Planning for Transition to Adulthood in Early Childhood.

Dr. Katie Herron interviews Mike Nevins, a research associate with the Center on Community Living and Careers (CCLC)at the Indiana Institute on Disability and Community, Indiana University, Bloomington. Nevins has a background in transition and postsecondary planning for students with high support needs, community based postsecondary programs, person centered planning, and college-based postsecondary programs. The podcast will touch on planning for transitions starting in early childhood.

Transcript

Welcome to the Early Childhood On-the-Go Podcast, where the Early Childhood Center team shares ideas and strategies for professionals and families.  Dream big, start early. Hello, I'm here with Mike Nevins, Research Associate at the Center for Community Living and Careers (CCLC), and he's joining us today to talk about transition. Mike, tell us a little bit about who you are. Hi. Yeah, I'm Mike Nevins. I'm with the Center for Community Living and Careers at the Indiana Institute on Disability and Community. I've been here for five years now. I've been a teacher for 25 years and focused on students with significant disabilities, and transition coordinator where I worked in programs that were for students 18-to-22 that were in the transition to adulthood years that still had an IEP, but were working on what their life was going look like after high school. So, I imagine now that people listening are thinking, “I thought we were listening to an early childhood podcast, and why are you here?”  So, I used to specialize in supporting transition from high school into adulthood. And I'm curious about, we're going to talk about the connection to early childhood here in a minute, but what are some of the things you've learned about that transition process? Yeah, we have a program called Family Employment Awareness Training (FEAT) that we do at the Center on Community Living and Careers, and I think through that training and through a lot of other projects we do that we learned that there's just so much information out there for parents that it's overwhelming. And we try to provide that training as a way for parents to access that. So, I think it's important that, not just parents, but parents and educators, you can't know it all but just know where to get some of that information. And know who to talk to - is one of the big things. I also think something that isn't great. And remember, I am a teacher, so that's where I come from. But sometimes there are these big jumps and the collaboration between education and then the adult service world, not because anybody's doing anything wrong, but there's sometimes some challenges with that collaboration. And really the collaboration, all the way up in all the transitions, not just the transition to adulthood, but the transition from middle school to high school, and from elementary to middle school, that sometimes we're all working in our own islands, as we say, and there could be some work there on how we collaborate a little bit. Yeah, absolutely. I went to one of the FEAT trainings, and one of the things that I loved about it, I mean, the resource sharing and the breaking down a little bit of those silos across systems was amazing. One of the things that I really liked, too, was all of the options that you shared with families about the way that it can look. Because I think there's kind of a perception that it can only look one or two different ways. So, I think that's really valuable for families, regardless of how old their kiddos are. As I'm thinking about our audience, which are families and professionals working with families of young kids, tell me about the thinking about transition as a continuum, and what you might have learned in the work that you're doing that might then support our work with families with young kids. Yeah, thinking about it, and not to say that I think a student in early childhood needs to know what career they wanted at five years old and plan their whole life out, but to really think about what interest they have, think about their interest and really facilitate that, and build on that with the thinking of it, with the purpose of guiding them and supporting them and to get into their employment. So, as they show interest, let's say in art or whatever it is, you think of that as we're building on that in early years to help facilitate and expand those skills and think of it that way, and then also if they're showing skills in other words, something like maybe they're really good at, I don't know, something like sequencing or ordering and things. And then you just keep supporting that. But with it not just because you think it's a good “teachery” thing to do or  because that's what's going to help the students stay interested in school, but with the purpose of trying to then build on that every year, until they get up to high school, and then you're getting more focused on careers then. But just thinking about it as how it's all connected, I think it's really important. Yeah, and that's something that I think in early childhood we don't always get. We're focused on the immediate. We're focused on our little silo, right, which is often like for early intervention, it's zero-to-three, early childhood, it might be zero-to-five. And I think we don't always make the connection to how these things are going to look later on. So, we might be working on putting shapes in a shape sort of thing. Why do we care about that? And if a family doesn't understand why we care about that, then how hard are they gonna work on that stuff? So, I like that that time together piece. I was talking to a family a few years ago and a child who was likely going to be diagnosed with autism. And this family was noticing how their child would order things, like to take things apart, and they could see how they worked and there was this sense that they said, “You know, I think it's more than just an autistic trade. I think he could be a good mechanic.” And so, they were already thinking about how he could use that strength. Yeah, and what are you thinking, in the way we think about some of those traits and exactly what they did, and to rethink them at an early age instead of thinking, how do we change this, or how do we make this to where they can get through school, but think of it as this is not an issue, it's actually a skill. It's a positive thing, and how do we support this and really guide it towards that? Which is what education really is anyway. We're always just supporting and facilitating, but to really think of it intentionally with how we're going to guide those skills over a long term, over the whole life of education until, with the purpose of maybe it ends up being an employment skill in the future. It kind of helps how we think about it a little bit. Yeah. And so, some of this comes down to mindset, right? I mean, when you're working with professionals, but also with families, if the mindset is, we need to fix this child, then it's going to be hard to do what you're talking about, which is identify strengths and think about how those strengths may, you know, lead us to a trajectory of a really cool employment opportunity down the road. We're going to be focused on, we've got to make this go away. This has to change. What things have you found that are helpful when working on that mindset shift? I think it sounds like the word we use for everything, but “communication.” That understanding is as a high school transition teacher, I never really knew totally what was going on in those earlier years in elementary. I mean, I would talk sometimes to some of those teachers, and we would have an occasional meeting on how, “Oh, you're going to see this student in a few years,” and then that would be it. But I think to really change our mindsets in that how we work together as in all the different levels and not just in school, though, but also how we worked together with other agencies where our students are going to be after high school, and how we really make sure that our language is the same. Sometimes we have a different word but we're doing some of the same things, but we just don't understand, oh, I don't have to start all over with this in high school, the elementary teachers have already been doing this, but change how we talk and how we work together a little bit. We do love acronyms; we even have different acronyms for different systems for the same thing. Yeah. One of the things that I was thinking about in early intervention, but also in VOC rehab, they're looking at the Life Course framework, which is really just another framework for person-centered company, right? Just the idea that we're starting maybe in First Steps, which is the earlier intervention system, and we're looking at how the decisions we make right here. And First Steps might impact what we call a good life and there is one of those terms that other people have different terms. But that long-term outcome that you're going for that you want. and thinking about how the decisions we make impact that. Is that something that you all have done work around? A little in that, but we do talk about that in the FEAT training, the Life Course, and I do like how you said it that it is very connected. It does seem very similar to persons interplaning, and I love doing persons interplaning.  And I think it's really a great guide and it helps everybody in a very positive way, and kind of focus on that. But, I think if we thought about again, change a little bit, just it doesn't take a lot of change, but a little bit on the way that all the different levels from preschool to elementary to middle and high school and beyond work together and think about how we use some of those things like the Life Course in persons interplaning, to help guide our students to that good life too.  And by good life we're saying a life that they're choosing, whatever they want to do. It might not, you know, whatever makes everybody has different things that makes their life happy, that makes their life feel purposeful. So, to use things like the Life Course and persons interplaning could really help with that. Yeah. And those are the conversations I would love to start seeing earlier. Because I think sometimes we do start to touch on those things in those later grades, but I don't see it happening with families of young children and people say, “Oh, well, how could they possibly know so many things will change? Things are happening so quickly.”  But of course, you can shift your ideas of the good life. And of course, early on, it's going to be the family's idea of what the child's good life is. But we know that what really matters is what the child wants, and so that will shift as well over time, but just starting to at least have the permission to hope and dream and think about it. Sometimes, I think we make it harder on individuals with disabilities, and that everybody has changes. Like especially when you're younger, obviously, you go through, but it seems like that sometimes we try to make certain people like, oh no, you, we have to really guide them totally to what they want to do, where it shouldn't be that way. This is just about giving a little bit of structure to how we're going to facilitate that. It's what I think most educators do. They want to go in and help guide a student, but sometimes we need a little bit of structure to how that guidance happens, and all those different supports we've been talking about can help with that. I think that's such an interesting point that we sometimes hold people and children with disabilities to higher standards than we hold ourselves. You know, getting marked off in a group home for not keeping your kitchen cleaned well. I would have gotten marked off last night. And then, even with young kids, I hear how many kids that say they want to be a firefighter, or a ballerina become that? So few, but yet, you never hear anybody say, “Oh, that's not, you're not going to do that, that's really hard to do,”  versus you do hear people say that. And my son wanted to be all kinds of things when he was young, and people would say they feel the need to insert realism, and it's interesting that we feel the need to do that. And we know from research that hoping and dreaming and thinking about positive outcomes is a good coping mechanism for families, and that they adjust over time, that things change. So, is there anything else that you'd like to leave us with, in terms of guidance or final bits of advice from someone who's down the road a bit? Well, as a transition educator and thinking about if there's anything to leave those early childhood teachers with to think about, first off, maybe IEPs a little bit differently,  and that not to change them, but to really think about what IEPs are we picking, not only the normal academic ones and some of those common ones that we do a lot, but also think about them purposeful thinking about after high school. I’m not saying that you have to pick goals that are already making that student stick to a certain area but just thinking about if I have a goal about sorting or organizing, then I'm doing that with the purpose of trying to help build a skill that could be an employable skill later. I think about things like that as something important. And another one is one we talked about a bit earlier. It's just thinking about how can I collaborate and get with those high school and transition educators now so that I can give them some of the knowledge I have about these students, and how do we set up a structure where we can collaborate and talk more? And I do know as a teacher, I know that's difficult. I know that there's not a lot of time in the day. We have got a million other things we're doing anyway. But that's really important to find ways to add that information. That way, those later transitions in high school teachers don't have to start all the way over and kind of talk to that. And it's not just about passing that IEP over. There's so much more information that can be gained just from some informal talks. Yeah, love it. All right, Mike, thank you for joining us. We really appreciate you as we think about transition and we will see you next time. Thanks for listening to the Early Childhood On-the-Go podcast from the Early Childhood Center team at Indiana University. Learn more at IIDC.Indiana.edu/ECC/