Episode 27: Social-Emotional Learning and Inclusive Education

On this episode, I welcome my guest Deirdre Azzopardi. Deirdre is an Occupational Therapist, and during our conversation, we discuss how mindfulness and social-emotional learning can break down the barriers to create a more inclusive environment for all students.

Transcript

Arthur: This is the inclusion Think Tank podcast brought you by New Jersey Coalition for Inclusive Education, NJCIE, where we talk about inclusive education, why it works, and how to make it happen.

On this episode, I welcome my guest Deirdre Azzopardi. Deirdre is an Occupational Therapist, and during our conversation, we discuss how mindfulness and social-emotional learning can break down the barriers to create a more inclusive environment for all students.

Arthur: I would like to welcome everyone back to another episode of the Inclusion Think Tank Podcast brought to you by the New Jersey Coalition for Inclusive Education. I am your host, Arthur Aston, and I am happy to welcome my guest today, Deirdre Azzopardi to the podcast. Thank you for joining me today. I am happy to have you on as a guest.

Deirdre: Awesome. I'm very happy to be here.

Arthur: Yes. So to start our conversation, can you share a little bit about yourself with us and tell us who is Deirdre and how did you become interested in the world of inclusive education?

Deirdre: So I am an occupational therapist now for 30 years and also have a son who received special services from 18 months to 18 years old, so have been on both sides of the IEP table.

And through that time I came to inclusion because I started to notice that my own ideas that somebody needed to be sort of ready before they got into a classroom that I needed to help them to catch up, whatever that meant when somebody kind of squeaked by and was in the classroom already, like I had to kind of open my eyes and, started to notice like kids at a whole lot better than I expected.

And that perhaps, I didn't know everything. And so as my own journey through like a spiritual journey, yoga, I became a yoga teacher through a lot of my own practices. I realized that I know less than I thought and that I'm more comfortable knowing less, which is good, and that, perhaps I was being a gatekeeper myself.

Deirdre: And when I started to really see inclusion as really a right, a civil right, it was kind of hard to turn back from it. So, I have a lot of heated discussions about it, but I believe inclusion is a civil right.

Deirdre: One of the definitions of OT that I've always loved and part of like the yoga journey that the yoga journey it is about removing all of the layers that we have accumulated over our life. The not enough-ness, the societal messages. All of the stuff that we accumulate, the traumas that, the traumas from our ancestors is to kind of find the essential you underneath all of it.

Right? And so I love that. And I feel that. And one of the definitions of O.T. that I resonate with is that we're supposed to be barrier removers. We're supposed to look at the environment and say, how can we help this individual become the person that they want to be the best version of themselves by helping to remove barriers?

Deirdre: And I think that that's amazing, except that sometimes we become the people that decide who the best version of that person is without their own voice. We decide what we think they should be, especially young children. And then sometimes we're the barrier. When we look at the environment as the environment that we're supposed to help to make environments better for kids, sometimes we're the actual gatekeeper and the people that are the barrier, by our own thoughts and about a child, about their belonging or about where they are.

So, yeah, it's really a lot of this work is really about a deep dive into yourself and your own ideas.

Arthur: Yes. And you've already started talking about this a little bit. You mentioned that you're an occupational therapist and you focus on mindfulness and social-emotional learning. Can you talk a little bit about what mindfulness and social-emotional learning are and how they can add a benefit to an inclusive education setting?

Deirdre: Sure. So social-emotional learning is kind of all the rage, right where we look at school systems we look in especially, I think, in disability spaces, right? How someone manages their emotions, how they feel about themselves, how they relate to others. And how all of that plays out in society is like, beyond important because without sort of that basis, mental health, someone can't learn, right?

You can't learn unless we have that basis of mental health. And there's such a crisis in our country across the world, really, of children who are not feeling so good about themselves or and so I think really all hands on deck. A lot of OT’s have been known to just be like these people who help with things like handwriting, which I personally don't care about very much.

It's very hard for me to care about. I have to like really I really have to get excited about it because I don't think that that's the barrier normally for kids not being able to access education. There are so many more layers to that. So in OT school we actually learn a lot about mental health as well as physical health, but we've kept them very separate.

But, the actual connection between the mind and the body and the spirit which very few professions do both, in school. we could be the experts on that. So that's what I think we could bring to the school system. But I think we all get stuck in our own little silos.

Deirdre: Arthur, you have a disability, a physical disability. There's no way that physical disability hasn't impacted how you felt about yourself on an emotional level. There is no way, right? It's your body and your body is a reflection of you. And so you've, I'm sure, had to work through a lot of feelings about that. I'm not putting you on the spot, but I'm just using you as an example.

So, all of us are impacted by the entirety of ourselves. And so mindfulness is really about taking time to really look into your heart, right? Instead of just moving from one thing to the next thing in the next thing. And especially in schools, people are moving at the speed of light and not taking time to realize, you know, I'm saying that we're all on this hamster wheel, right?

There are teachers who have five-minute schedules. I am not joking. Five-minute schedules

Arthur: Oh, yeah, you're absolutely right about having my physical disability. And I've had it all my life. There have been times where it, you know, definitely did affect my, you know, my mental health and whether it was being left out of things that that my friends could do.

I always tell people that it wasn't the being left out of sports or football or things like that. That didn't bother me because that never looked fun to me. Like getting hit, that never looked like fun to me, but just doing things like on the playground and not being able to climb up, or use the monkey bars, as they called them.

Not being able to do those kinds of things. The daredevil types of things that my friends would do, just little things like that or just more important or bigger things where my body just hurts sometimes so bad, where I just really want to stay in bed all day like that can be very draining on the physical and the mental health for me.

Arthur: So I definitely agree with you in that, we are like our total, you know, the total parts of everything of our life. That's so true. And I majored in psychology. So I really am connected with the mind and the body parts of, you know, being connected and how how they all work together.

Deirdre: I did that, too. So I got my undergraduate was in O.T., like back in the day. You could do that. And then my master's was in psychology, so I think I was or my master’s informed a lot of my work. And then I went back and I got my doctorate, and my doctorate was on using exercise as a tool for autistic kids and cognitive behavioral techniques.

So really like how we spoke to ourselves. And one of the reasons that I wanted to do that is because I always related myself to my work. Not always, but over time I realized how much I impact what I'm doing. And it was through my own exercise journey because what happened was I realized the only reason I exercise was to feel good.

I never could do it just because, like the world told me, I should, because I should be skinnier and all that other stuff that I never could sustain it for that reason. It was only when movement made me feel good that I was able to sustain it. And I was like, You know what? If that makes me feel good?

Deirdre: I bet it could help some of my students who are feeling super anxious. You know, a lot of kids, a lot of kids with disabilities also struggle so greatly from anxiety. So I want to help bridge that gap where a kid can start to understand, like, what movements make me feel good.

So it isn't only about exercise as a “should”, because the “should” part, I think, is one of the reasons that like 50% of people don't exercise because society has made it as should. So just like one of my biggest goals is to help people to find something in their body that feels really good. So they look forward to it.

It makes them feel good because that body awareness that impacts anxiety levels and health and all of those other things. So that really becomes sort of an obsession for me, like how can I help this kid to feel good in their bodies, through whatever means?

Arthur: I don't know what it was about, what you just said about the should part that was I was like, wow!

Deirdre: Well, I think that there's been plenty of studies on that, that when we make things a ‘should’, there is a part of us that says, screw you, I don’t want to do it. You just made it a should, I don't want to do it.

There's that part of us that does that and it's all unconscious, in our minds. Like think about foods. We all know we should be eating broccoli and not Doritos. Right? Right. There's like, there's no misunderstanding of that. Right. But we don't really do things based on this super conscious thing, like we should do the things that are right for us.

We tend to do things that make us feel good and treat us feel really good. Right? The marketers have figured out a way to make Doritos feel better than broccoli.

Arthur: Yeah, it's natural. As you said, it's unconscious, like a rebellion kind of thing. Like, okay, yeah, I should do it, okay. I'm not going to do it.

Deirdre: Exactly. Exactly. So I love I love sharing yoga with kids and mindfulness because the truth is because of the way the culture is right now and because of, video games and all, you know, they've everyone has figured out how to make kids feel like, you know, get really addicted to like these dopamine heads from video games and, you know, poor food choices and all this other stuff.

It's like very easy to get kids addicted to this stuff. So I think excitement has become like just being like hyper-stimulated and excited has become, confabulation with feeling good. So like that high level. But the truth is, if you see a kid like drop some of that and just really relax, you can see in their body they feel really good about that.

So that does feel really good. And so if you can get kids young enough to sort of and not every kid. And so when I teach it, I, just talk about how I feel in my own body, Like I constantly let people know about it so that they can come up with their own conclusions. I don't say to kids, you should feel whatever way you know your feelings or your own feelings, but you will see kids kind of like drop the mask, drop the armor, and it's really exciting to see.

Arthur: Yes. I am loving this conversation because you're leading all into our next questions.

Deirdre: How exciting.

Arthur: Which is great. So in preparing for all of my conversations for the podcast, I tried to find other conversations that the guests have had on other podcasts or articles they may have written or participated in.

So I heard you speak about Stop and Notice. And I would like for you to share what that is about, and how that can be important and the classroom setting.

Deirdre: So I lead a lot of professional development. And one of the things I kind of give out to everybody is a stop sign.

And using stop, it’s an acronym. I forget when you use each letter. I don't know. It's not coming to me. Anyway, so S is for stop. Just literally stop. Pause. We don't take many pauses in life, Take a pause. T is for take a breath. When we take a breath, a conscious breath, we kind of clear space a little bit to actually notice.

So O is for observe, like observe how you're feeling because so many kids don't know how they feel, So many adults don't know how they feel, and then P is to proceed with kindness. So like, always choose the kind choice. And a lot of it's a choice for ourselves, you know, a kind thought for ourselves, not just kindness towards others.

Deirdre: It’s just a nice one because you can see it out in the world, stop signs. You can just put it up on your wall to notice when you're nervous system is kind of off-kilter because sometimes we can get really locked into our own stuff. And when we do this and when we do this consciously, it when we do it out loud, I think we do it out loud with kids.

What I do a lot with kids is especially as I work with really our preschoolers, and I just feel like these messages, this is like in preschool. I think people don't understand enough about early childhood education that the voices that these kids here are, the internalized voices they will hear for the rest of their lives. So I'm always like, it's in real-time.

It's us where we are the voice right now. So if, I'm having a really rough day, right, and I come into a space and I'm like, discombobulated and I'm pissed off about something and whatever and say I'm about to teach a yoga class and the whole class breathes together and like, I have this moment of clarity, like, oh, and my whole nervous system reacts to that.

And I say it out loud. The kids call me Mrs. A. Mrs. A came, I was a disaster. I was late and my dog threw up and, all these things happened and I just wanted to get through this class. But when everybody stopped and took this breath together like you helped me so much.

I feel so much better. Thanks. Thanks so much, because I think the kids don't have enough messages that it's okay to stop and notice how they feel. And most of the messages of society is if you're crying, just get over it. Let's move on. A lot of messages are like, we're going to tell you how to feel.

Kid's emotions are inconvenient.

Arthur: Oh, wow.

Deirdre: Right. They are. And that and we have to be honest about that so that a lot of these like self-regulation tools I kind of laugh about because we put these things up on walls. I don't want to pick on the zones, but the zones is one of them.

Like there's the green and the red and whatever. And like, what zone are you in? How do you change it? All these things, all these steps. And I'm like, how many adults are doing that? How many adults are doing that? Like how many adults, when they're really annoyed, are stopping like, Oh, I'm really annoyed. I really shouldn't act like this or like, I've just hurt someone else's feelings.

Maybe I should stop, take a breath. Like they're not going through all of those steps. But we expect very small kids to do it. So unless we are one, sometimes when we're not in that heightened state, when we're like in a more middle ground at least where we can access those parts of our brain that are our higher self.

Deirdre: We should talk about it in front of kids. So kids are like, Oh, that's the steps in real-time. I'm doing it. I'm doing those steps and I've done it ten times wrong and I'm letting you know how I did it incorrectly. And that's okay too. That's just called being human. But expecting kids to do it is like, what? Like small children need us to do it.

They need us to be, to be able to regulate with them. They need us to, be able to access those parts of our brain. But that's a lot of practice. That's a lot of practice on adults have to practice it.

Arthur: Mhm. And as you said, the voices that they will hear for the rest of their lives is when they are that young and to have a physical example of you doing that, the stop for example, it's like okay, it makes it okay because it's like oh if my teacher did it, then you know, it makes it okay.

Yeah, it's not a big deal.

Deirdre: Exactly. And when you, can get a teacher to sort of I say get like as if I'm like making them. But if some, if a teacher really sort of buys in, I've had students like do these really awesome things like students tell they're like little four year olds tell their parents, like, you look really stressed, Mom, why don't you take a breath?

You might feel better, Like, drop the mic. That's all I need. My life's work complete, and all of this relates to inclusion. You know why? Because so many kids are not included because of behavioral challenges. That is one of the big walls. You know, when a kid has a behavioral challenge, emotional challenges like, you know, everyone feels very, very much that they don't belong.

That’s one that is easy for people to sort of feel like, well, they definitely don't belong you know? So all of us need to help kids to be able to regulate their emotions so that they don't become the other. And kids get scared of kids who can't regulate their emotions, That becomes frightening to them.

Deirdre: They might be able to accept an Arthur in a wheelchair. Hmm. They might be able to do that. But it's very hard for them to accept the kid that's hitting the teacher.

Arthur: Hmm. Wow. Yeah, That's a very good point. It's a very good point. Wow.

All right. So I have one more question for you before we wrap up this discussion today. And that is, can you tell us about the New Jersey inclusive education Technical Assistance Project and the grant that your district received and what you're doing in your district to make some change?

Deirdre: So we have been involved with that. It's really so there was a smaller grant last year, which was the related service grant. So since I'm part of related service, it was about moving from calling kids into our little therapy rooms and performing magic. Now we're pushing much more into the classroom, which I had been doing for quite a while.

But I think that the professional development kind of helped us to all figure out better ways to make it work in terms of scheduling. So a lot of this is about logistics. Logistics is a big issue in inclusion. It's just about like who, what, where, how do we use the resources we have, what are the resources that we need?

A lot of that is, you know, some of the barriers to inclusion. It's definitely been doing much more groups. And I think that therapists, you know, doing more groups, it helps tremendously with inclusion and I think even therapists doing whole class groups helps with inclusion because it's like, taking some stuff off the teacher. I think teachers are just inundated and stressed.

And so even if they would like to include a student, sometimes they feel like they don't even know where to start and they don't feel supported. And it's just so anxiety provoking. Everyone doing the same thing makes life a lot easier. You know, a lot of there's a lot of talk about compliance-based, kind of against compliance-based things like, that we shouldn't be doing things that are leading just towards kids being compliant, except when you teach a class.

And I think that's why therapists and, you know, administrators, like one of my biggest things that I would love in the world is if all administrators had to do one day of one day a month of a subbing, one day, month of subbing because it's very easy to tell people how to do inclusion. It is very easy to tell people how to take data and all this other stuff.

But it's another thing to actually teach a class where somebody is not being compliant and you're trying to teach the class. So I think when therapists or anybody kind of gets out of their own little place and actually tries to do it, you start to really see the difficulty and then come from a much better place of learning how to come up with the solutions to those problems.

Deirdre: You know what I mean? Because, you're kind of walking the walk instead of just talking the talk. So that's sort of what we started doing last year and now we're doing even more. We have among the leadership group. So there's a bunch of us who get together once a month. Now it's mostly professional development at this point about how we can increase our numbers, our own blind spots.

We're kind of self-evaluating. So that's where we're at right now.

Arthur: Wow, it's really great with the grants that the different districts get and the work that they can do to continue the change, I should say, of making schools more inclusive because it really does benefit everybody in the classroom and the district that really helps.

Deirdre: It’s the only way to an equitable world, we get to know each other like we have to get to know each other. So I think if kids in a gen-ed classroom and just literally don't know, say kids in other classrooms, they can only be scared, right?

I mean, all isms is related on is related to people not knowing each other. When people get to know each other, it's a whole different world. It's like I don't have to be afraid of someone if I get to know them. Then I start to realize all the places that we're the same and we're not the same.

We all have differences, and differences should be celebrated and understood and accommodated for. But there's also so much, we all have the same needs. We all want to connect. We all want to be appreciated. We all want to feel autonomous. We all want to feel like we matter. And, there's no kid that doesn't want that.

So we have to figure out ways to make sure that everybody does matter.

Arthur: Yes, I agree. I mean. Well, I had to sell the. Deirdre, thank you so much for this conversation, and, it's your day off today. So I appreciate you taking the time to join me for this conversation. I really appreciate it talking with you and just getting to know of the work that you're doing and the change that you are helping to create and the students you are, you know, have the privilege of working with and just, you know, so thank you again for your time and I appreciate this conversation.

Deirdre: Arthur, I appreciate you. And I love that you said the privilege of working with because believe me, it is a privilege to be in the lives of kids who the path is harder for. So definitely a privilege because of that.

Arthur: Yes. So I will be in touch with you since you gave me a good book recommendation. So I definitely will be following up with you about that. Awesome. Yes. So do you take care and enjoy the rest of your day.

Deirdre: Thanks, Arthur.

Arthur: Thank you.

Arthur: We thank you for listening to this episode of the Inclusion Think Tank Podcast. This podcast is brought to you by New Jersey Coalition for Inclusive Education, NJCIE. Be sure to subscribe on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts. And don’t forget to follow us on social media, @NJCIE. Until next time.