Playing to Our Strengths: Neurodiversity & Education | Christy Hutton | TEDxSantaCruz

after doing research in molecular biology for about six years up at UC Santa Cruz and getting reprimanded more than a few times for spending more time trying to instruct undergraduates than I was progressing my thesis research I decided to go ahead and change career paths and teach biology in an edge secondary education setting so in my first year of teaching I had a lot to learn the administrators came up and told me that as many as 35 percent of the students in any of my classes qualified for something they called accommodations and I should be aware of this some of you might have heard this term in relation to an IEP or a 504 plan these are codes the educators use to describe adjustments that we make on behalf of students with learning differences so I filed away my accommodations dutifully and tried to remember to get them out at the appropriate times and I was pretty frustrated to find that no matter how many times I asked the student I could almost never get them to take advantage of these accommodations I suppose unsurprisingly middle and high school students don't really want to be treated differently than their peers so flash forward a couple of years and now I find myself in the position of writing and facilitating these accommodations I'm reading neuropsychological evaluations that are anywhere from two to forty pages in length measuring everything from a student's dexterity to their processing speed it's like getting a student decoded I was actually really sad to see that there were a few students at my school that were scowling scoring in the lowest percentiles in multiple areas but then I got encouraged to see that those very same students also scored in the highest percentiles in other areas it was clear to me after reading these reports that every single student I had had something to offer that I needed to figure out how to support them properly so I started doing some research and asking questions I teach it a six through twelfth grade so many of these students had been working with a team of adults for years prior so I asked their educational therapist what do you do to support this child I asked their parents what do you do to support your child what can i as the school do to support your child and I put together all of their answers and they actually boiled down to a concept that was surprisingly simple you can build my child's faith in himself if you will give him an opportunity to experience a victory and I can capitalize on that and then he'll be able to persevere through the next challenge I've worked with a lot of students who have different kinds of learning differences and there's actually only one thing that gets a negative response out of all of them sadly enough it's the word accommodation when they hear this word it brings to mind something that they know they can't really do as well as most of their peers and so for in those circumstances for that child we lower the bar never mind that we know this student tests in the superior range in multiple learning assessments because we're forced to create two buckets for students the normal or the LD bucket we force the kids in the latter category to internalize a message that there's something wrong with them or they're somehow broken well this was unacceptable to me so I tried to look at this problem from a different angle I've had the opportunity to teach about the benefits of ecological diversity and genetic diversity in a variety of settings and it's pretty widely accepted that there there's no healthy biological system that doesn't have a lot of diversity and variation that that brings it resilience so I tried to apply these rules to cognitive processes the great thing about modern American education is we're moving in the direction of inquiry driven education and away from content standards so what that leaves us with is measuring how a student approach is a problem but it leads me to fear are we ready to agree as a society that there's only one correct way to approach a problem or that the answer that the student arrives at the quickest is the best when you ask the questions this way it actually seems pretty obvious that you wouldn't want that to be the way a classroom works that you would want a teacher to employ a variety of strategies and ways to get people to engage in that problem from a variety of perspectives to fully develop an idea but that's actually not how modern education works we designed instructional methods and assessments back in a time when we didn't have facts at our fingertips and we didn't know all the wonderful things we know now about how cognitive development can vary in my research I also found out that processing speed which is one of the things that gets tested in the neuro psychological evaluations increases with age now if you've ever worked with adolescents or been one you know that we don't all grow at the same rate therefore it would follow that my brain wouldn't speed up at the same rate as another child's either yet we continually subjects children to time limited standardized testing throughout their development now you would be angry at me if I told you the only way for your daughter to get an A in my class as if she can reach the highest shelf in this cabinet because you know my daughter can't control her height so why are we okay with a student being frustrated that they can't finish the SAT this data is not new I found this information in a publication from Washington University as far back as mm yeah the most statistically relevant standardized tests that we use in this country the highest stakes test the SAT is written so that more than 20% of the students who take it can't even finish much less finish thoughtfully when you punish a student for something that they can't control you give them the message that there's no point in trying when they internalize that message we lose them if I could give a neuropsychological evaluation to every kid in the education system imagine the power we could give our teachers and our students to understand how they learn to individualize their education we wouldn't need a bucket for LD or a bucket for normal we could all be part of a diverse spectrum of learners as we are and we would all have access to our personalized learning strategies so I know that probably some of you are have been familiar with it sometimes somebody who's been suffering under the structure of the current system and I don't want us to think that the stakes here are low you might have known somebody in high school maybe everybody knew this girl was super intelligent but for whatever reason she just couldn't achieve academic success I want you to think about what happened to her I want you to think about whether she made it to college is she applying right now is she going to go on to the next step in her education how does she feel about herself we have perfectly intelligent homeless citizens in our midst some of them might be addicted to chemicals that they ingested only to deal with the pain of the repeated experience of failure I'm here to tell you there's no need for us to be okay with letting people experience nothing but failure we can give them an experience of success but we have to have the courage to be able to define success differently we have to be willing to assess our children differently than we were assessed it doesn't work I'm ready to let go of the world where students need to know a catalogue of facts and embrace a form of education where we learn how to engage and solve problems may be simply maybe creatively maybe quickly maybe slowly but that's let's just reward the students who work regardless of the pace I want you to ask yourself do I want to live in a society where the people in positions of power have all come to the conclusion that there's only one way to approach a problem where the people who have the most objectives success all have the least diverse set of skills priorities and values that's not a world I want to live in a system without diversity has no resilience and our children are no different than an ecosystem and without resilience we will continue to fail thank you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 52,305

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, United States, Education, Classroom, Education reform, Inequality, Neuroscience, Teaching

Id: jkTCSseDNms

Length: 10min 16sec (616 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 22 2016