Exploring College Readiness

Originally presented on June 21, 2021

by Leslie Thatcher and Kate Katulak

Leslie Thatcher and Kate Katulak, from the College Success@Perkins program at Perkins School for the Blind, will explore what college readiness in 2021 means, and how to explore supporting your students to be prepared to the best of their abilities. They will introduce their College Readiness Checklist that can serve as a guide to support parents as they advocate for their students’ skill development and independence in the K-12 system. Time will be reserved for questions.

Transcript

Sheila

All right, welcome tonight to the Lighthouse Guild presentations, we are so very excited to have Leslie Thatcher and Kate Katulak, and we’re going to be talking about college readiness. And I’m going to turn it over to them because they are very qualified to tell you about themselves. And it will be much more exciting. But thank you guys for coming today and presenting to us. I’m very excited to learn all about this. So thank you.

Leslie

Thank you. Okay, well, we’re thrilled to be here. Kate and I will tag team our introductions, and then we’re going to screen share a PowerPoint that we can send to you all, at the end, through Sheila and Maggie. So quick, relevant background. So, I’m the Director of College Success at Perkins School for the Blind. And going into my fourth year, which is hard to believe. College Success at Perkins we’ll describe it a little bit more, but it’s basically a national initiative to address college readiness for students with blindness and visual impairment. We do that by delivering full direct service programming, we’ve done a residential program, that is no longer, and we are doing a very active virtual nine-month program as well. 

We also are doing a lot of sort of exploration of what the root causes are of the college-readiness crisis that we’re seeing in the blindness field. And so, we’re going to unpack a little bit of that and give you some context to think about what is college readiness? 

So, my background is as a parent of four children and lived to tell the tale. They’re all graduates at this point. And beyond that, though, I come from mainstream education, with the background as not only as a certified teacher, a kabillion years ago, but I also have been a learning specialist and an executive functioning coach. So, I really spent about the last 20 years digging deeply into how students learn in a college-prep type environment. I was a freshman Dean for five years, as well as freshman in high school. And so, I really spent a lot of time working to set students up for success in high school exploring academic profiles and academic readiness. And that, coupled with seven years as an Associate Dean of College Admissions at Lewis and Clark College, gives me a somewhat unique perspective, having interviewed about 6000 kids and read about three or 4000 transcripts at minimum. I’ve seen a lot of water coming to the bridge in the last 30 years, and I’ve seen how this field has evolved a lot. So, that is the quirky, unique background that I bring to it. I also love this age, I love the coming of age that our students do. And I love exploring ways to empower them through programming that we do, that we support the Lighthouse doing and to support parents as well. So that’s, that’s me in a nutshell-Kate.

Kate Katulak

Hi, everyone. My name is Kate Katulak. I’m the Associate Director of College Success at Perkins. I’m a certified teacher of students with vision impairments, with experience as an itinerant TVI in public schools as well as a classroom teacher. And for the last few years, in my current role, I’ve not only been working with college success, but also with the new program we’ll talk about called Compass, and I am a coach for that program. I happened to do my student teaching about a decade ago, in the Bronx and in district 75. So, I know that New York is really an awesome place to be. And a little bit more about my background on a personal level that connects professionally, too- I lost my vision very suddenly, and unexpectedly, just a couple of years before I was to graduate from high school and attend college. So, being in the role I’m in working with students who are congenitally or adventitiously visually impaired, working with families and educators to help prepare them for their transition out of high school. It just really feels as I often say, very full circle to me. So, we’re grateful to be here with you tonight. We look forward to your questions and great conversation. Thanks for having us.

Leslie

All right, thank you, Kate. So, as you can tell, we’re very much a tag team here. We have a very chock-a-block full presentation. And it’s intentionally designed to sort of over deliver on the data. To help understand the context that our students are considering college in this day and age. I think the context helps think in more critical ways and helps empower you all as parents and educators in this call, and I’m assuming we have that kind of range on this call right now. We definitely want to encourage you to ask questions, toss them in the chat, she will manage that. And I’m going to try and leave plenty of time for questions. So, we’re going to move kind of fast now. So, please indulge us. We’ll try and keep it fairly high level and not get too into the weeds. And we’re always around later. You’re welcome to email Kate, or myself, we’ll leave our email addresses on the final slide. And again, you get this PowerPoint. So, with all that said, I’m going to hopefully share my screen effectively.

Kate

In the event of technology troubles, Leslie and I have worked it out so that I will now be performing one of my favorite songs for you. Leslie, did you get it working with all these people this evening from hearing my voice?

Leslie

I’m really working hard. I have it all teed up.

Kate

If we were in person, you all would be distracted and entertained by my very lovely three-year-old yellow lab guide dog. His name is dodger. He’s currently asleep at my side. I’m continuing to mute myself so that if he starts barking in his sleep, as he often does, he will only grace me with the lovely sound. But I’ve had him for about a year and a half. And he’s my third guide dog. He’s really wonderful.

Leslie

And he is definitely a loud fellow. Alright, let’s cross our fingers, shall we and hope this works. 

All right, like we were saying, college readiness is something Kate and I have talked about and what we think about a lot. And what I’d like to do is give you a brief outline of what we’re going to talk about today. We’re going to explore a little bit about what is college readiness. It’s interesting, I suspect all of you if we sat down and asked you to come up with an answer, you might have an answer. As you might also imagine, Kate and I might have a more enhanced answer. And so, we’re going to offer you some nuggets to add to how you think of it. And to give you some updates about what’s going on in the world of college today. It is different from what some of us experienced even 10 years ago. And in some ways, I would argue, more demanding and perhaps less forgiving, even if there may be more support. 

We’ll give you a little background about some of the research that we have conducted as we’ve run our two programs. And we’re going to leave you with four takeaways. This is going to be a takeaway kind of night. And Kate is going to introduce those. 

So, the first thing I want to do is get us all to kind of have some concepts to play with as we think about what is called college readiness. And my work with students always evolves around sort of where they are developmentally you know, are they in ninth grade? Well, they’re gonna have certain needs, they might still be thinking in kind of concrete terms. They may not really know how to describe themselves yet. A junior is more likely to have some experience and ability to do that and more complex ability to think in more nuanced ways about themselves and their future. 

So, knowing ourselves as people is a key sign of college readiness. Being aware of your own interests, of why they’re interesting to you, of things you’re good at, of passions, of skills, of things you’re not good out, are all signs of college readiness. Setting goals, being able to identify a goal, even if it’s, I am going to walk every night after dinner. I am going to gain enough O&M skills so I’m qualified to get a guide dog when I go to college. I am going to qualify to go into that fourth year of math class that I want to do statistics, even though I hate math, I know it’s going to help me when I go to college because I want to be a counselor, and so on. So, that’s goal setting. And that’s taking that self-knowledge and acting on it, right. That requires executive functioning that we’ll talk about. A student’s college readiness can also be indicated by motivation, by that ability to act on an idea, a goal or what have you. Even if it is engaging with friends, or being kind to one sibling, and so on. They persist. College readiness is definitely indicated by a student who has that tolerance for the discomfort of getting something wrong, of having to work really hard over a period of time in order to conquer or master a book, a screen reader’s set of skills, simply learning how to type.

Or again, learning how to walk to the end of the street all by yourself, as you’re refining your O&M skills, and tolerating that discomfort, and that worry, that fear. So, you don’t give up, especially when things don’t come easily. That can be quite a complicated skill to develop when there’s a whole herd of adults whose job it is to get you over humps in school, right, and even at home. 

And finally, college readiness is often indicated by a student’s ability to monitor themselves. In techno talk, we call it metacognition, right, that awareness of a student’s thought process while they’re doing something.  “Wow, I am really stinking up the room on this test right now. I really didn’t study effectively.” Or “wow, I’m really not comfortable with this person.” Or, “well, I’m really feeling overwhelmed and I need some help to figure out how to meet my academic obligations”, and so on. So, they’re monitoring their self-regulating, some of that mood, and they’re able to act in appropriate ways, while self-advocating and doing some of the other first four things on this list that we have here. 

So, you may not have expected this kind of list. You may have expected, well, they have a 3.8 GPA, and they are in four years of English. But it is more about mindset than it is about what those numbers look like. I would argue and challenge you that all those numbers are really not telling you much of anything, even though colleges use those as ways of measuring college readiness. And we’ll get into that in a moment. 

So anyhow, this slide says we’ve been thinking about this for several years, why yes, we have. And I’ve been thinking through it for almost 30 years. So, it is something Kate and I tend to geek out on- we geek out from a parent perspective. We geek out about impacts that we can make on students in terms of expanding their mindset, and their sense of what they can do independently and what they can tolerate independently. And we definitely geek out from a teacher standpoint, too. There’s so much empowering that we can do by giving updated information. 

And so, a quick summary of the college success story. We covered it a little bit in our intros. We ran a residential program for two years. It was Perkin’s first attempt at addressing this college readiness dilemma. We had 11 graduates from seven states. We’ve transitioned that program into being a virtual program. Part of our learning was that we needed to start earlier -post high school was too late to build the mindset, the resilience, and that just simply technology skills that are essential and that are assumed to be already established once a student arrives in college. 

Compass is a virtual program for students grades nine through 12. We serve students nationally. We graduated our first class of 12 this year. Students grades nine through 12. It was fantastic. It’s composed of nine months of one-on-one coaching for the student, the parent and the educator with Kate, myself and other coaches including perhaps our friend Linda Gara, who does a lot of support for parents. We run a weekend workshop once a month, three hours that allow students to engage socially. We introduce them to a wide range of young adults, college students, college students who’ve had a lot of paths to their college experience and recent graduates talking about their journeys. 

And then time during each workshop to debrief and work on social engagement and networking. So, that is what we have evolved to take the learning that we gained from our residential program, a lot of the research that we’ve done, and implemented it in our new program. 

Here’s some grim stats to give context. Nationally, we know we know, you may not know, but 50% of the folks in the United States consider and attempt college at some point after their high school career. There’s a range of success levels in different colleges. I have some statistics in the right-hand column here under General Education Statistics, just to give some context for how wonky these numbers are. And when you read stuff in US News and World Report, and whatever major magazine or publication you read, these numbers are misleading. I encourage you not to fall victim to the hype that’s out there around each phase of this college process. 

In public institutions like University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, which is a 50,000 student, large, massive public institution. About 61% of the students who didn’t start there complete their degree, and they usually measured over six to seven years. At private nonprofit institutions, such as liberal arts college, I would argue (Fordham qualifies as that, Vassar qualifies as that, on the West Coast, something like Mills College that just merged with Northeastern in Boston, qualifies as a private nonprofit), 67% graduation rate. At some of the highly selective schools the graduations are significantly higher up in the 80s and 90s, depending on the school, and its profile. 

In for-profit colleges, which you might see advertised on TV or other places, about 25% graduation rate there. So, all this stuff gets smushed together and all sorts of national data. And it’s very hard to parse what’s really meaningful. 

What we know is that of our students attending college with a visual impairment or blindness, that about a little less than 40% actually complete that degree. And that is a very complex number for me to speak to you all. Because I believe that in that number are some students for whom college was sort of the easy answer, and everybody was on board with that. And there wasn’t a great deal of college advising that was going into the thought process about entering it. And there’s some systemic challenges that are set up right now, such as requiring that all of our students enroll full time in college in order to receive need-based financial aid, or state funding, when perhaps they’ve never written a paper by themselves ever in their lives. That is a setup for failure. So, there’s some very deep systemic elements that go into this as well. 

So, those are some fun facts for us tonight. But that gives the context for some of how Kate and I are approaching this, right. We’re approaching this from a data driven perspective. I could talk for days about the single slide and all the things that it tells me, but we’re not going to do that tonight, we’re gonna get to the four points in Kate’s imparting of some just some good nuggets to consider. 

I want to review a couple of barriers that we have identified through some of the work we’ve done in the K-12 system. And as parents, I want to plant the seeds for you- not because anyone is doing anything wrong. Everybody’s trying the best they can. The system is set up the way the system is set up. But there are some opportunities to have context for your advocacy for your children. And so, we want to give you some context here. 

We know that being a TVI is really hard work. If there’s any TVIs, besides my friend Kate on the call, it’s really difficult work. And they have a very wide range of students that they’re working with. And as a ninth-grade Dean, it took me a couple years to learn just that one job, working with the timing, the academic issues, the setup of the sequence of classes. These are hard things to know when you’re also needing to be an expert for students who are learning braille and maybe multiply disabled. And so, it’s almost like we need to clone them so they can do that extra advising as well. 

And there’s also a challenge in the coordination between the wonderful work in a VR agency, in any given state, the TVI, parents, the summer programs and the goals and the alignment of expectations of demand and holding students to a high bar. So, lack of access to assistive technology and proper training, we will discuss that a little bit. It’s a significant barrier. And we’ll talk a little bit about what we’re doing to address that specific issue to give you all some tools to use.  

We have identified that there’s a lack of understanding, not because they’re bad people, they’re good people, they’re really good people, Special Education Directors have very hard jobs. But there’s a lack of understanding of what we all know on this call of the complexity of educating students with visual impairments. In one school, they may have one student every 10 years with a visual impairment and they may be two very different experiences of having a visual impairment. That does not prepare anyone to effectively have an institutional strategy and to understand. 

Think about 10 years ago, what kind of phone you had, just think for a moment, the iPhone debuted about 12 years ago. So, for perspective, it’s hard to keep up with advances in this one tiny slice of the Special Ed field. So, part of what we’re working on is to help find more systemic ways of keeping them up-to-date to understand the needs and unique needs of our students. 

Funding Sources drive accommodations for students, we all know this way too well.  Success criteria in K through 12 can be often modified. But the consequences of those modifications are sometimes not discussed, or fully transparently provided to families. And so, if a curriculum is modified in order to meet the needs of a student, there are implications of that, that need to be explored carefully and thoughtfully over time. And we can talk about that if you have questions.  And when we say college prep, that’s a very vague statement. And we know that that often can even be modified even those terms that really impact a student’s real readiness for college and expectations. 

Finally, independent skills tend to be underdeveloped, because we’re all working so darn hard so our kids are successful. So again, we’re assuming good intentions, we’re assuming everybody’s trying hard, and we know this is hard work. But we know that these are barriers, and we’re here to talk about them to empower you to understand some new and fresh approaches. On the college level, and this is often not talked about, this should be one of our barriers, Kate, is that there’s often not a lot of unpacking of the reality of the change of expectations, and laws governing the delivery of education, and the support of students between the K-12 system and higher education. 

The IDEA…

Kate

The Americans with Disabilities Act, the Rehab Act of 1973 and IDEA like Leslie said, those are the three big ones.

Leslie

Thank you. So, the expectations of IDEA in the K-12 system are essentially assuming the school will do everything in its power to allow that student to access their education, and be successful and get through it with as few impediments as possible in the least restrictive environment possible. And that sometimes means a great deal of adult support through paraprofessionals, Special Ed homework sessions in a homework room, and a little experience independently managing and dealing with some of those frustrations, persistence- stuff you’ve got to figure out at home, task initiation at home and so on. 

So, the rules in K-12 are very different. In college, the responsibility lives solely with the student to describe their needs, to describe their needs aware of the context in which they’re walking in. They are to advocate with a disability service office on their own. And, that is a very different animal. Additionally, disability service offices can do really wonderful things and empower students in significant and important ways. However, if a student doesn’t know how to type or does not have skills developed enough to read at the pace and level demanded in a full college curriculum or even one class, they can’t fix that.

If a student does not have orientation and mobility skills to get from one class to another, or problem solve to get to their professors’ office. They’re not providing orientation and mobility skills in general -some do, and they’re wonderful. But a student is really expected to manage this on their own. And that goes all the way down to them. Making sure they’re eating enough. Getting to classes on time and a whole host of other things that you might be beginning to think about now that I’m saying these things. 

And that jump, without any preparation, and no experience, and all of the services a student had been receiving up until the end of grade 12. Gone, gone, gone, gone. That is a leap- that’s a chasm to cross for all of you. We are here to talk, really directly, with you about that. So, those are some of the barriers for college success. And we can now see, perhaps, that if those foundations are really uplifted, empowered, and challenged, and really throughout the K-12 system, that transition to college is going to be significantly challenging, and sometimes perhaps, insurmountable for some students.

So, a concept I want to put out to you all, because you may be thinking, but my student has a 3.7 GPA. Why, college X and Y college are really excited. We keep getting emails from them, why? Of course you do. The system is really set up right now -there’s a demographic decline in the number of college-age students, nationally. Colleges are struggling, and I’m just going to put that right out to you. So, they are working harder than you could possibly imagine, to recruit and attract, and get an application from and then enroll students. And so, they are going to think you walk on water or your child walks on water. If they have a 3.7 GPA, they are not going to ask, have they ever written a five-page paper with citations by themselves? They’re just simply not going to do that. 

We know that GPAs have risen in the last 20 years in kind of stunning ways, but we know that students’ skills have not commensurately risen. For our students who need to learn extra skills to access their material, whether it be a combination of braille and different other access tools, such as a braille note, a laptop, becoming proficient with a screen reader, or managing the integration of magnification, plus other tools to access for students with low vision. Those are skills that take years to develop and systems to manage. And we really want us to think hard about college acceptance, which is just going by numbers, and college readiness- which is that combination of that mindset that we’re talking about, a whole pile of skills that not a lot of folks are talking about, but we’re going to tell you how we’re trying to address that.  And, that ability to be proactive in recognizing this is not going well, I need to ask for help. So, that’s a little thought. 

So, what is college today? It’s real, it’s impactful. We know it impacts income, we know that it impacts health, we know it has a wide range of impacts, but it is more complex. I will tell you I graduated in 1987, just a couple years ago, from college, and I used books. I did use an early Mac desktop, because I was a terrible typist, and that saved my life. But mostly I used books to access my materials. I used a computer to write my papers.  All of my syllabi at that time were printed. And I had notebooks, right? My daughter just graduated from a four-year-college; she did not use one notebook. Everything was online, the learning management system was online, she submitted papers online, you found your assignments online, you did entire group projects online. And that’s before the pandemic hit. So, that demands a whole new pile of skills that we hadn’t even considered for those of us more than older than maybe 23. But it has significant impacts for us as adults working with students, whether we’re parents, educators, Lighthouse Guild folks who are supporting families, and so on, that there are so many more skills that students need to learn- understanding beyond skills that they need to learn. 

What is the language learning management system, what are the elements I need to go dig for? How do I do that? How do I know when it’s not working versus I just don’t know how to work, and so on. So, colleges are expanding the types of programs they are offering so they have a wide range of courses and programs now for students with autism. They have a wide range of courses and programs for students with intellectual disabilities as well, that 25 years ago would not have attended college. To me, this is exciting. These are opportunities for students to have a “college experience,” but perhaps not be burdened with the expectation that they should get a degree. Right? Because getting a degree means taking courses maybe you don’t want to take.  For me, that was things like statistics, and courses that for me were uninteresting, and super duper hard. And so, some of our students now have that chance to get some training, have that cultural experience that they can then share, develop their own network, and continue to work on their independent living skills. So, there’s wonderful things growing out there in colleges.  

There are colleges that are more focused on vocational training, career and professional training. A school like Quinnipiac is very much like that. A place like Santa Clara has a lot of programs like that out in Santa Clara, California, but they also have wonderful liberal arts and a wonderful Jesuit tradition there. So, there’s a huge range out there. And then there’s the wonderful resources of community colleges and technology, technical schools and so on. And we’re seeing our students from our programs attend a wide range of these. And with good guidance and thoughtful college selection, they are able to find that experience more successful.

Finally, here’s my stat for the six-year graduation rate- for schools that admit less than 25% of students, which are many schools at this point, because it’s such a wacky era right now, over 90% of the students who enroll in those schools graduate. So, you can see our concern about students in our population only graduating at a rate of 40% or less, and with perhaps significant college debt built up. This is an issue we need to take seriously. We need to advocate so that we are properly advising our students, and that we’re walking into this aware of what college in the 21st century is. It is big, it’s complicated, it’s not for everyone. 

Finally, a note for us all for context. Nowadays between 30 and 60% of students in all colleges are placed into remedial courses. I hate the word remedial. I prefer the word review of …., but we know that both from a math perspective, there are significant gaps we know for many of our students, but also writing and nationally, that they’re in good company, a whole lot of folks are placed into remedial courses. The thing I want you all to understand about what college is today, those courses are most often not credit bearing. And so, if a student places in remedial courses, and has to pass those courses before they can take a credit bearing course, that is one of the reasons there’s a high dropout rate in the US. It is because kids can never kick out of those remedial courses. So, an interesting thing to think about. 

There’s also a trend right now of community colleges just forgetting about that and simply placing students in credit-bearing courses based on the grades they’re getting in Math and English. And that terrifies me, because we know that grade inflation is masking a lack of skills for many students, not just students learning with visual impairment and blindness. So, geeky nuances, but hopefully this is helping you understand that simply saying, “awesome honey,” when your daughter or son or student comes and says, “I want to go to college.” There are layers we need to drill down to, to be able to talk effectively with them about their readiness and actions we can take to get them ready.

Sheila

I have a question regarding what you meant by splinter skills in the previous line?

Leslie

So, splinter skills –  College acceptance versus college readiness. We know that some students may present as very skilled in technology on a certain level, or they may be really verbally strong, right? Or they may um, Kate helped me with this, you’re so good at identifying splinter skills more than me. Other things like orientation and mobility, they may be quite confident traveling, and yet not know how to type.

Kate

And oftentimes, we see students with highly sophisticated skills in one area, and then they don’t even have some of the most fundamental skills in other areas- like this might be the socially adept student who gets along with everyone, has amazing technology skills, but can’t tie her shoes, as an example. So, it’s splintered because there are branches of really strong skills, and then there are others where they really need to be developed. 

Leslie

The worry we have about that is students present, and often very busy adults in their life may say, “oh, Kate is so awesome, you know, I can just talk with her about anything, she’ll be great in college.” And yet she can’t tie her shoes and you know, whatever other gaps are in her preparation. Does that make sense, Sheila? 

So, what we did, as we finished running our college-success residential program, it was very clear our students were struggling to accurately self-identify areas of strength, and areas of challenge- even after nine months of working with us of some really direct conversations and so on. So, we created something called the college-readiness checklist. It gave us a way to put down, so that everybody in their world could have the same conversation about technology, about self-determination, about independent living skills, executive functioning skills, which is sort of how you all got here on time today. How you all can remember to pay your bills on time, and so on, academic skills and social emotional skills. We will show you a link where you can download this wonderful college-readiness checklist. 

We call it a conversation starter because any one of us could use this as a tool in different ways. Sheila could use it, any of the parents on this call could use it and say, “you know, Kate you want to go to college, let’s talk about what that means. I’ve got this really nifty little doodad here, and we can go through this whole thing.” And it puts it in the student’s voice. I can type at least 30-words-a-minute. I can cross the street by myself. It uses very concrete terms, it puts locus of control in that student, right? So, all of us who are working with that student can hear it, it’s got to live in them, not any of us. And so, it’s a really powerful conversation starter that you could then bring to your VR counselor or your TVI, or whoever else is working in coordinating with you on that. 

So, a couple examples here for academic skills are; I can describe what classes I enjoy, what I do not enjoy, and why that is. I like history because I’m really good at memorizing things. I do not like math, because I just don’t get it, and the teacher is really mean, right? That’s an eighth-grade skill. So, in this setting, we’ve sort of matched this with certain grade levels. To give you a sense of how this helps us understand, oh, yeah, you should be able to do that by eighth grade. Because really, as we’re all thinking about helping our students, we need to start with what they need to look like when they get to grade 12, right? And we need to figure out a plan to get them to that point. And often we may be pedaling as fast as we can in 11th and 12th grade to kind of play catch up at a time when a student’s academics should be ramping up the demands on them to think in a critical and deep way should be expanding. But instead they’re working to play catch up.

So, you’ve heard me allude to technology and some of the gaps and challenges our students have. We began last summer doing some research to create some technology standards. We have learned them nationally. The general standard is that all students are expected to be pretty much tech savvy and functional on a wide range of programs such as, you know, what is a PowerPoint? How do I use it? Google Slides are just like PowerPoint. How do I use either one of those? They assume that students know how to function with all of these tools, and they kind of stopped teaching them. 

And so, for our students, who perhaps are busy, very busy learning braille and other access tools to access their curriculum, they haven’t even learned the technology that their peers are using in everyday work in the school to conduct group work, to have a normative experience that they’re typically sighted peers are having. I would argue as a learning specialist to access literacy skills and vocabulary development and the critical thinking that the rest of our students are accessing electronically now more often than they are accessing during via for the typically sighted world, print. So, we have created these national technology competencies that will help us begin to see at least for grades eight through 12, how to build layers upon layers onto a student’s skill set that some foundational skills have to happen before the more complex skills happen, and so on. So that is mine. I’m done, Kate, it’s your turn to do the four.

Kate

Before I talk about the four things we can do now, I just want to acknowledge that you all heard it here tonight. For the first time ever, I made up a word fundamentary. I was combining rudimentary and fundamental, I think. But I like it. I think we should start using it. Fundamentary, I kind of like it. What do you think Leslie? Should we write Webster and see if we can get it in?

Leslie

I think I can edit our tech competencies, and we can add it there.

Kate

Excellent. Let’s do it. We’re all about innovation and creativity here. But I want to talk a little bit about some things that we can begin today, right now, in our work with students and our parenting of students in our interactions with them. So, we’re going to get more specific with these four things. But I’ll just overview them very quickly. We’re gonna first talk about getting the whole team on the same page, supporting students with their flexibility and with our flexibility. We’re going to talk about teaching students to lead their own IEP meetings. And finally starting early and not waiting until their final year of high school to begin talking about transition, independence and some of those other key concepts. 

So first, I’m going to dig a little bit deeper into getting the whole team on the same page. When we talk about the student’s team, of course, the student is the first person who we should consider. And then closely behind is the family, parents, guardians, even siblings, and then of course, educators, administrators, paraprofessionals, really anyone who works regularly with the students and or is able to have an impact on their education and overall well-being. 

Oftentimes, we know that teachers of the visually impaired, they are the beholders of all the knowledge and wisdom about our students, right? Well, that’s what everybody tends to think. But realistically, we need to make sure that general education teachers and others also really understand vision impairment, its implications, and what it means to the student in their learning and living environments. And it is the role of the TVI to help bridge that gap and to provide some of that information, making sure of course that the student has that self-awareness and those advocacy skills. But ultimately, we need to make sure that everyone, all team members really have that basic level of understanding. And I’m talking, everyone. 

Even when we think about people who the student interacts with regularly, but doesn’t have formal interactions. I’m even thinking people like the custodial staff, people who are serving lunches, people who may pass by the students and say things to them, or offer help to them in ways that are not promoting their independence. So, even those seemingly minor interactions that the student is having day to day really does have a significant impact on their sense of self, their confidence, and their perception of what they can do, as well as the perceptions of others who are making those observations. 

Seeing someone say to the student, “oh, here, let me carry your backpack for you. Let me just go ahead and cut you to the beginning of the line.” Nonsense, our students are visually impaired, but we know that they can do a great deal of things on their own. 

So, in order to get everybody on the same page, just requesting that team meetings are held, I believe in addition to the IEP meetings, because that’s a really formal, sometimes tense, structured meeting in which people are really focused on presenting their reports and, you know, dotting their I’s and crossing their T’s. It’s a legal document that you’re contributing to, and that’s really not the right time to have some of those informal conversations about the implications of vision impairment. And so, you want to call a team meeting at any point in the year – most schools really will be on board with that. We want to make sure that those in closest contact with students of course, have the most knowledge, but again, we want to disseminate that across the team as much as possible.

Next, as I mentioned, we have to support students, we have to be flexible. And we also have to acknowledge that our students have a lot of differences. And it’s important that we allow them to be flexible in their mindset in the ways that they do things. Sometimes rigidity is a really good thing. And other times it can be what holds a person back. We know that our students may not access information in the traditional way of regular print, they may use text to speech, they may use braille, they may use large print, they may use magnifiers. They may use a whole lot of technology. We know that they may have alternative ways of accessing other visual information, even social cues. So, we need to make sure that we are helping them normalize what it means to be visually impaired. And that really does require that they have some flexible thinking. And those advocacy skills, of course, so that they can communicate their flexibility to others to help those students and other members of the community really understand where they’re coming from and be more accepting, and tolerant as well. 

Students are going to make mistakes- we all do. And I believe we should really celebrate those mistakes, because they’re opportunities for learning, and they’re opportunities to celebrate that we all have a chance to do better, become better, and it’s just a way of acknowledging our humanity, that mistakes are going to happen, and they’re okay, let’s laugh about them. Let’s move on. And we can set that example by modeling that within ourselves for our students. 

Also, the more we do these things, the more able our students are going to be to problem solve and make decisions on their own, regardless of the barriers, the obstacles, the challenges that come their way. So again, we really have to celebrate flexibility. And we can model that, we can talk to our students about it. And we can talk to those team members, as we’re getting them all on the same page about where the student is, and ultimately, where they’re headed. 

Something that we can do now is to help students become the leaders of their IEP meetings. And this might be sort of divergent for some of you and you’re thinking about IEP meetings, because again, they are so structured, we are developing a legal document, and the student may not know exactly what is needed to be included, like the present levels of performance, and what’s the difference between a goal and objective and what accommodations should be included. But, they are the ones who this is impacting the most and so as much as we can inform them about what the IEP is, what are all of the parts of the IEP, why do we say that they need a particular accommodation? And is that an accommodation that will also apply to the workplace or into college, if that’s their goal?

So, sit down with them and review past IEPs. Review what’s coming up, and ask them for their input. I always love going to IEP meetings where students have created a statement at the beginning where they overview some of the key talking points they want to make sure get covered that day. And always giving opportunities for the students to interject when possible, checking in with them. So student X, what do you think about this? Do you have anything to add? How does that sound to you? Are there any goals or objectives today that you believe you want to work on over the next year that we haven’t touched upon, and so on. And by giving students that voice, by leveraging their voices, it’s also going to help inform the team so that everybody works together in a more unified approach, keeping the student at the center of everything that’s going on.

Lastly, we could have come up with, I don’t know 1,000,400 things that we could do now. But we really decided to narrow in on just these four. And the fourth and final one that I’m going to talk about today is maybe the most important of them all, which is to start early. 

Transition happens across the lifespan. And at every stage of life, students can begin to be prepared for what’s coming next, always thinking as we say, three to five years ahead. I like to start talking with my students and their families about college when they’re in elementary school. And of course, we may not have a crystal ball for whether it’s going to happen, what their futures are going to look like. But if college or the workforce is on the table as a possibility, then we really do need to start thinking about where the students’ skills are now, and eventually, where are they headed? What do they need to do to get ready for the transition to middle school to high school, to college, to the world of work, and so on. 

So, please, do not wait until the student is in their junior or senior year or even worse, graduated from high school, to begin to have some of these tough conversations. We want to equip students with the tools to talk comfortably about their vision impairment, about accommodations that they need, about their hopes, their dreams, their goals, their skills, their values, all the things, all the unique things that make them individuals. And with that self-determination, really comes the ability to just be comfortable in a variety of environments, from talking to professors, to disability service office representatives, to their high school teachers, to family members, to friends, and it just trickles on from there so that they are more socially adept, and having fulfilling lives and getting involved in all the wonderful activities, events and different things that life has to offer. 

So, the earlier you can give students the opportunities to learn about themselves, to talk about themselves, to explore what skills they need to develop to make their goals come to fruition, the better off they’re going to be, the better off we’re all going to be. So that’s four things that we can do now. We’d be happy to answer questions that you might have about anything we’ve talked about so far. But I’m going to turn things over to Leslie to kind of close up here.

Leslie

All right. And so, the slide on the screen now has both Kate’s and my email addresses- we were happy to hear from you. Do not hesitate. There’s a link, https://www.perkins.org/contact-0.  And that’s a place where you can sign up to get updates, you can go into the Learn More section and download the college readiness checklist that we referred to- that’s the place where our new tech competencies handout will be soon. And just a heads up, you may go there today and it’s going to look one way, and in about a month, it’s going to look completely different because we’re redesigning the entire website. So, hang on tight, be ready for some surprises. And if you happen to hit a dead end, let us know right now and we’ll help you as we phase out our old website. So, Sheila, hand over questions, thoughts, concerns.

Sheila

Oh, that was full of wonderful information. We have one comment about creating an agenda with your student to lead the IEP meeting is another way to empower them to lead the meeting.

Kate

That’s wonderful. What a great idea. Thank you for sharing that thought with us.

Leslie

And that helps leverage executive functioning skills. It helps students understand priorities, prioritizations, hierarchy of needs, it helps them recognize what adults do every day in their jobs, right? So, that helps them learn what they may or may not like, and that can help the team see where that individual’s strengths are, and where they may struggle in real time. And that’s not a bad thing – that’s authentic. And that’s the authentic data the adults need, and it’s the authentic experience that the student needs to support their next steps. I see a question from Amy.

Amy

This is Amy. Leslie, that’s exactly – I was going to ask you to talk a little bit more about executive functioning skills.

Kate

Do you have another hour? When Leslie gets going on executive functioning – you got a minute Leslie- one minute.

Leslie

So Amy, I truly could talk- is there a particular element of it that you’re trying to lead me into or?

Amy

No, just how maybe parents can work on executive functioning skills at home when they’re working on their daily routines.

Leslie

Easy peasy – so the younger kids, “Hey, Jamie, we’re going to the supermarket. What do we need to get at the supermarket? Let’s see here. You know, I think the list is on the fridge (however you keep your list. I don’t know.) Is there anything we need to add? I think we’re doing chicken and rice tomorrow night and lasagna the next night, you know, what do we typically have with that?”  You know, you play dumb to allow her to think through those things and make a list, and it helps you engage with her on that level. Say, “you know, we’re not going to buy that super fancy buffalo mozzarella because it’s like $7 a ball, but this other stuff over here is half that price and it’s going to help our family, you know, meet our food budget.” So, it allows a lot of those hierarchy of needs, hierarchy of ideas, that executive functioning really is. 

It’s another way to have those self-monitoring conversations. I used to do this with my kids a lot. “Oh, my goodness, you know, well, so I’ve got to go work out.” (Okay, that never happened. But let’s pretend I did work out when my kids were little.) And we need to pick up Anna at elementary school at 10. You know, Joe, when do you think we should leave? It takes us like 20 minutes to get over there.” You know, helping them think through sequences of things, executive functioning. I put my hands on my forehead, because that’s where your prefrontal lobe lives. And that’s where all this stuff happens, it demands that you have a very effective working memory so you can hold competing ideas; I have to work out, I have to pick up at the elementary school at 10, and it’s pouring cats and dogs out. I have to remember all of that, to figure out how I’m going to do that. That’s all executive functioning, it’s sorting out the relative importance of each one of those ideas, anticipating obstacles, anticipating time and so on. So, does that make sense Amy?

Amy

Yeah, yes, it totally does. And it’s something that we spend a lot of time on, but I also think it’s something that isn’t talked about enough. In our world, we talk about independent living skills. We talk about orientation, mobility skills, but it’s not very often that we hear our teachers for the visually impaired talking about executive functioning skills.,

Leslie

Well, Kate and I are doing our part…

Amy

So, I was thrilled when you brought it up earlier.

Kate

And one of the reasons, the expanded core curriculum, you know, there are nine areas and executive functioning is not one of them. I guess it would fall under compensatory access. But realistically, it gets ignored. So, that’s such a great point. And it is something that we talk about pretty much in every conversation and to do a shameless pitch of our program, Compass. Executive functioning is one of the leading topics that we really integrate into all of our conversations with college-aspiring students. And as Leslie mentioned earlier, Compass coaches – we work with the student, but we also work with family members and educators, it’s often the teacher of the visually impaired to have these types of conversations. 

So, what is the importance of executive functioning? If we’re coaching a parent, that conversation might look like, “well, what things are happening right now in your household to promote executive functioning?” Then we ask powerful questions to really dig into things that are working really well and things that maybe could be enhanced to complement what’s being done at school in the household. So, if anybody does have a high school student, or even a middle school student, we can just begin the conversation. And if you’re interested in hearing more about coaching, whether it’s Compass, or if it’s just getting some college readiness information, we’d love to chat more with you. We are currently in our recruitment phase so we are accepting applications, as I said, I shameless pitch for Compass. But I really believe in the work we do, and the things we’re talking about tonight, are really laying the foundation for the discussions that unfold through our programming.

Leslie

And, Sheila, I know you’re going to wrap it up.  The other shameless plug, I’ll make, but this is a real resource that we are building. When our new website debuts, we are going to have an evolving and robust resource of college-readiness material that we have created over the last year that covers everything from how do you choose a college, to what is an appropriate college timeline? How do I find the “Best College” for my student with visual impairment? Well, there is none. So let that one go right now. How do you find a good college match for your student? What is executive functioning, and how does it relate? And a billion other things and we, we can’t wait to debut it. And we’ll let Sheila and Maggie know about it when it does debut ,and it will complement the work you all are doing, and all the other folks out there in the field who are kicking up some dust right now. 

This is really intended to be robust. It’s intended to provide a sort of mainstream-quality depth to what college readiness is right now. We know that high school counselors, guidance counselors who back in my day were the ones who guided me through the process don’t have the time to do that in most schools anymore. They just assume special ed or the TVI, or you know someone over there is going to do this, and that is just simply the wrong answer. And that is part of the reason our students are struggling. So, this is really designed to help empower students to understand different timelines, empower parents to have permission to say, we’re going to do this a different way. You know, a gap year is an awesome opportunity, a lot of material about gap years, training programs, opportunities to build skills and maturity that we know our students need before they tackle the next step. So anyhow, that’s coming. We’re done. Thank you, Sheila.

Sheila

I had a question in the chat about what are expanded core skills? 

Leslie

Kate, do you want to take that on my friend?  

Kate

Well, the expanded core curriculum refers to the set of skills that have been identified as critical for individuals who are blind or visually impaired to be successful in learning, living, working, and just life. So, it includes nine strands such as: independent living, orientation and mobility, technology, career education. But there are some really great resources out there, such as the American Foundation for the Blind has a great book on the ECC. But ultimately, what you need to know is there are skills that students with vision impairments benefit from learning. They might miss out on incidental learning, which is observations if they don’t have that visual access, even something like how do you communicate with someone and use the right body language if you cannot see them or receive their visual information? So, it’s compensating for the loss of vision. Leslie’s spiel is executive functioning. I love it, too. But ECC is really mine. So, feel free to reach out to us- our email addresses are there if you want to chat more.

Sheila

Thank you very much. I had one quick question from myself about the parents of these wonderful, gifted, challenging children. As part of the program, is there, I think of a lot of the parents I work with, and their struggle to let their child fail from a young age, or struggle even. Do you guys offer, like a support group or something for the parents? Because I think that’s where some of this, you know, difficulty lies is that the parent just keeps doing and doing like you mentioned?

Leslie

And I mean, Sheila, I think about that, from a couple of perspectives. I agree. And we’re dealing with parents who may be struggling against a system that’s complex, against a medical system that may not exactly be helpful. Grief, for sure. And we know that when you’re emotionally maxed out and taxed, it’s really hard to think proactively, and I say that as a mother, who had a chronically sick, complex kid. She’s very independent, but I was still dealing with things every single day that exhausted me and, and so I think we know that there is that level of exhaustion. 

For example, our CVI Now program at Perkins, it’s a brand new website for supporting parents with fresh new CVI diagnoses or suspected CVI, because there is that, fatigue and that loneliness, and so with our program, we’re not yet working with parents of elementary students, but I swear to God that I think that’s a wonderful idea. And Kate, we should work on that, you know, we agree, we would love to support them. We want to dive into our second year of Compass successfully and effectively, and then we will look to expand and maybe, you know, come up with a great way to partner and do something because there is a need.

Sheila

Thank you. No, I think you’re right. And it’s, it’s just so challenging and speaking to the fatigue, it’s hard to teach executive functioning when you’re tired and you just want to get stuff done. And I think that’s like the downside as a parent, you’re like, Okay, I can either do this and you know, be done with it, or I can have this teachable moment. And I think it’s a nice reminder of those important moments.

Leslie

But for the parents on this call, I want to give my belief in your good intentions. And I really want you to walk away from this conversation and these ideas empowered, and lifted and not feeling like, oh my gosh, I failed my child. That is not what we’re here for. We’re here to help support you moving forward.

Sheila

And just speaking of support for parents, that’s why we have the Lighthouse Guild tele-support program. So, my shameless plug is that there is support for parents out there, even if it’s somebody to hold you accountable. Like you said, you know, you have some information, but it’s really hard. So, other people who can really understand the path that you’re walking, and there’s groups for all different types of eye conditions. And I know that if you have any questions, you can always reach out and we can try to get you in the right group, so we can get you some support if you need it. Absolutely.  Lesley or Kate, do you have anything else to add? Perfect. All right. Thank you so much. And Maggie, did you have anything you wanted to add?

Maggie

I just want to thank you so much. That was really excellent and so informative. And I know that there’s a couple parents who were not able to be on the call tonight that are really looking forward to the recording. So we’ll be sure to share all of your resources too, with all the parents as well.

Leslie

Awesome. Thank you so much. And again, we’re here to help and we’ll let you know once we launch the Resources page for sure.

Sheila

Thank you and just so you know, there’s a lot of wonderful “thank yous”, “fabulous presentations” in the chat. So, you were very helpful tonight. And hope to see you or meet you in person sometime soon.

Leslie

Absolutely. Y’all take care.