Teenagers who stutter often come to therapy unclear about what, if anything, they want to change about their stuttering, and why it is important for them to do so. While change in speech fluency is frequently at the top of the list for adolescents (and certainly for speech-language pathologists) this focus can mask more personally meaningful changes, such as the way they and their listeners react to their stuttering. The mismatch between therapy goals and their meaningfulness to the individual can result in noncompliance, relapse or decreased likelihood of continuing in therapy altogether. In this presentation, we reframe motivation as readiness to change and describe ways to help teens identify both what they want to change about their stuttering and what they are ready to take on in the process of doing so. 
 
Learning Objectives:
Participants will demonstrate the ability to:
1. Describe the common factors that cut across approaches to the treatment of behavioral, cognitive, and health related problems. 
2. Describe the Stages of Change Model as it relates to stuttering therapy, and how to assess one’s readiness to make changes to the behavioral, cognitive, and affective aspects of stuttering.  
3. Demonstrate a general understanding of how to use readiness measures to design therapy methods for teens who stutter. 

Target Audience: Speech-Language Pathologists, graduate students

Bio: Tricia Zebrowski, Ph.D., CCC-SLP is Professor Emerita at the University of Iowa, and a speech-language pathologist specializing in stuttering. Her clinical, research and teaching expertise is stuttering intervention, with a special focus on teenagers who stutter. For over 20 years, Tricia directed UISPEAKS for Teens, a residential therapy program for teens who stutter. Her most recent work attempts to uncover the ways of thinking that facilitate teenagers’ decisions about their stuttering.