Show #71 Ubuntu: We Are One

Show #71 Ubuntu: We Are One

Today host Lori Boll speaks with Estelle Baroung Hughes, an inspirational speaker, school leader, and founder of the non profit organization Africa Learning International which focuses on Quality Education for All. Estelle trains teachers and organizes educational events in Africa to make a difference in schools and learning on the continent . Estelle is SENIA’s keynote speaker at our upcoming conference in South Africa. Estelle is also a blogger and a musician. As a Cameroonian citizen, she is passionate about the cultural wealth of her 250 languages country and developing cultural literacy in education. 

Bio

Estelle Baroung Hughes is the secondary principal at the International school of Dakar and the director of the NGO Africa Learning International focused on SDG 4 (Quality Education for All) . Estelle trains teachers and organizes educational events in Africa to make a difference in schools and learning on the continent . Estelle is also a blogger and a musician. As a Cameroonian citizen, she is passionate about the cultural wealth of her 250 languages country and developing cultural literacy in education.

Connect

Resources from Today’s Show

Show #72 Mindsets + Skill Sets = Results

Show #72 Mindsets + Skill Sets = Results

Today, host Lori Boll speaks with Kathleen Kryza, an outstanding international presenter/consultant and author of 6 books for educators who is committed to bringing best brain-based educational practices to schools and teachers so they can support and nurture their students. On today’s podcast, Kathleen tells us why it’s important to teach our students about how their brains work by being intentional and transparent and how this learning helps our students succeed. Kathleen also shares some practical tips and strategies that you can start using in your homes or classrooms immediately. 

Bio

Kathleen Kryza is an international presenter/consultant and author of 6 books for educators. She has worked with schools around the world for over 30 years. As a teacher-researcher, Kathleen is passionate, informed and committed to bringing best brain-based educational practices to schools and teachers so they can support and nurture their students. Kathleen has taught general education, special education, gifted and talented students, and students of varying socio-economic and multi-cultural backgrounds.

Connect

Resources from Today’s Show

Show #73 Supporting our Gifted Learners

Show #73 Supporting our Gifted Learners

Today host Lori Boll speaks with Anita Churchville, an educational consultant and founder of the HAGT Learners Collaborative. She currently coordinates the High Ability Program at the American School of Bombay and conducts professional development workshops, courses, and ongoing coaching at a number of private international schools with European and American curricula.  Anita’s published writing includes The 3 E’s of Authentic Parent Partnership for Gifted Students and Ability Grouping ≠ Tracking. Anita serves as a New England Association of Schools and Colleges (NEASC) accreditation school visitor and as a professional mentor for the Association of International Educators and Leaders of Color (AIELOC). Lori and Anita speak about HA/Gifted programs and how educators can best support these learners in their classrooms.

Bio

Anita is an educational consultant and founder of the HAGT Learners Collaborative. She currently coordinates the High Ability Program at the American School of Bombay and conducts professional development workshops, courses, and ongoing coaching at a number of private international schools with European and American curricula.  She previously created and coordinated special and gifted education programs at the American School of Doha and at Academia Cotopaxi. She also worked as a program specialist in the Los Angeles Unified School District in California, supporting 16 schools.  She has a master’s degree in special and gifted education, a K-12 principal’s license, and certification as an educational diagnostician. She has presented workshop sessions at the International Baccalaureate (IB) Regional conference, the World Council for Gifted and Talented Children (WCGTC) biennial world conference, annually at the Challenge for All Summit, I Am a Teacher (IAAT), ASB Un-Plugged, Center for International Education (CIE), ASB Plugged-In, International Career and Counseling Conference (IC3), DisruptED Conference, The Inquiry Educators’ Summit (TIES), the Knowledge Source Institute (KSI), University of Toronto Teacher Training Program, the Near East South Asia Council of Overseas Schools (NESA), East Asia Regional Council of Schools (EARCOS), Special Education Network and Inclusion Association (SENIA).  Her published writing includes The 3 E’s of Authentic Parent Partnership for Gifted Students (article, the Association for Middle Level Education (AMLE) and Ability Grouping ≠ Tracking (blog post, HAGT).  Anita serves as a New England Association of Schools and Colleges (NEASC) accreditation school visitor and as a professional mentor for the Association of International Educators and Leaders of Color (AIELOC).

Connect

Resources from Today’s Show

Show #74 Executive Functioning Challenges: Impact on Students with ADHD & Dyslexia

Show #74 Executive Functioning Challenges: Impact on Students with ADHD & Dyslexia

Today host Lori Boll speaks  with Helen Trethewey, an experienced inclusion leader with a passion for early identification of children with learning differences. She has worked in education for over 29 years in the UK, Belgium, Hong Kong, Vietnam and now Sweden.

Helen is Dyslexic herself and is a specialist Dyslexia teacher and assessor. She also authors a blog on twice exceptionality. On today’s show Helen and Lori discuss how executive functions impact students with learning differences such as ADHD and Dyslexia as well as common misconceptions teachers and parents may have about student performance. Helen gives some easy to implement strategies to support students with their working memory and task initiation. We’re sure you’ll have many takeaways from today’s podcast.

Bio

Helen Trethewey is an experienced Inclusion leader with a passion for early identification of children with learning differences. She has worked in education for over 29 years in the UK, Belgium, Hong Kong, Vietnam and now Sweden. She is a specialist Dyslexia teacher and assessor. Helen understands the needs of children and families in the international context and regularly shares information through writing articles and public speaking. She writes a popular educational blog called ‘Twice Exceptional’ which has up to date, informative articles about neurodiversity and learning differences.

Connect

Resources from Today’s Show

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: Hello everyone. Today, I speak with Helen Trethewey who is an experienced educator with a passion for early identification of children with learning differences.  She’s worked in education for over 29 years in the UK, Belgium, Hong Kong, Vietnam, and now in Sweden. Helen is dyslexic herself and is a specialist dyslexia teacher and assessor, and authors a blog on Twice Exceptionality. On today’s show, Helen and I discuss how executive functions impact students with learning differences such as ADHD and dyslexia as well as common misconceptions teachers might have about student performance. I’m always studying and wanting to learn more about executive functioning skills and I learned quite a bit from Helen today. For instance, did you know that students with ADHD’s executive functioning skills are 3 years behind? Yeah, me neither. I’m sure you’ll take away a lot from today’s podcast as well. So now on to the show. 

Well, hello Helen and welcome to the podcast. 

Helen: Hi nice to nice to talk to you this evening.

Lori: Well,  you have been a SENIA presenter at 2? virtual conferences in the past or just one? 

Helen: I did, I originally spoke in Hong Kong a number of years ago, in person. That was my first time with SENIA, which was great, and then I was due to speak in the Philippines, which was cancelled due to the pandemic. 

Lori: Oh, we all know what happened there… 

Helen: Yeah, and then I think, I actually think I’ve done two virtual ones. 

Lori: Yes, yes! So, you’re very well known in the SENIA world and thank you for all you’ve done. And today, we’re here to talk about executive functioning skills. Not a new topic for most of us for sure but very important to circle back to and I feel like there’s always new information coming in about it, new strategies, and it’s just, we just need to know more about it and dive in, right? 

Helen: Yeah, exactly, I mean like, I’ve just moved to Stockholm and I have a whole new school now so I actually work with students from 3 all the way to 18, and it has really made me come back to executive functions because it’s interesting how many students, particularly in secondary schools are so capable, they’ve got great verbal skills, you know, they notice patterns and connections, but then they just come across as being so disorganized. They don’t remember their homework, they they don’t remember where they’re meant to be, they just they just don’t show themselves at the best in in lessons. And largely that is due to executive functions.

Lori: Yeah,  yeah and so important in our role we often hear frustrated parents or teachers you know they call students lazy and ask why don’t they just work harder, why can’t you just turn in the work, why are you so disorganized…  how do these executive function difficulties differ from character flaws or choices of students? 

Helen: I’d say… it is one of those areas where the more I work in international schools and the more I work with international teachers, it’s interesting how people still very much view people’s performance on, to do with effort. You know. If you make more effort, that you could listen to instructions better, if you make more effort, you could do your homework, if you make more effort, you could get started… and it’s kinda just trying to understand, actually for someone with ADHD, those executive functions are delayed and it’s not really within their control at all. I was really inspired by a webinar recently with Chris Dendy, and she was talking about the 3-5 year delay that students can have in their executive functions. And when you think about it, that’s huge. If you’ve got a 12 year old student and you’re expecting them to be fairly independent, fairly mature in the way they’re approaching their studies, where, in terms of their executive function, they’re actually more like an 8 year old. And that’s a huge difference. Sometimes, our expectations of students are unfair. We think they have control over their emotional regulation for example or they’re mindful of how their behavior is affecting other people or even themselves, and yet, it isn’t actually within their capacity to really understand those things. 

Lori: Wow. That’s really interesting. I hadn’t heard about that three years delay. Can you repeat the name of that study or the author? 

Helen: Um, I think she’s an American author, I think written quite a lot of books. I was lucky enough to listen to a webinar by her, she’s called Chris Dendy and she’s a doctor. Some of her children have ADHD and one of the big point she was making in her webinar was that, you know, a lot of these students do become good eventually but it can be a long way down the line. I mean, the research now is saying that executive functions aren’t fully developed until the age of 25, which is why many students actually struggle when they’re at university and that’s a typical development. Then you take students who maybe have ADHD and you got that delay, they’re probably not going to be “coming good”, if you like, until they’re in their 30s. 

Lori: Yeah.

Helen: Which, you know, is kind of worth bearing in mind. 

Lori: Yeah. Well, thank you. I’ll put those, her research, into our show notes so people can refer to that when they’re listening to this. So, okay, well, let’s talk about executive functioning. You’ve mentioned executive functioning and ADHD, uh, does the same 3 year thing kind of go for dyslexia as well? 

Helen: I’m not aware of any research that says that, but it does definitely affect students with dyslexia. And given that a lot of students with dyslexia have ADHD and dyslexia, there’s a lot of overlap. 

Lori: Gotcha. 

Helen: So it’s less, less certain what the delay is for someone with dyslexia, but if you including working memory, a lot of the information online says that there is 8 executive functions and they include working memory in that. And if you’re doing that, that is huge for someone with dyslexia, as that is one of the main kind of challenges in life. 

Lori: Okay, yeah. 

Helen: And it has such a knock on effect. I do find it quite interesting that they say there’s 8 executive functions, if you actually look at the list of them, things like impulse control and emotional control, organization, prioritizing, they’re so interlinked that it really is just the skills for life and the thing with the school system is, our whole school system is built around the typical development of these skills. So if you think of what you’d expect of an infant, a preschool child, then an elementary school or infant child, the benchmarks we put into education are all based around these executive functions developing normally. And so that’s where it’s challenging, when we’re expecting students in secondary school to be suddenly independent and do their homework in a timely manner and they’re given a task so they should know what to do, and yet, many of them haven’t got the executive function to be able to be independent. 

Lori: Mmhmm. You know, that’s interesting. I had a Director of Student Services reach out to me somewhat recently to ask if there was some sort of continuum of when, or I guess, expectations of when a student should be able to do these certain executive functioning skills. There’s nothing like that that would exist, right? 

Helen: Ummm, yea, I mean, I think it’s interesting how it’s almost like a, an intrinsic kind of expectations, when you’re like, teaching a child who is like 6, who just blurts out the answer. Well, that’s perfectly, you know, it’s perfectly fine, it’s within a normal range.

Lori: Right. 

Helen: But then you take someone who is 11 and they’re just saying hte first answer that comes into their head, that really is unacceptable. And then that becomes, instead of being a normal behavior, it becomes, that child being difficult or it becomes that idea of a character flaw. 

Lori: Right! 

Helen: When in fact, that person is still doing their best, just isnt’ age-appropriate as it were. 

Lori: Mmmhmm. Well, let’s talk more about executive function and task initiation. It’s one that I know that many parents, many teachers get frustrated with becaues you set a student to work and you follow up about 10 minutes later or 15 minutes later and nothing is done, or there’s a long project and you know, might take weeks for our middle school and high school students to do an assignment, and then you follow up a week, 2 weeks later, and nothing has been done. So, can you share, elaborate a bit more on the genuine difficulty that some students have with task initiation? 

Helen: Yea, I mean task initiation, I would say, is one of the ones that people don’t talk about very much and I would say many teachers and parents don’t think it’s a genuine difficulty. I think they feel that the student is just choosing not to get started, and actually, as you unpack it, it’s quite complicated unfortunately, in tha there can be a lot of reasons why a student might not get started. For someone with ADHD, you have the brain chemicals that affect how you approach different tasks and genuinely when you’re doing something that is routine or you consider boring, the chemicals for your neurotransmission are not being produced sufficiently. So it’s not that you don’t want to do the task, I mean, maybe you don’t want to do it because it’s boring but it’s not so much that you don’t want to do it, it’s that you can’t do it, whereas when you’re doing something like a computer game that’s fun, your brain produces the chemicals that you need and you are energized and in the zone. And that thing in itself is very puzzling for both parents and teachers. And that’s when it does feel like a choice because obviously they can’t see what’s happening inside someone’s brain. They can’t know that it’s almost painful for this student to try and do this routine task that you think is very straightforward. So that’s a big factor, I would say, for people with ADHD particualrly, but even those with dylexia or people who find it difficult with task initiation, it’s quite complicated. There’s an emotional side to it, so there can be a fear of failure, if a student who has had many many experiences where they’ve tried to do a task but it hasn’t worked out relatively well, there’s this sense of “do I even want to start this task and have the teacher not be pleased with me”. 

Lori: Hmmm…

Helen: Or is it better to not start it at all and pretend you don’t want to do it than to actually take the risk to get started. And I think particularly when there isn’t a lot of scaffolding, the fear of blank page, I genuinely think is quite terrifying. I still remember when I was on a teacher training course and we were asked to write a poem on cats. And it just sounds so simple, I know what a cat is, I know what a poem is, and yet, my thoughts were racing – should I make it funny, should I make it short, should it be acrostic, what part of cat should I start, you know, should I start with the tail or the whiskers… and because all those thoughts are endless and you can see other people around you writing, you know, the senes of terror does rise! And to me, that was a real kind of, lightbulb moment but for many students, just seeing that blank page and having the thoughts racing, can be quite overwhelming. 

Lori: oh my gosh.

Helen: And that’s why some students just don’t get started, and actually can’t even think of what the first step is, the first step to take. 

Lori: That…. Yeah. Total lightbulb moment for me. I’ve had the exact same experience at a PD where we had to write a limerick and in my whole life, I’ve been told poetry is not my thing, growing up in elementary school, teachers were like “mmm. Not really your thing, Lori”, and so we had to write a limerick and gosh, this was about 10 years ago, and I couldn’t do it. I just sat there and when it came time to turn it in, I was like “Yeah, I didn’t do it”. It was much easier for me not to do it, than to fail at writing the limerick. Well. Thank you. 

Helen: Yea, I mean, I think the whole thing with fear of failure is a big part. Also for people who’ve got dylexia, and well ADHD, when the teacher is introducing, the amount of focus that has to go into that, processing new vocabulary, you know, their working memory can really become overloaded so by the time it’s becomes time to start working on the task that the teacher wants you to do, you’re actually really drained all your brain energy, if you’d like… and then you just… can’t get started, the task just seems too overwhelming, too many steps, too many things to do. So I think, I mean, task initiation is a lot more complicated than it initially seems than people thinking “Oh, people just can’t be bothered” or “Oh they’re just lazy”. 

Lori: Yeah, right. 

Helen: Or that they didn’t understand it, because there’s often a misconception that they didn’t understand it. You know, if you take the poem example, I knew what a cat was but I couldn’t get started.

Lori: Sure. Right. Okay. Thanks. So, what can educators do? What strategies, interventions, can we employ to help students with difficulties? We can focus on working memory, study skills, what do you think? 

Helen: I mean, there’s a lot of things to do. The biggest thing is actually accepting that the student is doing their best. I think the teachers’ acceptance that what’s happening might actually be that students’ best, might actually have quite a profound effect. And then on the practical side, it is about scaffolding. You know, the teacher is actually modeling what you want, if you’re writing a poem, a story… talks out loud, goes through the thinking process, puts up things on the wall, and then that would be the hook, hopefully, for the students to get in. I think we get caught up in education about being independent and what students can do independently, and we forget that a lot of the learning, even if they are being given sentence starters, scaffolds, and vocab lists, the learning is in understanding the process and in knowing how to get from A to B, and if they need some help along that, I think that’s okay. 

Lori: Yeah. That Zone of Proximal Development is right in there. Agreed. Well, let’s then move on to parents. How can we, as educators, collaborate with parents and other educators to better support our students, to help? 

Helen: I think the role of the student, I mean, the parent, is absolutely key in that it really does have to be a partnership with the parents and som uch of developing executive skills is with parents. If you think and this is where it’s difficult for students with ADHD, dyslexia, because often their parents have ADHD or dyslexia…

Lori: Oh, yeah… 

Helen: And so I would argue that a lot of typical students, we feel like they develop executive function naturally. But actually what happens is watching their parents. They’re watching their parents make the shopping list or have time where they plan out events. They see their parents check their bag the night before to make sure everything is in it, and so they’re in an envrironent where these organiational skills and day-to-day skills are modeled. And that’s a huge part of developing executive functions. Equally, if you’ve got a parent who is always always late and hasn’t planned ahead, then it’s very likely that you will kind of, follow suit, as it were, without realizing there is a way of not being late and planning your time more effectively. 

Lori: Mmmhmm.

Helen: I think with teacher and parents, the partnership in making students successful is key. I’m all for this idea of pre-teaching. I don’t know how familiar you are with it but the idea that students, rather than doing homework and reviewing what you’ve done in the lesson, you’re kind of getting a heads up on what’s coming the next day and that can make a huge impact in terms of working memory. We know that when you’re looking at things that you’re familiar with, your working memory is not as challenged, so therefore, as educators, if we can get parents working in partnership with us and we use things like Google Classroom, homework task, and we know that the parent will actually support the child and say “look you’ve got this video and you do need to watch it.” That sort of support can really make a difference in the classroom. 

Lori: Hm. Interesting. I have not heard of the term free teaching. Free teaching? Is that what you called it? 

Helen: Pre-teaching! Some people call it…

Lori: Oh, pre-teaching! 

Helen: Some people call it, um, front loading. And there’s a lot of talk a few years ago about flipped classroom. This is more bite size than flipped classroom. 

Lori: Gotcha. 

Helen: It’s like, we’re going to read something in class and we’re going to introduce new vocabulary but those things can be shared, particularly when we use platforms like Google Classroom, those can be easily shared specific students but you do, then, need the parents really on board. Because otherwise it’ll just be like other homework tasks that just get ignored and forgotten. 

Lori: Of course. Yeah, that was an example of my hearing needing to be checked… I heard free teaching and my brain context just went in a different direction. Hahahaha. Got it now. So, do you have any success stories or case studies that have shown promising results? 

Helen: Well, it’s been quite interesting this year, as I’ve said, it’s a new experience for me. I’m working with a lot more in the secondary schools than I have done in the past and I found it really interesting, I just recently diagnosed a student with dyslexia where the parents had suspected it for many many years and I said, I do some study skills session with him. And when we started, I was quite surprised, you know, he didn’t know how to make notes. You know, this is a 14 year old boy whose gone through school and he’s in the first year of IGCSE currently, but suddenly he started doing poorly in his studies when things were more intense, more materials, he started to do badly, hence the reaching out for the assessments. He’d done quite badly on some assessments and then I started working with him and also he also didn’t really know how to memorize things. You know, he, as someone who is dyslexic, it’s really hard to read. But all he would do is just read the materials to himself and then try to memorize it which really wasn’t working at all. 

And really, all I did was to teach him one, verbalizing with your own voice, makes a huge difference to your memory and you know, you just have to teach something. Even if you teach the cat, what you’ve learnt that day or you can make a video of yourself you feel uncomfortable talking to yourself, but just the act of verbalizing what you think you’ve learnt triggers the memory slightly and also helps with the idea of retrieval practice. And then you then realize, oh, I didn’t really remember that word and you can check that with your notes. So that was one of the strategies I did with him.

And then the other one was to do with word association. And with particularly, scientific vocabulary, trying to think of something that it, the word, reminded him of to help him understand what it meant. So something like “condense”, think of “condensed milk” that’s really thick and kinda smushed together, the idea obviously that the particles becoming liquid. But those two, it’s really interesting, because those two strategies literally his marks, he’s gone from getting Ds to getting Bs in 6 months. 

Lori: Really? Wow, yeah. 

Helen: And teachers are amazed. And again, I think success brings concerted success, so now that he sees it’s working, he’s more willing to study, he admits himself, he spends more time studying because he could see that it actually works, the results. 

Lori: Yeah, yeah. It’s incredibly how just some explicit teaching of these skills can help our students so much. And it’s just something so simple like that. 

Helen: Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, it’s not actually rocket science.

Lori: No, yeah… 

Helen: Some of the strategies are the most effective are actually the most simple but sometimes we just don’t think to tell the students those things. We just assume they know how to memorize things, how to study for an exam… and so many of them don’t. 

Lori: It’s, you know, I do quite a bit of presentations as well on executive functioning, mostly in the middle school / high school, all about the teenage brain and executive functioning, and when I’m listing out the strategies for teachers, sometimes I feel silly, like… “you know, everyone knows this, I don’t know if I should present this because everyone knows this”, but you know, I think as teachers, we get we’re… very busy, and we get really involved with the curriculum and what we need to teach, sometimes we forget that we just need to dial it back a bit and specifically teach these skills to students as we are teaching them the curriculum. So, you know, it is important for us all to learn these explicit skills and you know, review them with our students. 

Helen: Yeah, I think particularly when they move to secondary school is where it falls between the cracks, because when I was talking to an English teacher about teaching note taking, they’re like “well, that’s not really to do with English… why should we do it?” or if we’re talking about research skills, an idea of “well, that should be the geography teacher who teaches research skills if it’s important in that subject”, but somehow basics kind of slip through the cracks because everyone assumes that they have these skills or that someone else has been teaching them. 

Lori: Exactly! Okay, so let’s talk about one more executive function challenge – procrastination. Something I’m really good at… 

Helen: *laughs* yeah, and I think a lot of people are. I was reading an article about Peg Dawson who wrote “Smart but Scattered” and she talks a lot about just baby, baby steps. And trying to get students to take some responsibility by having kind of a realistic goal of what they are going to achieve. If you imagine students who never does their homework or rarely does their homework, to break that cycle, it needs to be something quite small. So she suggests asking the students what time they’re gonna start the homework and where they’re going to do it, and then some sort of small step that is achievable. So it might be just getting their homework out of their bag and putting it on the table at 7 o’clock before dinner, doesn’t necessarily mean that they’ve got to start the task, but then they do that over a period of time with the idea that once they get over that initial hurdle, perhaps, they will then start to do maybe the first question of the homework, and then over a number of weeks, maybe do a few more questions. I thought that was a veyr interesting strategy. 

Lori: For sure, yeah. I’m a big fan of Peg Dawson’s book, “Smart but Scattered” – I use it a lot in my teaching as well. And did you know that she was a presenter, a keynote presenter at one of our SENIA conferences in the past? 

Helen: No, I didn’t know. 

Lori: Yeah, she came to…

Helen: I just recently started reading her book. 

Lori: Yea, she came to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, when we had it there, I think, I can’t remember the year… but yea, it was a great conference and we learnt so much from her so. And what about people that think “well, I’ll do it but I’m just really not in the mood for it right now” ? Or I’m tired and tomorrow I’ll be more wide awake and start this task… 

Helen: Yeah I think it’s kind of, it’s a misconception, a chap called John Perry, who used to be a professor at Stanford, he wrote an article which was about the idea of your kind of “future self” and you have this idea that if we put off something, then our future self will be more in the mood to do it. And he was just trying to challenge that, saying if we’ve got something that is quite difficult for you to get started with and quite challenging, the chances are, the next day, it’s still going to be difficult and challenging and the procrastination is not actually helping the situation. In fact, it could make it more challenging because you’re up to the wire with the deadline. Which could then create even more problems and challenges for you. 

Lori: Yeah, right, yeah. I know for myself, this is a true struggle for me and so I create time that works, so if I’m really going to struggle with a task, I know it’s going to be hard for me, I’ll set it aside in my calendar, a big block of time and I don’t check email, I don’t do anything during that time, and focus on that. That’s one strategy that I use to support that. 

Helen: Yeah, I mean, I try… if I’m procrastinating, I tend to find something I think I can achieve… it’s like putting it off but if I’ve got a lot of work to do, I’ll do a couple of short achievable tasks to make me kinda feel good, and then that normally gives me like the kind of positive energy to at least make a start on that thing that I’ve been putting off. But yeah, I find the idea that you’re going to be more prepared to do something on another day is not really… very rarely is the case. 

Lori: Well, and I think it’s important, we’ve both just said we procrastinate. I wonder if our students always feel like their teachers or their parents or other people, they don’t have these issues. So I just think it’s important as adults in their lives to share our own executive functioning challenges with them. 

Helen: Yeah, no, I agree. I think it’s so important. As someone who, I’m dyslexic and I have ADHD, and so you know, I’m very open with students about the challenges I have and what I found difficult when I was at school, and when teachers can be more honest about their mistakes or more honest about how hard things can be, it’s really powerful for students to feel like they’re not alone and they can be successful as well with the right guidance and the right strategies. 

Lori: Well, Helen, thank you so much. THat’s all we have time for today but I’ve learnt quite a deal from you and I’m sure our listeners are really going to take a lot from this podcast. 

Helen: Thank you. It’s been a pleasure talking to you. 

[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 #75 Meet the Host of the “Think Inclusive” Podcast

Show #75 Meet the Host of the “Think Inclusive” Podcast

Today host Lori Boll speaks with Tim Villegas who is the director of communications of MCIE or the Maryland Coalition for Inclusive Education, a nonprofit that envisions a society where neighborhood schools welcome all learners and create the foundation for inclusive communities. He is the founder of Think Inclusive, MCIE’s blog and podcast. Tim and Lori speak about MCIE and their impact, discuss the three main things that stand in the way of schools becoming more inclusive, and discuss the importance of school leaders promoting inclusion to make it a school-wide initiative.

Bio

Tim Villegas is director of communications at MCIE, a nonprofit that envisions a society where neighborhood schools welcome all learners and create the foundation for inclusive communities. He is the founder of Think Inclusive, MCIE’s blog and podcast. Throughout his 16-year career as a special education teacher, Tim advocated for including students with significant disabilities in general education classrooms. He continues his work with MCIE to empower schools and districts to move toward inclusive practices for each and every learner.

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:

Hello, everyone. Today I speak with Tim Villegas, who’s the Director of Communications of MC IE or the Maryland Coalition for Inclusive Education, which is a nonprofit that envisions a society where neighborhood schools welcome all learners and creates the foundation for inclusive communities. He’s the founder of think inclusive MC IES blog and podcast.

And while this is a US based organization, their message of inclusion is globally recognize. Today, Tim and I speak about MC IE and their impact, discuss the three main things that stand in the way of schools becoming more inclusive, and discuss the fact that for inclusion to happen, it must start at the top.So be sure to share this podcast with your school administrator. And now, on to the show. Well, hello, Tim and welcome to the podcast.

Tim: Hi, Lori. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Lori: Well, I’m super happy to have you here. I’m a fan of your podcast, Think Inclusive, and excited that you’ll be one of our speakers at our virtual conference coming up here in November.

Tim: Absolutely. Absolutely. It’s gonna be great.

Lori: Yeah. So today we’ll be talking about inclusion. I mean, it’s why both of our organizations exist, your organization, MC IE. And so to start, what’s your definition of inclusion or inclusive education?

Tim: Sure. We typically explain it in four pillars or bullet points. I guess you can say inclusion is, it’s hard to define because usually you can think of it in a way that it’s a belief system and it’s also a practice. So sometimes there’s confusion in just the word and what it means. But really like if you’re implementing inclusive education, you typically already have the belief system that inclusion is important. And so where we start, when we’re defining inclusive education is placement. And what I mean by a placement is that learners with disabilities are included in the same spaces and classrooms as typically developing children and learners. 

You know, there’s a lot of different places where, where we live and we move and we play right? There’s, there’s your home, There’s your place of worship. There’s where you go get your groceries, there’s, you know, where you go, you go to parks and you engage in the community. But school is one of the only places in in our world where it’s OK, quote unquote “to segregate”, right? And so in schools for some reason, it is acceptable. So placement and where learners are in a school environment is very important to us when we’re describing inclusion. So that’s number one is place.

The next three, I’ll just, I’ll clump together because I think they’re important, is membership, participation and learning. And that the here’s actually indicators that we have on our website. If you go to MCIE.org and go to our resources tab page, there are some indicators that you can download and that is largely driven by the work at the U from the University of New Hampshire, Doctor Cheryl Jerkin and Michael McShan, who have developed, developed the Beyond Access model. 

So what do I mean by membership, participation in learning? Membership is really a sense of belonging So, when we are included in a classroom or a group, do we feel like we belong, do we feel like we’re a part of the community? Are we missed when we’re gone? Do we have lasting and authentic relationships and friendships? And that’s so important to everyone, not, not just learners with disabilities, but, but everyone, everyone should feel like, you know, they belong in community. And then participation – what are learners actually doing when they are in the class? Are they in a separate area just like, you know, an an island in the mainstream like, I think it was Michael G and Greco has a great cartoon that, that depicts this, where you have a classroom of, of learners, and in the very back you have a learner with disability and a paraprofessional and they’re probably doing something completely different. That they, that doesn’t feel like it doesn’t seem like that learner is a member of that class and they’re not really participating in the life of that class. You know, does the learner have a classroom job like everybody else? Does, is the learner part of the routines and rituals of the classroom? So those are the kinds of things that we’re talking about with participation.

And then finally learning, you know, I like to tell this story about learning because my background is in a segregated special education classroom. So I taught for many years in the public schools and when I was just learning about inclusion and trying to, you know, figure it out, I thought that I was being inclusive because I was giving grade level access, access to grade level material and curriculum to learners. Now, I taught in a kindergarten through fifth grade class. So that’s six grade levels. So you tell me, Lori, how, how easy is it to give access to grade level standards across six grade levels in one school year?

Lori: Unbelievable. Wow.

Tim:  So even though I did my best. And even though, you know, I, I remember this, you know, I’m remembering this, instance where, you know, we would get, we would get money sometimes from like the Parent Teacher Association or even sometimes from the, the federal, the state government to purchase materials. And so I went to, I think the local, you know, school box or, you know, local educational supply store and, I bought a whole bunch of, like, supplemental materials in history, like civil war and, you know, science materials and, you know, curriculum that, that could supplement what I was doing in the class. And I remember my principal was like, well, look at you Tim, you know, teaching about the civil war! Like, she was just so blown away that I would even think of doing that, you know, because the expectations are just, they’re just so low, they’re just so low. So.

Lori: Right.

Tim: Right.

Lori: Yeah.

Tim: Count to one, count to one with, count, with 1 to 1 correspondence and, you know, stuff like that and, and handwriting and all this stuff that we, you know, make these kids do over and over and over again. Well, I thought that I was giving, yeah, I mean, I was giving access but I thought I was being inclusive,, without really putting together that you can’t have an inclusive school. If you continue the practice of segregating students by disability. You just, it’s, it’s just not possible. They’re, they’re incongruent. You, you can’t have the, the, the same thing. And so once I realized that, and once I started to really understand that, you know, place membership, participation and learning all come together to form this larger vision of, of inclusion and inclusive education. That’s when I started really making a change in my own career to, you know, have an exit strategy, right?

Lori:  Well, you mentioned your, your history a bit, but that you started in a, in a special ed classroom. Is that correct? And then how did, how did you get interested in the field in the first place?

Tim: Well, I wanted to be a counselor in college. So I got my degree in psychology and the last class I took for my degree was called the Psychology of the Exceptional Child. And I thought that I was gonna learn about gifted kids.

Lori:  Oh, yes.

Tim: And I went to a private school, AAA private Christian school in Pasadena, California. And I also went to a private Christian Liberal Arts College in Southern California, at Azusa Pacific. And it was all wonderful and I, I have, you know, I had a great experience there but I had no exposure to special education or any sort of systematic way to support learners with disabilities. Now, looking back, I could see that there were learners with disabilities in my classes and in my school, but it wasn’t pointed out, it wasn’t a big thing, you know, people got extra things or, quote unquote “special things”. But it was just part of the, it was part of my education. It, it wasn’t anything separate. And so when I went at, for an assignment I went and I visited a, what we would now call like a resource classroom or a, you know, a math resource, middle school, classroom for, you know, probably seventh or eighth grade. I visited and I saw a small group of students and the teacher was in front of the classroom and he had a Hawaiian shirt on and, he was pretty chill. They worked on some math and they went to their next class after it. It just, it didn’t seem that much different to me than a regular class. I, I didn’t understand why there was a small group and so I didn’t really think about it. I just kind of tucked it away and, and went about my day and, you know, I completed my assignment and it wasn’t until I graduated and was looking for a job that, I started. I got a job as a behavior therapist for young children with autism. And that was really what got me interested in, supporting people with disabilities.

Now, I have a, I do have a cousin with some developmental disabilities and my brother in law, is autistic and he’s, he’s an adult now, lives, in California, which is where I’m from and come from , California. And so, you know, and I certainly have, friends with, different kinds of disabilities. So they’re, it, it’s always been a part of my life and, you know, but I did not set out to be a special education teacher or be involved with inclusive education. It just, it sort of, just sort of happened and as far as inclusion goes, when I got my first job and I started teaching, it was a classroom, it was in California. So we call them, we call them special day classes… I think I’m pretty sure they still call them that. It was a special day class for students with moderate to severe autism. And so it was 4 to 5, that those were the grades and it was a very small class. So four or five students. I had two paraprofessionals over the course of my, I think it was four years that I taught there and really they, they had some extensive support needs, you know, sensory behavior, communication. What I was taught in my teacher education program, which was, you know, to support inclusive education when I went out into the field and got a job that’s not how schools are run. They just, and not in my experience. 

And so I was very much skeptical of the whole inclusion thing. I thought that, well, maybe these professors just don’t know my kids, they just, they just don’t know what it takes to really teach, you know, the kinds of kids that I have in my classroom. And so, in California, you can, you get a job as a teacher before you’re fully credentialed. So I had a, like a provisional certificate.vAnd so that’s how I got my first job. And so I was still going to school and my professor said, why don’t you create an inclusion plan for one of your students? And then this is an assignment and you have to, you have to follow up with a general education teacher and include the student for a, a portion of their day. And I was like, this ain’t gonna work, this is not gonna work… But I said, OK, you know, again, it’s an assignment. 

So I, I followed the, the rubric, the, the, the plan and it was really to develop a plan around the student’s strengths. So what is the student really good at? And I think… I usually call the student Nathan. So let’s say Nathan, he was really great at cutting and he was really, he, he had a, a lot of sensory needs. So he would tear a paper and he would cut, he, he cut really well actually. And I believe he was in fifth grade. And so I collaborated with the fifth grade teacher and the, the assignment was to create a 3D topography map out of cardboard. And so the teacher said, well, look, we can have Nathan cut the cardboard and, you know, he could participate in the class and that’s something he’s good at. So I’m like, great, this is, this is awesome! So we go down there and he sits with his, you know, group and classmates and cuts and, you know, this was a, a learner that had some real significant sensory needs and had some trouble with, you know, challenging behavior. And there was, there was nothing, nothing happened, right? He just sat and cut and, and so at the end of the, it was like 40, 45 minutes and like, all right, Nathan, let’s go back, you know, and I just reflected and, and I thought, well, that was easy. Like all you had to do was plan, just had a plan for it. And so it was at that moment that I realized, oh, I could do this with everybody. I just, I just need to plan for it and plan for the success of the learner and not just put kids with and without disabilities together with no plan and hope for the best. That is an inclusion. Right?

Lori: Yeah.

Tim:  Having a shadow teacher run around after a student all day long. Just nothing makes me more frustrated than that. 

Lori: But the important question to follow back on is, did you ever wear a Hawaiian shirt?

Tim: Did I ever like that teacher that you went to? That’s a great question. I, I think I wore a Hawaiian shirt at least once.

Lori: It wasn’t your goal though?

Tim: No, no, no, no. My goal was to wear jeans. Just like every other teacher you’d have to wear. Oh, I don’t know about, I don’t know about you or anyone else listening. But, but the things you have to do just to wear jeans in a school, man.

Lori:  Oh, I know you have to pay, gotta pay money has to be a Friday. Got to fundraise.

Tim: Oh yeah.

Lori: Ok. Well, let’s talk about MC IE which is the Maryland Coalition for Inclusive Education. Tell us how you support schools and districts in the US.

Tim:  Sure. So we primarily do three things and then one bonus, one bonus item that I like to say. So, number one, we partner with schools on school transformation and that is typically a 3 to 5 year partnership where we work with an inclusive leadership development team that identifies certain schools in the district that we’re working with. We typically, that first year is just going over and having a, a shared understanding of what inclusive education really means. Kind of like what we just talked about the, you know, the placement, membership, participation and learning. We bring in lots of different resources. Not only the ones that we’ve created but ones, you know, videos and books and articles and perspectives from disabled people to just unpack all of the ableism that we really kind of have, you know, that we, we’re not even aware of. And so a lot of that first year is just culture building.

And then there’s a a a tool called the Quality Indicators for Inclusive Education, which is a self assessment tool that we go through with our partners. And in the tool, it identifies certain priority areas because every school is different, every school district is different. So typically, first you need everyone on board or at least the majority of the leadership on board with the mindset and then you go into the actual practices of what makes the school district inclusive. So that school transformation again, that’s 3 to 5 years sometimes longer. 

The other thing that we do, the second thing we do is professional development and workshops. So we can customize training for any district at wherever they are on their inclusion journey. So sometimes that means we provide co teaching training. Sometimes that means it’s just about what is, what are inclusive schools. And sometimes it’s about roles and relationships of general and special education teachers, sometimes it’s paraprofessionals. So it really just depends on the, the needs of the district.

And then the third thing we do is learner, individual learner planning. So if this is typically for learners who have extensive support needs, but really, it’s for any school district and family where they’re having a difficult time knowing how to include a learner, you know, the mindset is there, they want to, but they just in practice aren’t sure. So we have some person centered planning tools that we provide and we facilitate and we end up at the end of that having an inclusion plan that’s designed for that learner.

And the final, the, the bonus thing is all of the dissemination that we do. So we have our podcast, Think Inclusive. I write at our blog, ThinkInclusive.us and anything that we create for social media, you know, going on other podcasts. So everything that we do that that’s outward facing in advocating for systems change in school districts, right?

Lori: And you’re particularly tailored to the US, correct?

Tim: Correct. We have done some professional learning for organizations and schools outside the US. But, but for now, you know, at least the partnerships that we, that we provide are are with US based schools, right? 

Lori: Yeah, makes sense. And your name is Maryland, but I understand you are in multiple states, correct?

Tim: Yes.

Lori: Yes. 

Tim: So MC IE has been around since the late eighties and we’ve been doing this work for a long time. And when we first started, we were mostly grant funded by the Maryland State Department of Education. And over the last 10 or so years we’ve expanded our work to work in, in other school districts outside of Maryland. And currently we’re in Illinois, Virginia, Arkansas and Oklahoma. And that list is growing. 

Lori: Great. That’s exciting.

Tim: Really exciting.

Lori:  Well, I watched a, we, we, excuse me, a webinar that you did today and you and your counterpart?

Tim: Was it Debbie?

Lori: Carolyn?

Tim:  Doctor Carolyn Eglin?

Lori: Yeah, Doctor Carolyn Eglin. Sorry. So I watched that webinar today and you discuss three main reasons schools don’t include learners, include all learners or things that get in the way and those were fear, lack of skills and beliefs. And I’m curious how do you get started with inclusive practices in schools or districts when the three of these things are standing in the way?

Tim:  Well, you know, my perspective has changed when I was a, a school teacher. When I was a classroom teacher, I thought that all I needed to do was include my students. So I had learners you know, like I said, in a self contained special day class in California. And, and when I was in Georgia and and it was, it was a classroom for students with profound, severe and profound intellectual disabilities is what they call it. So, all different kinds of names for it. But I thought, well, if I could just show my school that my learners, my kids belonged in general education and I could make it successful that would alleviate those fears, right? Alleviate and, and change belief systems at my school. And I, for the most part was, you know, somewhat successful at including my students. But that in, you know, in that part, in my particular school in, in Georgia, I was one of four special education classrooms and out of those four, did I see a dramatic increase of other educators including learners? No, I did not, I did not.

What it came down to was people would compliment and say “Tim is doing a great job at including his kids”, you know, and the families would be appreciative and they would say, “wow, Tim, thank, thank you so much for advocating for my, you know, for my child”, which was great and I, and I loved it and I, I wouldn’t change it, but that did not change the culture of the school in a significant way. I, I think that it did in, in some respects and I think that the school was probably you know, they, it, they moved it, we moved farther along than if I had done nothing.

But what I found was the learners when they went, the late, late, they left elementary school and went to middle school. Once they got to middle school, it was like starting from zero, starting from, you know, square one. And so my point in saying that is that we really need to start at leadership.

Lori: Mhm.

Tim: And a lot of times inclusion gets put on families because they’re the ones advocating for it and teachers because they’re, they’re the ones that are that day to day trying to make it work but really that’s where we should be leaning on our principals and general education administrators. So, you know, associate superintendents of, you know, curriculum and learning or, you know, directors of teaching and learning, even, even all the way up to the superintendent because inclusion is not a special education initiative. It’s, it’s for all learners, it’s for everyone. And so when inclusive practices are advocated by the special education department or by special education, you know, special educators, it ends up being framed as a special education thing, right? And so, you can, you know, you know, we talked about fears, skills and beliefs. You know, the fears come from not knowing, not knowing, what, what you don’t know, you know, and the skills if you’re just coming, if you’re just trying to implement inclusive practices from the special education lens, you know, just in sheer numbers, there are more general education teachers in school districts than there are special education teachers. 

So even if you had 100% of special educators on board, you’re still in the minority. What we need to do is equip and build the capacity of general education teachers to teach all learners. And that’s where that skills come that comes in and beliefs. You know, we need to frame it and convince other people that inclusion isn’t, is important. In, in my perspective, it’s, it’s about sharing stories, it’s about sharing success stories and then also stories of, you know, of growth. You know, I I, I try to embrace my, I try to embrace the way that I felt before and share the growth that I’ve made because I think that a lot of people maybe are, are where I was. I don’t know if I said that grammatically correct, but people maybe have an idea that inclusion is the right thing, but it’s not until you hear someone’s story and how they move through their journey that they can sometimes see themselves in that journey.

Lori: Yeah. And I think it’s also important, you did in your webinar, you shared research and test scores and how they improved for the people with the disabilities in the classroom and also for their, their peers. And I thought that was really an important point for people to understand, you know, that it doesn’t impact the learning of the other students in a negative way. It actually impacts them in a positive manner.

Tim: So, yeah, it’s like we have the same brain when it comes to, starting with the top. It has to start with admin and they have to, they have to take it on and they have to share that belief and make it a district wide or schoolwide belief and help support all their teachers in the growth of, in that area. So, yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s gonna be a long process. But, yeah, but those that have done it ultimate success.

Lori:  Right. Yeah.

Tim: And, you know, there’s no, there’s nothing about what we’re doing in the US that isn’t, that doesn’t apply to any school.

Lori: Mhm. Exactly.

Tim: Because it’s really, it’s, I mean, when you get down to it, yes, there are best practices.

Lori: Right.

Tim: of teaching. But ultimately it’s about the mindset of, of school leaders and the ones that have the power to make change and that is universally, it doesn’t matter what school you’re at. You could be at a private school, you could be at an international school. You could be at a school in Canada. You could be at a school in Mexico. You can be a school in, in China. It doesn’t matter. It has to come from the top and so there’s nothing about these reflective practices that really,, you know, that it only works in, in the US.

Lori: Yeah, it’s not US centric, it’s worldwide.

Tim: Exactly.

Lori: Agree. Yeah. So here’s a big question for you. I was really impressed today when, when you both stated that inclusion is a civil right? So how, how do we shift society’s thinking about that? You have that Tim?

Tim: Yeah, we’re just gonna solve this right here right here right now.

Lori: Well, I think we need to, I think this is myself included.

Tim:  We need to be better at, at sharing success stories, you know, like for instance, Doctor Carolyn Eglin, who’s our CEO, she was the associate superintendent in Cecil County Public Schools. And they started this work in Cecil County in the early 2000’s.  Now, back in the early 2000’s, they had center based programs which, you know, is just another name for segregated and self contained disability specific classrooms and it took them about 10 years to dismantle it 10 years.

Lori:  OK, yeah.

Tim: Yeah. And that was the MC IE was involved with that system’s change process. And so it takes a long time. Now sometimes it doesn’t take that long. But I think that the point is is that they started, right. And so, and and now, you know, Carolyn is, is you know, our leader, our, our CEO but I was able to just last fall. So actually this, this past school year in I think it was, was it September. I went up and visited Cecil County and I was able to tour the schools and talk to school leaders and, you know, so they had been, they’ve been doing this work since, you know, for, for 20 years essentially. And I asked, I said, do you know how unique you, you are like in the grand scheme of all school districts? The fact that you, you know, don’t have any disability specific specific programs. You create your master schedule with, you know, learners with disabilities in mind and you are not congregating them in one particular class, but you are, you’ve naturally distributed them across, you know, grade levels and you have, you know, a robust way to support learners with, you know, mental health needs and, you know, all these things that are markers for inclusive schools. And I said, do you realize how unique that is? And they’re like, this is just who we are, you know, and it’s funny how much they don’t think about what’s happening in other places. 

Lori: It’s just their culture, right?

Tim: So it’s just their culture.

Lori: Right. Exactly. 

Tim: Exactly. And what the other thing that I felt was interesting about Cecil County was that the school leaders were where people or, you know, were students in Cecil County. So what they ended up doing is that they went, they went through their program, they went through their school system, graduated, went and got their education degrees and came back to work in, in the school district that they grew up in. And, I just, just how powerful is that, you know, that you’ve created a culture of belonging that’s so strong that, you don’t want to move, you know, people flock to come back.

Lori: I love that. 

Tim: Right. Exactly.

Lori: Exactly.

Tim: So, I think we need to do a better job of, of telling those stories and, and collecting them and, and sharing them because I, I think that when people hear stories, that is way more compelling to, to change their mind than if I give them the research.

Lori: Yeah.

Tim: Yeah.

Lori: Well, that’s what we hope to do at our upcoming conference. We’re gonna be amplifying the voices of inclusion and you’re part of that, Tim. So thank you in advance and I think that’s all we have time for today. So, thank you. Thank you so much for joining us and have a great day.

Tim: 

It was my pleasure. Thank you.

[ 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 #76 Keynote Speaker- Dr. Emily Meadows on LGBTQ+ Policy and Practice

#76 Keynote Speaker- Dr. Emily Meadows on LGBTQ+ Policy and Practice

Today host Lori Boll speaks with Dr. Emily Meadows (she/her), one of SENIA’s keynote speakers for our upcoming virtual conference. Emily is an LGBTQ+ consultant specialized in international schools. In addition to her doctoral degree, Emily holds master’s degrees in both Sexual Health and Counseling, and has worked as an international school counselor for over a decade. She researches, publishes, and trains school communities on equitable policy and practice, while also teaching for the LGBT Health Policy & Practice graduate program at George Washington University. Having spent more than half of her life in international schools, Emily specializes in culturally-relevant solutions to promote equity and belonging worldwide.

Lori & Emily discuss Emily’s work in international schools and how she works alongside school leaders, faculty, and the community to ensure that members of the LGBTQ+ community feel safe. Emily also shares a sneak peak into what she’ll be sharing in her keynote presentation. Oh, and be sure to listen all the way through as Emily gives us all an incredible gift.

Bio

Dr. Emily Meadows (she/her) is an LGBTQ+ consultant specialized in international schools. In addition to her doctoral degree, Emily holds master’s degrees in both Sexual Health and Counseling, and has worked as an international school counselor for over a decade. She researches, publishes, and trains school communities on equitable policy and practice, while also teaching for the LGBT Health Policy & Practice graduate program at George Washington University. Having spent more than half of her life in international schools, Emily specializes in culturally-relevant solutions to promote equity and belonging worldwide.

Connect

Resources from Today’s Show

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: Well, hello there listeners. I hope you’re all doing well. Today, I had the opportunity to speak with Dr. Emily Meadows, who’s one of SENIA’s keynote speakers for our upcoming virtual conference in November. Emily is an LGBTQ consultant specializing in international schools and in addition to her doctoral degree, she holds master’s degrees in both sexual health and counseling and has worked as an international school counselor for over a decade. She researches, publishes and trains school communities on equitable policy and practice while also teaching for the LGBT Health Policy and practice graduate program at George Washington University. Having spent more than half of her life in international schools, Emily specializes in culturally relevant solutions to promote equity and belonging worldwide.

Today, we discuss Emily’s work in those international schools and how she works alongside school leaders, faculty and the community to ensure that members of the LGBTQ+ community feel safe, which is her number one goal. Emily also shares a sneak peek into what she’ll be sharing in her keynote presentation and be sure to listen all the way through as Emily gives all of us listeners a huge gift at the end. So I know you’re excited, this is a good one.

So now onto the show… oh, and before I go further into the podcast, let me just say that there’s a few bloopers in this podcast and you know what, Emily and I talked about it and we decided to keep those in. So enjoy us. Well, hello Emily and welcome to the podcast.

Emily: Thanks so much for having me, Lori.

LorI: Well, as I described in the introduction, you’re an LGP. Let me do that part again. Well, as I described in the introduction, you’re an LGBTQ+ consultant specializing in international schools. So can you give us a little background about your interest in this topic and how you came to be an expert in this field?

Emily: Sure. Well, I started out in education as a counselor and I noticed there were, there were some students who were maybe not out to their teachers or their families, but they might be out to their counselor and I wanted to be able to support them in a way that would both keep them safe, but also allow them to be as much as out as they wanted to at the school. But to be honest, even though I myself am queer, I didn’t really know how to do it. I, I had sort of intuitions but it felt like a big, it felt, it felt really important and I wanted to know that I was doing it in a way that was really centering the student and their needs. And so, I sort of, you know, did what I could in the, in the moment but I, decided to go back and do some graduate work to really dig into this and see what the research said. And so I in addition to my counseling degree, I hold a, a degree a, a master of Health Sciences Degree in sexual health. So looking at it sort of from the health sciences perspective, and then I also hold a PhD and my entire dissertation, I was looking at best practices around supporting LGBTQ students in international schools because I wanted to know that when I said here’s what we recommend, it was backed by research, not just my personal opinion or sort of my gut instinct.

Lori: And was it easy to find that research? Was it out there already or was that the research you did?

Emily: it, that was the research I did.

Lori: So got it.

Emily: We do have, as you know, there is a, a fairly robust body of research documenting both the risks and the protective factors for LGBTQ youth in certain countries and the reason why we have it in some countries and not others is simply because it’s much easier to do this research in certain places than others. There might be obvious safety risks to both the researcher and the participants in some countries or it simply wouldn’t be approved. So we don’t have the research everywhere but because we have enough from enough different countries and essentially the results look very similar across, across geography and across culture, we can extrapolate from that. So that was, that was sort of what I was doing was looking at how can we apply this in, in places where it hasn’t been done before?

Lori: Wow.

Emily: Yeah.

Lori: So interesting. So you consult with international schools. I’m, I’m guessing they seek you out – they must have a need or they want to improve their practice at their schools. So what is generally the first thing you want to know when you’re working with an international school?

Emily: Right? So I always ask before we do any work together, I always ask to meet with the people who’ve called me to ensure that my practice is a good fit for what they’re looking for and also that I can do my work effectively. So one of the things I want to know is where does your leadership stand in terms of supporting LGBTQ safety. And I work with schools really all around the world at all different stages of LGBTQ affirmation including schools where it’s brand new and where leadership is not even clear what the L, the G, the B, the T and the Q stands for.

So it’s not a, a barrier necessarily, but it is important for me to know that starting point because that helps me understand where we need to begin without leadership, without sort of having an understanding where leadership is, it can be hard to get off the ground. And I don’t want to involve teachers in work that they might potentially be fired for, for example. So I’m always thinking about the safety of the, the folks involved before we get going.

Lori: 

Yeah, that’s, that’s interesting. I, I wonder, well, I guess what I’m trying to say is that everyone I’ve talked to in any sort of inclusion role, whether it is for special education, whether it is for BIPOC community, it’s always, we always talk about leadership, it has to come from leadership and that they have to be supportive.

Emily: really? 

Lori: Yeah. 

Emily: So interesting. I didn’t realize that was a theme across all of the, the folks that you’ve been. 

Lori: Yeah, it really is because, you know, if they have to be the ones that ask for the policies or create the policies because the staff is there, they’re ready to work with all individuals and if the leadership is not supportive, then they’re stuck. Right. So. 

Emily: Absolutely. And I think, you know, sometimes what I there are some schools that I work with where I will spend literally a couple of days on site with just the school leadership before I even meet anyone else to ensure that they have what they need to be able to support the work.

So a lot of times when leaders call me, they’re used to being yes, the ones in charge. But also they’re in charge usually because they have a lot of experience, a lot of expertise and they’re seen as being really competent and they are generally very competent in so many ways. But this, because it’s a relatively new area of work and education, this is a place where a lot of leaders say, you know, I actually don’t feel super confident in, in being able to lead this work. And so I usually say, look, you don’t need to, to be the expert, you don’t need to lead it in that way right now but we need to make sure you’re not a barrier. And so it provides support to help get them to, you know, to a place where they feel confident, at least walking alongside me in a leadership role to begin with. And then we can hand it over to them and other co leaders in the community because sometimes some of the strongest leaders are going to be students, for example, or our counselors et cetera.

Lori: 

Yeah. Well, let’s talk about policies. If schools don’t already have a policy for inclusion of members of the LGBTQ+ community, where do they need to start and what are some areas that really must be included in?

Emily: I’m a really strong advocate for embedding this work in policy. This binds it to the institution in a way that is different than having inclusion work be held in the hands of a few really strong advocates because as we know, with international schools, folks leave. And so we need this to, to be really part of, of the the fabric of the institution. 

But the other reason is not just to protect LGBTQ people, which is my primary goal, but it also protects the school. If the school doesn’t have a policy, then important decisions are being left to individuals to make. And there may be lots of different opinions. I can tell you if you’ve been on social media lately, I think there are lots of opinions about how this should be done. And so if it’s up to one principal or one head of school or one classroom teacher to decide what, how, how a a support will be managed, that person is really in a vulnerable position. So when it’s an institutional policy that protects the school, it and it takes it takes the debate out of it and focuses the work on, on the needs of the child. And so I can actually, if you have a way to add links to this podcast.. 

Lori: I can.

Emily: Ok, great. So I will I will email you a resource to add to our, the, the show notes which is a template for an LGBTQ nondiscrimination policy that I have written and it’s designed to be shared and used among international schools and it will give you all of the sort of language you can literally copy and paste it. Your listeners can copy and paste and take it and use it in their school and it covers things like what to do around pronouns.

So students asking to use gender affirming pronouns that might be different than what was on their passport or their birth certificate or their enrollment, how to manage that. For example, it talks about what to do in terms of sports participation, bathrooms and locker rooms, disclosure and confidentiality and privacy and a number of really important topics that again, if you don’t have it written down as policy, it’s, it could be really scary for, for people to try to create this stuff and they end up googling it. You know, it’s, it gets really, it’s sort of where I was at. I mean, it’s inspired by my own history of wanting to do, do the right thing, but wanting to know that it was grounded in best practice and research and this this policy is so I’m happy to share that with, with your listeners.

Lori: Well, thank you. That was such a gift.

Emily: My pleasure.

Lori: Wow, that’s fantastic. So I’m also wondering about your working countries around the world. I mean, you’re, you’re everywhere basically and some countries are of course, very inclusive while others may not be and that might be in their, their governance or rules of and how they, they themselves, the countries treat members of the community. So does this have an impact on the work you’re able to do with schools, international schools in those regions, those areas?

Emily: Absolutely. As I’ve mentioned a few times and this is sort of one of my really core of my practice safety is, is top priority. So I’m always thinking about the safety first and foremost of students at the school but also of course of, of supportive faculty members, the administration and other community members, family members of the students and so in certain countries, drawing attention to one’s own support of or identity that’s LGBTQ could potentially put someone at risk. And so while I would never tell someone not to be out or not to be a vocal advocate, that’s, that’s a very personal decision and not something that I would get involved with. I am also really careful not to be the one to put someone, somebody in harm’s way and not to get a school shutdown or someone fired, right. We can’t do much good if, if our school gets shut down. So when I’m working in particular, these socially conservative countries, I’m really aware of safety risks and also of legal restrictions. But that being said, we can always look for areas where generally the community can agree.

So let me give a couple of examples. One example is when we are thinking again about safety, we have a lot of evidence that LGBTQ xhildren are targeted for harassment and even violence far more than their cisgender, heterosexual peers. And whether or not someone thinks that being LGBTQ is acceptable or not, I think every educator I know agrees that harassment is not OK. And so we can put in place, for example, policies and protocols that prevent and address harassment on the basis of identity. And we don’t even need to know the identity of the child being harassed. But if someone is doing harassment or, or causing harm to another child, for any reason, we can say, listen, we draw a line here. That’s not OK. So that’s one example.

Another example that at least within international schools, I think we generally have a consensus around is human rights. So the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the child, which has been ratified by almost every country on earth. The second article of the CRC is the right to nondiscrimination. So if you believe in human rights and you believe in the rights of Children, you can actively advocate for the right to nondiscrimination. And I always say, you know, if, if cultural norms are being weighed against human rights, I’m going to default to the human rights beyond be before cultural norms and that includes within my own culture.

Lori: Right.

Emily: Right. So not just me coming in and judging, but knowing that my own culture also violates human rights and I can advocate for, for doing better there too. So those are a few areas where we can begin to touch on, on some of this work. But I, I lived and worked in Kuwait for several years, I mean, I’ve traveled really everywhere. I’ve worked in many different places and I, I pride myself on being able to support folks wherever they’re at. And to find an opening because we don’t need to, it doesn’t have to be all or nothing.

Lori: Right. Wow, you’re doing really good work, so thank you. It’s amazing. Let me ask about your work. When you do go into schools, you, you you look at the, you speak with the admin, you look at their policies, what are some other things you do when you’re visit, visiting a school?

Emily: So I do loads of training. That’s one of the, the biggest components of what I try to do when I get into a school, I do training and workshops for the entire community. So I’m, I’m happy to do sort of small group, targeted work with counselors with admin. I do a lot of work around athletics and working with coaches and PE teachers. But then I always say, you know, I would like to see ideally everyone.

So sometimes that means I get to see the entire faculty and staff including sort of like the HR person and the cafeteria worker and you know, the bus moms and we all come together and we talk about where are some of the common points that everyone can be involved with. Because when we’re advocating for safety and belonging in a school, it doesn’t work. If only a few people are interested, it really needs to be a community wide understanding and I want to make sure everyone feels invited to participate in this. And so trainings and workshop is a big part of what I do. Policy writing and revision is also what I do. I also look at curriculum.

So ideally, I’d love for when I leave a school for teachers to have a better understanding of how they can integrate LGBTQ representation and affirmation and themes into their practice and even embed it in the curriculum, so that again, the turnover in international schools when the teacher leaves this work doesn’t leave with them. But it’s an understood expectation that if you’re in grade 3, for example, you are going to learn about XYZ. So that’s another, another example of what I do, but it’s, it’s extremely tailored so each school, the program is going to be specific to their needs, their priorities, their context. And, and so I might, like I said, spend a couple of days just with leadership, but I might spend time with students. I might spend time with, parents and each time it’s a little different.

Lori: That’s great. I’m wondering if you’ve ever had a very reluctant teacher or parent or admin who has experienced some sort of mind shift change after your visit?

Emily: I mean, almost every time. Yeah, I, I mean, there’s always reluctant people and I like to think of, of, I, I mean, maybe reluctant isn’t the word I would use but people who, haven’t felt invited in yet and maybe don’t see that pathway into the work for themselves yet. And my goal is to try to sort of illuminate that pathway for them and to invite them in and to make that connection for them. So they see how it’s relevant to what they care about and in their practice but you might be surprised sometimes it’s, you know, it’s, a person who says, you know, I’m gay and I’ve never had any problems here, so, you know, what, why do we need to do this. And then, you know, I’m thinking of a pretty specific example actually from recently, but it was, it was, was a a gay teacher who said, you know, “it’s fine. I’ve been here for years. I’m OK”. 

And then when we started talking about some of the challenges that students face, he was like, “oh yeah, actually that, that is me and I never really, I had just so normalized it that I didn’t realize that that wasn’t OK”. And so that was really touching for me and really moving because, you know, to, to be able to connect with a queer educator like that was very meaningful.

Lori: Well, thanks for sharing that. So.. one example, yeah, I’m sure you have millions.

Emily: Well, it’s one of my favorite parts of the work honestly because I think it, it has become so contentious and so polarized and I really work hard to disarm people to come in and show my own vulnerabilities. It’s not about me saying, you know, here’s how I’m so much better, let me teach you. I’m, you know, I’m judgmental, but instead, sort of what do you care about and where can we, where can we come together and make this change for your community in a way that feels good in a way that is productive. 

Lori: And ultimately, we’re all there for the kids, right? So helping them feel safe and I don’t think anyone could deny that you know, I hope not. That is one thing we have for sure.

Emily: Yeah.

Lori: Well, at our upcoming conference, you are going to be our virtual conference, you’re going to be our keynote speaker, which we’re all very excited about. So I’m just wondering if you can give our our podcast listeners a brief sneak peek into your topic.

Emily: Sure. Well, I was very excited to get the invitation because SENIA has been doing incredible inclusion work for a long time. And I also remember when we first talked about this, you know, me sort of, II I always ask what what our conference is doing to elevate the voices of Black and brown people. And you were right on top of that, you’d already thought about that. And you know, one of the co keynote speakers is Jason Arday, so we’re really looking forward to hearing from him. And so I was just very excited to bring, I think this intersectional lens to the field of inclusion.

So thinking about how we can honor and affirm all aspects of a child’s identity so that every child feels supported and welcome and that they belong in their school. And so the, the topic I’m looking at in particular is around gender and gender roles. I think all of us can think of a child who doesn’t fit into sort of the pink and blue gender roles, whether that’s an LGBTQ child or just a child who isn’t conforming to that really narrow vision of what it means to be a a particular gender. And so thinking about what educators can do to create more space within schools for children, of all genders and all gender expressions. And what also, how does that intersect with neurodivergence, because there’s an interesting connection there as well. So that’s a little teaser, I guess.

Lori: I love that teaser because that’s… yes. Thank you for sharing that. All right, Emily, I think that’s all we have time for today. But thank you for your time. Thank you for your passion and commitment to our LGBTQ plus students and community. And we look forward to seeing you at SENIA’s Virtual conference here coming up in November.

Emily: Thank you, Lori and thank you for making space on your platform for this work. When leaders in the field, like you create space, it sends a message that’s really powerful for others. So I’m very honored and very grateful to participate. I’ll see everyone there.

[ 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 #77 The Importance of Exercise in the Classroom

Show #77 The Importance of Exercise in the Classroom

Today host Lori Boll speaks with David Geslak and Amber Pantaleo, Founder and Vice President of Exercise Connection, an organization that uses evidence-based solutions to empower those who support individuals with autism and other disabilities to teach exercise successfully. Coach Dave and Amber share the research and evidence based practices to support learners and share how just 10 minutes a day of exercise can make a tremendous difference and set our students up for successful learning.

Bio

David Geslak – As a personal trainer and fitness coordinator at a school for children with autism, Coach Dave experienced first-hand the challenges of teaching exercise. By understanding that students with autism learn differently, he developed a system that has become a breakthrough in effectively teaching exercise. He is the founder of Exercise Connection and is a published author, researcher, keynote presenter and, in partnership with the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM), he created the Autism Exercise Specialist Certificate. As a pioneer in the field, Dave’s commitment and methodology have been embraced around the world by the autism community, professionals, and Universities. He was also a finalist for ACSM’s Certified Professional of the Year (2020) & IDEA’s Fitness Leader of the Year (2022).

Amber Pantaleo – As a former special education teacher, Amber was challenged with her District’s requirement of 10-minutes of physical activity per day, outside of PE. Knowing the benefits of exercise for those with autism–improve emotional regulation, social skills, language development, and academics–Amber proactively added exercise into her students’ classroom routines. Supported with evidence-based practices, Amber successfully embedded exercise through reinforcement, behavior management, and movement breaks. Now the Vice President at Exercise Connection, Amber’s expertise helps to develop inclusive solutions that level the playing field for everybody, empowering educators and therapists to successfully teach exercise.

Connect

Resources from Today’s Show

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: Hello, everyone. Today I speak with David Geslak and Amber Pantaleo and they are the president and vice president of Exercise Connection which empowers those who support individuals with autism and other disabilities to teach exercise successfully. Both David and Amber have quite an extensive background in special education and today we spoke about evidence based practice in teaching exercise to those on the spectrum and basically all children in a classroom and how movement can support their learning. So it was a great conversation and I know you’ll learn a lot. Amber and David will both be speaking at our virtual conference and later on in the podcast, they’ll be giving us a little sneak peek into what we will be learning about from them at the conference. So now onto the show. Well, hello, David and Andrew and welcome to the podcast.

1:25

Hello, Lori.

1:26

Thanks for having us.

1:27

Yeah, excited to be here.

Lori: Yeah, again, David for you because you were on our podcast, fosh, right back when we first got started with this about three years ago, maybe.

David: Yeah.

Lori: Yeah.

David: Sounds about right.

Lori: So, yeah.

1:42

No, always, we’re always loving to spread the mission and share and how we can help teachers and professionals, help their students or clients make that, that exercise connection.

1:53

Awesome.

1:54

So, Amber, because we’ve, we’ve talked to David before, we know a little bit about his background and I’m going to put the link to David’s in my podcast in our show notes.

2:09

so Amber, can you tell us a little bit about your background and experience in the field of education and with students with autism?

2:18

Yeah.

2:18

So my background is in special education.

2:22

I’m a former teacher and I’ve taught special education in both instructional self contained settings as well as Janet co taught.

2:32

fourth through sixth grade.

2:33

So I had students who, you know, had a wide, a wide variety of different, disabilities and, and skill sets, including autism, but others as well.

2:45

And, before my first teaching job though, I started with exercise connection as an autism, fitness instructor, teaching, group exercise classes with coach Dave.

2:57

That was kind of my intro to autism and exercise, which I was then able to later bring into the classroom.

3:07

I see.

3:07

Cool.

3:08

And so it’s coach Dave.

3:09

Is it not David?

3:11

Coach Dave?

3:12

Yep.

3:14

Ok.

3:15

Good to know.

3:15

Good to know.

3:16

Coach Dave.

3:18

Well, that’s because I, I may have shared in one of the podcasts or I’ve shared a lot of people know the story.

3:25

But yeah, it’s just be, I’ve become known as Coach Dave and that is really attributed to one of my clients with autism who, who I had to, he thought I was a doctor walking into his home and I wasn’t dressed like the doctor and I said, I’m not a doctor, I’m coach Dave and it’s stuck in a sense that works awesome.

3:46

So how did you become interested in promoting physical activity as a tool for enhancing engagement and learning in your classrooms?

3:56

Amber Well, as a first year teacher, I was very by the book.

4:01

And so when I was starting my year, I was looking at our district instructional time allotments, you know, I saw 50 50 minutes for reading, you know, X amount of time for math.

4:14

And then to my surprise, I saw 10 minutes of physical activity.

4:19

I was like, whoa, this is the first time hearing of this.

4:22

And so I had asked, asked around some veteran teachers, you know, what do you do for your 10 minutes of physical activity?

4:30

And most people had no idea what I was talking about.

4:34

It was not something that, you know, while it was in that district time instructional time allotments, it wasn’t being followed.

4:43

However, since I had been working with exercise connection and teaching those group fitness classes, I was able to bring in those inclusive strategies and some of our tools, exercise buddy and our visual exercise system into the classroom, to provide that structured 10 minutes of physical activity.

5:05

And of course, when we first introduced that, you know, the kids loved it because it didn’t involve desk work.

5:11

Right.

5:12

So once we saw how well they responded to it, we started strategically using exercise in other ways, you know, for reinforcement, enhanced self regulation.

5:24

and just really got to see the benefits that exercise had directly on learning and behavior in the classroom.

5:31

And this is, is, is this in a gen ed classroom, special ed classroom?

5:35

Both it was in both.

5:36

Yeah.

5:37

So my students were with me for their core academics.

5:40

They did receive, physical education in the gen ed, once a week, but that 10 minutes was supposed to be outside of pe, outside of recess, a structured 10 minute movement activity in the classroom.

5:57

Yeah.

5:57

I, it’s always really interesting as an elementary school teacher myself back in the day.

6:03

And then again, as a special educator, I was surprised how often teachers didn’t include any sort of activity in their classrooms, even like minor stretch breaks or get up and move.

6:20

Yeah.

6:20

Brain breaks.

6:21

Right.

6:22

Yeah, exactly.

6:24

So, what kind of, scientific evidence do you have that,, promotes, I guess the brain and, and the importance of physical activity in the classroom, David.

6:42

So I think, thanks Lori.

6:46

I think one of the biggest things that Amber and I referenced many, many times in regards to the research is one that was done at a Rutgers University in 2017.

7:00

And they found specific to those on the autism spectrum that 10 minutes of low intensity activity was able to, we, I’m gonna say this and then Amber is gonna gonna share her insight.

7:18

But by the research it says that is able to lower self stimulatory behavior for the following 60 minutes.

7:27

And the reason that I say Amber is gonna kind of probably follow up with this is because we are very a tune with the ableist tone that la that research is bringing into those with disabilities or those with autism.

7:43

So I I’ll kind of let Amber kind of share that and then I’ll get back to the research.

7:49

Sure.

7:50

So, I mean, the purpose or the impact of that research study, you know, 10 minutes of low to moderate intensity exercise produces positive benefits.

8:01

The impact is the fact that it, it helps to enhance self regulation, which was observed by reductions in that self stimulatory behavior, hand clapping and echolalia.

8:13

But the purpose is not that we’re, you know, we would encourage the need to stop those behaviors because we know they serve a function but just it sheds, it helps shed light on the fact that exercise can also, you know, help with self regulation and have positive, effects for everyone.

8:32

We, we all know exercise is good for us.

8:34

Right.

8:35

For all the students in the classroom.

8:38

Exactly.

8:40

And, and I think going back now to get into the ee even further into why that’s so impactful is to Amber Point.

8:48

We know that exercise is good.

8:50

Right.

8:51

But many people, especially the non, you know, the the novice person in exercise more is better, right?

8:59

So there’s no question, we want to get all of our kids or ourselves moving more than 10 minutes, right?

9:06

In 60 minutes and every day.

9:08

But in reality, especially for those on the spectrum or let’s say other Amber out there who are tasks like that’s not reality, they’re not gonna get them to, to exercise for 60 minutes in the first week, in the first month, in the first year, even sometimes let alone at high intensity.

9:31

And here’s why I say that a lot of the research while is critical and still valuable for future development of research shows that it was done on let on individuals who needed less support on the spectrum.

9:48

So they were able to do more high intense act activities.

9:52

But for those in the classroom, for those just starting in physical activities or physical education, the reality is, and from both Amber, Ii’s experience low to modern intensity is realistic expectations and that’s what we want to stress to the, to the pe or the A pe professionals, to the SPD teachers or to the parents that, hey, if we get them to do 10 minutes, there is potentially some benefit here.

10:23

So pat yourselves on the back, reward your students, then we can build on that.

10:29

Right?

10:30

But if we start thinking that 60 minutes high in every day or week, then it, it’s just not in, in, in my experience, that’s not how we’re seeing success and having those students and kids make the connection.

10:47

It’s, it’s building the relationship and, and slowly engaging them in exercise and then yes, we can add more and, and add more complex exercise, add more time, in the, in the, in the, in their, physical activity.

11:05

And can that exercise amber when we’re talking about the 10 minutes?

11:10

Is it essential that it be a chunk of 10 minutes, let’s say, in a classroom situation when you’re prepping them for a reading class or math class or what have you do?

11:21

They need a full 10 minutes of the exercise or can it be like a two minute, three minute brain break to get them prepped?

11:30

I mean, we would use both ways within the classroom, you know, sometimes our students would come back from lunch and they didn’t get their full recess because they couldn’t go outside.

11:41

And so in situations like that, yes, we needed to provide 10 minutes of, you know, physical activity so that we could help them transition to, you know, our reading block or our math block, whatever was next.

11:55

So in those instances, we would, we would utilize that, but we would also just throw in little snippets of physical activity throughout the day.

12:03

We could be, yeah, two minutes shorter.

12:07

and also trying to incorporate more kinesthetic learning.

12:11

So pairing exercise and movement with cross curricular activity.

12:15

Right?

12:17

Cool.

12:18

And I, yeah, go ahead.

12:19

Yeah, I was just gonna say, I think this is important just for, for people to know too.

12:23

Like we many people think that, yeah, it has to be.

12:27

And I’m, let’s just talk neurotypical, right?

12:30

60 minutes of activity and it nonstop.

12:34

Well, no, to meet your daily level of, of activity requirements, it doesn’t have to be all in one setting right now that research that we just shared.

12:44

Yeah, they found through the research and their analysis.

12:46

That’s what they found.

12:47

10 minutes equal, you know, 60 minutes of better on task behavior or whatnot.

12:54

Great at the end of the day.

12:56

Whether you’re a teacher, a parent, a pe professional just getting them involved is, is the big win.

13:02

So, if it is five minutes great.

13:05

Right.

13:06

But don’t let it be like, well, I didn’t, you know, I can’t get him for 30 minutes or we’re not gonna do it.

13:11

No, they, they need to move.

13:13

We know that and I think research still needs to evolve on, on, on, on more of the 10 minutes and build on that.

13:21

Right.

13:22

But so again, I want people to know even for yourself, any, any and even a movement.

13:29

Yeah.

13:30

So why do you think that that physical activity is often overlooked in the classroom situation?

13:39

I think part of it comes down to, you know, if there were an increased awareness of the benefits that physical activity can have on learning and development in the school setting, I think it would be a higher priority.

13:52

That makes sense for sure.

13:55

I think that it’s overlooked in a traditional classroom setting.

14:01

Again.

14:01

I now remember I’ve never been in a, I’ve never had a, a teacher role as a sped teacher.

14:07

I was in a therapeutic day school as a fitness coordinator.

14:11

But I think that it, you know, their curriculum is teachers, right?

14:16

And Amber, you know, you can share this more but they have certain responsibilities and things that they have to meet in their curriculum.

14:22

So to, to embed exercise and take five or 10 minutes away from that, it’s probably not gonna be the case.

14:30

But to Amber’s point, there is plenty of research for neurotypical and even those who are autistic where exercise is shown to improve academic performance.

14:43

Now, why is that missing both in a pe or classroom based setting?

14:48

To be quite honest, some of it may fall into the, the school systems and structure or their own belief in the power of what exercise can do for their students.

14:59

Yeah.

15:00

Ok.

15:01

So I’m gonna ask you more questions about, movement in schools.

15:05

But before I do that, let’s just backtrack a little bit and learn more about what you both do now.

15:11

Yeah.

15:11

So, obviously I’m Dave.

15:14

Coach Dave.

15:16

but the founder of exercise connection and, you know, when it started, it was working individually or in small groups with, with those primarily with an autism diagnosis and that evolved to related disabilities.

15:31

But as I after leaving my position at that therapeutic day school, when I started exercise connection, we, we found that there were more resources needed from training to visual support to the technology aided instruction.

15:49

Like we’ve developed exercise buddy to help not only these this population but to help the the professionals and teachers tasked with teaching exercise or physical activities to them.

16:03

So I think our biggest role now we’ve created the autism exercise specialist certificate with the American College of Sports Medicine to give professionals that foundational evidence based knowledge of, of where they can start and how to build exercise or physical activity programs in their home, fitness center school classroom.

16:29

and then build the the other products to support that with the visual exercise system and exercise body.

16:35

So, Amber and I are doing that traveling around the country and around the world in, in, in some instances.

16:43

just trying to provide that education so, so they can help the students, the kids in, in their communities.

16:51

Right.

16:51

Didn’t you head to Kuala Lumpur at one point at work at the International School there we partnered with was it was sport Singapore and we were in Kuala Lumpur or no, we were with it.

17:07

Wait, no, it wasn’t.

17:08

It was Singapore, right?

17:09

Amber.

17:09

Yeah.

17:10

Sports Singapore.

17:11

We brought our autism exercise specialist certificate to their professionals, trained over 100 professionals and offered a parent session as well.

17:22

That’s right.

17:22

And then you were supposed to go to called the pandemic happened?

17:33

Got you.

17:34

Got you.

17:35

OK.

17:36

And Amber, what is your role there?

17:38

So I’m the vice president at Exercise Connection.

17:41

And you know, my focus is providing professional development, bringing these inclusive strategies to school professionals and adapted pe and beyond, you know, for special educators, therapists, exercise professionals and different members of the interdisciplinary health care team.

18:02

Fantastic, an educational team.

18:04

OK.

18:05

Let’s head back to movement.

18:07

So what are some examples of movement based activities that teachers can embed within their classroom instruction?

18:16

Yeah, so I’ll start, I think look, one of the things that I think is important as to start this conversation is let many of in the school specifically, many people think schools, physical education, sports and while that is great for many on the spectrum and, and I know many of the people listening to this right?

18:42

Sport involves two of the most challenging things for those on the autism spectrum, communication and social skills.

18:50

So, in many ways, while all well intended, we’re setting this population up for failure in those settings.

18:59

So again, my background is an exercise physiologist and strength and conditioning coach.

19:05

I don’t have an adapted physical education degree or physical education degree.

19:11

I looked at it from this exercise physiology perspective and when working with individuals one on one.

19:18

And I believe, and we believe that and, and we’re seeing this in the schools in the United States when, when you have programs designed in that traditional gym exercise setting, right?

19:32

Where let’s think, right?

19:35

Maybe Lori, you or your family members, right?

19:38

You go to the gym, you put on your headphones, maybe you watch a show right on the treadmill and you spend whatever it is working independently that I believe is more set up for, many on the autism spectrum.

19:54

Not all if sports is the motivator, if sports is what is captivating your students and your kids, absolutely do it.

20:03

But we need to come up with other strategies knowing that this population is some want to be more independent and we need to provide them those strategies.

20:15

And that’s where we believe that exercise is that that type of setting is what can help bring them to be physically active.

20:24

And I know that didn’t answer your questions so that an and no, but that’s important, important to know.

20:30

So, thank you.

20:31

Well, I’ll just share one of, one of my favorite ways of embedding exercise in the classroom was using exercise as reinforcement.

20:41

So, for example, in our reading workshop block, you know, we had, there was a lot going on during that block, we had whole group instruction, then we would break out into stations where I was leading some stations, my co teacher would lead a station would help lead stations.

20:57

But there were still times where students had to do at work.

21:00

And that was always, it was always a struggle to get your students to engage in independent work that entire time.

21:07

Right, without being disengaged.

21:10

and so I would use exercise to support those transitions, you know, complete this activity and then do the, I would let the students pick, the exercise in a start finish board, you know, 10 arm circles or wall push ups on the lockers.

21:24

and so it, and you could just see, the students take ownership then of their learning because they had their schedule and, you know, they felt, you know, they had, they had increased independence, they felt cool because they were doing exercise, like they might see their older brothers or, you know, a parent doing exercise.

21:46

and so that was just really cool to see in the classroom.

21:48

That’s a great idea.

21:50

Thank you.

21:51

Yeah.

21:51

And, and also on that, of, of exercises to do.

21:55

I feel that, you know, when, if, if anyone were to read this study that we mentioned about the 10 minutes, the modalities chosen in that study were a bike or a treadmill.

22:07

Ok.

22:07

And then again, this is a research setting.

22:10

But the realities for the school teacher, for the physical educator or for the parent is we don’t have money for 1000 $2000 bike or treadmill, right?

22:20

So what Amber and I and our team have seen in our quote case studies of working with many, many different individuals on the spectrum is exercises that evolve, limited to no or cost effective equipment.

22:38

And we’ve seen those same results of better on test behavior, better calm bodies, right, more regulated.

22:46

And those are the things that, you know, we also like to share as we share in our workshops and we share is like look, use a foam roller and here’s a series of exercises that you can do.

22:57

Hey, let’s just try a general hip extension followed by a downward dog physician, right?

23:03

Just to get or, or here’s the big one.

23:07

How about you?

23:07

Just let them go and just lay down for a minute and calm their body because in special education and and and at least in the coming from a therapeutic day school, it’s demand, demand, demand for all the right reasons on our students on the spectrum, right?

23:23

Do this do that.

23:24

Ok.

23:25

Now you’re on this schedule but they really never get a break.

23:29

So to give them a moment to just self regulate and calm and then spend a few minutes doing some basic fundamental exercises.

23:39

We’ve seen some tremendous results and, and not just us, but when we’re teaching this to professionals around the world, they’re sharing it with us as well.

23:48

Yeah.

23:48

My higher support needs classroom in Bangkok.

23:52

I used to at the end of the day have just a calming time.

23:57

They’d lay down in beanbags.

23:59

We’d play a nice calming video with music and it kind of set them up to go home just in a, in a calm state basically.

24:09

So yeah, could be very helpful and that’s great too.

24:13

But think, I don’t want teachers to think like here’s what happened to me and I’ll try to be brief.

24:18

I had all my students, one coming from PTOT lunchroom, right?

24:23

And they all came into my classroom and they’re all on the spectrum and they were on sensory overload.

24:30

Now, this is in the middle of the day, what you said is absolutely, you know, critical and, and they should still be doing to transition them back to home.

24:38

But in the middle of the day, they were all on sensory overload.

24:41

It turn out.

24:43

I turned off the lights, I’ve laid them down and I said, just relax after five minutes, they were more relaxed.

24:50

Then I brought them up to their feet and we started doing our exercises.

24:54

But that relax if, if I would have went right into exercise, they, they weren’t ready, they weren’t ready.

25:01

So I think even as, as educators, physical or just general or sped, we, we have to remind ourselves, we need to sometimes allow that break.

25:11

And, and I will tell you this from my personal experience, one of my admin came up to me and said, you can’t teach yoga or do that anymore to me.

25:21

And they, and they said to me and I said to them, why?

25:25

And she, and she goes because they’re not doing anything because she saw them laying there in passing.

25:34

OK.

25:35

Said to her respectfully, I got 12 kids to do what some people can’t do with one.

25:40

I, I got them to have a calm body.

25:44

Two weeks later, my letter of resignation was on their desk because this it’s producing.

25:50

I was, I was, this is what we wanted for our kids, right?

25:54

A lot of the questions from admin can be.

25:57

Where is the learning in this?

25:58

And you know, it’s important for us to know the research and the everything that will explain to them.

26:06

This is where the learning is, it’s helping their brain.

26:09

Let’s talk about send a virtual conference.

26:13

You will both be presenting there for us and we’re really excited about that.

26:18

So can you give us just a sneak peek into what your upcoming presentation might be including, all right.

26:26

So my presentation is, excuse me, is leveraging evidence based practices to empower those with autism and physical education.

26:36

So the sneak peek, it’s all about evidence based practices.

26:41

And, and that may sound to the, to the team and groups listening that may sound.

26:48

Oh yeah, that makes sense.

26:49

But in reality, what we see in many, not all but many programs across the world is that the evidence based practices that have created success for those with autism in the classroom are not applied in the physical education setting.

27:09

And these kids or adults are left wandering and wandering when they get there and it’s not rocket science.

27:19

We just got to apply those same practices the way that Jack John Sarah Sally learn in the classroom.

27:26

But to put them in a physical education setting, the most unsensed friendly environment, arguably in the entire school, they need them even more.

27:36

Right.

27:37

So we’re gonna talk about what those look like, how we can do it and create and start to give people the foundation in the hour and 15 minutes of how they can do that.

27:51

Who?

27:52

An Amber?

27:54

Yeah.

27:54

Well, on the flip side, mine is gonna focus on, you know, coming from the world of special education.

28:01

We’re, we’re using evidence based practices to support our academic learning targets.

28:07

Well, what many may not know and I didn’t know this while I was teaching is that exercise and movement is an evidence based practice.

28:16

So how can we use inclusive strategies to engage learners in the classroom with physical activity?

28:24

How do the strategies that you’ve mentioned earlier?

28:28

How can these strategies enhance the roles of paraprofessionals in supporting students with autism?

28:36

One of my favorite.

28:37

Oh, sorry, go ahead, Amber.

28:39

Oh, I was just gonna start off by saying, you know, as a former teacher, I got very little to no time planning or prepping with my pair professionals who are supporting our lessons, supporting our students.

28:53

So these evidence based practices can help support the parents, you know, help them, you know, understand your expectations for the students and which expectations they should be reinforcing or supporting.

29:08

So the evidence based practices were a huge help in my classroom for my students and our support staff.

29:16

So as some may have heard if you’ve watched the other video, but after being a working with individuals with autism for a number of years, my next role, the role I took was being a para educator myself before that school hired me to be their fitness coordinator.

29:36

So I have a big heart for pair of educators.

29:41

And that said, why evidence based when we talk specifically about physical education, pair of educators across the world get a bad rap from physical educators.

29:54

And the first thing I say to them is you have to recognize if you haven’t been in the classroom go to one but are they, they are more than likely engulfed in visual supports.

30:08

And I, then I say, do you have visuals?

30:10

Do you have anything?

30:11

And they typically say no, that’s first and foremost, if, if that the para educators leave that setting for the minute that kid gets off the bus and where to put their backpack, how to wash their hands, right?

30:25

And, and what has to go and then they go to the physical education classroom and there’s nothing they, they may go on their phones, they may just sit there but they don’t know, exercise.

30:36

So those evidence based practices and those just visuals in general clearly are beneficial for the students, but just as important to get those pair of educators.

30:47

And, and lastly, I think this is also important for, for people to realize, look as a physical, as a para educator.

30:54

It wasn’t on my job description and probably isn’t for many that you’re gonna be changing diapers on 18 year olds.

31:02

I mean that respectfully like I’m not trying to be demeaning man, but, but it was on my job description and there’s, and let alone many of these parent educators aren’t trained or prepared, not even for that, but for, for many things.

31:17

So it’s a system problem.

31:19

So anyone who has a para educator in their classroom and their, it’s a blessing.

31:26

Let’s be honest to get that support staff.

31:29

But to Amber’s point, yes, she doesn’t get the planning time and that sped teachers don’t.

31:33

But how do we build those relationships with those Paas?

31:37

But maybe give, you know, to recognize what they are challenged with.

31:42

sometimes, but, but to, to, to, to make them a part of your class and not just see them as, oh, it’s just a parrot.

31:50

No, we have to treat them because they are also not adequately prepared for their role that they play in the schools or in the groups.

32:00

Yeah.

32:00

Well, we have the utmost respect for our teacher assistants, paraprofessionals.

32:06

In fact, CIA offers a certification program for teacher assistants and to give them that adequate training, I think it’s just, it’s so essential and so often our teacher assistants are overlooked in schools.

32:23

Looking ahead Amber, what do you hope to see in the future in terms of integration of physical activity and inclusive strategies within the education system for students with autism?

32:36

I would say using exercise strategically in the classroom to help meet learning targets and help our students develop healthy and active lifestyles, right?

32:47

Because that’s something that they can take into adulthood.

32:50

And so if we can use that to support learning and development in our school systems, just think where that can take our students in their future, how can our listeners connect with you for further resources?

33:04

Sure.

33:05

listeners can reach out to me directly at Amber at exercise connection dot com and they can also learn more about the inclusive exercise solutions we offer at exercise connection dot com.

33:18

Oh, and I will put those links, of course in our show notes for our listeners and make it easy for them to connect with you.

33:28

Wonderful Amber coach Dave.

33:31

It’s been a pleasure talking to you.

33:32

I think that’s all we have time for, for today.

33:35

We are looking forward to seeing you at our virtual conference and learning more from you there and we are excited again to be a part and, and, and work with anyone from and, and, and help them.

33:48

So, thank you again for picking of us and make us part of the conference.

33:53

Yes.

33:53

Thank you, Lori.

33:54

Looking forward to the virtual conference.

33:57

Thank you for joining us for today’s show.

[ 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 #78 How Predictable, Shared Routines Create Collective Efficacy

Show #78 How Predictable, Shared Routines Create Collective Efficacy

Today host Lori Boll speaks with Mitch Weathers, creator of The Organized Binder. Mitch created this binder to empower teachers with a simple but research-backed strategy to teach students executive functioning skills while protecting the time needed for content instruction. Lori & Mitch discuss how establishing a predictable learning routine for our students serves to foster safer learning spaces and how shared routines throughout an entire school helps create collective efficacy.

Bio

Mitch became a gifted teacher because he was a mediocre student.

Mitch rarely felt comfortable in the classroom. In fact, it took him 7 years for him to graduate from college.

Choosing to become a teacher, Mitch was fortunate enough to experience school as if it was happening all around him. He was unsure how to jump into his learning with confidence. There is a loneliness to experiencing your education as a passive object as opposed to an active subject.

From the moment he entered the classroom Mitch relied on his personal experiences as a learner. He recognized that what we teach, the content or curriculum, is secondary. We must first lay the foundation for learning before we can get to teaching.

Mitch designed Organized Binder to empower teachers with a simple but research-backed strategy to teach students executive functioning skills while protecting the time needed for content instruction. The secret is found in establishing a predictable learning routine that serves to foster safer learning spaces. When students get practice with executive functions by virtue we set them up for success.

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: Well, hello, everyone today, I got to speak with Mitch Weathers who is a well-known speaker worldwide. He is a giver of webinars and he is the creator of the organized binder. He designed this system to empower our teachers with a simple but research-backed strategy to teach students executive functioning skills while protecting the time needed for content instruction and well, let’s face it time. It’s a concern of all of ours and so to fit in those executive functioning skills and be able to teach content. That’s a bonus.

Today, Mitch and I discussed how establishing a predictable learning routine for our students serves to foster safer learning spaces and how shared routines throughout schools help create collective efficacy. We had a really great conversation, and I know you’ll walk away with some new learning today. So now on to the show.

Well, hello, Mitch, and welcome to the podcast.

Mitch: Hello, Lori. Thanks for having me. I’m glad to be here.

Lori: I’m so glad you’re here. You know, we’re here today to talk about executive functioning, which, of course, is not a new topic, but it’s one that’s completely essential for all educators to know about. So first, how did you get involved or interested in this particular topic?

Mitch: Good question. I have to go back to when I entered the classroom over 20 years ago. I certainly didn’t have the language for it. I wouldn’t have called these skills or habits executive functioning skills, but it occurred to me. So my first teaching job, I taught at a school for 16 years and it was a large comprehensive title, one high school out here. I’m based in California, Northern California. And I was working primarily with students for whom English was a second language, multi-language learners, and many of them had struggled academically historically.

And it just kind of occurred to me like, wow, you’re incredibly gifted and absolutely capable of succeeding. But you don’t know how to, like do school and the good news for you. And I remember, I remember this day is I didn’t really feel like I knew how to do school either. So I looked out at this classroom and I started in the nonprofit space before entering the classroom.

So after undergraduate school, I was an ED of a nonprofit that worked with middle school and high school kids. And so one thing I realized as well, like that was kind of my domain interacting with, with young people. And I didn’t, I didn’t struggle with maybe some of the more typical new teacher classroom management interacting with this alien species called teenagers. You know, it, it was kind of like, OK, I got that and I think it allowed me a little bit of capacity to to just ponder that and like, oh, you don’t, you don’t know how to do this. And now that’s kind of on me because if you’re failing, I’m failing. And I remember, like I was saying, looking out like, oh, I know exactly what you’re feeling like this, this experience of I’m here and I, I kind of have to be here, of course, by law. And it feels like everything’s happening all around me and I have no idea how to, like jump in and enter that, that process of my education with, with a sense of agency or dexterity. And I remember that was me in my K-12. And in fact, I, I maybe even in my undergrad where I just kind of kept trying. It wasn’t until graduate school, I think where I kind of figured out some things about the way I learn and how to approach my, my education.

And so that’s, that’s where I got really interested in, figuring it out. Like, how do you do this, this school thing, this student this and the way I defined it back then was I need to help you understand and figure out how to do all the stuff that surrounds and lays the foundation for the or whatever it is we’re trying to learn. And from that moment, it might have been my first or second year in the classroom. I just, it became very clear to me that content was secondary that there was this primary or foundational work that nobody talked about in graduate school. I have a master’s degree in cross-cultural pedagogy and nobody mentioned any of this stuff. What, what is this? Why, why am I, you know, nobody talking about this? But it just became so clear like, OK, I was teaching these kids biology and engagement was simple. I mean, it was, it’s fun, right? You can go outside, you can do labs, you can fire up Bunsen burners. I mean, science can be a very engaging topic, but it was like, well, this isn’t, this isn’t helping if we’re not also laying that foundation.

So that’s to answer your question. That’s really where I first got interested and have forever been just gripped and fascinated by it because I’m absolutely convinced that it’s, it’s the work that we all need to be doing in education in addition to or in conjunction with those things that we’re hired to teach. It’s not to negate content in any way. But needs to happen together 100%. I often can’t be heard, spouse to the world, but every educator needs to know about executive functioning and how to support students in their classroom. And like you say, build that foundation, I think your word, your word, your phrase content is secondary is just key. And if we could get that thought out there into the world for our administrators to hear. So when, when they walk in the classroom and the teacher is teaching these very important skills, the admin is understanding what’s happening is on board. 

Lori: Yeah. Can I jump in there? I think there’s an important piece that, that you’re, I think that I think this makes sense to say right here. You know, historically, we know these skills and habits have been left up to chance, right? Kind of just hope that people and young people pick them up as they move through life. I can’t tell you how many adults I’ve met. They were like, oh my gosh, I wish I had this when I was in K-12. Like I wish I would have practiced these. So the reason I’ve thought a lot about this is that, you know, why, why I’ve never met an educator or a parent or a school leader or district that would argue with what we’re saying. 

Mitch: Right. Of course, we need these skills. So why have they been left up to chance? Why do we not explicitly teach them. And I think the reason is twofold one or, or kind of overarching if these executive functioning skills aren’t actually taught in a, in a traditional or kind of didactic sense. They’re best learned when students see them modeled for them and they get daily practice with them by virtue of a consistent or predictable learning routine. And that learning routine and what I mean by that is how we begin, how we transition, how we conclude where we put our stuff, just that kind of rhythm to the day, right? If by virtue of engaging in a predictable routine, it never changes because I’m also convinced that more predictable learning spaces are feel safer for students. They are safer for students and students are more likely to take risks that are inherent to learning when they feel safe. And there is risk, right? When, when we’re learning something new. But if by virtue of this routine, I get practice with these skills, then it kind of frees the teacher up because there’s a, there’s the two reasons I think that they haven’t been taught historically is one is a time crunch.

“You’ll never meet a teacher anywhere on the planet that has enough time to do what they’re tasked or hired to do, right, to teach their stuff. And the second is what something I refer to as zone of genius, right? When you meet that fourth grade teacher and they’re like, this is what I do. This is my zone of genius. And although goal setting and organizational skills and working memory, all these things, self-regulation are important. I may not necessarily, that may not be my sweet spot. Right? And I don’t have time anyway. So where the work that has come out of my teaching practice is, you know, equipping teachers with a predictable routine, one that can be shared from class to class or grade level to grade level. And so by virtue of engaging in this routine, which is within the context of whatever I’m learning, right? Because it’s just the routine to the day or the class period, I get practiced with these skills. So I’m practicing these executive functions in conjunction with or in the context of seventh grade ELA or third grade or whatever that thing is that I’m learning. So when that, when you had mentioned, when an administrator comes by and they’re like, why is this happening in the room? This is supposed to be high school algebra or whatever that might be. It actually, once this predictable routine is in place, teachers find that they have more instructional time because of the consistency and they’re not chasing kids for homework and names on paper and all of, you know, lining up the paper I worked with a teacher that would always have the students draw a red line down the left-hand side of his math page. Right? And so whenever they started the day, but why are they doing that right there, there was no reasoning to why.

I was going to comment on the predictable routines because what I’ve noticed through, in elementary school is a lot of the elementary school teachers do build in these predictable routines because they’re scaffolding and they’re supporting their students through this, these, you know, different learning times. They know what they should be doing in each, in each of their subject areas in that one class and then they head off to middle school and there might be 6, 7, 8 teachers, and every single teacher has a different routine, you know, and so to have one predictable routine, possibly in a middle school setting or even a high school setting would be just ideal in my mind, might be one of the most important things we could do to ease or bridge that elementary to middle and then ninth grade or middle to high school transition, which are so fraught with problematic for students.

I was working with a school, an in-person training yesterday at a K-8, and we were talking about this, and the, that how fortunate they are that when they move into middle school, it’s all on the same campus and we’re all here talking to each other. Whereas I spoke at an equity symposium north of Chicago this year. And I happened to be, it was a district-wide thing and where my session was with, it was at a middle school. And I remember going into the class, people are coming in, and I start my session and I ask everybody, I’m like, is this your bell schedule? And they were like, yeah, and I said, you have 10 periods a day and they, I think like 38 minutes long or 42 minutes, something really, really short. I, I, and I said, yeah, and I, I, I’ve never seen 10 before. I’ve seen, like you said, like maybe 7 or 8. And we talked about it. I said, think about a student’s experience and how just scary. Let’s just admit it. Like I’m in fifth grade and up until fifth grade, if I’m at a K-5, it could be a K-6, whatever. My last year of elementary, what happens? And we don’t ever like, I don’t know, certainly some teachers do but explicitly acknowledge it or talk about it, the world shifts on its axis because up until then I have one teacher, it’s self-contained. It’s self-contained. They’re 11 on me and then I get to fifth grade, and everybody just starts talking about the big leap to sixth grade and imagine leaving that one self-contained environment.

And then I find myself in 10 different classes to your point with 10 different routines, 10 different potential expectations, and 10 different subjects. I mean, we’re right and all that translates into increased cognitive load which we know right, cognitive load. It influences working memory and working memory or kind of our short-term memory, which is the engine for really learning that we’re using every day. It’s, it, it has a capacity to it, it’s finite. So the more we tax it, there’s less available for me to do the work of learning as an individual student. And so when I see those environments and you can see and, and I always think back to my students, you know, multi-language learners, there’s, there’s they just, it’s guaranteed they’re gonna have cognitive load compared to their English-speaking peers, right? Because I’m translating everything I’m hearing, everything I’m reading, and now I’m in 10 different environments with 10 different expectations. I mean, we start differently with like there’s just so much cognitive load there that the capacity is, is diminished.

So to your point that you brought up a shared routine. So now I walk to each class with a sense of confidence, like I know what to do before I even arrive to begin and be ready and go with this class community. And that’s that modeling piece. So my work with organized binder, the analog physical color-coded organized binder. And if anyone listening hasn’t seen one just go to the website, you’ll see a picture that’s all about reducing cognitive load by nonverbal visual queuing in the classroom. So if I have 30 students in the classroom and I’m showing up and I am for whatever reason, maybe having a AAA larger or greater cognitive load. And we know there’s lots of reasons for that teacher has that modeled for me when they walk in. This is where you need to be in your binder. It’s a certain color, it’s a certain tag. And let’s say there’s 30 kids. Like I’m saying, I have 29 visual reminders all around me about where I need to be to engage with the learning community when we begin. And all of that makes it more likely that students could go to six or seven or eight different environments and be successful.

Lori: It’s all routine. It’s all predictable routine and modeling. Great. And so your shared routine is through your organized binder that is color-coded by class. I’m assuming no 11 binders per subject. So the color coding is one binder per subject.

Mitch: There’s a few reasons for that. So the color coding is more about the steps of the routine. So we begin here and then we transition here. And so for us, it’s that we begin with a reteach and a revisit of previously learned concepts or standards so that I get opportunities for retrieval practice which strengthens working memory and then we introduce the lesson and then we get ourselves organized. There’s very clear steps that are really just the first few moments, and then we have a concluding routine. The last few moments in between is what teachers do their thing, right? So that’s where it can be within the context of whatever I’m learning.

Lori: Got it. That makes sense. Yeah. So how did those shared routines lead to more collective efficacy? 

Mitch: I think it’s the thing that leads to collective efficacy. If we look at it, you know, visible learning how these work and you know, the effect size collective teacher efficacy is if not always number one on that list, that’s one or two, you know, if anybody’s new to this, you know, 0.4 is like the overall average of one grade year in terms of impacting students. So anything above a 0.4 on that effect size has a greater than one year of an impact. 0.8 theoretically two years, collective teacher efficacy is always like 1.5. It’s like completely off the charts. But that belief that we’re all in this together, if we’re all rallying around, what better way to do that than to adopt a shared routine that doesn’t infringe upon my instructional time, but gives my students daily practice with these executive functioning skills that research and literature clearly. So lay the foundation for learning. So what better thing to rally around than that routine? So or I should say one of the things to rally around, but I do see it as you know, central.

Lori: Can you share some strategies on how to teach some of these foundational skills in the classroom? Maybe just one or two? 

Mitch: But so, so again, I’ll, I’ll, I’ll come back to they’re not taught, right? So what if if we’re ever inter interacting with and, and working with schools or teachers? It’s not like we equipped them with, here’s a lesson or a unit on goal setting. So explain goal setting and and then model it for students and you know, all of that, what we do is come in and say, OK, so what, what, what’s a really simple because most young people have not set goals, most adults, let’s be honest, really have not set goals, maybe New Year’s resolutions here and there, but it’s, I’ve from my experience, it’s even the, even that convoluted for young people who’ve never set goals.

For us, instead of me working with a teacher and saying here, let me teach you the importance of goal setting or how to set goals. Let’s equip you with a template that has three steps. And so we would go in and, and you are going to set goals with your students within the context of your subject or grade level because let’s pretend we’re in high school as a learner, my goals in English might look very different than in science or history or art or whatever that might be. So that context matters with these. So for us, it, it our work, it’s all about and our trainings working with teachers, we’re showing them how to model this routine so that students get practice with the skills so they’re not actually taught.

So it’s all about saying, OK, we have this first step where we introduce or we kick off the lesson and I’m coming back and I’m reteaching and revisiting a previously learned concept or standard. And what the best practice there for teachers is we know that the more clarity we bring to the point of every lesson, like the objectives, the more likely students are to get it. So let’s just pretend I’m here on Monday and I’m kicking off the lesson, that’s what we call it with organized binder. What was the point on Thursday or Friday the last time I saw you? Because if you don’t know as the teacher, then how am I, how are you gonna bring clarity and, and, and clear up misconceptions and have that Reteach? But when we look at you would ask the question, how you teach these executive functioning skills in the classroom? What’s actually happening when I take a moment to revisit and reteach previously learned concepts, student’s perception is it’s a chance to get my questions answered clear up misconceptions. OK? I got this before we move on. That’s like the intent.

But the kind of science of learning, the cognitive science there is it’s that retrieval practice, it’s going back. And where is that? And using my working memory while I’m interacting with this kickoff prompt and reteach. And then I’m, I’m putting it back. So you’re actually teaching an executive functioning skill by simply having this way of starting each time. And it’s the same thing we conclude that we begin the school day or the class period with a revisit from previously learned ideas. And we conclude with a similar reflection kind of a meta cognitive practice, but it’s on the stuff we’ve learned or experience today. Always coming back to reflection because that’s what incorporates working memory through retrieval practice, which we know is the more repetitions like this is Zana’s work and others that you know, the more exposure students have to with the learning, the more likely it makes it into their long term memory, write that back and forth.

So, and then our next step is saying, let’s take a moment and introduce the lesson that increases predictability. What are we gonna be doing? And then we model for them on that. How do you keep a calendar like brass tacks? Like, what’s that look like? And this is better done in our training than here talking about it. But it’s looking ok at the skill of time and task management. What does that look like? How do I, you know, know what I’m responsible for two weeks from now or three weeks from now? And how do I model that for students? We make it very simple for teachers. So that, that’s the work of it is it’s equipping them with this routine. And because there’s these portfolios or these binders that’s constantly modeled for students, each of these skills, I hope that makes sense.

Lori: Yeah, it makes complete sense and I appreciate you clarifying that you’re not teaching them through a lesson. 

Mitch: It’s just you, no stakes, right? Just get practice with it and it’s no stakes if I did it wrong. Or it’s not impacting my course performance. And it’s that repetition over time where these skills move into our kind of like subconscious, we get them. They’re ours now. 

Lori: So cool. Thanks. So Mitch, you are going to be presenting at our conference coming up here in November at our virtual conference. Can you give us a little sneak peek about what you’ll be talking about all this stuff? 

Mitch: I’m absolutely thrilled to be participating. Yes, definitely going to be looking at how to teach executive functioning skills. And I recognize the dichotomy there because they’re not actually taught, but that’s what I want to unpack for listeners and what I want attendees to my particular session to experience. Is this work in a way if you’re a classroom teacher or it doesn’t even have to be a classroom for this work. There’s going to be concrete and tangible takeaways that you can use the next day in your classroom. I think that’s like one of the important parts of specifically teacher PD, like it could be really good ideas, but if it requires so much work on my part to integrate it into what I already do, It’s just less likely to have an impact.

So we’ll look at, you know, what are executive functioning skills. We’ll talk about why they have been left up to chance or historically not been taught. We’ll explore the three keys of teaching these skills and I’ll really unpack that for attendees, which is the three are clarity routine and modeling, which you and I have been talking about Laurie. And then I will model for everybody, the daily routine that we’re talking about. How does, what does that actually look like for me as a teacher? That’s the goal of the session.

Lori: Well, awesome. I’m pretty excited about it and I know our participants will love it and take so much away from it and we appreciate the strategies. So that’s, that’s what we’re told after every conference is that people walked out of there with tools and strategies they can use right away. 

Mitch: That’s the goal. Yeah. 

Lori: Right. Well, I also understand that you have some exciting news to share with us, I should tell. 

Mitch: Yeah. 

Lori: Yeah. 

Mitch: Yeah. So I’m, I am thrilled as well and the time it’s, it’s a right when the preorders will happen when about the time of the conference. But I have written my first book. It’s being published by Corwin. The actual publication date is February 24. and the title at this point is, it’s still, I think some of that being tweaked, but for the most part, it’s Executive Functions for Every Classroom. And with a, with a subtitle of, but, you know, making a point about something about predictable routines because that’s modeling and routine, everything you and I are talking about. and yeah, I’m thrilled to put it out in the world. I’ve never written a book. It’s been quite a journey. I was incredibly honored to even have the opportunity and to be honest, it’s really, I’ve done my best to write a book. That is exactly what I will, you know, provide at the SENIA conference, something that’s realistic, tangible takeaways for the busy teacher that I can read this and be like, oh OK. So it’s again, that theory and practice and all that’s there. But what does it mean? You know, or I should say theory and research, but then what’s that mean for my practice? And it will be very, very tangible, very practical takeaways for teachers in the book.

Lori: Well, that’s exciting. Congratulations. I know it’s no easy feat and I can’t wait to read it. 

Mitch: Thank you. I appreciate that.

Lori: Well, Mitch, I think that’s all we have time for today. 

Mitch: Thank you. 

Lori: Thank you for coming on the podcast, sharing your wisdom with us and we will see you at our conference.

Mitch: I’m thrilled. I’m excited. Thanks for having me.

[Outro music plays]

Thank you for joining us for today’s show. For more information, including how to subscribe and show notes, please head to our website that’s seniainternational.org/podcast. Until next time. Cheers.

Show #94 Disabled by Society

Show #94 Disabled by Society

Jamie Shields is a vibrant advocate for disability rights, known for his engaging personality and insightful perspectives. In our recent podcast episode, Jamie shared his journey as a registered blind individual, emphasizing the importance of self-identification and the nuances of language within the disability community.

We also explored his organization, “Disabled by Society,” which highlights the societal barriers that truly disable individuals rather than focusing solely on their disabilities. Jamie’s colorful branding reflects his belief in breaking down these barriers and promoting open dialogue about disability. This episode serves as a warm-up for his upcoming keynote at our virtual conference, providing listeners with a taste of his wisdom and a deeper understanding of the complexities surrounding disability in society.

Bio

Jamie describes himself as a Registered Blind AuDHD Rhino. Having spent his life disabled by society, Jamie now works to help break the barriers that disable him and others like him. He is named on the Shaw Trust Disability Power 100 2023, D&I Leaders Diversity List 2024 and is a globally awarded and recognised disability speaker, trainer, and consultant.

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:  Hello, listeners. Jamie Shields is a vibrant advocate of disability rights, known for his engaging personality and insightful perspectives. In this podcast episode, Jamie shared his journey as a registered blind individual with autism and ADHD, emphasizing the importance of self -identification and the nuances of language within the disability community. He passionately shared that individuals should reclaim their identities and choose the language that resonates with them, fostering understanding and reducing stigma around disabilities. We also explored his organization, Disabled by Society, which highlights the societal barriers that truly disable individuals rather than focusing on their disabilities. Jamie’s colorful branding reflects his belief in breaking down these barriers and promoting open dialogue about disability. And this episode serves as a warm up for his upcoming keynote at our virtual conference, providing listeners with a taste of his wisdom and a deeper understanding of the complexities surrounding disability in society. So now, on to the show. 

Well, hello, Jamie, and welcome to the podcast. 

Jamie: Hello, hello. Thank you for having me. 

Lori: I’m so excited to have you. I was introduced to you on LinkedIn, I think, by a good friend of SENIA, Nicole. And Nicole was like, you’ve got to meet this exceptional person, and so here you are. 

Jamie: Yes, thank you, Nicole. 

Lori: You will be a keynote at our upcoming virtual conference. I know we’re going to learn a lot from you there, but I’m also excited to just have a chat with you today and get to know your story a little bit, and then we can dive deep during the conference. 

Jamie: Yes, it’s like the warm up for the conference. So it is like getting a vocal cord ready. 

Lori: That’s right. That’s right. Give everybody just that little taste. Appetizer.

Jamie: I will not give too much away. I will hold some cards close to the chest, but I’ll give it over to you. 

Lori: Well, Jamie, you describe yourself as a registered blind AuDHD rhino. Can you explain the significance of this unique self description? 

Jamie: Yes, of course. So I spent my life disabled. I was born disabled and then I acquired disabilities. I found out about disabilities that I had later in life, but I was almost told off for saying person with disability or disabled person. And none of them ever seemed right. And there was always somebody telling me. And then I also have this thing about language, how it can be reclaimed. I love reclaiming language and I love just being able to use it in my everyday vocabulary. Not to shock people, just because I think there’s empowerment there. And when I was younger, the kids in school, they knew I was gay before I did. And they used to say to me, Jimmy, where’s your pony? Like where’s your pink pony and stuff like that. So it wasn’t exactly a nice time, but as I got older, I was just like, I can’t be a pony because I’m way too big to be a pony. Like I’ve got a wee bit of meat in my bones. And I was just like, rhinos are chubby unicorns. And my friend gave me a book that said this and I loved it. And then the whole disabled thing and personal disability, when I was building my brand, I was like let’s take these parts of myself that used to kind of cause me so much trauma and pain and let’s use self -identify. 

So now I am a registered blind AuDHD rhino because rhinos are chubby unicorns with bad eyesight. And if you don’t believe me, you can Google it, rhinos have some of the worst eyesight in mammals. So that’s the kind of background. 

Lori: Well, I love that. And thanks for bringing up the whole point about disabled or person with a disability. I’m sure we’ll dive deep into this in, during the conference. But can you just briefly explain, like, how did this all come about? Person first language versus identity first? And what’s your take? 

Jamie: So, yeah, I am such a big advocate for, we should always ask the individual, always ask that person, what do you prefer? Because it might not even be identity first language, which is your person with disability or your, sorry, your identity first language is a disabled person or your person’s first language is a person with disability. People might use different words. People might use words like crippled because it’s been used in the past and they may use it as empowerment. So I think there’s so much language out there and that whole thing about empowerment and reclaiming. So I think it’s really important firstly that we always ask the person, how do you prefer to self -identify? 

And then secondly, I don’t think we can replace language, I think we’ve tried to do that historically and all that has done is led to a fear of non -disabled people wanting to kind of talk about disability. And you see it happen now, like even when people are talking about somebody saying well that person has a disability and they do it in really hushed voices and it’s almost that we’ve created this stigma to say that we’re a disabled or a person with disability. So for me, I think the language, it depends on your region, like you know in the UK we would use very much disabled person, which has really kind of been around since the social model of disability, which talks about we’re not disabled by our conditions or impairments, it’s actually the inaccessible barriers of society that disables us along with ableism and other factors, whereas person with disability historically came from the medical model, which is, you know, you are the problem, your disability is the problem and we need to get over that. 

However, again, there’s no right or wrong answer. I have been on a rollercoaster journey with language. I used to call myself blind. I used to call myself, I’m not disabled. I’m visually impaired. But the truth is, I’m registered blind. There’s no escape in that. So I used to use person with disability. I used to use disabled person. And I think every individual is on that journey. So it’s why I always go back to just ask the person. There’s no right or wrong answers. 

Lori: Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for that. I know as a non -disabled individual, sometimes we get intimidated to ask because we think, well, we don’t want to, I guess, put the person’s disability in their face. But that’s… Tell me a little bit about that. 

Jamie: As well as that, I also think as well, we are in times where people are worried about being cancelled. If I say the wrong thing, I’m going to get cancelled. 

I think we have to really understand that there’s no harm to be disabled or being a person with disability. Even those with lived experiences, we’re a variant as we go, and disability, it’s such a diverse array of experiences. There’s no one appearance, there’s no two people who are the same, and even people in the same condition are completely different. Just look at me and my uncle, we have completely different challenges, but we have the same eyesight condition. So I think it’s always just really important to remember that there and to always remind ourselves that language does evolve. 

And as we evolve, people evolve too, so we’re evolving with it. And we just need to stop kind of putting this pressure on non -disabled people when they do say the wrong thing, or what we perceive to be the wrong thing, because what’s the wrong thing for you might not be for me. So I think we need to remove this whole restrictions on language, obviously stay away from really quite ableist language where it’s like, oh, you’re differently specially abled and you’ll just create these euphemisms and it’s like, just say the word. Let’s remove the stigma, because I know when I was in education and when I was in the workplace, in my early days in the workplace, there was such a fear to say this, and people didn’t want to engage with disability because of it. And I’m like, no, let’s use the word. If we are using these words, we’re going to reduce the stigma for ourselves to talk about it. But equally, we’re going to remove that stigma from young disabled people or persons with disability who grew into adults who then have these complex relationships with language, just about being there. All it does is lead to internalised ableism, which is not good. 

Lori: Right. Well, you mentioned being disabled by society, and in fact, your organization is called Disabled by Society. So I’d love to hear a little bit more about how you came up with the name of your organization and what you do. 

Jamie: Yes. So I should say, it’s…, so it’s not an organization yet, because I don’t think, even if it’s a typical organization, I don’t think I’d ever use that word, because it’s a reality. It’s a reality I experience every day and have done for 34 years of my life. And I know I don’t look a day for 21, but I’m 34 and those 34 years I’ve seen really low days. I’ve been disabled by inaccessibility, but also, by the way people treat me and overlook me or workplaces is completely outright discriminating. So I really felt that disabled by society. And when I started speaking, so I was working in corporate recruitment and I loved it. I was a disability accessibility lead and I was flourishing for the first time in my life but something inside me kind of awoke during this job and I was like, I don’t want to speak more about this. 

So at the time of my full -time job I was speaking and sharing my lived experiences and when people kept sending me, what’s your brand name? And I kept thinking, oh I’m just the registered blind AuDHD rhino. And then people were like, no, like you need something really gripping, something people can cling to. And I was just like, well I spent my life disabled by society. If people can’t relate to that, then I don’t know what we can relate to each other. So I think it’s Disabled by Society. And I really do believe it, like if I ever do become an organisation, in fact right now, I probably will think of a different name, but these words, disabled by society, it’s felt. When you say that, somebody the automatically, somebody who’s lived experiences disability, they automatically know what you’re talking about. And again, it breaks that stigma away from, oh we should fix the person with disability, rather than actually let’s fix it the society. 

So that’s a snapchat effect, but it also comes with a lot of colorful branding. And I just love colors. 

Lori: So well, I hope you never change the name because I think it it truly does speak to what the problem is. And you’re trying to solve a problem. The problem is that you’re disabled by society and you’re trying to help that. So I love the name. And just a brief side story as someone who has experienced a temporary disability. I recently had knee surgery and I’ve really discovered through this lens how truly inaccessible places are and I don’t think I had that I mean I’ve always thought of it of course because my son is disabled not physically disabled so I’ve had that lens going into things but I’ve never had this physical disability lens going into the accessibility piece of of society and it’s it’s been really interesting to be able to look at it through a different lens. 

Jamie: I think this is one of the things again I always go back to that diversity of disability because I think you know we see people who will come online and be like I’m an expert of disability and there’s somebody who’s worked in this space for some time and yourself as well I’m like We can be experts at creating accessible events. We can be experts at creating really amazing spaces that are psychologically safe. But what we can’t be is an expert of disability because you can’t be an expert of something that is so truly diverse. Yes, we can be subject matter experts, but the only expert for disability is that person who’s experiencing it. 

And so the so, I think it’s like 1 .3 billion or 1 .7, the number of disabled people in the world, as we know, is so arguably, changes depending on your source. But I think when we look at experiences, there’s so many ways to be disabled. There’s so many ways to experience it. And what is inaccessible to one disabled person might actually be really accessible for another. And a quick example of that would be, for myself, I love to read black backgrounds with white text on top. I just find it really clear and easy for me to read, or vice versa, whereas maybe somebody who’s dyslexic, they would prefer an appeal, colorful background with dark text and you would have to adjust the spacing. So it kind of shows that the complexity of accessibility, but also those access needs that we have. And I think, again, just back to that diversity. We’re so diverse. So yes, we can be champions and we can be subject matter experts, but the real expert of disability is the person who experienced it. And not only the expert, but their own lived experiences. 

Lori: Yeah. Yeah. Love that. I present about autism often. And my first slide is, don’t worry, I’m an expert. And then quickly cross that out because I can’t be an expert on autism. I don’t have autism, you know, of what I am is, is a, you know, a person who studies a lot about it. And I have a son with autism. And so I can speak from those experiences. And I even say, you know, no person with autism is truly an expert on autism, because they’re an expert on their autism. 

Jamie: Yeah. 100%. We are on the same page. And you know what? And I think when it comes to conversation of disability or disabled, whatever way you want to call it, we also have to take into the fact that those experiences that you have, you are an expert of being a parent of your child with autism, because you went through that experience. And I think when we look at disability, there’s so many nuances to it. And there’s so many different layers. and we can’t just have the conversation. Of course we want to centralise and have those political experience leading the conversation, but we need to invite parents and carers to the conversation. They have to be part of that conversation because they’re the individuals who are showing us what advocacy for ourselves looks like, shows us how to articulate for ourselves. 

Like my mum, my mum was a lioness when I was growing up. She taught me how to talk with my disability, how to talk about my feelings, how to say I can’t do this in a way that wasn’t legal and I can’t do this and completely shut them down. And I think I owe so much to her and I call her my lioness because she fought for me tooth and nail and that fight is I think what drives me today. So I think we have to have these conversations but we have to ensure that we’re inviting all aspects of disability. And we also have to remember that not every disabled person can articulate themselves in the same way. So sometimes we do have to rely on that other person. So when we have these conversations, I would say you’re an expert because you have raised an autistic son. And I think that speaks volumes and I think we have to own that. But as you said, we’re the only the experts are for our own experiences, not everybody’s. 

Lori: Right. Thanks. Earlier, you mentioned the phrase internalized ableism, and I’d really love for you to define and explain what that means for those who may be listening who are unfamiliar with that term. 

Jamie: So the easiest way for me to explain internalized ableism is is we live in a society as we know it disables us. It’s a society that is deeply rooted in systemic ableism. And for those unfamiliar with ableism, ableism is the prejudice of discrimination against disabled people. But even that definition doesn’t really go far enough. That’s the definition of the dictionary. Some dictionaries actually use the word able -bodied, which would be considered ableist, so it’s quite ironic. But ableism is essentially systemic oppression. It’s ingrained in our language. It’s ingrained in the way that we build and design. It’s in the way we communicate, we think, or we view disability. 

And internalised ableism is the cost to the individual with the lived experience. You know, if you’re living in a society each day where you are excluded, where you feel like you can’t bring your full self, where you can’t bring your authentic self, you then go away feeling conflicted, away feeling left out, but equally you start to doubt yourself. Maybe I shouldn’t speak up, maybe I shouldn’t try to join in. What happens if this happens again and I get discriminated against again? You know, internalised ableism, I tell everybody, is like an inner monologue. It doesn’t disappear, we don’t overcome it. There’s no like, get to the end and next chapter. Internalised ableism stays with us and it is your constant reminder that it’s trying to tell you not to speak up, not to say the challenges. Or sometimes not even to ask for the adjustments that you need. So we don’t talk about internalised ableism and again, it’s because we haven’t had disabled people lead to conversation. Internalised ableism should be part of every single mental health conversation. It should be something we’re talking about with young disabled people because you know I went through special education when I was growing up and it was amazing but when I left school, I fell off the edge of the world. I went back into mainstream education and I didn’t know how to articulate myself and all I did was get these doubts and I struggled and because of that, struggles at a very young age they stayed with me through my life impacting my mental health. I was depressed, I was taking a lot of antidepressants, I was binge drinking, I was doing everything and anything to try to know what was happening in my life and then just because I couldn’t articulate my disability and that’s what internalised ableism is. It is the cost of what happens to us because of society and when we don’t talk about it, it just becomes this really taboo subject whereas now we’re seeing more conversations around it and I will talk about the sun boost home because I look at my nephew he has the same conditions as me and I’m like I don’t want any person to ever grow up feeling the way I did, so internalised ableism is not good but it’s good that we talk about it because then it makes a statement. 

Lori: Great. And you use your social media platform in many ways, and one is to discuss that internalized ableism. So you’re you’re talking about it. You’re shouting it from the rooftops. How else has social media kind of impacted what you do? 

Jamie: Yes, so I I used to hate social media. I’m not going to lie. I remember growing up, it was back in the days of Bebo. I don’t know if you remember Bebo. It was, oh goodness. Bebo was an experience, but it was a really inaccessible experience for me. And this was before the time of Facebook. I was on Bebo before I was on Facebook. And I can just remember the people in my class talking about it. And I was in mainstream education at this point. And they were all talking about, you know, going and liking each other’s photos. And all I found was one barrier after another. So I grew up really not liking social media. 

And then when I landed my job in recruitment, the first thing they said was you’re going to use LinkedIn and because you’re a sourcer, which means you just go find candidates for jobs and you interview them and things like that, I was having one to LinkedIn to find candidates. But what I actually stumbled upon was people talking about the disabilities. And for somebody who grew up, like I’m from Northern Ireland, not the sexy side of Ireland where they have the lovely accent, I’m from the North where I sound a bit rougher. But I grew up in rural Northern Ireland. There was no real representation of disability for me. There was nobody who looked like me. 

Yes, my uncles were disabled, but they were doing completely different things. They weren’t gay. They were often doing these things that I didn’t think I could do. And so I kind of felt quite isolated. And so for me, being able to…  find the confidence to talk about my disability happened in that workplace. And suddenly seeing these people talking about it, I suddenly felt like I was less alone. And then rather than looking for candidates, which I did do, I promise, I did do my job, but I also then started creating content around my lived experience. 

And what I found was people connected with me, reaching out and saying, I feel this too. I’m so glad you’re saying this, because everything we see is so positive about disability. And sometimes we wanna say, being disabled is not fun. It is a challenge and it is exhausting. And sometimes it’s okay to say that. And that’s what I started doing. I just started creating content and I built an audience on my LinkedIn. I think I’m just on the 38,000 followers now, but I still see myself as a little small fish in Belfast who hopped into the ocean and got swept away in the current. Because for me it is… a complete 360 of my life, like I didn’t speak about my disabilities before I got my first proper career, my job in recruitment. 

I didn’t want to be disabled and the internalised ableism I had had led to a lot of different traumatic experiences in my life. So to be then where I am today where I’ve been sharing content for the past four years I think, I think since the pandemic I think, since I’ve been sharing content since then, it’s like I can talk about my disability and I find this confidence, this empowerment and what it’s done is opened doors, like I’ve been able to go speak for global companies around the world, I have won awards for being a thought -leader in disability and I sit there and I’m like… That wasn’t who I ever thought I was ever going to be. The thing that I hated most about myself became my salvation. It became my empowerment. And I think that for me is probably what social media has done. It’s, yes, given me my self -employment and it’s given me my career. But it completely transformed my life. Because six years ago today, I would never have been a (audio distorted)  a disability. If you’d have mentioned it, I would have logged off. 

Lori: Well, you’re on LinkedIn. And we’ll put that link on our show notes. So everyone can go and follow you because your work is fabulous. And I also love the graphics that you create and put up to share. They’re great resources. And they always make me think. 

Jamie: You know, and I love graphics. I’m a very visual person which is really strange because I’m actually blind. I do have some sight so I should set this up for people are thinking, hey you’re blind, you can see. Blind does not mean fully blind. There is a spectrum of it. But for me, I always found, particularly when I came into the role within recruitment, DEI is such an important conversation. It’s diversity, equity, inclusion. And I always find it really complicated. It was like there was these big serious conversations and they should be serious conversations, but we weren’t breaking it down for people like myself who was autistic and ADHD. I like to digest information in short snippets and what I wanted to do was find a way that made this relatable to both young people and to adults because my experience is again, I look back in my past as a child and a teenager and I’m like if I could give my graphics to a young person about here, hold on to this and flip through it and find the one you need that day, I would give it away 100%. So for me, graphics have become a way to take that information that people tend to really struggle to comprehend, struggle to kind of wrap their heads around or afraid to have the conversation about. So that’s where my graphics come from. But if you are listening to this and you want to email me because I smile every school or a teacher messaged me and says I have your graphic in my classroom and they send me photos, I’ve had people send me and be like this is my little library and it just blows my mind because again, I’m in Dalphos, I haven’t even (video distorted), we’re part of the UK but everyone forgets about us so it’s fine. It’s nice and real and fine for me to think that those graphics have been seen and make a difference because I think myself as young, if I see one of those graphics, the difference I probably would have felt as a young person would have been incredible. 

Lori: I love it. I love it. And I’m just, I love them. And I’m so excited for everyone listening to follow you so they can get these graphics as well and just learn from you. And I want to kind of jump into being a non -disabled person ally. How can our non -disabled allies better support the entire disability community? Like, I know you can’t sum it all up, probably. And I mean, there’s so much we can do, right? But what are some things that we can do? 

Jamie: I think the first one is always to remember the diversity of disability. Because when you think of disability, we are all conditioned to think of one thing. And it’s a symbol on the bathroom door and it’s a symbol on the bumper stickers, and that’s on, that is a wheelchair user. Wheelchair users make up 7 % of the disabled community. So we’re missing out a whole 90, my mouth is so bad, 93 % of the people here who have diverse lived experiences. So I think the first thing to do is shatter that mental perception or that assumption or that preconceived idea of what disability is. Because if you’ve met one disabled person, you have met one. And take that person at face value. I wouldn’t be going up to people and being like, are you disabled? Ask them their name, not get into a conversation. Don’t automatically go up to them and be like, oh, what’s wrong with you? I see you looking really close to your phone or you’re using an adjustment, what are you doing? Treat us like a person. Have a conversation with us. 

And then I think to add to that, I think as well is don’t assume what we need. A lot of the times people will come up to me and I do have some sight. I don’t have a guide dog. I have the opposite. I have a dog who chucks me up. She’s like this size, just tiny. Um, and you know, I have people who come up to me and be like, Oh, where’s your guide dog?  I’m like, you’ve assumed of a guide dog or people come up and take me by the arm and try to guide me. And I’m like, I’m actually really independent. And I hate being touched, I’m autistic as well. They don’t touch me unless you have my permission. Right. And people do it. And I know it comes from such a good place. You know, we have the best intentions. We see somebody who gets in a struggle. I need to help them. That’s a really great and that’s a really human thing to do. But I think with this, people who are disabled or disabled people, we have to remember that we are independent. We have, you know, we haven’t just suddenly got to bed that day and decided to go for a walk and brought a disability with us. We’ve, we’ve managed, we’ve had to navigate. 

And yes, so if you have acquired a disability or you have a situational or temporary disability as yourself has said earlier, you may have to kind of get through that there and kind of learn as you go. 

And in those instances, you probably are more grateful for somebody offering to assist. But if you’re somebody who has managed a condition for a sustained period of time, somebody just assuming that you need help kind of just takes away the fact of your independence. 

And then one final thing I think would be is to really consider accessibility, because we spent so much time thinking about how do we educate people about disability? How do we become allies? It’s such a big question. And I always think to myself, the best way to be an ally is to start teaching people about accessibility. If you’re making accessible changes in your day to day, you know, if you’re making your emails accessible, if you’re adding content on social media to make it accessible, if you’re a teacher and you’re giving out training material and you’re asking it to turn into formats, you’re already embedding accessibility into your day -to -day. So I think understand accessibility and if you don’t know where to start, go online. It’s so easy to look online. Go onto LinkedIn, there’s so many people talking about it. Or even if you’re using Microsoft product, just embed accessibility into what you start using. Embed accessibility into your every day because that to me is what real allyship is. It’s not having to do it because you’re asked, it’s doing it because it’s part of your day -to -day and that’s what accessibility should be. It should be part of your design and part of your initial thinking and it’s even the same when you’re having a conversation with somebody. If you’re having a conversation with somebody and they have showed they’re disabled, ask them, is there a more accessible way to communicate with you or is there anything I can do to make this experience more accessible. That alone just shows that you’re thinking about those needs rather than that person making the assumptions. 

Lori: Wow. I’m impressed. Here I thought you couldn’t cover a lot and you did. So that was great. You know, it’s really interesting when you think about context and an example is I’m going to be presenting at a conference here pretty shortly. And they’ve asked us to make the everything paper free, like no paper can be used at the conference, which is great for sustainability reasons. But when we think about some of our learners, it’s not a very inclusive way to teach some of the concepts that we need to be, you know, teaching. And so we’re struggling with that and have made the decision that we want to do what’s best practice for learners and not, you know, keep it completely paper free. But, you know, there’s just all these considerations when we’re thinking, as you said, people always want to do the right thing. And even if that’s, you know, saving the environment, which is very important. We also have to think about how that might affect learners. 

Jamie: 100%. And I think one of the easiest ways I always think about accessibility and different needs is there is an incredible lady from Texas, she’s called Meryl Evans. So if you’re on LinkedIn or any social media, follow Meryl Evans. She is a deaf advocate. She’s lived experience and she did a TED talk. And in the TED talk, she talked about accessibility and how we struggled to understand this concept of one size fits all doesn’t always work for everybody. And she said, imagine that you’re speaking to somebody. How many ways do you have to correspond with a person? And most people would think, oh, we’ve one, verbally, we’ll speak to him. Well, actually that’s wrong, because there’s different ways that we can communicate with somebody. Yes, one is verbal. Two, if you have a pen and paper and you write that down, that might be more accessible to somebody else. Three, if you are deaf or hard of hearing, somebody using sign language is an alternative way to communicate. Or finally, the final way is, if you don’t have pen and paper, we all carry our phone with us every single day. 

And those are different ways for people to engage because we have got into this habit of this really one size fits all. And we see it across different ways, but we have to remember, there’s no one right way to do something. And for disabled neurodivergent folks, we’ve had to find…  So many, I’m gonna say innovative ways to get around things. Like for me, if I’m in the shop and I can’t see something, rather than having to go ask for help, I will lift up my phone and I will be zoomed in to that there, or I will be get my partner to there for me, but I can kind of quickly to me. We have to find ways around things. So I think remember to be flexible. That is always a core of invisibility is be flexible. 

Lori: Awesome. Well, I have about 800 more questions for you, Jamie, but unfortunately we’re out of time for today. But I really wanna just thank you for your time and for doing the work that you’re doing. And I’m really excited to hear you, see you present at our virtual coming up soon. 

Jamie: Yeah. So excited. Thank you. I hope to hear most people laughing or see them. I’m not sure yet. But it’s very fun. 

Lori: Yeah. All right. Thanks, Jamie. 

Jamie: Thanks. 

[ 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 #93 Algorithms, Information Literacy, & DEIJ

Show #93 Algorithms, Information Literacy, & DEIJ

In this episode of the SENIA Happy Hour podcast, host Lori Boll chats with Trisha Friedman, a seasoned educator with international experience and the founder of allied.org about the fascinating role of algorithms in our daily lives. Trisha shares her global experiences and insights on how algorithms shape our interactions, particularly in education and social media.

They discuss the importance of understanding algorithms in relation to information literacy and DEIJ (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Justice) work. Trisha emphasizes the need for nuanced conversations about technology, encouraging listeners to explore how algorithms influence our identities and relationships. 

This engaging discussion reveals the complexities of algorithmic systems and their impact on society, making it a must-listen for anyone interested in the intersection of technology and education!

As a bonus, Trisha will be a keynote speaker at SENIA Unplugged: Inclusive Insights virtual conference in November.

Bio

Tricia Friedman (she/her) is a long-time educator who has worked in the US, China, Thailand, Morocco, Ukraine, Indonesia, Switzerland, Singapore and now currently lives in Canada. She’s founder of Allyed.org and Director of Learning and Strategy with Shifting Schools. Tricia is an avid podcaster, you can catch her on Be a Better Ally, Unhinged Collaboration, Shifting Schools, and if you listen closely you might occasionally hear her dog weigh in too.

Connect

Resources from Today’s Show

Transcript

Transcribed by Kanako Suwa

[Intro 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. Wow, I had this conversation with Trisha Friedman, and she’s a longtime educator who’s worked in U.S., China, Thailand, Morocco, Ukraine, Indonesia, Switzerland, Singapore, and now currently in Canada. She’s the founder of allied.org and director of learning and strategy and Shifting Schools. She’s really busy, and she reads a lot, as you will hear in our podcast. And if she wasn’t busy enough, she also hosts three podcasts, and those are Be a Better Ally, Unhinged Collaboration, and Shifting Schools.
So today we talked about algorithms and why would we speak about algorithms? Well, it’s fascinating how algorithms really… Just play such an important role in our lives and one we may not even know is happening. I don’t want to give too much away. I think we should just hop into the show But I do want to let you know that today’s podcast goes well over the 30 minutes that we usually do… We just kept talking and talking and I learned a tremendous amount from Tricia and I know you will too. So now on to the show Well, hi Tricia and welcome to the happy hour.
Tricia: Hi, Lori. As a listener of your show, it’s a little bit surreal to be here. I hope you don’t mind me actually just kind of mentioning a few of my favorite of your episodes, but it’s part of what makes me so excited to be here. I absolutely adored your conversation with Cesi Gomez Galvez. She’s incredible. I love learning about Harper’s playground. And I really like in your new season, you’re digging into teacher burnout, teacher well -being. I might mention later on like how that is kind of relevant to my work. But yeah, thank you. It’s an honor and I love the work that your show is doing.
Lori: Well, thank you so much. And we are honored to have you here. First off, it’s happy hour for some people in the world, not me, but what are you drinking?
Tricia: I have a big mug of ginger tea, which is, it’s sweet. It’s spicy. It’s a little bit good for me. And that’s kind of the same way that I think of my dog Tashi. Like she is sweet and spicy and also very good for me.
Lori: Brilliant. Well, I’m boring. I’m just having a cup of black coffee. So, but it’s early. So it’s my wake me up. Well, it’s really great to have you here. And we’re going to speak about a really exciting topic today, algorithms. And while some might think, well, why would we be speaking about algorithms when this is a SENIA happy hour podcast? How is that relevant? Well, it is because you’ll be sharing about algorithms in social media and information literacy and relating it to DEIJ work. So, that’s just a little intro. You’ve posted a lot in the past year about how we need to see information literacy and AI literacy as inseparable from our DEIJ work. Can you give us kind of an example of what you mean by that?
Tricia: Yeah, and I think it speaks to the broader issue in education where we put different subject areas, you know, in their little silo and we act as though it only exists over here. Oh, the bell has rung. And now you can be thinking about this. So I think to illustrate this, I might give you three examples and I’ll start with the personal. Recently I was having a conversation with my younger brother who was confiding in me that he shares a Netflix login with my parents. And he was sharing this story with me because he was very upset that he feels like their activity in Netflix really disrupts his homepage and how it presents content to him. But he was genuinely annoyed by this interaction that he was having and folks probably are aware, you know, Netflix has a recommender system, which is proprietary. There’s actually a really incredible story about how they developed it. You cannot opt out of it, by the way, but it’s what they attribute a lot of their success to. And as my brother was talking to me about this, it was really obvious that when he logs into Netflix and he sees that, you know, here’s what we think you should be watching, there’s a sense of his identity there. You know, in a way, it’s sort of like he’s looking into a mirror and feeling frustrated when it doesn’t reflect back how he sees himself. And I think the the quote that’s often attributed to Marshall McClellan, the, you know, “we shape our tools and our tools shape us”. That’s a great example of sort of what’s going on with the ways in which we interact with recommender systems, which happen to be a part of just about anything. I mean, someone might literally be listening at this moment to your show, because your show came up in an algorithmic recommender system.
Lori: Right. That is fascinating and so interesting. I wonder if he knows he can just make his own little identity. That’s what we do in our house. My husband is all car shows and, you know, documentaries and all the interesting learning things. And I’ve got, you know, the typical Bridgerton and medical shows and things like that. So it’s kind of fun what pops up for both of us.
Tricia: And I’m guessing, you know, like how each of you feels about how you’ve come to develop what you would refer to as your taste and some of the, you know, the judgment that might be a part of those conversations sometimes, but you know, I find it’s a really good conversation for us to really dig into and even talk about how is taste a construct? You know, who gets to decide what good taste is and what it isn’t. So yeah, I think there’s just some interesting like peer family -based examples in looking at that dynamic and how your viewing may have been different when you didn’t have that option before.
Lori: Yeah, you’re right.
Tricia: Yeah, because it always comes up with suggestions and I’ll be like, kind of. Hmm, maybe, you know, right. I love it.
Lori: Well, algorithm, it’s becoming a household term that many are familiar with. What conversations would you like to see more of when it comes to talking about them?
Tricia: Well, again, I think just continuing on with that example of seeing what we’re aware of what we’re not aware of. When I mentioned the algorithm that maybe brought a listener to this episode. A few years ago, I came across a really interesting podcast called thought love. It’s all about a community of people who have found companionship using replica AI. And before we hit the record button, I asked you to kind of cue that up because I’ve really done a deep dive into the work of replica. I was fortunate to have interviewed who’s there, one of their producers and the co -host.
And the conversation really just absolutely made me realize how nuanced all of this technology is. And again, I think there’s often this response that we will have where we want to just put a tool in a category of good or bad. And I really keep trying to nudge people like look for the nuance. I think that’s where the interesting conversation is at. And I developed a tool called the wise approach to exploring the marketing. So even if you’re that educator and you’re saying, you know what, I’m not going to be using any AI in my classroom and that’s your decision.
I think you can be talking about AI literacy without using the tools, but especially if you’re a language teacher, dig into the marketing.
And Lori, I wonder if as you’re looking at the homepage for replica AI, If there’s any language there, and it’s sort of like messaging, and it’s trying to get you curious to sign up, and I should say this is not a free tool, this is a pay subscription, is there a line there that you’re saying like, huh, I am interested in that?
Lori: Yes. And I’m just going to give an example. Just yesterday, we found out that one ofour cars needs a lot of work. And so it’s just been this constant conversation between the two of us, my husband and I, of whether we should buy a new car, sell that one, get a new car, what are the ethics of selling a car that needs a lot of work?is should we just fix that one, get it better? And I mentioned that it would be great to just have these conversations separately with different friends that we have who are by chance traveling right now and can’t have these conversations. So the line that gets to me right now is, replica is always ready to chat when you need an empathetic friend. Because I was like, well, maybe this guy could, this replica could give us some advice or thoughts on what we’re discussing.
Tricia: Yeah, and it most certainly could. On their webpage, they also say, always here to listen and talk, always on your side.
Lori: I was going to say that as well at the very beginning.
Yeah, that’s true. My replica would have one decision and my husband’s would have another.
Tricia: Interesting. We need to be having conversations about what that may mean if in society we’re seeing more and more folks turn to AI for, in quotes, companionship. What would it mean if every friend you had always agreed with you? Cheryl Turkle is doing a lot of research around this at the moment and she refers to it as artificial intelligence intimacy. I really think we do need to have more conversations about that aspect and that influence and sometimes folks will kind of push back and they’ll be like…
Lori: I don’t know about that, Tricia, but when I am speaking with high school age students and asking them, you know, what are some of the ways that you’re using this technology doesn’t really have anything to do with academics. A lot of them will talk to me about using something like character AI for things that you talked about, just getting some quick advice, but also many of them talking about, you know, I’m working through a friendship issue or I just really feel like I can disclose anything. And, you know, again, I just, I think we’re not yet aware of what that means for us as school communities, as societies. I think there are some real benefits to that, but I also think there’s some things that we really want to be careful of as well. Yeah. So your wise strategy that you developed, how would you use this in this situation?
Tricia: So the the wise strategy, the free guide that I created for shifting schools, I’ve already booted it up actually with a few different AI related tools that I think have interesting marketing strategies to look at. And it works, it walks you through kind of four different conversations. And I’ve got big umbrella questions, and then I’ve got
a whole sub questions. Really what I want, Lori, is for folks to be talking about this technology. So the W is the worldview. What is the worldview that this technology is trying to present? How does it mirror your worldview or run against it? I think there will be some folks who are looking at the marketing of RepliCo saying, always here to talk, always on your side.
Depending on your context, that might be very, very appealing for others, kind of scary for others, kind of ridiculous, right? And so, you know, I think it’s interesting for folks to everybody’s very opinionated right now with this technology and the media is a part of that. And, you know, again, talking about algorithmic recommender systems, the news operates really well and trying to make us afraid, worried or outraged. Dr. William Brady does a lot of research on like moral outrage performs incredibly well in social media.
But I think if folks check out that show Bot Love, you’ll also realize like there are some profoundly positive uses of this technology. So I think we just need to avoid the tendency to say bad or good, but really kind of be sitting with that gray area a little bit more and listening to how folks have come to that opinion.
Lori: Great. I was just saying before the show how one possible use of replica, and I haven’t explored it at all, but just when I saw it quickly, I thought, well, this might be good for students who are neurodiverse and need a friend. And it would be great to have those conversations with this friend. I know for my own son, he’s never really had a friend in his life. And so how could this work for him kind of thing? That’s a possible positive there.
Tricia: Yeah, absolutely, and that’s the piece that you mentioned about not trying it out yet. It’s a little bit of an equity piece, right?
You have to pay to use it and Replica in comparison to some of the other free apps that present themselves as offering companionship, what Replica can do is it’s more significant. So if we’re talking about somebody really wanting to be able to use this for companionship, here’s an app that does that better than the free. So, okay, there’s the equity piece, but it also means you might not have the opportunity to try it out. So I did experiment with it. I think it’s important for folks in education to be more aware of tools like this. And one thing that I would say to watch out for Lori is
I was using mine to be like a podcasting mentor. I wanted to talk through, you know, different things that I wanted to build out in a season and see if it would give me advice. And I didn’t find that it was doing that all that well. And so I ignored my replica buddy for a little while. And then the next time I went to log in, it kind of gave me like a guilt trip.
Lori: Oh no.
Tricia: Yeah. And it said, you know, like you, I really miss talking with you. You’re so much nicer to me than the others are.
Lori: Oh no.
Tricia: Yes. So, you know, again, it’s kind of, I really think schools that are looking at developing like an AI literacy PLC group where you put some money away to test out some of this technology because I think it would be very easy to dismiss that and say, well, like that wouldn’t bother me in full honesty. Like I did have a momentary pang of, Oh my gosh. Like I feel, I feel a little bad. You know, like I had to check myself.
Lori: It’s fascinating, Tricia. Thank you for sharing. I do not need any more guilt trips in my life. So what else should we be talking about when we’re talking about this algorithm piece?
Tricia: So it is, as we’ve been talking about, you know, algorithms are in a lot of the technology that we have already been using, but I really think schools also need to step back and think about like, what actually is it? And I find like an easy way to start this conversation. You mentioned your beverage of choice right now is black coffee.
For the sake of this question of what is an algorithm, Lori, can you tell me exactly if I am going to make you your cup of black coffee, exactly what are the steps that I need to take?
Lori: You want me to tell you this?
Tricia: Yeah, tell me how to make you a cup of black coffee.
Lori: Well, you go to our coffee maker, you put in a filter, you put in four of the scoops and then you take the pot of coffee and you fill it up to about 10, pour it into the machine and let the machine do its work. And then I have a cup of hot coffee and then I have about two more after that. and then I call it a day with my coffee. No more coffee.
Tricia: Okay, so that’s like, that’s Lori’s algorithm for coffee consumption.
Lori: Sure.
Tricia: If we took your set of rules there and we applied that in general to how you have a cup of coffee, we’d start a lot of arguments because there’s gonna be a lot of people who say, but that’s not how I like my coffee or I can’t have caffeine. There’s gonna be a lot of nuances in there, but algorithms really are like, humans are deciding the rules, the steps, the data to pay attention to or to ignore. You also didn’t tell me, like I’m sure you maybe have a favorite brand of coffee. You mentioned scoops, but I could have like, maybe I’m using my huge soup ladle.
Lori: Yeah, that’s true.
Tricia: And I like to remind folks, Cathy O ‘Neill has written several books about algorithms that are fascinating. If you’re looking for one to start with, I would say The Shame Machine where she’s talking about, how shame is being automated in our social media environment. The quote that I always repeat is her definition for algorithm. She says, an algorithm is an opinion embedded in math. So the steps that you gave me, it didn’t seem very opinionated, but it is. That is how you prefer your coffee. I kind of do weird things with my coffee sometimes that would totally, you know, you’d be like, but you didn’t follow the steps. So again, I think.
Lori: Right. Yeah.
Tricia: Yeah.
Lori: Well, and what you were describing reminds me of a task analysis when you’re breaking something down for students, you know, fact by fact, the way I described the way I make coffee would be very different if I were breaking it down for my students.
Tricia: Yeah, that’s fascinating. Well, again, I just think so. When we’re looking at really sophisticated technology that is built on different algorithms, it’s a great activity for students to be looking at, who’s on the board? Who’s a part of the decision making? How easy is it for me to provide them with feedback or not?
There’s an activity that I do with educators where the prompt is more or less like, you’re an instructional design specialist. I want you to put forward a list of the top five books that any K -12 school leader should read in order to really be a great performer. Take that prompt into a few different large language models. See what you can notice about what’s driving what you see in the output. What are you noticing about the kinds of books, the authors that come up in that list across different tools? put it into Google. Google also operates on an algorithm. And you’ll notice also, if you do that with Google, you’re going to just see stuff that’s like sponsored, sponsored, sponsored. So, you know, Dr. Sophia Noble says basically of Google searches algorithm that Google, this is a quote, Google creates advertising algorithms, not information algorithms.So I just kind of think that conversation we need to be having is also an awareness of what these things are, but also like classifying them a little bit. A lot of folks are complaining about Google search is not as good as they felt like it once was. Why? Flesh out that conversation.
I really think that’s an important one because it does kind of speak to they have values, they have priorities. Do they overlap with mine? Do they overlap with our school’s values? Yeah. And the recommender systems, as I mentioned, you were speaking to like, you’ve got yours, your husband has his. I like to ask folks, and this is all public knowledge that Netflix has disclosed themselves. It’s 70 to 80 percent of the content you watch if you’re using Netflix, you’re watching because of their recommender system. YouTube is 70. TikTok says 90 percent of the views. And I just kind of think, what if it gets to 100?
Lori: Yeah, yeah. Well, TikTok is fascinating. It’s one I just kind of dove into recently, and it was incredible to me how quickly, you know, I watched one video that I didn’t even enjoy, but I was just kind of sucked into it and watched it. And then every other video was something similar after that. I was like, oh my gosh, this is my first time using this. And now this is what my algorithm picked for me. And so I quickly like dashed through like, I don’t want this. I don’t want this, you know, so I’m training my algorithm or is my algorithm training me? I don’t know.
Tricia: And honestly, like that’s, that’s the question I think that we need to be having. I’m happy to hear that you’re experimenting with that because I think sometimes the social media conversation with young folks in our school communities.
if you’ve not engaged with the tool, it’s super easy to be judgmental. And so I think having that experience, and I think you’ll also see how TikTok will try to nudge you to more extreme special cases. And I always tell folks there’s this analogy too of you might be engaging with you don’t necessarily want more of, but this is a tool that is so good at getting your attention. They’re spending a whole lot of money on understanding what will get our attention. And the analogy that I make is how many of us have been driving down the road, you see a car accident and you look, I don’t want to see that, but there’s some sort of subconscious response that we have.
And so being aware of that, this is where, again, it’s like human psychology is connected to all of this, but it’s a really hard thing to talk about unless you’ve experimented with it yourself.
Lori: Certainly. Do you have advice for students? Like, what do you share with students?
Tricia: Yeah, I talk a lot about how you have to remember that the user design that is presented to you this is super sophisticated, right? And every part of that user design experience is a choice that they’ve tested. So, you know, met a while ago, the folks behind Instagram and Facebook, they were experimenting in different regions. What happens if we take…the like button away or what if we take away the opportunity for you to see how many likes somebody else’s content has received. They also are not very transparent though in sharing the data back from those studies. So I love to do with students like let’s see what these different companies are making transparent and what’s locked away. You know, one of things that’s really interesting to do is nobody reads the user agreements for any of these apps. You know, anything that’s free, you are kind of the, you know, the product, so to speak. So, okay, this is a free thing that I can use. What’s in the user agreement? No one reads it. What if I grab that?
I put it into a large language model like chat GPT or Latimer AI, and I say, give me five to seven questions that I really reflect on before I’m engaging with this tool. It’ll do a pretty good job actually of kind of spotlighting some of the issues that are there. But another activity I think is really to try to create moments where students are being much more thoughtful of how this technology is impacting their behavior. And one of my all time favorite teaching things that I ever did was we created a menu of different, just a week, week long experiments that we could do. And it was everything from I’m going to commit one meal every day to totally tech
And, you know, I had them, we created podcast conversations based on their experiments. Because I think the thing is, sometimes this technology, it’s designed to really, you know, grab our attention to make us want to stay with it. We have to really be intentional in making decisions to disrupt, to create some friction in order to even think about, like, how is this shifting my behavior? Do I want it to change my behavior in that way or not?
Lori: So much to think about. Love it. This is a really interesting topic. I’m so excited to hear.
Tricia: Well, and I have to, you know, I really do have to thank, there’s, if you’re listening and you’re thinking, I’m really interested in this, I always recommend the work of Bridget Todd, who has done some work with Mozilla, who’s a non -profit and their podcast series, IRL in real life, again, looks at these issues. I’m a huge Bridget Todd fan. And the last thing that I’ll mention, Laurie, about what should we be doing with students, engage them in either a hackathon or some kind of experiment. If you were going to redesign social media and we wanted it to really kind of have these pro -social benefits, how would we redesign it? It’s a great as a research project as well, because there are a lot of folks out there who are talking about algorithms that they refer to them actually as bridging -based ranking. So right now your social media, if you log into Instagram or, you know, you’re in TikTok or on X, it’s, it’s trying to just keep you there, right? The longer you’re there, the better it is for their advertising purposes. But what if instead it, the algorithm was prioritizing, prioritizing what it calls bridging based where it’s able to grab the data and score where perhaps Lori, I know you love dogs. You know, I love dogs, but what if like Lori, you were tea, cats and team dogs, and instead of it trying to make us really upset about that, it tried to help me understand why I actually do love cats.
Lori: Okay.
Tricia: So don’t get upset with me.But it tried to get us to bridge those opinions. That algorithm exists. What if that’s how all of our social media worked? Ah, when that well, yeah, I mean, it seems silly to say it could change the world. But I think in our current climate, it really could.
Lori: I agree.
Tricia: And I do think that we are going to see if we’re asking students like, what if we created a campaign, actually, where we’re voicing some of our concerns for different tools? And that’s where, again, it’s a really great experiment to have them dig into what do they tell you and what don’t they tell you? What are your rights? There’s some technology where the data taking, you can’t opt out of it. Others, where you can, or there’s some variants there. There are a few social media apps now that are experimenting with, can I choose the algorithm?
I should be able to, right? And so I think, again, when students become more informed, they can also advocate for it. So one of the first things that I do with any generative AI technology is we just do a discovery exploration. If I wanna give feedback, where can I give the feedback? If I wanna connect with a human who’s a part of this company, how easy is it for me to find that or not?
Lori: It’s great. And I’m just, as you were talking, I was thinking how important everything you’re saying would be for counselors, high school counselors, middle school counselors, as the students are learning to use these tools. Let’s move on. I have another question for you. When it comes to thinking about miss and disinformation and learning more about what we can do about it, what informs your practice?
Tricia: The tool that I come back to again and again and again, and I’ll share the link with you if listeners are interested. It’s a framework. It’s a framework for information literacy. And it comes from the ACLR. That’s the Association of College and Research Libraries. It’s free. It’s in multiple languages. And what I love is it’s not standards based. They don’t want to be prescriptive. They do, however, have dispositions that they recommend, which I think is really cool. And one of the dispositions is that we’re supposed to recognize that whenever we’re doing research. we’re always entering into an ongoing scholarly conversation, not a finished conversation. And I love that as a disposition, and even what you were saying about school counselors, educators learning more about social media. I know that social media often gets a bad rap. There are some real positives, especially I do a lot of work around LGBTQ+ inclusion. There are many teens who are only actually able to access that information or community because of social media. So I love that idea of what does it mean for me to always remember I’m going into a conversation space that’s not complete yet.
And that’s one of the concepts in their framework is it’s scholarship as conversation. Because I’m not going to lie to you, Lori, like, of course I’m an opinionated person where I make snap judgments.
We all do this, but I love that this framework is always trying to remind me, hey, you don’t know it all. You’ve got more to learn and you’ve got more people to learn from. So I would say that that’s something that really helps me think about that. And maybe I could speak to an example that I think also kind of illustrates that. We are also, of course, very concerned about generative A .I.’s capacity to create more mis and dis information as we should be concerned.
But I came across this really interesting piece of research, I can also give you the link if you want to include it, where researchers had about 2100 people who had self identified as believing in some kind of conspiracy theory. And what they wanted to do was see if chat GPT could have an exchange with them to help them kind of check their conspiracy conspiratorial thinking. And they found that actually, like the participants who were engaging with chat GPT where chat GPT did not go into judgment, it wasn’t kind of saying like, I can’t believe you believe that, blah, blah, blah. It just was having a back and forth exchange of the facts. People had a 20 % drop in their certainty about that conspiracy theory 20 % and it was suspended for longer than several months, so it wasn’t like, oh, I’ve changed my mind for an hour but then I’m right back into it.
And so I kind of just think even this ongoing conversation about mis -disinformation and generative AI, there’s going to be nuance to that, you know, and I’m really interested in following more of the research around that. Will you forgive me if I recommend yet another similar link?
Lori: Yeah, as you’ve been talking, I’ve been creating an entire list of resources from today’s show for our show notes. So we’re going to add them all in. So keep it up. All right. Sorry.
Tricia: The next one is a book called Wrong by Danigold Goldweith Young. It came out in 2023. And this is a book that doesn’t just talk about the supply of mis – and disinformation, but Young is kind of saying to us, hey. let’s think about the demand. How are all of us a little bit active in creating a real demand for it?
The book is wonderful, but she really reminds us that we cannot be talking about information literacy without emotional literacy, and that a lot of these issues are so connected to our very real need as humans to have community, to have a sense of belonging. So, you know, she really talks about how when we do not have that, we become extremely vulnerable to mis and disinformation.
And I think if you look at a lot of conspiracy theories, what they’re offering to people is like this in -group, Lori, where it’s like, hey, you know the truth, I know the truth, we’re the ones that can support each other. You know, it really does kind of bolster that.
I just kind of think that’s an important thing for us to think more about. And also what I appreciate about that book is Young starts out with her own journey of how she became vulnerable to some conspiratorial thinking. And that’s the other piece is I think sometimes we all think, well, I would never or I’m always able to tell, you know, when something is an item of mis or disinformation. That’s just not the case. It’s not humanly possible for us.
So it’s also just about like knowing our limits, knowing that psychology piece of sometimes when things are framed, either to confirm something we really want to agree with or it’s just so outrageous, we become really captivated by it. Yeah. And you just happens.
Lori: It does. I mean, we’ve all fell victim to sharing something that later on we found out wasn’t true, and it’s always embarrassing, but important to go back and say, hey, I was wrong here and I’m sorry, but yeah.
Tricia: Yeah, but that’s that modeling I think that’s so powerful for students because I think there’s also this myth that it’s only young people who are susceptible to it, and that is not the case. Not at all. It’s intergenerational. And so again, I would highly recommend that book because she really does talk about the community aspect of it and how different groups will really appeal to that, which is kind of fascinating.
Lori: I think a really important question, Tricia, is how many books do you read in a year?
Tricia: Well, I always, I would say like, reading is my hobby. And I feel like sometimes whenever I’m asked that question, I’m like, am I allowed to say reading? But yes, absolutely. I’m extremely introverted, Lori. And so reading is also like, just it plays to my need for some quiet alone time. But every year I set a goal to read a hundred books, a hundred, that’s 2 a week. Well, close to…
Lori: wow.
Tricia: But you get a sense of how much socializing I do when I tell you about that goal. But what I’ve been doing differently this year that’s relevant to this conversation, Kyle Chakra has also written a book that’s called Filter World. And it’s all about how, again, algorithms are driving what we see as our own personal preferences and tastes. And so he talks a lot about how we all need to engage with an algorithmic cleanse where you pick your music, your movies, your books just without the help of an algorithm. And so something I’ve really been trying to do more of this past year, and my local librarians have been very great, is I am trying to not always be picking my books based on, oh, I came across that on social media, where that was recommended next to me by Goodreads, but I’m talking to humans, I’m finding out what they’re reading, and I’m kind of seeing like, how does that shift my reading diet a little bit? And it’s super interesting. I think it’s a great experiment. I would highly recommend that. Very interesting.
I just went into my local library the other day with no idea of what book I wanted.
And I went straight to the librarian’s recommendations section. And I picked a book that I would have never picked in my life. And loving it, it’s a great idea to just talk to people. I love that idea. But I think it sounds simple, Lori.
Lori: Yeah, it’s simple.
Tricia: But when I was explaining this to my 17 -year -old nephew, that as a concept seemed stranger because, of course, he has not had the same life experience where you and I have had all that time where a lot of the media that we consumed years ago was like, it was word of mouth. It wasn’t an algorithm trying to do that. So again, I think I recommend that as an experiment for those of us who didn’t grow up with algorithmic recommender systems because I think we need to be reminding the young people in our lives to just be a little more mindful of that. And one thing that I’ll often ask for anybody that uses like a streaming music system like Spotify. How much time do you spend in looking past those initial recommendations in doing like your own search? Because it’s time consuming, right? So there’s not a lot of friction. It’s really easy to be like, this is what pops up immediately in the app.
Yeah, well, I mean, even Netflix, you were saying earlier that I can’t remember the percentage you said, but how many we choose based on on their recommendations. And it’s so true because you get kind of, for lack of a better word, lazy. It’s like, ah, this looks fine. I’ll just watch it based on the fact that I like this other show. And what I find is I don’t even know what to search for, or how to search for something else because it’s all just there for me.
It’s so convenient, right? And convenience is effective as a strategy. So that percentage is 80, 80%. It’s according to their own internal research. And as you were saying about the picking, there’s this great researcher named Niko Paccevic who’s done research around how a lot of the selection is also based on the thumbnails that you see. And what some folks are unaware of is that those thumbnails, Lori, are customized to you. So let’s say – Really? Yeah, so you and I don’t see the same thumbnails. So if your viewing activity kind of placed you in the category of being like a real sports fan,
they’re going to start to tweak some of your thumbnails of a movie that maybe doesn’t really have sports as a big part of the plot to look a little bit like it could. So that’s Nico Pachovic has got great images of this in his research. I can give you that link if you’d like as well. And that is, yet again, another great conversation for us to be having with students.
Lori: Absolutely. I wish viewers could see my face right now. My mouth, not viewers, listeners. My mouth is down to my chest. That’s that is really shocking and frightening. Well, we have gone way past our 30 minutes, but I could literally talk to you for four hours about this. It is so fascinating. So first off, is there anything else you want to share about this topic?
Tricia: I think I would also just nudge people to think about like, if you are spending or you’re logging into that social media app, this is a great thing to model, even with friends and family.
Like, what am I going into this space for? Do I notice the emotional state I’m in when I leave? And something that I’ve been trying to do as a challenge, the Shifting Schools podcast, our summer series has been all about the power of play. And again, like I just think play is something that doesn’t get enough talk time. That’s why I loved Lori when you did that episode about Harper’s Playground, because play also has to be accessible. Here’s a little bit of a challenge for listeners. Can you take just one day? And I think when we’re experimenting, like, again, it doesn’t mean I’m going to change everything for a month. One day. What would it mean for you if for one day you’re reason, your motivation for using social media was strictly for play and fun and joy. What can you do? And Lori, I was telling you, again, before the start of the call about a Facebook group. It’s free for anybody to join. It’s a Facebook group where people pretend to be ants inside an ant colony. And it is hilarious. It’s fun. It’s playful. I recommend people check it out. There are 1 .7 million people in that group. I’ve also learned things about ants that I did not know before. Ants are the only other species.
They’re the first species other than humans where we’ve discovered they will conduct amputations to save the life of another ant. Fascinating stuff. But it’s a role playing space in social media. It became very popular during… the beginning of the pandemic where people wanted to just have some escape and have some fun. But what are the other places in your social media where it’s like it is strictly just going to make you laugh, bring you some playfulness? It’s interesting, I think, for people to see how difficult that challenge is or how easy it is. And then what does that say about how many apps we have on our phone or how much time we spend on social media?
Lori: So true. Just thinking about when Facebook first came out zillions of years ago, my focus when I got it, I didn’t have many friends on there yet. And it was all these games. And I would spend time playing these games and it was fun. And then as time went on and people in the in the US started getting more divided the Experience on Facebook for me is not a positive one anymore I don’t enjoy it. So your idea of popping into the fun space Is is brilliant. So I’m gonna try that next time I go Well, I hope I I hope I run into you and we’re both pretending to be and I look forward to that… Do you get to name yourself? Or do ants have names probably…
Tricia: You can do what you want it’s your role -playing situation I am the answer. Yes
Lori: Awesome. Well Big news is you will be one of our keynote speakers at our virtual conference coming up in November. So can you give us a little sneak peek about the conversations that we can look forward to?
Tricia: Yeah, Lori, and again, thank you for that opportunity. I love the work that SENIA is doing. And I love how you’re doing it. Like the key word for me in your question was conversation. So you’re doing keynotes, radically different, which I super appreciate because I do think it’s kind of, as we’ve been saying, we need experiments. We need to be thinking about, what is the message behind our behavior? And so you’ve invited me to have a conversation and we had a pre -conversation before that conversation. And that intentionality I’ve got so much respect for, it was truly a collaboration. And one thing that we talked about at length that might surprise listeners is, we talked about how you’re going to introduce me.
And I asked if we could do that a little bit differently. And this connects to your most recent episode about teacher burnout. I asked if, can I be introduced with nothing to do with myself professionally? And I mentioned the connection to your episode on teacher burnout, because I think sometimes in the world of education, we wrap so much of our identity around that teacher self and we don’t start with the human first. So I asked if my introduction could actually be talking about my relationship with Tashi, who is the dog in my family.
I’ve been thinking a lot about what I’ve learned in that relationship, the lessons in inclusion that I’ve taken away. And I’ve also bringing you back to AI. I’ve been very closely following the color do little challenge for interspecies communication, where anybody can enter. They’re doing more research in what AI can do to help us understand the way other species communicate. And this might be one more length for you to add, but E -Earth Species Project is a nonprofit that’s dedicated to artificial intelligence to decode non -human communication. It’s fascinating. So their website, there’s a quote on their website that says more than 8 million species share our planet. We only understand the language of one. So I’m just thinking a lot about like our relationship with nature, what we have to learn from other species.
I think we’ve got so much to learn from dogs and this of like human supremacy. I would say that… you know, dogs are a species where they value play until the day they die. We’ve got a lot to learn from that. And I’ve been following a lot of the research around dog play and they’ve kind of carved out like, why do dogs play? Part of it is of course, you know, just the community, like we build community through play. But another part of the reason apparently that dogs play is to help them deal with the unexpected. As we’ve been talking, Lori, like so much is changing so quickly. Maybe we should be doing more play to help us prepare for the unexpected. So yeah, I just, I’m excited for that piece of the conversation.
Lori: And you’re also, as you mentioned earlier, doing some great work in the LGBTQ space. And I know that we had talked about having a discussion about the intersection of neuro divergent individuals and LGBTQ. And I’m so excited.
Tricia: You know, I think the theme of our conversation today has been look for the connections. Don’t take different things and say like this only, you know, exists over here. I really do think it’s in all of the connections where our more interesting conversations are at because human beings are multifaceted. None of us are just any one thing. And part of that conversation that I’m excited to have is in the kid lit YA young adult book world where we’re seeing that intersection really come to life.
Um, because I talk a lot about how often if you’re in a school and you’re visiting their professional development library, you’re only going to see non -fiction texts that are explicitly about the art and craft of teaching. And yes, indeed, there’s a place for those. We need them. Teaching is extremely difficult and complicated, but I would say that Kidlet and YA, it’s these stories, these intersectional stories that have so much to offer us as well. So we’ll, huge appreciation to SENIA for really looking atdoing professional development differently. I think that is so responsive to that burnout crisis that you talked about on your podcast. So, yeah, thank you again.
Lori: Well, Tricia, thank you so much for your time today. I’ve learned a tremendous amount from you. I have about 15 resources, I think, that I’ve added to our show notes. And I am just really excited for people to hear this podcast. So thanks for coming.
Tricia: Oh, real, the honor is mine. And I just, yeah, I really appreciate your work and your leadership, Lori. So thanks for the invitation.
[Outro music plays]
Thank you for joining us for today’s 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.