E95: Audiologist with Amy Sorrow [IEP Team BONUS Series]
This week's IEP Team BONUS Series has a special guest! Meet Amy Sorrow, Doctor of Audiology! In this episode we discuss: 1) What audiologist do 2) The overlap and difference between Audiologists and Deaf and Hard of Hearing Teachers (DHH) 3) Auditory Processing and why it's so controversial 4) Qualifications of Audiologists Download FREE IEP Process Step-By-Step Guide Join the Facebook Group Shownotes Connect with Amy!
This week’s IEP Team BONUS Series has a special guest! Meet Amy Sarow, Doctor of Audiology!
In this episode we discuss:
1) What audiologist do
2) The overlap and difference between Audiologists and Deaf and Hard of Hearing Teachers (DHH)
3) Auditory Processing and why it’s so controversial
4) Qualifications of Audiologists
Download FREE IEP Process Step-By-Step Guide
E95: Audiologist with Amy [IEP Team BONUS Series]
[00:00:00] Welcome to this week, somewhat different IEP team bonus series podcast. Today, we are talking about the qualifications and role of the audiologist and because I’ve worked with a few, but felt a little bit unsure if I would get everything right. I invited Amy sarow on the podcast to talk about her own profession so that we can get everything super accurate.
So if your child has any kind of hearing loss or if they happen to have a diagnosis or you suspect. Auditory processing disorder, then you definitely do not want to miss this episode because it’s all about audiologists.
You are listening to the parent IEP lab, the podcast that helps you get an effective IEP plan for your child so that you can get them supported and learning in school.
I’m Beth Rosenfeld, occupational therapist, who started to notice trends in parents who got effective IEP for their kids without having to fight the school. My mission is to help you turn insider knowledge from the school side into effective parent advocacy for your child. The parent IEP lab focuses [00:01:00] on prepping you for your upcoming meeting, but also talks about commonly missed opportunities for parents to get effective.
outside of the IEP meeting. So let’s dive into today’s guest and think about what we can change and tweak to get the right formula. For success for your child to learn and grow at school. Welcome to the lab.
Just a little reminder that I have a super special freebie for you that’s already been downloaded over 300 times, and I’ve only been talking about it for a couple of weeks.
If you have ever felt overwhelmed by the steps in the IEP annual review process, this is going to make things so much more predictable and calm this year. The IEP process step-by-step guide is a freebie that you can download and have it sent straight to your email.
It breaks on the annual IEP review process and includes what in, when you should share your parent input. So you can actually feel heard at your meeting, download your free copy at www.theieplab.com/iep. Or the link [00:02:00] is below this podcast in your podcast player.
Beth: I am so excited to have Amy on the show today, and we audiologist. I am so excited to pick your brain about this, um, because I’ve worked with audiologists, but not a ton. So I just, I love that you’re here in sharing your expertise.
Will you just start us off and just tell us about your experience, your qualification, what you’re doing right now, and then we’ll jump into our
Amy: topic. . Yeah, absolutely. Well, I’m so happy to be here. Um, so I’m Amy Soro. I’m an audiologist. I’m based in Michigan. I did my training at the University of Iowa.
I did my fourth year residency at Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Florida. And right now I currently live in Michigan and I work with the veteran population. So I work mostly with. But during my training at Iowa, I did have experience in rotations in a school setting. So I got to see, you know, children in school and, how the school audiologist helped them in their learning in [00:03:00] school.
Um, I also got to see, how a variety of professions work together in, a special setting at the Center for Disabilities and Development at the University of Iowa. So they’re, um, they would work with children who had autism or a variety of other, developmental disabilities, and we would try to.
Rule out hearing loss or decide if that was playing a role in what they had going on. So I do have a diverse background, although I currently, um, work with adults and recently I’ve started working with the Forbes Health Advisory Board, in areas of audiology, hearing, healthcare and related topics. So I’m really excited to be here and share, what I can with you on those topic.
Beth: I love that you’re here and I love that you have a diverse background. I think how having that context of like how it all fits together across the lifespan is so important too. So if we can just start by talking about what audiologists actually do and really focus on that pediatric setting, that would be super [00:04:00] helpful.
Of
Amy: course. So audiologists help people who have hearing difficulty, um, they may perform testing to find out, you know, does this person have any degree of hearing loss? And if so, what, uh, might be appropriate, um, intervention for them. Do they need a hearing aid? Um, do they need a cochlear implant, a bone anchored hearing aid?
You know, there’s lots of technology solutions as far as that goes. So audiologists also work in hearing conservation. So they might help people, um, you know, to use hearing protection in different settings, in work environments. So I personally work with veterans. Um, I help to assess their degree of hearing loss and specifically, um, in terms of disability.
Uh, currently that’s what I do In a pediatric setting though, there are a variety of tools that an audiologist is going to use to help children, um, ranging from infants to, you know, teens.
So in a pediatric setting, you know, the audiologist is [00:05:00] gonna pull out all the stops. They may have toys or bubbles, things to engage the children. There are ways that they can test, um, for hearing loss that don’t involve the child’s active participation. So they might just need to sit quietly. Um, they have something in their ear and then we can get some objective measures of their hearing.
Or they might have something that’s more like play or games to try to responses from them to see what they’re able to hear. Mm-hmm. . Um, so they may have, you know, some fun toys, like some blocks. They’re gonna listen for the, the birdies and then put them in the, the bucket. Um, things like that.
Beth: We use our hearing a lot more than I think we do, but this is the perfect segue to talk about why is hearing so important, and specifically, what kind of impact does hearing loss have on the children’s ability to learn when they start to get into that school age?
Amy: Yeah, so when we think about it this way, so when you hear and you’re able to [00:06:00] access. , you know what people say to you? You can learn a language, right? But when you’re missing pieces of that or you don’t get all the information, it’s gonna make it much harder to develop speech and language, and that’s gonna, you know, have a lot of trickle down effects for the child in school.
So that’s why that early intervention is so important. We wanna catch it before, you know, there may be those gaps in their learning, where they’re behind their peers. Um, if you think about. . You know, when you talk to a child, all of the learning that they’re picking up just from having conversation. You know, if you’re in the grocery store, you hear like a mother talking to their child like, oh look, do you want this cereal?
Or do you want this one? Let’s look at the, you know, those are all just situations where the child is soaking it up like a sponge. They’re absorbing it, and if they’re not able to hear and access that information, it just makes it harder for them to learn those things. , yeah.
Mm-hmm. .
Beth: Yeah, exactly. You know, [00:07:00] when I’ve interacted with audiologists in the school setting, it’s been like audiologists are the experts, the specialists, and so they’re involved as far as like identifying what’s going on, what’s.
you know, what kind of accommodations can we put into place? But then there’s this overlap with the deaf and heart of hearing teacher, and I’d love for you to talk a little bit about that, because I always saw the audiologist like in the I E P meetings, but then I never really saw the audiologist, like doing direct.
Like therapy type interventions with that child. It was more like the D H H teacher deaf of hardy hearing teacher. So can you talk about like that overlap in specialty that you guys have with A D H H and how you overlap and how you kind of, um, both combine to help support a kid with hearing loss?
Amy: Absolutely. So in a classroom setting, you have, you know, on an I E P team, you have a variety of people working together to help the child. Now, depending on the school, that might be the district might be the [00:08:00] budget. It’s going to really depend on how many students that audiologist is responsible for.
So for example, when I was in the school rotation in Iowa, there was one audiologist who was responsible for a lot of different schools in a rural setting. So we spent actually a lot of time traveling from one school to the next. You know, in one school we needed. , get some batteries to a child to make sure you know, they had what they needed, that their hearing aids are working okay.
Then we would drive on to the next school, you know, check. Okay, there’s a child having a problem with their hearing aid today. Can you do a listening check and kind of figure out what’s going on there? And another classroom, they may be helping a teacher gets set up with an FM system to make sure that those children are getting, you know, the, the sound to their hearing aids that are paired with that device. Um, they might be doing a check to see, okay, is how is this classroom set up? Are the acoustics.
[00:09:00] Appropriate enough is, is the child gonna be seated in the right distance from the teacher so that they’re able to hear what they’re saying? How much echo or reverberation is there in the classroom? So the audiologist is thinking a little more from the technical side of things. Versus the teacher, obviously they’re gonna have a lot more access one-on-one with that student. Um, they may be working with a fewer number of students. You know, the audiologist, for example, in that, um, school district where I was, they were multiple schools. So technically they, they’re responsible for let’s say like 10,000 children or something like that.
Now, obviously not every child has hearing loss, so you’re not actually working with that many children, but. , it’s a significant amount in some cases, um, versus a teacher is gonna be working more one-on-one directly with that student. So, yeah, so that’s a good point. And I think that the audiologist and the, the teacher of the deaf, um, they compliment each other in those ways.
Um, and so yeah, they, they help each other, [00:10:00] they work together, um, to accomplish those goals. I love
Beth: that. Yes. Okay, so the next question that I have is a little bit controversial, but I hear a lot from parents that, you know, my child has this outside diagnosis Of auditory processing disorder and then they bring that diagnosis to the school and then different providers will look at it and some seem to like not regard it as a real diagnosis or not really know what to do with it.
And so I wanted to ask you if you could explain what auditory processing disorder is, but then I know that there’s some like complicated or like different views to it. And will you explain that to us so we can better understand
Amy: that? Yes. So this is a great question and I will forewarn you, it is a controversial topic in my field.
Um, so I wanna say, first of all, anyone who has that diagnosis and they’re receiving, treatment for that, you know, that’s totally, that’s valid. I don’t wanna say anything against that. I’m happy for anybody who’s getting [00:11:00] help and support that they need. Um, that being said, auditory processing disorder, just to give you a quick, you know, explanation of what that is.
Yeah. So somebody can have normal hearing, but they’re not able to receive speech or they’re not able to understand things where you think, oh, this person has normal hearing thresholds on an audiogram. Why can’t they understand me? Or why don’t they hear me? That’s kind of the, the idea behind it. Mm-hmm.
um, now the audiology profession is a little bit divided on how to go about diagnosing it, addressing it, um, The thing that’s difficult with it. So it is essentially a diagnosis of exclusion. Just think about it this way, right? If you’ve had a hard day, let’s say you had something negative happen during the day, your mind might be focused elsewhere.
And if somebody’s talking to you, you don’t hear what they say. Or it’s like a, a lag time, a delay, and then you, oh, you said something. What was that? [00:12:00] So that’s just one example of how. , you have perhaps normal hearing, but you may not be responding in the way that one might expect, right? So there’s lots of different, um, noise that could be going on in that sense.
Um, , you know, someone might have attention, problems like A D H D or something like that, that could be another variable where you say, okay, this person is, has normal hearing, but they’re not able to focus. Or they have very short attention span. So that’s obviously a, a concern that needs to be addressed.
Um, and so we wanna. Room to find if there may be something like that going on that needs other medical attention, perhaps there’s, you know, something that a physician would recommend to help that child and maybe something like that is gonna provide, you know, what they need so that they’re able to focus and communicate.
Um, uh, So definitely as I said at the CDD in Iowa, we would [00:13:00] see, a variety of, um, children coming through who had disabilities. They’d be evaluated maybe by 10 or 15 different professionals who would each provide an opinion. So maybe a psychologist would evaluate the child, audiology would evaluate the child.
A physician would evaluate the child, and then everyone would come together on a consensus of what is the best for this. What do they need? How can we support them? Mm-hmm. . So that’s something where, um, occasionally auditory processing disorder would come into the conversation, but in a lot of cases there was something else going on that the child needed instead of that.
So that is a little bit of the controversy behind it. We don’t currently have a lot of evidence that supports, certain treatment methods.
Beth: That’s wonderful. I love that you say that. And I’m, I’m just curious too, because I, I don’t think I’ve ever asked this question of a parent who said they had this diagnosis.
Like, do you think that. Audiologists are providing this diagnosis of [00:14:00] auditory processing disorder in some cases? Or is there another professional that also like is technically allowed to diagnose this but isn’t an audiologist?
Amy: So audiologists are the ones who would be diagnosing this. Okay. At least to my knowledge, I’m not aware of other providers who do that.
Yeah. Um, and there are certain audiologists who they, they do that, that’s one of their specialty areas. Okay. Um, and if you were someone who were concerned, you know, does my child have this disorder? I would seek out one of those audiologists. Mm-hmm. . So you may be able to find on the ASHA website. They have, you know, providers that you can look up in your area and they may specifically say, yes, I work with auditory processing disorder.
Okay, that’s someone you would wanna look into if you suspect that may be an issue, but again, You wanna look at other things also.
Beth: Yeah, I love that explanation because you’re really going back to look at the whole child and saying like, okay, this could be a thing, but is there anything else? That could be a thing too.
And thank you so [00:15:00] much for explaining that, cuz I know it’s kind of a touchy subject, but I. , I see the confusion in so many parents of like, what I have this diagnosis, like why is nobody recognizing it? And it’s very, very similar to what I see too for sensory processing disorder, which like isn’t officially in the D S M, it’s not an official diagnosis, but yet doctors are diagnosing it.
And so there’s this like tension in the same way where it’s like, Like it’s a thing. We think it’s a thing, but also like it’s not an official diagnosis. So there’s some, some kind of conflict in really qualifying it or defining it or, um, figuring out if it’s something else first. So I definitely identify with that kind of like touchy topic, diagnosis part.
Thank you so much for coming on and sharing your expertise. I was going to attempt to explain what an audiologist does by myself, but you do it so much better than I do, of course. So if parents have a follow up question for you or wanna connect with you, where would they go to do that? And we’ll link it up in
Amy: the [00:16:00] show notes too.
Absolutely. Well, I have enjoyed chatting with you about this topic. Um, they can go to my website, which is my name, amy sarow.com, so that’s a M y s A r o w.com. Um, and I, I’d be happy to provide any more information than I can.
Beth: Perfect. Thank you so much for coming on again.
Amy: Thank you so much for having me.
Thank you so much to Amy for coming on the show and explaining a little bit about her profession,
and especially tackling a touchy subject. So if you are used to the regular IEP team bonus series, you know that I also go over qualifications, which is something I didn’t ask Amy at the time. So I’m going to go over those really fast right now. So I do refer to Colorado’s list of qualifications on their website, but your state might have different qualifications for audiologists in general. It seems to be pretty the same across states, but we don’t yet have a universal system [00:17:00] for people like therapists and audiologists to certify across the country.
It is very state by state. So I am going to be reading off of the Colorado state website for the requirements for a school adiologists so the first one is an AUD or a PhD in in audiology, which just means that they have a doctorate in audiology. The second qualification is a completion of an approved program from a regionally accredited institution in audiology.
A practicum or internship in a school setting equivalent to a minimum of eight weeks full-time or 320 hours under the supervision of a professionally licensed or master’s level, licensed audiologist. And passage of the Colorado state board of education approved audio. Audiology exam. So they have two practice exams that they complete in order to become a school audiologist in the state of Colorado. And again, I am sure that audiologists in different states have something very similar as well.[00:18:00]
Okay, so that concludes our discussion about audiologists today. I really hope that this made. I really hope that this is helpful to go through each person’s role on the IEP team. So that, you know, especially in this case, what a deaf and hard of hearing teacher does versus an audiologist, so that you know who to add, who to ask questions of. If this comes up for your child as well,
If you have any questions about your own state’s regulations or qualifications for audiologists, why don’t you hop in and join us in the Facebook group? You can find the link to join the Facebook group in your podcast player below this podcast. And we would love to see you in there if you have any IUP questions and especially if you have ones around audiologists
Don’t forget to click the link below this podcast in your podcast player to download your free IUP process step-by-step guide. And I will see you next week. Same time, same place. Thanks so much.