In recognition of ASHA’s National Speech Language Hearing Month, we sat down with Jen Walentas Lewon — clinical associate professor, LSVT LOUD practitioner, and self-described “consumer of voices” — to talk about what it means to do this work well.
Some careers are found, others are stumbled into. For Jen Walentas Lewon, clinical associate professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, speech-language pathology (SLP) was both. What started as a search for the intersection of language, science, and people, and a practical eye toward job stability, grew into a nearly three-decade career spanning acute care, skilled nursing, home health, private practice, and eventually, the university clinic where LSVT was born.
“It felt like this nice intersection of language and science but very connected to people,” Jen recalls of first discovering the field. She and two close friends even declared their major together on the same day. All three went on to become practicing SLPs—one in early intervention, one in deaf education, and Jen working with adults in geriatrics and neurogenic communication disorders. A detail she loves to share with students as a reminder of just how wide the field truly is.
Finding Your Niche in a Cheesecake Factory of a Field
The scope of SLP practice, Jen notes, is famously broad. She describes it with a metaphor that lands: “I’ve heard it described as like the Cheesecake Factory menu, it’s just pages and pages, and then each section has so many unique little offerings within that section.”
That breadth can feel overwhelming to students, but Jen sees it as one of the field’s greatest strengths. She’s proof that what you think you want when you start isn’t always where you land, and that’s a feature, not a bug. She had expected to go into school-age SLP. Then she worked with her first adult client.
“It just felt like such a natural fit for my sort of natural skills, but also what I was looking for in the profession,” she says. Working with motivated adults who are active participants in their own care, rather than, as she puts it with a laugh, “getting someone to do something they don’t want to do”, turned out to suit her approach perfectly.
The Intimacy of Voice — and Why It Matters
Jen’s draw to voice disorders is personal and perceptive in equal measure. A musical theater background made her a natural listener, she’s the person in the grocery store tuning into the conversation in the next aisle, the one who can identify the voiceover narrator in a commercial that most people wouldn’t clock. She recently found herself analyzing an interesting laugh during a live theater performance.
“I just really tune into voices,” she says. “How much identity and expression is tied up in voice, and how impactful having voice changes can be.” When she asks students whether they’ve ever lost their voice to a temporary or chronic condition, the discussion that follows is always the same: many feel like they couldn’t quite be themselves, not just in what they could express, but in how they could connect.
It’s that intimacy, the relationship between voice and selfhood, that also drew Jen toward gender affirming voice and communication training, work she describes as some of her most meaningful.
LSVT LOUD: A Framework That Clicked
When Jen first trained in LSVT LOUD, something fell into place. “It just really felt so, it was such a match for what I wanted to do in sessions,” she says. The underlying principles, intensity of practice, high frequency of treatment, high repetition, functional materials, weren’t just a protocol. They were a philosophy for motor change that she could apply broadly.
“I really was like, this is a framework you can use for a lot of speech motor change.” The evidence-based structure gave her reliable tools, while the real-time responsiveness required in each session gave her room for the creative, intuitive work she values most.
She reaches for an analogy: “I sometimes describe it to my students as like doing improvisational comedy or improvisational music. You try something, you’ve got a whole bag of tricks, but you have to tune into the response and then modify and try something again.” That artistic dimension, she believes, won’t be replaced by technology anytime soon.
LSVT also sharpened her attention to calibration: helping clients carry new vocal behaviors beyond the treatment room into natural, spontaneous speech. It’s not enough to achieve change in session. The work is in making it stick, and in helping clients recognize it themselves.
From Medical Settings to the University Clinic — and Why She Made the Move
Jen spent years in medical settings, acute care, skilled nursing, home health, and loved the pace and the stakes. (She was, she admits, very into ER in the 90s and is currently invested in The Pitt.) But those settings came with real constraints: clients who were discharged before meaningful progress could be made, insurance limitations that cut treatment short, and the recurring experience of meeting someone and then losing them as they moved through levels of care.
“I wanted to see some of those clients that were falling off that access,” she says. The university clinic offered something the medical setting couldn’t: more time with clients, the ability to serve people who might not otherwise receive services, and a new challenge, translating her person-centered clinical approach into how she mentors students.
Teaching Philosophy: Scaffolding, Not Sink-or-Swim
Jen is candid about the model she was trained in: “Let’s just put you out there and see if you can do it.” She’s deliberately moved away from that. Her approach leans on scaffolding, modeling, and creating what she calls a safe learning environment, stretching students’ skills, but in ways that build confidence and competence over time rather than eroding them.
She draws a direct line to motor learning theory and the zone of proximal development, concepts central to LSVT, now applied to training clinicians. “I think we’re kind of using that same theory for our students who are learning SLP skills,” she says.
She’s also attentive to the parallel between clinical and educational relationships. Just as she wouldn’t prescribe a direction to a client, she tries not to prescribe to students either, supporting them to find their own style as an SLP while giving them the evidence-based tools to practice confidently.
KEY TAKEAWAYS FROM THIS EPISODE
- The SLP scope of practice is vast — don’t expect to master it all at once. Trust your clinical reasoning and stay curious.
- Voice is deeply tied to identity. Effective clinicians — in voice disorders and gender affirming work alike — lead with humility, not prescription.
- LSVT LOUD offers a motor learning framework applicable across speech conditions, not just Parkinson’s disease.
- Great clinical mentorship mirrors great clinical care: scaffold, model, and empower — don’t just evaluate.
- Technology and telehealth are expanding access to underserved populations — including those who need gender affirming voice care in states with limited local expertise.
This post is based on Jen Walentas Lewon’s appearance on the Think BIG and LOUD Podcast from LSVT Global. Listen to the full podcast episode.
Jen specializes in voice disorders, neurogenic communication disorders, and gender affirming voice and communication training. She is an LSVT LOUD certified clinician and clinical associate professor at the University of Colorado Boulder. She is a longtime advocate for evidence-based, person-centered SLP practice.
To find an LSVT certified therapist in your area, visit lsvtglobal.com.
AI (Claude) assisted in the translation of this content from a podcast to a blog, edited by humans of course.