The Cult of Pedagogy Podcast, Episode 243
Jennifer Gonzalez, Host
GONZALEZ: This is Jennifer Gonzalez welcoming you to Episode 243 of the Cult of Pedagogy Podcast. In this episode, we’re going to talk about a few small changes that will make your classroom more neurodiversity-affirming.
GONZALEZ: Over the last 10 years or so, the word “neurodivergent” has become a more common part of our everyday language. And while not everyone agrees on an exact definition of this umbrella term, it’s frequently used to describe people who are on the autism spectrum, people with learning disabilities, and people with attention differences like ADD and ADHD, among others. As our understanding of the human mind gets more sophisticated and nuanced, we are learning how to identify neurodivergence, how to appreciate it, and how to help those who fit under that umbrella navigate the world better.
One place where that process has been happening quite a lot is in schools; we’ve definitely made progress with neurodivergent students. But the progress has been spotty, and it’s also framed our population in a sort of binary way, with “neurodivergent” students on one side and “everyone else” on the other. The adjustments made in schools are often treated as special accommodations made for a special few. But one of the things we’re learning about neurodivergence is that it’s not necessarily an either/or; it’s not that you’re either 100% neurodivergent or you have a standard-issue “normal” brain. The way our brains are wired puts all of us somewhere on a spectrum, or a few spectrums, really, with each individual person having their own unique wiring.
And that’s why the title of this episode uses the term neurodiversity instead of neurodivergent. This shift in language acknowledges that everyone’s brain is different, and if we set up our schools in a way that makes room for many variations, we’ll all be better off.
My guests today are going to help us learn some simple ways we can create those schools. Amanda Morin is a neurodivergent neurodiversity activist, author, early childhood specialist, and speaker. Emily Kircher-Morris is a mental health professional, neurodiversity advocate, author, and host of The Neurodiversity Podcast, which, as a podcast listener, you should definitely check out! Together, Morin and Kircher-Morris have written a book, Neurodiversity-Affirming Schools: Transforming Practices So All Students Feel Accepted & Supported. The book offers all kinds of specific guidance that will help teachers reshape their classrooms into places that offer flexible options for students with a wide range of “wiring.” In today’s episode, they’ll share four actionable changes you can make right now that will begin that reshaping.
One more thing: Near the end of our conversation, I asked my guests to weigh in on a problematic scenario I’ve been hearing more about lately, where higher-need students are being placed in classrooms with teachers who have none of the training or support necessary to meet those students’ needs. I brought this up because I think situations like these are making classroom teachers more resistant to the kind of approach my guests are advocating for — possibly making them view any and all decisions made in the spirit of inclusion as beyond their skill set, when in fact, all of the changes we talk about in this episode are pretty doable.
This is one of my longer episodes, but I think it’s worth every second. As a society, even if it may seem at times like we’re sliding backward, I believe most of us are still steadily moving in the direction of a world that appreciates, celebrates, and makes room for all kinds of differences. My hope is that today’s conversation takes us one more step closer to that.
Before we get started, I’d like to thank our sponsor, Boclips Classroom, a library of over 1.7 million ad-free, curated, curriculum-aligned videos. Access engaging content from over 650 trusted media brands and teacher-loved educational creators, like TED, Amoeba Sisters, Fuseschool, PBS, and Crash Course. Teachers save time with their powerful navigation tools to quickly search and filter by subject, grade, and language proficiency level to find content mapped to key learning objectives from more than 70 common curriculum standards, then share it with students in a distraction-free environment. Sign up for a free account today at cultofpedagogy.com/bcc.
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Now here’s my interview with Emily Kircher-Morris and Amanda Morin about neurodiversity-affirming schools.
GONZALEZ: So I would like to welcome Amanda and Emily to the podcast. Welcome, ladies.
MORIN: Thank you.
KIRCHER-MORRIS: Thank you.
GONZALEZ: We are going to have, we’ve got a lot to talk about, but we’re going to start by just getting to know the two of you just a little bit. So, Amanda, we’re going to have you go first. Just tell me a little bit about your background, what you do in education.
MORIN: Sure. I’m a former classroom teacher and early intervention specialist. I currently work with students and parents one-on-one doing executive function coaching and parent training, do a lot of educator training. And I’m a special education advocate, right? But most importantly, I think for this work, I’m a neurodivergent neurodiversity activist, and I have three neurodivergent children of my own. So it’s work close to my heart, right? Very much so.
GONZALEZ: Yeah. Fantastic. Thank you. Emily, tell us about yourself.
KIRCHER-MORRIS: Yeah, so I am a licensed professional counselor. But prior to that, I worked in the schools. I worked as a classroom teacher. I taught in gifted ed programs, and I also worked as a school counselor. I’m also the host of the Neurodiversity Podcast, but all of those kind of experiences have brought me to this place. You know, I am neurodivergent. I have neurodivergent kids. And having all of those experiences, you know, again, kind of like Amanda was saying, kind of leads you to this advocacy place. And so I’ve written a couple of other books, but super excited about this book because I really think it’s going to have a big impact on educators, you know, as far as supporting the neurodivergent kids that they have in their classroom, whether they realize it or not.
GONZALEZ: Mhmm. And I think it’s come up a whole lot in the last, especially sort of 10 years. And I’m actually, I’m kind of going a little bit out of order, but I feel like we might as well lead with this. Let’s get a clear definition for this conversation and for my listeners about what we mean when we say neurodivergent, and I’ve heard this a dozen times in the last few years. Why is it that all of a sudden everybody has a diagnosis of neurodivergent? Which I know the answer to that question already, but I hear it a lot and I have to answer it a lot. And you addressed it in the book too. So you’ve both, you know, identified a lot of people in your own lives and yourselves as neurodivergent. And I’m imagining that that means slightly different things depending on which individual person you’re talking about. So feel free to use yourselves and your kids as examples when you’re defining this.
KIRCHER-MORRIS: Yeah. Well, when we talk about all of a sudden, it’s interesting because I was actually diagnosed as ADHD when I was a kid, when I was in fifth grade, which is pretty rare for women my age. Many women really were not identified very much at all. I mean, this was during the early 90s. And, you know, as time has gone forward though, it’s interesting to think about the fact that I can look back now and recognize that there were people, peers in my life who would, are now what we would call neurodivergent and have various diagnoses but never had a label at that time. But when you put this in context of the historical perspective of all of this, so when I was diagnosed with ADHD in 1991, Asperger’s at that point in time was not even in the DSM. It was not even a label that could be given. Prior to that, the autism diagnosis was only given to significantly, people with significant disabilities, people who are primarily non-speaking. And so in 1994 was when Asperger’s was added to the DSM. And the story I always tell along with this is, okay, so that was 1994. Well, my first year teaching in the classroom was the 2001-2002 school year.
GONZALEZ: Mhmm.
KIRCHER-MORRIS: And about midway through that school year, the school counselor came into my classroom and said, you know, that student so and so, I think he has this thing I just learned about at the state school counselors conference called Asperger’s.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
KIRCHER-MORRIS: So in 2001, the school counselor who had been there for 20 years, I don’t know how long, they had just learned about this. So that student clearly didn’t have a label. Well, that student now is in his 30s. Did he ever get a label? Did he ever have a diagnosis? Maybe he has children now who are getting a diagnosis that are bringing him to this piece. In addition to that, so there’s this filtering down process of those labels, first of all, that really influences how we conceptualize these different labels. There’s also been a process of destigmatizing and de-pathologizing which has allowed people to seek this out a little bit, the self-understanding a little bit more. And in 2013, the DSM-5 was released, which is what then brought the Asperger’s diagnosis into autism spectrum. It’s all one label now. But even prior to then, you could not be given both an ADHD and an autism diagnosis prior to 2013. They were mutually exclusive in the DSM. So to boil all that down, the diagnostic processes that we use to find these labels has shifted significantly over the last couple of decades. Awareness has increased, stigma has decreased.
GONZALEZ: Mhmm.
KIRCHER-MORRIS: And so, yeah, we’re seeing a lot more of these labels, you know, coming to the surface for a variety of reasons, but primarily it’s because it wasn’t that neurodivergent people weren’t there before, it’s just that they weren’t being labeled.
GONZALEZ: Right.
MORIN: And I think would jump in with that and say, you know, I’m just enough older than Emily that I started school just about the time that IDEA came into effect, right? And I had all of these sort of traits that made me quirky. Quirky is the word that people used to use.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MORIN: You know, I was quirky. And, you know, I didn’t have an identification. I didn’t have a label. When my kids got to school, I, you know, I have two sons who are autistic. One who is an AuDHD-er so he is, he does have that dual diagnosis of ADHD and autism. And, you know, I think this might be the first time I’m saying this, but you know it helped me recently pursue my own diagnosis for clarification, right? So I have recently learned that all of the things that make me quirky and neurodivergent, I’m autistic as well. And, but I didn’t find that out till way late in life, right? Just like very recently. Emily knows that, and I think now everybody who’s listening to this knows that too. But I also want to make the point that the word neurodivergent has really evolved to include other things under that umbrella. So it’s not just autism anymore. It’s not just ADHD. It’s things like dyslexia and other learning disabilities. And there are other things that fall into that. And I think that’s really a nice thing to see is we’re expanding the definition as people realize how the variations of their neurological wiring impact their ability to sort of function in the world.
GONZALEZ: You make a point in the book to use the word neuronormative to replace what has been neurotypical in the past. Again, this is not on my list of questions, but if you don’t mind just explaining that too, because we’re going to try to use that language in this conversation.
MORIN: Sure. And I mean, I think, you know, when we talk about things like normal and typical, it sort of implies that there is a way that you should be, right? And that we’re comparing everybody to that particular thing. We chose to use the phrase neuronormative — and Emily might jump in and add on to this as well — not because we’re looking at the word normal, but because we’re looking at the word norms, right? So the things that societal norms and standards are. It’s not a perfect replacement for a neurotypical, but it really shows us how we are measuring people against these standards that society has put into place for what we expect a person to look like. And so we really wanted to find a word that would stop that kind of feeling of “other.” And so neuronormative is where we landed for that.
KIRCHER-MORRIS: Yeah, I would just add normative, and this is always kind of the tricky thing. Normative, what it really means, we’re talking about statistics. We’re talking about the bell curve. We’re talking about the middle, you know, portion of any group of or population. And so we will rather than say, well, a neurodivergent student compared to a neurotypical student, well, there is no typical student. There are, there are students who are part of that majority in the neuronormative population. And so just trying again to break down and understand that every student has variability. They’re all different. They’re all unique. And so, we really focus a lot on language and how language influences how we see things. And sometimes people I think might give a little bit of pushback to that, but it is interesting. So as a mental health counselor, when we talk about cognitive behavioral therapy — which pros and cons to that, but that’s a separate conversation — but ultimately what the focus is there is recognizing that the language that we use, that the words that we use to describe things internally influences how we feel about things, and how we feel about things influences how we act. So that’s why it’s important that language evolves, and that’s really what is happening a lot in the neurodiversity movement, but specifically with that neurodivergent versus, you know, neurotypical or neuronormative.
GONZALEZ: Mhmm. Thanks for explaining that. And also, Amanda, I just want to just take a moment to just sort of acknowledge that you just sort of said something that you realized you had never said out in public either. And so thanks for sharing that also about yourself.
MORIN: You’re welcome. I mean I just, I think it’s, I think it’s important, right? I think it’s important.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MORIN: Especially in the context of this book, in the context of the people who are trying to explore their own identities, and in the context of the fact that, like, sometimes we think about autistic, or we think about neurodivergent, and we think about what people can’t do. And for me, being able to say that out loud, I think, you know, gives an opportunity to say, “Look what we can do.”
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MORIN: Because I’ve done a lot. I’m tired, but I’ve done a lot, you know.
GONZALEZ: That sounds like a t-shirt.
MORIN: It does, doesn’t it?
GONZALEZ: And what is interesting, because you’re talking about how there’s just been more and more sort of, I guess sort of like fine-grained diagnoses, and you’re probably the 30th person that I’ve heard in the last two years, and this is largely because of TikTok, people saying, identifying as autistic. That flies in the face of what my mind thinks of as what a person with autism presents as.
MORIN: Right. Absolutely.
GONZALEZ: Because I think of certain speech patterns and certain, and so it’s just like, wait, what? And I think that for a teacher maybe that is resistant to all this, who might have the attitude of, like, “Oh, now everybody’s neurodivergent.” It’s like now even, you know, people who don’t seem to be autistic at all are saying that they have autism, and it’s just, we’re just learning more basically.
MORIN: We are, you know, and I think that that’s an important part of the variability, right? Because even within what might be considered identifications or labels for neurodivergent students, there’s variability in how they show up too. And I think that’s really important.
GONZALEZ: Yes. Yeah.
KIRCHER-MORRIS: Well, and I’ll just add to that. I think it really is important that we break down what we think we know about these things. So I mentioned that in my background, so I spent a lot of years teaching in the gifted ed world. And in the gifted ed world, there is a huge overlap with autism and giftedness. As a matter of fact, research shows that of individuals who are identified as autistic, they’re one and a half times more likely than the general population also to be, to have intelligence in the gifted range.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
KIRCHER-MORRIS: And so when you talk about those twice-exceptional learners, those are often the individuals who would go undiagnosed. They would have a missed diagnosis because they can compensate in so many ways.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
KIRCHER-MORRIS: But you don’t see what’s happening often beneath the surface. And so, you know, there’s a, that’s another component to understanding this in a different way, that just because it doesn’t look like what you’re used to seeing or what the stereotypes are, what you see in the media, like that’s one way that it can show up, but there are other ways too.
GONZALEZ: Mhmm. So we’re going to get into your book, Neurodiversity-Affirming Schools. And let’s just talk a little bit about, you know, what it means to be in a neurodiversity-affirming school, why it’s so critical for today’s educators to embrace it. And then after we get into that, we’re going to start to talk about some specific things that teachers listening can change right now about what they do in their classes to make a difference, even if they don’t even get the book. But the book has a ton in it. So what is a neurodiversity-affirming school?
MORIN: I think the first thing I would say is we chose very specifically to talk about a neurodiversity-affirming school because there is a difference between neurodiversity and neurodivergence, right? Neurodiversity is all of us, all of our brains. The whole world is neurodiverse. And I think that’s an important distinction for us to understand.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MORIN: And so when we were thinking about what makes a neurodiversity-affirming school, we weren’t just thinking about what makes a school open and fosters a sense of belonging for neurodivergent students. We were thinking about how do you create an environment that rethinks that sort of one-size-fits-all teaching and learning that we do in classrooms for not just your neurodivergent learners, but all the learners in your classroom? How are you celebrating sort of all of the different neurotypes that show up and working with the brains that you have in your classroom? And it sounds like a heavy lift, but it actually, as we start breaking it down, it’s really not. I mean, I’m not going to say it’s not a heavy lift. Having been a classroom teacher, I wouldn’t want to hear that. I wouldn’t want to hear it’s not a heavy lift. It’s a mindset shift, right? It’s a paradigm shift. But what it’s really doing is challenging the, is there a one-size-fits-all way of teaching, and do we have to really change just for our neurodivergent students? And I, you know, no. I think it’s “no” is the answer. But there’s more too, right, there’s more to it.
GONZALEZ: Yeah
KIRCHER-MORRIS: I think another piece with this is also just recognizing how we shift what our practices are in the schools to meet kids where they are. So in my, one of my favorite things to talk about in my clinical practice with my clients is we have to find ways to work with somebody’s brain instead of against it. So recognizing that different people learn in different ways, that they, you know, show up in the world in different ways, that they communicate differently, they have different executive functioning skills. We can constantly try to shove that square peg into the round hole with varying impacts, but ultimately in education, we really want to work with somebody’s brain instead of against it. And so, you know, when I think about that, I think about the fact that like when we look at accommodations, how do we help somebody use their strengths? So if you have a student who is dyslexic and they really struggle with, you know, reading visually, if we give them the opportunity to listen along with an audiobook, if we’re testing reading comprehension, or whatever it might be, let’s work with their brain to actually help them learn what we want them to learn as opposed to constantly trying to get them to do it the way things have always been done. Because that’s not working for a big portion of our students.
GONZALEZ: Yes.
MORIN: And I would add too that oftentimes, you know, and this is a little more wonky, right, from a special education perspective, we think about, you know, the students that we need to support as the students who have an identification, who have an IEP, who have a 504 plan. But not everybody is going to have that identification, right? There are going to be different types of learners in your classroom who don’t meet the threshold or the criteria for an IEP or 504 plan. And in your classroom, when you think about a neurodiversity-affirming school, to Emily’s point about the square peg and the round hole, your classroom is more like that Fisher-Price sorter that everybody uses when they’re little kids, you know, and they have all the different blocks and the different, like the star in the, you know. And so it’s setting up a classroom that has all of those different places where people can be put into the sorter instead of just one.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MORIN: I just lost my, you know, analogy there, but it still stands, I think.
GONZALEZ: Instead of just one, right, right. Square peg in a round hole or round hole in a square peg. But yeah, instead of just the single spot to fit things into, you’ve just got lots and lots of —
MORIN: Yeah.
GONZALEZ: And the point that you all make over and over in the book, and I, and this is going to come up again and again here too, is that this is not just for the neurodivergent kids anyway, because you’re going to have plenty of kids who have varying degrees of not only necessarily needs or wiring, but just preferences that, you know, may not ever meet some sort of a diagnosis, but it’s just like, oh, this feels better. I’m getting this better. Yeah.
MORIN: Yes.
KIRCHER-MORRIS: Well, and I think also there is a real barrier to identification or diagnosis that we also need to just recognize. So, you know, one of the, depending on where somebody goes, perhaps. If they’re going into the community to get a diagnosis. So many neurodivergent learners may never qualify for an individualized education plan because the educational criteria for that identification is very rigid in many ways, and it has to see that educational impact. So you might have neurodivergent learners who are doing okay academically, so they don’t qualify for those things. But let’s say that they go into the community to get a psychological or a medical diagnosis that aligns with some of these things. Again, understanding, like the DSM can be interpreted in different ways depending on what a clinician’s training might be. And so how do they, does somebody meet the diagnostic threshold to have, you know, that diagnosis? Well, one diagnostician might say yes, and another might say no. But regardless, all of those students are in our classrooms. They’re all there with us and they all have those different needs. So, you know, you might, I’ll kind of, you know, joke a little bit about my son. So all three of my kids are neurodivergent. I mentioned my oldest is, he’s ADHD, but we also just say he’s just spectrum-y. He doesn’t quite reach that threshold, but he has a lot of those traits.
GONZALEZ: Yep.
KIRCHER-MORRIS: And so he needs, like I recognize that as a parent, he needs a lot of those supports. I kind of advocate for him at the school, but his 504 for the ADHD is what primarily meets his needs. So we haven’t really pursued a more formal diagnosis. And again, I don’t know that it would quite, you know, quite cut it.
GONZALEZ: Yeah. Which is, you know, I’m thinking back when I was a teacher, there were always students where I would think, I feel like we need, you know, and I would talk to somebody and I would be told, and this would have been in the mid-90s, no, their IQ is too high for us to even test. And I was like, what?
KIRCHER-MORRIS: Right.
GONZALEZ: Wait, what? Or no, no, they would say it was too low to test.
KIRCHER-MORRIS: Oh yeah.
GONZALEZ: That there had to be a differential. I don’t remember. All I remember was just like, they need services, and we’re not getting it. And I had no training.
KIRCHER-MORRIS: Right, so it’s both. They would say it’s both.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
KIRCHER-MORRIS: So what would, really what you’re talking about there, so you have the gifted kids, right? And so if they’re not struggling enough —
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
KIRCHER-MORRIS: — so like if you’re looking at dyslexia, not that we use, we use the MTSS model and all of those things, of course. But when you’re looking at that discrepancy, you know there is something about that ability achievement discrepancy. And so that’s why a lot of bright kids don’t get any services because even though they may have 40 or 50 points between their ability and their achievement, their achievement is still in the quote-unquote average range or at grade level. But then what, hopefully, what the MTSS model is moving away from are those kids who have those lower cognitive scores. Because I remember sitting in those IEP meetings where you would have a student who would, who they would say, well, yes, their reading comprehension is at a 75 when we look at these scores as far as, you know, but because their IQ is only an 85, that’s only a 10-point discrepancy. So we can’t say that’s a specific learning disability.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
KIRCHER-MORRIS: And it’s like, okay, so we’re not going to give this kid help? Like that’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve heard.
GONZALEZ: That’s what it ultimately came down to was just, just tell me what to do and how can we help them do better?
KIRCHER-MORRIS: Right.
GONZALEZ: So moving more in this direction of your book is just such a relief, I think.
MORIN: Yeah. Yeah. I was just going to say too, like it varies from state to state and that’s important, right? So the identification process varies from state to state, and the discrepancy that needs to be shown varies from state to state.
GONZALEZ: Wow.
MORIN: And that’s so, you know, and that’s really hard especially if, you know, if you’re a family that moves because you’re a military family, or you’re a family that moves for work, you may have a student who qualifies for an individualized education program in the state that you were living in, and then it doesn’t qualify in the next state too.
GONZALEZ: Yeah
MORIN: So to the point of moving towards this model where we’re actually supporting the students who exist in our classrooms, I think that matters a lot. It matters a lot to realize, like, if I move over the border to the next state, my student’s still my student. They’re still, they still are struggling with the same things.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MORIN: It doesn’t matter necessarily what the criteria is. We need to support where they need to grow, and we need to celebrate where they have strengths.
GONZALEZ: Yeah. So what I’ve asked you to do, because the book has so much in it, and, you know, I think teachers in schools, this would be such a great professional development sort of for the whole school to read this book and have some takeaways. But I wanted to give my listeners some immediate takeaways right away. So I thought we could just share a few specific things that teachers can do to make their classrooms more neurodiversity affirming, so that they can make those adjustments right away. And I picked the first one and I asked you to pick the other three. Because the one that jumped out at me right away was to stop insisting on eye contact from your students. I see this a lot in disciplinary situations where it’s like, you need to look at me when I’m talking to you.
MORIN: Mhmm.
GONZALEZ: So let’s start with that one. If teachers could just stop insisting on that from their students. Why should they stop and what impact would it have if they could stop that?
MORIN: I mean, there’s so many reasons they should stop, right? The first is it doesn’t actually indicate that somebody is paying attention. And that’s the first one that I would say. Just because I’m looking at you doesn’t mean I’m paying attention to your words or the content that you’re trying to impart. For many neurodivergent students, it actually can be very distracting to ask somebody to look you in the eyes, you know?
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MORIN: And they’re distracted by sort of all of the other things that are going on or that they’re trying to figure out. Their brain is literally distracted. There’s research that shows that even adults aren’t processing information the same way when they’re asked. I loved there was, we talk about this in the book, and I think this one really struck me, is that oftentimes when you ask an adult a really difficult question, 85 percent of the time, they’ll look off and try and think about it.
GONZALEZ: Mhmm.
MORIN: Our students are doing the same thing. I think we insist on eye contact because we feel like it shows that somebody is paying attention to us.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MORIN: But you know there are other ways that we can ask them to show that, right? And we can ask them to just, what is the way that I will know when you’re paying attention? How can we indicate? You know, A lot of times kids who are not actually making eye contact, if you ask them, what did I just say? Or can you rephrase that for me? They can do it like that, you know. And I think that one of the things we do is we try and teach kids ways that look like they’re looking at us, even though they’re not. Like, look at my nose, look at my forehead, look at my eyebrow. That doesn’t actually help either. So I would say, there’s many other ways, right? Like, let’s ask our students what’s most comfortable for them, and let’s figure out how else we can see that they’re paying attention. And I think challenge our own thoughts about why do I need someone to look me in the eye. Frankly, it makes me a little uncomfortable when I have, and I’m trying to talk to somebody, a student in particular, when they’re, you know, we’re staring at each other, because it feels like a showdown a little bit.
GONZALEZ: Mhmm. Right.
MORIN: You know, and the first thing I say to the students that I work with is, I’m not going to ask you to look me in the eye. I’m not going to ask you. You tell me how I will know when you need me to redirect. How you, you know, when you’re not catching what I’m saying, ask me, tell me what you need, you know.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MORIN: And so, I mean, I just, I think it’s really fascinating that we have all this research saying adults have difficulty looking people in the eye. We shouldn’t be asking our students to do things that we can’t do ourselves.
GONZALEZ: Right, right.
KIRCHER-MORRIS: I think I would just add to that too, first of all, recognizing that eye contact is very culturally specific.
GONZALEZ: Yes.
KIRCHER-MORRIS: And so the assumption that any person, you know, is that that’s something that is valuable to them or sends a certain message. You know, I think that we just need to question that, like Amanda was saying, in ourselves. Like, why is it that we’re asking for this? And the other thing that I would mention is Amanda talked about how sometimes we will ask a student, like, “Well, look at my nose,” like kind of fake making eye contact.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
KIRCHER-MORRIS: And what we have to realize when we’re doing that, all we are doing is teaching them to mask or camouflage what kind of makes them different. And it doesn’t necessarily help them. It’s not helping them feel more comfortable.
GONZALEZ: Right.
KIRCHER-MORRIS: That’s about making the other person feel more comfortable.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
KIRCHER-MORRIS: And at what expense? If that causes more anxiety, if they actually get less from that interaction, wouldn’t it be better to teach that student to self-advocate and say, it’s actually much easier for me to focus on what you’re saying when I’m looking at the floor rather than looking at your face?
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
KIRCHER-MORRIS: But this kind of goes back into this bigger societal thing that we have to change because, let’s be honest, there are people who can’t get a job because the interviewer says, “Oh, well, they’re not making eye contact, so they can’t get that job.” So we also recognize, like, there’s a bigger thing here, but this is a starting point at least to question it and be aware of how we see these things.
GONZALEZ: Mhmm. I think that’s a really good point to just at least look at what you’re doing, you know. And this applies in, because when I first thought of this and was reading about it, it had more to do with, like, one-on-one conversations and even confrontations about a behavior thing. But also, I know that there are a lot of schools that insist that students track them, the teacher, with their eyes as the teacher is moving around talking. Which is another form of insisting on eye contact where if the student is trying to concentrate and process, they may do better looking down and thereby sort of get themselves into some kind of trouble at school for not having the right study habits or listening habits.
MORIN: Yeah.
KIRCHER-MORRIS: Well, and I just go back to, just because somebody is doing those things doesn’t actually mean that they’re doing, that the result is what you’re hoping it’s going to be.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
KIRCHER-MORRIS: That doesn’t guarantee that they’re listening at all. I promise you, I can look directly at you and not hear a single word that you are saying because I have something else.
MORIN: I could vouch for that.
KIRCHER-MORRIS: The things you can learn when you write a book with somebody, yes.
MORIN: And Emily can vouch for the fact that I just can’t look her in the eye when she’s talking to me, right?
KIRCHER-MORRIS: Yeah. Yeah
MORIN: Like that’s, yeah, so, you know.
GONZALEZ: Yeah. And I can think of my own personal examples. I can be watching a basketball game on TV, and they could, something can happen, and somebody reacts, and I’m just like, I was looking right at it, but my brain was someplace else.
MORIN: Right.
KIRCHER-MORRIS: Right, right.
GONZALEZ: And I always have to look away. If I’m the one talking in a conversation, I have to look away when I’m the one talking, and I get called out on it all the time and I have to force myself sometimes, and it’s uncomfortable.
MORIN: So interestingly, I do that too, but I’ve learned to say this is my thinking face, right? Like I say those things out loud at this point. And actually when I was, when I was working, you know, I was, I worked for Understood.org for a very long time and it became a joke, you know, that’s Amanda’s thinking face, but it wasn’t a joke joke. It was like people were telling, they were advocating for me.
GONZALEZ: Yeah. Yes.
MORIN: They were saying, you know, which is really lovely. That explicitness is really important.
GONZALEZ: Mhmm.
KIRCHER-MORRIS: And I think the other thing, what are, just with this specific example, when we talk about the eye contact, what is it that we are looking for when we’re asking a student for eye contact? We’re looking to see that they are engaging active listening skills. And so I’m going to pull it back to what Amanda was saying at the beginning, but there are more effective ways to teach active listening skills than insisting on eye contact. And I think that, but again, because this is — let me also just say, just because somebody is able to make eye contact does not mean that they’re not autistic, if that makes sense. Like I’ll hear people say, “Oh, well, they can’t be autistic because they make eye contact.”
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
KIRCHER-MORRIS: It’s like, okay, that is one example of a nonverbal communication skill that is not indicative one way or the other. But what we can really do is we can just try to make sure that, you know, we’re really, what is, what are we, what is our hope that we’re trying to actually get across to that student in that moment?
GONZALEZ: Mhmm.
KIRCHER-MORRIS: And find other ways to do that.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
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GONZALEZ: All right, let’s move to No. 2, revisit your assessment practices, which I think. I like this choice of language because you’re not advocating for one specific change, but just revisit them and consider some things.
KIRCHER-MORRIS: Yeah, so with this, and when we say assessment, we’re not necessarily talking about testing, although it might include testing. But what we really have to think about, and this kind of ties in with some universal design for learning principles, which is we need to really make sure that when we are assessing something, we’re assessing what we are actually wanting to assess. So for example, one of my soap boxes that I like to get on, and I have many, but one of them is about timed tests. And so you know we talk about, like, math fluency, and I know that there are many elementary schools specifically that still really use timed tests as a way to increase math fluency for math facts. The problem with that is what are you actually assessing there? Are you assessing math fluency or like in that retrieval where it’s immediate as opposed to like the calculation? Or are you assessing a student’s processing speed and their working memory? Like those are two very different things, and many of the practices that we put into place are not actually always measuring the thing that we say that we’re measuring. Another example for this would be, when you are, do you give participation points in your classes?
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
KIRCHER-MORRIS: And what does that look like?
GONZALEZ: Yep.
KIRCHER-MORRIS: And, you know, for a student who is neurodivergent, perhaps you have the ADHD-er who is very impulsive and monopolizes a conversation, and kind of, like, I mean depending on how you’re grading that participation, like that might not look the way you want it to. Or again for a client, for a student who’s more just quiet and reserved where they are really, you know, they have a harder time jumping in. So it’s, that let’s say again you have a student who has slower processing speed. Sometimes when you have group conversations, those conversations move so quickly that they’ll tell you it’s like by the time I come up with the thing I want to say, the conversation has already moved on, and I haven’t had a chance.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
KIRCHER-MORRIS: But then if you’re, if you’re then assessing them and taking participation points away, then that’s a barrier. So when we talk about this, we want to look at accommodations, and we want to find ways to help kids make sure that we are able to measure that they’re actually accomplishing what the objective is of that task. What is the goal that we are trying to actually see if they’re able to do or that they’ve mastered a particular skill? And just really being intentional about how we frame that with kids and also not being hesitant about giving accommodations because sometimes people will say, well, I can’t give that accommodation because it, then I’m not, you know, that’s just not the way things are always done. You have to kind of boil it down a little bit more and distill it to what is the goal of that task or that assignment so that you are, because there are many accommodations that get all that other stuff out of the way. Like that’s the point of the accommodation is to get the stuff out of the way so that you can actually measure the thing you’re trying to measure within that assessment process.
GONZALEZ: Mhmm.
MORIN: And I will give a quick example of that. I have a 14-year-old who is a freshman in high school who is taking midterms for the first time. And was, you know, He has a 504 plan, he has accommodations. But one of the things he said to me is, in my English class, I’m really worried about that midterm because I don’t think I can write all that information out. Like Literally, write all the information out.
GONZALEZ: Yes.
MORIN: And I said to him, do you have to? And he was like, I don’t, I don’t actually, what do you mean? I said, can you talk to the teacher and see if it’s okay for you to type it? Because if you type it, and you’re getting more information out, is that teacher actually trying to assess your handwriting skills?
GONZALEZ: Right.
MORIN: Or is that teacher trying to assess your thought processes and the information you can bring to the table?
KIRCHER-MORRIS: Great example.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MORIN: And he went in and did it, and I said, you know, I can help you if you want. He said, now I’m going to try it. And he went in and had that conversation with his teacher, which, like, hooray for my son on that one. And the teacher was like, of course, and actually opened it up to the rest of the classes that if anybody else needs this —
KIRCHER-MORRIS: That’s so awesome.
MORIN: — we’ll do that too, which is, which is wonderful because what it shows us is that teacher was willing to think about what was the important part of this goal was not to measure their handwriting, not to time them in getting it out.
GONZALEZ: Right.
MORIN: But to make sure that they could get the thought process in place.
GONZALEZ: Yes. Yes. You know, I did an interview last year with two people about math supports. And one of the things that they talked about with assessment, and they’re just bringing this up because it’s super relevant. One of the things that they do sometimes is if a student seems to be struggling, but the teacher knows that that kid has interacted with the content in a perfectly, like, robust way, they’ll pull them into another room and ask them a few prompts. And almost give them a few hints like, “Don’t you remember when we talked about this?” And it’ll jar the student’s memory, and they’ll say, oh yeah. Some people would see that as a cheat. But it’s like, and then the student goes ahead and finishes the assessment and does great, but they just needed that little, and people will say, you bring this up in the book too, that’s not how the real world works, but it is.
MORIN: It totally is.
GONZALEZ: A lot of times, people help each other all the time with little things, and the point is, do they know the stuff or not? Not, can they perform under these testing conditions?
MORIN: I had a teacher recently reframe something for me that I loved the way she reframed it. We talk about cheat sheets, right?
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MORIN: We talk about giving kids cheat sheets and she was like, they’re handy helpers. They’re not cheat sheets. They’re handy helpers. And I’m like, I’m going to use that forever now. It was perfect.
GONZALEZ: I’ve been looking for another word. Yes, handy helper.
MORIN: Yes. Handy helpers.
KIRCHER-MORRIS: Let me, I just want to say something too, though, is I think sometimes in this conversation, what will often be the critique or the pushback is that people will say, well, we have to get these kids ready for the real world.
GONZALEZ: Yes.
KIRCHER-MORRIS: And let me just say, school is not like the real world at all, because you know what happens in the real world? First of all, if I have a boss that I hate, I can quit that job.
GONZALEZ: Right.
KIRCHER-MORRIS: And if I’m a student and I don’t like my teacher, I’m stuck.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
KIRCHER-MORRIS: Second of all, though, if I’m in the real world, I have my strengths. And so I might talk to the people that I work with and say, “Hey, you know what? You’re really good at this part. Why don’t you do this part? I’ll do this part that I’m really good at.” And so, you know, or for example, with executive functioning skills, it’s like there are tools and strategies. There are so many other options that are available in the real world that we don’t offer to kids.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
KIRCHER-MORRIS: And I think that that’s another way to reframe that as far as us, you know, in the educator position, recognizing that our kids, like, what are we really asking them to do and what do we really want them to be able to do in the future?
GONZALEZ: Yes. Okay. So No. 2 was stop insisting on eye contact. No. 2 is revisit your assessment practices. We’re going to move to three, be more explicit.
MORIN: Yeah. So explicit versus implicit, right? There are things that we think that students know, that we think that we’re getting across, you know, sometimes it’s talked about as hidden curriculum, but it’s beyond that. It’s beyond the hidden curriculum. It’s also things like the goal of the lesson. What is it that you are trying to do? If we tell kids the goal of the lesson, we’re not giving them a cheat code. We’re telling them what we’re hoping them to pay attention to and learn and know by the end of, you know, the end of that lesson. Instructions, let’s be explicit in how we provide instructions and give the opportunity for students to ask clarifying questions. Let’s be, you know, really direct as much as we possibly can and tell them this is what it will look like when it’s done, or this is what I’m expecting, or here’s the rubric I’m using. All of these, you know, I think are teaching practices a lot of teachers use already.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MORIN: But saying it out loud and naming as neurodiversity affirming really reframes for you that, like, you’re already doing some of these things in your classroom. Like, this explicit instruction piece is just good teaching, and I think a lot of teachers are using that good teaching. But to understand that it really supports the minds that are perhaps a little more literal, right? The minds that need to have you rephrase something. So the explicit piece also includes when somebody says to you “I don’t understand,” I think there are times when as educators we repeat the same thing over again and hope that it will, It’ll sink in. But sometimes what they’re saying is, can you say that differently?
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MORIN: So being able to rephrase something I think is part of that as well. The goal thing really matters a lot and that also goes back to a universal design for learning kind of thing is we, you know, I had a student say to me, I really don’t like it when teachers go in and they do a whole activity and we do the whole activity and then by the end of the lesson they’re like, and what we learned today was. And I thought about that, and I was like, that’s true. If the teacher had flipped that and started with what we’re going to learn today, and we’re going to learn it through this activity, that student would have been more engaged. They would have been more bought in to doing the lesson. But he spent the entire period trying to figure out, why are we doing this?
GONZALEZ: Mhmm. Yep.
MORIN: Right? And so the explicitness of why are we doing this matters a ton to our students. I mean, it matters to me as an adult. Why am I doing this, right?
GONZALEZ: Yes, yes.
MORIN: I tend to know why I’m doing what I’m doing.
GONZALEZ: Right.
MORIN: Right? And I tend to know how to do it, and if I don’t, I can find instructions, right?
GONZALEZ: Yes.
MORIN: And so I think providing instructions in multiple ways, showing exemplars of what things can look like.
GONZALEZ: Yes.
MORIN: Right? Giving rubrics, giving checklists, all of those handy helper kinds of things are part of that being explicit. Because it also recognizes the fact that not everybody’s processing information verbally, and not everybody’s processing information in written form.
GONZALEZ: Yes.
MORIN: Right? They are processing in all kinds of formats and providing those options is explicit instruction as well. I’m passionate about this. I just realized that.
GONZALEZ: Well, no, I am, that’s why I’m making all these gestures over here because the instructions in the air part, I mean, that is one of my pet peeves with teachers. If they just say it, it’s like half your class is absolutely going to be missing that. I want to quickly address this question of giving the students the goals ahead of time, because I want to make sure that teachers who are listening, who think, “Oh, I’m doing that already because I have my ICANN statements on the board.” I believe that they’re not doing it if they only have their “I Can” statements written on the board or if they have the kids copy it down maybe in some sort of an organized, because it’s, I think if you’re missing the verbal, that’s also a problem. If it’s just written out and you’re not having a little conversation, and sort of, even though the “I Can” statements are written in kid-friendly language, I think it’s really worth it to spend a minute saying, here’s the “I Can” statement today, or here’s what our goal is, and here’s why, and here’s how today’s activities are going to relate to that.
GONZALEZ: Connect it a little bit.
MORIN: It’s the why.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MORIN: It’s the why that matters so much there for so many of us. Go ahead, Emily.
KIRCHER-MORRIS: And I think also, I was just going to say, in the tethering it to something that they’ve done in the past or something they’re going to do in the future.
GONZALEZ: Yes.
MORIN: Like, give it something to ground it.
GONZALEZ: Yes. Yes. And it doesn’t take long, but it’s sort of when you skip that step, I think a lot of times there’s enough distractions in the kids’ lives. They’re not, they’re just like, I don’t know. We’re supposed to copy it down every day. I don’t know what it means.
KIRCHER-MORRIS: Totally.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MORIN: Yeah.
GONZALEZ: So No. 4 is compliance versus context-based interpretation of behavior. So we want to be shifting maybe from compliance to context-based.
KIRCHER-MORRIS: Yeah, so I’ll start this off by just saying many educators I know out there have heard the phrase, “all behavior is communication.” And that’s kind of what it, what is the foundational piece of this concept of compliance versus context-based interpretation of behavior. So, I’ll share about this with an example. This was a client who I worked with at the time. This client was, I can’t remember if it was late middle school or early high school, but regardless, autistic ADHD, walked into his science class one day and all of the chairs were moved. They were in a horseshoe shape. And he was like, I don’t, I don’t know where to sit because that social pragmatic problem solving, it was unexpected, like all of these things. So he went and got his chair and moved it to where his chair normally goes and sat there. And so the teacher walked in and interpreted this based on compliance, right? Move the chair back. That wasn’t where I had the chair. You need to, you know. And the students said, well, this is where I sit. True facts. That is not wrong. That, you know, that is where his seat goes. And the teacher said, you know, it, you can see where this went. It escalated.
GONZALEZ: Yep, yep.
KIRCHER-MORRIS: This student ended up having a meltdown in the principal’s office. But a context-based interpretation would have said, “Hey, I noticed you moved your seat. What, you know, I had these in this other arrangement. Why did you move your seat?” “Well this is where my seat goes.” Okay again, dig a little bit deeper. Why did that student, it’s like if the teacher had either previously the day before said, “Hey, heads up. Tomorrow we’re going to watch a video in class. I’m going to move the seats. Hey, let’s even look at what the seats will look like, and everyone can kind of figure out where their seat is going to be.
GONZALEZ: Mhmm.
KIRCHER-MORRIS: That could have prevented that entire thing. But in that moment when he walked in, nobody gave him instructions. There weren’t, and I mean, there weren’t instructions on the board. It was, there was no help for him. And so, but because that educator in the moment focused on the compliance instead of understanding the context for that student, it escalated into this big deal and a disciplinary issue.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
KIRCHER-MORRIS: When really it didn’t need to be. So when we talk about compliance versus context-based, for our neurodivergent kids, if you have a student who appears like they’re being rude or they’re defiant or they’re, you know, not paying attention, instead of immediately going to that knee jerk, you’re not following the rules or whatever that might be.
GONZALEZ: You’re not respecting me.
KIRCHER-MORRIS: Yes, yes. We need to, we need to check ourselves and recognize our own triggers. And that’s a conversation we often have with teachers —
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
KIRCHER-MORRIS: — is about recognizing what are the things that elevate our own emotions and how do we react to that with students.
GONZALEZ: Yes.
KIRCHER-MORRIS: But then just taking a minute and going, instead of reacting, I’m going to respond. I need to just, I need to pause just a second and try to figure out what’s really going on here, and then find a solution. Because ultimately the problem with any of those compliance-based outcomes, which typically are disciplinary actions, you’re not actually helping that student understand what they’re supposed to do if that situation comes up again anyway.
GONZALEZ: Right.
KIRCHER-MORRIS: They just know that they got in trouble for it.
GONZALEZ: Yep.
MORIN: You can’t punish skills into action, right?
KIRCHER-MORRIS: No
MORIN: Like, you can teach skills, but you can’t punish somebody into having skills. And I think that’s something we don’t talk about enough. I often will talk about this as connection before expectation, like connect before you expect.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MORIN: You have to understand what’s going on with that student in order to really expect of them what, you know, what the rules are. And in rethinking whether or not your expectations are necessary or reasonable. And sometimes they are, and I want to be really clear in saying that. Sometimes they are.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MORIN: But again, going back to that why, going back to what does that look like? But, you know, I just, I feel very strongly about the fact that we need to look at the skills that are missing, and we need to help teach those skills instead of, like, you know just sort of saying, well, they’re not there.
GONZALEZ: Yeah, yeah. I feel like this is a, its own whole separate conversation, this fourth item.
MORIN: Yeah.
GONZALEZ: And so we’re only just touching on it really, but this is another really big issue. And I asked outside of our conversation if I could bring one more thing up, and so I’ll spend a minute introducing it because I wanted to get your take on it. One of the things you talk about early in the book is how the reason that we have teachers needing to learn these skills and strategies is because in decades past, more kids were isolated in separate classrooms if they had any kind of learning differences. And that has had, it’s been a whole continuum of different kinds of sort of separation or not. And we’re having more and more of a movement of inclusion in classrooms as much as possible. And so I wanted to bring this up because I think that when some teachers hear the title of this topic that we’re talking about, they’re going to see it and they’re going to go, oh no, that whole movement has gone too far and here’s why. And I’ve heard of situations that are happening right now in schools where kids are being moved into regular classrooms who used to be in self-contained classrooms all day long. And these are, In the situations I’m thinking of, these are kids who are basically non-speaking for the most part, are not really able to do the class curriculum at all, and maybe also have quite a few sort of physical or verbal outbursts that can really derail the class and drain the teacher’s energy. And also, the teachers in these situations are saying, I don’t feel like this student is getting what they need. In some cases, I think there may be a staffing issue in the school, and in other cases, what I’ve heard is that the parents are actually insisting that these students be placed into regular classrooms for social reasons. And so I think what’s happening is that teachers that are being placed in these situations are understandably kind of freaking out saying, I have no training for this. Is this what you all mean when you say I need to have? And it sounds like when I’m reading your book, these are not, it’s not the same set of needs, but I think it’s all in some cases getting lumped under the same umbrella in terms of what’s happening in some schools and the way some teachers are interpreting it. And so I want to address it with you all because I want teachers listening to this to be able to receive what you’re teaching because you’re talking about a pretty big population of kids, but it’s not necessarily those situations that we’re talking about, the kids who have higher needs that really need a full-time specialist. So I asked if you could just give me your thoughts on this in general.
KIRCHER-MORRIS: Yeah, and I’m going to let Amanda do the heavy lifting on this question, but, you know, because she comes from the special ed background, I think she’s got some really good perspectives on this.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
KIRCHER-MORRIS: But the thing I will just say is I think both Amanda and I really understand this. And we recognize the difficulty that teachers are faced with when they do have kids who have more significant behaviors that are harder to manage in a classroom setting. And trying to balance that, I’m trying to meet the needs of all of these students, and then I’ve got this one or two, you know, these one or two students who really are, just have, need more of my attention, need more of my energy. And is that taking something away. And so, you know, I think, what I will preface Amanda’s comments, you know, about as she kind of talks about this is just that recognizing that the more we understand neurodivergence and neurodiversity, and the more we put into place processes that are accommodation, accommodating for all students, we actually will build the systems that allow all of those students to be more successful in varied environments. But to, more specifically to your question, we’re not necessarily talking about what’s happening in those types of situations. And so, Amanda, there you go.
MORIN: Yeah. Nice setup. Thank you, Emily. And I think from the special ed perspective, you know some of what we’re talking about here is what used to be called mainstreaming, what is now called inclusion. But really what we’re talking about is the idea of least restrictive environment, right? And least restrictive environment isn’t always a place. It’s an instructional model. It’s. like, it’s how does that instruction get put into place? And I think a lot of times when IEP teams and parents are thinking about least restricted environment, they’re thinking about the place, the place where the learner learns. And you hit on something really important when you said the teachers don’t have the support they need, or there’s not, there’s a staffing component of this.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MORIN: And I really want to echo that and elevate it because the support staff matters, right? Having that support staff who can really support the needs of the learner and balance the teacher’s other responsibilities matters a lot. To go back to the LRE piece though, I think, you know, the language of the law is to put students with disabilities in a place to learn to the maximum extent appropriate, including in, you know, all of these places, educated with students who are not disabled. That’s the language of the law, and we take that language very, very literally sometimes. Okay, so this student needs to be in a classroom, a general education classroom, with students who are not disabled. But the language of the law is different than the intent, and the intent is to make sure they have an opportunity to access that curriculum, to access education in the same ways as students who are not disabled. That does not always mean in the general education classroom. And we actually make this argument in the book for neurodivergent students who, you know, sometimes students who need acceleration. It’s not the best place to be in the general education classroom too.
GONZALEZ: Yeah. Yeah.
MORIN: So, you know, I think this sometimes is a misunderstanding that the other criteria of least restricted environment is that meaningful access to learning. And what we’re talking about is how are we making sure that students have the opportunity to interact with all of their peers, right?
GONZALEZ: Mhmm.
MORIN: But also learn. And I think, you know, I hear it from a parent perspective. I hear it from a teacher perspective. And I just want to make it really clear that that’s a conversation that you can have as a team is to really, you know, acknowledge parents’ fears about their students being segregated, right?
GONZALEZ: Yeah, yeah.
MORIN: It’s, because it is, it is a fearful place to be.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MORIN: I have been that parent in a situation, even knowing all of this that I know. It’s, you have this sort of, reaction that, you know, I don’t want my child to be away from. But I think reframing it as, when can my child be in a classroom with non-disabled peers and have meaningful access to learning? And when are there opportunities to provide them with more meaningful access to learning? And how does that in itself support our teachers in feeling like they can be really, they have a sense of self-efficacy, right?
GONZALEZ: Yes.
MORIN: Part of what we’re talking about is a sense of self-efficacy. Teachers need to feel like they can teach the students who are in their classroom. And sometimes that also means putting into an IEP training and support for a teacher. And that exists in an IEP. And I don’t think we often use that as much as, like, what is the training and support that this teacher needs to be able to do this?
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MORIN: The other thing I would say too, you know, And I, you know, you can cut me off if I’m going really long here, but like the other thing I would say too is sometimes the things that make us as teachers uncomfortable really aren’t bothering the other students in the classroom as much as we feel like they might be. Sometimes they are, right? But when you think about, you know, students who make noises, you know, a student who might have Tourette’s syndrome, for example.
GONZALEZ: Right
MORIN: Or a student who stims and what they, what they do for their stim is they’re, you know, they’re sort of moving in a way that makes noise. We often worry about the future. What are kids going to think? Is that child going to get bullied? All of those kinds of things. And the reality is we need to think about what’s happening right now. Is that a problem right now?
GONZALEZ: Right.
MORIN: Is it distracting to us as teachers? And what can we do to sort of minimize our own distractedness?
GONZALEZ: Mhmm.
MORIN: Or is it distracting the class and the learner themselves? So some of it’s a matter of, like, let’s make sure we have the right environment for that student.
GONZALEZ: Mhmm.
MORIN: And some of it’s what is discomfort that we have to live with a little bit?
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MORIN: And I’m not saying that, that significant behaviors that are causing learning to stop is something we have to live with. I don’t, I’m not saying that at all.
GONZALEZ: Right.
MORIN: But I’m saying that there are smaller things that maybe we need to think about, whether I’m uncomfortable with that or whether, you know, I don’t know. I think I went on a tangent there that I don’t necessarily want to pursue but.
GONZALEZ: I think it’s, I’m glad that you’re talking about all of this because I think a problem on top of this problem is that most teachers who are in a situation like this have gotten the sense that they cannot say anything at all because they are going to be labeled as ableist.
MORIN: Mhmm.
GONZALEZ: And So even if they’re getting the sense that, like, I’m not going to be able to do my job here, I can’t serve this student or my other students. I don’t have the tools. I don’t have the support. But I’m not going to be able to say anything because I’m going to be labeled as an ableist. And they don’t have, even listening to you all describe sort of the technicalities of the situation and the way of looking at it, I think is helping to give a vocabulary to more sort of neutrally describe what’s going on here, and that this is not somebody who is being, it’s that word gets thrown out very, or just that they have a crappy attitude and they need to try harder, which teachers get told all the time, you just have a bad attitude. And it’s just, I think they have so much on their plates already. They’re just, they’re trying their best and being told that they’re not trying hard enough is just so demoralizing.
MORIN: Absolutely.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MORIN: And that goes back to what Emily was saying at the beginning about language, right? Giving teachers the language to reframe it and to say, I really want this learner to be successful. I want all the learners in my classroom to be successful. And I want to be successful. It’s very different than saying this child doesn’t belong in my classroom.
GONZALEZ: Yes. Yes. So I appreciate you sort of validating that situation. And I think most people, school leaders, teachers, everybody is trying to do the best that they can. But I think if we don’t have the language to have these conversations, then sometimes these kids are going to get pushed right through the system and not actually get what they need. And that’s, that’s not what our goal is here.
MORIN: Yeah. And we want everyone to be successful, right? And I think that that’s, that is something that I want to stress over and over again. We want our students to be successful, but we also want teachers to be successful. We want, this is huge. It’s huge. Having been in the classroom, you know. I’m going to say my first couple of years of teaching, I feel like there’s an entire generation of kids I need to go back and apologize to because I was not a great teacher for them.
GONZALEZ: Same here.
MORIN: Right?
KIRCHER-MORRIS: Oh my gosh, who let me in a classroom at 21 years old? That was a mistake.
MORIN: I know, right? I mean.
GONZALEZ: Yep, yep, yep.
MORIN: But we’re all evolving.
GONZALEZ: Yes.
MORIN: And that’s the point is we’re all evolving to try and get to a place where we can be really successful, our learners can be successful. Our systems can change to make sure that happens too.
GONZALEZ: So before, my final question for you is going to just be for you to tell us about your online stuff and plug the book and everything like that. But last question is, if neurodiversity-affirming practices became the standard across education, what would our schools and our society look like in 10 or 20 years?
KIRCHER-MORRIS: Yeah, so I think what I would love in the utopian world in our schools, I would love that we didn’t even need all of these labels, and that we would just have systems and supports in place so that any student who needed them was able to access them. Sometimes the labels can be, right now they are often necessary in order to find those supports, but also, they can be a barrier for people who maybe can’t access those barriers or can’t access those labels or identifications for a variety of reasons. And I think also just the changes in part of the school’s fabric as far as normalizing accommodations and understanding those unique ways of communicating and experiencing the world, like those are not less than, they’re just different from, and we can value those as well as all of these other differences that we see in our kids.
MORIN: And when we do that, right? So as we change systems in education systems, we’re changing societal systems too. So in this utopian world, once we have raised students who are empowered and neurodivergent students who know how to speak up for the accommodations they need and all students, then we are also building a society that is going to have hopefully reduced ableism in their hiring practices. We’re going to be hiring those people who don’t look you in the eye when they have that conversation because they have the skills and they can, you can see that they have the skills to do the job. And that we are more aware, and our neurodivergent students feel more confident that they can navigate the world. They can navigate that world once they’re out of school. So that’s, for me, that’s the beyond piece of it.
GONZALEZ: That would be a really nice place to get to.
MORIN: Yeah.
GONZALEZ: Tell me where listeners can go online to learn more from you.
KIRCHER-MORRIS: Yeah, so I’m the host of the Neurodiversity Podcast, so if they want to check that out, that would be wonderful. Additionally, Amanda and I co-facilitate a community, a membership community called the Neurodiversity University Educator Hub. So we do office hours, and we do roundtable discussions, and we do expert webinars. But then the other cool thing that we do actually is we do these little five-minute PD videos that people who are members can actually share out to their wider school community. And so we wanted to offer all of your listeners a 50 percent off discount for their first month if they would like to join. And so we talked about it, and they can use the code CULT in order to access that. And we’ll send a link, and you guys can throw it in the show notes and everything. But yeah, and so Amanda, what else would you add?
MORIN: I mean, I think we’re on the pretty standard social media. You can find us pretty much on the social media. We are not on what used to be Twitter, may it rest in peace, but we’re pretty much everywhere else.
MORIN: And for the book specifically, we have a website, we have neurodiversityaffirmingschools.com.
GONZALEZ: And does the University Educator Hub have a URL that you want to give here, or do you want to?
KIRCHER-MORRIS: Yeah, absolutely, thank you. Yeah, neurodiversity.university.
GONZALEZ: Okay. That’ll, that takes care of it. And I will make sure that I have links in the post that goes with this interview to all of your stuff too, so that if the people are listening and they can’t catch all of it, they can just go over and click on Episode 243 and they can get all the links to that. So thank you so much. I had probably 15 to 20 other questions. So maybe I’ll have to have you come back on again in a few months, and we can talk about this some more. But I really appreciate your time, and everybody should read this book.
MORIN: Thank you so much for inviting.
KIRCHER-MORRIS: Thank you so much. Yeah, this has been great.
For a full transcript of this episode, and links to all the resources we talked about here, including Amanda and Emily’s book, visit cultofpedagogy.com, click Podcast, and choose episode 243. To get a bimonthly email from me about my newest blog posts, podcast episodes, courses and products, sign up for my mailing list at cultofpedagogy.com/subscribe. Thanks so much for listening, and have a great day.