Transcript
Lori: Well, hello, Matthew, and welcome to the podcast.
Matthew: Hi, Lori. So lovely to be here and chat with you. Really looking forward to it.
Lori: Well, you are one of those kind of rock star people that everyone wants to meet. And so I get to meet you and what a joy that is for me.
Matthew: I’m going to pass on the rockstar thing to my kids because I joke to them when I’m working with schools around the world. I’m doing a tour and I do gigs and they tell me you’re not a rock star. So I’m going to tell them officially now I am. So that’s great.
Lori: Thanks for that. Senia has deemed you a rock star. You’re also a prolific writer and I see you’re writing all over LinkedIn. So for our listeners, if you are not following Matthew on LinkedIn, I want you to just hit pause right now and do that right away. You won’t be sorry, I promise. So I thought today to frame our conversation a little bit, we’d use two of your powerful articles from the International School Leader magazine. The first is The View from My Wheelchair. And the second is Power Is Everything. How does that sound?
Matthew: It sounds good to me.
Lori: Okay, cool. So your writing, it beautifully intertwines your lived experiences with broader reflections on inclusion. And I was just wondering how your journey with disability shaped the way you view leadership in schools and beyond.
Matthew: It’s an interesting one, I think, and I hope that at my core there has been a fundamental and passionate and sincere commitment to inclusion from the get go. But there’s so much noise. I think when you’re learning to teach, when you’re teaching, when you’re leading, that it’s easy to be pulled off course, you know, like these magnets that pull us here and there. So in recent years, experiencing what it’s like on those cold fringes where you’re not included, where you’re excluded, where you’re not reached, has been—I know it’s weird to call it a gift because I’d do anything to mean it didn’t happen—but in some ways it feels like a bit of a gift because it’s given me insights that previously I only had vicariously, I suppose.
Matthew: I mean, my daughter was diagnosed autistic when she was three and a half and she’s 25 now. So our experience as parents with the necessity that an exclusionary system actually sorts itself out and includes our children goes back to me as a young adult. But living as someone with significant additional needs in a very ableist and exclusionary world, it sharpens your view, I suppose.
Lori: Yeah, yeah. No, thank you for that. I have my own little story, and it seems so silly, but when I tore my ACL last year, I was on crutches and in a wheelchair for a short amount of time. And it really opened my eyes to the world around me and just how difficult it was to navigate our community here from a wheelchair. And then I was disappointed in myself because I realized that I don’t know if I had thought very much about it before that experience. So, yeah, it was both eye opening and disappointing time in my life for not realizing that ahead of time.
Matthew: Well, I think it’s like that, isn’t it? Because, you know, physical disability is the one thing that could happen to any of us tomorrow, regardless of what we do or what we choose or what we decide. You know, it’s the great leveler, if you like. My son’s taken—it’s really interesting. So, I mean, obviously I cannot do anything but observe all of the obstacles in the built environment that prevent me finding my place in the world outside where I live. But my son, now, whenever he leaves the house, he finds himself just noticing every single poorly designed or poorly executed adaptation or the absence thereof. Right. So I think it’s one of those things, whether it’s through us having an accident or having to spend some time on crutches or in a chair or someone close to us going through that, our eyes are just opened, aren’t they?
Lori: Yeah, yeah.
Matthew: In ways that it’s hard to think, why didn’t I see that before, you know?
Lori: Yeah, exactly. And you did a great job yesterday, I thought, in your LinkedIn post describing just a single incident at the—it was at the Heathrow airport—that was completely inaccessible, you know, even though it was meant to be accessible. Can you just describe that story a little bit?
Matthew: Yeah, it really troubles and distresses me when adaptations are made with the intent that those previously excluded can now be fully included, but those adaptations fall completely flat. And oftentimes it’s because the people who needed those adaptations weren’t consulted on what form those adaptations should take. Right. So I see this all the time. You know, I see it with this simple curb cut or dropped curb from pavement to street in cities across the world, where someone’s clearly decided to put one there, but have they decided to put one on the corresponding other side of the road? Oftentimes they haven’t. Or does the curb cut create a ramp from the level of the pavement actually to the level of the road, which might seem really obvious, but usually there’s like a one or two or three centimeter gap between the bottom of the ramp and the road. Or sometimes you see these punishingly steep curb cuts, which I suppose they’ve arisen through someone realizing they’ve got to make the world more accessible, but actually it’s a bigger hazard than would have been no curb cut whatsoever.
Matthew: So yeah, sorry, my mind goes off in different directions. I digress. But go back to that example at the airport. So I fly a lot. In fact, I was leading a systems thinking workshop with a group of kids in Vietnam once a few years ago, and I was asking them, what is this thing we call the climate crisis? And where is it? And I said, who is it? And one of them put their hand up and they said, Mr. Matthew, I think it’s you. And I said, okay, why am I the climate crisis? And he said, because you just told us your job is to fly around the world, working with kids and students everywhere. Anyway, so it’s what I do and it scars. And I don’t think it’s too big a word to say that it traumatizes me every time.
Matthew: So part of my disability is what is called a functional neurological disability, which is also a dynamic disability in that within some contexts, at some times it is very accentuated and very severe. At other times it seems my system almost seems to dial it back and be able to manage it more effectively. But the fascinating thing still for me—as soon as a car drops me at an airport, so even if I was able to do a little bit of even walking at the other end—as soon as the car drops me at the airport, both of my legs cease to work and they do not work again until I arrive into the hotel room at the other end. Such is the difficult and painful and scarring experience I’ve had of airports.
Matthew: Anyway, to actually answer your question, which I’ve not done yet, so I apologize. One of the things that happens when you book special assistance as a wheelchair user trying to use a plane is that you specify what level of assistance you need. Can you do stairs unaided or with assistance, can you move around the cabin, etc. And so I forget the exact code I’m given, but I’m given the code for someone who, because I always choose seats at the very front of the plane, and I can sort of, even on bad days, slide-walk from the plane door to my seat. What I specifically need is to get from the terminal to the plane door. And oftentimes if it’s via a bus, like we’ve all flown places where there isn’t a walkway directly to the plane door, it’s via a bus. And so they give me use of an ambulift.
Matthew: An ambulift is a little bus that has this platform which raises. You go onto the platform at this level, it raises it up, they drive you to the plane, and in theory you board seamlessly. But Heathrow and a lot of other airports—the bottom of the platform, which you would assume just would have an integrated ramp so that the very people who need to use it can get onto that platform—oftentimes it doesn’t. It’s got sort of a four-inch step so you can’t get onto the ramp designed for people like you. And then even getting from the ambulance to the plane entrance, every single walkway, be it from an ambulift or actually in a terminal that I’ve ever used, there is a step up of a significant distance to get from the walkway to the plane.
Matthew: So beyond all the other million things that air travel does to disincentivize and dissuade, and further, to disable those whose mobility is limited, even those basics fail. And someone has designed this ambulift specifically for people like me, and it fails to meet the needs of people like me. So that was a very long answer to your question. I’m sorry about that.
Lori: No, I love it. Thank you. Yeah, it’s important. And I just—after your LinkedIn post, I saw another post by Max Simpson, who had noticed that the curb cuts in Bangkok had posts now stuck right in the middle of them. And it was to dissuade motorbikes from riding on the sidewalk, which is a problem in Bangkok. But what they did was make it so it’s inaccessible for people using wheelchairs or people pushing baby carriages or whatever.
Matthew: Baby carriage. I love it. Love that we’re back in a previous age.
Lori: Yeah, I know.
Matthew: But those things are everywhere, Lori. They really are, like simple examples from public buildings or from hotels. Like most public buildings, if not all now, will have an accessible bathroom. And the accessible bathroom will have a seat at the right level. It will have bars to transfer yourself across, though typically they’ll be against the edge of the room. So as long as you transfer from the left and not the right, or vice versa, you’re okay. So even that fails.
Matthew: And then they have a sink at a lower height, and they have the emergency cord and everything else. But the door to get into the bathroom in 99% of the cases is a heavy, hinged, handled, outward opening, automatically closing door. And then you get the same in accessible rooms in hotels. The room itself, beautifully designed, but the door to get into the room, not accessible at all. So you find yourself—and this is one of the things I was writing about in that article—it’s about power. You find yourself dependent again, on others, on strangers, on people with whom you don’t feel safe whatsoever, because you need to ask them, can you help lift me up that step? Can you open that door for me? And in the bathroom example, please, can I go to the toilet?
Matthew: Which is something I don’t think kids should actually have to ask, let alone me. So, yeah, I think we get this wrong even when we’re trying to get it right.
Lori: Yeah.
Matthew: And I think the parallels in schools are enormous. You know, even if it’s not about physical accessibility, it’s about inclusion and accessibility, full stop. We get it wrong even when we’re trying to get it right.
Lori: That’s exactly where I was going to go next. Thank you. Schools—what are these unintentional barriers that schools are putting up, whether physical or for students who are neurodivergent? What do you see in schools?
Matthew: In terms of physical disability, almost every single school I’ve ever visited around the world is not fully accessible to a wheelchair user. Right. And sometimes the school, kind of slightly embarrassed, will say, yeah, I know, but at the moment we don’t have any wheelchair users—as if that is a reason why we shouldn’t be able to provide for them.
Matthew: Something I said in my LinkedIn piece yesterday was I strongly believe a school is only as inclusive as the experience of its least included community member or even visitor. So yeah, the lack of accessibility campus-wide for anyone in a wheelchair or with any sort of limited mobility is really lacking and it’s really problematic even in schools for which I have the hugest respect in so many other ways.
Matthew: But it goes beyond physical disability. You mentioned neurodivergence. Right. We are forever introducing or perpetuating instruments of this kind of invisible exclusion, whether we realize we are or not. For example, when I first started to work as a teacher in the UK, back then we were required on reports to put effort grades, right? We were supposed to put some sort of grade for what effort the child has put in. I got them myself when I was at school.
Matthew: Schools around the world, be they US curriculum schools, IB Continuum schools, British schools—they all, they call it something slightly different, but they have something to describe a child’s behavior. And when they want to soften that, they call it behavior for learning, or they call it attitudes to learning or effort or whatever else it might be. But if you were to look at a detailed description of a neurodivergent learner—and every single neurodivergent learner is different—but of quite common challenges and quite common manifestations and symptoms that a neurodivergent learner might show, and then on the other hand, you were to show the rubric to describe positive effort behaviors for learning, attitudes to learning, whatever else we want to call it, it is indistinguishable in many schools from what would be the descriptor of a neurodivergent learner.
Matthew: Therefore, as a neurodivergent learner, you can never shine under the spotlight of their rubric on which they report, which goes on to report cards going home, which then seep into the child’s self-esteem and stay with them for life—in something that might have been deemed as neutral as an attitudinal or behavior rubric.
Matthew: And we just, you know, I talk about data a lot, but we do this in all sorts of assessment. Whether in US schools we’re working with standards-based assessment, or in British international schools we’re working with age-related expectations, that mere notion of there being a level of supposedly measurable knowledge, skills, understanding that you should have reached if you were—though they don’t use the word, they mean “if you were normal”—you should have reached this level.
Matthew: That approach to the assessment of academics I find so exclusionary also, because it excludes, because it suggests that normal kids can do this and if you can’t do this, then you’re not normal. And again, how can we as developing children, young people, do anything other than ingest that into our system and carry with us for life?
Matthew: Again, I’m not tremendously good at short answers, sorry, but one could go on forever about the ways in which we—and this is challenging language for many school leaders, I think—the ways in which we harm kids. Because we’re so good at protecting kids from harm now in ways we’ve never been. We can still be so much better. But our approach to discrete child protection safeguarding is thankfully getting better all the time. Yet simultaneously, the very schools who are the best at that are also the schools who, through accidental, invisible, unintended exclusionary practice, are causing harm to neurodivergent disabled kids. Any kids existing anywhere on the margins of a typical school community—those kids are experiencing harm.
Lori: Absolutely, yes. And do you see it also at the policy level of schools? What are some examples?
Matthew: Well, I mean, I see that at every level of schools. Since being in a wheelchair, it suddenly dawned on me that—and I know I’ve not visited every school in the world, far from it, there are what, 20,000 or more international schools and growing the whole time. And maybe I’ve worked with 100 of them in the last five years—but I’ve yet to see anywhere a school leader who needed a wheelchair. And therefore I failed to see myself in the leadership of the school community.
Matthew: Now colleagues, friends of color have experienced that lack of racial representation for as long as we choose to go back. But that lack of representation of those who exist on those fringes and those margins, I think, is a real problem. And it’s not a policy—it’s not “we will not recruit or promote people with these particular identities.” But something’s going wrong with policy if that recruitment and those promotions don’t happen.
Matthew: I also see—I call it a mismatch. It’s to do with marketing, if you like. Schools will have a marketing policy, they’ll have a marketing strategy, they’ll have their own way of competing with the other international schools in their locale so that parents send their kids to their school and not to others. So what most schools do—and this time of year is so depressing for me on social media because school after school uses academic excellence as their mechanism through which to sell their school. They’re blind to the problem that every single school is doing that.
Matthew: And so actually, it doesn’t help parents choose a school anyway. But even if it did, these are schools who say that they are completely inclusive. They have an inclusive mindset and inclusive culture. They are schools who put well-being and belonging first. They’re schools committed to the meaningful and authentic and relentless pursuit of DEI or DEIB or whatever acronym we use there. And yet their loudest and strongest marketing message is, “look at all the kids who got the highest grades.”
Matthew: And again, that policy, that practice is breathed in, it’s inhaled, it’s ingested by everyone in that community. And therefore, if that isn’t you, you’re going to think you’re not enough. And for me, that’s perhaps one of the biggest cruelties of all. You know, as someone who’s grown up never feeling I’m enough for various complex reasons, I think that it’s something that we owe our kids more than anything else—to grow up and wake up each day thinking, you know what, I’m enough. I could grow, I could develop, there are things I can learn to do, but I’m already enough.
Matthew: And yet that marketing policy or strategy or a mixture of both says, actually, some of you are not. You’re not enough. Those kids are enough, but you’re not quite enough. And at that policy level, often it’s—Stephen Covey once said, “the main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.” So one of the most problematic policy scenarios in schools is that there are too many main things. Our main thing is to be fully inclusive, but our main thing is also to pursue academic excellence at all costs, but our main thing is also for our sports teams to beat all the other sports teams locally. But our main thing is also sustainability. And our main thing is this and this and this.
Matthew: So it’s like a clutter of policy priorities, each of which, through that clutter, ends up reducing the impact of any of them and leaving the most persistent
one—i.e., the best results possible—loudest of all.
Lori: Yeah, I’m so glad you mentioned that. You’ve got me all fired up now. Just yesterday or maybe the day before—I read a post from a school that I know quite well, an international school, and it was all about celebrating the AP scores that their students did. And this many students received this score. And I just threw up my hands and I just couldn’t believe that’s where we still are in this marketing era. Why are we celebrating this instead of celebrating our students?
Matthew: But there’s a dispersal of blame and responsibility there, Lori, I think. Sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt.
Lori: No, thank you.
Matthew: Even those leaders who recognize this happens—and as I said in my LinkedIn article, I’m absolutely not school bashing or leader bashing or anything else. There are extraordinary people out there who are doing much more challenging jobs than me, probably much better than I could. So it’s not about criticizing any leaders or schools per se. So even those schools who know they’re doing it will say, well, we have to do this, right? We know it’s not what we should be doing. We know it has consequences, but it’s what our parents want. Or they’ll say, we know it’s problematic, but universities ask for this, so we’ve got to play that game. Or they’ll say, yes, it’s problematic, but we don’t exist in a bubble—we’re part of this inspectorate or this ministry of education still oversees us. And they want these things, therefore that’s why we’re having to do it.
Matthew: And I wrestle with that as somehow a defense of that sort of mismatch between who a school says it is and who it actually kind of thinks it is or wants to be. Because we can’t just pass the responsibility on to those different entities like parents. So many parents in the international school community want nothing but the very best results—because that’s what schools talk about most. And so then when their neurodivergent kid comes back with a report card that doesn’t have that “working above standards” or “age-related expectations,” then they’re disappointed with their child and then the child feels even more inferior. That hasn’t happened in a vacuum. That’s happened because as schools we keep on saying “academic excellence.”
Matthew: And under no circumstances am I suggesting that results don’t matter. But I’m suggesting that the results will happen if we are fully inclusive, if we actually center belonging and psychological safety and the avoidance of identity-based harm, and if we have really good teaching going on—then the results will just be much better anyway. But I think a lot of responsibility lies with us, not just for playing others’ games, but for actually setting the rules of the game that we then suggest to others that they should be playing.
Lori: I love it.
Lori: Okay, back to your articles. You highlight the exhaustion that comes from both planning and masking. How do you think schools can better recognize and respond to this invisible labor carried by our disabled and neurodivergent students?
Matthew: If we go back to what you said about the injury you sustained and how actually living for a thankfully short time within that situation opened your eyes to what it’s like to be in that situation—right. So empathy is this magic skill which we underuse. I think the more we talk in a safe space with our disabled and neurodivergent learners, the more we understand their story and the more that they feel safe, the more we will enjoy their actual story rather than the story that they’ve created to mask what’s actually going on underneath.
Matthew: And now, as parents, our first experience of the concept of masking was with our daughter when she was an elementary-aged autistic kid. And some of the books we were reading were books like Martian in the Playground or Pretending to Be Normal, oftentimes alluding quite strongly to this metaphor of the mask. Obviously everyone in your network will be familiar with this as well.
Matthew: I read a provocative post a short while ago and I cannot remember who wrote it and therefore I cannot credit or source it here, but I’m trying to dig it out. It was suggesting that the language of, or the word “masking” is almost problematic in itself. And I just thought I’d throw that out there. And what they were suggesting instead was the idea of “camouflage,” because mask suggests something almost Machiavellian. Right, I’m going to put on a mask to cover up who I am. Like it’s a conscious thing that I’m going to hide something about me.
Matthew: Whereas in my experience—and I must stress, I am not an expert, I’ve done no masters or postgraduate study in inclusive practices, I’m not a psychologist—but in my experience as a parent of neurodivergent kids, and in my experience as a disabled adult who feels this pressure and necessity to pretend, it’s not a conscious, almost calculated design of a mask and decision to wear it. It’s more like camouflage. Because why does camouflage happen in nature? It happens as a means of survival. If the camouflage hadn’t developed or the ability to camouflage hadn’t evolved, then whoever or whatever needed to camouflage would be exposed and they’d be exposed to harm, they’d be exposed to danger, they’d be exposed to risk.
Matthew: Which makes me see the concept of masking slightly differently. It’s the same thing we’re describing. But when my daughter was “masking” in the playground, it would be far more accurate to say that she was camouflaging, because she wasn’t necessarily consciously doing anything. She was doing what we’ve evolved over the history of time to do, which is to survive. So her doing what we call masking was actually her instinctively camouflaging so that she was at less risk from others. So I’m trying now to talk more and more about this notion of camouflage. But whether it is conscious covering or subconscious covering, it comes at huge emotional cost. It’s exhausting.
Matthew: Any of us who have consciously done it—you know, I’m cripplingly introverted. I say cripplingly because in some contexts it really feels like that context is disabling me as a result of my introversion. But when I was a school principal, I had to go to cocktail receptions and diplomatic receptions, and I came out of those experiences really damaged and really exhausted and just wanting to cry or actually crying or breaking down. Because being someone other than yourself for sustained periods, for existential reasons, is physically and emotionally draining.
Matthew: And the story I’m about to tell you about my daughter will be familiar to many parents of neurodivergent kids in primary or elementary school. In the worst years of her time there, when she got home within a meter of our front door, she would almost every day fall to the floor, break down, and descend into streams of tears that took a while to stop. And yet in school, what they saw was a happy, go-lucky, confident child. And that’s living evidence for us on a daily basis of the damage and of the exhaustion of camouflaging in order to survive.
Matthew: And I feel that myself. I love what I do when I work with schools, but there is a degree of camouflaging—less so now, I think, because I don’t feel the pressure of being a school leader and therefore being accountable in the same way, I can be far more vulnerable. But certainly when I was a school leader, it was exhausting, because to pretend to be someone else is a tiring thing to do.
Matthew: So I think, what do we do with that? As school leaders or as educators? We seek intentionally to develop the empathy to understand the form and function of that exhaustion so that we can reduce the intensity and the duration of the experiences which will lead that child to need to camouflage and to exhaust themselves as a result. In other words, we can adapt the culture, the climate, the physical and pedagogic architecture of our school. We can use actual universal design, so that it’s not necessary to camouflage a lot of the time, because there isn’t harm lurking around every corner.
Lori: Thank you. We’re going to switch gears. We’re running near the end of this podcasting time. We’ve actually gone over. We usually do like 30 minutes. But I could talk to you all day. So I do want to just mention or ask you about your work. You’ve talked about going to various schools and working with them. What is it that you do with these schools?
Matthew: Increasingly, I find that a little hard to answer. I used to find it really easy to answer because I just did this. But now, ultimately, I’m helping leadership teams, schools, communities, groups of parents, students—everybody—to almost interrogate their school through richer, more varied epistemological lenses. In other words, how do we know who we are as a school?
Matthew: Because we have who we say we are as a school, we have who we think we are as a school, we have who we actually are as a school, we have who we want to be as a school. But it seems to me that rather than all these schools around the world who say that they’re outstanding and amazing—most schools have a long way to go, right? Because the construct of formal compulsory schooling, bringing hundreds or thousands of kids into one space to learn, it’s problematic in the first place.
Matthew: So it seems to me the more that we can bring those four parts of our school together, so that who we say we are is much closer to who we think we are, which is much closer to who we actually are, which is much closer to who we want to be, then we are happier schools, we’re more authentic schools, we’re safer schools, we’re more inclusive schools. So my work is around those ways of knowing. And through a data and assessment lens—we have traditionally known things through a remarkably small toolbox of epistemological strategies. And so I’m trying to help schools just to know things more holistically, to know things in radical and fresh ways, rather than these orthodoxies to which we’ve clung in education for so long.
Matthew: So even that wasn’t a snappy answer. I help schools to get to know themselves better.
Lori: Thanks. Well, you’re also going to be our keynote speaker in Dubai in April, so I would love for you not to give everything away, but can you just share a little bit about what you’ll be talking about?
Matthew: Yeah. And I’m so excited to be there. Genuinely, Laurie. So excited that even though I’m new to the Senia family, it still feels very much like home already. So super excited to be there.
Matthew: So when I speak to the whole conference and share some stories with the whole conference, I’ll be talking a bit more about this view from my wheelchair and what I have learned and continue to learn on a daily basis. I will be showing vulnerability, or as my kids say, oversharing, and hoping to highlight the links between the learning I’ve undergone and the ways in which schools can learn from that sort of learning to make them more inclusive spaces for every single child.
Matthew: I’m also going to be leading a pre-conference on these different types of data. I call them kind data, kind of warm or contextual data, the street data that Safir and Dugan have written about, and then what I call slow data, which is really stepping back and letting all of these ways of knowing that we’ve embraced just sit and then we can dig into what we could find out there.
Matthew: So yeah, a variety of different things, but essentially I’m sharing stories in the hope that my story helps you with your story, because ultimately we’re all made up of stories. And when we share stories with each other in that liminal space between them, I think beautiful things grow. So hopefully we’ll see that happen in Dubai, too.
Lori: Yes. And the theme is the Transformative Power of Belonging. So it sounds like the perfect keynote and pre-conference to support that theme.
Matthew: Absolutely. The belonging paradigm is one that every school claims to have done. “We’ve cracked it.” And yet I would say, and this is a bit bold, but I still believe that an awfully large number of students and educators and leaders and parents in the international school ecosystem do not feel like they belong there. So we’ve got to do better.
Lori: I think we’ve got to do better. And that’s a great way to end this podcast. So, Matthew, thank you for your time today, and we will see you in April in Dubai.
Matthew: Wonderful. Thank you so much, Laurie. Thanks for having me.
Lori: Okay. I’m going to keep it recording because I was wondering—you don’t have to—would you want to do a top tip?
Matthew: I’ve got two, but I want to run them by you before I then share it, because then you can say which one’s going to work best. One was about something I’m working on at the moment. It’s a protocol that I’m calling the Well-Being Footprint. And it’s basically encouraging leaders in schools to consider in advance what might be the impact of changes and decisions they take on the well-being and belonging of their most vulnerable community members, rather than waiting for that damage and harm to appear downstream and then saying, oh dear, what do we do about that?
Matthew: And then we put in all the interventions. So that was the first one—intentionally interrogating our policy and our pedagogy upstream so that we don’t have to mop up the problems downstream. And the other one was—you know, talking about UDL. I’m a big proponent and fan of UDL and I talk about it a lot in my work. But I wonder whether it’s one step ahead of where we should be focusing, which is on what I call UDWB—Universal Design for Well-Being and Belonging. Because if we universally design so that everyone felt like they belonged and that they could be well, then the learning is going to be more universally enjoyed in the first place.
Matthew: So those were a couple of the tips. But if they’re not practical enough, then very simply—research the curb cut with the user before you design and execute it poorly in the first place.
Lori: I love both your ideas, the first two. So I say you do it.
Matthew: Let’s do the upstream-downstream one.
Lori: Okay, sounds good.
Matthew: Hi, my name is Matthew, and I work with schools across the world, helping them with meaningful and intentional and unconditional inclusion and belonging, and how we can use assessment and different ways of knowing to help them get there. My top tip is that as school leaders, I think we need to do more to interrogate the potential harm of the decisions and the changes we are designing and executing. And we do so upstream so that we can assess and mitigate that harm before we affect that chain and take those decisions, rather than waiting for the problems to manifest further downstream and then we can wring our hands and say, what are we going to do about that? So think upstream. Sort out the problems before they happen.
Lori: Awesome. Brilliant. Well, I really appreciate your time. This is great. And we’ll… oh, I can hit stop recording. The recording has stopped. I needed to ask a question. You said Martian in the Playground. And what was the other?
Matthew: The other one was Pretending to Be Normal. Now these may be dated in terms of best practice, and thinking advances all the time, doesn’t it? Just like when our kids were little, we were talking about Asperger’s, and yet we don’t talk about Asperger’s now. But Pretending to Be Normal was by Liane Holliday Willey. And she embraced her autism after years of self-doubt and self-denial. So she’s talking about her story and we found it really empowering at the time. But I haven’t read it for a long time. Sometimes things date, sometimes they don’t. Sometimes things are timeless.
Lori: Well, I can just note that next to the resources.
Matthew: And I should try and find who said that thing about camouflage or who pointed it out to me. But I’ll let you know if I figure it out. It’s so important to source and yet, like, we’re learning stuff all the time. Like even that idea of upstream thinking, I’m learning with Tricia Friedman because she, April, and I are working with Bavarian school. And if one stops at every single juncture to say, oh, this idea I originally got from this person in this conversation, you’d never share the ideas. So there’s a balance there somewhere, I think.
Lori: But that’s a power team. Tricia, you…
Matthew: And it’s so exciting.
Lori: Goodness.
Matthew: It’s really exciting. I love it.
Lori: Yeah. Okay. Well, this podcast will probably go out next week. I’m quite behind in getting these things out to the world.
Matthew: Well, that’s pretty swift for me. I’ve been on podcasts where they say it’ll be out in the next six months. So a week is cool.
Lori: And I want to get this one done and I want to get people excited about you.
Matthew: And my rock star persona.
Lori: Your rock star. Yeah. You know, there’s just a few of you out there.
Matthew: Oh, it’s funny.
Lori: Yeah. All right. Well, thank you. Have a great day ahead.
Matthew: Thanks a lot, Lori. And we will speak soon, I’m sure. But thank you so much for having me on your podcast.
Lori: You betcha. See ya. Bye.
Matthew: Take care. Bye.
