Institutions are increasing their focus on creating inclusive environments. In this episode, Megan Kohler joins us to discuss a course design framework she developed to support neurodiverse learners. Megan is an Assistant Teaching Professor and Learning Designer in the John A. Dutton e-Education Institute at Penn State. She is the recipient of the Marion G. Mitchell Award for Innovative Teaching and is conducting research, funded by the Schreyer Institute Scholarship, on supporting neurodivergent learners in higher education. Megan is one of the co-editors of The Multi-Disciplinary Instructional Designer: Integrating Specialized Skills into Design Toolkits.
Show Notes
- Gamrat, C., & Kohler, M. (Eds.). (2023). The multi-disciplinary instructional designer: Integrating specialized skills into design toolkits. Taylor & Francis.
- TILT Higher Ed
- The UDL Guidelines – CAST
Transcript
Rebecca: Institutions are increasing their focus on creating inclusive environments. In this episode, we discuss a course design framework to support neurodiverse learners.
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John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.
Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…
John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…
Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.
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Rebecca: Our guest today is Megan Kohler. Megan is an Assistant Teaching Professor and Learning Designer in the John A. Dutton e-Education Institute at Penn State. She is the recipient of the Marion G. Mitchell Award for Innovative Teaching and is conducting research, funded by the Schreyer Institute Scholarship, on supporting neurodivergent learners in higher education. Megan is one of the co-editors of The Multi-Disciplinary Instructional Designer: Integrating Specialized Skills into Design Toolkits. Welcome back, Megan.
Megan: Hi. Thank you so much for having me here today. It’s great to be talking with both of you again.
John: We’re very glad to have you back again. It’s been a while.
Megan: It has.
John: Today’s teas are:… Megan, are you drinking any tea?
Megan: Oh, I’m always drinking tea. [LAUGHTER] I have a lovely new tea, and if you’re willing to indulge me in a short story, I’d love to share that with you. So the tea that I’m drinking today is called Paris, and it’s by Harney and Sons. And I discovered this tea completely by accident. It was Mother’s Day, and my husband decided to take me to this lovely little creperie. It’s like 45 minutes away, and I only drink tea, not a coffee drinker. And we get there, and they don’t have my tea, and so he grabbed this one, [LAUGHTER] and I tried it, and absolutely fell in love, and this one has become my go-to tea. So I highly encourage you all to try it. because it’s absolutely delicious.
Rebecca: Such a great story! I had a tea emergency that John solved for me today, so I’m drinking a decaf Irish breakfast tea.
Megan: Oh, I love Irish breakfast! It’s so good. It’s got a lot of great flavor to it.
Rebecca: Yeah, nice and bold, nice and bold.
John: And we’re in the midst of getting this cloud of smoke from Canada from the fires that are burning there. In honor of that, I have some lapsang souchong tea, which is a smoked tea. So it just adds to the ambiance of the day here.
Rebecca: So it’s smoky inside and out. [LAUGHTER]
John: Equally.
Rebecca: So we’ve invited you here today, Megan, to discuss your framework for supporting neurodiverse learners. First, though, can you tell us how to define neurodiversity?
Megan: That’s a great question, and it’s also somewhat of a difficult question, and I’ll explain why. So first and foremost, I try to keep things very simple. I think the more simplistic we can keep things, the more approachable they become for people, and that’s something that I really want to keep in mind in doing this work. The more approachable something is, the easier it is for people to buy into it or to understand it. And so I think of neurodiversity as largely just differences in the way that our brains function, most often because of some form of condition such as autism or ADHD. Those are the two most common ones that people think of, but it goes so far beyond that. It also includes things like post-traumatic stress disorder, and a lot of people typically think of like military veterans who have had some type of traumatic experience. But it’s more than that too. You can have trauma from a wide variety of things in your life. So there’s cancer survivors who you talk about their experiences having PTSD from cancer treatments that they’ve undergone. It also includes other conditions such as dyslexia. Dyslexia is actually the most commonly diagnosed condition over autism and ADHD, but yet, autism and ADHD are the ones that people typically go to. And so, the reason why I think it’s a little challenging to come up with or to have a definition of neurodiversity is because there are so many different perspectives that end up tying into this. So we have the medicalized version of neurodiversity and what that means, and then we have the social movement and what that means, and then in between those two sort of opposite ends, we have the lived experience that fits between those, and that lived experience is something that people hold very dear and very close to them, and that can impact the way that they see and understand and perceive certain things about neurodiversity and the many conditions associated with it, so it’s not as simple and as straightforward as it seems.
John: So there’s quite a bit of diversity in terms of neurodiversity, which makes some sense, I think. So how did you first become interested in focusing on support for neurodiverse students?
Megan: It was about eight years ago. My daughter was first diagnosed, and it’s a very long story and heart wrenching for me. I’ll try to summarize it briefly, but essentially we had had her in a daycare. We had her in a Montessori school, and that was after having her in a different daycare, and they kept telling us your daughter’s really, really smart. And we were like, “Oh well, thank you.” And they’re like, “No, no, no, no, she’s really smart.” And it was actually their encouragement that we sought out a more academically focused program, such as Montessori, and that was kind of always in the plan to begin with because my husband and I both work at Penn State University and education is something we’re very passionate about. So we had had her in this Montessori school, and we went there for an open house, and they started telling us all of these wonderful things about her, and they had her demonstrating all of these things that she could do for us. And then the teacher at the end of the night said, “I would really love if you’d come back in and we could have a more detailed conversation about your daughter.” And so I got really excited. I was like, “They’ve just told me how brilliant she is and showed me all these wonderful things that she can do.” And so I went in for the conversation, and as it went on, they just started sharing more and more of these things, and they were like, “We notice that your daughter isn’t engaging in cooperative play, and that’s something that we typically see at this age and stage of development.” And so they just started talking about all of these different things that they had observed with her, and then towards the end of that conversation, they were like, “We think that she might have autism, and we think that you should get her evaluated to see if this is the case.” And so it turns out that she doesn’t have autism; she has ADHD. But it was through that very long journey of trying to get her diagnosed, and then eventually getting the diagnosis that, as a mother, you want to do everything you can to try and support your children, and so I dove into the research and started to recognize two things: one, that I also had undiagnosed ADHD my entire life, and the light bulb went off, and I was like, “Oh my gosh, this explains so much,” and that’s very common in terms of how people are starting to recognize their neurodivergence, but then also something else that occurred to me at that point in time was that there’s a lot of support in K through 12, but then once students were going to college, that support largely dropped away. Now again, this was eight years ago, and we’ve seen some tremendous changes occurring in higher education, especially around the amount of support that’s being offered, but there’s still so much work that needs to be done, and that’s actually one of the reasons why I designed the framework that we’re going to be talking a little bit about today, is because everything I saw was very fragmented, and there was no comprehensive, clear pathway that spoke not just to how do we support our learners from a learning perspective, but how do we also address some of these more personal belonging needs?
Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about why the framework needed to be created? In other words, why don’t traditional methods work for neurodiverse students? What challenges do neurodiverse learners face?
Megan: So, first of all, I think that there are actually a lot of strategies that do work. It’s just when you’re looking at the ocean that is learning, how do you whittle it down to find the strategies that are most supportive of neurodiversity, and that’s essentially what I’ve tried to do for educators, is to dive into that research and to figure out, okay, well, what are their needs? Where do we start? How do we even go about this process? And that was largely driven by my daughter because I wanted to make sure that once she gets to college, she’s been supported too. So to sort of cycle back to your question, there’s a lot of strategies that do work. Challenges that neurodiverse learners face in the more typical or more traditional classroom consist of a number of different things. First and foremost, there is a lack of understanding and awareness about what neurodiversity actually is, and there’s a lot of stereotyping, and we need to be very careful with that. And we’re also starting to see, because it has become more prominent, there’s a lot of labeling that is going on. I’ve heard people in my different social circles, and they will be like, “Oh, you know that person? Oh, they are so on the spectrum,” and that’s exactly the type of conversations or statements that we want to avoid making. You don’t ever want to do that to somebody, and you don’t know what their circumstance is. You don’t know whether or not they have a diagnosis, or they could simply be a person who is just a little quirky. That doesn’t mean that they are neurodivergent, so we need to be really, really careful about saying things like that and putting labels where labels might not apply. But some of those challenges, I think the most prominent one from my perspective is really sort of a social component. It’s really making sure that our diverse learners a re supported and made to feel like they belong. Belonging is such a huge piece of the experience that we’re offering nowadays, and it’s really interesting because educators and institutions as a whole are starting to recognize how much the belonging piece impacts whether or not a student chooses to stay at an institution, and not only that, there’s a lot of other research that shows us that when we start to engage students in things like social emotional learning, they’re building those skills socially, but they’re also ending up developing and reinforcing other skills that are critical to their academic experience.
John: What are some strategies that we can use to create the sense of belonging, so that students do not feel like they have some sort of a deficit?
Megan: Yeah, that’s a great question. [LAUGHTER] This is one of the reasons why I love talking with you both, you both think so deeply about topics. So some strategies that we can think about, and this is tapping into the model a bit, things like co-designing. So when you sit down and you work with a student, or even if you share an assignment, for example, with the entire classroom, allowing those students to come in and give their thoughts and ideas on the assignment, see how it might need to be altered in order to make them feel as though it’s something that’s achievable and attainable, and to revise instructions that maybe don’t make sense to them from their perspective. Allowing that exchange to occur goes a long way to making a person feel as though they are accepted. We can also talk about things like normalizing if somebody does have some type of a learning difference or a disability in which it can be supported. When I give my keynote talk about this, there’s an example that I give about how using transcripts from videos or even creating audio recordings of the lectures, so having the ability for every student to be able to not just read the text but also to download an audio recording. I had a faculty member who did that several years ago, and the students loved it. They just kept writing her all of these notes saying “this was so fantastic, so wonderful. I was able to download this, and I could listen to it at times that worked for me.” And when you do that, you take some of the stigma away from people who need that different format, and now you make it something that is really cool because now it’s just this different format. It’s this different modality. There’s almost like a novelty to it to some degree that I think students really enjoy and appreciate. So those are a few quick examples.
Rebecca: So we started to talk a little bit about the valued minds model that you developed, but we haven’t really dug in yet. [LAUGHTER] So, can we talk a little bit about the system that you’ve developed and the framework and what that looks like?
Megan: Yeah, absolutely. And you probably noticed I’ve been like holding back a little bit [LAUGHTER] because I’m like, this is in the framework. [LAUGHTER] It’s all in there. [LAUGHTER] Absolutely. So the framework really has three core components to it. So the first is learner agency. The second is system design, and this is where we tend to address a lot of our systemic barriers that occur. And then the last piece is belonging. Now within that, there’s several different layers or different components that should be taken into consideration. So within learner agency, the first thing that we need to do when we’re designing for neurodiverse learners is to start with some foundational components, and that is really about integrating strategies that support the executive functioning skills. So there is plenty of research that exists that indicates that if you have a neurodiverse condition or a neurodivergent condition, a lot of times there will be differences in the executive functions. And so, when we design for those, what we’re doing is sort of leveling the playing field. So, if somebody has a known issue with working memory, and we’re bringing in different types of supports to help balance that out, so that there’s not as much cognitive load being expended on their part. Well, now you’re instantaneously putting them in a place where it’s going to be easier for them to engage in the learning process, rather than for them simply trying to decode or to follow along in the way that you had originally intended them to. And then we bring in this accessibility piece after those foundational components. So making sure that if somebody has some type of a difference, and I think that this is really critical for those more applied conditions such as like dyslexia and dyscalculia. So bringing in those accessibility pieces to make sure that there are screen readers that can communicate that information to them or help support them in the exploration of that content. That’s really the next level or layer. And then when we talk about sort of the custom design, that’s a piece that fits in the top. And this is where I see a lot of people approaching it in the inverse, a lot of people try to start with those custom strategies and work sort of at that level. But if you do the foundational components and the accessibility piece first, you’re setting everyone up for a much better success. So then, when we get to that custom piece, this is really about sort of meeting people where they are and taking a look at who they are and what their skills and abilities are, and very specifically what their strengths are, and so one of the things that we need to be really aware of is the fact that a lot of neurodiverse individuals have received a lot of negative comments and a lot of negative feedback throughout their entire lives. In fact, it’s estimated that by the age of 10, a child who has ADHD – and these are metrics just for ADHD – it’s anticipated that that child has received 20,000 more negative messages than their neurotypical counterparts. So that’s something pretty significant. And so then when we think about the language that we use and the way that we engage with those learners, we need to be helping them recognize what their strengths are, and we need to be speaking in a way, whether it’s person-to-person conversation or even through our text. And a great example that I love to use is when we’re designing our rubrics using strength-based language in our rubrics. So, for example, you’ve probably seen the rubrics that use categories that range from excellent to poor. But what happens when you put the label poor on someone’s work? That’s a label that indicates that they’re lesser than, that they’re not as good, and it’s kind of an endpoint when somebody tells you that your work is poor. So we need to be shifting that to using language that’s more along the lines of expert to novice, because if somebody tells you you’re a novice, your work is at the novice level, what does that immediately make you think of? It makes you think of a trajectory or a journey; that this is a starting point, but that you can grow beyond what you’re currently facing. So, strengths-based language is absolutely a critical component of that. So, those are the three layers of learner agency.
Then we talk about system design, and this is where we get into things such as accommodations, training for faculty, things like the hidden curriculum. And I don’t know how many people necessarily think of hidden curriculum as being something that we need to think about when we’re talking about neurodiversity. It tends to be something that we think about a lot with first-year students, but it’s absolutely a component of neurodiversity, and the reason for that is because a lot of it stems from interpersonal relationships. That’s how you become aware of a lot of those components of hidden curriculum is through your interactions and those relationships. So, making sure that we’re addressing that as part of this process as well, and then we also have other things in there too, such as stigmatization, making sure that we are trying to reduce stigmatization of our neurodiverse learners as much as possible. So that’s all part of that system design component. And the challenging piece with that is that some of this that you can do in your classroom, and some of it occurs at the institution level, so there’s a wide range of approaches that can be integrated within that. And then this last piece is belonging, and where we start with that is with the concept of validation. So making sure that we are bringing in inclusive strategies that, as I mentioned before, not just help the students feel a greater sense of belonging, but can also help them develop those executive functioning skills. And the great example of that is social emotional learning. But there’s other things that we can do too in terms of making students feel validated and supported, such as peer-to-peer confirmation. You’re making sure that you’re enabling students to give each other positive feedback and say, “No, you did really great on that work. I really valued what you did here, and the way that you did it was really great.” So integrating strategies such as that, and then we get to recognition, which is the next piece of the framework. And so, recognition and accessibility kind of parallel one another as those foundational elements, the executive functions, and validation parallel one another. And we talk about recognition. We’re talking about that normalization of the different practices. So as I referenced that strategy before about the audio recordings and just normalizing it, making it feel like diversity is a part of everyday life, and it just belongs here, and it should be recognized and it should be valued. And then the last piece of belonging is this sort of modeling, if you will, of acceptance and what that can look like in the classroom. So we talked about co-designing information previously. So that’s a great example, but also making sure that we’re making students feel like your classroom is a place where it’s okay to have those sort of fast-fail experiences. So nothing’s ever a mistake, nothing’s ever a failure if you’re learning from it, if you’re growing from it. So making sure that we are creating dynamics such as that, and if we do that, making sure that we’re also tapping into things like a student’s motivation, helping them integrate things that are really very important to them, and I think if we integrate all of these pieces together, I think we can create our classrooms to be those more inclusive environments for neurodiverse learners. Because we know that some of the more traditional inclusive practices don’t necessarily apply. And one of the things that I always get sort of stuck on a little bit when it comes to inclusive strategies is that one of integrating research papers or using articles published by authors who have the same types of differences, whether it ends up being a disability or if there’s a different type of ethnicity. But how do you do that when the difference is something that’s invisible? So how do you know whether or not the author of a paper has autism or ADHD or dyslexia or dyscalculia or one of the many other conditions? And so that’s why I think a framework like this is something that’s needed because there’s shifts, there’s nuances that we need to address in order to create these dynamics that are neuroinclusive.
John: Now you mentioned that some inclusive practices don’t work as well for all students. Could you elaborate on that just a little bit in terms of some things that people routinely do that may not work as well for students with various forms of neurodiversity? You gave the example of papers as one case, but could you give us some other examples?
Megan: I think where there’s a lot of confusion is actually… this is another framework that I’ve been researching and working on… but one of the things that I have seen occurring is faculty not necessarily understanding what is inclusive support versus classroom management versus learning support and so on. So I was attending a conference not long ago, and there was two very lovely women who were leading this session, and at one point they pulled up this Padlet and they were like, “What strategies do you think are going to be great instructional strategies for the students in your classroom?” And I saw people just contributing things to the board, and they were like, “Yes, all of these are wonderful.” And I just sat there going, “No, that doesn’t align with this. And hmm hmm…” and I saw a lot of that confusion. So the paper example that we gave just a second ago – that’s typically an inclusive strategy, and that was one of the things that was mentioned in this conversation. And I was like sitting there thinking the same thing that I just communicated to you, like, “Okay, but how do we know? [LAUGHTER] How do we know whether or not this person has a neurodiverse condition?” But yet it was listed in one of those strategies. So a lot of times we’re relying on information that we know from other circumstances, and we’re not necessarily creating those subtle shifts that need to occur. And so another great example is classroom management. So I see this a lot. One of the people in this session listed brain breaks as a great strategy, and the learning designer in me sat there going, “Oh, wait a second. Are we talking about breaks for the sake of taking breaks?” Because we know that there’s no research to back that up, and if we’re talking about breaks for the purposes of taking time to reflect on information, then yes, that does work. But what they were talking about were brain breaks in terms of getting up and moving around the room if you felt like you couldn’t focus on the information that was being shared at that moment, and apart from the fact that there’s research that says that that’s not actually how our brains work, and that’s not the best way to help us develop the ability to stay focused on information for a long time, that also tends to align more so with the classroom management side of things rather than the instruction side of things, so there’s a lot of misunderstandings and a lot of confusion around what strategies actually align with what sort of categories of support, if that makes sense. So yeah, it can be very confusing unless you spend a lot of time researching this, and I think one of the things that made me very concerned at the end of the session was that the two women who were leading this were like, “And we’re going to be writing a book chapter about this,” and so [LAUGHTER] that goes back to kind of the concept of right now neurodiversity is kind of the wild west. There’s a lot of really good advice being put out there, and there’s a lot of advice that we need to evaluate a little bit more deeply. But it’s being put out there and could actually be harmful in some ways, and so we need to have more conversations, deeper conversations around that.
John: And that’s where that co-creation that you talked about before can help to address the needs of the specific students in the room.
Rebecca: Well, one thing that I’m observing or thinking about as you’re introducing the framework is that it has components from a lot of other existing frameworks, and you kind of hinted at this a little bit. Things from universal design for learning, TILT – transparency in learning and teaching, just good learning practices to make sure we stay motivated around agency and things like that that are certainly in UDL or Universal Design for Learning, accessibility practices, relationship-rich practices, but it’s not inclusive of everything in those frameworks. Can you talk a little bit about the process you use to pull what would be most important for neurodiverse students from those existing frameworks, you kind of integrated them all together and put them in one place. Can you just talk a little bit about the process of doing that?
Megan: Yeah, it was a lot of research, [LAUGHTER] a lot of research and reflection and evaluating this. I think the thing is, is that there’s so much amazing work that has already been done around the process of learning. We have all this great research about the brain and how the brain functions and what it needs in terms of learning and how we can best support the learning process for our students, and it was really just about diving in and just trying to understand what the unique needs are for neurodiverse learners, and then pulling the pieces that best supported those needs, and the reality is, there’s no one size fits all. There never is, and so I don’t see this as something that should ever be thought of as trying to replace UDL or trying to replace TILT . That’s not what anything we do in education is ever about. It’s a tool next to several other tools that, when it makes sense for you to pull this in, pull it in. Maybe there’s a faculty member who is tied very strongly to UDL, and they know their students very well, and they know that UDL principles are going to work for them. Then they should use UDL. This is a tool in the toolbox of support, and at the end of the day, there is never one perfect solution for everything, for every learner, for every need. But that’s hopefully one of the things that I would really love for people that when they look at this framework, they see that there is space for those unique needs, and I think that that’s something that maybe is a little more challenging to find in some other models. But when I talk about that custom piece, one of the things that having undiagnosed ADHD my entire life, there were so many times when I felt like I wasn’t measuring up and I wasn’t good enough. And in some circumstances, I had people who were very supportive, and they would say, “Megan, you can do this. You can do this. Just let’s figure this out. I’m going to help you, however you need help, and we’re going to figure it out.” But that was not always the case. I had a lot of other people who saw my differences as shortcomings, and they took that as an opportunity to berate me and to tear me down, and it’s those unique instances where you have somebody that steps forward and says, “I see something amazing in you, and I want to help bring that out. I want to help you shine, because I know that you’re capable of this.” That’s that custom piece of my framework. That is where I think we have the biggest ability to really make students recognize their own strengths, not just as students, but as individuals with something incredible to contribute to the world, we need to be shifting this paradigm from a deficit-based mindset of difference as lesser to a place of different is unique with incredible opportunity behind it. That is the goal of this framework. Sorry, I feel like that was very deep, but you want to know why I do this work. That’s why.
Rebecca: It sounds like the custom layer that you’re talking about is really important for what can really sometimes be competing needs, like very different kinds of needs that, in some ways, like on the surface, can look like they’re directly in competition for one student versus another because this student needs X and this student needs Y. But if you had provided the opposite to the other, [LAUGHTER] it wouldn’t help.
Megan: Absolutely, and I’m so glad that you mentioned that because that’s one of the other things that I’ve noticed. So when I talked earlier about the fragmentation that’s occurring around neurodiversity, that’s a large part of it. So you have people saying these are the 10 strategies that work for individuals with autism, and these are the 15 strategies that work for people with ADHD, and then a large part of the other neurodiverse conditions are just completely overlooked. And so in creating this framework, I wanted to say that’s not the way that we should be going about things. We need to be looking at the common threads across all of these conditions, and that ends up largely being the executive functions, which is why that’s the starting point. But then, how do we look for those common threads, those common building blocks across these different conditions, while at the same time allowing there to be this degree of flexibility, so that we can meet students where they are. A great example of those differences that you just mentioned… So my daughter has ADHD. I have ADHD. We have completely different needs, and yet we share the same genetics. [LAUGHTER] And yet our two conditions are very, very different. She’s brilliant. She is absolutely brilliant. She’s in the gifted program at school, and she’s working at grade levels that are two grade levels higher than where she’s currently enrolled. She’s looking at going into fifth grade, but last year when she was in fourth, they had her working on math problems and reading books that were at the sixth grade reading level and the sixth grade math level. I run away from math. [LAUGHTER] I run away from math as far as I can possibly get, because I just don’t have the working memory to be able to hold the numbers in the right places. But yet she does it, and she does it in her brain. And it’s so fun because my husband’s an engineer, and we’ll be driving in the car, and he’ll just randomly shout out a math problem, and they’ll see who can answer it first. And both of my children already have the answer, and I’m like sitting there with my calculator [LAUGHTER] like hidden down beside me because my brain’s just not structured that way, but hers is. So even when you have a specific condition like ADHD, not all of those strategies are going to work for all of your students with ADHD, so it’s just so complex. It’s so complex, which is why we need to have that flexibility.
Rebecca: I just want answers, Megan. [LAUGHTER]
John: But the answers are different for each student.
Megan: [LAUGHTER] They are. They absolutely are.
Rebecca: It’s really like the underlying subtext always is like “Ah, why is this so complicated?” [LAUGHTER]
Megan: Because humans are complicated. That’s the bottom line: is that we are all unique, and within that uniqueness, there is a beauty, but there’s also complexity, and it gets really hard when you’re trying to be an educator who’s working towards addressing all of that complexity. I don’t know that we give our educators enough credit for how challenging it is to take a single message and ensure that 30, 60, 120, 200, 350 people in the same room all get an accurate understanding of what that message is or what that concept is.
Rebecca: You’re kind of asking for miracles. [LAUGHTER]
Megan: Yeah, it is like asking for a miracle. But that’s also where we, as human beings, that’s where our neuroplasticity or our cognitive functions really come into play because we can have that flexibility of thinking. We can learn new ways of communicating, and once you learn how a specific faculty member communicates things or what their expectations are, you, as a learner, you can be quite successful, but the learning curve to that is not going to be the same for everybody. And so, the more that we can do to address some of those differences, we’re only going to make that process easier on everybody. So, the days of I’m just going to sit down, and I’m gonna create my course and write this lecture, that’s not sustainable, not for the way that we need to be thinking about our students. And a lot of these conditions, the diagnoses are increasing. When I first started, even just a few years ago, and so much has changed. So much has changed. But even just over the past few years, we’ve seen the diagnosis of autism in the general population go from approximately one in 100 down to one in 89, and now the census currently is that I believe it’s children under the age of eight, it’s one in 63 are diagnosed with autism. So it’s going to continue to change and to flux, and the hope is that we also continue to have the compassion and the desire to want to change and flux with it.
John: And I think an important takeaway from what you’ve said is that when we give students encouragement that can make a really big difference, but when we say anything that discourages students, that can also have an extremely large impact. And we have to be really careful in how we phrase things and how we communicate to students, so that we do focus on their capabilities and their possibilities.
Megan: Absolutely, and I think there’s one important thing to keep in mind with that is that it’s not about walking on eggshells. It’s not about “oh, I can’t say this or I’ll upset somebody.” It’s about learning to think about how we communicate differently. It’s learning to think about taking our words from a place where they communicate as though somebody isn’t measuring up, to a place where we are highlighting those strengths and making them see the value in themselves and their future in what they can achieve. And so it’s a subtle shift, but it’s an important one, and one of the reasons why I think it’s so important. I don’t know if either of you have ever heard of rejection-sensitive dysphoria, more commonly known as RSD. It’s a significant condition in which a person really perceives as though the interactions that they have with people, it always has a negative sort of perspective or a negative spin on it. You know, somebody says, “Hey, everybody, we’re going out for coffee,” or “Hey, everybody, we’re going to a party,” and the person sits there and thinks, “Well, of course, they’re inviting everybody else, but they don’t mean to invite me. They must have forgotten that I was here. They didn’t see me or didn’t recognize that I was in the room.” So there’s very much a sense of separation that can occur around that too, and there’s some instances of RSD that are so severe that it actually causes physical pain for the individual. So it really is about shifting our language so that we are raising people up rather than tearing people down, and this is something that I have conversations with my kids all the time. Do you have children?
Rebecca: Yep. [LAUGHTER]
John: Yes.
Rebecca: Earlier, you were describing my car. [LAUGHTER]
Megan: Yeah. So we have these conversations whenever there’s a fight. The kids are in the back. “But he did this to me,” and “but she did that to me,” and it’s “Okay, okay, I hear you. Instead of accusing one another and saying what they did was wrong, how can you change this? How can you rephrase what it is that you’re thinking and feeling in a way right now that communicates what is happening or what you feel is happening, but that you’re not tearing the other person down as a part of that process.” And we do a lot of reflection in our car rides. [LAUGHTER] My kids will say one thing, and I’ll say, “Okay, let’s pause. How could you rephrase that?” [LAUGHTER] Because the rest of the world isn’t going to teach them how to do that. That’s my responsibility as a parent, and so we engage in those conversations a lot to be more aware of the impact of our words on other people.
Rebecca: We talked a little bit earlier about things that we can do in the classroom, but also kind of a more institutional or global approach or systematic approach that needs to happen. And the conversation that we’re having right now makes me think about one of the ways that these things can be modeled is also at like the employee level at an institution, which trickles down also to students. That this kind of a framework can be used in other contexts outside of a classroom setting that enhance the learning environment overall.
Megan: Absolutely, yeah, and I need to do a little bit more research because there are definitely nuances between the classroom versus the work environment. But I think a really quick piece that could be swapped out is take a look at hidden curriculum and replace it with office politics.
Rebecca: It’s all the same. [LAUGHTER]
Megan: To some degree, to some degree.
Rebecca: Yeah, yeah.
Megan: It is. [LAUGHTER] But yeah, and that is the thing that I hope to be able to do with this work is to carry it forward because it’s so interesting when I have these conversations. Practically every single time I’ve had a conversation about this framework, that question has arisen: “Can we use this for the office environment too?” I’m like “Yeah, with some modifications, but yeah, absolutely.” So you have a coworker who continually struggles with deadlines. There’s your executive functioning skills. It can absolutely be applied. I just need to sit down and make some of those modifications and some adjustments with that. So stay tuned. [LAUGHTER] It’s coming. [LAUGHTER]
Rebecca: Seems pretty workable at the moment. [LAUGHTER]
Megan: Thank you, thank you. [LAUGHTER]
John: We always end with the question: What’s next?
Megan: What is next? I’m currently working on a co-edited book with the amazing Adam Davi, who’s a good friend from our days working with the Online Learning Consortium, volunteering with them, and this book is titled Advancing Learning Design in the Age of AI. And what we are hoping to capture within this book is the conversation around now that AI is essentially commonplace and everybody has access to it, and we’re seeing more and more people leverage it for designing their courses, what does that relationship look like as a learning designer? Where do we shift? How do we shift? What do we need to be realigning in terms of our workflows and our responsibilities so that we can leverage AI to better support the work that we do, but also helping understand that AI is not a replacement for a learning designer, and it never will be. And if you know and understand anything about simply writing learning objectives, there’s a great example just within that. So I don’t know if you’ve asked any AI system to write learning objectives for you. They are lacking. [LAUGHTER] They do not follow a very traditional learning objective format, and it can take you quite a bit of back and forth to even get that to a point where AI is getting something even close. So there’s a lot of misunderstandings. People are putting information in or asking ChatGPT to come up with, “Oh, give me a course outline” or “write this assessment for me,” and it does it. But is it what you actually intended? Is it what the students actually need? Is there alignment with your instructional goals? Is there alignment with the overall goals of the course at the programmatic level, like there’s so many things that AI can’t fully understand because it just gives you that response to that one prompt. So there’s a lot that AI can’t do. We still need humans in the process. So what does that look like now? So yes, that’s the thing that’s coming down the pipeline. [LAUGHTER]
Rebecca: Sounds like an exciting adventure.
Megan: I think it will be. [LAUGHTER]
John: Thanks for joining us. It’s always great talking to you, and we’re looking forward to hearing more about these future projects.
Megan: Excellent. Thank you so much.
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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.
Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.
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