Nothing has been more disconcerting to me in my forty-five years as an educator than to ask a parent or teacher:  ”What is your child’s (or teen’s) strengths?” and have them answer:  ”He hasn’t got any.”  I’ve actually heard this several times in my career.  It was such responses that motivated me to come up...Read More

Any time you mandate that kids must do something, ANYTHING, you’ve automatically created a special category for those kiddos who don’t or won’t – and that’s how labels are born.  Before reading was mandatory for kids, there weren’t any reading disabilities.  Before we descended into this ”short attention span culture” of ours, we didn’t have...Read More

The concept of neurodiversity emerged in the 1990’s as a way for autism advocates to affirm their identity as people with neurological differences rather than as disabled individuals.  The idea has spread as other advocates (including myself) have sought to articulate the ”diversity rather than disability” message to a broader segment of the population than...Read More

This quote came to me via email and it seems to speak so profoundly to those who look at young children, especially those with special needs, and place them in foretold futures (e.g. ”this child will never be able to …” or ”most children with this diagnosis will grow up to….”).  I’m working on revising...Read More

Today we have a guest blog from Chris Santos-Lang who is the founder and president of The Organization for Collaborative Leadership, Inc.  Chris has written about evaluativism, which, simply put, is the disregard of people with differing values, including political, social, moral, philosophical, gender-based, sexuality-based, racial, ethnic, and class-based values, among other points of view....Read More