How do you find your style of teaching or your pedagogical approach different when you're working with teachers than when you're working maybe with a singing voice student, a gender-affirming voice client, or anyone else?

Anna: Yeah. So I think about consent a lot—get consent a lot. Especially with non-teacher clients, I will ask consent for, "OK, would you like to hear the pedagogy behind this?" Because I also bring in a lot of clients who are interested in that specifically. They're like, "I want to go study voice with this nerd," and that's part of why they’re there. And some folks are like, "No, I just want the exercise."

Maurice: Mm-hmm.

Anna: We can—we don’t have to get into that. But the teachers usually do. I mean, I will still say, "OK, ready for a big pedagogical info dump?" And related to that, sometimes I won’t even just give the info dump. Before we get into that, I will ask them questions.

I just saw a teacher yesterday that I hadn’t seen in a couple of years, and so it was great to have him back in my virtual studio. But we would do something, and I would ask the usual questions of, "OK, what are you experiencing in your body during that?" And also, "What does this mean pedagogically for you?"

Not necessarily like a right-or-wrong-answer kind of quiz, but like, "OK, I would like for you to use your brain in a singer kind of way and also use your brain in a teacher kind of way," because you’re a teacher too, and it is helpful for you to have that deeper level of understanding about what’s going on so that you can articulate that and go on to use that in your own teaching.

So there’s kind of that extra step. You know, even though all the nerds come to Diemer Voice Studio, having that thought provocation and extra step there...

What about you?

Maurice: You know, I called you an expert nerder yesterday. You’re so good at nerding out—you are an expert nerder.

Anna: A nerder. I am very good at nerding out.

Maurice: You know, for me, when I’m working with clinicians, I had gotten so much benefit from working with you and learning how to be a student—and really learning how to learn again. As a voice clinician, I was often in scenarios and situations where I was so expected to be an expert in a thing. It doesn’t remove the curious part of your brain or the student part—because I learned a lot from the clients that I was working with. But it definitely... it was a few steps away from being a student.

So now I think as a teacher who teaches teachers, I try and facilitate a space where that clinician or that teacher feels comfortable to be a student again—which means trying and explaining things in a really messy way without having to be clinically correct, and guiding them to connect some of the tissue between thoughts.

Because I know how important that is. And when you’re in clinician brain, you don’t always get to do that in a safe way—a way that allows you to be curious first and correct second.

Anna: I think that is really tough—and it’s making me think that I want to explore being a student more, because it has been a while. And I got to experience that a little bit at the NATS internship and...

Maurice: Being a student. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Anna: It’s hard, because I was sort of in both brains at once—teacher and student. And I think that’s good, right? Like, that’s part of what we are encouraging when we are teachers teaching teachers.

And also, the moment of just being a student—I don’t... maybe I need to, like, start taking piano lessons or something. Something that I don’t know.

Maurice: Yeah—entering the new thing.

Anna: You know? Though I still know motor learning pedagogy, right? But it won’t be turning on that, like, expert knowledge part of my brain.

Maurice: You know, you talk about being a student, and there’s many ways of being a student, right? I think there’s the—I'm gonna use that therapy language—there’s direct, and there’s indirect. And I think there’s the direct way of being a student, and there’s this indirect way.

And I know during the NATS internship program, you also got to observe other teachers, which is a form of learning, right? You were almost a student to the process of pedagogy—which is an interesting relationship. It’s almost an indirect version of being a student.

What was that like for you?

Anna: Yeah, it's so meta—especially because you are watching someone teach, and their mentor teacher is also watching them teach, and also jumping in sometimes and giving them pedagogical questions.

So the teacher is doing their thing. I'm already scribbling down exercises—because, I mean, that’s why we have Tool Time, right? I love vocal exercises. So I'm like, “Oh, this vowel is good,” or “This phrase is good, I haven’t thought of using that before.” So I’m already observing them, doing my thing.

And then the mentor teacher jumps in and asks the teacher, “OK, what did you hear there with that exercise? What result were you going for?” There was one lesson I was sitting in where the mentor teacher had the student close their eyes and cover their ears and go, “Bah bah bah bah bah bah bah,” so the mentor teacher could give the teacher an instruction to help cue the student better.

I feel like this is a weird triangle, but that’s why I was saying it was so meta, right? So they could give instructions to cue the student in a more effective way—without giving it away to the student beforehand. And so it was really cool to witness that kind of learning and that kind of—not interrogation—but inquisitiveness about what you’re doing.

Because I think that’s something that, working one-on-one with clients, no one is sitting there being like, “Now why did you pick that exercise?” I’m usually thinking that in my brain, but especially for folks who are not there yet, to have that—to be curious about that—to have someone in there getting them to be curious about that—I think is so helpful for that learning process.

Especially because for voice teachers, we don’t necessarily have our clinical supervisor coming in and observing, right? It’s like—I think I had a grand total of, like, three voice lessons that I taught observed in all of my schooling. That’s terrifying to say out loud, right? Like, I promise I’m a good voice teacher. But you know, it’s just not the model. And I think that’s a great thing about the NATS internship—that I’ve learned about being a teacher who teaches teachers. And hopefully, the rest of my cohort—they are all fantastic—they might end up being teachers who teach teachers too.

To have this idea of what to do with that—to take out into our own work.

Maurice: Yeah, that's awesome. I think I've reflected with you—and maybe here on the pod—that some of my ideal clients are teachers and people who have this knowledge of the voice.

Because I just find it so interesting to collaborate and work with someone who has the same knowledge bank and base as I do. And specifically as we begin to interrogate some of the really, really big things. Yeah, I find that all intellectually very exciting.

I serve as a mentor for Vocal Health Education, which is a continuing education company based out of the UK. And in that company—and I’ve been doing this since my third or fourth year of practice—I observe teachers teaching their students, and they record lessons and I give them feedback.

And it's really interesting too—the relationship that teachers and clinicians have with feedback. I think we often, until we’re exposed to it enough, view feedback as punitive sometimes, or as something meant to diminish what we're doing. And even changing someone’s relationship to feedback can be really challenging.

Not all feedback is negative. Some feedback is just meant to help you consider. And a “why” is not a judgment—it’s really just a question.

So I find interrogating a clinician’s relationship to learning fun for me. And I love it when people do that to me. I love it, love it, love it. Like when someone looks at what I do and they're like, “Well, why?” I'm like, “Yeah, that’s such a good question. Thank you for asking.”

Anna: Yeah. Yeah, right? It’s like a deeper level of what we’re doing with our clients who aren’t teachers—where we’re saying, “Get curious about this. Get curious about your voice, about your body.”

We’re asking that to teachers. And I think it’s also harder—

Maurice: Mhm.

Anna: Because as teachers, as clinicians, we're like, “We are supposed to know about this.” And that makes it even harder to be in that student mindset—to be...to feel free to say, “I don't know,” or to release that sense of “there is a right and wrong answer.” Because I know that sometimes that environment sends me right back into school stuff. And once a nerd, always a nerd, right? Like, I was a straight-A, you know?

And so, finding that growth edge in a way that is holding space for that person being a person—and for when it’s like, “I need to be right, because I always have been right, and look at my grades”—that’s definitely something that I deal with when I’m receiving feedback. So that’s very real.

Maurice: Yeah, yeah. I hear you. That’s exciting.

What do you—maybe—what are some things that you are—

Maurice: OK. We’ll do one of each.

What is something that you’re excited to teach? Like, what’s a role as a teacher that you’re maybe looking forward to taking on—either a topic or like a specific function?

And maybe what’s a role that you would be interested in being a student in?

Anna: Yeah, that’s a really good question. I think it would be cool to be in a more one-on-one position with teachers.

I really enjoy the work that we do in VoiceProEd, where we are presenting to a group and learning in that way. But I don’t think I’ve ever had the opportunity to observe someone and be the person giving feedback—asking those questions.

I think that might be really cool. Sometimes people who attend the NATS intern program come back later as mentor teachers. So I think that would be a really cool opportunity to dive deeper into that topic—NATS, if you're listening, hi. And also, I mean, that's something we could offer. I'm not going to put anything else on the table for VoiceProEd yet until you're all set up. But hey, teachers—if you're listening and you want to get your teaching observed—that's something I'd love to try.

I think something I would like to be a student of more is more in musical theatre pedagogy. I feel like I got some really great new concepts in classical pedagogy while I was at the NATS intern program and wish I could have gotten more into other styles, because I have less experience there. So that's an area where I’ve pursued my own professional development throughout my career, and I'm interested in doing more.

I also, like, miss taking my own voice lessons. I think it would be great to return to that, even though I have been a voice student on and off for 20 years in private voice. Which is kind of wild to put a number to that. But I think it's a good reminder—like you were saying—of student brain. And that also helps me learn about what my clients are going through when they're sitting here and I'm creating the environment that I do for them.

So what about you? Any teacher topic, student topic?

Maurice: Love it. Yeah, they're probably in a similar tree.

Student: I would like to maybe dive back into a new speech pathology–related topic or something related to ENT, whether it's like dysphagia or head and neck. I think it's just scratching the itch of learning a new... geez, I don’t know... skillset, probably. I'm getting closer to a brain space for that.

And I don't know that it would ever turn into something practical—like I don’t know that I would change my specialty—but I think it would just be interesting to learn new things.

Yeah, and then teaching would probably be in a similar vein. I really like working with clinicians—speech pathology student clinicians. It's such an impactful time. You really get to help someone feel the excitement of learning, and that carries far beyond education.

I think if you can foster that energy in someone again, it carries on for the rest of their career—because people did that for me. And now here I am, years later, still invested in teaching teachers and in my own education.

So I just think it’s been a beautiful journey for me, and I really enjoy doing that for anyone in the area that I practice.

Anna: Yeah. I feel like I'm coming from the opposite side of that. People didn’t do that for me—not in a malicious kind of way, but that just wasn’t really available in the path that I took.

And I floundered it down because I—

Maurice: Mhm. Hmm.

Anna: We’re all making it up as we go. So I want to make sure that the next generation of clinicians has more guidance.

I want to be there for that. I want other people to be able to provide the same—

Maurice: Mm-hmm.

Anna: —thoughtfulness and care and level of expertise and pedagogy to their clients.

And so if I can help facilitate that, then more people in the world get to have voice lessons that are an affirming and beautiful growing experience for them—and less of a stressful growth-edge kind of experience like mine sometimes was.

Maurice: Yeah, yeah. Minimizing harm, please. In all of our humanness—minimizing harm.

Teachers teaching teachers—we could talk about this all day. Maybe we will one day.

Anna: Yes. I mean, that is why we started a podcast.

Maurice: That is why we serve. I guess we are.

Anna: Ready for—

Maurice: Are—are we ready for the—

Anna: Tool time. Are we ready for tool time?

Maurice: When you did that with Meredith—and the guitars came in—I cackled.

Maurice: Like, our one comment is, “Please stop the tool time guitars.”

Anna: No! I love the tool time guitars. It also brings me so much joy.

Maurice: And just for everyone out there—if you’ve ever heard the noise, whether it’s the intro song, the outro song, or the tool time guitar—we need you to know that this is done so intentionally.

Everything is so serious that maybe the intro music to a podcast called Yap Sesh doesn’t have to be, you know... we’re just keeping it light.

Anna: I love the beats. Honestly, I feel like that’s related to the kind of music that you and I like to listen to, anything.

Maurice: Remember when we were picking these? Like, doo doo doo doo doo...

Anna: Like what a bop. What a bop.

Maurice: A banger, even? OK, alright. Do you wanna go first or second with your tool?

Anna: Well, I feel like we’ve done enough episodes of this that I may have talked about this before. But it came back this week, and it’s something that is related to some NATS internship fun.

I feel like I’m just gonna constantly tag Bel Canto Boot Camp, because that’s a lot of the stuff that was later in the program and so it’s stuck with me more—singing on consonants. Singing on voiced consonants as a part of creating legato in classical music.

Did I even talk about this last time? I may. I’m just still, like, hyped about this.

Maurice: I don’t think—I don’t know.

Anna: This is an exercise that we did together when you were studying voice with me, and you named it actually—“Amma Langas.”

Maurice: We’ve talked about this.

Anna: Yeah! So it’s with an M, L, and G sound. Did I talk about this last week?

Maurice: No, no. It wasn’t last week.

Anna: Later than that? OK—or earlier than that. Great, great. OK, that makes me feel better.

Well, it’s coming back. I have students that love this and that hate this because it is kind of hard. And a lot of folks haven’t thought about, like, holding out a consonant in an extended way—even sometimes in an SOVT kind of way.

So I like to do the same amount of time on the vowel as on the consonant. Can you keep the flow consistent? Can you keep the vibration consistent throughout all those consonants? And are you making those consonants as efficiently as possible?

Sometimes I break that down just to even one consonant that someone might be having a hard time with—like, “OK, how do we isolate the tip of the tongue to get to that L without getting our jaw involved?”

I do—also, I feel like I’m constantly yapping about tongue and jaw independence, but it’s for real.

Maurice: That was one of the very first things I learned with you. You were like, “Look in the mirror.”

My tool is—almost the, not the opposite, but the contrast to your legato vowel—non-voiced laryngeal actions.

How important I find it, sometimes, for folks who are having pretty significant, like, moderate to severe functional voice problems. So I think like muscle tension dysphonia or like a psychogenic something-or-other—or just something hyperfunctional, where they have a limited awareness of what their larynx does and how it works.

I was working with a client this past week who—we just, like, did throat clearing and coughing and laughing and inhalation phonation and all sorts of things with their larynx so that they could start to build an awareness of how it felt and how it functioned.

And through that, then, we were able to not only build a shared experience of their voice, but then take that into voicing with a lot more language and access to things that they hadn’t previously considered.

So—make some noises that aren’t singing to learn more about the singing voice. Draw those connections to just function and form and body and feeling through non-voicing tasks.

Anna: That is so real, because singers are like, “OK, now I’m singing it,” and then that is not the way they use their voice for anything else.

Maurice: Yeah. No. Yeah. No, no.

Anna: No.

Maurice: Yeah.

Thank you all so much for joining us this week. I just got back from London, so I brought this accent with me.

Thank you for joining us this week for Yap Sesh. Just a reminder—we are taking off for the month of July and then are coming back full swing for the fall, which we’re very excited about.

You’ll see some of your favorite courses swinging back around—and some new ones!

We do have two asynchronous courses currently available to learn from: Voice Notes: Practical Documentation for Voice Clinicians and Achieving Competence. What’s the tagline for—

Anna: Achieving Competence as an SLP Working with Singers. It doesn’t have a tagline because the title is so long, but it’s accurate.

It sums it up, right? Like, if you are an SLP—if you’re becoming an SLP—and you want to work with singers, you’ve never sung a note a day in your life.

Maurice: There we are. As Anna says, the title is the tagline.

Anna: That’s OK. We made this course for you.

Maurice: We made this course for you.

Thanks again. Reach out to us via DM or message, and we’ll see you for the next Yap Sesh.

Anna: Bye!

Maurice: Bye!