Inside the SIUE Speech Pathology Clinic: Jamie Henderson on Clinical Education, Externships, and Pivoting to Telepractice
Jamie Henderson calls clinical supervision an art. It's the kind of thing you don't fully appreciate until you're three years into the role, watching graduate students stumble through their first diagnostic evaluation, and realizing you're still figuring it out yourself.
Jamie is the clinic coordinator at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville's speech pathology program. She manages day-to-day clinic operations, coordinates all off-site clinical education placements, runs community outreach and screening events, and supervises graduate clinicians as they work with real clients. It's a role that touches every part of the program, and she wouldn't trade it.
The Job That Keeps Growing
When Jamie took the clinic coordinator position, the learning curve hit from every direction at once. Clinical supervision was just one piece. She also had to run the university clinic's administrative side, manage community screening events at local schools and the Early Childhood Center, and coordinate externship placements for every second-year student in the program.
Three years in, she says she's just now starting to feel like she's wrapped her brain around the magnitude of the job. And she's still tracking most of her externship communications with pencil, paper, and email spreadsheets.
That tracking process matters more than it might sound. Each externship site has its own preferences, its own supervisor expectations, and its own communication style. Jamie acts as the go-between for students and off-site clinical educators, making sure the match works for everyone. It's a relationship-management job as much as an administrative one.
Three Externships Instead of Two
SIUE restructured its graduate program since Jamie and host Kadie Jackstadt were students there. The biggest change: students now get three off-site clinical rotations instead of the two that were standard before.
Here's how the current structure works. First-year students spend fall, spring, and summer semesters in the on-campus clinic, carrying one to three clients at a time and completing diagnostic evaluations alongside fellow grad students and faculty. Then in their second year, students compress their final coursework into the first eight weeks of fall semester before heading out for their first externship from mid-October through December.
Spring of the second year brings two more back-to-back rotations. Students typically complete an adult medical placement, a school-based placement, and a third rotation in a setting of their choice. That third slot is where it gets interesting. Some students double down on schools but with a different age group. Others try private practice or seek out another medical site.
The result? Students now earn the majority of their clinical hours off-site rather than on campus. Jamie says the feedback from both students and supervisors has been strong.
A $25 Session and the Trade-Offs That Come With It
The SIUE clinic runs as a private-pay, fee-for-service operation. No insurance billing. Families pay $25 for a 50-minute session, collected in three installments across the semester using a tuition-style model.
It's an affordable rate that reflects the reality of the setting: graduate clinicians are providing the services, closely supervised but still learning. Families understand the trade-offs. Their child's clinician rotates every semester. There are longer breaks between terms. Some families supplement SIUE services with school-based therapy or use the clinic specifically over summer to bridge the gap.
That arrangement works because of trust. Families know the students are closely supervised, and they're genuinely partnering in clinical education. Jamie is proud of the outcomes, even within those constraints.
Pivoting to Telepractice When the Clinic Went Dark
The conversation took place in May 2020, and the pandemic was the unavoidable backdrop. Jamie called it the biggest challenge of her time at SIUE, and she wasn't exaggerating. The clinic had never offered telepractice before. Everything had to be built from the ground up.
For the spring semester, students used Simucase, a clinical simulation platform, to keep working on cases. But for summer, Jamie was in the early stages of establishing live telepractice through a HIPAA-compliant version of Zoom, secured through the university's existing infrastructure.
The preparation wasn't just technical. Students and supervisors both needed training in telepractice delivery. Jamie leaned heavily on the Midwest Clinic Directors Group, a regional network of colleagues who were generous with shared documents, advice, and lessons learned from their own pilot programs. She credits that group with keeping clinic directors from having to reinvent the wheel.
And there was the human side of it. Students who were already nervous about being observed and critiqued in person now had to navigate internet glitches, family members in the background, and the general awkwardness of delivering therapy through a screen. Jamie's reminder to herself and her colleagues: everyone was new to this. Grace was the only reasonable approach.
The silver lining? Colleagues who had piloted telepractice with their students reported that the clinicians were just thrilled to see their clients again. After six weeks away, even a Zoom session felt like a gift. And the experience gave students a real-world skill they'd carry into their careers.
Programs Worth Talking About
Jamie wrapped the conversation by highlighting a few of SIUE's standout clinical programs. The clinic runs community speech and language screenings at local private schools and the Early Childhood Center. They've established a collaborative care arrangement with St. Louis Children's Hospital's Cleft Palate and Craniofacial Institute, where a mutual client receives continuity of care across the river. And faculty member Ted Masingale runs a transgender voice program.
These aren't just clinical hours. They're the kind of experiences that shape how students think about the field long after graduation. Jamie's hope for every student who comes through the program: that they walk away with a passion for evidence-based practice, the ability to think critically, and enough professional connections to know they're never really working alone.
Running a university clinic means coordinating schedules, tracking clinical hours, managing client records, and supervising students all at once. ClinicNote is an EMR built for university clinics and private practices, handling documentation, scheduling, and reporting in one place so clinic directors can focus on what matters most: their students and clients. See how ClinicNote works.
Transcript
Kadie: You are listening to Clinic Chats. Clinic Chats is a multidisciplinary therapy podcast that was created for students, professionals, clinic directors, and supervisors. Clinic Chats is bridging the gap between graduate programs and professionals, sharing personal journeys of the smallest of private practice startups, large and expanded practices, as well as university clinic triumphs and tribulations. We hope you'll find our podcast informative and helpful in your career endeavors. Clinic Chats is sponsored by ClinicNote, an electronic medical record company for private practice and university clinics. ClinicNote was designed to make scheduling, documentation, report writing, and billing effective, efficient, and HIPAA compliant.
Kadie: I have been looking forward to conversing with our podcast guest today, Jamie Henderson. Hi Jamie.
Jamie: Hi Kadie.
Kadie: Jamie is an SLP and clinic director at Southern Illinois University of Edwardsville. We were actually in the same undergrad and graduate class at SIUE where we graduated together in 2015. Feels like a long time ago, doesn't it?
Jamie: It sure does.
Kadie: We've occasionally remained in contact through the years. And how long now have you been clinic director at SIUE?
Jamie: You know, I'm going on my third year there as clinic coordinator. Yep. Third year.
Kadie: Wow. That's amazing. I am guessing that, even though you're probably settled in by now, maybe it's recent enough that you can recall how it felt to jump into such a big role.
Jamie: Oh, I would say that this is definitely the most challenging position I've ever held in my career. I say that and it's also the most rewarding. So that kind of shows you that it's definitely a humbling experience, but just so rewarding to work with the graduate students as they provide services to folks in our community. It's really amazing.
Kadie: Yes. I can only imagine the work that you have to put in and all of the faculty put in and it has to be rewarding for you to keep coming back, right?
Jamie: Absolutely.
Kadie: I'm curious, whenever you first jumped into this position, what were some of the things that you recall that were just on your to-do list to learn? I mean, I'm sure it's a long, long list, but if you can give a brief rundown of all of the responsibilities that you had to learn.
Jamie: Primarily, just the art of clinical supervision and clinical education. I say that, that it is indeed an art. I think it takes a long time to develop your own style and to learn how to meet the individual needs of your students and just to be adaptable. That's an ongoing process. No one has ever arrived at being the perfect clinical supervisor. I enjoy working with a lot of really great people who are role models for me, who inspire me to challenge myself to be even better in terms of my ability to work with students in their learning process as they become clinicians.
Jamie: But also in addition to my role as a clinical educator, I'm also an administrator. So just running the day-to-day operations of the university clinic was also a major learning curve for me as well. And in addition to that, I handle our community outreach, all of our screening events in the community as well as facilitate the clinical rotations for externship for all second-year clinicians. So it definitely was piece by piece. I think I'm just now starting to feel like, okay, I've got my brain wrapped around the magnitude of my job. I still have a lot of work to do in terms of things that I would like to be better at.
Kadie: I cannot imagine your tasks within the clinic and then just keeping in contact with all of those placements that you're finding and in contact with and you're frequently connecting with and evaluating the needs of that student and how they're doing. It's a lot, I imagine. Do you have a systematic way of keeping track of all of that communication?
Jamie: I guess I do have my own kind of internal system, don't we all, in terms of just how we work. Honestly, I can be a little old school in terms of pencil and paper, just keeping and emails in terms of keeping track of my communication with all of those externship supervisors and education coordinators out there in the field who take our students. I do kind of have a routine of sending out an all call for upcoming placements and then just kind of tracking those and keeping a nice little spreadsheet of placements that I secure for our students.
Jamie: Honestly, it's a lot of relationships in terms of just respecting how people work and how they like to do things and making sure that I'm a good go-between between the student and that off-site clinical educator.
Kadie: Yes, 100%. And as far as students tracking hours, I assume you're all still using Calypso?
Jamie: Yes, correct. We are still using Calypso. I think our class was the first class to the pilot class for using Calypso at SIUE. And we're still using it.
Kadie: Oh, were we? I didn't even know that.
Jamie: Yes, we were. It was brand new to our class. And so, yes, we're still using that. Another great relationship I have is with those folks down in Charleston. I call the help desk quite a bit. So yeah, we're using Calypso to track our clinical hours and clinician competencies and experiences.
Kadie: And I'm curious how the outline of the program looks as a grad student these days if they are entering on-site clinic now for how many semesters? Do they go out for any evaluations or is that all in-house? And when they leave for externships?
Jamie: Sure. I can give you an overview of that. It's a little bit different than when we were in the program. So when you come in as a first-year graduate student, you might have been able to take an elective class like counseling or a seminar class on autism as an elective or head and neck cancer the summer before you start that fall semester as a first-year clinician. But usually, you come in for that intensive clinic orientation for a week before classes start. And then you begin to prep for your clients.
Jamie: Usually, the first day of fall clinic is that Tuesday following Labor Day. So you have a couple of weeks to settle in. And then your first fall semester, spring semester, and the summer semester of your first year, you are in the in-house university clinic and you have anywhere from one to three clients. Also, within that semester, you may be called on to do a diagnostic evaluation. You usually work with a fellow grad student partner to work with a clinical or academic faculty member who may supervise that diagnostic. And we sometimes do anywhere from five to six full diagnostic sessions a semester.
Jamie: But keep in mind, too, that even with our clinic clients, we're still doing assessments, both formal and informal, throughout the course of treatment, primarily at baseline and inline. But those initial diagnostic sessions, it's different than when we were in the program. We do the intake, we do a consult, we schedule that longer session, and then we do the write-up of the report and the follow-up meeting with the client and family. That process is a lengthier process, of course, and so that's done in addition to their regular clinic clients.
Jamie: But that's the first three, fall, spring, and summer. And then the fall of the second year in our program, students spend the first eight weeks in their final coursework, which is quite intensive. It's like shrinking a full semester of coursework into eight weeks, the first half of the semester. And then they go at kind of mid-October through December, they go through their first clinical rotation in the fall of their second year. And then their final spring semester are another two back-to-back clinical rotations out in the field.
Jamie: And so the big difference from what you and I experienced is that our students now have the opportunity for three off-site clinical rotations, and it's usually an adult medical, a school-based externship, and then an externship in a setting of their choice. So students may want an additional school-based externship, but maybe in a different age group. Or they may want to try out interning at a private practice or an additional medical site. And so frankly, our students actually get the bulk of their clinical hours, or more clinical hours, I should say, off-site rather than on-site than in the university clinic, even though they spend two full semesters in a summer in our in-house clinic. So it's kind of a mix. But since we've begun the third externship, they've been getting most of their clinical hours offsite.
Kadie: We've gotten a lot of good feedback from students and supervisors out in the field with this model.
Jamie: Right. I think it sounds like a really great revamp to, like you said, just get some more real life experience. And additionally, I'm sure it really helps ramp up those numbers as far as clinical hours.
Kadie: Yes. It's definitely beneficial just in terms of clinical experience. Absolutely. And I love that they get to pick that final placement or at least have some sort of say about their preference of where they'd like to go.
Jamie: It's definitely a collaborative process to choose their externship sites. I work really hard to start the process early and keep in constant communication throughout the process so that the students feel like they do have more buy-in and more excitement to their externships. Of course, I can't deliver the moon and you may not get your first choice, but students seem to be satisfied with their sites.
Kadie: And do they get to, for that final site, do they get to potentially leave the general Southern Illinois area or do they need to stay close by the university?
Jamie: We ask that they stay close by for that fall externship, their first one, just in case. Mostly in case I need to head out to their site to assist with anything or to facilitate any assistance for the supervisor or the student, which is very rare. But in the spring, we've had students go out of state. And so as long as we have an established affiliation agreement with the site and the university and their supervisor meets the ASHA standards in terms of being able to supervise, we can go ahead with a place that maybe is closer to their home or so they can venture out for sure.
Kadie: That's great. And how would you say the clinic is structured? Do you still all have like an intake person, a front desk person working or who is responsible for client check-in?
Jamie: Yeah. So we do have an office support specialist who works in our clinic office who is there to check clients in, to take payment, to keep track of client records and all of those responsibilities as well. So we do have office support to assist.
Kadie: And is it a fee for service clinic? I can't recall.
Jamie: Yes, it is a private pay clinic. We do not bill insurance. So folks pay by cash or check to the university. Certainly it's a reduced fee, as you can imagine, since students are providing services, even though they're very closely supervised. So we feel like it's affordable. It's $25 for a 50-minute session, which is a very nice fee for 50 minutes of speech therapy.
Jamie: So essentially we use a tuition model. So you don't pay per session. We take payment in installments, like three installments throughout the course of the semester. But essentially folks are paying $25 a session.
Kadie: Okay. That's a really nice model and definitely a good rate. We have our private practice listeners who are probably like, no!
Jamie: Yeah, we understand that these are graduate clinicians providing the services. However, still the clients and families should expect good outcomes. But they do understand they're partnering with us in clinical education. And we definitely appreciate our families.
Kadie: Yes, absolutely. They're definitely receiving quality services. Like you said, they're being overseen by their supervising therapist. But they also have to understand that their students rotate every semester. There's more breaks possibly. So it's a give and take, I'm sure.
Jamie: Absolutely, yes. You named the big ones there. They do understand they'll get a new clinician if they're continuing services across semesters. And there is a sizable break. Sometimes families supplement with us. The child may receive services at school that come to us for additional services. Or they may come to us in the summer only to kind of bridge that gap between the school year.
Kadie: And speaking about summer services, I hate to always talk about it, but I'm just curious. Do you even know what things are going to look like or what's the plan for this summer?
Jamie: We're still working on that. It has been probably the biggest challenge of my time at SIUE. It's the same for everyone across the nation. So I'm not saying it's unique to me, but just working on clinical instruction when you can't be with people in the room, it's very difficult. And so we've used so far a program called Simucase, which you may have heard of, for this semester. And we'll probably still continue with that somewhat over the summer just so that they can work on a few cases each week. But we are in the process of establishing some foundation for clinical practice through telepractice for the summer.
Kadie: Have you checked out a teletherapy platform that's going to work for everyone or will it be different for different students?
Jamie: The university is already established with Zoom. And so right now I'm in the very early stages, but I'm in the process of securing the BAA for the HIPAA-compliant version of Zoom for our students and supervisors to use.
Kadie: Oh, okay. Well, that's good that it's already up and running in the university.
Jamie: I think it will be ideal simply because they can offer us our own ITS, they can offer us tech support for using the platform. But it's still, again, in the very early stages in terms of making sure we have that platform established, but also just the student and supervisor training in telepractice. That'll take some time and I have some different resources.
Jamie: I'm actually very fortunate to be a part of the Midwest Clinic Directors Group, which is a fantastic group of colleagues who are so generous in sharing ideas and documents and just to make our lives easier. They're just a wonderful group of colleagues in the region who have done this and who are up and running and can give really good advice.
Kadie: Yes. I recently heard of that group and I think it's great. I don't think everyone needs to reinvent the wheel and spend days and hours wrapping their head around what this will look like. So great resource for sure.
Kadie: I'm curious, and maybe this is a more nosy question than anything, because I'm just envisioning how the SIUE clinic used to work. So will you have that front desk person be the family contact scheduling and then relaying that information to you to finalize a schedule?
Jamie: I know that the office support specialist works with me and I also rope in a couple of colleagues. We all just sit down and hammer out the schedule together. And then we get that mapped out just in a pretty old-fashioned way, just a paper and pencil or a big whiteboard in my office. Now again, that will have to be done virtually probably in the coming weeks. And so that is a challenge for sure to figure out how we're going to do the scheduling. But yes, the office support specialist would be the primary contact for if someone needs to cancel or if they have questions about payment or other logistics like that.
Kadie: Is this process that you're getting ready for all just in case or have you already gotten the word that the clinic will not be up and running in person for summer?
Jamie: We're planning to just do a combination or a hybrid of clinical simulation and telepractice for our students this summer. We just decided to call it.
Kadie: Well, at least that way you can have a plan in place and you're not just hanging by a thread waiting for someone else to make that call for you.
Jamie: Yeah, and just the fact that it takes so much preparation and planning that we can't really wait to begin planning it. So we just have to, you know, we haven't done telepractice in our clinic before. So that means that a lot of us are having to do continuing education and looking at a lot of resources and relying on groups like my Midwest Clinic Directors group just to try to put this together in a way because the services have to be beneficial and they have to be effective. And so we have to put in the hard work to set that up for the most possible success.
Kadie: I truly can't imagine what that must feel like for the graduate students. Just knowing, looking back and talking to you, I'm like, okay, the clinic director and the faculty were not that intimidating. But at the time, it feels very scary to present a session where you're being supervised in person, let alone where you're learning how to provide therapy, you're working with internet glitches and lags and having family right there trying to get student participation. Everything is just going to be that much more scary and I feel for them, I really do.
Jamie: It's a good reminder to always be in tune with student perspective in terms of the unknown. And of course students are always kind of in the spotlight, right? They always feel they're always being critiqued. Yes, I mean that's part of the process. It's a good reminder for all of us that this is new for, I think, almost everyone who's going into it. So we're all kind of in these new waters together.
Jamie: But I will say for colleagues who have done some pilot work with their students in telepractice after being away from clients, that the students were so excited just to see their clients again and to work with people, even though it was via telepractice, that it just felt like at least I'm working with a person again. And so on the positive side, I think they've been away from clients for about six weeks now and I think they'll be happy, really happy to jump back in even if it's telepractice.
Jamie: And there will be a lot of learning and I think we all have to give each other a lot of grace in this time. I do think it's a great experience, though. They're going to be exposed to so many materials, new resources. It's a great little tool to have in their back pocket for once they do go out in the world.
Kadie: Yeah, talk about it. I mean, they're going to be taking data, using new tools in real time. And yes, you're right. It's going to be a really big learning experience for them. And I think they'll rise to the occasion. I think everyone might know that you can record Zoom sessions, but I've been trying to do that more often with my own professional side of things just so I can go back and review myself. So it's a nice tool that they can use for themselves as well.
Jamie: Well, their sessions are, as you probably recall, the sessions are recorded in the university clinic for that reason, for teaching and learning to go back. But yes, so that is a feature that they can continue should they need to go back and review.
Kadie: I'm just curious if you have anything to add as far as anything about your specific role, anything about the clinic or something that you would just like to share for the students and a takeaway message.
Jamie: I'm particularly proud of the work that my colleagues do, and the students are frankly just amazing. They're wonderful to work with. It's a very grueling process. I think you and I both remember grad school quite well. It's such an impressionable time, and I'm hoping that they find that it's rewarding and can look back and feel good about their foundation in the field.
Jamie: My main hope is that students walk away from this with a passion for what they do and the drive to be critical thinkers and savvy consumers of research so that they can just continue to provide evidence-based practice and to really enjoy what they do. That's my hope for them, that it's truly a vocation more than a job, that they really feel like this is their calling and they've been well prepared and they're resourceful and can establish those connections because really the SLP world is such a small world. And so the ability to network and respect colleagues, even if you disagree with them, to be able to have good positive professional working relationships just to keep your clients at the center of what you do.
Jamie: I am really proud of the community outreach that the students do through our clinic and screening events for speech and language at local private schools and at the Early Childhood Center. We've recently done some collaborative care work with St. Louis Children's Hospital with their Cleft Palate and Craniofacial Institute where we share a mutual client and the student is able to work with one of the SLPs on that team very closely. That has been a tremendous learning opportunity for our students and the ability that we have the family who lives on this side of the river who can come to us and experience that consistency and continuity of care for the program that they started over at Children's. And so that's been really amazing for the student involved in that.
Jamie: And my colleague, Ted Masingale, runs our transgender voice program and that's a really lovely program as well. So we are involved in a lot of wonderful learning opportunities for students and my hope is that they can feel just confident about their clinical preparation.
Kadie: Yes. Thank you for touching on some of those special programs that you all run. I meant to ask that. Well, I appreciate you taking the time to chat with me this morning. I was really excited to touch base and just to see how you've been.
Jamie: Oh yeah. Thank you so much. It's been wonderful to connect with you again and I love to talk about the clinic. It makes me so sad right now just because that's where I should be. That's where we all should be at work, but unfortunately just not able to do so right now.
Kadie: Thank you for joining me and listening to Clinic Chats. If you have a moment, please leave a five-star review for Clinic Chats to help other SLPs find our podcast. If you'd like to share your own personal journey through private practice, please email me kadie at clinicnote dot com. That's K-A-I-D-E at clinicnote dot com.