{"data":{"ID":1560,"Class":"Conversation","Created":1790085151,"CreatorID":79,"RevisionID":null,"Status":"Accepted","Title":"Rethinking the Systems We Ask Students with Learning Differences to Navigate","Handle":"rethinking_the_systems_we_ask_students_with_learning_differences_to_navigate","ShortDescription":"What happens when we stop asking students to fit the systems we have built and start asking whether those systems fit the learners in front of us? Using students with learning differences as a lens, this conversation will challenge participants to examine the structures schools often treat as fixed\u2014from pacing, schedules, and assessment to intervention, executive-function expectations, and definitions of independence. Together, we will explore where student support ends and system redesign begins, asking a bigger question: What could school look like if we intentionally designed it around how students learn?","Description":"Schools often devote significant time and resources to helping students become more successful within existing educational systems. We teach students to organize more effectively, work independently, manage time, read increasingly complex texts, communicate their thinking, meet deadlines, and navigate established schedules and expectations. But what happens when we turn the question around? Instead of continually asking how students can better navigate school, what might we learn by asking how school could be better designed for the students actually sitting in our classrooms?\r\n\r\nThis conversation draws from the experience of a K\u20138 school intentionally designed for students with learning differences, including dyslexia, dysgraphia, dyscalculia, ADHD, and executive-function challenges. Working with learners who have often struggled within traditional educational structures provides a unique opportunity to reconsider assumptions about pacing, intervention, assessment, independence, instructional design, scheduling, and academic rigor.\r\n\r\nParticipants will examine common school structures and identify which elements we tend to treat as fixed\u2014and why. Small-group conversations will invite participants to take familiar student challenges and \u201cflip the problem,\u201d shifting from \u201cHow do we help this student fit the system?\u201d to \u201cWhat could we change about the system or learning environment?\u201d\r\n\r\nThe conversation will also explore an important tension: If we design schools to be increasingly responsive to individual learners, how do we simultaneously prepare young people to navigate a world that will not always adapt to them?\r\n\r\nIn connection with EduCon\u2019s question, \u201cWho are the kids the world will need?\u201d, participants will consider whether independence should mean doing everything without support\u2014or developing the self-awareness, agency, strategies, and ability to advocate for the conditions needed to succeed.\r\n\r\nRather than leaving with a prescribed model for redesigning school, participants will collaboratively identify principles of learner-centered design and one assumption within their own educational setting that may be worth challenging.","Link":["https:\/\/www.linkedin.com\/in\/julie-harakal-7a992a238\/"],"Audience":["Middle School","Elementary School"],"Practice":"This session will be structured as a facilitated conversation rather than a traditional presentation. After a brief introduction and learner-profile provocation, participants will be asked, \u201cWhere is the problem located\u2014the learner, the instruction, the environment, or the system?\u201d Their responses will establish the starting point for our conversation.\r\n\r\nParticipants will then engage in a \u201cWhat Do We Treat as Fixed?\u201d protocol, collaboratively identifying school structures and expectations that are rarely questioned, such as schedules, pacing, deadlines, assessment formats, intervention structures, and definitions of independence.\r\n\r\nIn small groups, participants will use a \u201cFlip the Problem\u201d protocol. Each group will examine a familiar student challenge, but instead of asking, \u201cHow do we fix or support this student?\u201d they will ask, \u201cWhat could we redesign in the instruction, environment, or system?\u201d Groups will share their thinking and identify common themes.\r\n\r\nWe will then facilitate a whole-group dialogue around a productive tension: Where is the line between designing responsive environments for learners and preparing students to navigate a world that will not always adapt to them?\r\n\r\nRather than providing participants with predetermined conclusions, the group will collaboratively develop a set of learner-centered design principles based on the conversation. Participants will close by responding to one final question: \u201cWhat is one thing your school treats as fixed that might not actually need to be?\u201d\r\n\r\nThe facilitator\u2019s role throughout will be to pose questions, surface differing perspectives, connect ideas across groups, and create space for participants to challenge both existing systems and one another\u2019s assumptions.","Presenter":["Julie Harakal"],"PresenterAffiliation":["The Hillside School"],"PresenterEmail":["jharakal@hillsideschool.org"],"ScheduleSlotID":null,"ScheduleLocationID":null,"SubmitterID":79,"AdditionalComments":null,"LiveChannel":null,"Hashtag":null,"VokleID":null,"RecordingURL":null,"ConferenceID":14}}