Neurodiversity: The Umbrella
There is little doubt that many aspects of our world are rapidly changing. I see this most notably in many societal areas rejecting binary, either/or thinking to recognize complexities that have long existed. People are rejecting being pigeon-holed into a single identity. And instead, what is developing are spectrums, ranges, and multiple options that help people more accurately describe who they are. We see this happening in education, particularly in the use of "neurodiversity" as a term to describe different elements of special education.
In Moscow, when we were initially developing the Gifted and Talented (GT) program, one of the earliest and best decisions we made was to locate this program under the umbrella of our Special Education Needs (SEN) Department. Now, schools call these departments, services, etc. different names, and I am sure there could be an interesting debate on which names or terms are best. But that's not the focus of this post. Instead, I want to talk about is how we recognize the learning needs of a child and then create a learning plan for that child. SEN teachers have been long been at the forefront of differentiation and personalized learning. In fact, Moscow went further to put Learning Support, English as an Additional Language, Occupational Therapy, and Speech and Language services all under the SEN umbrella with the Gifted and Talented program. In doing so, what we recognized and communicated to the larger community is that we recognized that a one-size-fits-all approach to education does not work and that many students need a differentiated spate of services to achieve their personal best in a variety of areas.
Furthermore, this decision shifted the conversation about what these services actually provide for students. When parents would question how to groom their children to be identified as "gifted," it became much easier to explain how we were meeting the students' current learning needs, not making them into something else. The Neurodiversity Movement, among its many tenets, seeks to shift the conversation from how to "fix" or "cure" students to accepting that all of our brains work differently. What we as educators do is, in part, find different ways of helping students learn about how they learn best. Having the overarching umbrella helped direct conversations to a healthy understanding of who the child is and how they learn. Being identified as "gifted" through our rigorous identification process just meant that the child had learning needs beyond what was provided through a grade-level, age-appropriate curriculum. And just as we did with other students under the SEN umbrella, we created a menu of services that could help students work to their best potential.
What grew out of this process was a widening of what an Individual Education Plan (IEP) was at our school. A neurodiverse body of students had many different plans with different kinds of services with different goals and measurement tools. We were personalizing education, but in a slow, measured way that insured thinking and reflecting on the decisions. We did consider the next big step, which we thought would be Personalized Learning Plans (PLPs), and we recognized that at the time, we just did not have the resources, faculty/staff, etc. to begin such a complex initiative. But as schools continue to develop their thinking towards students as existing on spectrums of learning, hone their IEPs and processes, the more we will move, as a profession, to what many understand to be personalized learning.
What I had hoped would grow out of much of the online and blended learning of this pandemic is a greater acceptance of, and movement towards, less rigid categorization of students by seemingly haphazard qualifications like age. Seeing curriculum standards as a spectrum of learning to happen and recognizing that just because a group of children is of a certain age doesn't mean they are all in the same place on that spectrum. However, it does seem that many schools want to return to "business as usual" and discard what we've seen as a result of online and blended learning. Students could watch class recordings multiple times if they did not get a concept or skill the first time. Some students found asynchronous learning to be freeing from anxiety and empowering. Not all students had the same experience, but it seems we are going to try to force them back into that box in face-to-face learning. However, I am hopeful that we can learn from these trials and move towards a more neurodiverse approach to teaching and learning.
