Show #41 Parenting with Confidence & Self-Compassion

Parents with children with special needs can find themselves overwhelmed as they do their best to care for their children. It’s easy for them to get caught up doing many “good” tasks throughout the day to ensure their child’s growth. As a parent coach, Sharoya Ham aims to give parents the permission to let go of some of those “I-need-to-do” tasks to focus on self-care and to recapture the joy of parenting. Her motto for parents is: Parenting is a Gift; Not a To-Do List!

Today Sharoya talks about the three C ‘s of parenting a child with profound needs: Connection, Community, & Coaching.

Bio

Sharoya is a veteran teacher and former stay-at-home mom of 17 years, who’s now the Founder of Embrace Behavior Change, a parent coaching practice aimed at helping parents transform from a state of stress and overwhelm to a place of confidence and peace in their parenting. She has a special place in her heart for special needs families.

Connect

Transcript

Transcribed by Kanako Suwa

[ Introduction music plays ]

Welcome to the SENIA Happy Hour podcast with your host, Lori Boll. We know you’re busy, so we bring you one hour’s worth of content in under 30 minutes, leaving you time for a true happy hour.

Lori: Hey, everyone. Today I had the great opportunity to speak with Kevin Schaefer, who’s the Director of Inclusive Practices for the El Dorado County School Office of Education in Sacramento, California. In this role, Kevin works to improve educational outcomes to students with disabilities through the provision of high quality leadership and support to the county and throughout the state. Today, Kevin and I spoke about exactly what his office does and barriers that he sees to students with disabilities being included in general education settings. More importantly we discuss how cultural and mindset change plays such an important role in creating those inclusive environments and what are some common threads that he sees between schools that are able to make these sweeping cultural changes. Kevin is a fun, exciting speaker, I am also pleased to tell you that he’ll be joining us for our virtual conference coming up in November so be sure to join us where he’ll be discussing how to create those cultural changes in schools and supporting policies as well. So now on to the show.

Well, hello Kevin and welcome to happy hour.

Kevin: Well, hello Lori. Thank you very much for having me 

Lori: Yeah, well, it’s early here. So for happy happy hour. I am sipping on a coffee How about you?

Kevin: Well, um, I have an energy drink to keep me going I’m an early riser. So I gotta keep going 

Lori: Nice nice. Yes. I’m an early riser as well and I Will not share how many cups of coffee I’ve had except that my husband came in this morning and cut me off. He said no more no more for you. That’s where we’re at…

Kevin: I’m in that between coffee and energy drinks and then Eventually moving into a glass of cabernet this evening. 

Lori: There you go Yeah, I think people in our field that tends to be the kind of trajectory of our day, right?Yeah. Coffee, energy drink, water, wine.

Kevin: There you go.

Lori: The works. So as I described in your intro, you are a very busy man.

Kevin: I am.

Lori: Yeah. So tell us about your personal journey that brought you to this point in your career. And then we’ll talk about SIP and all the interesting things that you’re doing.

Kevin: Well, interestingly, Lori, my journey to this role actually started when I was about five years old. In kindergarten through third grade, I was actually in a pullout program for students with expressive language and speech articulation. And I remember very vividly the, The path that would take me from my classroom at five years old, all the way through the hallways of my elementary school, up the stairs and then through the secondary classrooms, up to the really tiny speech room. And the interesting thing is that this is the aspect of my education that I remember most vividly, because I remember the color of the tiles on the wall and the wire in the glass of the offices I passed. And I even remember the names of the two students that were in the session for me.

And I reference this because I’m so connected to that feeling of being pulled out of a classroom and not knowing why, but knowing that there was something that had to be fixed or was wrong. And no one ever talked to me about it. And I think what we don’t talk about in our culture, in our society, tends to turn to shame. And you’re questioning, like, what is it? And even at five years old, that was 53 years ago this year. And I still so vividly have those memories of what it’s like to feel segregated and separate. And it wasn’t until probably 10 or 15 years ago that I looked at all of my report cards, including my speech report card, where all of those memories really started flooding back. But I think that’s the catalyst for me to be so passionate and involved with this work for so long.

Lori: Yeah. Oh, what a story. It just made me think of all the students that I’ve pulled out in my past to bring to my classroom. And I’m wondering if they remember the tile color and all of that. But you’re right. I think your point about shame, that’s so important. And one reason why in the past I’ve always really encouraged parents to share a diagnosis or a challenge with their kiddos. So they know why they’re receiving the supports they’re receiving.

Kevin: Well, and the flip side of that, too, is if we don’t talk about disability to our youth, they’ll never be self -advocates. They’ll never understand themselves and know what they need, and then to be able to ask for it. So this idea of let’s not talk about disability, it’s actually so harmful because it promotes that deficit -based thinking, and it’s really one of the main barriers for students being successful beyond the pre -school age 22 system.

Lori: So true. Yeah. Well, you talked about segregation and seclusion. So how do you define inclusion?

Kevin: Ooh, such a great, such a big question.

Lori: It is a big question.

Kevin: I think the distinction has to be made that inclusion isn’t about a place. I mean, it’s part of it, of course, but students could be in a place with their typically developing peers in general education and not experience meaningful inclusion. So when we talk about inclusion, it’s this integration of a student being in a place, but also experiencing a sense of belonging, relationship, and community. And the way the adults frame that environment is critical, but it’s that connection that students have, students with disabilities have with their peers that allow them to be educated and take risk and make mistakes in authentic environments. And when we segregate, the environment becomes artificial and then somehow we expect students then to integrate back into society when they graduate or leave the system, which is nonsensical to me.

Lori: Yeah. So true. 

Kevin: Yeah. 

Lori: Yeah. That’s a great definition. And I think the belonging piece is the key word in that, not just being in the classroom with their peers, but truly belonging. And I love what you said about that ability to take risks and to fail and everything in being part of a classroom situation.

Kevin: And there’s really interesting research on how by segregating students into artificial environments or segregated environments that we’re denying them the dignity of risk. And this whole idea of we experience risk in authentic environments. And when we over-accommodate for students with disabilities, we over-protect students with disabilities. We don’t allow them to fail and make mistakes. And in some cases, like gently hurt themselves to learn a lesson to, you know, recalibrate or self -correct. And that’s where all the learning happens.

Lori: Yeah, yeah. OK, so the denying dignity of risk. Is that what you said? That’s powerful right there. So thank you. Have a new term. So you are part of an organization called SIP. I’m going to say that again, SIP. So what is it? What exactly is that?

Kevin: It is an incredible project that’s been in existence for about 10 years now. We are funded by the California Department of Education to work with county offices, SELPAs, districts in California to increase inclusive opportunities for students with disabilities. So our indicators, the data that we collect to show our impact, is really around indicators for least restrictive environment, as well as statewide student achievement on assessments. And we have a three -tiered model. The first tier is universal supports, where we have events, we have resources, our website. We thought partner with anyone who contacts us. We’re on social media, so it’s no cost access to all of our resources and we record and we archive all of our webinars and we add all of the resources through a padlet that anyone can access anyone in the world, not just California. 

And then tier two is actually working with districts within their own context, which allows us to understand the priorities and the initiatives at the leadership level to actually make that change organization wide to change the mindset around disability, inclusive policies, and inclusive practices through shared leadership. So, we’re working with about 100 organizations very specifically on their individualized needs to create and implement an inclusion plan.And then we also work with the State Department on their monitoring process to work with districts that are considered intensive level of support in those particular areas of inclusion, least restrictive environment and achievement.

Lori: Wow, so you just do a few things.

Kevin: We just do a few things. And I have to mention that the team that makes up SIPP is incredible. We’re funded through, like I said, the California Department of Ed through El Dorado County Office of Education and Riverside County Office of Education. And my co -director in Riverside, Dr. Kristin Brooks, we work together as one team with our coordinators, our program specialists and our program assistants to make the magic work.

Lori: Yeah, well, it does sound like magic. And the fact that you’re able to provide those resources at no cost is…is incredible. So we’ll put the links to those in our show notes for our listeners. I’m sure they’ll love it. So thank you. Thank you for all the work you’re doing. Well, you work with a lot of organizations on inclusion. So what do you see as the primary barriers to students with disabilities being included in general ed settings?

Kevin: Woo. Lori, where to start with that question? I think number one, we work within a framework around inclusive culture, inclusive policy, and inclusive practice. I think they all impact in a very deep way to perpetuate a system of segregation. And I think at the base of that, the foundation is mindset around disability.

And we have made it okay to segregate students on the basis of that singular identity of disability. And in doing so, we negate all other identities that make up that whole child and youth. We see it in special education as disproportionate representation of other marginalized populations. So we would never explicitly segregate a student based on race, but qualify them for special education. And…we’re okay, off they go, right?

So I think this idea around how adults in the system perceive disability is critical through that fixed mindset model where students are broken, they can’t perform, and therefore not my responsibility. I think it’s important also to note that we confuse special education with disability. And if we don’t understand the needs and the experience and honor the disability experience, then we are doing a disservice when we design special education supports and we have to separate the two because we could be an expert in special education and still not understand the needs and the experiences of the disability community and and and be able to identify the ableism in the system which in my mind is that that that cultural belief that that students with disabilities don’t deserve the same, can’t do the same, and therefore not my responsibility let’s move them across and it’s that mindset that that allows the system to continue.

Lori: right yeah agree wholeheartedly working in systems in the past where I’d be working with a student as my role as learning support teacher or whatever I was called at the time. And it would be, oh, your student is doing this, Lori. And it’s like, no, it’s not my student. This is our student. Every student in this classroom is our student. And by pinpointing that student as mine, you have just segregated them. Yeah. Great points.

Kevin: It works on the flip side too, where we work with special educators who also just want to love and hug their students on their caseload until they graduate and hope for the best. This bifurcation of the system, where in general ed, sometimes there’s a fear for making a mistake or not knowing what to do, therefore that’s your student.

And on the special ed end, you’re creating that barrier by segregate them because you’re the only one that can really do the job that savior complex.

Lori: Yeah So and they don’t learn to advocate for themselves or learn how they’re How yeah, uh -huh how to learn In their way their best way possible, creating that independence for them So How do we change those mindsets? How do we change the culture?

Kevin: Well, we our approach is to work with leadership teams because if the leadership team doesn’t have a really clear understanding and vision of how they define inclusion and to communicate that out to the organization and include? accountability Factors then it the system is going to do what the system is going to do so working with the leadership teams to understand the difficulty and the, I would say requirement, for them and their organization to change the mindset around disability and hold everyone accountable for that change.

One of the frameworks that we use is called the Results Pyramid. We expect new results on an old culture and that cycle will continue if we don’t address the experiences that we provide that change the belief system around disability that then influence the actions.

The IEP process is a great example. The ableist language that’s used, and not on purpose, but from, lack of understanding, if we have an IEP team that has had experiences that weren’t successful around inclusion, they will continue to segregate and feel as though students with disabilities have to be educated with other students with like disabilities and hope for the best. Changing the experiences that change the belief of that IEP team so that we’re now making decisions in more of an inclusive mindset, that’s where the actions take place. The experiences influence the beliefs that then impact the actions that will improve or get us to the desired results.

And I think that framework is really important to understand because districts will focus on the activity. We’re gonna do co -teaching, we’re gonna do UDL, we’re gonna do PBIS. If you don’t get to the root of the belief system, then that initiative isn’t going to be as successful as we need it to be.

Lori: Yeah. 

Kevin: That was a lot.

Lori: Well said. That was a lot of time. No, it was fantastic. I’m a slow processor, so I’m trying to take it all in. And I think that’s something I’m gonna have to refer back to later. But one thing that I really honed in on there is that Results Pyramid.Yeah. So yeah, that’s something I need to check out. I haven’t seen it before.

Kevin: It’s been super powerful.

Lori: Great. Yeah, thanks. And that’s in your resources as well?

Kevin: It is. And then actually, we’re working with an organization called Culture Partners and working with our entire team so that we’re able to effectively work with our districts to look at their current plans and then go deeper into that culture component that they may not have addressed previously.

Lori: Awesome. Well, thanks. 

Kevin: You’re welcome. 

Lori: So thinking about threads that you see between schools, what are some common threads that for those schools that are able to make those sweeping cultural changes that you’ve seen?  

Kevin: Hmm.I think it’s a coming together of the culture piece that I talked about previously, but also looking super deep at your policies. And we find that many of our districts have collective bargaining agreements that are just rooted in ableism and continue the message that students with disabilities require more and they require different. And when we other this idea of special needs, then we are in our language, segregating students because we’re singling out students with disabilities needs as special. I think calibrating across all students that all students have needs across different contexts. I think it’s the districts that really focus on the disability and changing the mindsets around disabilities, and then connecting that to the policies that they’ve created and allow, and thirdly, the practices.

Lori:Yeah.

Kevin: I think the last part of that is that the districts that are making the most movement have collective responsibility for making changes around inclusion, and by collective responsibility at the leadership level, it’s not just curriculum and special ed and general ed, it’s also facilities, it’s also business and budget, it’s human resources, like how are we all working together to change that mindset around disability so that our teachers are coming into a culture that they’re very clear on and the accountability measures and the expectations for them in the classroom, where we have that powerful relationship that makes change between teachers and students.

Lori: Yeah, well, what you were saying, it made me think about the term special education in general, which I’m sure we could hold an entire podcast on and we’ve met with individuals and disability advocates such as Emily Ladau and Derek LaHorn and others who, oh, yeah, you’ve got her book, Demystifying Disability, right, and their ideas on special education. And so what is your group using as a term for special education? Are you still calling it special education in your districts and what are your thoughts on that?

Kevin: It’s still special education. What, and mostly because that’s what people are familiar with. 

Lori: Right. 

Kevin: But what we’re actually moving toward is this idea of rightful presence. The federal government just funded a new National TA Center called the National Center on Inclusion Toward Rightful Presence. So we’ve been infusing rightful presence into all of our professional learning opportunities and going deeper into rightful presence as a frame for ensuring environments are designed and representative of the students they are designed for, right? Often students with disabilities come into classrooms, they’re invited or they’re welcomed into classrooms but the classroom isn’t designed in such a way that they’re not allowed for equity and access.

Right, the research on rightful presence just kind of mind flipped us a little bit the whole team You’ve actually been working with that center over the last year really to bring them into California and they’ve kind of infiltrated in the best best of ways Many of our really upper level state work to start laying the foundation that inclusion isn’t just about students being present or Known or just invited but they’re involved and that they’re needed and that they influence diversity in the classrooms in such a positive way.

Lori: Yeah Wow, I could just listen to you all day because this is really great I’m just a little passionate about it and I love that I love that passion and and I’m now a super fan of the term rightful presence, so thank you for introducing that to me. My last question for you is, can you share a success story from a school or organization that you’ve worked with where you’ve really watched that shift or that they were able to make those sweeping changes, we were talking about?

Kevin: I’m going to share an example that it’s one of our large urban districts that we work with. And they have been in significant disproportionality, they have been not meeting special education indicators in a big way for a long time. Over the past couple months, since we’ve been able to actually work within their curriculum and instruction department, their curriculum instruction department, their focus is literacy, high quality first instruction, and climate and culture.

And we’ve been able to bring all of the external technical assistance providers, as well as ourselves, to then start talking about how their work is integrating and how it all comes up through curriculum and instruction. And from the top down, creating that vision and then how we are able to integrate disability with all of the work that they do, simply by asking the question, who at the table, at all of these different meetings that they’re having, who at the table understands the disability voice? Even when we’re talking about diversity, equity, and inclusion teams, disability wasn’t a part of it.

It’s in special ed. It’s the special ed department’s responsibility. So bringing that voice into these open forums where all of the planning takes place has completely changed the focus of the directors around literacy, high quality instruction, and culture and climate. And it’s just moved the district in a very short time has moved the district in a way that they haven’t been moved in 15, 20 years. So it’s not that they’re…

Lori: fantastic. 

Kevin: It’s not that they’re a success at this point. 

Lori: Right. Yeah. 

Kevin: In that process of creating the structures that are going to make a difference.

Lori: Yeah. Yeah. Again, it’s not about what is success and success is that progress, that forward progress. So that’s really exciting. 

Kevin: Yeah, we’re excited about it. It’s great. 

Lori: Yeah. Yeah, it is great work. And I’m just so pleased to have had the opportunity to speak with you today. So thanks for your time.

Kevin: Thank you so much for having me and my team and my project.

Lori: Absolutely. Of course.

[ Outro music plays ]

Thank you for joining us for today’s show. For more information including how to subscribe and shownotes, please head to our website. That’s SENIAinternational.org/podcasts. Until next time… cheers!

Show #42 Return to School: More Referrals This Year Than Ever Before

Today on the podcast, we welcome back Tracey Ellis from International Diagnostic Solutions (IDS) to discuss the impact this past pandemic year has had on families, parents, teachers, and students with learning needs. Tracey predicts there will be large uptake in student referrals for assessment and evaluation since so many of our kids spent the year behind a computer screen, making it more difficult for their teachers and specialists to be able to identify possible red flags.

Bio

Tracey Ellis is the CEO and founder of International Diagnostic Solutions, a company providing online special needs services and therapy to families and schools around the world through a telehealth model. Tracey started IDS over a decade ago as the first online special education team to support families abroad. 

As an occupational therapist by training and with a background in public health and special education, Tracey recognized early on that using online delivery of support and resources could mean that children could have access to experts, treatment, and assessment no matter where they lived. As a champion for inclusion, Tracey has worked hard in these 10 years to provide schools with the resources and training to make sure that all children participate and all children succeed.

Transcript

Transcribed by Kanako Suwa

[ Introduction music plays ]

Welcome to the SENIA Happy Hour, where you get 1 hour of learning in less than thirty minutes.

Lori: Hey everyone. Today on the podcast, we welcome back Tracy Ellis from International Diagnostic Solutions, or ISD,  to discuss the impact this past pandemic year has had on families, parents, teachers, and students with learning needs. Tracy predicts there will be a large uptake in student referrals for assessment and evaluation since so many of our kids spent the year behind a computer screen, making it much more difficult for their teachers and specialists to be able to identify possible red flags.  I learned so much from today ‘s show and I hope you will too. So now… onto the show.

 Hi Tracy and welcome back to the podcast!

Tracy:  Hello, how are you, Lori?

Lori: I ‘m doing great. I will tell everyone that once again the stars have aligned and there is more construction going on outside my house today during the podcast… I swear it doesn’t happen unless I’m doing a podcast! So if people hear beeping and crunching and all that good stuff, you know that’s what’s happening. So, we met about a year ago on this podcast to discuss your company, International Diagnostic Solutions and your telehealth model of support. Today, we thought we would talk more about the impact this past pandemic year has had on families, parents, teachers, and most of all, our students with learning needs.  Does that sound good to you?

Tracy:  That sounds fantastic! 

Lori: Alright so I’ve got tons of questions for you”¦

Tracy: Fire on when you ‘re ready!

Lori: Okay, so we ‘ve heard that a lot of parents felt that their child was really struggling this year but due to the online learning environment. they didn’t get flagged for an assessment. So how would you characterize this past year in terms of kids getting identified as needing support?

Tracy: Well that’s a really really good question and you know I guess I could start by saying in a, in what would we would consider a typical year, we see the same kind of trends where the beginning of the year, kids come in and around October or November, we start to see that we’re getting referrals. Kids are getting flagged for struggling in the classroom and struggling with the new school year. This year, you know, teachers, um, struggle to really be able to observe like they normally would in their classroom. There’s so much that goes on when, when you’re in a classroom transitioning from subject to subject, recess, back into the classroom to lunch and there’s so many opportunities that teachers have to really observe kids in person. 

And you know, I think everyone did a really great job adapting to the online format and really finding ways to serve kids differently and make sure that they’re getting the academic and educational support they need. But let’s face it, if you have, what I called the Brady Bunch window, where you’re a teacher and now instead of just, you know, you can see and observe a little bit better with two people on a screen. But when you have 20 kids and you’re seeing the small little windows and you might be able to see that they’re there but as an occupational therapist by training, I kind of look at it like well, I can’t really see a lot of what’s going on below the shoulders, for example. I can’t really observe how they are approaching a task, how or where their paper is placed, what’s going on with their hands and feet, what’s their posture like,  and those are the kinds of things, even seeing how kids are going through the school bumping into each other, whether those transitions kind of bring out different behaviors that might not be as functional for a regular classroom still in attendance. 

So, I feel as though it was hard for teachers to identify kids who might have normally been flagged as needing an evaluation or needing a screening. So what we’ve started seeing, as normally we would get all these referrals for evaluations in October or November, we started to see them trickling in at the end of the year because it took longer to identify some of those issues. But what we know is that there are so many kids who fell under the radar. For example, if you ‘re, if you see a child that’s looking back at you in the screen and you think “oh, they ‘re doing a great job attending to me, they don’t seem distracted at all,” but they could really be looking at the lights on your ceiling, or the picture behind your back, or they might be actually trying to see.. Oh, look at Johnny. I wonder if Johnny ‘s in his living room or family room. You know? There are so many things kids might be looking at and we see them looking at the screen but it doesn’t mean that they’re really absorbing and listening to what’s, the educational materials being delivered.

So, I think we’re going to see a huge wave of kids in, in the fall who are behind that we couldn’t necessarily tell online. And so, we’re going to have this issue where there are going to be a lot of kids with needs, on top of the regular kids, that we would see and I think it’s, it’s something that we really like… I’m trying to raise the alarms to school to say, you know a lot of kids were missed and families might not have known also in the beginning because they just see, “okay my child’s online and they seem to be attending school” but by the end of the year, I think a lot of parents were able to identify the fact that their kids didn’t make the progress they needed to make. 

Lori: Sure, I mean, that makes so much sense. Going along with that, a lot of families moved and teachers moved and signing on from places that were not even near their school, from different countries in the middle of the night… I’ve had that experience myself, teaching at like 2 in the morning and in general, there just seem to be fewer resources available since it wasn’t as easy to access evaluation and treatment services that might have been in place during in-person schooling or with regular school stuff. Have you heard from many schools that staffing and availability of their local resources impacted their ability to get kids evaluated and supported?

Tracy: Oh, absolutely. So first of all, if you think about what school would have looked like, even not that all schools had a lot of resources in house, there were schools that might have had speech therapy and OT, and maybe it was someone local who came in to support one day a week. We’ve even heard of people in the past that had models that someone would fly-in even like once a month”¦ But with the pandemic, so many people shifted. Teachers, like you said, were teaching from different locations. Maybe a local psychologist that schools could have referred to in the past wasn’t seeing people in person. Or maybe the kid that was attending that school was no longer really local but they were signing in from someplace else. 

So it’s almost like you took what was, what was this like… everything in place in a box and you just shook it up and so people connected with those resources, some of the things might have fallen out. So if you might have had a speech therapist in the program, and let’s say, because of the employer of a spouse, maybe they ended up leaving and so now all the sudden, that school that used to be able to say we have the speech therapist, they didn’t have them there anymore. And that person wasn’t able to sign on and do it online or wasn’t comfortable with it. We had a lot of schools too, in the previous year, they might have had staffing allocated for  inclusion and learning support staff but because they didn’t know what this past school year would look like and how many kids were actually returning, it was harder for them to say, “actually, yeah, we do need those extra learning support staff”, because schools, really let’s face it, when it comes to anything in our world of special education and learning support, schools typically over… they don’t over staff. They usually staff with what they think their needs are going to be. 

And that presented a huge problem because if schools didn’t know which kids were coming back or if they didn’t think they would need to support them in the same way because let’s say, they, you know, the kids that needed maybe somebody really in person and a low student staff ratio now all of a sudden those… they didn’t need those people or didn ‘t have them available. So you have this situation where even if a teacher was able to stay, “wow, that student really needs to be evaluated”, they were faced with the problem of “oh actually they’re signing in from Canada, we don’t know who’s local there” or you know, there.. There are even issues of of licensing, country to country, so people weren’t necessarily as familiar with the online resources available for things like testing. But it was really tough because schools were trying to support but a lot of those local resources, there were lots of psychologists for example, who, even though they were still there, they didn’t have access to the tools for testing. But they weren’t even willing to do some of that in person testing even if the people were still there and it was because of covid restrictions so it ‘s understandable… but it just meant that people wouldn’t have the support they needed so teachers, I think, were also a little bit more hesitant to refer because they didn’t know how to without having the normal resources that they’ve gotten used to. Again, it’s not like this is all been even over time, with all of our support, so psych, OT… it’s not like everyone’s known where all the resources were to begin with. 

Lori: That ‘s a great point”¦ So what do you think this means for students who might have just gone through an entire school year without the support they needed or without being evaluated for that support? 

Tracy: So, for the students, I think we ‘re gonna see that there’s a huge need; it ‘s kind of two-pronged because we’ve got… what are the schools going to see and surprise, surprise, they’re going to see almost double the caseload because they didn’t or weren’t able to address a lot of these issues but kids are really going to be in a bad situation. So if in a normal year, let’s say, in a normal classroom in September or October, a teacher identifies five kids or even three, right? What we’re looking at is… 3 kids were supposed to have been identified in September of last year too and then over the course of the year, there’s another three or four more so if you’re looking at.. you had seven kids that missed out last year and now you have over the course of this year, 7 more kids. I put it in math, because it isn’t…  when people understand the numbers, so if we had a classroom where we had again five, five kids starting out the year for therapy, normally by the end of the year we have about 10 so schools are going to have to understand that those numbers are doubled. So if they were struggling to cover and get assessments for plans in place, meetings with families, all of those things that really are time-consuming”¦

Lori:  Oh yeah, it takes so much time… I was just thinking how just one student, it might take, you know, months to get the whole process under way, and”¦ 

Tracy: Exactly! So for example, we do our evaluations and we get them turned around in two weeks, and that means as a teacher and a family can have the information they need to get started right away but if you’re using some other local providers who say “well, you’ll be able.. we can schedule you in about five weeks, and then we usually takes 4 weeks to get the test done”, so now that students not even going to have a written evaluation for 9 weeks. And that’s if.. that’s if if all goes well with scheduling. So, someone starting in September or October, you’re going to be looking at”¦ now we are in December by the time we can get a meeting and everyone together but then there’s the break and the coming back and things are a little bit crazy in January”¦ So by the time that students actually getting support during, maybe February, March. And what that means is they almost missed another whole school year because by the time they start to get some momentum, it’s the end of the school year. They’ve got spring break and then end of the school year and that teacher also is likely going to have double what she had. And then so I’m trying to really not only make sure their parents become a stronger part of the team here, because if you know that your child… if you have questions about whether your child made enough progress, then that’s probably meaning they didn’t, and at the very least you should get them evaluated. 

So my whole push right now is trying to get people to do it early, you know. I know that… I know that summer is, is when everyone wants to be on vacation but I think we have to look at this year as… it was an anomaly and it’s not going to be a typical summer if families and parents want their kids to be prepped and ready to, to make up for lost time this coming year. But also for teachers, if you don’t identify this now, you’re”¦ you’re kind of choosing to go in blind in September and September is already tough enough for the new school year and with everyone coming back, it’s going to be a little bit, you know, more chaotic too this year in person coming back, systems have to get going again”¦. I think, I think if teachers and administrators can look at this year a little bit differently and say let’s, let ‘s look at at least identifying kids… but to parents, I would say, do everything in your power to get your child evaluated over the summer so that when you walk into school this year you can say, you know what I don’t want my child waiting till February, we went out and we got what we needed so that we could be, you know, ready to go and and you know just ready to make some progress.

Lori: Yeah. I think that ‘s a really smart action for families to take. Again just this year, right, like it’s… it’s just such an anomaly and if they need to advocate for their kiddo, then they need to. But I like what you said about schools doing it as well. So you’re recommending that schools take the time that they need this summer to recognize who those kids might be or at least plan, maybe they don’t know who those kids are just because of the different restrictions that happened with Zoom and all the different platforms, but to be ready, maybe.

Tracy: Yeah I think I think…it is the… on the part of parents and teachers, you know, when you have a hunch. A lot of times, we don’t get that many kids who have been sent to us for testing who didn’t need it. You know, with some of our US based working schools, it’s a natural process like they’re screening and assessing and they end up not needing it, but with the international program, if a child is coming up on the radar, that means that they really needed some kind of assessment and then potentially some intervention. So if you even had a hunch, I really think that for the parents, don’t just say “well I’m not sure, I’m not a teacher so I don’t know”¦”, I would just say, “you know what, go get it done so that you know”. 

Now, for schools, the difference is teachers probably know which kids, they have a hunch, and teachers are smart like that. Again, I think some people might not have felt that they could refer in the same way or they didn’t want them, you know, where is a big flag because it takes a while, I’m not really sure, you know, Zoom is so awkward, I don’t know if they needed something.. But I would say now’s the time to make a list and prioritize. It’s just like triaging so if you know, if it if you can say, okay look, these are the kids that I…my, my, my little feelers were going up for, so there’s these five kids. But I’m… I would say, I would rank order them and if you have five, then contact those parents, just saying, you know what, we really want your child to be ready to go next year and while they made it through the year and things are okay, we just have”¦ we have some concerns so we think it would be great if you could get, try to get evaluated and see if you could get some information and a plan so we can get a good plan in place for the start of the school year. Most times, you know which parents are going to do that. You know which ones are actually going to follow through over the summer or which ones might say, you know what, I think would be better if we waited until the school year. 

And that’s fine too, because you say, at least you have your list and now you know who is going to be first, second, third when we start that testing in, in the fall. And I think it’s important too, because there is going to be volume and schools might not have had the resources, so either they need to start making partnerships with their local providers that they have used before and say, okay we know we’re going to have a lot more, are you prepared to take them in? And you know, x number of evaluations or referrals. What we do, especially what we ‘re doing with our schools this year, is we’re saying, hey let’s see if we can get kids on an evaluation schedule over the summer but if not, we’re also working with schools to say, okay, we have a speech therapist who is going to be dedicated to testing at your program. We have a psychologist who’s going to be dedicated to testing at your program, for the month of September or the month of October, so let’s get on a kind of.. Um.. um”¦ put into play a process where you know maybe three kids are getting evaluated whether it’s each week or you’re doing 2 a day but let’s get them done quickly. 

Because the longer a teacher has to have kids in her classroom that don’t have a plan in place, she’s or he is not going to be struggling to figure out how to meet their needs. So, on top of having double the number of kids that might be struggling, they’re sitting there pulling their hair out because they don’t have a map for how to help that child right away. And so I think, if you want to help your.. your teachers to feel supported, you give them the resources they need and instead of making them all spend the entire year scheduling meetings with parents and you know having to”¦ drip drip drip over the course of the year, and let’s face it, teachers want to see their kids make progress. And if they don’t have the ability to do that because they’re not given the resources, which would be good evaluations and a good plan, if they don’t have a plan that the parents are also in tune with and in agreement with and supported, then the poor teachers are going to be struggling all year. 

So instead, make a plan, find a partnership, and find someone who’s going to save you this amount of time and say let’s get this amount or number of evaluations done. And one of the reasons that’s really important too, is because just like teachers when you want to get, like the best teachers for your program, the likelihood of you finding the best teachers once you get into September or October is not that likely. Because they’re already in”¦ in programs. So it’s no different in our therapy world, our speech therapists and OTs and the social workers, they all want to know what their caseload is or what their workload is for the year coming into September. So if you decide to wait and say I will figure it out once we see how many kids are in here, you know, you’re not going to be able to find someone who can do 5 to 10 evaluations so quickly. You ‘re gonna get someone who says, “well, with my schedule, I can only do like one a month, maybe 2″.  That ‘s gonna put you behind. 

Lori: Sure is. Huh”¦ *laughs* it ‘s, given, it ‘s given… given certainly a lot of food for thought and  something I’m sure most of us just haven’t really thought so much about just because most teachers as you say they ‘re in the thick of things so thank you for that I think, is what I ‘m trying to say.

Tracy: I think, um, you know sometimes we don’t want to think well, first, about summer time but”¦ we don’t want to think about the fact that there’s going to be that… there ‘s going to be some of those challenges moving forward. But I think from a leadership perspective, if you really want to have a successful return to in-person learning, the best thing that you can do is.. is predict, right, you don’t you don’t just go into the school saying,  “well we’ll see how many kids”.  We have a plan, and we have a lot of kids who are going to be in need, and so setting up that plan in advance is the best way to give your teachers the resources they need. 

It’s the best way to let parents know, hey, you know we think that there could be some issues. And you make a partnership with the parents, so for parents that you know will actually go out and get the evaluations, partner with them now and say this is what we need and so they can also start helping to look for resources. So again, whether they know someone local, or let’s say they come to us and say we need these done over the summer… Triage is important. Having a plan in place too. Some schools, what we’ll do is when they know that kids are going to get pulled on certain days, like Mondays and Wednesdays are speech evaluation days.  And making sure too, that teachers and other staff know that hey, you know there’s going to be people looking for information from you on a student whether it’s questionnaires and things like that so that evaluations can be well-informed.

Teachers are also thinking, that’s a lot of extra work for teachers as well so plan ahead, so they… they don’t come to you in in mid-October saying we have so much work on our”¦ we can’t even”¦ we can’t even focus during the school day because we’re doing meetings, doing questionnaires, with all of these other things so I think even”¦ even finding ways to encourage teachers, whether it’s perks or bonuses to give them for the extra time they take in this whole process but definitely developing partnerships in having a scheduled plan in place is the best way to get this through this. 

And also making sure too, when you do find providers, some will do a month or longer to get to writing a report. And I think it’s important that with the providers the schools use, you have an agreement, this is what I need reports to look like.  Maybe they can do them all in the same format so teachers also aren’t getting 15 different types of evaluations written 15 different ways. If a teacher knows the speech therapist doing the evaluations because they’ve just worked with 5 of their kids, it’s a great way to have communication and banter back and forth to really understand and share information. And I think developing that, that’s a partnership as well and it’s a real way the teachers feel like”¦ oh well it’s kind of like we have a speech therapist right here, and they work with us all the time and then reports look like this same for psychology and  it just works better because you did a really good kind of working machine. 

Lori: Yes. Brilliant. Thank you. Well, finally, Tracy, changing gears completely”¦  your organization has decided to sponsor SENIA yet again for the 2021-2022 school year and you guys are gold level sponsors. First of all, thanks so much for that because it’s due to sponsorship such as yours that we’re able to offer our participants a significantly reduced price for our amazing conferences that we have. Second, can you tell us why you chose to sponsor us again? 

Tracy: Well, first of all, we love SENIA and as a”¦ as an organization that really provides the support of whether it ‘s valuation, it ‘s treatment, even just consultation and kind of coaching to teachers and especially for programs that don’t have a lot of the resources, we just found SENIA feels like a home to us in… in terms of networking and, and connecting with people. We’ve gone to a lot of conferences over the years and we just felt like there’s just like mindedness with SENIA, and we are able when, when we’re sharing information, we feel like it’s really being shared and used. We feel like people come to us looking for answers as well and so would it ‘s like SENIA just kind of spread this net around the”¦ around the world, global domination, and uplifts everyone within the inclusion environment or to those trying to bring that kind of mindset to their school. And so we just feel like, wow, the the mission of SENIA and the people involved, I just feel like it”¦ it’s driving this process so much faster. 

So we started doing telehealth, an online support in 2009 so we’ve been doing this for 12 years now  and we feel like, since, since we first met SENIA and when we first went to the first conference in Hong Kong 2, 3 years ago now.. Now I can’t remember”¦ the growth, the growth of the organization has been so dramatic that we’re seeing programs popping up everywhere where they’re actually bringing resources in education and inclusion back in. So I feel like what we were trying to do as a small organization providing therapies and evaluations to get people that mindset to change and understand that inclusion isn’t hard, it’s just shifting of how you do something, I feel like SENIA has”¦ it’s like you came in and just like shine the light on it. The global creep has been gigantic, and so we feel like it’s almost a privilege for us to be connected with you because the work you guys have done is fantastic. 

Lori: Thanks and I love that. The global creep. That’ll be our nickname from now on… but for our listeners who were tuning in for the first time or they don’t know so much about in your ideas,  can you just give a”¦ your 30-second elevator pitch about what you do and how, how you can provide evaluations for our students overseas even though you’re located in the States? 

Tracy:  Sure. We’ve been doing it for 12 years so before everyone went online in this way, and so we, we feel like it’s it’s just second nature for us to be able to see and identify and work with kids through the online medium. We provide evaluations, treatment, as I said, coaching… A lot of families that had to, to bring education back home, needed some support as well, we’ve been there for all aspects. And if we, we also do it in a way that’s relevant for families in school, so we have bilingual provider so whether it’s you know Korean, Italian, Spanish, no matter what the language is we wanna make sure that kids are evaluated in a way that’s meaningful to them, that is meaningful to the parents, culturally and language appropriate. 

And what we’ve done is also worked with companies to, to get their evaluation tools validated and push them to get validation for tools so that people can be evaluated online around the world. So what we try to do is make sure that for schools that don’t have resources they can partner with us to be a resource in their school like their Special Education team even though we’re at a distance. And when schools programs grow and they have the capacity to bring someone in full-time, then we we can just step back but we, we really, I think help to be a great bridge for programs needing resources but they don’t have them immediately available. 

And for parents, one of the things that’s really great is when they have a therapist in one location and then they move 2 years later, we go with them so we make sure that their plans go with them. They have the same provider, especially when you’re talking about counseling, it’s a great thing to have a consistent provider. We help schools and we help with the transition from school to school so we do all the evaluations online with psychology, occupational therapy, speech therapy, you name it. We ‘re able to do and we have the provider’s on everyone’s time zones and like I said, different languages, cultural backgrounds”¦ we kind of pull it all together because our job is to make sure that we’re supporting families no matter where they are in the world and no matter what the programmer local resources are. 

Lori: Great! And at our conference, we will have, you will have your own booth,  virtual booth, and you can set up a visit with our participants. And so I’m encouraging all our participants to go and meet Tracy and Katie at the, at the conference and greet them in person! 

Tracy: And we ‘d also love to hear from people in advance what they want to hear. That to me, is the most important sometimes when we project what we think people want to hear but in reality, it ‘s something different. So I encourage parents and teachers to go to our website, which is idsalliance.com and go to contact us and feel free to share thoughts, questions, um, areas that you ‘d like to hear more about, because we ‘re always ready to go and dig in. We have a lot of people on our team that do research at universities and colleges so we ‘re happy to make sure that we ‘re making the, the, experience meaningful at the conference. 

Lori: That ‘s perfect. Well, thank you Tracy for your time today, and happy summer! 

Tracy: Same to you, same to you! Thanks again. 

Thanks for stopping in to SENIA Happy Hour, don ‘t forget to head over to SENIAinternational.org/podcasts and check out our show notes from the discussion today. We at SENIA hope you ‘re enjoying these podcasts. There ‘s so much to explore and we ‘re at the very beginning. So feel free to drop us a note and let us know what you ‘d like to hear more about during your next SENIA Happy Hour. Until then”¦ Cheers!

Show #43 A Chat with a Math Education Change Agent

Today I speak with Steve Leinwand who has a long and impressive career as a math teacher, leader, researcher, and author in the field. Steve calls himself a Math Education Change Agent and as you ‘ll see does not hold back from sharing his views on how we can best support our students and teach math in a way that is meaningful to them. Steve shares best practice strategies and explains why students learn much more from our questions than our lectures. We also discuss UDL, the effects of the pandemic, and give you a sneak peek into Steve ‘s presentation for SENIA 2021. 

Bio

Steve Leinwand is a principal research analyst at AIR, the American Institutes for Research in Arlington, VA, and has over 40 years of leadership positions in mathematics education. He currently serves as mathematics expert on a wide range of AIR projects that focus on high quality mathematics instruction, turning around underperforming schools, improving adult education, evaluating programs, developing assessments and providing technical assistance for school improvement. Leinwand co-authored “What the United States Can Learn from Singapore’s World-Class Mathematics System (and what Singapore can learn from the United States.” Leinwand has spoken and written about effectively implementing the Common Core State Standards in Mathematics, differentiated learning and “What Every School Leader Needs to Know about Making Math Work for All Students. In addition, Leinwand has provided school and district-level support and technical assistance for the General Electric Foundation ‘s Ensuring Futures in Education project and the Microsoft Math Partnership, As part of AIR ‘s assessment program, Leinwand has overseen the development and quality review of multiple-choice and constructed response items for AIR ‘s contracts with Ohio, Hawaii, Delaware, Minnesota, South Carolina and the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium. 

Before joining AIR in 2002, Leinwand spent 22 years as Mathematics Consultant with the Connecticut Department of Education where he was responsible for the development and oversight of a broad statewide program of activities in K-12 mathematics education including the provision of technical assistance and professional development, the evaluation of Title 1 and K-12 mathematics programs, the assessment of student achievement and teacher competency, and the coordination of statewide mathematics programs and activities. Steve has also served on the NCTM Board of Directors and has been President of the National Council of Supervisors of Mathematics. 

Steve is an author of several mathematics textbooks and has written numerous articles. His books, Sensible Mathematics: A Guide for School Leaders in the Era of Common Core State Standards and Accessible Mathematics: 10 Instructional Shifts That Raise Student Achievement were published by Heinemann in 2012 and 2009 respectively. His forthcoming Invigorating High School Mathematics: Practical Guidance for Long-Overdue Transformation, co-written with Eric Milou is due out in Fall, 2021. In addition, Leinwand was the awardee of the 2015 National Council of Supervisors of Mathematics Glenn Gilbert/Ross Taylor National Leadership Award for outstanding contributions to mathematics education and has been awarded the 2021 NCTM Lifetime Achievement Award.

Connect

Transcript

Transcribed by Kanako Suwa

[ Introduction music plays ]

Welcome to the SENIA Happy Hour, where you get 1 hour of learning in less than thirty minutes.

Lori: Today, I speak with SteveLeinwand who has a long and impressive career as a math teacher,  leader, researcher, and author in the field. Steve calls himself a math education change agent and does not hold back from sharing his views on how we can best support our students and teach math in a meaningful way for them. Steve shares best practices and explains why students learn much more from our questions than our lectures. We also discuss UDL, the effects of this pandemic, and give you a sneak peek into Steve’s presentation for SENIA 2021. And now… onto the show. 

Hi Steve and Welcome to our SENIA. happy hour.

Steve: It ‘s a pleasure to be here Lori. 

Lori: well I’m delighted you’re joining me today as we are going to discuss, honestly my least favorite subject, which is math and I’m sure you hear a lot of people, whether we’re educators or students, say this very thing”¦ Your title is “math education change agent”.  Is this why you call yourself a change agent?  

Steve: Yes.  Change and being a change agent, empowering teachers, supporting teachers, and validating outliers is pretty much what I’ve done for almost 50 years. From very early on in my career, which actually I started teaching at Middletown High School in the “school in the school” program 50 years ago this September and it ‘s mind-boggling to me that I ‘ve done that. Early on, I realized that the status quo was unacceptable. The status quo wasn ‘t working. There were too many kids that were falling through the cracks. There were too many kids being sorted out by the traditional programme at all levels. Then I started teaching AP Calculus and you had the best and the brightest, in fact, in my second and third year of teaching, I had consecutively Christopher Reeves, Superman ‘s stepbrother and stepsister in my AP Calculus class and I mean you couldn’t ask for kids who were just more amazing and more wonderful,  they would tell you first and foremost how they ‘d been hurt by the programme. And you know,  some people think that it’s only the bottom third that did get hurt or screwed. I think that’s not the case, bottom line is that things like calculators and things like bringing AP Statistics to the world, like far more estimation beginning early on, I’m using context, recognizing that we had play. The kids played in music and art and learned in math, but it was all just worksheets and all. 

So more recently, it has all been about shifts in classroom practices so yeah, I mean, I’ve been an advocate for change or supporter of change and you know what, when you say “I didn ‘t like math” to me, you know,  I have a standard answer or standard response to that every time I hear it”¦ and you ‘re right, we hear it all the time, and um, that is, “you were screwed by inadequate, ineffective teaching”. And as soon as I say that, I mean it really reminds you that everyone can learn it if we teach better but but then people say we ‘re blaming teachers, and far from it. The problem is the teachers have been screwed. Teachers have not been getting the guidance, they’ve not been given the support, how few teachers really have effective coaches to help them and guide them. When your experiences are mediocre in math, how do you do anything different than what you’ve always done or what you’ve learned to do? And so that ‘s why I think we need change and I think we all spend too much time blaming the kids and blaming the teachers when in fact, there is a serious systemic issue. 

And you know when we start talking about special-ed, you know there is nothing worse than the kids who most need something different getting the same old same old mindless worksheets and rules, and you know, that ‘s where we can come back to. So yeah, I ‘m proud to announce to the world that I am a mathematics change agent and if you ‘re not interested in changes, then fine, I mean, I have enough places to go and enough to read, and enoug still to write, I don ‘t need to go there. And it ‘s easy to be able to say that, when you ‘re 72 and say it with a smile, and mean it. And I ‘m fine if I don ‘t get on a plane ever again. 

Lori: Perfect, I love it and I’m sitting here… Or standing here giving you a standing ovation right now.  Love, love, love that attitude. So you’ve written multiple books; one of them’s entitled “Accessible Mathematics: 10 Instructional Shifts that Raise Student Achievement”. In this book, you focus on the crucial issues of classroom instruction, according to the book synopsis You scoured the research and visited highly effective classrooms for practical examples of small adjustments to teaching that lead to deeper student learning in math. So can you give us some examples of these small adjustments?

Steve:  Sure, I mean I love the fact that you know, you remind me of what ‘s on the book cover and it’s really important that people do read it and you better be able to answer those kinds of questions. It ‘s, it’s funny that this morning, we just Tweeted out the fact that Eric Milo and my new book called “Invigorating High School Math” is available for pre-sale.  And, in fact we spent a lot of time on the language on the back cover and you’ve only reminded me now that, you know, I better take that seriously because someone’s going to read it back to me and I better not, you know, not be able to respond. 

So this is an incredibly important question; everyone asks “where do you start?” and, I mean,  you got this whole range of shifts and adjustments, and we will talk about some of them if you want, but the most important thing is recognizing that the given is they, the students, learn far more from our questions than they do from our lectures. What stimulates the development of synaptic connections, to use a fancy term, what makes people smarter, what helps people begin to understand, is responding to stimuli. And the best stimuli are the questions, and so when the principal says to me, “well, where do I start? How can I help my teachers?”,  I go.. “from the side of the room, because I refuse to let you sit in the back of the room, whenever you were in the class, you should have a side of the room where you are participant and we can see the teachers and not the back of their heads, and you jump up or sit right there and your job is when the kid calls out 72,  that’s the right answer or even if it ‘s not the right answer, you say “pause”.  you know that the teachers going to basically say, “okay good, yes, let’s move on” but when single most important thing that every instructor can do is ask, “huh. 72″¦ why is that? Can you explain? How do you know? Can you convince us another way? to solve it differently? Can you draw a picture and show us?” And of all the shifts, the one that I think makes the most difference in kids lives, the one that I see least of in classes with students with special needs,  because it reduces itself to just rules and regurgitation and the same old same old, and then the kid feels inadequate because it ‘s not done differently, is we don ‘t pause and go “so why do you think that is?” And sure, we have non-verbal kids, who have to focus on a picture, “can you draw a picture?” or I ‘ll draw a picture of that and can you label the picture? Those kinds of interactions around, “how did you picture it? and why? and how do you know?” and all that means is less is more.

No class should kids be doing 10 examples,  never should kids be given a worksheet with 10 stupid mindless regurgitated problems, no kids should ever be given me more than 4 task at a time,  the class is 4 tasks where you spend time, and the expectation is we ‘re gonna talk about how and why. And the first one we do as a class or the first one we do as a group of 2  and then we have kids start up individually and then share with their partner, and then the partner share with another partner, and in a class that has four different tasks where the last one is really the formative assessment,  and the last one is the only one that ‘s done individually, and each case we ‘re going to talk about, “can you explain it” and “why”  and “who wants to explain it” and those are the characteristics of classrooms that I see all over the United States. All over the world. Those are classrooms with teachers who have figured out that less is more and that my questions are absolutely indispensable. And so of all the things in “Accessible Math”, that’s the one that you know that I put high up. 

The other two strategies and you know, we’ll talk about this probably a little later if you want to talk about Universal Design, but the whole idea of differentiation is so bandied around in our business. It is amazing how few teachers really understand what we mean by differentiation other than kids just gets different work. And how many administrators who write on a teacher’s evaluation “oh you really do need to differentiate a little more”, and I tell teachers because I’m supposed to, I tell teachers, “well if you want to ask that evaluator to come to your classroom and help you,  check in my classroom and show me what you mean by differentiation” and the sad reality is that far too few people can do that.  Math coaches, effective math coaches, can do it and what they know is that differentiation is as simple as “who did it differently, how did you do it differently, and how did you picture it, and who pictured it differently” and in other words, the idea of multiple representations and the idea of alternative approaches are critical if we’re going to have mathematics work for more than the same old  â…“, or at most 40% of the high SES community, and that ‘s not acceptable in this society. We just spent hours talking about the pandemic and what it taught us about mathematical ignorance in this society, we pay a real price for that kind of ignorance. 

Lori: I have so many questions”¦ well, you did mention Universal Design and I was going to ask does that come into play here, when we discuss how we can best support our learners who find math challenging or have that learning disability? So besides differentiation, what are some strategies teachers can use to help with our kids?

Steve: Pictures and context”¦ I spent a large part of my life writing thousands and thousands of test items and we got a contract from a state that said “we expect every one of our items submitted, we ‘re talking about 4,000 items, to live up to the UDL standards” and so we spent a lot of time looking at what all that meant and came away after weeks of reading into it, that it just means effective, accessible items for all kids. And so when I look at a test, when I looked at, for example the Oregon online test that is given to the kids, when I look at the NWEA MAP test,  I say, let me just scan through or run through these items online and see how many have a graphic, how many have a picture. Not a gratuitous graphic, but a graphic that helps ground it, give kids access.  And so, that notion of how did you picture it, of stopping and saying that for you it’s a number line, I say to the class three-quarters of the brownies have icing on them,  what do you notice? what do you think? Can you draw a picture? What do you need to know? There ‘s three-quarters. What is three-quarters? And an student will say, “how many are there?” and I’ll go “well I’m not sure” and some classes will say there are a dozen and deal with a dozen is 12 and all that stuff”¦ But can you picture three – quarters?  I mean, UDL and effective teaching and this idea of multiple representations, this idea of giving kids access to math is a class where the kids on their whiteboards or on the board or in the piece of software that we can post all of their work so that everyone can see it, is a class where one kid says 3 line 4, wonderful, and another has a number line a big line to the left of 1 and another to the the right of ½. And another kid draws, um, a rectangle. Or a square and divided into four pieces and colours in 3 of them. Another kid has four circles and colors in three of them. Another kid is weird and has 8 circles and colors in 6 of them. And those are really the right answers because you know that I want to cultivate the wrong answers and I want to ask them, which one is not 3/4 and how do you know and why? But look what I’ve just done, I have accommodated the fact that I’ve got, you know, five or six different ways of how brains are processing and if all math, and particularly math for kids who struggle, and kids whose brains are not wired the way in which the textbook authors ‘ brains are wired, um, if we don ‘t provide an opportunity that say “this is so great, I don ‘t understand why but you ‘re a number – line person, or you ‘re a whole lot of number line people but I can tell you you can get high with the rest of your life if you think about number lines. And the other kids are sitting there going, well I’m cool with this 3/4 because it’s three-quarters of the square, I need that kids to see that if you would separate those four squares, it becomes 3 out of 4 parts, not the three fourths of the whole and that idea is what keeps people back if they only see it as a part of a whole. They ‘re screwed when they come to the idea of 3/4 of a set, and so when you think about math being something that you just didn ‘t like, I sit there and say that was a mismatch because you should have been loving math. There should have been contexts and there should have been recipes and then”¦ don’t get me started right now, but I am so tired of hearing about learning loss. Learning loss is racist. 

Learning loss is so arrogant. Now, yes there are  kids who really had had a terrible year and a half. There are kids who, because of lack of access and lack of other things, did not learn a whole lot of things. But how about all the things they did learn? How about all the kids who wouldn ‘t have spent time with their parents otherwise? How about the kids who did recipes to learn stuff in the kitchen? How about all the kids we hear stories about from our friends who have little kids and not so little kids that they entertain and the kids who did puzzles and games and strategies, don ‘t tell me there is learning loss, they were learning games to off-set some of those learning loss and then, learning loss about what? If kids didn ‘t get effective instruction in third grade, or a third grade didn ‘t learn some of these things about fractions, we ‘ve got to fix that. We ‘ve got to make that up. But if the kid didn ‘t do two digit multiplication, that no one does with pencil and paper anymore, that ‘s not learning loss. To me, that ‘s learning gain. You didn ‘t have a chance to be strangled in a three digit long division. So I just think we have to be really careful about banding this around when we know that we gotta go back right into grade level stuff, look at kids as individuals, worry about who needs additional support, and the fact that kids did gain things, but that just may not be the things that are, you know, sitting there on some multiple choice test. So, long answer”¦

Lori: No, I love it and, you know, it just got me thinking about you know, some of the students that I’ve worked with in the past who, you know, we are teaching kids different strategies to solve problems but that can also be very overwhelming for students who struggle and, you know, trying to advocate for those students that the number line works for them so can they continue to use that, but there ‘s a lot of pushback with people saying “well, no, they need to learn this algorithm and they need to learn friendly numbers or blah blah blah” and it it just gets overwhelming.

Steve: I have, I ‘ve watched teachers put the four different strategies on cards and say to the students so let’s talk about this one “What’s happening here, alright”. The number line, what do you think? “I don ‘t like number lines”, “good, what about this one?”, and “Well yeah that makes sense to me, that ‘s the box, that ‘s the I can cut anything up into the same number of pieces”, I ‘d already won. When the kid Is able to say I cut it up into the equal size pieces, that kid is ahead of the game already and then the kid gets to decide because you’re absolutely right, I cannot teach all the strategies to kids, I have to decide, to help the kids decide which is the one that works for them and then build from there. I mean, just go back and think about what you first start feeling inadequate. The kids around you are all memorizing 8 + 9 and they all know it ‘s 17 alright, wonderful, so here I sit at 72, with 800 on all my SAT and on my GREs and ready to do amazingly large amount of mathematics. My brain does not have a neural connection between 8 + 9 and 17. I practice it all the time, I talk about it all the time, but there is nothing I can do to solder that link, as smart as I’m supposed to be. My brain since I’ve been 7 years old says 8 and 8 is 16 and 1 more is 17. And I ‘m talking about being at the airport,  I think something is $0.80 and something is $0.60 and my brain says $80 $60. That’s the only way I’m able to do it. So this idea of double +1,  double -1 opens the floodgate for all kinds of things. Then you ‘ve got the kids to go I hate doubles but I love replacing nines with ten’s, and then the whole class is sitting there going “wow, why didn ‘t I think of that?”  and so we know that 8 and 9 is 18 minus 1 and now I know the place value stuff. And then I got another guy sits there and goes “wait a second, 8 and 9 is the same as 10 and 10, but they ‘ve spent so much time with 10s frames, they know that the 8 has got 2 wholes and the 9 has got 1 whole and so it ‘s 20, 18, 17. And they count backwards 3. And so that to me, is the essense of alternative approaches, or different approaches, and how we are giving the shortest form of approaches, and they then, with our help,  decide  which ones work for them. This is not rocket science, this is stuff that ‘s been out for years. I worry that the testing and the pressure to get kids up to speed on multiple choice test has really got in the way of some of these things. The greatest hope is that the pandemic help us recognize that the most important thing is not testing, and I think, I ‘m as guilty as anybody else, not paying attention to social emotional learning. 

You know, I did a whole bunch of pro bono pep talks to  friends and forefriends and people all around the country during the pandemic, and my simple 45 minutes, you know Steve’s pandemic pep talk, you know, you work and can tell this is hard. The good news is that for teachers, it’s the first time you got to figure it out with your colleagues because there’s no administrator that has any clue of what you’re going through and they can ‘t help you, because they don’t know what you’re going through, and don’t know the answer to this stuff. Only your colleagues know and the schools that are the most successful understood that. But I spent a lot of time in these, in these pep talk sessions, reminding people, look, just starting off with, alright, on your whiteboards, and you ‘ve got 30 faces or 18 faces, on your whiteboards, are you ready? What did you have for dinner last night? What a great, like, who cares about math? Who cares about any of that? Every kid writes it down, has to spell it out, I got misspellings, I don ‘t care, and I have the things so that every kid can see on the screen, and so I go, “so hold those whiteboards, look at the screen, what ‘s the weirdest food up there? What ‘s your favourite food that ‘s up there?” What an amazing conversation about multiculturalism, what an amazing discussion about the different kinds of foods”¦ what if we honour kids in that way, and I love switching around to, so how many people did you eat with last night? Yes, it ‘s mathematical but i mean, for a kid that ate by themself or doesn ‘t realise that there are 6 other kids in the class that are stuck eating by themselves, and then you sit there and realise there are 2 classmates that are eating with 6 other people, it ‘s just mindboggling. But that ‘s just pausing, being that grammatical and focusing on the social emotional, and I think that teachers I talk to, and there are many, are all saying um, yes, we really learnt something important and that ‘s more important than, you know, the warm up and the today ‘s checklist, and again, it speaks to why we need an hour a day for math, period. 

Lori: Okay, full stop. So, you have a great website and I will share that on our show notes for our listeners and you also share a ton of free of your presentations that you’ve done in the past, and I think that’s a real gift to teachers, so thank you for doing that.  you had one”¦ 

Steve: let me just”¦ let me

Lori: Yea, go ahead. 

Steve: Um, it just goes back to the fact that I’ve been so blessed and I just think that if I have a few decent ideas they really need to be shared and that ‘s part of my message that isolation of the professional is what gets in the way. Why would I ask you to do something I myself won’t do? And that ‘s what it says on the bottom of the website, it says, everything on this website is open and available for you to use in any way, shape, or form that help you help kids. That ‘s just what it is. Now, a part of it is, I was a teacher for 8 years, and then I was the state bureaucrat running math in Connecticut for 22 years, um, I stayed low on the totem pole in both positions, I refused promotions, over and over and over again, because I loved what I was doing, but that taught me that in this profession, proprietary information just isn ‘t necessary. It isn ‘t appropriate. So if everything isn ‘t shared, it just is in my DNA. And some of the hardest stuff, the last 20 years in the American Institute for Research has been that there is proprietary information and there are some things that I can ‘t share or that I have to wait until it ‘s been fully released by the government, and it hasn ‘t been easy, but at least I always knew it would eventually be posted. 

And then, I don ‘t know, I grew up with the message that to whom much is given, much is expected, and I guess I internalised that early on, and anything i can give back, anything I can do to help teachers help kids, makes this a better society. And I ‘ve already said to you that, you know, it just fits my self-concept of an empowerer of teachers and a valid ally. You know, I love the fact that I hear over and over again from, the 20% that are like me, that ‘ll break the rules, that justify what they do by serving kids, they take risks, they believe in “fail fast, fail often” and pick up the pieces and try it again another way. That ‘s not easy. And it ‘s not easy to do when your colleagues are looking at you like you ‘re making them look bad and so my job is to validate that, my job is to help those people realise that everything I know is what can happen. And so that ‘s why if it ‘s of value, I put it on the website, it ‘s there, go use it, and you know, I wish that even more people went there. So. That ‘s why it ‘s there. 

Lori: Well, you ‘ll have lots of visits to your website, I think, soon, especially after the SENIA conference. So you’ll be presenting at SENIA 2021 conference, our virtual conference. Can you give us all a little sneak peek of your talk?

Steve:  that’s easy, I mean, I don’t even know how long I have.. Do I have an hour, the whole day”¦? 

Lori: Yeah, an hour or 75 minutes.

Steve: Perfect, wonderful. So, this is an adaptation, because it’s always adapting, I mean I never do the same thing twice, and this one is called “Practical and Accessible Strategies for Making Math Work for Students with Special Needs” and so it really plays off of some of the things that we’ve talked about here, but it’s a fast pace example leading session. I’ll be asking lots of questions, I’ll be trying to model the things, and about halfway through, I’ll say, now look at how this is grounded in one slide, these aspects of the research, okay, that ‘s not what this is about, It ‘s simply says to you, I ‘m not making this up, the research says it there, but i mean, not surprisingly, we ‘re gonna look at ways to replace the mindless worksheets and replace rules that are instantaneously forgotten with things like multiple representations as we talked about, about alternative approaches with lots of examples, where and how, and we ‘ll look at cumulative review, which I think is pretty cool. We know that memory is a real issue, we know that understanding trumps memory, we know that memory is not fluency, fluency is understanding, and so how you do the cumulative review and how you keep these skills current, becomes absolutely important. And um, you know, we ‘ll talk about using contexts because there is a big difference between 3 + 2 symbolically on the board and 3 boys and 3 girls standing in front of the room. And um, you know, I put 3 + 5 on the board and I go, what do you see? And the kids go “I see a 3, I see a plus, I see a 2″ and they see a 5. Good. When I put 3 boys and 3 girls in front of the room, what do you see? The whole world explodes. My weakest kid is sitting there saying, you know, “Oh I see Robyn and I see Beth and Vicky” and another one says “I see 5 of my classmates” and another one says “well, how do you know that ‘s Robyn?” “What do you mean, how do you know that ‘s Robyn, that ‘s her name.” “Oh, neat!” So we can start talking about how we name things and we are able to refer to them that way. And another kid sits there “I see 5 classmates” I go ” what happened to boys and girls?” well, you know, so I ‘m again talking about apples and oranges, become 5 pieces of fruit. And those are the ways in which we pull it all together and you know, I get people think about it, and then we can send them to some of the things they ‘ve written and go from there. 

Lori: Perfect, well, I ‘m excited. And I know everyone will be too. 

Steve: That ‘s great. 

Lori: So, thank you for your time today, I think we ‘re out”¦ um, so, we really appreciate it and we ‘re really looking forward to seeing you talk at SENIA 2021. 

Steve: Sounds wonderful! Thank you so much for asking me to talk and for inviting me to the podcast, obviously, it ‘s something near and dear to my heart.

Lori: Thanks. 

Thanks for stopping in to SENIA Happy Hour, don ‘t forget to head over to SENIAinternational.org/podcasts and check out our show notes from the discussion today. We at SENIA hope you ‘re enjoying these podcasts. There ‘s so much to explore and we ‘re at the very beginning. So feel free to drop us a note and let us know what you ‘d like to hear more about during your next SENIA Happy Hour. Until then”¦ Cheers! 

Show #44 Building a More Inclusive Culture in International Schools

Today on the podcast, I had the great opportunity to speak with Kristel Solomon Saleem who is a passionate inclusion leader and will be one of our presenters at the upcoming SENIA virtual conference. 

Kristel currently works as the Director of Students Services at the KAUST school in Saudi Arabia. She is the Asia Pacific Regional Coordinator of Next Frontier Inclusion (NFI) and contributes to the International Baccalaureate (IB) Guidelines for Inclusive Education.  Our conversation today revolves around inclusion and how schools can build an inclusive culture. We also discuss how all of us can advocate for more inclusive practices at our international schools. Plus Kristel gives us a sneak peek into her upcoming presentation. 

Bio

Kristel ‘s dedication and passion in the field of education has led her to work with a wide range of schools and organizations that ensure children have access to quality education so that they may find their individual pathways to excellence. Her personal commitment to leading has allowed her to work closely with the Next Frontier Inclusion (NFI) as their Asia-Pacific Regional Coordinator, The Special Education and Inclusion Association (SENIA) and contribute to the International Baccalaureate (IB) Guidelines for Inclusive Education. As a workshop leader, Kristel endeavors to develop and support teacher self-efficacy in their work with all learners. Her belief in the possibilities and unseen potential of a lifelong learner has led her to explore the physiological and neurological makeup of individuals in order to gain a deeper understanding of our students and enhance our role as educators. Kristel is a graduate of Temple University with degrees in Elementary and Special Education and a Masters Degree in Educational Psychology. She is currently pursuing an additional graduate certification in Mind, Brain, and Teaching from Johns Hopkins University.

Transcript

Transcribed by Kanako Suwa

[ Introduction music plays ]

Welcome to the SENIA Happy Hour, where you get 1 hour of learning in less than thirty minutes.

Lori: Hey everyone it’s Lori Boll, your host of SENIA Happy Hour Podcast. Today I had the great opportunity to speak with Kristel Solomon Saleem, who is a passionate inclusive educator and leader, and will be one of our presenters at the upcoming SENIA virtual conference. Kristel currently works as the Director of Student Services at the KAUST School in Saudi Arabia and our conversation today revolves around inclusion and how schools can build an inclusive culture, and how all of us can advocate for more inclusive practices at our international schools. Plus, Kristel gives us a sneak peek into her upcoming presentation. I know you’ll enjoy today’s conversation. And now… onto the show!

Hi, Kristel! Welcome to the podcast!

Kristel: Thank you  so much for having me, Lori.

Lori: Oh, we are so excited to have you. You’re coming to us today all the way from Saudi Arabia”¦ what brought you to Saudi? 

Kristel: You know, we have become this family of adventure… I guess, you know, thinking about how do we continue this life of stability and bringing and infusing the adventure with their two boys. And after being in Hong Kong for 10 years, we said “okay, it ‘s time. Let’s see what else is new!” And you know, KAUST was up and looking for, you know, two educators for my husband and I and he said all right, here we are, let’s do it! 

Lori: oh that’s cool. I, I taught in Saudi Arabia myself many years ago and I have such fond memories and hope you’re enjoying it!

Kristel: We are, we are! KAUST is in its 10th , 11th year, so, so being able to kind of come in again at some of the early stages of a, of a younger school and being able to be part of that is really exciting.  

Lori: Yeah! Well, speaking of that, before Saudi, you were at Hong Kong Academy and you and Jennifer Swinehart hosted our last live SENIA conference”¦ In Hong Kong and”¦ I know, that was our last live one because of COVID”¦ thank you very much”¦ 

Kristel: Wow”¦ wow!  

Lori: But so now you’re, you’re currently serving as Director of Student Services. Is that correct? 

Kristel: Yeah, yeah, that ‘s correct.

Lori: okay, okay.  And, what, what does that role entail at your school?

Kristel: So it’s, it’s quite a big role and exciting one in that it allows a number of Student Support Services to come together under one umbrella. So this is including Counseling Services, Learning Support, we have an intensive needs program that goes through school. We have English Language Learning support there as well as talent and enrichment so it’s really kind of accessing those in addition to the therapies that we ‘re able to provide and figuring out, how do we integrate all the services we provide and more importantly, incorporating the whole school so all of us are working together. So it’s yeah it’s an exciting role. 

Lori: Yeah, like you said, a very big job. Kind of all-encompassing, right? 

Kristel: All encompassing, yeah.  

Lori: Would you say most international schools have this position? 

Kristel: You know, I think that, I’ve seen an increase of it probably over the last five to six years. I think I’ve seen it more in kind of a coordinator position where maybe they also have some teaching responsibilities and what I’ve noticed now as schools start to understand how complex and really how involved the rules are, that it really allows for, kind of more of an administrative position. It also means that there’s a voice at the table for other administrators and so being able to make some, you know, mission-driven decisions and be a part of that strategic planning.

Lori: Yeah, I think  that’s so important to always have that someone at that table with that lens of student support in any way shape or form”¦ it ‘s essential. So I ‘m glad that more and more schools are building this in. 

Kristel: Yes, definitely. 

Lori: So, let ‘s talk about inclusion. Okay, at our upcoming SENIA virtual conference, you will be presenting a session entitled “Leading the change for greater inclusion”, and we’ll get to that in a bit but first of all why do you have such a passion for this inclusive education? 

Kristel:  You know, there’s, there’s so many influences but I would say at the core of it, I grew up with a”¦ my uncle, a family member who had some pretty intensive family needs, a special needs, and what I understood as a child was that he was part of our family. There wasn’t any sort of distinction between whether or not he should be part of things or shouldn’t be part of things. The whole family really embraced him and it was actually only as an adult when I met my husband, and he came to visit us and I didn’t say anything to him about it”¦ I didn’t say “oh you know my, my uncle, he may have a seizure” because he would have, he would have grand mal seizures and didn’t really think to say anything. And he said, “isn ‘t that important?” And you know, actually we just haven’t really thought about it. And he was… it was always really important that he was treated as a family member, as somebody who deserved as much time and energy, as you know, everybody else in the family. And so it was really important to me when I was in education and getting into education, that how do we create settings for all of our Learners where they feel valued, that they feel incorporated, but at the same time recognizing that sometimes they just need something that’s very specialised for them. But not that should exclude them from their peer group or from having access to as many opportunities that are appropriate. 

Lori: That’s great! And I think you’ve been in some pretty unique situations possibly, being at Hong Kong Academy and now KAUST, where they do serve so many Learners of all… of all types so, what or how, how did you happen to find a school or did you, were you brought in to build these programs yourself?

Kristel:  You know, I think a little bit of both. So when we started, my teaching in the U,  and it was diverse in a different way”¦ so in terms of socioeconomic status and kind of looking at a special needs as well as students who had some more behavioral challenges and, and that side of it. And then thinking “okay well where else can this go,” and when we decided to move overseas, we went to the international school in Nigeria and they hadn’t started a formal programme and so I went there to kind of help develop that. 

And then, when we transitioned from there to Hong Kong, Hong Kong Academy was such a special place because that was the intention as the school was founded; it was meant to ensure that it was an inclusive environment for all learners, so part of that work was already done for me. And that, that was the mission and vision of the school and that’s not always the case for international schools. 

So kind of thinking about how do you take that momentum and recognize the nature of international schools, people are coming from all different backgrounds,  are coming from different pedagogies, they’re coming from different approaches and even defining inclusion is very different. And then going to KAUST and again,  a young school but not necessarily the same history, and so how do we ensure that the setting for the admission process, where we really accept many, many students, that we still are being intentional about setting up a process in a program that is going to support our Learners. And not just able, be able to take them, we’ll figure out how to do it later, but really be thoughtful and methodical about making sure that we are prepared for all of our learners.  

Lori: Yeah, and again your title is “Leading the change for greater inclusion”, I’m going to ask a question, I don’t know if this is going to throw you or not”¦  but if you were to give advice to a teacher in a school or parent at a school who want their school to be more inclusive, what would that be? Or perhaps a better question might be, can one person make a difference when advocating for inclusive education if they are not a school leader?

Kristel: That ‘s a really good question, you know, I think that there’s a couple of really important things to factor in whether you’re a leader or if you’re in a position where you may not have as much influence and it’s it’s being able to start conversations with people that share similar beliefs and values. And one of the things that draws us as educators together is that more often than not, we are in this field because we feel that all children have a right to a high quality educational experience, and that all of them are deserving of opportunities for success. And if we kind of come to the table with sharing those, those insights, it no longer becomes “this is what I want” versus “what you want”. 

And so to be able to say, okay, well yeah you you would have had a teaching experience where you know that it was really difficult for you teaching a certain student or for a student to be able to be part of a classroom and your heart went out to them, and you just, I don’t know how to do it and then when you’re able to start connecting with people on that level, it ‘s like, we agree about this. Where do we, where do we start? And let’s take it step-by-step, and the change is on a continuum, you know. 

And I think sometimes we get really overwhelmed by saying, well if you’re not here, then it can’t happen if there’s too much. But we can take it step-by-step and we can say you know maybe it’s “how do we influence change in our classroom”, “how do we create experiences”, where even inviting my colleagues to come in and see something that I’m trying and then they get to try it and it builds from there and then bringing your, your, your admin team just to look at what we’ve been able to do. So sometimes it can start from that level but it can also come from at a leadership level and saying you know, why can’t we be leaders in this field, why can’t we say that we’re not just doing it but we’re proud to do this and you know we’re really making a change for our families. 

Lori: Yeah, well, what, what would you say are the biggest barriers for international schools becoming more inclusive?

Kristel: I think the fear of”¦ somebody said it to me in this way, the fear of attention deficit I think, it came from Kevin Bartlett, it’s this idea, or Bill Powell, and the idea that that if we start to accept quote-unquote “these students” which we know are already part of our diverse population whether or not we want to acknowledge and recognize that, then what happens to my child? And does that mean that all of the attention is going to this student or that student and not mine? I think there’s this concern that somehow, you know, every parent wants what’s best for their child and they feel that maybe that’s a threat if in some way, the school wasn’t able to manage it with staffing appropriately or or being able to give the teachers the skills to differentiate appropriately so that all Learners have everything. So I think there’s, there’s layers, they are but that’s definitely one of the community pieces that sometimes comes up. In end, the perception that the level of rigor out of school will be compromised if somehow we cater to the full continuum of learners, right?

Lori: And at KAUST, you have an intensive needs program which I think is pretty exciting, and and quite a few of those are popping up around the world now so I’m really excited about that. And just a quick plug for SENIA, at the upcoming conferences, we are going to have an intensive needs strand to help other schools maybe see how, how important that is and build that understanding and capacity for accepting students of all abilities, so very exciting stuff. You also mentioned Bill Powell and Kevin Bartlett who are well, founders I guess, of Next Frontier Inclusion. Do you want to tell us a little bit about that since you’re involved too deeply with them? 

Kristel: Yeah, so NFI has been such an important, Next Frontier Inclusion, has been such an important part of my journey as an educator, my journey as a leader, and that was actually after participating in a conversation, because they call the conferences “conversations”, probably about 10 years ago. And I was just taken aback at how the work that we were doing together was about carrying on conversations that were quite generative and sharing ideas and leaving, which happens sometimes after you leave a conference, either feeling really excited and inspired but worried about what happens next or saying I’m so drained and now what? And I was feeling very very excited, and I had ideas about what our next steps could be and and making sure that teachers felt that it was possible and so that is, that is still very much their goal as an organization, to ensure that there are there’s an inclusive school in each major city around the world so that families do feel that they can travel with their whole family and not say they can’t take this job where they have to leave a child at home with somebody else or something like that. So if there’s work to be done but the mission and vision of it is still very real and very inspiring. 

Lori: Yeah, it is definitely inspiring. Let me just jump a little bit to building that inclusive culture in schools. And I know NFI works a lot on that, but how do we begin to build that inclusive culture in schools who might be beginning this journey? 

Kristel: Yeah I think there’s a, kind of, coming back to where, where do we find ourselves on the same page? And it’s always really helpful to find out where our similarities are, it allows conversations to be safe, it allows us to connect with one another, and then figure out what is it that we want to talk about and if that’s inclusion, why is it important to all of us the table? And now let’s discuss the how.  Sometimes I find that we go the other way around and we start with how do we become more inclusive and we start getting into more of the kind of the technical changes versus more the transformational is where it really is about who are we, who do we want to be, who do we serve, and why is it important to us? And that really is that culture; that’s that intangible piece of why do I feel good about coming to work everyday. Why do I feel that I can invest in the vision and the mission of the institution that I’m working with and that I’m honoring not only the work that we ‘re doing and the people that I’m with, but who I am as an individual. 

So I find that if we’re able to kind of start with, one of the my favorite resources is looking at Dilts ‘ Nested Levels of Learning, and you know that that, visual and having identity at the top and then going into those beliefs and values and even surfacing assumptions, then starting to move into more of those capabilities, really just allows us to find out where we ‘re similar, and how do we align ourselves, and then figure out how do we talk to those pieces that make us maybe approach things a little bit differently. 

Lori: Great! And I know you’re going to be talking a lot about that during the SENIA conference, can you give us a sneak peek into what else you’ll be sharing? 

Kristel: Yep! You know, I hope to share not only kind of the philosophical piece which is kind of that, feel good moral impetus kind of, get everybody motivated from that side. But also transitioned into what are some of the technical pieces that just allow us to work together and kind of, more of a systems approach. And this is something that you know, I’ve continued to and in different presentations really spend a lot of time on, because when we are working kind of individually or in silos or kind of in separate departments, it’s really hard to kind of keep it going, keep that momentum going. 

We also find that we’re doubling up on work and one thing that we know we’re always short on time so, how do we then approach, kind of, systems in a very practical way to say okay, how do we make sure our time is being spent well, what types of meetings can we have that allows everybody to feel informed, that things are transparent, that using our time wisely? The work that comes out of adaptive schools has been just absolutely, again, transformational in terms of just how do we connect with each other, what are those norms that we use for communication,  and education is a community. Collaboration doesn’t happen on its own, just because we put people together in a room. The really kind of addressing those points that can sometimes just feel like sticking points we ‘re trying to make progress, so I hope to kind of get them to both that philosophical feel good kind, and think about some of the theories that exist and, where does research sit as well as what is that mean when I go to work everyday.

Lori: Well that’s perfect, I think that is a great place to end this conversation today. Thank you Kristel for such a great talk and your time

Kristel: Thank you so much! Really looking forward to connecting with you again in a couple of months. 

Lori: Can ‘t wait!

Kristel: Okay, take care! 

Thanks for stopping in to SENIA Happy Hour, don ‘t forget to head over to SENIAinternational.org/podcasts and check out our show notes from the discussion today. We at SENIA hope you ‘re enjoying these podcasts. There ‘s so much to explore and we ‘re at the very beginning. So feel free to drop us a note and let us know what you ‘d like to hear more about during your next SENIA Happy Hour. Until then”¦ Cheers! 

Show #45 Hosting a SENIA Watch Party: It's Easy, Fun & Impactful

Today ‘s podcast is all about Watch Parties! In December we ‘ll be holding our virtual conference and as an organization, we encourage you to hold a watch party at your school or in your community. What is a Watch Party, you ask? Ah, good question. Laura Cox, the PK 12 Inclusion Services Coordinator and Coach at the American International School of Johannesburg discuss that today.Laura is an educator and leader who believes that our questions inform our learning journey. And this belief inspired her to hold a watch party at her school last year. Today we ‘ll learn how Laura and her team organized the event, what it looked like for them, and how they got their administration on board with the idea. Laura ‘s and my hope, after listening to the podcast today, is that you will consider hosting a watch party at your school, as we believe that when we learn and discuss together, we all grow as individuals and as a group collectively.

Bio

Laura Cox is an educator and leader who believes that our questions inform our learning journey. She is passionate about working with neurodiverse students and multilingual learners because she believes all students have a right to an education that is relevant to their needs, goals, and interests. She has a Masters in both Special Education and Leadership and has taught in public schools in the United States, the International School of Prague, and is currently the K12 Inclusion Services Coordinator and Coach at the American International School in Johannesburg (AISJ).

Resources from Today’s Show

Transcript

Transcribed by Kanako Suwa

[ Introduction music plays ]

Welcome to the SENIA Happy Hour, where you get 1 hour of learning in less than thirty minutes.

Lori: Hello everyone, this is Lori Boll, your host of the SENIA Happy Hour Podcast. Well, I’m really excited about today’s conversation as it’s all about watch parties! So in December, we will be holding our virtual conference and as an organisation, we encourage you to hold a watch party at your school or in your community. What is the watch party, you ask? Good question! 

Laura Cox, the PK-12 Inclusion Services Coordinator and Coach at the American International School of Johannesburg discusses that today on our podcast. Laura is an educator and leader who believes that our questions inform our learning journey, and this belief inspired her to hold a watch party at her school last year. Today, we will learn how Laura and her team organised the event, what it looks like for them, and how they got their administration on board with the idea.  Laura ‘s and my hope after listening to the podcast today is that you will consider hosting a watch party at your school as we believe that when we learn and discuss together, we all grow as individuals and as a group collectively. And if you want to know what those crazy bird sounds are the background, well, those are Hoopoe birds from South Africa and Laura’s given us a picture of them so make sure to check those out on our web page! 

And now, onto the show. 

Hi, Laura, and welcome to the podcast! 

Laura: Hello Lori, it’s lovely to be here! Thanks for having me.

Lori: Well, we ‘re certainly excited to have you here today. And we are discussing watch parties! Wooo! So before we begin this conversation of parties, can you just tell us a little bit about yourself and where you’re joining us from today? 

Laura: Sure, ya, so I ‘m Laura Cox and I’m originally from the US but I ‘ve been teaching international for about 20 years now, and am currently in Johannesburg, South Africa where I am the K-12 inclusion services coordinator and coach, so coordinating ELL and learning support across our both our campuses and all of our divisions. I’ve been here for 3 years now and prior to that, I was in Prague at the International School Prague for quite a long time. 

Lori: Oh wow. Such beautiful places. Lucky you!  One of our directors of SENIA  yeah Jay Lingo is working at your school and I follow him on Facebook, and he’s always posting beautiful pictures of safaris and things he’s gone on so yeah, insanely jealous.

Laura:  it is, it is kind of amazing like you just go a little bit outside the city and you’re like so I am at this beautiful place and there are giraffes and zebras and elephants just walking around, so”¦ and Jay is one of our learning support teachers and we ‘re so lucky to have him, he ‘s a great addition to the school. 

Lori: Yeah super positive, super fun. So, last year, you organised a watch party for the SENIA virtual conference and that’s what we’re here to talk about today. We’ve had people ask us about our term “watch party”, which people are like I don’t understand that term, what is it, what do you mean by that? So our definition is “watch parties are virtual or face-to-face gatherings of colleagues and friends to watch and discuss the content of the SENIA presentations”. What’s your understanding of a watch party? 

Laura: It’s pretty similar, in our context, the watch party was an excuse to get ourselves and our colleagues together in a situation where we don’t always have the time to get together and really engage in professional learning and professional conversations because they’re always so busy. And so for me, a watch party is a time to pause and learn and reflect together as a team and as a school community. 

Lori: Yeah, that ‘s great. So how did you go about organising it last year as far as… did you have a day off from school to watch it? Did you do it on the weekend? What was your plan around that?

Laura: Yeah so it started because we were, when we learned they were going to be virtual and not in person, I mean, it was just much more cost friendly for a larger percentage of our population to participate. So it was like, hey this is a great conference, you know, when it’s in person and face to face and and now we have this really great opportunity that a lot more people can participate. 

So I started with that and then the watch party came a little bit later, because then, you guys were sending out, “hey, you could do a watch party and here ‘s what it could look like!”, and Jay and I had a chat about it and some others. And so, we, on the Friday when the conference was starting, we did, we had a regular day of school and what we did is just those people who were able to get coverage and there were some subs provided by the school, and some people came and went based on when they were free during the day. But there was a significant percent, you know, a good chunk of us that were there all day with sub coverage or released time off, so the school had supported that idea. And so we spent the day together. So it wasn’t the day off and we didn’t do it on the weekend as a group, although many of us then engage with the conference over the course of the weekend. 

Lori: Okay, well, that’s a good point about your admin and how they supported you. How did you go about getting them on board to have this opportunity for your staff? 

Laura: Yeah I mean, we were very lucky that we had a quite supportive admin. They were super keen for us to grow our knowledge because of course it positively impacts our families, our students, and our community so they saw the value. It wasn’t so much convincing in terms of that, the convincing part was just figuring out the coverage and the release time. How do we make the logistics of it work. The theory, you know, the idea was very well supported. It was just the logistics of making it happen that was a bit trickier. But because they supported this theory, they figured out how to, you know we work together to figure out the logistics so”¦

Lori: Now, at your school, did you have learning support teacher only or did you have more of your teachers involved, general ed and specialist teachers? 

Laura: Yeah, so in our first watch party, so last year was our first watch party, and we are organising one for this year as well, which we ‘ll talked about in a minute, I’m sure, but it was predominantly learning support staff. I’m not really”¦ because I it was my first time, actually, I had not participated in SENIA before. I had heard great things but haven’t had the opportunity and so I was only”¦ and again I wear that learning support / ELL hat so I was kind of a little bit focused on that, and so I had communicated to my team that it was a great opportunity but hadn’t gone much further. And we were a little bit late coming to the party, in terms of getting people signed up and then organising the watch party, so one of the things that we recognised after having the watch party last year was that it would be an awesome opportunity to really extend that to the wider community of our school. 

And so this year, I just actually sent out, in the past week, all of our principals added it out on their weekly newsletter, you know, SENIA is coming and we’re going to organise it, and whether you participate in the watch party or just participate just in the conference virtually at your own time to let us know. And I’ve had a lot of good feedback from a number of class teachers and the Specialists and others that are interested this year so we’re getting together a list and I think we’ll have a wider representation of the community this year. 

Lori: That ‘s really exciting to hear. Many of us at SENIA conferences, year after year, people have come up to me and say, “you know, as a learning support teacher, this conference is so powerful and so wonderful but sometimes I feel like we’re here, you know we ‘re preaching to the choir so to speak. in that we’re learning this but we can’t”¦ we can’t get it to our wider audience of teachers at our school,” and so we really were excited about inviting presenters this year that we felt would benefit all teachers, not just those in the learning support field. 

So you know, we have Shelly Moore who’s just this dynamic inclusive educator that anytime you watch one of her videos you’re just empowered and it’s just so exciting. Then we have, you know Michelle Garcia Winner, who talks about social thinking and Leah Coopers who designs Zones of Regulation which is beneficial for everyone, right? And then we have that SEL strand which I think is going to be really powerful for everyone there because we’ll be talking about student mental health as well as teacher mental health and how to support everyone. 

Laura: I think that strand in particular, the social emotional learning, is attracting a lot of our teachers because I think we just recognise in the current times with COVID and being virtual and back and forth, just a lot of unrest in the world currently that are certainly we’re feeling as individuals and professionals and absolutely our students are so I think there’s a just such an urgent need to understand that better and that’s that’s a lot of our teachers and why they”¦ 

Lori: Good, good. And I would be remiss in not mentioning that when when you sign up for teachers, you actually get a much cheaper rate so that’s pretty exciting for schools. We have a flat rate of you know it’s it’s pretty inexpensive rate for 50+ individuals who want to attend, so anything over 50.. We’ve got one school last year who brought 77 people from their school. That was Jakarta Intercultural School, and Singapore American brought well over 50 so we have that flat rate. Then we have anything from 10 to 20 individuals is just 125 per person and then 21 to 50 individuals is just $99 per person US dollars so really it’s just so cheap kind of like why not?! 

Laura: It ‘s a bargain! 

Lori: I mean, with the, with the keynote speakers that we have, we also have Lederick Horne who’s this fabulous spoken word poet who is, he has a learning disability so we’ll just learn so much from him and then our teacher presenters so overall we have over 60 hours of content and you have 4 months to watch it. 

Laura: And I think, I think for those of us who participated in the watch party  party or virtually in some capacity last year were super excited to hear that it’s 4 months because I think some of us, since the conference was at the beginning of December, then many of us went away on break, it felt a little bit rushed or crunched for time to really capture everything that we wanted to get out of the conference. So having access to them, it’s awesome.

Lori: Yeah, great. Well, let’s talk logistics”¦ So you had the watch party, how did you make it work, like how did you do it? Did you watch all the keynotes together or… and I know many schools have done this and they’ve all done it a little different way so really just interested in how your school did it.

Laura: Yeah, so we did the watch party over one day on a Friday and we started all together and watched the keynote on executive functioning with Sarah, Sarah Ward I think I’m remembering that correctly, which was amazing, it was just such a great way to start together. So we started together watching and then we spent some time discussing and considering that and then we had a chunk of time in the middle of the day where people were watching, sort of, their own choice of things so we kind of went off into our own different in areas. And that was again because people, you know, some people had all day, 3 or 4 in terms of coverage and release and others only had smaller chunks of time. 

So then we whould watch your own thing and then came back together, and say “what did you watch”, “definitely check this one out, it was really good,” you know, so that we sort of share what we had watched during those couple of hours in the middle of the day. And then we watched another session, we watched one of the sessions all together at the end of the day and that’s how we closed. And then yeah and then people watched it over the next weeks and then over the course of the next weeks, when we’re back for the year in January after the break, we were all comparing notes on what we had taken away from the sessions that we watched and and sharing resources if people hadn’t watched the same sessions. So there’s a bit of a, there’s a bit of a follow-up discussion and and conversation on going after the actual day of the watch party as well. 

Lori: That ‘s great, I love that it lasted through time. You know, and I’m circling back to what you said at the beginning; learning support department, I mean, you rarely have that opportunity to gather together and discuss new learning or anything really and so to have that time set aside for everyone to do that is a very powerful, a very powerful thing. 

Laura:  Yeah, and I think, you know, in pre-COVID days, when people would go away from a conference, you know, there ‘s the cost of the airfare and the hotel on us, so maybe only one person would go or maybe team of three or four people would go and they would get really energized and come back with all these different ideas but it was, you know unless you’re very intentional and clear about how you then disseminate that learning and figure out how you want to grow that into the rest of the community, sometimes it can get lost or you can be in the sort of pocket of enthusiasm about something but also on your own. 

So having a large part of our team as a part of that especially like”¦ When Sara Ward, when she was doing that “Get Ready, Do, Done”, like I think all of our learning support teachers across the entire school is using that right now.  So then you start having common strategies and common language that your community like that your kids that you work with specifically that then we had. And it more quickly and easily disseminated out into the classroom, into the classroom where it ‘s a class feature and then it ‘s being used within that context as well. I think that’s the power of having a large chunk of people involved in, you know, a watch party because you ‘re learning together. 

Lori: I love that. Well, we do have a watch party kit on our website and so it’s just right there on the top tab of the conference website, and it does include all of the logistics that you might need to think through in planning, planning this. Have you used any of our watch party kit for your events? 

Laura: I didn’t use it so much so like the first year, last year, but now we have watch party part 2 coming out in December, so I’m looking at a few other bits and pieces that you guys have shared as suggestions. One of the things that we ‘re looking at is also adding in some sort of the social peace, like a TGIF after the end of the day or dinner or something, to make it a little bit more social. 

And also we are hoping to actually connect it to some other work we’ve been doing. We ‘re very fortunate in Johannesburg because English is one of the official languages so we have a lot of resources within our community and English in terms of outside providers, and play therapy and OT and Speech help and psych on site and all of that and so we have this wide range of people that partner with the school and we’ve done some work with them, again pre-covid, bringing them on campus and doing some sessions where they’re learning more about schools and see if they can better support us. And we’re learning more about what they can do to better support so we can better support our families within our community and our hope has been that we were going to do this watch party and connect it to this networking with our outside provider so we can continue to deepen our understanding on our part with some are outside providers… 

But unfortunately, because of COVID still, we’re not allowed to bring all of those people on campus so it’s going to be a closed event just in our teachers on our campus. But I think there’s a lot of opportunity there depending on what the situation is where you’re living or in the future, to use the watch party to our advantage, to also build in your ties within your community and do some learning in your wider community. Like, we were also hoping, I know we have some families that are, you know, would have been thrilled to be involved as well with this so. 

Lori: I hope so and thank you for bringing up families. I know that Singapore had many families attend their event with them last year and they said that was extremely powerful for for all of them to learn from the families as they had their discussions together after each each presentation. A part of the watch party kit is the discussion questions that the presenters put together themselves so they they present and then they have listed some questions that they thought you might want to discuss afterwards so yeah the families were a major part of that group and we got really good feedback from that. And we want to add orgnisations as well! I love that, I love that you’re thinking through that and planning that and I hope in the future you will be able to have those groups attend as well so thanks thanks for doing that, and thanks for giving us the rest of us the idea. So maybe there’s someone out there that’s like, “yeah I’m going to do that this year!” that can! 

Laura: Yeah, no, we’ve been thinking that for a while and things are getting better and and we’ve been very fortunate to be on campus and in person for most, or significantly more of this whole COVID thing than a lot of other schools so we were cautiously optimistic that we would be able to bring more people on the campus by this time, or the end of the year but unfortunately not. Not yet.  

Lori: Yeah, not yet. Not yet.. Growth mindset!  Let ‘s see”¦ What ‘s another question that I have”¦.? What are some of the  feedback that you received from your learning support teachers from this event? 

Laura: From the watch party last year? 

Lori: Yeah.

Laura: They were really impressed with the quality of the sessions and the variety of the sessions, like as if there really was a bit of something for everyone. You know we have a more diverse team, we have people who are trained in different parts of the world, people with more and less experience, so it seems like there was enough there for everyone to find something of interest and to find something that where they feel they felt like there were many, multiple things, sessions, or ideas that they they felt like they took away something of value from it so I think that was one really key feedback, that there really was a lot on offer and so there was enough of a range for everyone to feel like they were getting something out of the experience. So that was one thing. 

Lori: That ‘s great! 

Laura: I think, you know, conferences and sessions are always a hit or miss; some are awesome and some are not so great so I think one advantage of it being virtual  is when your 5 or 10 minutes and and you didn’t love what’s going on you can very easily change and it is one little bit of flexibility that you have, when you ‘re doing it from home on your computer in your pajamas”¦

Lori: Yeah, exactly. And for those schools out there that may not be able to be in session right now due to the restrictions, that is a possibility as well. I know Malaysia chapter last year held a watch party virtually. So, they set it up on Zoom, I believe, and they just all met, they went off to say, a keynote, and came back together and discussed it, so they had a really nice experience with the virtual watch party as well. 

Well, just to change gears a bit, you are going to be one of our presenters at SENIA 2021, you and Mary Donohue, so can you just give us a little sneak peak into what you ‘ll be discussing? 

Laura: Sure! Mary was one of the learning support teachers that participated in the watch party last year and she and I were so inspired by the experience so we said we may have something we can offer, I’m sure. So we put our heads together and one of the things that we’ve been working on quite a lot at our school currently and Mary and I work very closely on this together is really working on refining our multi-tiered systems of support and improving and deepening our understanding practice in that area. And so we wanted to share our journey doing that so that those who are new to MTSS can take something away from what it is and how we feel it supports students and what it can offer and those who may be are already involved in MTSS can think about how they might want to reflect on and refine and deepen their practice as well, based on what we did. And she’s going to, she works in third and fourth grade as a learning support teacher, and so we ‘ll do sort of a macro look at that work, from a big picture system side, and then she’s going to speak to what it actually looks like in practice in her third grade literacy work last year with the grade 3 teachers and her learning support students. 

Lori: That’s a really relevant topic and I know many of our participants will enjoy that so thank you for bringing it to us”¦

All right, well, I think that’s about it today so thank you so much for your time and for telling us about your great school and all you do there for your students! And hopefully exciting some people to or motivating some people to throw a watch party!  

Laura: Do it! It ‘s awesome! 

Lori: I love it. 

Laura: If I haven ‘t convinced you yet”¦ it ‘s fun and we are super excited to do it again! 

Lori: Sure. Great. Thanks so much, Laura!

Laura: Thank you so much for having me; it was so great to talk to you today. 

Thanks for stopping in to SENIA Happy Hour, don ‘t forget to head over to SENIAinternational.org/podcasts and check out our show notes from the discussion today. We at SENIA hope you ‘re enjoying these podcasts. There ‘s so much to explore and we ‘re at the very beginning. So feel free to drop us a note and let us know what you ‘d like to hear more about during your next SENIA Happy Hour. Until then”¦ Cheers! 

Show #46 Social Thinking

On today ‘s podcast, host Lori Boll speaks with Michelle Garcia Winner, the creator and founder of Social Thinking and a globally recognized thought leader, author, speaker, and social-cognitive therapist. She is dedicated to helping people of all ages develop social-emotional learning, including those with social competency challenges. Across her 35+ year career she has created numerous evidence-based strategies, treatment frameworks, and curricula to help interventionists foster social competencies in those they support. Michelle’s work also teaches how these competencies impact a person’s broader life, including their ability to maintain relationships and their success in school and career.

Today we discuss the concept of Social Thinking, who benefits from it, some strategies to try, and why there ‘s no such thing as a mild social skill deficit. Michelle is one of SENIA ‘s keynote speakers at our upcoming conference, and Michelle gives us a sneak peek into her topic in this podcast. We (SENIA) hope you ‘ll join us for our conference, and hope you enjoy today ‘s conversation. 

Bio

Michelle Garcia Winner, MA, CCC-SLP, is the founder of Social Thinking and a globally recognized thought leader, author, speaker, and social-cognitive therapist. She is dedicated to helping people of all ages develop social-emotional learning, including those with social competency challenges. Across her 35+ year career she has created numerous evidence-based strategies, treatment frameworks, and curricula to help interventionists foster social competencies in those they support. Michelle’s work also teaches how these competencies impact a person’s broader life, including their ability to maintain relationships and their success in school and career.

Transcript

Transcribed by Kanako Suwa

[ Introduction music plays ]

Welcome to the SENIA Happy Hour, where you get 1 hour of learning in less than thirty minutes.

Lori: Hello everyone, it’s Lori Boll, your host of the SENIA Happy Hour Podcast and today, I get to speak with Michelle Garcia Winner who is the creator and founder of Social Thinking and a globally recognized leader, author, speaker, and social cognitive therapist. She’s dedicated to helping people of all ages develop social emotional learning including those with social competency challenges. Across her 35 + year career, she has created numerous evidence-based strategies, treatment frameworks, and curricula to help interventionists foster social competencies in those they support. Michelle ‘s work also teaches how these competencies impact a person’s life including their ability to maintain relationships and their success in school and career. Today we discuss the concept of social thinking, who benefits from it, some strategies to try, and why there’s no such thing as a mild social skill deficit. Michelle is one of SENIA ‘s keynote speakers at our upcoming conference and she gives us a sneak peek today into her topic in this podcast. We hope you’ll join us for the upcoming conference and hope you will really enjoy today’s conversation. 

And now onto the show! Hi, Michelle! Welcome to the SENIA Happy Hour podcast!

Michelle: Thanks for inviting me! 

Lori:  Well thank you so much for joining me today to explore social thinking. I’ve had the privilege of seeing you speak in person on several occasions and each time I watch you present, I go home and back to my own classroom feeling pumped up, excited to implement your very practical strategies into my own classroom setting.  So one of the most impactful statements you made at one of your presentations is “there is no such thing as a mild social skills problem”. I may be paraphrasing that incorrectly so you can correct me on that. But for me, that was one of the most mind-blowing moments. So can you explain what you mean by that statement? 

Michelle: Yeah, So I’m very familiar with the spectrum of autism and the spectrum and then I started talking about the spectrum of social cognition because who gets what diagnosis when is really not predictable. So when”¦ I began my career working with those who, in the old days, were called classic autism and now they are autism spectrum level 3, and worked a lot with functional adaptive behavioural strategies where you identify skills and you teach a skill. 

And then when I ended up many years later moving back towards my hometown, I was in California, I started working with students who have what I call more subtle or emerging social abilities. And they had a lot of language, and what I was noticing was the more subtle your social issues, the more profoundly bad you were treated,  not only by beers but by teachers. That if we could see, it was if it was obvious that you had social issues that were outside of your brain ‘s control, there was what I call a forgiveness factor. 

But as soon as we expect you to walk amongst us amongst us and and be able to do this really refined set of social abilities, if you mess it up, we’re really quick to condemn, bully, reject. And so, the reason I started saying this idea that you know mild social skills problems are significant, is because it’s really hard to qualify students for services if we don’t think they’re severe enough. But there is, there’s different treatments for different levels of severity but anyone who’s considered by their peers to be socially awkward or off faces a pretty hard road and I feel like that is severe enough to be able to qualify and serve a person.

Lori: Yeah and I’ve heard, I’m not sure on the exact statistic, but I believe it’s like 12% of people on the Autism Spectrum are gainfully employed in the States and I imagine that has something to do with it.

Michelle: That has a lot to do with it. You know and I think when you”¦ because if I was to define all this, if someone asked me to to figure out how to put this social cognitive system in place, I would have a dividing line between those individuals who do not have social self-awareness, that they’re really not actively tuning in as part of their normal process to what’s going on around them, the intentions of other people, what’s expected of them”¦ Those who don’t have social self-awareness and those who do have social self-awareness, because when you get to the folks who have more this, what we tend to call emerging or subtle but significant abilities,  meaning they’re sitting in the mainstream classroom and they’re doing a lot of the work, if not all of the work for themselves, they can have some incredible areas of strong intelligence there, they may be easily qualified as gifted and talented, and yet if they’re not working in groups well or you know, acting in a way that makes people uncomfortable without intention, that not only do they have social issues but if they have social self-awareness, I can guarantee you, they are now walking down the path of gaining major anxieties. 

Because social anxiety, anxiety about what I’m supposed to do or not do, how I’m doing it, is all part of our awareness system. If you’re not aware, you’re not going to have anxiety about what they’re not aware of, right, and so that gets us into what we call the ASD perhaps level 1, to some extent ASD level 2 as that group is gaining awareness, what we call them the emerging group, but it also opens the door to a whole lot of people diagnosed with mental health problems that are not seen as having social issues only because whoever’s diagnosing them thinks they look too typical to be what they think of as on the autism spectrum. So in my world I just see tons of confusion and not clarity. The diagnostic system does not provide a lot of clarity. It’s all based on the bias of the people who are diagnosing to begin with. 

Lori: You’re absolutely right. Well, that is so interesting. Well, let’s talk social thinking. It’s a huge topic to try to cover in our 30 minute podcast, so can you give us that Cliff Notes version or definition of social thinking? 

Michelle: Sure. So there’s two different things. One is our actual ability to socially think and the second one is our social thinking methodology. So as I was working with students in a high school district, and I came from a background of working with folks with classical autism who were coming out of institutions and were nonverbal or minimally verbal, and being part of a 24-hour team that help them to learn adaptive skills to be able to live in the community, largely in group homes, and try to establish some level of employment and recreation. It was awesome and I ‘m  really proud of my work and the work I did with my team back in the early 80s, and then I ended up in a high school district when I moved back home to my home state of California, and in the high school district there were a lot of like”¦  “who’s on the caseload of a high school speech language pathologist”? Well, it turns out, largely a lot of people would settle with social issues but what also, there was a subgroup of my caseload that really resented therapy like they hated it. I hate you, I hate social skills, and I really had to think about that because to be an effective professionals to be able to work with people and so that was the dawning of the social thinking methodology, but it was also the dawning of me thinking about, wait, this is more than behavior. Like treating a behavior was effective for my folks who did not have language and had weak intelligence, weak measured intelligence,  doesn’t mean all intelligence is weak, it’s what we measured is weak, so treating a behavior was effective if we were consistent and we had a humane environment wrapped around that person. 

Now my high school students were like, no no way, like I’m not doing one more social skills group where someone tells me how to behave and then punishes me for not behaving. And that began with me stepping back and just talking about and me even thinking about for the first time, you know what, our brain thinks socially. It is aware of who’s around us, we read intentions of people we will never talk to, that’s called driving a car, walking down the street, riding your bike, and that we take perspective those people will never engage in, that’s called reading comprehension of literature, that’s called studying social studies and history and that our social mind is this amazing meaning maker in our lives. And yet, when we have kids with social skills problems, what we are attempting to do was tell them what  and how they should behave rather than engage them in this thinking process. 

So for me, it was like, I remember to this day, my excitement of like getting this challenge to figure this out to get these kids interested and engaged and what I found was it was not by telling them what to do. It was getting them to study how their own brain was already on the journey of thinking about other people, and to get them to value what they were already doing so that I could help them expand that awareness to add more strategies to what they were already doing, increase some level of awareness, and then also tied to that, when they became more aware of, for example I created social thinking vocabulary. Is your body in the group?  There’s a group plan. Think with your eyes, it’s not about eye contact. We shouldn’t be telling kids, give me eye contact. That’s a nothing but if we tell them hey, let’s figure out who knows people, who doesn’t know people in this room, how do you know that somebody knows someone? And getting them to figure out their thinking, then was a natural connection to helping them adapt their behavior and learn how you relate socially based on their own goals. Does that make sense or”¦? 

Lori: Yeah absolutely! I’m just thinking back to a student I had in middle school who, no diagnosis, nothing, but you know, we sit in our advisory class and he would pull his chair away from the circle where we were all sitting and then he wondered why it seems that none of his classmates liked him. 

And after going to see one of your presentations, I talked to him about it and I said, you know, you sit outside of the group. How do you think that makes the people in the group feel? What are they thinking in their thought bubbles? What are they thinking about you when you’re sitting outside of that circle? And he was like “huh, well, maybe they think I don’t”¦ I don’t like them. They think that what they’re saying is not important”¦” So it just kind of got him to think more on that social level, what you ‘re talking about. 

Michelle: Right. I think that ‘s what I really tried to do was to be able to help my student see the world that we all take for granted. Right, beginning at 3 years old,  we put kids in the preschool and we already expect 3 year olds to be able to kind of read the room to some extent, realize somebody standing there or sitting there,  where your friend is, and then we never really explicitly teach it. So I started deconstructing aspects of the social world. I will never fully deconstruct the social world, it is way too complicated, but give people some kind of paradigm. 

So I created something called the 4 steps of communication, which is first, we think about people around us. Second, we use our eyes, like first of all, we ‘re just in a thinking mode. We’re in this space, we use our eyes to kind of figure out what’s going on around us, if we want to be part of something, we have to use our body to get into the group. And then fourth is we use language to relate. Some of my students were using language without thinking with their eyes or their body in the group. And so then, people were seeing them as incredibly rude because they’re hollering out comments or they’re hearing a group of kids who are socially relating and they are talking to that group as if they’re in that group. Which set you up, it’s people don’t understand what’s happening, they just think that, you know, that person becomes possibly in harm ‘s way, so the more I could dissect it, and open it up, and give people some guide post for just figuring out how the social world works because we literally don’t teach it, we just expect it, the more I could also help my students be part of it. 

Now, I would take your your student you just talked about is sitting outside the group. One is there ‘s a lack of awareness about really where the boundaries of those groups are. So in my treatment, we always start with observation. We never start with changing a behavior so if I had you know a student like that, and I like the way you talked about it to him because what you did was you got him to start observing, where is this group? Where am I in this group? And that’s like, even when I’m working with mature adults, one of the first things I have them do is going out to, you know, not during the COVID years, now maybe a little bit we’re letting up, I just start go noticing what’s happening in a restaurant. Qhat’s happening there? Like where are the groups? How do you know this or that about people? Because that’s what our brain is figuring out and then we work on strategies based on their own goals. So if that kid wants to be in the group, like that would be another question, do you want kids to see you as a part of the group? The logical thing is “Okay, pull your chair in the group.” 

Except kids who have underlying anxiety feel so uncomfortable doing that. That just feels so strange to them, so now you have to practice. One, what is the competency of oh like when groups we kind of sit in a ring with our shoulders, but now we’ve got to figure out ways to manage our anxiety to assure us that we’re doing the right thing even if it feels uncomfortable at first.  

Lori: Yeah, that ‘s definitely. Well I will follow up with that, that’s exactly what we did and he ended up joining our group. We also talked about”¦ One time, he was walking by and I said “hey is something upsetting you?” and he’s like “why do you ask that?” and I said “well your face is showing me that you’re upset or angry”, and he goes “oh, my face just always like that” so I pulled out that trick of the mirror and just told him what I thought, what my thought bubble was saying, when I see that face and it was really great and an authentic teaching experience for both of us. 

Michelle: What ‘s interesting for so many of our clients or students, children, whatever we’re calling them is they may not be able to do things in a way that their peers do so they’re not keeping up socially, but they are still strong social interpreter. So if somebody else looked at them with that face, they may be offended. They don’t have what I call this circle of perspective-taking where actually we check in with ourselves to see how we’re presenting ourselves, which is part of why we pop on this somewhat fake you know, you know a little bit of a smile even if we don’t, you know why the smile all the time just to keep people comfortable when we meet them even if we’re uncomfortable. Right, because social is more than ourselves. It’s ourselves with others, and if our goal is to be with the others, how do we understand that process of.. 

Lori: I think another point, important point you made earlier was about reading literature. And that was another thing. One important thing I learned at one of your presentations is, how can we expect our students who don’t understand the social world to infer text? How is the character feeling right now? We ask that all the time, and so that… that just opened up a whole new world with me, for me, when working with our students and just different questions to ask them.

Michelle: Yeah, the kind of the trick on that one for people who are like thinking about this for the first time, is across, if we’re specifically talk about the autism spectrum, across the autism spectrum, part of what defines different levels of the spectrum, but this is not written in the DSM, but it should be”¦ they just need to consult with me”¦ is level of literalness. How literal one is when one interprets because as many of you guys are very familiar, with some of your students who are science bright are very literal when it comes to social interpretations. 

Science doesn’t really require.. It requires an abstraction based on fact, so all advances in science are making a leap based on a fact system, right? You always know a fact and then you can extend that and develop more abstractions. But social is never based on facts. Lori, how I see you today and how I see 10 minutes from now doesn’t mean you’re going to feel the same. I can’t say Lori is always this,  therefore”¦ and so in this journey we’re trying to look at how literal. So when you have someone who’s persistently literal, persistently unable to really make significant social inferences, I will”¦ I’m going to say, I can guarantee reading comprehension of literature issues. 

Because literature all in inference and that’s I think that was one of my messages or one of my ah-ha ‘s because I had this incredible group of kids in high school that I was learning like crazy from, and reading the literature was that in the academic world we see reading comprehension of literature as completely separate from our social functioning. So one is a social skills problem, one is a reading problem and here’s the other one we see,  we see written expression as completely different from reading comprehension and social. But if you go back and you look at the seeds of that, it is the social mind at work that’s being able to take information about people in text and now use our knowledge whether we know we have this knowledge of feelings and thought and start to apply them both in narrative. does your paragraphs make sense is not for you to decide its you stepping away from your work and trying to read it to someone else ‘s eyes to decide if it makes sense. Because we always make sense to ourselves. 

Lori: That ‘s what I meant! 

Michelle: So that was what was fascinating to me was, who’s talking about this? There were some people, but they weren ‘t loud, loud voices and you know I’m still a minor voice in the world but I scream loudly about, let ‘s look at the social mind, rather than our social skills. Step back, look at the mind, start to see what it’s doing and that how we apply that mind, and how the way we apply that is through social behavior other parts are through our academic performance. And when we see the social mind is formed that it doesn ‘t naturally infer, let ‘s stop expecting that we ‘re gonna have growth in academics, because the kid is smart because all the tests are based on facts. Right, and really understand who this person is so that we can treat them humanely and also treat ourselves humanely. 

Lori: Yep. No follow up to that. Beautiful. Who benefits from social thinking work? 

Michelle: Good question. Because it’s not designed for everybody. Because I did so much work with those who I called classically autism, those with minimal language and measured limited academic intelligence, when I started social thinking because it uses our metacognition, which is thinking about one ‘s thinking and feelings and thinking about others ‘ thinking and feelings, that’s what metacognition means. 

It’s for students starting at about 4 years olds who have solid development of language and so they don’t have to be completely at age level with language, but their primary source of communication is through a language system. If that language system is augmentative, that ‘s language. So it doesn’t have to be a spoken language system because language, just the production of language is a thinking process. Right, if you don’t think,  and it’s amazing how quickly does this but to allow us to speak is organise our thoughts, to think about how to convey something to someone else, and when I work with folks who don’t have that type of language, they are using language but in very literal ways just to talk about wants and needs, not to explain their thinking or anyone else ‘s. 

So once a kids can start to understand how to think through someone else’s for at least be able to start having you know I work with folks who are not great at this is what I’ll call all are solid emerging or even our challenge social communicate a word with him I’m just trying to engage that thinking system because they have solid language skills who our work is best served are those who really are able to talk about their and others ‘ thinking and feelings. 

Lori: I think what ‘s essential for people to know too, is although. I mean probably the focus was maybe originally on autism spectrum disorder, there’s many people out in the world that have some social skill deficits. 

Michelle: that are not diagnosed! 

Lori: Yeah,  and a lot of the strategies that will be talking about in a moment really can be used in like a general education setting, with all the students in the classroom.

Michelle: Sure so because of my early interest in autism in the late 70 ‘s, and I worked with Dr.Koegel at Santa Barbara you know, some of you know his name, well, Pivotal Response Therapy, but that was my early training. And then once I get started working in the high school, I’m like “whose deciding who’s got social issues?” Right, based on… I’m a speech pathologist and so we do measure social pragmatics as independent of autism but all of our tests are pretty pretty limited in what they look at. And, it really, because I knew so much about autism and then I watch the spectrum evolve, it was like well, it doesn’t really make sense that we think social is limited to the autism spectrum because we’ve got you know 68% of people with ADHD have some level of social challenges, and now you start looking at who’s getting the primary diagnosis of anxiety, depression”¦ 

I have an employee here, I have a company and I get to hire some of my clients, so I have a couple of clients who have been with us for many years who were unemployable out there but I saw all their talents in the treatment room and put them to work here and it was great. You know everyone it’s amazing how far they’ve come but, this idea of really understanding”¦ What I was mentioning  was one of mine is diagnosed with primarily ADHD. And I ‘m like.. she is on the spectrum, she is fully on the spectrum! But she would go in and even when she went into a doctor’s appointments, nobody would believe she had a problem because she looks pretty. And I ‘m like”¦ “?????” So then, I start going to her doctor’s appointments because she, when early on, had serious mental health problems that were putting her in very risky situations, just even trying to get her doctors understand because she could not explain her needs. That requires a lot of self-awareness and so you know that’s where I was like, hey let’s talk about the spectrum of social cognition and stop talking about mental health diagnosis because babe do not capture this intelligent typical looking folk. And especially the new DSM tries to eliminate some of that, and it’s just like you know, what what a mistake for people to think that the only problem they could have is a mental health problem. 

Lori:  Well when the DSM comes to speak with you can you have them call me too?! 

Michelle: I know! 

Lori: There ‘s a lot of us out there that could help them.

Michelle: And, and I think for  and parents in the world up by autism need to focus sometimes less on the autism and more on the social emotional learning because sometimes diagnostic labels are traps. And they ‘re self fulfilling prophecies in the sense that if we want someone to learn and cope and adapt, then we can’t just look at autism treatments. We have to look at treatment that’s relevant to their learning needs and that’s where I start social thinking and I started applying it broadly and now I’m really good at having debates a psychologist about the term narcissism… What is it, like if you look at it as a set of behaviors, but how many people with narcissism have some compelling social emotional learning components that they’re really not understanding how they’re showing up in the world to others? 

Lori: Well yeah, that makes complete sense. Well, switching back to your strategies”¦ I ‘ve used so many in my classroom that you mentioned some earlier. Body in the group, brain in the group, there ‘s the super flex programme, the size-of-my-problem, and my reaction size to that, our eyes tell us what you ‘re thinking about, social fate, social fortune”¦ there’s so many unexpected expected behaviors so can you speak to one or two of these strategies for audience. 

Michelle: So something I evolved kind of early on in my treatment was my awareness, because I had this incredible group of kids who had nowhere else to be on campus so they were always in my office after school, during lunch, and I just got to observe and talk to them and one of the things that became really apparent was that they really weren’t thinking through what I call a social emotional chain reaction. That in any situation, there are things we expect from each other, behaviors and when we do something unexpected, we process that as well. 

If you do something expected or unexpected we have feelings about what’s going on, we have actions and reactions we may take, possibly, based on how we feel. And how we treat someone based on how we feel or actions and reactions affects how that person feels. So I tied that together, it’s”¦ you know, we call it the social emotional chain reaction, the tool we developed to kind of map this out is called social behavior mapping, and that’s the genesis of the book, Social Fortune Fate, where we give a whole bunch of explanations of any one of us can affect those around us positively or negatively and how to be accountable for what we do, and how it contributes to what’s how people might be interpreting us. You know, so that person who really wants to be a part of the group but is standing outside of the group vomiting their thoughts in, that person actually wants to be part of that scene but they don’t actually understand that that’s an unexpected behavior, and is leading to an uncomfortable feeling, which may lead to people treating them in a way that they were not desiring by throwing their thoughts on it. They didn’t know it was thought bomb. 

So I started breaking this open and then having my students go through this and start studying situations because you can’t self-regulate in a situation if you don’t understand the situation. And so many of our folks on the higher end of the autism spectrum well, all through the autism spectrum, but we assume those on the higher-end already have figured this stuff out. And when I start to share these concepts, even you know I work a lot with mature adults who nobody would think was a client of mine, and it’s fascinating when they see this because it just helps them to put together that social is a wraparound of each other’s thoughts. emotions, expectations, and reacting and responding and then feelings about how each other is treating each other. So that ‘s kind of”¦

Lori: I love that book. It ‘s kind of shown in a graphic novel format and um, so that ‘s great for our middle school students and some in high school as well. 

Michelle: Yeah, and you know, and I ‘ll say that that gives you a framework, many things happening at once, to teach that framework, you have to start by pulling out the parts first. 

Lori: Right, so that ‘s social mapping. 

Michelle: Yea, so the think with your eyes, the expectations about our body, and different aspects with in that. We have to use flexible thinking, we need to make smart guesses”¦ so we built, we have strategies to pull it apart to understand moving parts, and then we bring in frameworks together like the social emotional chain reaction, to see how all these parts go together. 

Lori: Well yeah, it ‘s really effective, and your website will be put on our show notes page for everyone so they can go and find all those resources on there. 

Michelle: Great. We also”¦ I have a goal with my business to not have people have to access our information through something they have to pay for it to get them going with understanding it. So they will find over 100 free articles and over 20 hours of free webinar. We have a lot of free to just give people a sense of who we are and what we’re about, to see if this is something that makes sense to them. It is interesting because pre-COVID, we got to travel the world and we were in almost every continent in the world right now. and how this information is transcend the specific culture because these are the the actual kind of instruments that culture than that was some cultural twist on so that ‘s interesting. 

Lori: Well, whenever administrators or someone comes to me and as you know what should we train our teachers on at school, my first answer is always social thinking and executive functioning. If every single teacher had a background in these areas, I think, all of our students would have so much more success in school. 

Michelle: Right, so it ‘s no surprise that executive functioning and social thinking are actually part of the same.. You know, you use your executive functioning toolkit, not only for homework but in your social mind. 

Lori: Yeah, exactly. Cool. Finally, at our upcoming SENIA conference, you will be one of our keynote speakers! We are so excited to have you. 

Michelle: Thank you! 

Lori: I can ‘t tell you how excited we are. But first of all, thanks for joining us, and we have had so many people write to tell us how they ‘re so excited to see you. Your keynote is entitled “Self Regulation, a journey towards developing social emotional competencies”. So can you give us a sneak peak into what you ‘ll be discussing? 

Michelle: Well, actually, a number of things we discussed during this podcast but giving some, defining more of the tools, showing the visuals related, and just, I think people think of self-regulation as you need to behave, and social skills as you need to be socially appropriate, they ‘re all part of the same thing. Self regulation is dependent on us understanding the social scene. We can self regulate by ourselves, like having to do our homework, but even homework in a home requires us to be social, right? Screaming at your parents because you ‘re furious about your homework. So it ‘s really just helping people, giving some core information about social thinking but also getting them to re-think some of the divides they have in their minds about “social regulation is a behaviour problem, social skills is a social problem” and it ‘s like, “actually, social and behavioral are all part of the same core. 

Lori: Great! Well, Michelle, thank you so much for your time today! 

Michelle: You ‘re welcome! And I ‘m honoured to be a part of this. Looking forward to the conference.

Thanks for stopping in to SENIA Happy Hour, don ‘t forget to head over to SENIAinternational.org/podcasts and check out our show notes from the discussion today. We at SENIA hope you ‘re enjoying these podcasts. There ‘s so much to explore and we ‘re at the very beginning. So feel free to drop us a note and let us know what you ‘d like to hear more about during your next SENIA Happy Hour. Until then”¦ Cheers! 

Show #47 Meet the Creator of the "Zones of Regulation"

Today I speak with Leah Kuypers, the creator of the Zones of Regulation curriculum which has been enthusiastically received by educators, therapists and parents around the world, Leah ‘s  book, also entitled The Zones of Regulation, has sold more than 100,000 copies worldwide.. If you are new to the Zones or need a refresher, then be sure to join us for our SENIA virtual conference in December, as Leah will be teaching us about the Basics of The Zones of Regulation. In today ‘s podcast we learn about her inspiration behind creating the curriculum and how teachers and parents can implement it into their classrooms and homes. We discuss what it means to feel regulated and also about the impact of Covid on our children ‘s ability to regulate on a daily basis upon going back to school. I know you ‘ll enjoy this podcast, so happy listening. 

Bio

Leah Kuypers has practiced as an OT and specialist in school and clinical settings, specializing in regulation and social-emotional learning. Through this work, she was inspired to create The Zones of Regulation (Think Social Publishing, 2011) which has been enthusiastically received by educators, therapists and parents around the world. In addition to developing additional learning tools to supplement The Zones of Regulation curriculum, she owns a small business, Kuypers Consulting, Inc., based out of Minneapolis, MN .  She enjoys providing training and consultations to parents, schools and professionals by offering workshops on regulation and the Zones framework to groups locally, around the United States and internationally. To date over 100,000 copies of The Zones of Regulation book have been sold and the framework has been implemented in districts around the world to support students’ social emotional learning.  Please visit www.zonesofregulation for additional information, a current schedule of trainings, and to find support in implementing The Zones of Regulation.

Transcript

Transcribed by Kanako Suwa

[ Introduction music plays ]

Welcome to the SENIA Happy Hour, where you get 1 hour of learning in less than thirty minutes.

Lori: Hi all it’s Lori Boll, your host of the SENIA Happy Hour podcast. Today, I have the great pleasure speaking with Leah Kuypers, who’s the creator of Zones of Regulation which has been enthusiastically received by educators, therapists, and parents around the world. Leah’s book, also entitled The Zones of Regulation, has sold more than a hundred thousand copies worldwide. If you are new to the zones or you need a refresher, then be sure to join us for the SENIA Virtual Conference in December as Leah will be teaching us about the basics of the zones of regulation. In today’s podcast, we learn about her inspiration behind creating the curriculum and how teachers and parents can implement it into their classrooms and homes. We discuss what it means to feel regulated and also about the impact of COVID on our children’s ability to regulate on a daily basis upon returning to school. I learn more each time I read about or attend a presentation of Leah’s, and I hope you’ll be inspired to try the Zones of Regulation as well. 

And now, on to the show. Hi Leah, and welcome to the podcast! 

Leah: Thank you Lori, it is an honor to be with you today! 

Lori: Well, as both a learning support teacher and an intensive needs teacher, and a mom of a child with special needs, I have been using Zones of Regulation for years and it seems whether I’m checking out classrooms in the US or overseas, the zones are everywhere. 

Leah: Yeah, um, it ‘s very… Humbling to see the impact it is having across the world. 

Lori: I imagine, I imagine. Can you tell us a little bit about your journey in creating the zones? 

Leah: Sure I am an occupational therapist by trade. I was working in the schools as well as I had some clinical practice, but I really saw the need come through when I was in the school based settings, and had so many students on my caseload who couldn’t stay in class, they couldn ‘t regulate, and it was impacting their participation with academics as well as with peers and socially. It was heartbreaking to see these punitive measures be applied over and over again, and not impact results; the students weren’t becoming more engaged. In actuality, we saw that negative self-esteem impacted more so, and withdrawals. So I felt it was my duty to figure out how can they become more functional in the classroom, engaged in these meaningful tasks throughout their day, and build relationships. 

As an OT, I just didn’t have all the tools and resources I needed, so I start taking more graduate courses. I ended up getting a autism resource graduate certificate,  and applying things I was learning to my caseload. Eventually this idea of these 4 zones popped in my head, and I started trialling out my ideas. I had kindergarten classrooms up to high school classrooms of kids with really significant behavior needs. They were in all special ed schools, self-contained classrooms within those schools, and it was very much this behavioral based model with a lot of punitive measures to try to curb that behavior. So I wanted to go about it and truly teach them lessons, build more capacity for them to manage themselves and regulate through the stress or so that they could be more successful. So, a lot of trial-and-error, a lot of collaboration with my colleagues, a lot of continuing ed that to just get more pieces of the puzzle to fill in, and eventually I wrote the curriculum first as my graduate Capstone, and was then really fortunate to have interest from publishers, and from there, worked with social thinking to transform it into the curriculum it is today. 

Lori: Yep, Yeah well did it surprise you when this concept, like, spread worldwide?

Leah:  Yeah, it is just mind-boggling to me really. You know, I think about those kids on my caseload that I was desperate to try to figure out some different strategies to support them, and I really thought you know, this is something I see for therapists to be using, special ed teachers to be using, and hopefully we can get it to generalize into some regular item in classrooms and reported across settings, and see the adoption in the General Ed and move from school wide to district wide, and it ‘s been amazing. It just really touches me because I know so many kids fall through the cracks, they don ‘t get identified as needing services or they don ‘t qualify, but there ‘s clearly needs, there ‘s kids who internalise a lot of their dysregulation and find unhealthy ways to regulate as they get older and so it really brings me a lot of joy to think about when, with the adoption of this across schools, across countries, how many kids we ‘re helping by building a life skill that everyone uses for their lifetime. 

Lori: Yeah, I love when General Ed takes it on. Our last school that my husband and I were at in Bangkok, there was a presentation given at the school and then almost every elementary school teacher adopted it in their classrooms. It was really powerful to walk in and see all the kids in the community discussing their Zone and strategies that they can do. It ‘s just powerful. 

Leah: Yeah, it creates an inclusive environment where all of the learners are supporting each other.  You know, I hear from teachers that it really shifts the lens in which the kids see each other. It’s not about the behaviors anymore, they understand each other based around feelings when zones is part of the language in the classroom. And yeah, it’s not that one kid who then is using the zones and now has no to little support network, it’s everyone speaking the same language , everyone has a toolbox, and that’s okay that they look different. That’s a part of the regulation on what the zones really are. It teaches you that you can individualize your toolbox based on how you perceive these zones, and support you and regulate them. 

Lori: Can we back up a little bit just in case people are unaware of the term regulation and self-regulation can you briefly describe that for us?

Leah: Sure. You think about regulation as being able to regulate your sensory needs, so thinking about your states of alertness and being maybe in a heightened state because you just heard a loud bang, and physiologically your body changes; that heart races, that eyes popped open, alert, looking for danger, muscles tense, to we can have really low states of alertness. Think about feeling groggy in the morning when that alarm clock goes off, and so these states of alertness change throughout the day and certainly those with sensory needs can perceive more heightened states of  alertness from the sensory environment around them and vice-versa, moving to lower states of arousal to more easily. So, we think about regulating that, as well as emotions. Which is just innate, that ‘s who we are, as humans we have feelings. So that ‘s natural and we work to regulate these states of alertness and feelings and energy levels in context of what ‘s going on around us. 

We also think about task demands that are before us, and maybe it ‘s trying to work through this problem to work through your homework. Or maybe it ‘s trying to engage with some classmates at lunch and have someone to talk to. We think about those goals, whether they ‘re ones right in front of us having fun while we play this game, or even as we are more perceptive as we ‘re aging up to those long -term goals; I wanna get into a good university. So regulation entails monitoring and managing these different feelings and states to achieve these goals and meet the task demands, and establishes a sense of wellbeing. 

Lori: Thanks. Thanks for that. 

Leah: And then when you think about self-regulation, we ‘re doing this independently. Much of what we ‘re doing is co-regulation, where there’s a social factor involved in this. Thinking about a baby coming out of the womb and being comforted by caregivers. Or you, as an adult, after a frustrating day at work, finding a colleague or partner to vent to. We co-regulate throughout our lifetime too. 

Lori: Yeah, thank you. So at the upcoming SENIA Conference, you’ll be giving us all an introduction to the Zones of Regulation. I absolutely can’t wait, I know so many of our participants are really really looking forward to it. Without giving away your whole presentation, can you give us just an introduction to the zones? 

Leah: Yeah, so I ‘ll be talking about the zones as a simplified way to think and talk about all these feelings we experience and the zones of Regulations gives us this visual structure, an easy way to communicate where we ‘re at. So with these four coloured zones, we categorize all these different feelings and states, and then once we have that awareness of what zone we ‘re in, we can start thinking about what are our tools and strategies to help us regulate that zone. So for example, the Red Zone tools, when we ‘re in this zone, we ‘re in a heightened state and this really big overwhelming emotions, those tools and strategies are going to look different to when we ‘re in the Blue Zone, and we ‘re in that lower state of alertness, our emotional needs being down in that coloured zone, so our strategies look different. The zones then really emphasize that all feelings are okay, all zones are okay, and your zone is based on how you’re feeling on the inside, it is not defined by your behaviour on the outside that may or may not match what ‘s going on inside. 

Lori: I think that ‘s really important. But “all zones are okay” it’s a, it’s a hard kind of”¦ I think for a lot of teachers, a lot of therapists, when we, when we see a child in the Red Zone, we automatically want to, you know, jump in and help. So how, how do we balance that thought with all zones are okay? 

Leah: Yeah, well, understanding you know, really, I think of behaviour as communication and this child in need of something and isn ‘t feeling quite right in their situation. So one thing we stress is we ask you to have compassion and empathy and try to take away that judgement. Seeing a child in that heightened Red Zone state might be an opportunity for us to connect, even nonverbally, with them and we could use visual supports if they ‘ve been familiar with these visuals ahead of time, you don ‘t wanna spring it on them when they ‘re in that Red Zone, and with trust and rapport and building tha relationship, which is something we really stress when introducing that Zone of Regulation framework, we can support them in finding healthy tools to help regulate. 

Maybe we ‘ve pre-taught and practiced going to a comfort corner or regulation station that they ‘re familiar with. So we can use the zone structure and language, and that can be done nonverbally, with visual support too, to guide them to this tool that we talked about and practiced. 

With time, maybe that individual become more independent in being able to self-identify and say “yep, I ‘m in that Red Zone and this is my go-to tool that I know helps me when I ‘m in that Red Zone” so we overlearn these responses to how to manage our zones so it becomes easier and second nature. But that does take time, it takes practice, and there ‘s a whole curriculum that walks us through that, teaching that, and gives the individuals you ‘re teaching time to practice and exposure in setting up that climate that allows for it to be safe and to have these emotions and use these tools to regulate. 

Lori: Great, yeah, I had a student in one of my intensive needs classroom, she had autism and sometimes she’d walk in and her emotions were waaaay in the red, and we had the signal of”¦ I would just point to this sign, what zone are you in? And she’d look at it and she ‘d say “I’m in the red zone” and then trot off or storm off to the sensory room where she would get on the swing and swing for.. She ‘d set the timer for like 3 minutes, and she’d come out and she say “okay I feel better, I’m in the green zone” so it was really just such an easy way to state the obvious without stating the obvious. 

Leah: Yeah, I think that brings you to this much more conscious level of awareness and gives us this easy way to kind of think through”¦ like, “okay yep, I ‘m in this red zone, and here ‘s what I do” or “Yep, I ‘m in the Blue Zone today, and I need this to help me” 

Lori: Again, I ‘m so excited for everyone to learn about this at the conference. They ‘re gonna love it. 

Leah: Well, thanks! I ‘m excited to share it. It ‘s fun to do what you ‘re passionate about. 

Lori: Oh yeah, definitely. Well, I reached out to some of our SENIA Board members to, and the Directors and the Associate Directors, to see if they had any questions for you and they did. They said, one said, “Zones of Regulation is a tool that is often used at school but can it be used at home? How can parents use zones with their children?” 

Leah: Great question. I’m a parent of an 8 and 11 year old, and we’ve had it in our home since my son was about 3 so it certainly is easy to adapt to the home environment. I hear from a lot of parents that give me the feedback that the book is very”¦ it very much lends itself to be used in the home, as well as you know schools or therapeutic settings. So they’re, with getting caregivers on board, we now provide this consistency and you have that co-regulations support from caregivers, again, creating the safe space to talk about feelings and using those strategies to support that. I think it helps with caregivers too, I know as a parent, I had all this training as a therapist but it still doesn’t prepare you to be a parent. 

Lori: Nothing does! 

Leah: You know, your kids ‘ doing something and it ‘s frustrating, you know, it ‘s like”¦ Even this morning, you know, it’s the third day of school and my son who’s 11 was really upset that we didn’t have Nutella. So we have never had Nutella in the house. So this girl in his class is getting peanut butter and Nutella sandwiches and he really wanted this and we haven’t gotten to the store since school started so it is what it is and it’s, he offered last night to buy the Nutella, and I was like, Yeah, you can bike to the store in the morning and get Nutella if you wake up early enough”¦ but you know we’re not going just for Nutella”¦ And so he ‘s kinda storming around this morning, and you know, we check in, and he tells me, he ‘s like, Yeah, I’m almost in the red zone. And I’m like let ‘s stop and think about this. You know, so he decides to take his breakfast and eat alone by himself to help him. We hear him fuming. And I go, Daniel, is this”¦ are you kind of stuck on the Nutella? And he goes. YES! And my husband goes, don ‘t tell me this is all about Nutella”¦ and I said, David, this isn ‘t about Nutella, but Nutella is what is at the surface of this and a lot more other things going on, but you know.. Gives us a different lens to look at it. Does that make sense? 

Lori: Oh, absolutely. He ‘s got to have so many feelings”¦ third day of school, he ‘s meeting new people, we don ‘t know what interactions are going along at school”¦ what his relationship is with his teacher, I mean”¦ there ‘s so much. 

Leah: And we have this grumpy, irritable kid, who  seems obsessed with Nutella, but yes this is the behavior were like observing, and underneath this though, are a lot of feelings, you know. It is really at the heart of it, so my husband was like oh yeah. And he kinda just backed off. You know, we ‘re not gonna talk logic with him about Nutella, we ‘re just going to understand there ‘s a lot of feelings underneath his behaviour and I think that that ‘s something the zone lends caregivers to see a little easier, is that it ‘s not just the behaviors and me getting frustrated with my kid who ‘s not acting the way I really hope they will. And I ‘m getting uncomfortable with those feelings too because now I ‘m frustrated, and it puts this language back to base it back in emotion and not so behaviour based. 

Lori: And maybe once he ‘s in the green zone, tor a while, you can do the more deep dive into the feelings, right? Well, I hope you work out that Nutella situation”¦ 

Leah: Well, I might have grocery shopping on my to-do list this afternoon”¦ 

Lori: and he’ll probably try it and hate it! So”¦

Leah: Right! 

Lori: Well, and um, another one of our associates asked, “something I’ve noticed in both my daughters is the social anxiety piece, having to go back to school and interact with their peers. COVID really isolated us and now it’s trying to help our girls with feeling nervous, scared, etc… so in the classroom, and maybe how to use the zones in a morning meeting type environment to help children start to identify what zone they’re in and strategies to use within their interpersonal interactions”¦” I guess that’s not more”¦ it’s not really a question but more of a statement of how how their teachers could support them.

Leah: Yeah, I know a lot of schools are starting to integrate what we call “zones check ins” into that morning meeting or opening circle time with their classrooms, and it ‘s a great read for teachers to gage where their students are at, who they may need to personally connect with”¦ You know, you see a student maybe check in in the red, and that ‘s time well spent if you can support that learner and have a successful day as an outcome versus kinda letting that boil to”¦ you know, get maybe breakdown later. But what this also does is it gives our learners the opportunity to just pause and reflect where they ‘re at. And with that, for many of them, they might realise “hey, I am coming in to school this morning in the yellow”, which is before the red zone, where our feelings are getting more intense but not as overwhelming as the red zone, and for them, they might just”¦ notice and check themselves. And think, ok, what do I need to do to take care of my yellow zone? Maybe it is take a deep breath, or you know, find a way to move before I have to sit, or something like that. So it gives them the opportunity to self-reflect and evaluate what might be best to support them. 

Lori: Yeah, and I ‘m also wondering if maybe the underline question here is is more about COVID and the effect of the isolation for the past year”¦ Have you heard from teachers or what is your experience now with kids heading back to school and their their levels maybe? 

Leah: Uh, Yeah, I think we have just a big mixed bag of emotions, you know”¦ and parents too. Speaking of personally, there ‘s a lot of things up in the air and new norms and yeah, social anxiety is huge, I think. For a lot of these kids. And their learning style at home was maybe a lot more accommodate than what it might be in the classroom so it ‘s now back to a more traditional learning gormat that some of our kids are really going to struggle with, having kind of that flexibility to learn upside down or in a soft chair, or sprayed out on a rug, or whatever it may be. So I ‘m really hoping that we have schools, teachers, who can offer some flexibility in meeting our kids where they ‘re at, and really taking note of some of the lessons we learnt during COVID that our kids can learn a lot of different ways and the more that we can support that, you know, allow for that regulation to happen, we ‘re going to have more attentive kids ready to take in that knowledge that ‘s

Lori: Yeah, I think you know, also, Just that you hear so much about all we need to fill in the gaps from last year the academic caps from last year and you know if I if I had if I ran the world I’d be like can we not focus on that? Just focus on these kids and getting them to feel comfortable and less anxiety about the return to school”¦

Leah: Yeah, I know, my daughter is in the third grade and she said, “yeah mom, there ‘s some kids I don ‘t think they ‘ve been in school for a loooooong time, I think they forgot how to go to school” 

Lori: What an observation for a third grader”¦ 

Leah: Yeah, and I ‘m thinking about all these teachers.. You know, I think we just need to offer a ton of grace to kids and teachers and all just be really flexible. And um, what this might look like and how can we shape education going forward to really support these different needs of the kids. 

Lori: Yeah, yep. Thanks. Well, finally, you ‘ve recently released some new products”¦ tell us tell us what they are!  I know we have zones story book series and tools to try card decks”¦

Leah: Yeah, so um, myself along with one of my close colleagues, Elizabeth Sadder we worked together and created a 2 book series that really explains the Zones of Regulation and how to use tools to regulate our zones and puts it together in a this, pathway that we call “road to regulation”, which is the title of the first book. And the second book is called “Regulation Station” and that ‘s where they ‘re thinking about their tools and how those tools help them manage each of the zone. So that storybook set is really designed for our primary age kids, elementary school, 5-12 year olds. 

And then we have the same characters featured in our Tools to Try Cards for Kids, and that is 50 different tools or regulation strategies for them to explore and reflect on how these tools might help them in different zones and helping to ultimately create this, toolbox, that is taught in the Zones of Regulation curriculum.

We also have the Tools to Try Cards for Teens and Tweens, which is for those you know, adolescents, could also be used with adults, these cards are illustrated in a style that is more appealing to the adolescent population. Some of the core tools are the same but we also introduce new tools for that population. More cognitive based tools, thinking strategies, mindfulness straegeies, and those card decks are great to pull you know, one tool a day, not a day, one tool a week, and just focus on it as a tool of the week and let the kids explore it. And then at the end of the week, reflect on what zone this tool will help me in. And building that tool box. So yeah, it ‘s been fun to create these products. It ‘s all intended to be used in conjunction with the curriculum itself, and that ‘s gonna give you that format, the detailed lesson, that structure. And these are to enhance and extend learning.

Lori: Oh, I wish I had that card deck when I was teaching middle school. That would ‘ve been so perfect! But now I know about it and I wanna grab it for some other students that I ‘m seeing now. So. I ‘m excited about it. So thank you! Well, Leah, that ‘s all we have time for today but thank you so much for talking with us and joining us on this podcast! 

Leah: Yeah! And I meant to say this when we were talking about caregivers too, I made a video during COVID, super awkward video, I ‘m not intended to be a YouTuber, however, I did my best and so we created a Zones check-in video of how you can do this at home and it helps the learners and caregivers set this up for the home environment. And that is available on our website at zonesofregulation.com! 

Lori: Yeah, and I ‘ll put all of that in our shownotes and link the video as well. 

Leah: Awesome! Thank you! Thanks Lori! 

Thanks for stopping in to SENIA Happy Hour, don ‘t forget to head over to SENIAinternational.org/podcasts and check out our show notes from the discussion today. We at SENIA hope you ‘re enjoying these podcasts. There ‘s so much to explore and we ‘re at the very beginning. So feel free to drop us a note and let us know what you ‘d like to hear more about during your next SENIA Happy Hour. Until then”¦ Cheers! 

Show #48 On Being a Neurodivergent Educator

On today ‘s podcast, I speak with Sara Larrington, a learning support coordinator at Dresden International School. Growing up, Sara felt “different” from their peers. In Sara ‘s 20 ‘s they received a diagnosis of Aspergers. Our discussion today focuses on Sara ‘s experiences in school as a child, why boys are diagnosed at a much higher rate than girls with ASD, what schools can do to better support their neurodivergent learners, and how Sara ‘s ability to connect with students is their super power. I hope you enjoy our conversation today as much as I did. And now…onto the show.

Bio

Sara Larrington (they/them)  is an educator with 21 years of experience. As a person who is Asperger’s, they  have always had a passion for helping students who are learning diverse and for facilitating inclusion.

Sara has been lucky enough to work in International Education since 2010 which has taken them to Thailand, Panama, Vietnam and Germany

Transcript

Transcribed by Kanako Suwa

[ Introduction music plays ]

Welcome to the SENIA Happy Hour with your host, Lori Boll. We know you ‘re busy so we bring you 1 hour of content in under thirty minutes, leaving you with time for a true happy hour. 

Lori: Hi everyone! In today ‘s podcast, I speak with Sarah Larrington, a learning support coordinator at Dresden International School. Growing up, Sarah felt different from their peers, and in their 20s, they received a diagnosis of Asperger’s. Our discussion today focuses on Sarah’s experiences in school as a child, why boys are diagnosed at a much higher rate than girls with ASD, what schools can do to better support their neurodivergent learners, and how Sara ‘s ability to connect with their students is their superpower. I hope you enjoyed our conversation today as much as I did. and now, on to the show.

Hi Sara and welcome to the podcast.

Sara: Hi, nice to speak to you.

Lori: Well, really great to meet you today. I’m excited to have this conversation. So you’re, you’re currently a learning support coordinator at Dresden International School and you ‘ve been an international school teacher for many years. Where else have you taught overseas and what drew you into International teaching? 

Sara: So I was, I taught in the UK, that’s where I trained and I did about 10 years in different kinds of education settings in the UK including behavioural schools as well as regular primary schools, and then in about 2009, I decided that I wanted to see a bit of the world. I wanted to meet other people, different cultures, because I was very interested in all of those things, but I ‘d done a little bit of travelling in Europe but not anywhere far away. So I decided that maybe I should look for a new adventures and I had some friends who had taught in Dubai, and they had a great time there and I thought well maybe I’ll try. So in 2010 I got a position in Bangkok at Saint Stephens school which is a smaller international school. I was there for a few years then I move to Panama, at the Metropolitan School of Panama. And then I went back to Bangkok and worked at NIST, that that was my best experience. Then I moved to UNIS Hanoi in Vietnam and then in 2019 I moved to Dresden.

Lori: Ahhh. Now I see, this whole time I ‘ve been looking at you, you look so familiar”¦ so I used to teach at International School Bangkok, so we have definitely crossed paths, at some point. 

Sara: Yeah, probably! 

Lori: Yea, got it. Okay and you’re a learning support coordinator at your school in Dresden, is that correct? 

Sara: yeah yeah I’ve been a coordinator at different times”¦ When I went to NIST, I was a learning support teacher because I felt like I still had so much to learn so I took more time to learn and create an opportunity for me to learn more, learn from people who really knew their stuff. And you know, I worked with an excellent team at NIST, and other people in Bangkok and such as ISB and at Patana, and then you know, working with people like from STEPS or the different educational consultants”¦ I just I just really enjoyed that time because I gained so much more knowledge and I worked on my postgraduate diploma in special education. And when I came to Dresden, and I was a learning support teacher but 2 years ago, I took over the coordinator role of PYP. 

Lori: Well Sara, you’re not only a learning support teacher, you were also diagnosed with Asperger’s (with a hard g). Now that’s what we call it in the States and in the UK”¦ 

Sara: Aspergers (with a soft g). 

Lori: And what age were you diagnosed?

Sara:  I was actually diagnosed very late; I was 23. 

Lori: Okay, and I hear that happens quite a bit, a later diagnosis.

Sara: Yeah, so I always knew I was different and my parents kind of did too, but they didn’t have anything, any frame of reference. I was diagnosed earlier with dyscalculia and dyslexia and I sort of had some things, but everybody was mentioning the social aspect, that I I was always very quiet, and you know, I had friends but I also may choose to work on my own projects, things like that. And teachers had said different things, but I mean this is back in the late 80 ‘s, early 90 ‘s and so people really”¦ any sort of autism to  them was what you see when someone has more severe challenges. and at that time it was thought to be just boys and so I didn’t get diagnosed until I went to university, and found living away at University quite difficult. I had a great time but it was difficult and then when I started my first job, something happened and then I went to see a psychiatrist and I got my initial diagnosis then. 

Lori: Hmmm. What did that diagnosis mean for you? 

Sara: For me, it was like a light bulb moment. It was, I’m not weird, I think definitely, my brain is a bit different and also there are other people like that in the world. At first I didn’t tell anybody because again it wasn’t that much information and I don’t feel like I really fit to the typical things you were seeing in the media or what I was finding when I was doing research, you know, about it. I don’t want to say I was ashamed but I was uncomfortable with that diagnosis. But then as I started teaching and my experience grew, and moving internationally that made me feel more comfortable with who I am and how I act how I am and I think I gained the confidence to just say you know what I have this but I always try and spin it with a positive. I do mention some of my challenges but I also say what my strengths are. 

Also, sometimes I was getting into situations like social situations like misreading people or not understanding someone or communications, missing the point or going off of a different point and I always have to say, sorry, I have Aspergers, and then when I said that, people would make more accommodations.  

Lori: Oh that’s so interesting, it’s more the empathy piece, rather than what you were saying earlier, where you said you felt weird growing up. And I mean of course, that makes my heart break to hear you say that about yourself, of course you’re not weird, but I know that people in social situations… if they’re in a situation and someone’s acting I guess differently, then that’s the word that they that they might use. And then when someone comes out and says well, I ‘m on the  Spectrum or I have Asperger’s, it’s then that empathy piece kicks in.

Sara: I took some bullying, in secondary school, primary school was fine but you know, secondary school, I think everybody might get bullied a little bit but I definitely had some, because I wanted to be in the library instead of outdoor recess or I was interested in things that other people weren ‘t interested in, and I do think, you know, if I had known what knew now, if they ‘d known, they wouldn ‘t have bullied me. They would ‘ve just thought”¦ 

Lori: Yeah, I agree. I agree. That ‘s why, so many of us in the field, encourage our students to advocate for themselves. Yeah. Thank you for sharing that. It must’ve been really difficult to move overseas and take in all the new cultures and challenges. 

Sara: Yeah, it was. It was exciting at first, I mean, I don ‘t like change very much, but it was exciting at first. It just seemed like I was on a really long holiday, but I also did work, you know? And then it would sink in. Then it sank in that, no you ‘re living here, and so there were definitely challenges with how systems worked, how schools worked, how.. Just e everything. It was a big leap. 

By the time I moved back to.. So, I moved to Panama, and when I decided I didn’t want to stay in Panama anymore, I was like, where in the world can I go? And I chose specifically to go back to Bangkok because I already knew it. And I knew, I ‘d already gone through the process of figuring a lot of processes out in Bangkok, and so that move was not as difficult. Moving to Hanoi was the hardest move I did, I found that that was the most challenging place I lived in.. and moving to Dresden, it has been challenging but that ‘s because of COVID; I ‘ve spent most of time in lockdown. And you know, you think, Germany, Europe”¦ but there ‘s a lot of red tape. I thought it would be more like the UK, but it ‘s not really.

Lori: Interesting.

Sara: Things work differently. 

Lori: Well. Heading back to the thought of you being a girl”¦ so you ‘re neurodiverse girl in school, what was your experience like? You mentioned bullying, do you have anything else to share on htat? 

Sara: Yeah, I do. So, I actually now, identify as gender-neutral, which many people, you ‘ll find a higher prevalence of people with Asperger ‘s who either are gender neutral, identifies as gender neutral, or trans. We can talk bout tha at a different time, that ‘s not for this conversation, but there is research for that. But I was a girl, I was born female, and so I didn ‘t understand this term, masking, until I started, until you know, 5 years ago, when people wrote papers and research on it. And I definitely did it.

And what that is, is trying to fit in, trying to pretend to be something you ‘re not, I feel like for a good 20, 25 years, I pretended to be something I wasn ‘t really. I put pictures up of bands that people said were cool, so I thought I should put pictures up. I talked about things that I actually didn ‘t really understand, when you have groups and you ‘re hanging out, and you ‘re chatting about things, I put myself in situations that I didn ‘t really enjoy or didn ‘t really want to do because everyone else was doing it and I wanted to fit in and I wanted to be like everyone else. 

And this is a typical thing with people who are female, born female, who ahve Aspergers. Tere ‘s research for it. And eve nnow, I still find myself masking. You know, not all the time. I ‘m much more happier with who I am and I advocate for myself really well, but I still try, you know, I ‘ll stay at social situations when I really am done, I should ‘ve gone half an hour ago”¦ or take something on because everyone else is taking it on, but it ‘s probably not a good fit for me, you know? 

Lori: Got it. So According to the CDC, autism is diagnosed 4 times more in boys than in girls. In your opinion, are boys more likely to have autism or is it that the girls are masking or are they exhibiting different signs than boys”¦?  

Sara: I think it ‘s a little bit difficult to tell. I ‘m not sure what the data completely supports. In my experience, there ‘s probably as many girls that have autistic conditions as there are boys. But because for many years, they thought it was a male thing, girls were misidentified as ADHD or depression or mental health challenges or other things. I think also, females tend to mask very very well, and boys don ‘t tend to? I don ‘t see that. I’ve been teaching for 20 years and I very rarely see boys mask”¦ sometimes they say it but and I don’t know that you know, if you look at books from maybe ten years ago, research groups, help guide, and tips are about boys boys boys boys. And you know Temple Grandin is a great role model but there were no other. It is a few but there’s not that many female role models here you know identify as I have Asperger ‘s or autism, so my personal opinion, is it ‘s probably equal, but im not sure that at this point in time, the data shows that as much as we ‘d like to. But i think in the future, it would happen. 

Lori: Yea, I think so too. I have read that most of the studies have been on boys as you suggested, and and how they just kind of left out a whole subset of the population. So very interesting. And I do want to take you up on that future podcast about gender identity and that sounds so interesting and I’m really excited to talk to you about it! 

Well I want to talk to you about your teaching your neurodiverse learning support teacher so”¦ do you feel like you’re able to kind of get in the heads of your students and that’s for lack of a better phrase, I’m not sure how to phrase it but, than many of the rest of us who are learning support teachers? 

Sara: yeah, I think, you know, several of my colleaguees in different schools or my line managers, have said I have something that they don ‘t have that help me connect with the students that they can ‘t connect to on the same level. And one of my friends who was my supervisor, he was the assistant principal at UNIS Hanoi, for the PYP, said it was a gift, and now I ‘ve decided to call it my superpower, because you know. I live and breathe many of the challenges that not just neurodiverse students have, but all the different challenges, and I know what it feels like. But I also, he also says I have a gift for just seeing a child and in a few minutes, just going, I know what they need and I know how to,  I don ‘t know, but I can suggest how to support him, suggest accommodations and strategies, and whatever. And I just had these really great connections. ANd I can ‘t tell you why, I can ‘t say I ‘m a better teacher than everyone else or I have better knowledge but I think just through being me, I have these skills. 

Lori: Sure, I mean to have you as a staff member at a school would be would be like having a super hero, to help the rest of us better support our children. So. Can you kinda give me an idea of some of the things you ‘re noticing? Are they sensory related, social, or is it just everything? 

Sara: I, um, I definitely notice sensory much quicker than some other educators might. I ‘m also able to put the challenges into terms educators will understand, when a child may not be able to voice it themselves. And I sometimes notice some of the social, not always, because I do struggle with body language and reading that face, but for some professional development of the primary school, the learning support team decided to do some autism awareness training, and one aspect was”¦ a colleague was interviewing me, much like you are now, asking some of the questions about my experience as a person who is neurodiverse, and so many teachers came to me afterwards and were like “thank you for that, I wasn ‘t aware of that. I didn ‘t know what to look for, I didn ‘t understand”¦” and then we took it to a local SENIA Thailand meeting where other schools from bangkok and other professionals from Bangkok, and we repeated some of the PD and also the interview, and I had several other special educators and learning support coordinators come up to me afterwards and just thank me for doing it but also express what they learn from it. Which was, it was good for me. 

Lori: Yeah, well, it was good for them. That ‘s the important thing to remember. Good for all. How do you think or do you think schooling has changed for neurodiverse students since you were in school? 

Sara: Um, I mean, when I was in school, you didn ‘t see, you didn ‘t notice if anybody was neurodivergent. I got the feeling that they probably went to a special school, a unit or attached unit, and definitely when i first started teaching, it was often neurodiverse students would either be in a unit and participate in the mainstream class every now and then or they have a one-to-one aide, shadow teacher, or something like that. And those who were in mainstream school often had lots of challenges because they weren ‘t getting other support. They weren’t getting speech support or cognitive behavioural therapy, or anything else they might need. A homeroom teacher, particularly in the UK, who was not trained as a special needs educator is trying to work with them and do the best they could and the psychologist might come in once a year”¦ and we ‘d see more inappropriate behaviours because of frustration, or not knowing how to communicate, and they’re trying to navigate school. 

Then, when my career developed, I saw more integration, particularly for people with Asperger ‘s. So I ‘ve seen less one-to-one aide, I’m seeing students being part of the classroom, all the teachers learning how to support students who are neurodiverse. I’m seeing safe spaces created in classrooms, I’m seeing results in manipulatives, and I’m seeing we ‘re given the opportunity to get their say in what they need. 

I think that it is like my privilege and my job as an advocate for myself and advocate for my students, being visible. You know, I wear a t-shirt that says neurodivergent to school and all my kids know that I have Asperger ‘s, and every classroom now has headphones, noise reduction headphones, and any kid can use them and they do. We have, we’ve put those results as in when I was at NIST, some teachers were empowered by what I was talking about to create a safe space of room for students to go during recess when they didn’t want to be outside in the noise or in the library in the noise. I mean, so with my support, we created this sensory friendly room for any students to go to but it meant but they shouldn’t”¦ any students could go and feel safe and included too. and so you know I ‘ve seen that change. 

Lori: That ‘s, That’s great and I’m sure you’re inspiring some of our listeners to come create those rooms right now so”¦ I as an aside I really hope that we can have you on this podcast more often because I really think that you can bring so much insight into what we can be doing as schools as international schools, to better support our neurodiverse population because they’re they’re right and you know I think for a very long time international schools really didn’t they didn’t say they had students with any type of difference but but they had them and and now I know the majority of us want to support all our learners so they just need to know how to do it so. 

So, what ‘s next for you? I understand You have a fledgling consultancy so tell us about that. 

Sara: Yeah, so during lockdown, when I started teaching, i had this plan, i ‘ll teach and then become learning support coordinator and work through that, and then at some point when i was getting closer to retirement, I ‘d like to be a consultant and support teachers to support students like me, and with other challenges. But then during lockdown, I realised that all I ‘ve known is about teaching in schools and being a learning support teacher, and I actually find it quite challenging, I didn ‘t know how challenging i ‘d find it until lockdown. Because I was working from home, I had a better work-life balance, you know, I was one of the few people saying “I don ‘t want to go back to school!” You know. I love being with kids, but I find adult relationship difficult, you know, and even get into schools some morning, getting on the tram, and the noise, and the settling, and so I was talking to, I have a therapist who does cognitive behavioural therapy with me for different reasons, and she said “why are you waiting until retirement to do this master plan? You could do it now” and in Germany, they have a law, where you could get an abridged contract. So for a year, if the school agrees, I wanna go part-time, for 60% or 80%, and after a year, you could go back to your full time job if you want to. Or you could continue. So I thought, why don ‘t I take the opportunity to see if I can do something that I really want to do.

And so, I created a consultancy, where I would support families and schools, to advise them. How to support students in the classroom”¦ I ‘m not really about how to write an IEP or advocating for parents in that way. I ‘m more about how I can support your child better and what support does your child need. What do you need, as a school, to be more inclusive and diverse. 

So that ‘s really what my plan is. I have been in contact with April Remfrey, wh has her education consulting business, and she ‘s kind of mentoring me a little bit because I have no clue how to do this. I know what I want to do, and I can build a website-ish.. But  beyond that, I didn’t have a clue. So she ‘s been advising me and telling me where to go. The website just became live, about a week or so ago, maybe 2 weeks, and I haven ‘t taken any bookings yet, still sorting that out, but I offer online consulting, consultancy for families, and if they’ve got questions”¦ you know, they might have just gotten a diagnosis so they just wanna know what that means and what that means for their child. They might want some strategies for home, or it might be a group of parents. I have been asked by a parent in Panama asking if I ‘m willing to speak to a group of parents about different things to support students. And I ‘d like to, eventually when the world is a bit more open, go to schools and look at the classroom and say “have you thought about this, this, or this. Have you tried this? How can I help your school be the most inclusive it can be, specifically for neurodiverse students and sensory processing”, but for other students too. 

I also teach a lot of maths. I’m not really a reading specialist, I’m a math specialist, so I’ve got a lot of strategies for how to support students with math strategies, and so I kinda do both. So I’m just putting feelers out there. I just created something with a company in the UK called the School Improvement Tracker and I have devices for learning support audit talk, and I will be presenting at the AGIS conference in Germany talking about supporting students through math but also bringing in other things too. And i’m just putting feelers out there, but it ‘s more about making sure kids get what they need. 

Lori: That is so needed, and I’m just thinking of some conversation I’ve had over the past few years with families in need of that support. And schools that need that support. So I have a feeling you ‘re going to get flooded with requests. 

Sara: Oh great, because so far, the business is taking money rather than providing any. 

Lori: Well yeah, it ‘s a new business so you can expert it. 

Sara: And my plan is, and i talked to april about this, when things get up and running, we make more connections with small businesses, and so a parent or a school can come to us and say “i have a child who needs this” and we can say “right, this person can do this”

Lori: Now, that ‘s what SENIA is all about and its about making those connections as well. Well, Sara, this is all we have time for today but you have a new superfan, me, and you’re absolutely phenomenal and we definitely hope we can have you back or learn more.

Sara: Definitely, definitely, i actually enjoyed it much more than i thought i would, but then i’m talking about myself. 

Lori: Best topic.  

Thanks for joining us on our show. For more information, including how to subscribe and show notes, please head to our website. That ‘s SENIAinternational.org/podcasts. Until next time, cheers! 

 

Show #49 Advocacy Through Art: A Chat with a Spoken-Word Poet

On today ‘s podcast, host Lori Boll speaks with LeDerick Horne, one of SENIA ‘s keynote speakers at our upcoming virtual conference.

LeDerick was diagnosed with a learning difference in 3rd grade. He shares how this diagnosis impacted him as a child and how he used his passion for poetry to advocate for a more inclusive school system and a more inclusive society.

LeDerick also talks about his podcast, The Black and Dyslexic podcast, and his advocacy work for a school in Kenya.

Please read more about LeDerick ‘s work below in the bio.

Bio

Labeled with a Learning Disability in third grade, LeDerick Horne defies any and all labels. He ‘s a dynamic spoken-word poet. A tireless advocate for all People with Disabilities. An inspiring motivational speaker. A bridge-builder between learners and leaders across the U.S. and around the world who serves as a role model for all races, genders, and generations. The grandson of one of New Jersey ‘s most prominent civil rights leaders, LeDerick uses his gift for spoken-word poetry as the gateway to larger discussions on equal opportunity, pride, self-determination and hope for People with Disabilities.

His workshops, keynote speeches, and performances reach thousands of students, teachers, legislators, policy makers, business leaders, and service providers each year. He regularly addresses an array of academic, government, social, and business groups, including appearances at the White House, the United Nations, Harvard University, the Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week, the National Association of State Directors of Special Education, and the State Departments of Education across the US. His work addresses the challenges of all disabilities, uniting the efforts of diverse groups in order to achieve substantive, systemic change. You can learn more about him and his work at www.lederick.com.

Transcript

Transcribed by Kanako Suwa

[ Introduction music plays ]

Welcome to the SENIA Happy Hour with your host, Lori Boll. We know you ‘re busy so we bring you 1 hour ‘s worth of content in under thirty minutes, leaving you with time for a true happy hour. 

Lori: Hey everyone today, I speak with LeDerick Horne. LeDerick was labeled with a learning disability in the third grade. He’s now a dynamic spoken-word poet and a tireless advocate for all people with disabilities. LeDerick uses his gift for spoken word poetry as the gateway to larger discussions on equal opportunity, pride, self-determination, and hope for people with disabilities. Our discussion today focuses on many things; his diagnosis and the impact that made on his life, how he became interested in poetry, his podcast called The Black and Dysleic podcast, and a bit about his advocacy work for the Rare Gem Talent School in Kenya. It was a true joy speaking with him today and we’re super excited that he will be a keynote speaker at our upcoming conference so enjoy and now, onto the show.

Hi LeDerick and welcome to the podcast 

LeDerick: Lori, hello, thank you for having me. 

Glad to, so first of all, thanks so much for agreeing to be a keynote speaker at the upcoming SENIA conference. 

Oh yeah, I’m looking forward to it. I hope everyone appreciates my message. 

Oh, they will and we feel quite honored to have you. So thanks for taking that time. 

I know that you’ll be sharing through the conference about your journey with a learning difference, but do you mind telling us briefly about your dyslexia diagnosis and what that meant for you as a young student? 

Yeah, so I was, I was a student who started struggling relatively early in school, I had to repeat the 1st grade and then got to the third grade and was diagnosed there and and the first label that I was given was that I was neurologically impaired, which was apparently a fairly common diagnosis, particularly given to black boys here in New Jersey at the time that that I was being diagnosed. And that was really the label that I carried until I got To to go to college and was re-evaluated in my early 20s, and the you know with specific learning disability with a diagnosis of dyslexia and and throughout my my childhood, my experience of carrying a label of having a learning difference was really one around silence and shame. 

I think that my school had a culture that didn’t really promote us talking openly, it was something that really wasn’t mentioned too much in my family and so. Uh, what I definitely knew was that I was someone who was in special ed and I knew that within the hierarchy of the the students within my school I was a part of a group that was at the bottom and so there was a lot of shame associated with that. And that started to flip once I got to college and I was a part of a support program for students with learning differences. 

And the label I actually really embraced was learning disability. I actually found a lot of empowerment in that label, particularly coming at a place where we didn’t talk anything about, you know, having differently, differently abled minds. And yeah, and so that’s that’s sort of the journey you know and and and I I love being a part of this community. I love being a part of, you know, a long line of historical figures whose minds work differently and who have helped to contribute to making the world a great place and and I’m very proud to be someone who’s LD. 

Lori: Well thanks, thanks for sharing that story. You said you like the term learning disability and there’s so many labels out there and it’s a big topic of discussion in groups I’m in, you know, we don’t know. Should we call learning disabled? learning differently? Abled learning difference. Do you have a preference? 

LeDerick: You know, I I land where I think I think that it is an inalienable right that all of us have the right to define ourselves in the way that feels right to us. And whether that be a difference or disability or neurodivergent, you know whatever feels right to you.I think that’s that’s what you should embrace for me again, coming out of a place where we weren’t talking about anything and in the first language that was sort of given to me by the the counselors at my school was was learning disability and it was done in an asset based way where I wasn’t focused on what I couldn’t do, ut instead was focused on what I could do and how I could utilize those, those gifts in those talents to be able to leverage those at the face of different challenges that I was facing. For me, that language is very empowering. 

The other thing is, and this is this is one of the points that I will frequently make when you get into the label conversation is, here in the US, I don’t get it right, because I have a difference, I have rights because I’m a person with the disability and and that is because of a long history of people who have fought for a very long time to allow for access and anti discrimination, you know it’s the Americans with disability that you know the idea ain ‘t right and so, uhm I I do know that it is also important, particularly as we’re preparing young people to become stronger advocates to know the right words that they need to use in order to have legal protection. 

Now for some people, maybe they they never have to worry about that, right? Maybe they’re in a situation where they’ll be able to get a job and live in a community, where being able to advocate on that level is something that will never come up, but for for many people there are those of us who are going to need to access services who you know may even need legal protection in order to get the things that we’re entitled to. And so it’s it’s the the disability piece that that protects us. 

Lori: Thank you. So you’re a poet. 

LeDerick: Yeah, yeah. 

Lori: And I believe you’ll be sharing some of your spoken word poetry with us at the conference. How did, jow did this become a passion for you? 

LeDerick: Yeah, the same at the same time well, I would say poetry has always been a Passion right so Uhm, as a as a very small child, my parents with my parents would play poetry album, spoken word albums for me and I think I’ve always enjoyed language used well. And I got to I , you know I was going through school and was surrounded by guys who were You know who were MC ‘s that were incredible rappers wordsmiths… And and I think many of them maybe saw potential in me that I didn’t even see within myself at the time, but when I got to college and when I was given the freedom to just write and not worry about spelling, the the first thing that started to sort of fall out of me was poetry, and so again the the value of community. I was very fortunate that here in Central New Jersey, I connected with a great group of peers who were also artists, writers and musicians And so it it nurtured that that aspect of of my creativity. I was, I wasn’t, I still am a visual artist even when I was a little kid I could draw and paint. And I I have a BA in mathematics, and I minored in fine art with an emphasis in painting because that’s that’s something that has always been there As well, but. 

Lori: That’s really interesting, sorry the math and the the artists. Those those don’t always go hand in hand. 

LeDerick: Well yeah, yeah. 

Lori: So yeah thanks sorry I interrupted you but. 

LeDerick: No, no I I yeah and I sometimes yeah it, I get a raised eyebrow when I say that you you know, but I was I, I knew I wanted to get a bachelors degree and sort of the dyslexic dilemma right? Like how do I get through this with like the minimal pain, right? Like more school and for me it was like math was so logical right? Like compared to the challenges that I’ve had with writing and spelling and so math felt like a much easier route in order to get degree. I initially also was pursuing a bachelors once I really decided what I wanted to do I thought I wanted to work in education and so the idea of being a math, a math teacher felt again like an an easy path to being in the classroom. Now if I was perhaps a bit braver as a student when I was when I was younger, I think I would have pursue to creative writing or literature degree”¦ But yeah, but a math degree is nothing to be ashamed of.

Lori: Speaking from a non mathPerson yet growth mindset, but yeah Nothing to be ashamed of. So I mean on top of everything you do, you know you’re also the Co host of a podcast called The Black and Dyslexic Podcast, and you you do that with Winifred Winston, I believe who’s the founder of Dyslexia Advocation Inc. 

LeDerick: You got it. 

Lori: I understand from this podcast, but black and underrepresented minorities do not experience advocacy in the same way as white families, so can you tell me a little bit more about that ?

LeDerick: Sure, so the the podcast is Winifred Winston ‘s creation and Winifred’s an amazing social entrepreneur working in Baltimore and with her nonprofit, she’s looking to make Uh, advocacy a lot easier, a lot more affordable for families, particular families of color in the Baltimore area. And she’s also the the parent of a daughter who has dyslexia and a few years back, she sort of started stepping into this advocacy space. And realize that many of her white peers were just much more prepared, much more in the know about the educational system about policies and and, and so with the the with the podcasts, when she initially sort of presented it to me, what it, what it made me realize was that this was an opportunity to do something that I I just really thought there was a need for, which was to create a space where families of color could talk in a in a way that was brave, that was safe about the experiences that they were having, both with their kids and also through navigating the education system and to do it in a way which was culturally responsive, right? 

That that felt like just the way in which people of color sort of exchanged with each other. And yeah, and it’s I think that we’ve both Winifred and I realized that there’s tremendous power that comes from being in the know. But you have to kind of like know the right questions to ask. You have to know the right people to connect to the right books to read and unfortunately a lot of that information just isn’t isn’t readily available within the black community.

And you know, for for some of our white peers, for many of our white peers who are fortunate enough in some cases to send their kids to private schools to afford you know attorneys or or you know some of the best tutors or what have you. There’s just a a knowledge base that builds up from being able to to provide that support, and that’s something that a lot of black families don’t get. So with the with the podcast we’re inviting literacy experts, advocates, attorneys, we have a segment so it’s black and dyslexic, so we have bad ass parents and the parents come in and they they share their story of of you know you know wrestling through some some very challenging times to support their kids and and we sort of meet them in whatever point they are in their journey and then the other thing that’s also very interesting after recording quite a few of these interviews now is, we find that a lot of the the people who are working in the field of course come to this work because they have kids who have dyslexia or ADHD or or what have you and and so you know it even”¦ with many of our experts, it also ends up being a conversation with a family member. So that’s yeah, so that’s the that’s the, that’s the podcast and that’s that’s what we’re hoping to provide. 

Lori: That’s great! 

LeDerick: And then and and if I could just add. You know, so we absolutely have a focus on black and underrepresented minorities for on families, but I think the one of the truisms of of black people is you know, particularly in the US, as we were fighting for greater and greater liberation that fight, although it may be, you know, sort of targeted at the black community is something that’s a benefit everyone and we’re Like we’re being, we’ve been bombarded by comments You know, white Moms, you know who are just like man this is so good! You know this is the information I need and so you know I encourage everybody to listen to it, but we we absolutely do come to this work with the focus on on black people. 

Lori: Well, that’s that’s great and it just made me think about how, what, what we speak about so much in our field is that universal design for inclusion. What you do for students with learning differences can be so beneficial for every student in a class, so if we design our lessons and our programs to support those students, then everyone benefits. So sounds like you kind of have that universal design for for your podcast it’s supportive of everyone. Do you have any tips for educators who are working with families To help better support the families in their journey? 

LeDerick: You know one of the things that, that I’m that, I think is really important is accessible language, right? So within the learning difference space within the the space of providing supports, you know with it being special education or even in private schools we can get so caught up in acronyms, right? And there’s, you could sit, I mean you could sit at these tables and everyone just sort of throws them around. And I, I think in a way that that they’re almost utilized to maybe not intentionally, but as far as how they function, they in a way make access to information and knowledge and empowerment more difficult. So you know, having a commitment to talking in a way which is Which is open up that you know and and and in meetings with families being OK with stopping and saying, hey, that’s what this means. 

You know, I’ve even, I’ve even advocated for for folks writing up a list right of like, here are some of the terms that you can expect to hear in the in the course of this meeting and handing those out to everybody. The other thing I think is really important is that I don’t believe our families, and I think this is especially true for families of color are aware of how much power they have in an educational setting. Right? 

Uhm, you know that no one has to sign off on an IEP until they’re happy, You know until so it’s meets what they think it should, you know? Yeah, even in the podcast, you know. We we’ve interviewed people were like no, we’re gonna have a IEP Meeting every week right every week. Till until until my kid is getting what my kid needs that our families have that power.

My mother, you know my mother has shared with me, you know, dealing with a number of different issues in her life at the time when I Was first diagnosed. You know, going through a divorce, you know having two kids going to tonight’s school to finish her,, her own degree working, you know, working a full time job, and then when the you know the quote, unquote professionals showed up With their PHD’s and their their very fancy words she she did something that she regretted was that she just stepped away. You know she stepped, she stepped, back and assumed that they knew best and and had the right solutions and there was indications right like? I went from, you know, having Cs To bringing home A’s And B’s. Right, but our our parents need to know our families need to know and I think it is the place of our schools to proactively approach them from a place where we want our families to be empowered. 

Uhm yeah, you know I, I’ve also really advocated for schools to come to find a cohort of families who are either in the system you know in the school system now or whose kids have passed through the school system and those those families should be liaisons. They should be advocates on behalf of of family members who are new to the district That they should be the ones that they can turn to when they have questions. If the situation is is challenging, if they’re having an issue with a teacher or an administrator talking to another family member and taking that proactive approach to empowerment, to connecting them to the system is much better than waiting for someone to get to a point where they’re just absolutely upset with the school and then have to seek outside counsel so you know, and I’ve seen it. 

I’ve seen it work in in communities in Ohio and different places in the in the United States and I and I think that proactive approach it’s it’s what we look for for any good Leader and I think it’s something that. We should definitely Look for for For the educators and the administrators In our schools. 

Lori: Yeah, agree 100%. It’s interesting; a colleague and I are are currently writing our first book and it’s on this topic of teachers, educators, therapists and parents all working together to do what’s best for their children. One of my chapters is called Enough with the Acronyms Already. 

LeDerick: That’s great. 

Lori: And I, you know, share a little bit about our first IEP meeting when they’re because our son has special needs and they were like, OK Mr and Mrs Boll, You know this IEP meeting. We just had an SST meeting then we now have an IEP meeting, And for Brayden we gave him these assessments, the ABELS, the AIDAS. See this the. You know, and it’s just overwhelming. 

LeDerick: And like you’re supposed to know what all that what all that means right? 

Lori: Yeah, and by the end I was like what what, what’s happening? I have no idea. So that was my impetus to go back and get my special Ed degree because I didn’t know what was going on with my own kiddo so. 

LeDerick: Well, I look, I look forward to reading your book. 

Lori: Well, we’ll see. Thanks. So the majority of our audience are faculty at international schools around the globe. Knowing what we know now that these students are not advocated for as often as their white peers, What we can we do to ensure this advocacy happens? 

LeDerick: You know I’ve I have as I’ve traveled The world and done more work with communities outside of the United States, I have sort of realized the the challenges that are that folks outside of the US face right? So even if You’re you know someone who’s native and you’re going to a school, you know where, You know an International School, so the population there is to be what primarily like Well, it’s. 

Lori: It depends, but the majority of the international schools have people there from, you know 20 to 70 countries and and it can have a large population of the local population or it may not. It just depends on the school. 

LeDerick: Right and so right, and that’s what my sense was. And so I think you know, the the idea is that different communities, different countries, different cultures are going to approach dyslexia, learning differences, disability in different ways, right? And so I think it’s it is again part of the reason why it becomes so important. You know, like universal design but also individualization having to get to know every, every family right like”¦ What are their values? What are their thoughts? Where their what’s their approach to this? ’cause you know I’ve met some people where, No, like even, school school staff where you know I can, I can talk a whole lot of and provide a whole lot of information around empowering their young people But their thing is like our biggest impediment is the the family, right? Like the parents doesn’t don’t even want us to talk about this difference, right? 

Lori: Right. 

LeDerick: And so it’s like. OK, well well then that’s where we need to start. Right, we need just. We need to figure out. How do we communicate with our families about about what what the services that we have to offer and why it makes sense that they should? They should take advantage of them. And again, you know, being able to you know, utilize technology utilizing multimedia to capture the stories of families who were in your school Who were able to take advantage of supports, You know, playing those for the for the new family members, and I think that’s that’s a great strategy. 

And then I also think that there’s there’s tremendous power and also engaging with the young people in your school to be ambassadors for For the you know, for everyone that’s working in the school, right? So I sort of began my my career around youth leadership and development. So how do we empower young people? With a variety of different kind of disabilities to be able to take leadership roles within the agencies and the organizations that are designed to serve them right so? Uhm, you know is there? A team of youth and young adult leaders who are part of your school that can go and have conversations with families, particularly if they may be a bit reluctant to take advantage of all that your school has to offer if they have a learning difference or what have you right like having that youth voice sometimes can be a whole lot more powerful than having the head of the school show up and say, hey, here’s here’s what I think you should do so so yeah, so those, those are some suggestions right around being able to engage those families. 

Lori: Those are brilliant suggestions, by the way, and now my cats meowing in the background so.. Sure, everyone ‘s hearing that”¦ so I also understand that you are involved with the Rare Gem Talent School in Kenya and you’re currently helping to raise funds so that the school can build a foundation for their new building that will house the students. This school supports students with learning disabilities. 

LeDerick: Yeah yeah. Dyslexic dyslexic students. And they have a few students who are on the autism spectrum as well. 

Lori: Cool, so how did you get involved with that? 

LeDerick: Facebook right? So the head of this school is an amazing lady, amazing parent and educator, Nancy Meunier. And we were introduced through a mutual friend online and chatted for a couple of years until I was asked to do the closing keynote at the International Dyslexia Association Conference. And she was there. And so we got to meet in person and then, just through happenstance, it ended up that she was going to spend about a month here in the states after the conference with a family in New Jersey. So I took it upon myself to go and hang out with her for a day and and some of the conversations that we had had about just you know what is the school and and you Know who do you serve began to evolve into, what do you need right? And she gave me the story of the school of how it basically started in a small home Where she was providing support initially for her own, her own son who’s dyslexic and then for neighborhood families. They would send their kids, you know, to provide that support and and you know what Nancy was able to do, was something really remarkable, Was that she was able to get dyslexic students to be able to go to college, right? 

And in Kenya there are very high stakes testing that had done in middle school, you know, and they shut the whole country down,It’s like a three day thing, and if you don’t, You know the way I understand it, if you don’t pass, then your education basically ends, that’s like, that ‘s it go find a job. And so yeah, the some of the first students to receive academic accommodations, or the first students who receive academic accommodations for dyslexia in Kenya were because of Nancy because of her, her advocacy and so now they they’re renting a a motel, an old motel, that the 1st floor of it is The academic space and the 2nd floor is primarily dormitories. They provide support for about 125 or so students who are a combination of boarding students and then students who come in during the day. I had the pleasure and the privilege of being able to go and spend about a week at the school in 2019. Stayed right there in the community with Nancy and her family and and got to meet a bunch of the family members who were sending their kids, I mean from all over the country were sending their kids to Rare Gem because what they were able to provide was so unique, but they’re renting a space. They don’t have the security of knowing you know whether a lease is going to be turned down for the the the you know the following year, they’re limited in the amount of improvements that they can make, and so very early on in that conversation that we had, it became clear to me that you know they needed to control their own destiny. You know, buy a piece of land and build, build, build their own school and so through our work. And really during the pandemic, it was a great, great support that we’ve got from folks all online for an extended international community of people who were able to make Donations through the Platform Global Giving to the Rare Gem Talent school. And so they were able to make it through the pandemic we we’ve now purchased our first piece of land. 

They’ve recently received all of their approvals, the sort of infrastructure for this first building is in place as far as water and sewage and things along those lines and that. Now we’re looking to raise money now to build the first building, and that first building on that on that first acre of land will allow them to move from this space area now into this new one and then all the funding that comes in will just be about building out this school that the plan is to be able to provide an education for 500 students. 500 dyslexic students in Kenya. And then really? Beyond because they’re they’re getting requests from people outside of Kenya who hear about. The work that they’re Doing so, you know it’s it’s being able to support and provide a resource for the region. 

Lori: That’s fantastic and very inspiring, so. 

LeDerick: No yeah, and and if. And if there’s anyone who’s interested, you can go to the Globalgiving platform and and put in Rare Gem Talent School and I’ll also, I’ll, I’ll provide the link if that’s something. You can put in the shownotes.

Lori: Sure, yeah, yeah. I’ll put those in the notes for sure. So, well, LeDerick, I think that’s all we have time for today, but thank you so much for your time and for your wise words and we are just so excited to see you in December at our conference. 

LeDerick: Well, this was this was amazing again I, I’m glad we were able to have an opportunity to to chat and I’m looking forward to talking with everybody at the conference. 

Thanks for stopping in to SENIA Happy Hour, don ‘t forget to head over to SENIAinternational.org/podcasts and check out our show notes from the discussion today. We at SENIA hope you ‘re enjoying these podcasts. There ‘s so much to explore and we ‘re at the very beginning. So feel free to drop us a note and let us know what you ‘d like to hear more about during your next SENIA Happy Hour. Until then”¦ Cheers! 

Show #50 Drawn to a Story

Today host Lori Boll speaks with Cath Brew. Cath  is an artist who illustrates and educates about marginalised experiences for positive change – with a focus on identity, belonging and expat life.

She ‘s also a passionate advocate for open and honest conversations. Cath hosts Talk-Back Tuesday – a weekly Q&A on social media about LGBTQ+ issues and the podcast “˜Drawn to a Deeper Story ‘ which explores the lives that challenge us and the difficult conversations around them.

Cath will be speaking at the upcoming SENIA conference in the inclusive practices strand, helping all of us understand how we can better support our LGBTQ+ students.

Note: Today ‘s podcast lasts a few minutes longer than 30 minutes.

Bio

Cath is an artist who illustrates and educates about marginalised experiences for positive change – with a focus on identity, belonging and expat life.

She is a passionate advocate for open and honest conversations. Cath hosts Talk-Back Tuesday – a weekly Q&A on social media about LGBTQ+ issues and the podcast “˜Drawn to a Deeper Story ‘ which explores the lives that challenge us and the difficult conversations around them. Cath also works as a shamanic practitioner, helping people to find relief from their emotional wounds.

Connect

Transcript

Transcribed by Kanako Suwa

[ Introduction music plays ]

Welcome to the SENIA Happy Hour with your host, Lori Boll. We know you ‘re busy so we bring you 1 hour of content in under thirty minutes, leaving you with time for a true happy hour. 

Lori: Hi everyone, today I speak with Cath Brew. Cath is an artist who illustrates and educates about marginalized experiences for positive change with a focus on identity, belonging and expat life. She is also a passionate advocate for open and honest conversations. Cath hosts talk Back Tuesdays, which is a weekly Q&A on social media about LGBTQ+  issues and the podcast Drawn to a Deeper Story, which explores the lives that challenge us and the difficult conversations around them. Cath will be speaking today about her presentation at our upcoming SENIA conference and that presentation is in the inclusive practices strand and it’s going to help all of us understand how we can better support our LGBTQ+  students. As an educator who is constantly trying to be more inclusive of all students in international schools, I truly enjoyed our conversation today. And now onto the show. 

Hi, Cath,  and welcome to the podcast. 

Cath: Thank you very much for having. 

Lori: Me oh, you bet so. 

Well, you really have an interesting background. You are an artist. You are an expatriate. You’re an author. And more. Can you give us a little background as to who you are and more about why you have the social media handles of DrawnToAStory? 

Cath: Ooh, of course uhm well I’m an Australian and I live in Southern UK with my wife and. 

DrawnToStory came about really as a way of me processing my experiences like so many of us who lived this this globally mobile life. Uhm, I got caught out by lots of things here where where. 

There’s a sense of you almost expect things to be the same because the countries are so similar and it kept catching me out and I it, I realized that I needed to explore all these complex thoughts and feelings and I started to draw and I started to just have ways of processing things, and I suddenly realized that there were so many other people in the same boat. And illustration had been such a powerful thing for me that I decided to do a book and then that led on to kind of creating a business and and then having a network of people and and all the work that I that I do now and so now the main work that I do is that I illustrate and educate about marginalized experiences for positive change. 

Lori: OK, well that’s that’s a lot. So we’ve got tons of listeners who are expatriates right? Let us know a little bit about your book, Living Elsewhere. 

Cath: Yeah, well as I said it, it started out as a a strategy for me to help myself. I realized that I was badly depressed and I was not coping and I’d always drawn a bit. But drawing, I realized, gave me some relief from that state of mind. And and and I decided knowing that I needed a goal to work towards that, that I would do. I would create a book and I would launch it at the next FIGT conference and that I would give myself a year to do it. And it was a almost like a Wellness project getting myself. Well, of course, with the help of medication and all kinds of other stuff. But what I love about illustration is that the brain processes visual imagery 60,000 times faster than the written word, so it’s another whole level of communicating with people that the written word doesn’t doesn’t give, and so I did this book, that was. It’s essentially 100 cartoons of what it’s like to live outside of your home country, and people assume it’s funny and it’s like cartoon and light and there are some of those, but then you open it and a lot of people would be like smiling and then suddenly like, oh, Oh yes, that’s me. And there’s a a poignancy, and there’s a simplicity that comes through drawings that I find is incredibly powerful. All extraneous information is removed, and you can hone in on a point. Uhm, quite powerfully and and kind of get that off back to back, that thing it hits you in the chest. So that that’s the book really. And everything with Drawn To Story grew out of that because I realized there was this great need to be communicating these experiences, because, as you say, with your listeners, being a lot of them being expatriates that there’s so much great stuff that happens, but there’s an awful lot of difficult stuff that people don’t talk about, and I sometimes think just showing people that someone else sees them is really powerful and the book as a gift, it’s a kind of a small square book, it’s also a book that you can give to family members to say look, this is my life. This is what it’s like so that they really start to understand some of the stuff that you’re living with. When you, when you’re in those moments when you don’t know whether to laugh, to cry or do a WTF. 

Lori: I’m fascinated by it, I’m going to pick up a copy for sure, and I mean and I was just thinking about, you know neurodiversity and how so many of our students who are on the autism spectrum response so well to comic strip conversations or visual information like that, and I wonder if it might support some of those, hose students who are new to the country.

Cath: Yeah, quite possibly. Yeah, I haven’t it it. It obviously wasn’t. Well, not obviously, but it wasn’t created with that in mind, it started out as more of my coping process, but what I have discovered is that it, regardless of neurodiversity that it’s, it’s multigenerational. So a lot of families I know they’ve sent me pictures of their kids reading it, but then also parents as well and I think. I, I think, for people who do respond better to who are different kind of different kind of learners, then and process information differently it it would absolutely be a an option. 

Lori: Yeah, well I I can’t wait to read it. 

Cath: Do you read?  Do you read a cartoon book? I don’t know, everyone keeps calling me 

and also like she, she’s written living elsewhere, I’m like would you write if it’s drawn? 

I don’t know. 

Lori: I think I think definitely you are an author for sure. So we’re absolutely delighted that you’re going to be speaking at our upcoming SENIA conference, of course. Your talk is entitled “Support at International School Staff in Making Schools More Welcoming for LGBTQ+ Families, Insights, Support, and Practical Tools”. It’s quite a mouthful. 

Cath: It is quite mouthful. It could be shortened if needed. 

Lori: But important, so it’s a topic I know many of us and many of our participants really want to learn more about. So can you tell me more about how you became so involved in this particular talk? 

Cath: Umm, I realize I started to see a pattern forming that, uh, as a lesbian, I was getting a lot of questions from straight people about my life and about things to do with the community. And I realized that they were asking the same few questions over and over again, and I thought if this selection of people are asking it. There must be loads more people out there who want to know but the issue is that a lot of people don’t know who to talk to, how to find out. They don’t want to offend someone accidentally by saying the wrong thing, or that they think they don’t know someone in the community who they could ask, so they’re often left wondering, and I just thought actually, if we don’t have open conversations, nothing is going to change. If someone asks me a question and I shoot them down instantly, they’re never going to ask anyone ever again and nothing ever changes. As I keep saying and I have no problem with open, honest questions, nothing is going to be a threat to me. 

So I decided to create as part of my social media in terms of marginalized experiences. 

To create Talkback Tuesday, which I do every Tuesday on Instagram and and Facebook at 2:00 PM London time and the aim is that I talk about anything and everything to do with the LGBTQ plus community, and if there’s no questions, then I just talk about an issue. And I’m not shy. I mean, as you get to know me, you’ll note there’s not subjects I shy away from, so we’ve covered, uh, homosexuality in the Bible. We’ve covered kind of sexual practices. We’ve covered gender, we’ve covered transgendered stuff with like huge amount of subjects. 

And I honestly mean any question is on the table and it’s been really exciting because I’ve had a not a lot of people are public about it. I get an awful lot of private messages. There’s a lot of straight people thanking me for it, but also a lot of LGBTQ+ people saying thank you, we can’t be visible because of our life circumstances but thank you for the work that you’re doing. So yeah, it’s important awareness raising. And important work that, uh, essentially, creates a safer world for everybody. 

Lori: Oh yes, well we will put that in our show notes and make sure that people tune in. It must be so interesting and and so I don’t know, rewarding as well for you hosting that. You must get all sorts of questions but like you said, It’s it’s so nice to have someone to ask those questions too, rather than just being, stuck, you know? 

Cath: Yeah, absolutely yeah. 

Lori: Not understanding and then just taking your ideas as truth? Yes, not your, but you know the person asking. 

Cath: Yeah, I know. Yes, yeah absolutely yeah. And also there’s there’s so much in the media now and you see stories and it’s always kind of salacious stuff or it’s cliches about what they think a gay man might look like or behave like. And I want to normalize it and and broaden people ‘s understandings and be visible, because if we’re not visible. We’re constantly seen as different. We need to be part of people’s lives. We need to be in TV shows as normal characters. We need to be the love song that’s written about in a new something that’s come out or in a magazine that, like the wholesome couple that gets photographed for advertising, talcum powder or something like we have to be there to just to normalize. And so part of my work is all about normalizing and talking, laughing as well, like I’m I’m not precious about any of it so. 

Lori: My husband, I were just listening to a song yesterday on the radio is about this. It was really pretty song. It was like a I need a man who treats me like my father treats my Mom and I said I would, I think this song is so pretty but I think it be so much nicer if she said I need someone who instead, of a man. So you know. 

Cath: Yeah, that that’s true. I get sick of that. Everything is very straight, very binary and my life. I mean it is changing but my life is not represented publicly and often when it is, in an ad on TV or there’s a same-sex couple in our TV show, they then get complaints about it. So like even when it does exist so and and I’m amazed that people don’t use it more for marketing because the pink pound as we call it in the UK and the the the Gay, Lesbian money. I guess we should say is a massive massive market and there’s an awful lot of money to be spent. And if people don’t like something, they won’t go there but if if they know you you are supported, then we’ll spend money with you. 

Lori: Yeah, yeah, exactly so. Well, we obviously don’t want to give away your whole presentation for the SENIA conference, but I do have a few questions for you if you don’t mind, which I now know you don’t. What’s it like for a young person, or maybe not so young of a person to come out? 

Cath: Well, that’s a bit like how long is a piece of string. Its circumstances can be massively varied, uhm? So on one hand you might have children who don’t need to come out because it is so obvious, they’ve been that child that everybody is always just known and they’re just waiting for the child to realize. And I I, I know people like that. So for the the people that do need to come out in that sense, what I would say is that it can be and often it is quite a terrifying thing because all you want is to be loved and accepted for who you are and before you come out, assuming that you’re in control of coming out, you will have spent years, months, if not years, observing the people around you. And what their attitudes are, how they behave when the subject of homosexuality comes up, or if there’s something on TV, the kind of comments that might come out of someone’s mouth as you’re sitting there or watching together. And that person will be looking to see who is safe to come out to so if. If there’s a parent who’s sitting on the couch, watching TV, and every time a gay man comes on, those flag moth, that child is not going to come out to that parent willingly and it makes it very, very very difficult. Uhm, so there’s a it can be incredibly scary, because there’s always the just what if I’m not accepted and it’s not like you’ve just got red hair or a tattoo, or what it like”¦ Those are things that you can change. This is a fundamental part of your identity so when parents do reject children, it’s absolutely crushing and when people then come out, also when they’re older. It can be kind of doubly painful, because if they’re older they’ve often got families, marriages, kids and it’s not to say that they’ve suddenly become gay. They’ve made out known all along, and they’ve tried to suppress it so when people come out, it can often take a while because we know what society thinks of us broadly and you end up often having an internal homophobia of not liking who you are because society tells you that you’re not acceptable. You don’t fit the norm, that kind of thing. 

So I I mean, I remember when I realized, and I remember thinking Oh no, oh, Oh, I have to deal with this like it. It’s something that you’ve actually got to work out, whether you like yourself, whether the people that you love are gonna like you love you, whether you can cope with this life. What does it like? What does all of this mean? So it’s a massive massive thing for that to happen, and also I’m and I’m not just talking about gay and lesbian and bi. I’m talking about transgender people. I know of transgender people who have come out later in life when they’ve got families and they’ve known since they were like 6 or 7 and they’ve had like 50-60 years of being someone else while hiding this other person. 

And if you imagine the effort that goes into trying to be someone else, it it shows. How significant it is of what, why people are afraid to come out and and what their, that hesitation because it’s just, yeah, but what if then someone might not love me so it’s yeah it can be blue and terrifying. And and also it’s just the relief of getting it out. Like if you’ve lived with something for so long. I mean, I remember when I told my brother. He said to me it was it was just wonderful, but he just said oh thank God that’s all it is, he said. I was”¦ He said we were really worried about you. He said you haven’t been yourself, we weren’t sure what was wrong. 

And and I was putting on weight. I was getting depressed. I was not happy and I’d known for, like properly known for about five years and and in that time span I was unwell as a result of it and and the relief when I could come out and be open and honest about who I was was huge and but for the person coming out, there’s also that there’s the duality of the huge relief of suddenly getting it out but then also having to kind of hold back a bit sometimes because it can be complete news to the family member and you need to allow to give them time to get used to it as well so it can be a bit of a dicey time. 

Lori: And and then, like you said, it’s it’s the coming out piece. But then it’s everything in the future that you had fear and anxiety about. What’s next? 

Cath: Yeah, and and that’s often it. If it’s a parent as well, that’s often the concern that I hear from parents is, if they’re positive and they’re OK with it, it’s like we love you. There’s no problem but we just worry about your future that you’re going to be OK because they know as well what society thinks. 

Lori: Society, Yep, exactly well. Here’s a question about coming out. Is it important to come out? I mean, as straight people you never have to. 

Cath: No you don’t. 

Lori: I like stand up and identify I’m straight. So tell me a little about about that. 

Cath: It’s yeah, it’s important because the straight the heteronormative world assumes that you’re straight, so you have to constantly people talk about coming out as though it’s a one time thing. It’s a coming out on a daily basis because every interaction that you have with systems with organizations with people, they assume that your partner is someone of the opposite sex. 

So I might be chatting to someone, a complete stranger in a coffee shop and I’ll say, Oh my other half does this. I’ll use gender neutral language. They then say oh, what does he do as like, ah, do I correct them? If I don’t, it’s like well, it doesn’t really matter. I don’t. There’s a stranger I don’t want to tell them, but actually, if I don’t tell them in my lying to myself and actually, why am I lying to myself? Right like? Why shouldn’t I be able to? And it’s like, well I want to, but is this a safe space? If he has a problem with it, am I going to be. OK, like this is a million and one questions going on in your head every day, at every instance, and then if you had, I mean for me, I’m self-employed, I’ve had jobs where you’re meeting a client and you talk to them and it’s like if I and you’re not coming out for the sake of it, you’re mentioning it in any way like you would say my husband, if I come out to him or her, am I going to lose this job legally officially? That’s not allowed to happen, but we know how the world works. We know how things can be made difficult for you, so coming out with pride and with authenticity is really, really powerful to be living a comfortable life where you own who you are and people see you. And celebrate you in the same way that they would straight person. It’s it’s massive. It’s it’s all about identity and and expatriates will know about identity and how how big we are on things like that so. 

I mean a, perfect example is, a number of years ago, someone said to me, could you please describe yourself? I said 5 words in five words. But I only managed to get out a few and I just instantly said redheaded Australian lesbian and I was like, oh that that surprised me. Where was woman? ’cause I’m a feminist. Where was all these other things and I realized it was the things that had been used against me. And I was trying to reclaim them, so coming out and saying this is who I am. Look at me, see me, it’s it’s. It’s really important. 

Lori: Thank you for that. As a trusted adult, what do you think is the best way someone can react when someone does come out to us or them? 

Cath: Well, I would always say be positive. Say like just welcome it with open arms and actually say. I mean it depends on who the person is. I I mean, trusted adult can become like someone outside of the family or it can be even a family member. Uhm, but I would just say to someone that’s a wonderful, congratulations, love you as you are like I just want you to be happy you’ve got our full support that, as like it’s a parental kind of thing. If it’s not a family member and it’s so in this context we’re talking to you, it’s someone in the school equally, I would say that’s fantastic, congratulations. 

But what I would add is if someone is a teacher that there’s a level of pastoral care that a teacher has in a school environment for for students, and it might also be good to say to a student, do your parents know? Because then you know very quickly what that home situation is going to be like and whether the child might be coming to you for support because they’re not welcome at home because of if they’ve told apparent and and and checking, particularly if someone is trans. But also I mean. Anyone really is, are you OK? Are you safe? Do your parents know? Have you told anyone else and and also what what do you need from me? How do you want me to help you? Because when someone is a minor and that kind of school setting where you do have responsibilities. I, I always think there’s another level of inquiry that that should probably happen. 

Also, so that you don’t accidentally out that child to their parents. If they don’t know so, uhm. 

Lori: Well, that kind of leads me into my next question. So as International School educators, how can we better support not just our students, but their families. 

Cath: There’s a number of really simple ways, uhm, very simple thing is, is the use of language. If there’s any forms that the school has, it often would be a name of mother name and father on a form. Let’s change that to parent number #1, parent #2 or come talk about instead of saying to child, what does Mommy do? What does Daddy do like? What does your parent do? It’s using neutral language. It’s things like being aware that same sex couples who have children, the parents may not have the equal level of of rights in that country in terms of visas, so I know of couples where one parent is considered to be the birth parent and therefore the other one doesn’t have as many rights, so they will be in a country on tourist visa, while the birth parent will be there on the parental visa, so they can do a lot of stresses around renewal times visa, so just being aware of what might be going on in someone family. 

 

I would also say never assume, I said this before, but never assume that parents know their child is LGBTQIA and really, there’s kind of a, there’s probably two other things that that are really easyis that when talking to children, like I said, don’t don’t be saying what does Daddy do? What does Mommy do? Because that then child, that child then has to say I don’t have a daddy so then, you’re reaffirming their difference all the time. It’s it’s putting awkwardness and putting issues onto a child who in their home environment. Life is normal when they go outside of that, suddenly they’re they’re coming up against the norms of society. Shall we say that create that create tensions, but one of the things that I think is particularly good for families, but also for raising awareness more broadly is to show for the school and for teachers to show that you are inclusive. So say it on your website. Say we are an inclusive school. Celebrate coming out days have celebrate, acknowledge the Transgender Day of of Awareness. In in any marketing material have same sex couples in your marketing materials. To start a LGBTQ club for kids at the school. There’s so many different things that can be done, just showing that you’re there and and supporting and also things like don’t have Daddy-daughter dances. 

Lori: Yeah, I was just that. That’s what I was thinking of Is is all these holidays actually that we celebrate Mother’s Day and Father’s Day? And and yeah, how that kind of normalizes the differences and we don’t want to do that so. 

Cath: Yeah, and also that that often has a big impact on adopted children, particularly transracial adoptions. It’s just. It doesn’t have to change it for everybody in that sense, but it’s just shifting things very slightly so everybody can fit basically.

Lori: So important, thank you, so I’m assuming you’ll be giving us some definitions during the conference of all the acronyms you just, you just mentioned IA. So from my reading recently, it’s LGBTQIA+. So can you just give us IA? Just, just for today. 

Cath: Yes, what I would just say is the LGBTQIA it it depends on where you are in the world. 

Actually what which country uses. Some people just do LGBTQ or LGBTQ+lots of variations, which makes it even more complex. 

Lori: OK. 

Cath: But yes, the I stands for . Intersex and the A generally stands for asexual or ally. And Ally is straight people and and cisgendered people. So some people, some people in the community don’t like the A’s ally because it’s like we’ve got our own acronym like just go away, let usjust have something that sells. But yes, it’s generally asexual or ally, and the plus is then anyone else that does that is not a heterosexual or cisgendered, and I’ll just say I’m using the word cisgender, but just so people know cisgendered is it’s CIS gendered and it’s someone who is living the same. I speak, sex that they were assigned at birth. Right, yeah, yeah. So born woman living as a woman. 

Lori: Yeah, well, you know. Just as an aside, I’m a 52 year old straight woman and just through the years has have watched the the letters grow and and and then you know the the the difference between sexuality and gender. I mean I had to have all that explained to me by some younger people who could help me through it because it it isn’t just known. 

Cath: Yeah, yeah. No, it’s not. 

Lori: But it’s, but it’s important that we get out there and learn. 

Cath: It it is and and you’re not alone in that. Like so many people don’t know the difference between sex and gender. Sex is biological, gender is social social. Right? So it’s there’s there’s. There’s so much. It’s variation in all these terms, s come to my talk. And you’ll, you know how to speak LGBT. 

Lori: Exactly well on our last kind of like hot button topic I think come we talk a lot now about pronouns and many people are now putting their pronouns in their email signatures. It’s a newish pronoun that, well, not really new, but is, that’s being used to describe people is they / them so just”¦ can you help us understand why pronouns are so important?

 

Cath: Yeah, I think a perfect example is. If I just start calling you Luke. It’s very nice talking to you today, Luke. Uh, I’m I’m surprised that your name is Luke, ’cause you actually look like a woman to me, and it’s,,, I make a bit of a joke and that might not really make sense to people, but it’s. It’s how we are spoken to every single day. So if you imagine as a woman as a straight woman. For tomorrow, whatever next day, everywhere you go, people refer to you as a man. 

They use, he hears they call you Luke. You start to feel, I mean if you if you think about that now in your body what that feels like I’m, I’m sure there’s a level of discomfort, It’s not kind of sitting comfortably and when you’re constantly called something that you don’t feel that you are,  

It’s physically painful. 

So if you identify as gender neutral or transgender or genderqueer, whatever way you identify. It’s really important to be able to feel safe and to have a space to exist now, a lot of straight people don’t see why it’s important, but what I would say to people is the fact that you have a choice about whether you choose to put it shows that you there is a privilege there that. 

You it doesn’t iImpact your life. It’s not a negative thing for you and and the reason that people are starting to put it that who are straight, who would put she/her,I mean he/his is really powerful form of being an ally because it normalizes it so some people have said, well, why can’t, if you want to use it they then you just use it. That’s fine, and on one level yes, but on another level, why do people who are on the outside? Why do they always have to be the one that leads the fight and then people are tired, as are margins. And inclusivity is about the people who have the power and the majority of inviting a space for others to come into. So if straight people do it as well it shows, firstly it shows. Other people like gender neutral people or people who aren’t binary. That that person gets it that that is potentially a safe space and and it also it’s about visibility. It’s about normalizing. It’s about showing that there’s all these other options now. 

In Western society, we talk about binary as male and female. You look into other cultures, in other lands, spiritual parts as well. There’s a lot of other genders that have existed for a very, very long time, and people think this is a new thing and it’s trendy and it’s just, but it’s not. It’s a varieties of gender, have been around for a very, very long time. Yeah, so people need constant that, well, with the with the, They them I know that. 

Lori: At the beginning, when we first started hearing about this as a someone who follows grammatical rules to the TI really, really struggled with the they/them, Excuse me because you know that that’s a plural, that it was more than one person and yeah, and then I. 

Cath: Yeah, I know I was the same. Yeah I was the same. 

Lori: Read an article of a, I think a grandmother wrote it about her, her grandchild, that preferred, they them, and this grandmother was like, yeah, I was the same way. Get over it and I was like yeah get over it, yeah. 

Cath: Yeah, absolutely, but this is the thing, bottom line. So yeah, for, for someone who doesn’t need to do it. It’s the easiest thing. It’s the tiniest thing to do, but for the person who needs it, it makes an enormous difference. It’s like 1 less difference that we have between each other. One less thing that that makes someone feel other. It’s yeah. It’s really really important and and I know the people in my life that are they them’s. I mean I, I refer to her as my wife and I say her because that’s what we, she, ny wife says it doesn’t matter to me what you call me but but, When they go and talk to other people, it’s always I’m a they/them. Right and and and people choose how they they present themselves and and the other day my wife was filling out a form a government form and they had male, female, and nonbinary. And they said to me it was such a relief. It just, it’s not that internal disease or that discomfort. It makes a massive difference. I cannot stress that enough. I love I I hope. So it’s a minor thing, but it’s massive. 

Lori: I I hope if people take well, I mean there’s so many things to take away from this podcast today, but one of them is to go back to their schools and work on that paperwork. It’s something that I think many of us haven’t haven’t thought about so, No, no and it’s”¦ 

Cath: I  mean when we got married, we made the photographer, we had to fill in the form that said name of groom, name of bride. So I was the bride and my wife is the groove, but that was a long. I mean that was 14 years ago and it’s just not good enough now, like people need to to to do that. And in in my talk at the conference. I will be giving a lot more detail and kind of practical skills and things that people can use to to be able to do this. So you’re not you’re not out there on your own, having to work out what to do. 

Lori: I love it. Well, I honestly can’t wait. I’m really looking forward to your talk. So thank you.

Cath: Fantastic, I’m looking forward to it, thank you. 

Lori: Well, thanks for joining us today. I truly did learn a lot from you and I know I know our participants at the conference are are just anxious and ready, ready to learn from you as well. 

Cath: Yeah fantastic. I look forward to meeting everyone. 

Lori: Thanks, Cath. 

Cath: Yeah, thank you. 

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