Dawn Cotter-Jenkins
Biography
In her private practice, World Class Speech Service, Dawn Cotter-Jenkins specializes as a speech-language trainer in the areas of telepractice development and training, professional voice use, public speaking, and accent modification.
She served as Clinical Supervisor for the master’s program at a University’s Speech and Hearing Center in the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders. There she established the Telepractice Practicum and Research Suite and has created the course, Introduction to Telepractice for Speech-Language Pathology.
The Backstory
Dawn started her role as Clinical Supervisor with the University in 2016 at a time before they had started any serious talks about including teletherapy in their course options. Dawn pushed the envelope with the new idea and leading up to 2017 she secured approval from the Dean and Chairperson, over the program, to incorporate teletherapy as part of the curriculum. The workspace changed to accommodate virtual conferencing for graduate students and their clients. Dawn worked with IT, administrators, and support teams to set up their telepractice suite and in just one semester their program was live, their client load was increasing, and their students were hosting virtual sessions.
The TheraPlatform Difference
Dawn needed technology for their program built specifically with therapists in mind, something that offered unique features and tools for Speech Language Pathologists. She wanted to offer Adelphi University students something with more features than typical screen sharing, with built-in therapy tools. She decided on TheraPlatform, she thought it was great for student learning because of the teletherapy specific functionality. With TheraPlatform students easily prepared worksheets and resources ahead of sessions. Students worked with the built-in applications and learned different ways to progress with their clients and encourage active participation. It was important for Dawn that she was giving her students hands-on experience with a platform built for therapists, one that they could use in their professional careers.
The program experienced accelerated growth as the need for virtual conferencing reached new heights over the course of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. Students showed high levels of engagement and graduate students took on an increasing number of teletherapy-only clients.
Dawn’s Advice
Therapists should embrace the shift to teletherapy and virtual conferencing. Work with a tool that offers specific features, that work, for therapists! You want built-in features that make things easy and convenient for your clients, save you prep time, and make sessions better. It is best if you can have most of what you need all in one place, TheraPlatform is a great comprehensive service to learn.
