Welcome to Ep 138: Neuroinclusive Advising with Rachel Adams and Fred Zinn. Rachel Adams is Associate Director of Education and Training, Disability Services at UMAss Amherst and a Doctoral Candidate, UMass Higher Education and Administration. She offers education and training around disability and also teaches undergraduate students at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Fred Zinn is Associate Director, Digital Learning in the College of Education at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and focuses his practice on teaching teachers how to teach and teaching with technology as well as educating others about accessibility. In today’s conversation, Rachel, Fred, and I discuss how faculty and staff in the role of an advisor can support undergraduate and graduate students, both formally and informally. We discuss best advising practices specifically with a neuro inclusive lens. You’ll hear my new favorite term in today’s conversation “unconditional positive regard” in relation to supporting neurodivergent students, but it seems appropriate to me to use in many other situations. I hope you enjoy this thoughtful conversation on the Think UDL podcast.
Resources
Contact Fred Zinn (zinn@umass.edu) and Rachel Adams (rmadams@admin.umass.edu) via email
Find out more with their website: Neuroinclusive Advising Website
And learn more about Advising here: NACADA Advising Website
Transcript
1:09:19
SPEAKERS
Fred Zinn, Lillian Nave, Rachel Adams
Lillian Nave 00:02
Welcome to think UDL, the universal design for learning podcast where we hear from the people who are designing and implementing strategies with learner variability in mind. I’m your host, Lillian Nave, and I’m interested in not just what you’re teaching, learning, guiding and facilitating, but how you design and implement it, and why it even matters. Welcome to Episode 138 neuro inclusive advising with Rachel Adams and Fred Zinn. Rachel Adams is Associate Director of Education and Training Disability Services at the University of Massachusetts, at Amherst, Massachusetts, and a doctoral candidate in the UMass higher education and administration program. She offers education and training around disability and also teaches undergraduate students at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Fred Zinn is Associate Director digital learning in the College of Education at University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and focuses his practice on teaching teachers how to teach and teaching with technology, as well as educating others about accessibility. In today’s conversation, Rachel Fred and I discuss how faculty and staff in the role of an advisor can support undergraduate and graduate students, both formally and informally. We discuss best advising practices specifically with a neuro inclusive lens. You’ll hear my favorite term in today’s conversation, unconditional positive regard in relation to supporting neurodivergent students, but it seems appropriate to me to use in many other situations. I hope you enjoy this thoughtful conversation on the think UDL podcast. Thank you to our sponsor text help a global technology company helping people all over the world to understand and to be understood. It has led the way in creating innovative technology for the workplace and education sectors, including K 12 right through to higher education for the last three decades, discover their impact at text, dot help forward, slash, learn more. That’s L, E, A, R, N, M, O, R, E. So I’d like to welcome Rachel and Fred. Thank you for coming on to the think UDL podcast with me today. It’s great to have you.
Rachel Adams 02:57
Thank you for having us.
Fred Zinn 02:58
Thank you.
Lillian Nave 03:00
I’m really glad to talk to you. I saw what you were presenting at a recent workshop at a conference, and I was really glad that we were able to connect afterwards to talk about this, this neuro, neuro inclusive advising. But first I have my very first question for all my guests, and that is Rachel. I’ll start with you. What makes you a different kind of learner?
Rachel Adams 03:26
So this is a hard question for me to answer. Ironically, I spend all day asking other people about how they learn, and it’s been a while since someone has asked me that question. So, um, it’s, it’s almost like being a fish trying to describe water, in a way, because I, I know that different people learn differently only from talking with them, but I never really, I think, thought of myself as a different learner, necessarily, until I started working with a lot of neuro divergent students and teaching where it kind of opened my eyes to seeing how different people related to different things in their learning process. And so in having those experiences, I was able to think back and reflect on myself as I think any kind of mentor or instructor should be doing, and I have come to find that I’m very much someone who learns by doing. I need to have some kind of a hands on experience, whether that’s creating. Um. I think it was why I was drawn to education and teaching, um, and really trying to understand, like, how all these components fit together, and what do what? What do I do with them? Right? It’s not just memorizing information, it’s having some kind of an application, and so I discovered in my early 30s, when I started my PhD program and I was struggling to keep up with a lot of really dense theoretical readings that I am neurodivergent, I got diagnosed, and so things started to click into place and make more sense for me. It gave me a framework and some language to kind of understand myself better as well. So there’s that iterative process. And so I know a lot about my strengths in terms of visual thinking, creativity, understanding things like the big picture and kind of working, quote, unquote, backwards from how a lot of maybe more traditional learners think and learn. So yeah, I think that’s me in terms of my learning.
Lillian Nave 06:33
Thank you very much. And Fred, I wanted to hear your answer as well before we get into this.
Fred Zinn 06:39
So very similar to we were comparing notes on this question. Okay, we got on and very similar to Rachel, I have to do, I have to process. I can’t just listen. And the way, I also need a bit of a if someone’s talking lecturing, I have to be doing something with what they’re saying, or I have to be doing something. And so when I was in school, I would doodle, and I wouldn’t doodle what they were saying. So I would get distracted and I would not remember anything. What I’ve learned late in life, again, diagnosed very late in life, is that by drawing cartoons of what people are saying in conferences, I could actually remember what they were, what it was go back, so I’ll spend my entire time in a lecture drawing little pictures of the people or the concepts, and when I finally returned to grad school in my 50s. That got me through grad school is that I would be sitting there doing drawings of the lecture, and I could remember better what was being said. I could by processing it and converting it into visuals in my own words. And I in grad school, also learned that’s how I read. If I need to read something for close comprehension, I actually have to draw a cartoon of what the reading is slows me way down, yeah, when I’m doing reading. But that whole being able to convert the doodling of my childhood into a learning tool in adulthood was an amazing sort of discovery in the last little bit.
Lillian Nave 08:17
Oh, wow. What reflective answers here and I so appreciate too, that you’ve both had kind of a long history, you know, of learning and looking back at and seeing how it’s sort of progressed, and you’ve learned what those strengths are and how to manage that. I think, you know, we often are dealing with the more traditional students who are very early on in that journey, right then, they’re just starting off in college, and they haven’t had the chance to actually be looking and reflecting at that. So, oh, this is really helpful. And I can already tell this is what has really been kind of infusing your work with what we’re about to talk about. So fantastic. All right, so the first question I have is about what prompted this workshop on neuro inclusive advising relationships, and really, I know you’re coming from kind of different areas at UMass Amherst, but what was the need that you saw that you were hoping to address? And Rachel, I’ll start with you on this one, yeah,
Rachel Adams 09:31
and I appreciate this question, because I think it was something that had been building up for a while, right? Like kind of percolating in the back of my mind. So I consider myself, I guess, to be a scholar, practitioner again, hands on learning. So part of my role in the disability services office here is I oversee. The what we call a learning specialist program. And the learning specialists are a team of graduate students, combination of masters and PhDs, and they do a lot of, I would say, like disability mentoring and academic executive function and coaching. And so in working closely with a lot of these graduate students, they will often disclose to me, whether it’s when I’m interviewing them, or, you know, a couple months into the role that they themselves are neurodivergent, which probably drew them to apply for the job. And so in getting to know them and understanding their experience, where you know they’re a first year doc student, first year master’s degree student, and in many ways, informally advising them around the socialization process of becoming a grad student, I’ve learned a lot about some of the things that they experience, and have been thinking about how we might be able to take this knowledge and information and try to apply it more systemically with advisors, because that advisor relationship is so key for folks when they’re coming in, because it’s a really big transition from undergrad to grad. So and I think, you know, I’ve had some exposure to working with faculty around practices, around neuro inclusion, but it’s more in the classroom setting, less around the advising setting, and this is where Fred and I started to connect, because he’s on the other end with connecting with faculty in a more holistic sense. So I don’t know if you want to take it from there. Fred,
Fred Zinn 12:37
yeah, that was one of our realizations. Is that we both had different stories that we could speak to, and I’m always working with faculty on how to teach. And then it started percolating up that there was more to it than just the teaching. In fact, my boss and Rachel’s advisor, who’s Dr Kate Hudson at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst College of Education came to us about a year ago and said all six of her graduate advisees had, pretty much that fall, disclosed some form of neurodivergence. Okay, yeah, and so 100% of her advisees, all of them women, all of them late diagnosed, as is the case with a lot of women. And she basically asked Rachel and I, who are working on neuro inclusive instruction, to give her some advice on how to advise these students to help make the Get Help them be more successful. So that actually was the spark. We’d both been circling the issue, and then having Dr Hudson come in and say, Can you help me with this? Turned it into a handout, which turned it into a conference proposal, and then we were visiting in Chicago about a month or so ago. So
Lillian Nave 13:58
yeah, that’s a that is quite the origin story, like 100% of these advisees, and we’re seeing it, of course, more and more in higher ed, and for good reasons. Now, as you both mentioned, a late diagnosis, especially for female students, is it’s because it’s not that it just happened lately, it’s that we didn’t have the best diagnostic materials, or the materials the DSM or the the medical arrangement that said what the symptoms were were based mostly on males, and especially a specific type of young male, you know, so it’s quite common now that we’re getting these late diagnoses, and, yeah, we’re learning so much more about it, so it’s so important right now. So I thank you very much for that. So the next part is, you. Started really investigating this, and came into figuring out, like, what those experiences are for neurodivergent students. So I wanted to ask you, what sort of barriers do neurodivergent students have in higher ed that you’re seeing? And Rachel, again, I’ll start with you on that.
Rachel Adams 15:20
Yeah. Well, I mean, first of all, just the transition, right? It’s a huge transition, because you think about undergraduate school and the expectations, or even even high school and the expectations, right? And when you go through a transition, whether it’s from high school to undergrad or undergrad to graduate program, you’re uncovering the new hidden curriculum just when you figure it out,
Lillian Nave 15:56
that’s right.
Rachel Adams 16:01
So there’s increased independent work. There’s many, many, many more demands on executive functioning. And if you think about neurodiversity, that’s that’s a thing around executive functioning, yeah,
Lillian Nave 16:19
that it takes a lot longer to for those skills to kind of be polished, more later than the usual 25 years old. It’s a lot later, if you’re neurodivergent.
Rachel Adams 16:31
Yeah, and it that, I guess, the expectations that are imposed or assumed on to students as they’re going through these transitions, and you know, thinking about how, essentially, a lot of students are coming in and thinking about the experiences of they’ve had, whether it’s in K 12 or undergrad, and some of the things they’ve learned around stigma and feeling isolated if they don’t disclose masking trying to perform as if they are neurotypical, and that takes a huge cognitive and mental and emotional load for students to have to navigate those kinds of barriers, especially when there are these assumptions imposed onto students.
Lillian Nave 17:45
Fred, did you want to add to that? There
Fred Zinn 17:48
was one of the things we ran into when we were looking into this, is there’s no we were looking for data, and we couldn’t find data about grad students, but we did find undergraduate students. Only one of the numbers was only 37% of undergrads with disabilities will disclose to their universities. And so we are imagining we need someone to maybe do some research. But when you’re dealing with an advisor, this is somebody you want to impress. Maybe someone recruited you, somebody who’s really encouraging you at the beginning. How do you how do you go about disclosing to this person? Do you want to disclose? Do you not want to disclose? And one of the experiences I’ve had in the college is just because I’m in the building, a lot, I’ve had grad students drop by to ask one question, but then once they know I can listen, well, they will come to me and tell me things about struggles with grad and one of the big things is they don’t want to tell their advisor. They don’t want to ask for help. They’re trying to do it all themselves, which, as Rachel mentioned, just leads to bad outcomes. Yeah,
Lillian Nave 19:04
yeah. So this environment is really important. As you just said, like they that somebody is not going to first of all, somebody doesn’t want their first interaction to be. I need help. They want their first interaction to be. Look at me. You chose. Well, I’m ready to tackle this, you know, I’m going to be a great candidate. I am, you know, I’m, I am smart, you know, I don’t want to let anybody down. And so the first interaction is not going to be, hey, you need to know this about me. And I’m going to need you to do some things, you know, to help me out. And so first of all, we don’t want to do that. And then it’s going to be, well, who can I tell, and do I need to tell, or what? Yeah, who’s the person that I can trust that’s not going to try to push me out of this program, this educational, you know, institution at all. Who can I, who’s, who’s somebody who’s going to be a champion for me? And that’s take. So while to figure that out, so I’m really glad that we have these. This is exactly why I wanted to talk to you both so well. Then my next question is about, well, how can advising help? What’s the role of the advisor? How should advisors think about their role when dealing with neurodivergent students. And for this one, I’ll start with you. Fred, yeah.
Fred Zinn 20:24
So when we when Dr Hudson first asked us to look into this, we went out and found resources on how to be a good advisor, because it’s a little bit like you know, that UDL template of what are the best practices and what could apply to everybody, because
Lillian Nave 20:44
there’s a lot So which ones.
Fred Zinn 20:47
And we ended up going with Nakata, which I am totally blanking on what it stands for, but they are the national the National Organization for people who do advising. And they have pillar they have a bunch of definitions of advising and pillars and best practices and core competencies, which, when you read them carefully, it’s like, this could totally be neuro inclusive, but we need to offer just a little bit of a twist to it, okay, so that people think of it through a neuro inclusive lens, and what we summarized for our workshop is our own sort of compilation of the NACADA definition, which I’ll just do a quick read of here, is that advising is a long term relationship between the advisor and advisee that facilitates the advisee’s personal and professional development. Good advising requires an advisor to be familiar with effective advising practice and be able to communicate knowledge of an institution’s curriculum and processes. We were trying to fit that on one PowerPoint slide when it pages of their website. But some of the key things that we wanted advisors to reflect on and be aware of is this is a long term relationship. It’s different from a neuro inclusive teaching or neuro inclusive management, which we’ve also written about, and it’s about helping someone develop themselves. So it’s a very different relationship than an instructional one, where the goal is learning, the goal here is accomplishing personal goals. Okay, so as an advisor, you want to be aware of the fact this is a long term thing. We’re talking mostly about grad students. So it’s two years, two ish years for Master’s if you’re neuro diverse, usually longer. PhDs can be up to six longer if you’re neuro diverse, we’re finding So being aware that you have to develop this long term trusting relationship, and in order to do that, one of the things we talked in our workshop about is the first step is to reflect on who you are as an advisor. So if these are the standards, sort of the generic standards, how well can you fulfill them? How well can you match up with the core competencies? And it’s really important to know who you are, what’s your own lived experience as an advisor. So several times I’ve run into grad students who you could tell they triggered something in their advisor, and you can’t tell whether it was a previous advisor that sort of someone was mean to them as a grad student, and now their generational trauma, inflicting it on their own advisees, or maybe it’s a parenting thing or just a personal trigger when you’re asking for help, and so being aware of what you’re comfortable with and what you’re capable of when you’re meeting with a student, if there’s issues that make you a little get you a little worked up, and which are the things you’re perfectly happy to do for an advisee, and what are the things you feel they should probably find elsewhere, of being aware of of that in yourself. And then finally, just some basics, that things that if an advisor can do anything, these are the things we feel are the best things to be able to do is, like, make the Hidden Curriculum visible. I had one grad student talk to me a few weeks ago about how comps were always referred to with like, an echo effect and a spooky science fiction we should be very afraid of them. Yeah, that was all they’d ever said to this person, is that comps are scary, and what they really needed to know was, what is, what is the comp, what I need to do so knowing, what are the expectations as an advisor, what do I expect you to do, to communicate with me? What do I expect you. To to tell me and provide me with, and what do I expect to provide you with? Sometimes there’s just that you know you’re in right field and the ball is dropping right between you because the advisee just doesn’t know, especially and this is again, where UDL can come into play, because making that hidden curriculum visible also helps your first gens. It helps international students. It helps anybody with a marginalized identity who might not be as familiar because they didn’t grow up in a household with five generations of grad student in a PhD, being aware of where the flexibility is in the program, in yourself, in the curriculum, where can you allow for more flexibility? Where can you allow your advisee to do things a little differently, and then, how can you advocate for flexibility? Do you have to be a buffer between them and the rest of the faculty in the program, because everybody else is a stickler for logistical rigor? Or can you talk to your colleagues and open up the whole program? So being able to play with flexibility, and again, that UDL idea comes into play of, how can we open up what it’s like to be a grad student and show that you’re capable,
Lillian Nave 26:17
right? So you make me think of being clear is kind Yeah, it’s not. It’s not a bad thing. You know, being absolutely clear on and unveiling the hidden curriculum, as you mentioned, what is it that’s expected? You know that means to me also knowing what the goal is, being really clear on goals, which to me, is the basis, you know, a foundation of Universal Design for Learning is know the goal, but what are the flexible ways to get to that goal? And and making that clear, like, can you go this multiple ways? You know, use your strengths to get to that end point. There are multiple ways to get there, but you need to know and be really clear on what that is. So I didn’t mean to jump in there, but Rachel, did you want to add anything to Fred’s answer there?
Rachel Adams 27:09
Well, I guess to echo some of what’s already been said, it’s I do think really understanding the curriculum, both like the hidden curriculum, the policies, the I guess you could even say like the culture within the department, and trying to make those things more explicit for Students. And also, you know, when we’re thinking about neuro divergent students, understanding that progress might not be super linear, and hence the flexibility that you know there will be the final goals and the outcomes. But kind of, you know, using that backwards design method with the students to figure out what path do they need to take to get there. And so I think helping students be informed about the process and being agents within the process to empower them to make those choices, because sometimes the traditional cookie cutter path is not going to work for them. Yeah,
Lillian Nave 28:39
exactly. Okay. So the next thing is about advisors too. What should they be aware of when working with neurodivergent students? So we’re kind of already getting into this, but anything they should particularly be thinking about as they’re focusing on the student and Fred. I’ll start out with you again on this one.
Fred Zinn 29:03
Yeah. So in a follow up to what we’ve been discussing, one of the diagrams we came up with that we showed at the presentation, which, of course, this is a podcast, so I’m waving my hands.
Lillian Nave 29:17
I do that all the time. Don’t worry, we will have a link to the web page that you have, you know, so so people can look at the slides and see everything you’re talking about, yeah.
Fred Zinn 29:29
So one of the things we showed was a sort of a diagram of of neurological function. It was sort of a having advisors get more aware of the range of functions around very specific things. We specifically avoided labels in this presentation. We didn’t use ADHD, we didn’t use ASD, but we did talk about very specific things like memory or organizing ideas and all those. You know, time, keeping track of time, keeping track of of processes, a lot of the executive functioning functions, yes. And when you look at how people can rank themselves on these things, you know, if you’ve got kind of a five point, you know, most of the time, effective, most of the time better than average, most of the time less than average. So you’ve got a full range there. Your neurotypicals are kind of in a nice, wavy river down the middle. Okay, they’re always, pretty much always, able to predict how they can do things, and they typically do things as they’re expected to do them. But when you’re talking about someone who’s divergent, what you’re talking about is sometimes it’s less than so that they wish they could do better, or other people wish they could do better at time management, yeah. And then sometimes they can do better than others, and and you don’t see a lot of places where people are self scoring themselves, where they can talk about how much better they are at some things. And usually when we’re talking neurodivergent, we use that term neuro spiky, yeah. And if you look at one of these charts, and on our slide, it showed that there was this person, we had their profile up, and they were really good at this and this, and they were average at that, but they were less good at these other things. And if your expectations around performance are always just focused on that mid range, a spiky profile can’t fit through the door, and especially if you’re very narrow and rigorous in your way, in the way things should be done. You know, they definitely can’t fit they can’t do it. So as an advisor, it’s about recognizing the strengths and the weaknesses of someone who diverges from your own profile, and allowing for that is an important aspect of this, I think another aspect that always comes out is especially with neuro in a neuro divergence around executive functioning, is it gets overlapped with moral failings a lot.
Lillian Nave 32:14
Yeah, you hear me about that.
Fred Zinn 32:19
You hear things like, lazy, unmotivated, disrespectful, that all could also be mapped on their time they are time blind. They cannot. I know this is one of my divergences. I have my partner, yes. What time of day it is? They nail it. You know, it’s been an hour, it’s been 50 I can feel five minutes or an hour as the same amount of time, and we’ll have no idea that the time has passed or that only five minutes has passed, and that can often you end up being late to things you often hyper focus and don’t break away from doing Something that you should have broken away from Yeah. And as you grow up like that, your parents, your caregivers, your teachers, everybody around you is constantly throwing words at you that aren’t about, huh? How do you think we could help you manage your time better? It’s about it’s usually judgy. It’s usually a moral in a negative way. Yes. So you end up, especially people who are late diagnosed, can end up with some with shame, trauma, all sorts of stuff wrapped around any discussion around some of their weaknesses. Yeah. So it’s important for an advisor to help focus on strengths. That certainly helps. And when talking about weaknesses, being able to speak in a way and practice speaking in a way that doesn’t bring up moral judgment, language that they probably have heard their entire lives, going back to being toddlers, and that can affect the relationship, right? If you’re parroting that stuff.
Lillian Nave 34:00
Yeah. So it is a real lens, I think, to be putting on that, taking away the evaluative. This is bad, but rather, is this helping you in this, in this particular endeavor, you know, it’s, okay to be time blind if you’re getting your stuff done, you know, what? If you can write your 25 page paper in 24 hours, you know, because you you’d spend a lot of time thinking about it, but you weren’t writing it until you had, you know, had this verse, and you get it done, then there’s nothing wrong with that. However, if, if that also conflicts with you’ve got to work for eight hours during that 24 hours, or you need to do other duties or something else, then it’s not really serving you well. And so how are you going to kind of manage that? Right? So it’s just another, a different way of couching that, rather than, that’s terrible. You shouldn’t be doing that instead of, well. That’s not really going to work for you if you need to get this done in a certain amount of time, if you’re you know, but without it’s very counselory, you know, very you know, helping the the student, the person, really understand what their strengths are, and, and, and if that in that time is serving them or not, and how to use that. Yeah, I love it. I really appreciate, I really appreciate this discussion and reframing of things. Yeah, and you’re also bringing in a lot of something I’m interested in, which is intercultural competence. The first thing you say is thinking about yourself, your own understanding of your way of doing things which also gets coded into is that good or bad? Well, this is the way we’ve always done it, so it must be good, but, yeah, you meet somebody else who’s always done it the exact opposite way, and it takes a while for you to think, oh, that doesn’t necessarily mean that is bad, that it’s done that way. So Rachel, did you want to add anything about this part?
Rachel Adams 36:04
Yeah, I think you know, as we’re talking about this, it makes me about how you know disability, neurodivergence, especially when we’re talking like with a medical model, language is so steeped in these deficit narratives. And what I appreciate about having, and if folks want to check it out like the you know, the neuro spiky profile is challenging that deficit narrative to look at how neurodivergent students are a huge asset, and looking at the quote, unquote superpowers they might have. And also it, from my experience working with a lot of neuro diverse students is that because of some of those deficit narratives we’ve talked about them growing up with and hearing and also knowing that they do have a lot of strengths and talents, it’s kind of like this perfect storm for some folks to go way above and beyond what’s being asked of them. I say this from my own personal experience as a recovering perfectionist, which was my coping mechanism, and how I masked for so many years, and I have to say, particularly in grad school, that’s where, you know, I hit the wall of, I can’t go above and beyond with a dissertation, because I’m never going to finish, right? So it thinking about, you know, the students you’re working with as an advisor, and looking at like, what is the assignment actually asking you to do? And making sure that you know you’re not bending over backwards to get it done because you want to prove yourself you know, despite the deficit narratives and like, way overshoot into your superpowers for all the assignments, right? It’s kind of trying to help students find that middle path because it’s more sustainable for them.
Lillian Nave 38:35
Yes, absolutely. Okay, so you’ve got, I think you’ve put out a really great case for how important advisors are, for sure. And I have my own stories too about how important that advisor relationship is with good and ill effects. So I want to know, what can we do? So what are some ways an advisor can build that trusting relationship so that student can feel they can speak to them, that they’re not going to be judged, that they’re not going to get those negative reactions again. So what are ways to build that trusting relationship that advisor can take with a neuro divergent student, and I’ll start with you, Rachel on that one.
Rachel Adams 39:26
Yeah, that’s huge. And I think you know when it comes to building trust and building rapport again, know yourself, and also try to get to know the students you’re working with, just on a human level, and acknowledging that there is a power dynamic. As the advisor. And so I think this is where some humanizing comes in, where, as advisors, we should be humanizing ourselves, and we can do that through, I think it’s called targeted self disclosure where, you know, we’re personalizing certain things that might come up in conversation. For example, I work with a student who may be struggling with their time management, and I can say, you know, I’ve also struggled with time management myself. And you know, here are some strategies that have worked for me, and maybe we can have you try them out and see if they work for you, because in that moment, I’m sharing, you know, enough information about myself that puts me on their level, and they see that I’m not this, you know, perfect entity that i i also have struggled in the past, and it’s okay to struggle, Um, and so I think that’s part of it, also having this unconditional, positive regard towards students. So, you know, say, I share these strategies, the student and I come up with a game plan, and they’re like, Okay, great, I’m gonna do this. They come back and meet with me the following week. I’m like, how did it go? And they’re like, I didn’t do it. Oh, good. And unconditional, positive regard is going okay. Thank you for sharing that with me. I’m kind of curious what got in the way there. Yeah, right. And let’s talk about some of the things that got in the way, in the barriers and how we can collaborate and work together. I’m not judging them in that positive regard. So, yeah, I think there’s, there’s a lot of things, you know, trying to give students choice and consent, so they know what to expect with the meetings framing as like, Hey, you’re not in trouble. Like, my role here is to help you, and what does help look like for you? Right? Really trying to give the the students some some choice in that. So those are the things top of the mind around building that trust with students, yeah,
Lillian Nave 42:53
that unconditional positive regard is, I really appreciate that, because it is not helpful again. How is that serving you? It’s, it’s not going to help the advisor, for them to be judgmental, to say, Well, you didn’t do a really good job there. Then did you, you know? Or that’s, you know, I’m angry at you, right? That’s not helpful at all.
Rachel Adams 43:16
What is that actually teaching? Yeah, that’s,
Lillian Nave 43:19
it’s,
Rachel Adams 43:20
yeah, not helpful. It’s not building those those skills, right, not
Lillian Nave 43:25
serving either of the two people in that relationship. So, Fred, what did you want to add to that?
Fred Zinn 43:33
Oh, rachel, put it so well. The this is more of an experience I had in grad school that helped with perfectionism. Rachel brought up perfectionism, I think were both the type of folks who compensated pre disclosure or pre diagnosis with I have to do as good as I can. And one thing my advisor kept saying to me, there were two good things that were said to me, my advisor and my master’s program would check in with me about what I was working on, and would often say that is a dissertation stop and let’s back off and let’s just write, you know, a paper. This is a paper, not a dissertation. The other incredibly valuable thing that an instructor I had multiple times did for me around perfectionism is would say things like, this is a 15 page paper. When you reach page 15 stop, you can stop mid sentence. The other thing that this professor would allow is, if you got to a point in the final project and you couldn’t quite fill in this one part of it, you were allowed to put a parenthetical note saying, This is what I would have inserted here if I had had more time to develop my ideas around it, and that was allowed. And so allowing within, if it was a time set assignment, you allowed for a little more play in the scope. And even though the final project was. Supposed to have three pages on this. You were told. I was told up front, don’t you don’t need to kill yourself to do this. Just leave me a note, and if we want to follow up on it later, we’ll follow up on it later. So those were amazing to me of specifically addressing this instinct to just stay up all night and make it perfect and then turn it in late or not turn it in at all. Because even though what you produce is so much better than most, it’s not up to your weird, high standards, so you never turn it in. I
Lillian Nave 45:35
see. So, yeah, okay, yeah. Like, the best dissertation is the done dissertation. But and your example, Fred tells me that your professor there really understood and was very clear on what the goals were. And so, yeah, the goal wasn’t, you know, grammar apparently didn’t matter necessarily. On this particular one, they wanted ideas. It was an idea generation exercise a certain amount, you know, and they needed certain things in it, but all the other things that you were adding on to it that were not in the assignment, he was able to say, they were able to say, you know, don’t, you don’t need to. That’s not what I’m looking for. You can stop that part. Don’t need to add those things, because that’s actually hampering your ability to do what the point is of this assignment and that again, you got to know your goals. You got to be clear on your goals, and then have flexible ways to get there. This the UDL for me. Okay, so the advisors role, what is it in helping that student connect, then with the community, because you said advisors are supposed to really bring the university, unveil the hidden curriculum, get them into this community. What’s that advisor’s role in helping the student connect with that community? And Rachel, I’ll start with you.
Rachel Adams 46:57
Yeah, I think the advisor’s role is so crucial because they are a major facilitator to connect with the campus community. And I say this because sometimes the advisor is the first person that a student makes a connection with right and if the student is first gen like myself, and they don’t really understand the culture around higher education, the advisor, I think, really does need to help the student facilitate the connection beyond themselves, right beyond the advisor, because an advisor is just one person, and they can’t be the first and last stopping point for the student in the workshop, I remember we listed, I think, five different types of support that people typically need, and so thinking about it as the advisor, like, what kind of support can you offer and where you’re comfortable? And then where is it beyond your scope, and who are the people in your network across campus that you might want to be referring students to? And we talk about this idea of a warm handoff, or a facilitated handoff, rather than just like, oh, go talk to the Counseling Center. Go talk to Disability Services. I know Rachel in Disability Services, and how about we write that email together right now? About we walk over to the counseling center and meet some people together? Right depending on your capacity, because at the end of the day, you as the advisor, need to have that network and that community to sustain your work, and it also helps the student to feel connected to the campus community, to increase that sense of belonging. And I encourage anybody who’s in an advising role to also look at the different kind of identity and cultural centers that might be on campus and the affinity groups, because if you have a neurodivergent student who is recently disclosing to you, it’s probably going to be really good for them to connect with other neurodivergent students with similar lived experiences, because that’s going to help facilitate their own. Development and understanding and identity.
Lillian Nave 50:04
Absolutely. Fred, did you want to add anything to that? One
Fred Zinn 50:08
that was this idea? Well, one of the things I work with faculty a lot is their responsibilities, and they’re overwhelmed with teaching, research, advising usually isn’t even part of the the annual review. And so when we start talking about, hey, you need to do something different and more with advising, you can kind of see the faces in the room of like, oh, another thing I need to do, right? And so talking about connecting the student with community is one of the good places where I feel like I can reassure them that you don’t have to do it all. Might not be capable of it all. And I had an interaction with a grad student, I think, in the past few months, where their advisor essentially said, I’m not your warm and fuzzy person. Oh, so if you need if you’re having a bad day, if you need a hug, you need someone to like cry with you. I’m probably not the best person, but you know who is. Let me introduce you to my colleague. And apparently these two faculty do this often that they kind of they work as a community to support each other’s advisees, because they each have strengths good and so even though they they’re named advisors for different groups, they take a different role. So if you need the hug, it’s a bad day, you need a hug, you don’t have to go to your advisor. You go to the person next door. Yeah. So,
Lillian Nave 51:34
and if you need the tough love pep talk, and here’s where you got to get your stuff together, you go back
Fred Zinn 51:43
that one, and as someone who’s neuro divergent with the executive functioning, if you’ve have an issue with deadlines, we all have had that experience. If you need the deadline to finish, to actually get up the energy to do the work, but you also need to know there’ll be some grace when you can’t make it, because if they say there’s no deadline, turn it in anytime, that means never, yeah, and if they’re really firm and they scare you about the deadline, you won’t do the work because it’s too scary. So having that mix is lovely,
Lillian Nave 52:15
excellent. Oh, wow. This is a lot about knowing ourselves as advisors, right and then and knowing our students. So let’s say we see a student that is struggling. So what? What do you do? How do you advise that student to progress through that difficulty? Rachel, I’ll start with you again.
Rachel Adams 52:41
This is such a good question. And I have to say, I think it really does come back to getting to know the student, because I think we all have our different strengths and, you know, different pain points and different tells around how and when we’re struggling. And so I guess you know I can say one example I have with student is, do you know when you are struggling, or is it something that is kind of hindsight, like, oh, that I would I was struggling with that like, and trying to get, you know, students to understand themselves, and some of the warning signs of if and when they’re struggling, and to normalize that struggle happens that we’re going to have stall points, and again, this goes into that unconditional, positive regard where on the students. And you know, they may be feeling ashamed or guilty because they’re having a hard time, they may be trying to mask their way through it. And it’s, it’s really interesting when, you know, we call these like non apparent or hidden disabilities, but when the student cannot successfully mask, the disability becomes more apparent and they’re feeling really vulnerable sometimes in those situations. So I’ve had a lot of students who will tear up in my office. Lillian, you can see my like table back there. There’s the tissues where, if that happens, yes, and I think you know, the initial thing is just responding in a way that is empathy. Esthetic that is understanding. And you know, just holding that safe space for students to maybe start to learn how to regulate some of the negative feelings that might be coming up. And then, you know, from there, forming an alliance with them around a game plan. Like, what can I do? How can we strategize? Like, you know, within the scope of my role as an advisor, you know how I can lean in and support, um, what do you need to do right? And here’s some clarity, because if we’re having all these negative thoughts and feelings, it’s hard to think clearly and to really try to help them strategize a way through the issues. Again, I think a lot of this comes down to just knowing yourself, knowing the student, trying to see where there’s opportunities for flexibility, and then strategizing from there,
Lillian Nave 56:18
what an important role advisors have. This is so important in in guiding our students, undergrad and grad, through their programs. Fred, did you want to add
Fred Zinn 56:30
one of the things I have a couple of one of the things we were talking about yesterday is how to deal with it when a student disappears, I’ve often had faculty talk to me saying I haven’t heard from them in weeks, you know? Yeah, and one of the strategies Rachel and I were talking about is simplifying the request. For one thing, don’t just let them disappear and wait, but at some point the student is very aware that they haven’t responded, or that they haven’t done a check in, and there is probably some sort of shame going on, a shame spiral, even where they can’t even think about opening their email, because what do I say? And so sending, starting to send very low, low impact check ins, like you don’t need them to explain what’s going on. You just need to know. You need to let them know that you care about them. And you just want to know that they got this email, and if there’s something going on, that’s fine, but just in fact, one of Rachel’s suggestions just send me a thumbs up emoji yes or a yes, no question, so they don’t have to think it’s not engaging a lot of stuff, and they might be able to respond before the shame blocks them from doing it. They’re not disappearing for lack of interest those moral issues that we usually hear when someone disappears, it’s like check in or check in with the network. If you’ve built a community, you could check in with other people. Have you heard from this student? And maybe they’ve reached out to someone else, and then you can be reassured, or maybe they’re talking to everybody except you, and then maybe there’s something to work on in the relationship, because why are they checking in with everybody? But so we’re working on a list of strategies and simple emails, because that’s what faculty are asking us, for these advisors, is, how do I deal with it when a student bursts into tears? How do I deal with it when they disappear? How do I deal with it when they’re get upset? I think that’s one of the things that a lot of faculty are asking whenever I talk about this topic, they are asking that they immediately jump to, what happens if it gets emotionally uncomfortable, which is fascinating, yeah, that they associate us, yeah,
Lillian Nave 58:50
yeah, because they’re that’s not something we you learn about in graduate school when you’re getting your doctorate in physics, You know, or or exercise science, or whatever it’s it’s so, this is why it’s so, I think, so important that we have these resources, because you don’t have to be and we’re not asking faculty to be a full on counselor. You know, it can be a warm handoff. It can be you’re uncovering the hidden curriculum. You are helping them to understand what’s needed, because you do have that expertise, but you don’t necessarily have to be a licensed clinical health you know, mental health counselor, of course, you don’t but, but there are some kind of easy ways that we can help, help our students to move forward, especially in some really difficult times that might not need too much. Just say you can make it through this part, you know, and kind of diagnose what the real issue is, yeah, rather than having to go full on Doctor counselor kind of mode, yeah.
Rachel Adams 1:00:00
Yeah, yeah. Because at the end of the day, right? We talk about, this is a long term relationship. It’s not a transactional relationship. So being able to show up and to respond to the, you know, the yes, the learning that the students are here for. But also in Lillian, you talked about this recently with the new UDL guidelines, there’s this social, emotional component, yes to learning, and so as advisors, like acknowledging that to your point, we’re not mental health counselors, just acknowledging that we’re we’re thinking and feeling humans, yeah, yeah,
Lillian Nave 1:00:51
that’s okay. We can do that right, right? Yeah. You know, I the role of advising is so important, and we might have formal advisor roles, but we often have these very informal advising roles to anyone in our program, to anyone who’s really interested in our topic. You know, I teach first year students that could go on to anything, but they might just be interested in what our class is about, and I can advise them in, you know, thinking more about that as a person or professionally or as a student, but that advising role is so, I think, important for the longevity of the student, right, and to feel that they belong in the university. And your first comment, really, about the unveiling that hidden curriculum is so, so important, and I have a little story before I ask that very my very last question about how we can support students, where we can go for resources, is I have a very good friend whose daughter is a Late diagnosed, like during college, neurodivergent student. And I have known this family that and our daughters are friends, you know, grown up 20 years and went to the University, and in through this advising was it kind of fell through the cracks, which is something that has happened a lot with the student and and being neuro divergent, and kind of figured I’ll just figure it out on my own, and I’ll kind of figure out what I need to do. But there was part of that hidden curriculum that was not made clear, and just found out that whereas she believed she had graduated from college and applied to a job and was waiting for the final call from the job about when the start date was found out that, in fact, she had not graduated because there was one course that was needed to be taken within that major that was not taken. Yeah, and therefore this student who walked at graduation because they thought everything was fine is no longer does not have a diploma. Yeah, and so that, yeah, this is a real life. This happens, right? This happens to this day. It happens to neurodivergent young women. It happens when people fall through the cracks and we’re not thinking about how we can, in just a little bit, we can add something, and now she’s gonna have to take another course in the spring online, thankfully, doesn’t have to go back to campus, you know, hours and hours away, and can finish one class that is needed to fulfill whatever the requirement is for that particular major. That was somehow like, how did that not happen? How did that, you know, not an email that that said this. So this is it’s, I see it. I see it. It’s so important to me. It’s why I wanted to talk to you. And I so appreciate the work that you’re doing to make sure that we are serving those students who are bright, they’re brilliant, they’re ready to learn. They and are so good at so many things, and we just need to be there for them. We need to do a few things that are going to help these students not fall through the cracks. So All right, so it’s important, that’s what I’m saying. So my last saying. So my last question is, so where can you learn? Where can someone learn more about supporting neurodivergent students outside the classroom in this advising relationship and through their educational journey? What? What can they do? Where can we find that stuff? And I have a feeling that you have some things for us, because I wanted to talk to you. So, Rachel, why don’t I start with you?
Rachel Adams 1:04:46
Yeah, so I guess since you you kind of gave a little plug there. So Fred and I have up on our website, resources, and it’s. Yes, it’s a live website, so we’re constantly adding things and updating so we encourage folks to check it out
Fred Zinn 1:05:08
that provides there. They have a whole section on the core competencies and the pillars and how to be a good advisor. And I think a lot of folks, you want to start there and then start applying a neuro inclusive lens to what NACADA is asking or is suggesting. So I think that’s a good place to start.
Lillian Nave 1:05:28
Great. So so we’re we’ll definitely have a link to your building neuro inclusive advising relationships, presentation, and your website that has a handout, which is really fantastic. If people want to have that, print that out and take that with them, have it on the desk. It’s got some really great things that we can do, but otherwise it’s a neuro inclusive advising website that will have linked to the resources section. Yeah, great. And I’ll add the NACADA website as well, about advising perfect
Fred Zinn 1:06:04
and on our on the website, if you go all the way down to the resources, some of the things we found particularly useful were some articles about support priorities of autistic university students, or articles about how ADHD students in STEM experience grad school and what they need and what they ask for. So there’s some, if you do a deep dive, there’s not a lot, but there’s some really good stuff from the perspective of someone who is neuro diverse, so that you can get a glimpse into their heads. Rachel and I have been joking recently about how we would like to get a glimpse inside neurotypical heads, so we can explain this better, but yeah, just getting a sense of what it’s like to live inside someone else’s head, I think, is really helpful.
Lillian Nave 1:06:50
It sure is. It certainly builds empathy so that we can understand each other. So I just want to say thank you so much, both of you, for being on the podcast today really important things as as I can attest to from my experience. And thank you so much for putting this together for our listeners.
Rachel Adams 1:07:13
Thank you so much for having us. This has been
Fred Zinn 1:07:15
great. Thank you. It’s good to be able to get this message out there to as many people as possible
Lillian Nave 1:07:22
out in the world. So I appreciate it. Thanks. Thank you. You can follow the think UDL podcast on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to find out when new episodes will be released, and also see transcripts and additional materials at the think udl.org website. Thank you again to our sponsor, text help. Text help is focused on helping all people learn, understand and communicate through the use of digital education and accessibility tools. Text help and its people are working towards a world where difference disability and language are no longer barriers to learning and succeeding with over 50 million users worldwide, the text help suite of products includes read and write equatio and orbitnote, they work alongside existing platforms such as Microsoft Office and G Suite and enable them to be integrated quickly into any classroom or workspace with ease. Text help has changed the lives of millions worldwide and strives to impact the literacy and understanding of 1 billion people by 2030 visit text, dot help forward, slash, learn more. That’s L E, A, R, N, M, O, R, E, to unlock unlimited learner potential. The music on the podcast was performed by the Odyssey quartet, comprised of Rex Shepard, David Pate, Bill Folwell and Jose Cochez, and I am your host, Lillian Nave, thank you for joining us on The think UDL podcast.