TRANSCRIPT Transition Tips with Dr. Mary Morningstar March 2017 Mary Schuh: Welcome to SWIFT Unscripted. These SWIFT podcasts will give you, the listener, the opportunity to hear the inside story and be part of this conversation about “All Means All” with leaders in the field of inclusive education and schoolwide transformation. We’re talking with Mary Morningstar. Welcome, Mary. Mary Morningstar: Thank you. Thank you for inviting me. Schuh: Of course. Morningstar: Thrilled to be here. Schuh: Yes. Mary is an associate professor at the University of Kansas and she’s the Director of the Transition Coalition. Is that right, Transition Coalition? We’re talking with you today about your vision for “All Means All” and how that translates into the high school setting and get a little bit of your own history. Morningstar: Well, great, great. I’m happy to talk a little bit about it. First of all, starting with my current history and maybe I can work my way back over the course of this conversation. The Transition Coalition is an online professional development website. The focus is primarily on special educators—secondary educators—but there’s resources and materials and online learning modules. There’s a range of tools and applications that we share with the wider community, what we would call “Transition Stakeholders.” Schuh: So do you—I’m sorry to interrupt, but I’ll probably do that… Morningstar: Okay, that’s fine. Schuh: …during this conversation. Feel free to shamelessly plug whatever it is that you’re involved with. Morningstar: I just did. I just did.

Schuh: Good. So there’s a website, transitioncoalition… Morningstar: .org. Schuh: All right. Transitioncoalition.org. Now do you have to be a student at the University of Kansas in order to access the modules? Or can anyone, anywhere… Morningstar: Anyone. Anywhere. It’s been 15 years in development. It was primarily federal funding, so the Office of Special Education Programs has been a prominent supporter of the Transition Coalition. Almost everything that’s on the website is completely open access, so any practitioner, family member, teacher can go on and access the tools and resources. We try to design tools, online tools, engagement tools that folks in the field ask us for. Schuh: Excellent. Morningstar: It includes university folks, so we have what we call a “PD Hub,” so we have a lot of university faculty… Schuh: And “PD” stands for? Morningstar: Professional Development. Schuh: Great. Morningstar: So it’s the “PD Hub.” It can be used by state agencies or by university faculty who might want to include one of our online learning modules as a part of either professional development or as part of course work. It’s an application so that the teacher or the trainer can access whether individuals have completed their module before they hold a face-to-face. It’s a way for the professional development providers to keep up with their class or the folks that they’re interested in following up with after learning something online. Schuh: These modules, I’m assuming, promote sort of state of the art, innovative practices in supporting students at the high school level? Morningstar: Mhm.

Schuh: Maybe you could just give us an idea of what those practices are in easy to understand language. Morningstar: Sure. Well, over the last probably twenty years, we have been able to really focus on what the critical research has come out with in terms of both evidence-based practices related to secondary and the transition to adulthood, as well as predictors. When we talk about evidencebased practices, I like to help practitioners understand that’s how you can help transform students’ skills. Those are the different practices primarily that teachers and educators in buildings or in families in the community would use so that students can improve their skills. Schuh: What do those practices look like? I’m a parent. I have a 14-year-old student who experiences disabilities and I want to know what should I be looking for, for my child when they go into high school? Morningstar: Great. Before I answer that question, what I want to do first is also talk about, because I think they’re even maybe more essential and particularly for the SWIFT audience, are the evidence-based predictors. Schuh: OK. Morningstar: Those are the systems level programs that also are side by side. So we know a lot about what interventions work to improve students’ skills and we also know a lot about what should their day look like, what should be going on in schools and out in the community in order to ensure that they’re achieving their post-school goals for the future. With that in mind, we certainly know a lot about student-centered planning and student-focused learning and that is really within the realm of self-determination. Students who are more engaged in their own learning—particularly in secondary schools, because as we know secondary schools are fundamentally very different than elementary schools and I would even say than middle schools. Middle schools are kind of the bridge between an elementary school experience and what’s going to happen in high school. And the more students are engaged, adolescent learning is all about their own ability to start taking control. We know from the dropout prevention research that students have to be motivated and engaged. And engagement can mean multiple things, but it can mean as simple as making sure they’re in class, that they have to come to class in order to learn. But it also is how they view learning. And from a success perspective where they have a good understanding of, “If I persevere and if I persist in learning, failure isn’t a bad thing.” It’s step one to learning. As we think about what’s so different about high schools, that’s a major component of it: student-centered planning.

Schuh: Yep. Morningstar: Student focused learning, and within the transition research, there’s quite a bit of work that’s been established around self-determination skills, so we have interventions. There’s curricula already in existence that has shown to be highly effective related to building those skills, self-advocacy skills. The ability to know yourself, know your own self. To be able to value your individual as a healthy person and a successful young adult, but also to be able to advocate for the supports that you might need as an individual. So, quite a bit of research on that. I would say to families and to other teachers in the field if you don’t know about self-determination, you do not have access to an evidence-based curriculum or intervention that has those words in it, or you’ve never seen a student run their own IEP meeting, then that’s a place to start. Certainly a strong place that has a lot of evidence behind it is essential for particularly, I think for all kids, but by secondary school, by high school. Schuh: Okay. So number one, we want to make sure students heading into high school at that kind of age, middle school, high school are really learning about how to advocate for themselves? Morningstar: Right. Schuh: How to decide what’s important in their life? What they want their future to look like? And how to make sure that they are the ones sort of… Morningstar: …driving… Schuh: …driving that bus, planning that path, creating the direction. I get that, but what does it look like at the high school level? A day in the life of a high school student who experiences disabilities, maybe more significant disabilities. I know what it looked like ten years ago, but what are we hoping it looks like? What does it look like in terms of the evidence and a really innovative practice? Morningstar: Well, one of the things is, and I’ll speak from the perspective of, because the other hat that I wear at the university other than thinking about secondary transition to college and career readiness is students with more significant support needs, so students with low incidents of disability. Well, what I mentioned earlier about evidence-based practices, tying to that, here’s what a student’s day should look like. We have pretty strong evidence that students who are included in and have access to general education curriculum context are more likely to have more positive postschool outcomes. They’re more likely to go on to a post-secondary educational experience. They’re

more likely to be employed in integrated employment for real pay and real jobs, and they’re more likely to be living on their own. Schuh: And probably more likely to have friends and involvement in their community and hobbies. Morningstar: Yeah, exactly. In my mind, the ideal day for any student who is in ninth through twelfth grade is that they are included in the day-to-day life. Both learning and all the other extracurricular experiences are an essential element of college and career readiness, so that they are fully immersed in the full environment that’s going on in that high school. Schuh: Excellent. So you’re saying that the schedule, the experience of a high school student with a low incidence disability, or with any type of challenges within their educational experience should be the same as any other student? Morningstar: Mhm. Schuh: There’s the scheduling, access to extracurricular activities, involvement with guidance counselors, how they get to and from school. I can picture that. Morningstar: Yeah, and what that might look like is—and it’s not unfamiliar to the SWIFT audience— taking all of the substantially separate programs and practices and transforming them so that those supports are being pushed into the academic setting. You know, some people might say, “Why do kids need algebra?” Schuh: Right. Morningstar: That’s a class that can be challenging for a whole range of students. But similar to any other elementary and the middle school, if algebra is being taught with a universally designed perspective, where all kids are receiving a range of strategies that support them in that learning, then any student can participate in that. We talk a lot about how it’s nothing new to have individualized goals. Some students may be working on numeracy within that algebra class, so they may have an adapted…their learning objectives might look slightly different from the student who’s sitting next to them without a disability, but they’re still working on what we know are essential skills for college and career readiness. We talk about 21st century skills, which employers say are essential, post-secondary campuses say they’re essential. Those are communication, teamwork, problem solving, goal setting, being self-monitoring, self-motivated. Those are the skills that all students should be working on, including students who have support needs.

Schuh: You’ve just described to me what I would definitely call essential functional life skills. Communication, getting along with others, getting to and from places on time, knowing how to interact in a group. But in the old days of special education, we had a totally different sort of definition of functional life skills, like making a bed or change for a dollar. Morningstar: Exactly. Schuh: Can you talk a little bit about that shift and how we think about relevant life skills? What we thought, you know, many years ago and what we’re learning around what are essential life skills. Morningstar: I’m really glad you said that, because when you said “essential functional life skills,” I cringed a little. Schuh: Oh dear. Sorry. Morningstar: Because what I see in high schools in particular, there does seem to be a shift. There’s the sort of the general cultural shift particularly within special ed. Schuh: Yeah. Morningstar: I will say that from elementary school where we can easily talk about… we think about inclusion differently by the time students…well, those kids aren’t going to be able to be in that class. Schuh: Right. Morningstar: They need to focus on functional skills, so we’ve created functional classrooms. Schuh: Right. Morningstar: In some states, they’re called functional classrooms. Schuh: Right. Life Skills Classrooms. Morningstar: Life Skills Classrooms and I taught… Schuh: I did, too.

Morningstar: In Life Skills Classrooms. Schuh: I did, too. Morningstar: I had a real strong focus. Even though we were included in the high school I taught in, we spent a lot of our day out in the community. Schuh: Yes. Morningstar: Shopping. Schuh: Community-based instruction. Morningstar: Community-based instruction. And, you know, there isn’t a substantial amount of evidence 20, 30 years later...I don’t know when. So 30 years later there isn’t a substantial amount of evidence that that effort to, first of all, create a completely separate curriculum for a certain class of students made a difference in their post-school outcomes. Schuh: We are not seeing increases in employment or kids going to college as a result of years of functional life skills classrooms and community-based instruction. Morningstar: Focusing on cooking in the classroom or having a bed in a classroom so that they can work on those, but those skills are not going to generalize into the adult world, particularly for students who have a hard time generalizing. That’s one of their support needs. Then those supports have to occur in the environment in which they would need that. If they have a job in a hotel and part of that is working in the restaurant and if they’re in the catering department then they need to learn how to set the table in that setting—not in some other setting that where the cues and the environment is not the same, the contextual environment is not the same. But I think we potentially are going off a little bit. I believe that… Schuh: You mean in our conversation? Morningstar: Yeah, maybe. Schuh: No, I don’t think so. I think this is the conversation. I think the conversation, because I’m in schools all the time, at the high school level people are still talking about the importance of

community-based instruction and life skills classrooms. I think we’re constantly having this conversation now that is, “What’s a more important life skill, getting along with others or making your bed?” Morningstar: That is the shift in focus that I’ve tried to do, particularly since we’ve seen the college and career readiness standards come into play—the common core and those standards. Using that term “college and career readiness” is really essential because that’s for all students. That’s language that is directly focused on the general student group. In my mind, we need to use those similar terms, so college and career readiness. It’s not just about academics in high school. And no high school student will tell you, “I’m here only for the academic content.” There’s definitely a place and a strong emphasis on academic content similarly for any student, even students who have substantial, extensive support needs. There’s a place for them and the expectation should be that they will continue to work on those. Their academic skills, as well as the other essential skills … the research is very clear. Not the special ed. research. The general ed. research has had years of thought and understanding of what does it take for young adults to become successful post high school. And it is academic content and academic engagement is one of several domains and elements of success. Others include interpersonal engagement—having some of the adult roles and responsibilities and those competencies are critical, including understanding career culture, having opportunities for schoolbased experiences, career tech classes, occupational awareness classes for all students, as well as work-based learning. All students should be having opportunities, whether it’s service learning or actual internships and those terms are not uncommon within most high schools today. Schuh: Right, right. Morningstar: So in my mind, it makes it even easier for us to be able to think about students with more significant needs, students who have support needs, they should also be experiencing those same opportunities. We don’t need to create a separate work study program for students with significant disabilities when there’s an internship program that exists in that high school. That it’s so much better to aggregate up for school/business partnerships with the partners who are there working on that than to create something separate that is just for a certain group, a subclass within that high school. Schuh: Right, that comes along with its own stigma… Morningstar: Exactly.

Schuh: …and reputation around how we think about students. Morningstar: And typically in lower quality. Schuh: Right. Exactly. Exactly. Morningstar: Because special educators no matter, and you know, I train secondary special educators all over the country to be strong, secondary transition coordinators. I’ve had a program in place for over a decade with that specialized expertise, which is really important. But one of the skills that they have to learn is to collaborate with their CTE colleagues. Schuh: CTE? Morningstar: Career Technical Education. Schuh: Thank you. Morningstar: Because they have a level of expertise around career content that special educators may not. Schuh: Right. Morningstar: That is equally important that we’re partnering with others in the building. When you get to high schools, there are so many more other types of adults in the building that provide support and guidance to adolescents that we can’t continue to be operating in a separate sort of arena down the hall or on another wing. Schuh: I actually think when we move toward high school and “All Means All” that there are more opportunities for students to be included, involved, welcomed, and have a sense of belonging and learn about post-school opportunities because there is so much diversity within typical high schools for all students to learn those things. Morningstar: It does take some direct attention. Schuh: Well, it takes direct attention, of course.

Morningstar: But nothing different than what SWIFT already did. Schuh: Right, but I think that’s our direct attention approach around how do we support students and… Morningstar: How do we transform certain environments? Schuh: Yes. Yes. Morningstar: So that we’re successful for all. Schuh: Yes. Morningstar: Because it’s really, in that respect, no different. There are other groups of students in high schools who may feel disenfranchised. Taking a look at “how do we make high schools more inclusive” is good not only for the students I care about, it’s good for a whole range of students who maybe have not had the attention that they need in order to move on to post-secondary education or to be successful in a career. Schuh: I’m thinking about my local high school. It has about 30 extracurricular clubs, student organizations and every student is required to participate in at least one. Everything from a hip-hop club to an origami club to a student leadership club to a students in politics club. You name it, there’s a club for it. If you’re interested in something and there’s not a club, you can invent one. I just love that so many opportunities to get involved naturally exist in high schools. But for students with disabilities, many of whom are entitled to be in school until age 21, what happens after senior year? Morningstar: That’s a really good question. I would agree that between ninth grade and twelfth grade as much as other students are engaged in school, because not all kids, my daughter who just graduated and is going on to Chicago to go to school. Schuh: Congratulations. Morningstar: There’s some shifting there that I have to get over, but in addition to her senior year, she had a short schedule, right. She worked in the afternoons. Schuh: Right.

Morningstar: It’s not unusual to see schedule flexibility in high school so that students do have an opportunity…students who need and desire and are focused on opportunities outside of the high school building get those. Such as going on to dual enrollment, so there’s a lot of high school juniors and seniors who take classes… Schuh: At the local community college, right. Morningstar: … at the local community college. Similar to that expectation, but by senior year, by 18 years old, most young people, most adolescents in high school, do not need to stay in high school. So creating the next phase for students who are still able to be supported and served under IDEA, because the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act for students who need additional support can continue services through 21 years old. You have to look at your community and say, “Where is the naturally occurring place where students who are over 18 who have spent four years in high school to be?” Our community, because we are a university community, it’s at a post-secondary setting. Schuh: You’re saying that the general public schools can support students outside of the school building. Morningstar: Absolutely. Schuh: The public school environment can be supporting students in post-secondary experiences or exploring employment. Morningstar: Absolutely. Schuh: Doing volunteer work, internships, and the learning opportunities but all those should take place in the community. Morningstar: Inside the community, outside of the high school. Schuh: Outside of the high school building. Morningstar: Exactly.

Schuh: I think we’re on the same page. Yes. That’s great. Well, this has been a great, really informative, insightful, thoughtful conversation, and I’m wondering if you have a story to share. I mean, the evidence-based practices, the innovations, this conversation we’re having, bring it to life with a student. Do you have any students that you’ve been supporting who’ve been benefiting from these experiences? Morningstar: Yeah. There’s a couple of students I might do a little bit of a combo to get a sense of this. There’s one student that I’m thinking about; I recently spoke with his family and him about his experience. A student with the label Autism, pretty significant support needs. Probably the best thing that happened to that family was they started his school life in a fully inclusive preschool, so from the beginning the expectation was that he would be fully included with his peers without disabilities. He is not a big talker. He doesn’t like change. He has very strong points of interest. You know, he is not atypical from anybody else who says, “Well, what about this kid? What about this kid?” But from the beginning the belief was the best place to work on and to learn was from peers without disabilities. He really spent most of his time in school beginning in preschool. Actually, they had him in a kindergarten class at age five and then he sort of doubled up on kindergarten. Then he was included throughout his elementary school years into middle school and high school. He did have opportunities for work-based learning, so there was the career awareness. Oftentimes I think what happens for a lot of students with significant support needs is they may not have the opportunity to spend the night at someone’s house. Schuh: Rites of passage. Morningstar: If they’re not having those early experiences, it gets so much harder to talk to families about adult life and living on your own or going to work. He was a young man, so having those experiences throughout, it’s better for the student, for everyone. It’s better for the student. It’s better for the peers, because they see that disability and diversity is a natural part of life. It’s a lot better for families, because they are able to look beyond a certain lens and to think about high expectations for future adulthood, so it’s really better for everyone in terms of the long-term planning. He did have opportunities for work-based learning, and he did not remain in high school after age 18. I think that’s really important, because schools are responsible for supporting certain students up until age 21, there’s often the assumption, that they’ll just stay in high school until 21. They’ll stay in the high school classroom. He did have an opportunity to go to a vocational technical school and begin to work on much more focused career development classes and then work-based learning. The internship part becomes equally important. He was from a small community, and as an adult, he has maintained his circle of friends from high school.

Schuh: Nice. Morningstar: So the friends he made in high school, the friends he made at his church have maintained into adulthood. Schuh: So he’s a grown-up now? Morningstar: He is. Schuh: With a job? Morningstar: With a job. He’s been at his job, I think he’s gotten a 10-year pin. Schuh: Whoa! Morningstar: For the job where he I think he got that, you know. Morningstar: Here’s the other interesting part. I mentioned he’s not a big talker. Schuh. Yeah. Morningstar: He’s not a big talker in the sense that he does have a lot to say; he just doesn’t. He expresses it in a range of ways. Most recently, he has taken on running his own support team and he’s starting to get into legislative advocacy. He met with his senator recently to advocate for continuing individualized supports for adults with disabilities. He continues as we all do, even as older adults, we continue to grow and expand our skills and have new experiences, so that has continued for him, as well. Schuh: Wow. That is a fantastic story and I think it really illustrates All Means All from kindergarten through…from preschool through high school graduation and beyond college, and lots of opportunities and I think learning…. Morningstar: One more thing I have to say. Schuh: Yes. You can.

Morningstar: And we may be wrapping up. Schuh: We’re wrapping up. Morningstar: OK, I thought we would be, but I do have to say this because I would be remiss not to as a teacher/educator. “All Means All” and that includes teacher education. Schuh: Oh, that’s a whole other podcast. Morningstar: We cannot continue to substantially separate special education training from general education training. We have to figure out how to merge that so all educators in buildings see themselves in the critical role of supporting all students. Schuh: You know if this was a blog post, we’d be highlighting…bolding that sentence right now. Morningstar: Okay. Schuh: So mMaybe we can get you to write a blog post … yeah, the next one for sure. Morningstar: Yay. Schuh: Yay. Thank you so much, Mary. This has been a terrific conversation and, again, if you want to learn more, listeners, go to the transitioncoalition.org and explore those opportunities. And additionally swiftschools.org, plenty of resources there; past podcasts, blog posts through SWIFT Talk, our SWIFT Shelf, all of our policy briefs, training materials and tools you can find there on swiftschools.org and we really appreciate your time spent listening. So thank you, Mary. Morningstar: Thank you.