April: Celebrating Neurodiversity!

Your language-teaching mission, should you choose to accept it, is to celebrate neurodiversity in your classroom during April (and all year long!).

Image: https://today.uconn.edu/2020/01/engineering-new-learning-environment-neurodiversity/#

DID YOU KNOW? In the 1990s a journalist named Harvey Blume and an autism advocate named Judy Singer wanted to create a new political category so that they could fight for the rights of those whose brains worked differently. They also wanted to celebrate the strengths that many neurodiverse people have. For example, people with ADHD are often creative problem-solvers, and people with dyslexia will often have great visual thinking abilities. Now in the 2020s there is a better understanding that there is no ‘normal’ brain, and that everyone’s brain is unique and works ‘differently’. However, many people with conditions like autism choose to continue using the term ‘neurodiverse’ because, according to an article by Howard Timberlake, “it is a useful and positive way of defining their identity and community.” Now, the United Nations has a World Autism Awareness Day every April 2, and many countries use April as the month to raise awareness and celebrate the contributions of neurodiverse people.

 

How can you celebrate neurodiversity in your ELL or language classroom this April?

  • Talk explicitly about neurodiversity and how it helps us create a tapestry of different minds in our society that can contribute different perspectives. For example, Billie Eilish recently won an Oscar for her song “No Time to Die”. In class, you can mention that Billie is neurodiverse: she has Tourette syndrome, which means that she has involuntary tics, and she is synesthetic, which means her senses, like vision and hearing, can blend together.

  • Share resources with your colleagues on ways to celebrate and support neurodiverse students. Shameless plug: On the Lesson: Impossible site, there are two podcast episodes that you can listen to with Michael Weingarth and Drew Thompson and a blog post (with a PDF you can share, below) about “5 Minute Differentiation Strategies”. That is the tip of the iceberg for podcasts and posts about neurodiversity!

  • Highlight neurodiverse individuals in your classroom while making connections to the content. I have a few activities that I created originally for the Edmonds School District to celebrate neurodiversity within various content areas which you can check out here. For example, I drew connections to Alan Turing for a cryptography math lesson and Dr. Maggie Aderin-Pocock for a science lesson on making a spectroscope.

  • Listen to neurodiverse people about their experiences, and avoid organizations that center anyone other than the neurodiverse person themselves. Beware of resources from organizations like Autism Speaks, which according to the Autistic Self Advocacy Network, “uses damaging and offensive fundraising tactics which rely on fear, stereotypes and devaluing the lives of people on the autism spectrum”. Both Michael and Drew, the two people I’ve interviewed about neurodiversity, identify as neurodiverse, and you can follow Michael on Twitter!

 How do you celebrate neurodiversity in the classroom? Feel free to share in the comments!

5-Minute Differentiation Strategies

Your language-teaching mission, should you choose to accept it, is to make small changes to your language lessons in order to support all of your learners.

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On the Lesson: Impossible podcast this week I’m talking with Drew Thompson about supporting neurodiverse learners. In honor of his sharing his perspective and tips for supporting diverse students, I thought I’d share the strategies that I try to use in my language classroom, most of which can be implemented in less than 5 minutes!

We know that each of our students have strengths and weaknesses that we need to adapt to, but differentiation can seem overwhelming, no matter how long you’ve been teaching. The idea of reaching each individual learner seems like an incredibly time-consuming pursuit: if it takes me X hours to craft a lesson, does not mean I need 30 times that amount to sufficiently plan for my 30 students? However, the good news is that there are a TON of ways that you can make your lessons more accessible, and most of them can take less than 5 minutes to prep. A colleague and I developed this list of small adaptations in 2016, and I taped it on my desk. Before each lesson I’d run my eyes down the below questions and see what I could do to make one or two changes to what I had planned. In my opinion, that’s the key: if you try to change everything at once, you’ll get overwhelmed quickly and it will feel impossible. However, adding one or two tools to your teacher toolbox at a time is doable!

These questions are meant to be for all subject matters, though the examples below are specifically for language teachers. Feel free to share with any colleagues you think might benefit!

RESOURCE DOWNLOAD AS PDF: Quick & Easy Strategies for Differentiation

Examples:

Example of a quick check for understanding: If I have time, or I’m covering a really important concept, I like to use CSI (Color, Symbol, Image) , which is explained in more detail in this post.

Example of a reference guide: It can be as simple as a hand-out with verb conjugations or as complex as a guide on how to be better communicators (see post on the TALK Strategy)

Example of self-differentiated learning targets: In order to practice their use of the future tense, I have a fun, easy “Game of Life” that students can play in small groups. When we play, I’ll put up a slide that outlines my expectations for ALL, for SOME, and for only a FEW students:

Let me know in the comments what strategies you use and if they should be added to list!