(bright rock music)
-: Welcome to the "Accessible Learning Experience,"
where we help you turn learning barriers
into learning opportunities.
On this episode, we're joined by three of the authors
of "Inclusive Learning 365:
Edtech Strategies for Every Day of the Year."
They are Mike Marotta, Beth Poss, and Chris Bugaj.
We had also hoped to have Karen Janowski on the podcast,
but we experienced some connectivity issues.
You can find out more about each of the authors
of this book at inclusive365.com.
Now let's listen in as CAST TA specialist Maggie Pickett
has a great conversation with the authors
on topics such as the importance of an inclusive mindset,
how to build an inclusive strategies toolkit,
and their vision for a more inclusive future.
-: I am thrilled to be sitting here today
with the authors of "Inclusive Learning 365:
Edtech Strategies for Every Day of the Year."
So the work that we do is emotional work,
and we wanna know why you do the work that you do,
what makes you wake up in the morning,
what makes you put your shoes on and walk out the door.
Mike, let's start with you.
What's your accessibility story?
Why'd you get started in the field?
-: Thanks, Maggie.
So why did I get started in the field?
It's so interesting to look back.
When I started hearing you asked this question,
it made me start looking out the window
and just kind of thinking about it.
Many moons ago, far too many than I would like to admit,
but it's 30-plus years ago, I actually got into this field,
but by training, I'm an engineer.
And when I started in this field,
I had for many years prior to that,
I had been in and out
of a local center for people with physical disabilities,
mostly because my mom worked there.
And so as a child, I had been there a lot
and I liked that idea of troubleshooting
and helping solve problems.
And moving forward as an engineer, that became
the kind of the cornerstone of my AT journey,
if you will, my assistive tech journey is looking
for solutions to problems.
And it's so interesting to think about where you start
and then where you end up.
And I've had who knows how many titles throughout the year.
They've been rehab engineer, rehab technologist,
assistive technology specialist.
I've moved through kind of all of those I've gone through
and I've kind of settled on this title
that I've given myself because at one point
I was doing a lot of consulting privately and I, you know,
when you buy your own business card,
you get to call yourself whatever you want,
and I became an inclusive technology evangelist.
and I really like the idea of that just kind of the one
who's kind of shouting from the rooftop
about how you can do this, it's possible to do this.
It's not scary and hard, just start.
And I think that flows really nicely with the concept
of our book as we put that together,
this idea of little bits of learning
to make yourself better every day.
And so it's been a long, strange journey,
but it's been pretty great as I've gotten to this point.
-: Beth?
-: I'm sitting here thinking about this
and I feel like my why has changed.
I've been in this field,
in the field of education working with individuals
with disabilities for over 35 years.
And I was trying to pinpoint like the point
where inclusion became
the tipping point for me, right?
That piece that was like, this is where it all is.
And it actually was a parent
who I was fortunate enough to work with
for many, many years, work with her child and work with her.
And she was the most amazing advocate for her child
who had significant physical
and speech and language disabilities.
And this parent insisted in the nicest way possible
that her daughter be fully included,
be fully included in general education,
despite the fact that, you know,
the schools were not really seeing competency there, right?
They weren't seeing this student as being appropriate.
They wanted to put her in the most restricted settings.
And this parent said, "Nope, not happening."
And I feel like I got to go on her journey with her
and see it work and see
it never made her daughter
less physically or speech and language-impacted,
but it made her daughter an important part
of the learning community and an important part
of the community that's evolved.
I think that's where like my passion for inclusion came from
is because a parent pushed me to change my thinking
and brought me on her journey with her.
The push for inclusion came
with the recognition
that technology and assistive technology
could facilitate the inclusion
of this child
in typical classrooms.
And without it, we couldn't do as much, right?
It never made anything perfect.
It wasn't perfect,
but it gave her the means to participate,
to be engaged, to develop friendships.
And so that was a really powerful means
of driving my quest, so to speak,
of being an inclusive
education advocate.
-: Thanks, Beth. Chris?
-: So I think, well, I think,
I guess I would start by saying
that my background is a speech language pathologist.
So is Beth, right?
And my early interest
in accessibility and inclusion
came from the aspect of language
and learning language and how did we learn language.
About three years into my career,
I was asked to be one of the founding members
of the assistive technology team in our district,
and that really broadened the horizons.
I was something who for,
to someone who's experiencing this podcast right now,
if you're an administrator or anyone that is in a role
where you can influence others in a very direct way,
one of the best ways you can empower people
is by not telling them what to do,
but asking them what to do.
I think everyone on our team from years ago,
I guess over 20 years ago now,
when we started our assistive technology team,
we were just told like, "Help.
Figure it out. You guys, you tell us.
You tell us what to do."
And there was this sense of like,
it was a little startup in our school district
to help bring about new ideas about how technology could
at the time provide accommodations for people.
Now I start to wonder if the name
of this podcast shouldn't be, or maybe this segment,
"The Evolution of Accessibility,"
because that's how I thought of technology at first
was, like, someone is having trouble do something,
give them technology to help them do that thing, right?
But now how I think of myself
as an inclusive design facilitator,
which means I help educators look at that technology
and design ways to make it as an option for everybody.
And that I think is the same evolution
our whole team has gone on,
is that move away from assistive technology,
meaning this thing we provide to an individual
to help them accomplish
to inclusive design.
How do we design so that everybody has options
to use this thing, right?
And I certainly have seen,
I think we would all agree maybe
that many companies that provide technology
have sort of seen that move too, right?
Where they start to provide more options within their suite
of tools built around people with disabilities,
but then that we all tend to use, right?
I mean, the latest thing like that
that comes to mind is like dark mode, you know?
Every tool now has dark mode.
Well, that's just high contrast that people
who have visual impairments have been using for a long time.
But maybe that's now just the default setting
for a lot of things.
And if you don't have that,
maybe that's just an example of something
that you would add to your technology.
So that's how I think of it now.
That's like it's how I got started to where I am now.
One of the reasons we are such advocates for inclusion
is because there isn't this real divide
of general ed and special ed.
That's a human-made construct.
So there might be kids that would qualify
for special education and therefore they have the right
to have accommodations, right?
But there might be a whole other set of kids
that for whatever reason,
did not cross the magical line of being eligible
for special education
who also needs those same technologies.
And that's why we shift, sort of like
the learner that Beth is talking about.
That's how we can shift to be thinking, well,
if we provide options to everybody, we catch anybody,
whether you're in special ed or general ed or just ed.
-: Wow, those are all such powerful stories.
And I'm sure all of those stories have fed into this time
and space where you are today, authors of this book.
So when you all sat down to write this book,
what was your goal?
-: Really, we sat down,
we're thinking about this, you know,
in all of our work together,
we're forever working to encourage people
to look to inclusivity, to look to accessibility
and finding ways to in a sense demystify that.
Sometimes I feel like educators
struggle at times to kind of almost wrap their brains
around what this means
to be more accessible in your instruction,
to be more inclusive in your instruction,
and it feels almost unattainable at times.
And so when we thought about the book,
we thought about this idea of, well,
how can we make this feel simpler?
How can we make this bite size?
How can we make this something that is not asking you
to learn a bunch at once,
but instead spreads the learning
across a longer period of time?
And in fact, that's the whole idea
of behind "Inclusive Learning 365."
It's a little bit of learning every day of the year
in order to be better and more inclusive
with the instruction that you provide.
-: I love that. That's so powerful.
Thinking about those little nuggets, if you will,
and demystifying this, what can be a huge massive concept
for folks to kind of take on.
But at the beginning of the book, Beth,
there's a section that says in capital letters,
"Read this first!" exclamation point.
"Do not skip this part."
Based on this messaging, I mean the concepts laid out here
in this part of the book are really important.
There are a variety of concepts,
but the ones presented on creating inclusive mindset
and culture in a school,
why are these things so important?
-: So we are really passionate about the idea
of an inclusive mindset that without that,
everything else can just sort of fall to the wayside, right?
If you don't really believe in the power of inclusion,
and one of the things we often ask when we do trainings
is what is inclusion and what is it not?
And we get all sorts of different answers.
A lot of times our response is
that inclusion
is the fight against exclusion, right?
And understanding that if we are not thinking that way,
talking the talk, walking the walk,
we're not going to move the needle.
What we often find, however,
is with a lot of the people that we talk about
and probably the people that are picking up the book,
is that they are already well on their way
to having a very inclusive mindset,
and the book for them is gonna be about strategies,
how to further it.
But what we almost always see
is that when we ask people
to rate their mindset and then their school
or their district's mindset, there's a disparity.
Their mindset is inclusive
and they rate their district's mindset
or their school's mindset as less inclusive.
And so it really becomes about changing that school culture
and being the bearer,
if you will, of inclusivity into that school culture
and making it a part of school culture.
And so yeah, we want everybody to read that part first.
Don't just dive into the strategies.
They're great and they're wonderful,
but without that sort of background piece,
it might not be as powerful for you to be a change agent
with the larger school community that you're in.
-: Creating change agents.
Really, really powerful.
So we had the opportunity earlier this winter
to kind of do a explore learning series.
During that series, and in the book,
you discussed using action words to plan
or design learning opportunities for kids.
Chris, can you tell us a little bit more about that?
-: Sure, Maggie.
Well, the name of the book is "Inclusive Learning."
It's 365 Strategies, right?
Strategies was right in the title.
And we had to really think what does that mean?
Even before writing the book,
we had done many presentations together
or had chatted together and we used all sorts
of different words like functions and features.
I mean, this podcast is about accessibility.
And when you say the word accessibility
and you think about the tools
that help you provide accessibility,
you think of the word tool
and you think of the word feature
and you think of the word function of the technology.
So what does that all mean?
And what we came to as authors together
was strategies start with verbs.
It's not about the tool necessarily,
but what you can do with the tool.
So when we think about the strategy,
we think it starts with an action word.
It's something you do.
So you are enlarging text, right?
That's an action word.
You are listening to text,
you are decreasing the number of hits it takes
to get to content.
Whatever the action is that's really at the heart
of what we want educators to do.
The change that they can make is change the actions
around what they're planning for the learners
that they are developing their experiences for.
-: Oh, that's great.
So again, it's almost demystifying,
almost taking away the wonder
of how do we make this accessible
to actually putting it in action.
-: Well, and Maggie, can I just say one other thing too?
There is one verb that we intentionally tried not to use.
So it was sort of a rule for ourselves,
but a little r not a big R for the rule.
And that is, we tried not to use the word using.
Using QR codes to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
That is just a sort of,
it wasn't getting to the real action,
that's just using a tool, right?
It's like what can the tool really do for you
to help provide more options
for the learners that we're designing, for.
-: Really getting some clarity in the those action words.
Awesome. So we've got the book, right?
But building new skills as an educator,
it's something that takes intentionality and time,
which is in high demand, right?
How can we as coaches,
as trainers, as leaders,
help educators and support them
to build their inclusive strategy toolkit, if you will?
-: Maggie, I love this question.
I love everything about this question because I think,
isn't that always
a quick answer that people give us?
"Well, I don't have time to do that.
I don't have time to do that.
I have so much I need to do and so little time."
And that's true.
I mean, I'm sure we could all spend the rest
of our time right now talking
about all the things we have to do today,
but I really love that word intentionality
and thinking about how someone approaches this.
What I always feel like is so powerful
about our idea of leading with strategy
is that there could be opportunities
as people leaf through the book
to find things they're already doing,
but never quite tagged it as an inclusive strategy.
And I think that's a really great moment for people too,
to recognize, "Hey, I am doing some things."
Everybody needs a little positive reinforcement sometimes.
Like, "Oh, I'm doing these things already, this is great,
but how can I go a little further with that?"
One of the other things
that I feel was really helpful in the book
as we were throwing it together was thinking
about the indexes that we put in the back of the book.
And one of the indexes,
even though the book is strategy first, tool second,
there is this approach to it
if you go to the back of the book,
there is an index that lists tools
and what pages they show up on for different strategies.
And I feel like that's a really powerful on-ramp
for some people too,
because they may have just enough time in their day
to use Google Docs better than they are now.
How could I use Google Docs to be more inclusive?
I don't have time to learn a brand new thing,
but I have time to use something I already know
more inclusively or to be accessible
with the instruction I put together
using a tool I'm already familiar with.
And I think that is a really great way
to build someone's toolkit.
And really we might, and in some cases even be building
what we might be doing.
It's kind of just fleshing it out a little bit more.
These are tools I already have.
Now I have these creative inclusive ways to use them
to meet more of the needs of the learners in my environment.
-: I was just gonna add one more thing to what Mike said,
like that was so powerful about the way that you can build
your toolkit with just like one more thing
that you're gonna add on,
but also the idea that because of the way
the book is organized and being cognizant
of the lack of time that educators have these days
is that it's that that ability to just find one piece
in there and if you would low hanging fruit, right?
Like, you don't have to reach all the way up
to the top highest branch.
You can find something really practical
that you can do with what you have tomorrow.
And that's how we can empower educators
to build that toolkit without feeling this sense
of overwhelming like, I agree with all of this,
but I just can't do it.
-: This is so powerful.
It's giving people actionable real world,
like, I can do this right now opportunities
to really kind of build those skills.
It's not this pie-in-the-sky stuff
that sometimes our educators get confronted with.
It's really actionable, which is what we need.
But let's do pie-in-the-sky for just a minute.
So if we were to think 10 years down the road
and each one of you could paint your pie-in-the-sky picture
of what education looks like
when you walk into any classroom,
what would you see in these classrooms
if it were your pie-in-the-sky kind of moment?
What do you wanna see happening in classrooms for kids?
And let's do a round robin.
Who wants to start us off.
-: When I think about this question, Maggie,
my first comment is this is is slightly off-center
and maybe a little bit of a wise guy,
but why does that learning in 10 years
have to be defined by the classroom it's in?
And so maybe that would be my pie-in-the-sky
is that we're learning all the time.
I think one of the interesting aspects
of learning during the pandemic was seeing how the shift
in the learning environment
was a good positive move for some learners
and then it was a struggle for others.
And so we saw these interesting things.
I know that there's there's a young man
that I work in his district around here.
I used to work in the district,
I don't work there this year, but I did before,
And I remember his mom saying to me,
"I wish he could be at home learning all the time for school
because he's moving around throughout the day."
He's walking around their house
with a Chromebook in front of him,
actively participating in every class,
but doing it in a manner that works for him.
That learning had been modified to work for him.
And so I guess my big word
that I would say would be flexibility, just an increase
and always looking for the next way
we could be more flexible in thinking
about what does our learning environment
look like for learners.
-: I really, instead of like what I'm gonna see,
it's what if I was, like, listening, right?
If I was listening to the way that adults
in a school building were talking,
I wanna hear them instead of using words like those kids
or your kids, I wanna to hear my kids and our kids
so that when there are students
with an IEP,
it doesn't belong to somebody else,
it belongs to that general education classroom teacher.
That inclusiveness,
the language that we use is so, so important.
So I wanna hear that language change.
-: All right Maggie, well I guess I'll wrap it up for us
with tying the pie-in-the-sky to a practical strategy.
So if you really wanna know
what the authors think the vision might be like for,
gosh, I hope it's not 10 years away.
I hope it's five years away or less.
We actually wrote 366 strategies.
There's a 366th strategy in the book
that sort of outlines the vision of where we'd like to go,
what we'd like to see.
And some of the things that we include there
are, like, a significant decrease in standardized tests.
Mike brought up the pandemic, right?
It's one of the first things we cut during the pandemic
was like, yep, don't need those and who missed them, right?
But now they're back.
So something like that is a great example.
Thinking about reshifting from grade levels
and grade level content just to making it
more learner-centered and learner-focused.
So those are some ideas of what's in the,
I don't wanna spoil it all.
Go look at what we wrote really wrote as strategy 366,
but in it's a practical way to get there,
marrying that pie-in-the-sky to how to get there.
One way we advocate for doing that
is to look at your learning environment.
Mike said, "Why classroom?
Why not learning spaces or learning environment?"
And how can we take that physical space
or a virtual space and make it more flexible.
If we can take that space and make it more flexible,
the next question educators ask is, "Well,
what else can I make more flexible?
Like, that seemed to really work to support the learners."
So if you think about a physical space,
do we have different heights in seating?
Are kids invited to sit on the floor or stand if they want?
Are there different types of lighting that's available?
Not everyone has the buzz or the drone
of the fluorescent lights above.
Is there different spaces that they can work
so they could work individually or in pairs
or small groups or in full groups.
And can your environment shift to embrace those different,
different groups of learning from individual
to small to whole?
And those sorts of ideas of looking
at your physical space starting there.
And that, there is an actual roadmap for how to do that.
If most places listening right now to this podcast
or reading the transcript
were to look at the special education classrooms,
the segregated classrooms that still exist and go,
"Wow, look at those classrooms.
The autism programs, they actually have soft lighting.
They have multiples flexible seating.
They have different places that you can shift
to go from individual cubby work
to small group work to whole group work."
They can be a template
for how we could design the learning spaces beyond, right?
And then once you do that,
you could say the shift happens to say, "Hmm,
what if we put learners with disabilities
at the center of our design?"
Let's design for them and then everyone else
comes along with that
'cause it's just gonna benefit everybody else
as opposed to how it probably works now,
which is, oh, we designed some sort of thing
and then we adapt it for kids
that that doesn't work for, right?
In 10 years, what if we designed,
if we thought our educational experiences started
with people with disabilities and then we moved from there.
-: I think I hit my like button 20 times
while you all were talking.
Such powerful messages and, you know,
taking it from pie-in-the-sky into really actionable stuff.
Thank you, and I flipped to my book
and I looked at the 366th strategy.
Yes, yes.
I wanna start my list right now. Make a stop doing list.
Well, let's wrap things up and we really wanna make sure
that anybody listening to the podcast or Chris, as you said,
reading the transcript could get a hold of you all
or know where to find you on social media and whatnot.
So can you share with us
where folks can find you and follow you?
-: Sure, so our website
is inclusive365,
so the number 365.com.
And you can find pretty much all of our information
about us as individuals on there.
You can follow us as a book
on Twitter @inclusive365 also.
And on Instagram @inclusive365book.
We have a Facebook page Inclusive 365 Book as well.
And then all of us are of course on Twitter
and Instagram and social media as individuals as well.
But starting off with those,
the book sites are probably a really good place
that you can get in touch with any one of us
that you wanted to touch base with us.
-: Wonderful. Thanks, Beth.
And the learning series that we all got to work with you on
is available on sites.cast.org.
For anybody who's interested,
that webinar series is up live on the website.
So go check it out, it's a lot of fun to watch.
And it's a three-part series.
Thank you all for joining us today.
It was a lot of fun having this conversation.
We appreciate your time.
-: Thanks for tuning in to this episode
of the "Accessible Learning Experience,"
brought to you by the National Center
on Accessible Educational Materials at CAST.
You can find us on the web at aem.cast.org.
There you'll find show notes we link
to all of the resources mentioned on each episode.
Thanks again for listening and remember,
accessibility is everyone's responsibility.
(bright rock music)
The contents of this podcast were developed
under a cooperative agreement
with the US Department of Education.
However, those contents do not necessarily represent
the policy of the US Department of Education,
and you should not assume endorsement
by the federal government.