Creating Neurodiversity-Affirming Schools, with Amanda Morin & Emily Kircher-Morris

Debbie: 

Well, hello, Emily. Hello, Amanda. Welcome back to the pod. Both of you are our return guests. Nice to see you guys today.

Amanda Morin:

Same. Thanks for having us.

Emily Kircher-Morris:

Yeah, it’s good to see you.

Debbie:

Yes, I’ve been looking forward to this all day, all week actually. And I have read your formal bios and I have a hunch my listeners are familiar with both of your work, but I still would love to get just a little bit about your story and maybe you each share how you came to this collaboration. Because I’m really, when I found out you guys partnered, I was like, my gosh, this is going to be magic. So I’d love to hear a little bit about the origin story of this project.

Amanda Morin:

I can start. Also, I love that you love that it’s magic because it didn’t always feel like magic. And you know, to your listeners, I’ll just, if you haven’t heard our voices, this is Amanda talking. It’s probably worth giving that, you know, that audio clue. So aside from my formal bio, I’m a certified teacher and I work with kids right now in families. I work with kids who are neurodivergent and do neurodiversity affirming parent coaching kind of work. I myself am neurodivergent and I’ve raised or am raising or hope to have raised three children who are neurodivergent. So, you really come at this from an angle of all of these angles, right? Having been in schools, having taught in schools, being a neurodivergent student myself back before there was a lot of support for that or recognition of it and raising my own kids and realizing that I really wanted a different education system for them than the one that I went through. Emily and I met on what used to be known as Twitter through professional, may it rest in peace, through professional learning communities and had great conversations through that. I mean, it’s such a great place to build community as we all know that social media can be and realized we had a lot to say, which hasn’t changed at all.

Amanda Morin:

We realized that we really wanted to do some shifting of the paradigm of what people typically think of as inclusion into a more neurodiversity affirming. And we use that word really specifically neurodiversity because we want to be including all kinds of minds in these conversations. And so I had just left my job as the director of thought leadership at understood.org and went into consulting. We were finishing up separate books and we’re sort of each other’s accountability buddies in that situation. Emily was like, Hey, so I have a great idea for another book proposal. Do you want to think about doing this together? And we were, think, in different airports while we were having this conversation because we were traveling somewhere else. And I was like, I’m in. And from there, mean, Emily, do you want to? Emily got moving and we, yeah.

Emily Kircher-Morris:

Yeah. Yeah. Well, and I think. Just a little bit about my background. So I also come from education. I taught for over a decade in both the general education and the gifted ed classroom. But I really loved that kind of social and emotional piece of teaching. So I went back and I could have two masters, one in gifted ed and the second one in counseling. And so I worked for a while as a school counselor and then transitioned into a practice and I’m a licensed professional counselor. And I support mental health and various needs in the counseling setting. And I have written a few other books more specifically about twice exceptional learners. But in my work with that, really realizing that we need a broader understanding of neurodivergent students and the fact that they really are in all of our classrooms. so I have a podcast. The Neurodiversity Podcast is the name of my podcast. And speaking to experts there and learning so much and just realizing there’s nothing out there that is working to change the system, that is trying to change the paradigm. And I knew that Amanda would be a perfect partner for this project because we have really complimentary backgrounds for the areas. She has some specific areas of strength. I have some specific areas of strength. And together, it really created a great framework for what we think educators need to know to understand that neurodivergent students are here. They always have been, and we haven’t been serving them as well as we can. And these are not necessarily kids who have IEPs or 504s. Sometimes they do, but sometimes they don’t. And I think both of our own personal experiences growing up neurodivergent, raising neurodivergent kids really informed all of this work. So yeah, I mean, I’m all about the big ideas and the impulsive, like, let’s do it. And then, we got it together. We got the proposal together and sent it off. And, you know, it feels like so long ago that we started on it, but we’re so excited for it finally to be out in the world because it’s new. I think one of the things that stood out to both of us, you know, Amanda and I have both written other books. And we both feel like this was the hardest book we’ve ever written because it is on the forefront. It is the cutting edge. This is new stuff. There’s not a lot of other people who are out there talking about and writing about this stuff. There are people talking about it, especially on social media and different places. But there was nothing else comprehensive to really give a guide. And so we really were pulling from a lot of different places to create this and make a model that teachers can learn from and follow.

Amanda Morin:

And one of the things I think from that complementary perspective, you know, I come from a special education background, Emily comes from the license counseling professional background, we were able to push each other thinking as we were writing the book too. There were things that we, you know, we would go back and forth on and say, is this, you know, what do you think about this? I don’t know, what do you think about this? And, and that shows up in the book, which I think is really helpful because it, it’s really important for people to understand that there is no one way to change a system, right? It starts with the fundamental belief that every student in your classroom deserves to be sort of accepted, supported the way that they are, but there’s no one way to do it. And I think we did a really nice job of representing multiple perspectives in the book.

Debbie:

Yeah, absolutely. I agree with that. It is a new concept. I think that’s why I was so excited about it for so many reasons. In fact, when you guys teased on social media like a year or two ago that you were working on, was like, what is it? I wanted to know what book you’re writing because it’s going to be awesome. So I was so excited to find out. I haven’t announced the title yet except for in the intro. So let me do that now.

The book is called Neurodiversity Affirming Schools, Transforming Practices So All Students Feel Accepted and Supported. And it is a paradigm shifting book. It is a new conversation. And it’s so needed, right? Because I’m sure you have this experience too. When I speak to groups of a school community and there are educators in there, it can be uncomfortable because it feels like I’m calling people out and that’s not what I’m trying to do, but we need to be having these conversations. So let’s start there. Let’s kind of back up a little bit. And if you could go into a little more detail about what your goal of this book is, what are you really hoping it does in the world?

Emily Kircher-Morris:

I think you mentioned that feeling of calling out when you’re talking to people. And I think one of our main goals with this was instead of calling out to call people in, to realize that educators are already doing many of these things. And educators go into teaching for authentic and good reasons. I don’t believe that anyone goes into teaching because they want summers off. That’s ridiculous. And, but there’s this fear, there’s this stigma surrounding neurodivergence in general and these big scary labels of autism, ADHD, dyslexia, whatever it might be. And so then what that prevents though is that’s this barrier that teachers feel like, don’t know what to do about that. That’s not my realm. That’s for the special education teachers or that’s for the occupational therapist or whatever. But what we need is we need this broad view of how to support kids. And so when I talk about that calling in, it’s that recognition that you know how to support kids. You’re already doing many of these things. It’s not going to upend everything that you’re doing to make some of these small tweaks but the difference that it can make in the lives of your students is huge. And I feel like that’s a big part of what we were trying to do.

Amanda Morin:

And I think that one of the other things we were trying to do is to make sure that this was a book that talked to systems, right, not just individual teachers, because we really want to emphasize the fact that teachers really are doing ground up work. A lot of teachers are doing this ground up work, and they are doing it in silos in a lot of ways. And so to make sure that we put together something that could be used not just for an individual classroom but also to talk to the systems. How do you change the systems around it? How do you change the conversations and the ways that we’re looking at students? You know, Emily just used the word neurodivergent students and the book is neurodiversity affirming. That’s purposeful, right? And I think that’s one of the conversations that we have to have with educators and parents and you know, anybody who’s in this space because there is a difference between neurodiversity and neurodivergence. And I don’t think that’s always coming across. And so what we are doing is providing practices and ways of looking at students that really is neurodiversity affirming, right? It’s looking at all of the different types of neurotypes or all of the different ways that in and also specifically adding information about how to support the neurodivergent students in your classroom. And I think to me, that’s part of the paradigm shift if we are looking at truly a sense of belonging in the classrooms, we need to not just be calling out neurodivergent students and how do you support them. We need to be saying, how are we supporting all students so that they really do feel like a cohesive community of learners.

Debbie:

Yeah, yeah, yes, it’s getting rid of the other rising of people. And I think what you just said just restates why this is such a big idea book, you know, bigger than probably people have realized, who might think it’s just for these kids, right? Okay, so the title again is Neurodiversity Affirming Schools, and I really appreciate you breaking down or teasing out the difference between neurodiversity and neurodivergence. So how would you define a neurodiversity affirming school?

Amanda Morin:

I mean, the first thing about a neurodiversity affirming school is that it recognizes that there are multiple ways of learning, right? And that not one kind of mind, it’s not a one size fits all thing. Teaching is not a one size fits all thing. And unfortunately, we live in systems that sort of have gone that way for a long time, that we’re looking at a one size fits all, how do you teach students? But a neurodiversity-affirming school recognizes that there is no one-size-fits-all, that there are learners who are going to learn from the traditional type of teaching that you do in your classroom, but there are also learners who are going to benefit from you understanding some of the motivations behind how they show up in your classroom, some of the motivations of how they don’t show up in your classroom, because I think that’s just as important. And also it neutralizes the way that we talk about disability and neurodivergence, right? So we’re not looking at it as like those kids over there. It’s let’s talk about this for what it is, right? You know, and using more neutral language around it, not, I’m stuck, I’m stuck, folks, I’m sorry. Using more neutral language around it so that we’re not putting moral and value judgments on how people learn. And I think that’s the first thing that I want people to understand is if you take away good versus bad or right versus wrong, that’s how you start looking at neurodiversity affirming. You look at just this is.

Emily Kircher-Morris:

And just to build on that, really recognizing the fact that neurodivergent kids are who they are, and many of the quote unquote interventions that we have attempted in the past have been attempting to quote unquote fix these character flaws specifically that we attribute with neurodivergence. You’re disorganized? You should try harder. Or, you have a hard time making friends? Well, you should just be more likable. And that’s what we’re talking about when there’s this value judgment of the things that are sometimes different for neurodivergent people. When I think about what it means to be neurodiversity-affirming, one of my favorite phrases is to talk about how we work with our students’ brains instead of against them. You cannot continue to try to force that square peg into the round hole without having long-term damaging trauma impacts realistically. And the problem with that is when we think about the goals that we have for our students, what are we thinking about long-term? What do we really want for them? We want for them to be happy. We want for them to be successful. We want for them to live the life that is meaningful to them. So setting them up for that is not the same as mastering a very specific curriculum and checking off all the boxes, because sometimes that’s different for different kids. And so we need to just have more flexibility. We need to recognize that being neurodiversity affirming doesn’t only mean for us as educators supporting our students who are neurodivergent. It also means creating a culture in the school that embraces all different neurotypes. And we actually have one little feature in the book about the double empathy problem. And so just in case anyone’s unfamiliar with what that is, the double empathy problem is this idea that for many years, people who are neurodivergent and often specifically autistic have been told, well, you need to be more empathetic. You need to look at this from somebody else’s point of view. You need to use different perspective taking so that you can adapt to this other way of being or this other way of thinking. And in so doing, those people who are insisting that are not being empathetic and not being flexible and not looking at it from that other person’s perspective. So recognizing that that goes both ways. So one of the features we have in the book is we have these little vignettes that are about the double empathy problem. What does this look like as far as neurodivergent communication goes? How is this perceived by the teacher, by the other students, by the neurodivergent student? When we talk about, quote unquote, problematic behavior, whatever that might be, looking at it through this angle of how do we evaluate this from all of these different perspectives and circle around it in order to really understand what’s happening, in order to support that student in a way that works for them and with them.

Amanda Morin:

And I would build on that and say, you know, to Emily’s point about the, you know, the round peg in the square hole or the square peg in the round hole, part of neurodiversity affirming culture is realizing that it looks more like those, those toddler toys that have the star and the rectangle and the circle and the square. That’s your classroom, right? Your classroom has all of those different shapes and that’s fine. And that’s wonderful. And from the perspective of what we call nor neuronormative for using the word neuronormative because we think it’s more value judgment than neurotypical to be really frank, you know, typical is a word that means there should be a certain thing. And so we were trying to introduce the idea that neuronormative is the standards that society sort of has for, what we would expect. But when you’re looking at things from a neuronormative perspective, you’re leaving out an entire entire amazing population of students who have really interesting perspectives to bring to the table that other people should try to understand instead of just the other way around.

Debbie:

Super interesting. And now my brain is going in multiple directions. But I want to ask about, in terms of when we’re talking about creating neurodiversity affirming cultures in schools, I’m just wondering, you know, when I imagine when you’re writing this book, you have to think about, what are we up against? Right? Like when I launched Tilt, I had to think about it, I tried to create it as a revolution. Right. So what are the barriers or what are the pillars that are keeping the current status quo, this paradigm in place right now, because we need to know what those things are in order to dismantle it. So what do you see as the biggest systemic challenges in having this cultural shift?

Amanda Morin:

Well, you know, Emily may disagree with this. like, I want to, but which is fine, right? Like, I think fear. That’s fair too. Yes. Yes. Yep. Yes. Okay. I mean, I think now I’m afraid to know. I think fear on a bunch of different levels, right? I think fear is the biggest driver of avoiding change. There’s fear around the stigma of labeling students, right? If we call them neurodivergent, if we tell them they’re autistic or they have ADHD or ADHD or however they identify, right? If they’re dyslexic, what does that mean, right? What are we going to do to them? What are we going to do to our systems, right? Kind of thing. There’s also fear and change. There’s such fear in changing. There are things in education that we have done the way we do them because it’s the way we’ve done them, right? And that’s pervasive in education systems. And I say that having been in education systems, having taught in education systems and teaching educators, right? There are ways that we do things because we are fearful of what might happen if we take some of that control away, right? And that’s a big systemic problem that we have to tackle. What does it look like to be willing to make change and know that you’re not entirely sure what’s going to happen when you make that change? And I also think that there’s a lot of fear around what if we take away standardized testing kinds of components? What if we change the way we teach our curriculum? What if we can’t necessarily put a number or a grade letter to this kind of thing? And my question for people is, but what if we can have kids show you what they know, right? What if you know exactly what your goal is and however that student’s able to show you that they’ve mastered it is good enough?

Emily Kircher-Morris:

The other thing I think that stands in the way actually is related to one of the things we included in the book. And miraculously, I was able to pull it up while Amanda was talking just then. But this basically is an outline of what we see as kind of the ways to combat some of those barriers. And it is the Neurodiversity Affirming Teacher’s Compact of Shared Beliefs. This set of beliefs that really, if educators embrace these, we’re going to be pushing against those barriers. So I’ll go through them, and I’ll go through them very quickly. But basically, it’s just a list of these beliefs. So we believe difference is different, not less. We believe all students learn differently. We believe in showing respect to all students. We believe all students deserve accommodation and differentiation. We believe all students should have agency. We believe in honoring advocacy. We believe that all students can and should participate. And we believe in holding all students to high expectations. And so, you know, that’s a long list. who could disagree with any of those, right? But when you examine it from where we are in our school system culturally, how we view these things, we’re not always viewing that difference is different, not less. We have a lot of inherently ableist ideas, and that you should look a certain way or behave a certain way. And those things prevent us from actually educating students in a way that is honoring who they are as people. And so all of those different ideas within that compact really exemplify what we can do and the big picture ideas of how to push back against a lot of those barriers.

Amanda Morin:

And we, you know, we would love to actually provide your listeners with the compact. can, we can share it with you as a PDF that they can download and have available in their classrooms for their, for the teachers that they might want to provide it to. It was really important to us to be able to come up with a set of beliefs that we can all agree to, right? And, and even if you can just start with a couple of them, you’re making change, right? Even just the idea that every student should have accommodations? That’s groundbreaking. It shouldn’t be, but it is groundbreaking, right? We think it’s oftentimes it’s like, well, if we give them accommodation, are we actually, are they still learning? And the answer is absolutely they are, absolutely.

Debbie:

I love that. And yes, send on that PDF. was as you were reading it off, I’m like, I want this on my wall. I’m thinking t-shirts, mugs, like there’s a lot of potential here. But it is so important. And when you as you said, who can, how can you disagree with any of these? And when you’re even having heard it, it starts to change the way you’re the lens through which you’re doing all of this work. So when we were talking before, Amanda, you started talking about how great it would be for students to be able to demonstrate their knowledge in a way that really is based on their strengths and how they learn. I think that’s a nice segue to talk about, you have a whole chapter in the book about universal design for learning. And I was hoping you could kind of talk with us about that concept and why it can be such a good model for neurodivergent students.

Amanda Morin:

Yeah, sure. And I’m actually really passionate about universal design for learning, which is kind of an incredibly nerdy thing to be passionate about. But I love that. It’s one of those things where I think people get scared by universal design for learning because it sounds like such a big idea. Right. And if you start and look at the framework, the principles look very overwhelming. But it really sort of boils down to how are we getting our students engaged? How are getting them motivated? How are we giving them multiple ways to show what they know? And how are we measuring that? And one of the things about universal design for learning is it really doesn’t have to be a whole classroom change. It doesn’t have to be a flip of everything you’re doing. It’s really just introducing choice and multiple modalities. And I talk about multiple modalities, but really what I just mean is like, for example, if you have a student who doesn’t want to do a written report, could they do a video? Could they do a presentation, that kind of thing? But I think when it really comes down to universal design for learning, one of the first things is examining what the barriers might be in the classroom. And it’s proactive. It’s a matter of looking at the lessons that you’re teaching and thinking through what might be, it’s a matter of looking at the lessons that you’re teaching and looking at it from a perspective of what might be the place where people get stuck and how can I change that ahead of time? So in real time, I’m not frustrated. My students aren’t frustrated. Where are there things that I can change? But even more importantly, it’s about knowing what your goal is, right? So for example, if you are teaching about, and I use this example a lot, Alison Posey used this and I loved it. If you’re teaching about the life cycle of a butterfly, right? Is your goal to have your students do a perfectly handwritten grammar perfect summary of the life cycle of a butterfly, or is your goal for them to know what the life cycle of the butterfly looks like, right? And if that’s the goal, then the other things can sort of stay in the background and take the pressure off. The other piece of that is letting your students know ahead of time what the goal is, right?

I think a lot of times we go into lessons and we’re doing this round of a roundabout kind of way. I actually, you know, and I, and I’m going to interrupt myself because that’s neurodivergence right there, right? to say, like, I had a student who said to me, you know, what I don’t love is when teachers go into a classroom and they like, they start this whole thing and they do the whole activity and they haven’t told you what we’re supposed to learn. And I thought that was such a reflective thing for this teenager to say to me because he was right. Right. But what he said to me is if I knew what it was I was supposed to walk out of that class knowing from the very beginning, I would have been right there with the teacher. I would have been willing to do the thing. I would have asked the questions. And so not leaving students in the dark about what it is they are going to learn, not making it difficult to understand how to meet the expectations and giving multiple options. You know, if you’re doing a book report, does it have to be about the Battle of Gettysburg, or could it be about dinosaurs? If it’s the book report you’re looking for, can it be something that the student’s more interested in and more passionate about? So I think universal design for learning has a lot of components to it. But if you start with engagement, motivation, and different ways of showing what you know, a lot of teachers are doing that already. And so I say to those teachers and I say to the parents who are seeing those teachers in action, they may not know it’s universe. They may not know it’s universe. Wow. They may not know it’s UDL, but they’re doing it. They’re doing it already.

Emily Kircher-Morris:

You know, the thing that comes to mind is an anecdote from when I was in the classroom. And it reflects on the idea that Amanda was talking about with focusing on what the goal of the learning is when we’re providing accommodations and supports. So there was a student, this was a gifted ed classroom, they were doing a research report. It was a co-taught classroom. And this student was twice exceptional and had a diagnosis of ADHD. I also had a diagnosis of sensory processing disorder. I look back now. I haven’t done an assessment, but he had a lot of autistic traits. this was, I don’t know, let’s see, my daughter Maggie is 14. So this was about 15 or 16 years ago when this happened. And I think our understanding about all of that has changed a lot. But one of the requirements for this research project that they had to do is they had to go through, had to find this research, they had to read through it, they had to highlight it, and then they had to write down these facts on note cards. So they had to transcribe from this piece of paper onto these note cards, these facts that they were then going to use to write their research project. And he was way behind. He was so far behind. so I called him up and let’s work on this. Come on, let’s do this. And so I basically scribed for him in that situation. Again, before we really had a lot of options for speech to text, different things like that. And actually the teacher who I co-taught with, she and I actually had a disagreement about this and had to have a conversation. And I didn’t know anything about universal design at that time. But what I did know is that the goal for this is to see if he can read this information and find the big picture points and pull those out so that he can then use them. The goal is not to see if he can write things down on a note card. That is not the goal. And that’s what we’re talking about. Like, how do we adapt for students in a way that works with their brain instead of against it? And luckily now we do have so many technological tools that there are lot of opportunities where students can still be very independent with this. We also just have to realize that for a lot of neurodivergent students, so many of these things are developmental, and even though they don’t have it now, doesn’t mean that they won’t have it eventually. But we need to work with them where they are in this moment so that they build the confidence, so that they build the skills, so that they’re not afraid to even try. And I just look back on that, and I think that was me just as a teacher adapting, doing what I knew that kid needed. Granted, I was in a co-taught classroom. I had the luxury of pulling a student up and spending some dedicated time. 

So I understand that those barriers still are very real, but what was our other option to let him sit there and not get it done and have to try to take it home and have his parents have to battle with him to try to, I mean, I don’t know, again, what’s the big picture? What’s the goal? How do we work with the student’s brain to help achieve those overall objectives?

Debbie:

I mean, as you’re both talking about that, don’t think, I mean, it’s been a while now, but reflecting on my middle school and high school education, I don’t recall any teacher ever explaining the why behind anything that I was doing or learning. It was rote memorization. It was, you know, just kind of getting it done to get it done. So I appreciate that question. Even that question feels provocative and kind of like mind blowing, right? And so my question then is, what about, you know, so much of what we’re doing in public school systems is, you know, preparing for testing and assessment? So how do you kind of address that when you’re talking to educators?

Amanda Morin:

Part of that is about the goal of the testing too, right? Is the goal for the students to be able to show their knowledge of a specific topic or is the goal for them to be better test takers? And like the answer could be one or the other, but I think that that’s a good way for teachers to start looking at that and to start having those conversations is because it is, I mean, it is a valid thing if you have a student who needs to learn how to take tests to name that out loud and say, know, what we’re going to learn here today is how to take this specific kind of test, right? Because this is part of what we do here in school. And it also can take some of the pressure off the student feeling like they have to do perfectly on that exam. And I think that part of what we get caught up in is we need them to know the things, we need them to know how to do the test, we need them to be able to do it on time and all of those kinds of things. And for some teachers, it’s really helpful to break down what we are doing today? Are we learning how to take a test? Are we learning the material that’s going to be on the test? Or are we learning how to do it in a certain amount of time? And so those goals exist in preparing for testing if you really start to think about it. I don’t think we always have time to think about it. So I name it out loud so teachers can have a moment and say, there’s actually more to this than just I have to get them ready, right?

Emily Kircher-Morris:

The other piece of this is recognizing part of the problem is that we use tests as a way to hold schools and teachers accountable. And when we do this, we compare groups of students, so this grade level, and we see how this grade level does. And then the next year, we take that same grade level and we compare it to the grade level before. And you’re not actually comparing apples to apples in that situation. What really is the measure of growth there is the growth for every individual student. And that’s kind of the disconnect there, because what’s best for students is not necessarily what’s best to improve test scores. The only other thing that I will mention with that is that this is where it gets really important, where we do document certain accommodations for students. Because when we talk about testing, whether we’re talking about at the high school level, with the ACT or the SAT, or we’re just talking about state level testing, you know, year to year. If you have a student who you’re giving extended time to in your classroom because you just know it’s the right thing to do, that needs to be documented because otherwise they will not be eligible for that in those other situations. Sometimes for the parents who are in your audience, they might be very hesitant to think about a Section 504 plan or something along those lines because they don’t want to formalize these pieces. Having a paper trail is to your advantage. There are really no drawbacks to it because all it does is protect you. And so if they are using a scribe for some things, they need to have a test read to them, we can still do those things. And if they need them on those state-level tests, then is there a way that we can then document that so they can still have those accommodations in those scenarios as well?

Amanda Morin:

And I would add that there is specifically in IEPs, there’s specifically a section around accommodations for state level tests. So parents, if your child has an IEP, make sure that you have that conversation at the IEP meeting around what accommodations they may need. And I think the important thing I would add to that is just because it’s in there doesn’t mean they’ll need it all the time, but it does give them your child. the option to use it when they do need it.

Debbie:

Yeah, yeah, that’s great. Thank you. I want to quickly, I don’t know, is the right word? Let me. I would love to, before we start to wrap up, talk about, you know, navigating demand avoidance, navigating burnout, know, you address these things, masking, that you talk about in the book. So I’m just curious to know, you know, what do teachers know and not know about these things and how important is it that they really have an understanding, a deeper understanding of the experience of what we know is a chunk, a good chunk of their students.

Emily Kircher-Morris:

So having awareness is huge. I think it’s also important sometimes. I think Amanda and I both agree on this, but maybe don’t know. But I think we do. But recognizing that in a utopian society, we wouldn’t need labels. We would just give kids what they need. However, we’re not at that point yet, but my thought, like when you mentioned demand avoidance specifically, is like people sometimes get very caught up in that particular label. But there are different reasons why different students might experience demand avoidance. There are some particular labels that might fit with that under the autism spectrum. And those aren’t necessarily always the same things, but the goal really is how do we support it? And so having the awareness of it, and I guess moving away from the idea that it is manipulative or that it is intentional, like there’s some other piece there. And so if we can get teachers to look beneath some of that, that’s kind of the big factor there. I’ll also touch on masking just a little bit and help recognize that. I had a client at one point in time who I was working with who was a high school student, was very bright, was ADHD, and again, probably autistic, although had not officially gone through an assessment process for that, but she recognized it in herself as did her parents. And she was taking some AP classes and was doing very well in these classes, but she got to the point where she was so stressed out. She was going home at night and she was studying from the time she got home to the time she went to bed.

On the weekend, she said she was a very diligent student, but it took her a long time to complete her work. And so we approached the school and were asking for some accommodations, but she was a high masking student. And so the school was like, well, we don’t see it at school. We can’t give any accommodations because we don’t actually see that this is impacting her. Well, it was impacting her to the point that it was so extreme that she was experiencing suicidal ideation and had begun self-injuring. And you know, but again, she was, you would, and the tears and all of the, the, the emotions that would happen at home surrounding this, she wasn’t showing at school. So for parents and, and, and educators to recognize that sometimes there’s a disconnect. And when a parent reports something to you as an educator to hear that and realize like, okay, there’s something here. That’s a big piece to recognizing that students might be masking and you may not even know it. And also self-advocacy is so hard, especially for kids. And these kids have been taught from an extremely young age to look normal, be normal, make eye contact, don’t flap your hands, clean out your desk, stay organized. And they get these messages and it’s like, they might be white-knuckling it through and just trying to get through day by day just to survive without getting that negative feedback. But that doesn’t mean that they’re actually thriving. And when we allow those conversations to happen, when we allow that self-advocacy, when we allow people to be authentic, that’s when they actually have the opportunity to grow.

Amanda Morin:

I’m like knuckling through listening to you describe all of those things because I don’t think I can do that in a day. Like in all seriousness, those are things I can’t do in a day. And when we ask our students to do them, are, and students are developmentally not the same as adults, right? At this point, we’re asking them to do things that are things that we can’t do. And I think that that’s important to recognize as well. The other thing I would add to that is that we have to be prepared to receive that self-advocacy as teachers, right? We can teach students to self-advocate and they can do it beautifully. But if we’re not able to receive that and be respectful and have the conversation and make some of the adaptations or the changes or even talk about what else we could do, then we might be setting kids up to fail, which explains why they continue to mask, right, to some degree. It’s not the only reason they can continue to mask. And then the other thing I would say too is not all students feel comfortable unmasking. And there are situations in which that’s the way that they handle being themselves. And we need to be okay with recognizing that we can’t ask them to always unmask, but we can give them safer spaces to feel like they have the option to unmask.

Debbie:

Yeah, that’s a great distinction. And just one more thing on the self-advocacy piece, as you were saying that, Emily, was hearing, you know, I’ve got this kid at university and we were just talking about, you know, tests are coming up and making sure that you’re getting the accommodations that are, you know, that you’re registered at the Disability Services Office. And I was thinking about the fact that, yeah, we want our kids to advocate for themselves and we’re asking them to do that when they are likely recovering from all of their behavior, or a lot of their behavior when they were younger or even currently being perceived as disruptive, negative, bad. So now it’s like, okay, we hear you and lean all the way in and now ask for more. So it is really a heavy lift that we’re asking for our neurodivergent students to lean into this.

Amanda Morin:

Well, in a neurodiversity affirming space, ideally, they don’t have to ask because you’re providing those options to them upfront and not just neurodivergent students, all students. You’re giving them ways to access the information and do what they need to do without them having to ask. And like, that’s a paradigm shift that I would love to see. I would love to see students just like, I don’t know, walk up to the front of the room and say, is what I’m needing today. And a teacher to say, cool. That’s great. That’s fine.

Emily Kircher-Morris:

I think the other piece of that is that as educators, we need to be opening that door to self-advocacy, thinking about it as a scaffolding piece. Because it’s not like all of a sudden if you tell a kid, well, just come ask me if you need help, the next day they’re just going to walk up and ask it. It means we’re going to offer some options. We’re going to do some individual check-ins. We’re going to make sure they feel comfortable. But it’s interesting. You talk about being at the university level. And self-advocacy is, at that point, as you’re entering adulthood, it is put back on the student. Those universities are not following up with those kids. And so when the kids are younger, when they’re at elementary, middle, and high school level, we need to have that gradual release so that they have that opportunity to self-advocate and know how to do it and know what their needs are so they can be successful as they enter whatever their next phase of life might be.

Debbie:

Yeah, yeah. So, okay, we’re running long and I want to be respectful of everybody’s time and there’s so much more we could talk about. So here’s my question for you. This book, as you guys are listening to the show, the book is just out and again, it is called Neurodiversity Affirming Schools, Transforming Practices So All Students Feel Accepted and Supported. It’s a wonderful resource and It’s so empowering for parents to know. There’s lots of ways for parents to understand how they can better support this paradigm shift as well. Are you guys doing a lot of speaking to school communities? Because what I would love is if we could do a check-in halfway through the year. I’m so curious to hear how this lands and to learn more about the conversations you’re having with communities.

Amanda Morin:

We are, we are, and it’s exciting and exciting. doing, we both speak with schools, we both speak with educator communities. Sometimes we do it together, sometimes we do it separately, which really sort of multiplies the impact, which is really exciting to be able to do. And we’re really hoping to see significant change as we continue to have these conversations. 

Emily Kircher-Morris:

Yeah, the other thing actually that we have is we actually are co-facilitators of a community called the Educator Hub. And so for those people who are educators who really are interested in putting this into practice, not only are there live events that we host that you can join in on, or Amanda and I both have office hours as part of it, but we also do these expert webinars. And we actually have these little five-minute PD videos that you can push out to your whole entire staff just about little concepts. What is masking? What is demand avoidance? And just kind of like this little drip where it’s not too overwhelming to give people little pieces of this information. so people can check that out as well if they’re interested.

Debbie:

That’s fantastic. So exciting. So listeners, I will have links to the resources that we talked about to the educator hub, to the PDF, to the book, of course, and to where you can connect with Emily and Amanda, their website, podcasts. There’s a lot of ways to connect. And I’m just so excited. So I just want to say thank you, first of all, for writing the book that we all need, that our community needs and deserves. And thank you for everything you shared today. It was so fun to get to talk through this with you.

Emily Kircher-Morris:

Thank you, Debbie.

Amanda Morin:

Yeah, thank you.