The Baked Potato Approach: Shelley Moore on Inclusive Lesson Planning ~ 802

Shelley Moore:
Every kid needs a plan A. Some kids need a plan B. The problem was when the plan B becomes the plan A. So plan A is that kids are in a peer grade-based cohort, K to 12. They have the same opportunities as everyone. If they’re having a day, they need a break, they need to go for a walk—have a great time. The problem is, is that we don’t tell them to come back.

Tim Villegas:
Hello and welcome to Season Eight, Episode Two of the Think Inclusive Podcast presented by MCIE. I’m your host, Tim Villegas. From everyone at MCIE and Think Inclusive, a very happy Thanksgiving to all those listening and celebrating in the United States. As long as everything has gone to plan, this episode drops on Thanksgiving morning—perfect for those of you who like to listen to podcasts while cooking. I have fond memories of listening to true crime and music podcasts while I prepped for our Thanksgiving feast last year. Be safe and well, everyone.

This podcast features conversations and commentary with thought leaders in inclusive education and community advocacy. Think Inclusive exists to build bridges between parents, educators, and disability rights advocates to promote inclusion for all students. That’s right, y’all: all means all. To find out more about who we are and what we do, go to thinkinclusive.us, the official blog of MCIE, and check us out on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

Thank you for joining us for our conversation with Shelley Moore, inclusive education consultant and presenter extraordinaire. We talk about what her path looked like to becoming a special education teacher and why she cares about inclusive education so much. Also, we discuss what the major differences between Canada’s educational systems and the United States are regarding special education. And what is all this fuss about baked potatoes and how do they relate to strategic planning for students in the classroom?

But before we get to Shelley, when was the last time you visited thinkinclusive.us? You might notice that we are no longer using ads on our site, which is fantastic, but it also means that we receive no income. And here’s where you can help. Your tax-deductible donation will help us expand our reach to people across the United States and the world to promote inclusion for all students. Did you know that just last month we reached over 8,000 page views just from India and the Philippines alone? Go to bit.ly/mciegive to make your donation. Again, that’s bit.ly/mciegive to make your donation today. So stick around—after the break, our interview with Shelley Moore.

Shelley Moore:
Hi there. My name is Shelley Moore and you are listening to the Think Inclusive Podcast.

Tim Villegas:
Fantastic. So Shelley Moore is from beautiful Vancouver, British Columbia. Shelley is a highly sought-after teacher, researcher, speaker, and storyteller that has worked with school districts and community organizations throughout Canada and the United States. Her first book entitled “One Without the Other” was a follow-up to her TEDx talk called “Under the Table.” She’s also the host of the widely popular and beloved Five Moore Minutes video series and companion podcast. Welcome to the Think Inclusive Podcast, Shelley.

Shelley Moore:
Thank you so much. I’m so happy to be here.

Tim Villegas:
It’s been a long time coming, I feel like.

Shelley Moore:
We have been trying to set this up for years.

Tim Villegas:
I know. Yes. One of the things that I haven’t heard—we have seen all of your videos and I’ve heard your stories—but one thing that I haven’t really heard is your story of how you became a special educator. So I would love to know your path to being a special ed teacher and why you even care about inclusive education.

Shelley Moore:
That’s a good one. Okay. Well, to answer that question, we have to go back in time a bit. So let’s see here. I grew up in Alberta, which is above Montana-ish, Idaho. I kind of got to about grade two by just being cute. Do you know what I mean? If you’re funny and you’re cute and you’re nice and you’re kind and kind of well-behaved, you can kind of drift through a little bit. But grade three became a little tricky because that’s when I had to start doing a lot of reading and writing, which was very, very difficult for me. So it was grade three that I was diagnosed myself with having a learning disability. And I just, from that point on, was just like, “Schools—I’m not made for this. I’m not made for school.” And it just was a struggle. My poor mother—every single morning, it just was this big struggle.

And if I think back, it wasn’t—it’s so fascinating too—if I could go back in time and talk to myself, because when I thought about it, it was only school that was the problem. I never felt this way about any other part of my life. I had no problems playing outside. I had no problems with my family and friends. It just was school. I just didn’t feel like I fit in. And so I was early pulled out and early recognized how much I hated it, because I always felt like it happened during the most fun parts of the day.

And it kind of all came to a head in grade seven because in grade seven we go to junior high. It’s probably similar, but we’d go from elementary to junior high school. So this is the year that I know that I’m a little disabled. This is the year that I also got a little chubby and the year that I also realized I was a little gay. It just wasn’t the best combination for middle school in a super conservative province.

And so I was just really bullied, really awfully, and it kind of just came to a head and I beat up my bully. I just was done. I stopped going to school. I was a grade seven dropout. And I remember being in the principal’s office—and this is kind of before kids were a part of conversations, right? I remember sitting in the office and my mom comes out of the principal’s office. And what I hear is, “I just don’t think we can meet Shelley’s needs in this building.” And I always come back to that. I always think, “How many parents hear that?” Do you know what I mean? “How many parents hear those words?” And it was devastating for my mom. My mom was a single mom. She’s like, “Well, what am I going to do with her? I mean, she can’t just—like, I can’t homeschool her. She can’t just not go to school when she’s 12.”

And so I was recommended to go to this kind of alternate site school, and I absolutely thrived there. It was cross-grade cohorts. It was the first time that there was any type of inclusive setting, where I didn’t feel like I was the only kid with a disability. There were kids with intellectual disabilities there. Everything was inquiry-based, hands-on learning. It just was like—all of a sudden—it was Canada’s first Apple technology school. And so it was the first time I had access to technology, which was a game changer for me. And so all of a sudden I go from absolutely hating school to wanting to be there every single second.

And the reason why I feel like this is part of the story is because I’m now 13 and my mom asks me, she’s like, “Shelley,” a few months in, she’s like, “How do you like your new school?” And I remember in my 13-year-old brain being like, “Oh, I love it.” And she’s like, “But you’ve never liked school. What is it about this school?” And the 13-year-old self was just like, “I don’t know, whatever, it’s just the best.” But I do remember also saying to her, “Why did I have to go to any other school?” And looking back, I feel like that moment was pretty pivotal for me because if people ask me, “Why does inclusion matter?” I go back to that moment and I’m just like, yeah, why did I have to go to any other school? But not only that, why did I have to fail so miserably and horribly to finally get to a place where my needs were actually met?

And it kind of links to this entire medical model of education where not only did I have to fail in grade seven, I had to experience crisis and trauma. And when I think about the things that kids are negotiating today, school cannot also be a place of crisis and trauma. And so when I think about this, and if I think about the big things that made that school meaningful—community, showing my learning in different ways, access to technology, flexibility, choice—and I’m like, why does that have to be an alternate school? And so this became the whole thing. I’m just like, why isn’t that just school for everybody? Why do kids have to fail? Why isn’t what I experienced at this alternate school the standard status quo? And why is that only designed for kids after they have completely dropped out of school?

Shelley Moore:
And I’m just like, it just didn’t feel right. So when I went into special education, I kind of went in with that in mind—that idea of how do I work with kids with my kind of profile? Kids that have learning disabilities, some behavior challenges, kind of that at-risk profile—and see if we can meet their needs before they fail. That was kind of my whole thinking.

Where it turned was this whole thing—because in special education, if you are a trained special educator, you get scooped up pretty fast in the education field. So when I started working, I did work with kids with my profile, but it quickly turned into not just kids with my profile, but working with kids with intellectual disabilities.

And that’s where my path split into this: “Oh, I’ve been thinking about this all wrong.” It isn’t the kids who are at risk we need to target, it’s the kids with intellectual disabilities that we need to target. Because if we can make it work for them, everyone else will fall into place—which is where the bowling metaphor came from. So it was this long, convoluted journey of me struggling in school and leading into this, “Wait a second, who are we actually designing for?” And that’s turned into this incredible career of trying to make this work better for more kids.

Tim Villegas:
What do you think are the major differences between how y’all do it in BC or Canada and how we do it in the U.S.?

Shelley Moore:
That’s a good question, because it is quite local here as well. You guys have your states, we have our provinces, and our education is a provincial mandate. I think probably the biggest difference is that we’re less standardized. Even across Canada in general, BC is the least standardized. And it’s interesting because there’s a strong correlation between BC also being the most inclusive.

In a standardized system—like in BC just last year—we don’t have any standardized exams K to 12 anymore. So things like this allow for a whole bunch more room and flexibility to focus on growth, as opposed to these benchmark standards that are actually quite narrow. Our efforts can be less on “let’s achieve standard” and more on “let’s help kids move between a standards-based window.”

In the work that I’ve done across Canada, for sure, it’s not like that everywhere. But even in terms of standardization and high-stakes testing in Canada, even our highest isn’t what you guys have to negotiate. I was interviewed for a magazine for the Canadian Down Syndrome Society, and they asked, “What do you think is one of the biggest barriers to inclusion?” A lot of people will say time, money, people—but I actually think it’s bigger than that. There are these ableist infrastructures that still exist. In a standardized system where the underlying assumption is that everyone needs to be the same, that goes directly against the idea of valuing and reaching diversity that includes ability. So I think there’s a piece of that, for sure.

Tim Villegas:
Absolutely. Yeah, that makes sense. And you’re right—that isn’t a very common answer to that question. It’s typically “time, resources, mindset.” I hear mindset a lot, which are all barriers, of course.

Shelley Moore:
But they’re not deal-breakers.

Tim Villegas:
That’s true.

Shelley Moore:
You could have two schools across the street from each other with the exact same resources, the exact same population, and one can be inclusive and the other one isn’t. This is what I’m trying to communicate—especially now with the anti-racism movement that’s going across North America, which is very good. You realize that, of course, there are barriers to anti-racism, but the ultimate barrier is the discrimination and the mindset that no resources can change.

Tim Villegas:
So I just briefly wanted to go back to something you said about inclusion—about inclusive education being more flexible than people think. Because I run into this all the time. I’m sure you do too. The assumption that, “Oh, well Shelley believes that everyone should be in general education class, regular classrooms, 100% of the time, no matter what.”

Shelley Moore:
Okay, here’s how I’m going to explain this. Every kid needs a plan A. Some kids need a plan B. The problem is when the plan B becomes the plan A. So plan A is that kids are in a peer grade-based cohort, K to 12. They have the same opportunities as everyone. If they’re having a day, they need a break, they need to go for a walk—have a great time. The problem is, we don’t tell them to come back. The problem isn’t that kids leave, it’s that they never come back from their walks, from their therapeutic programs, from their reading. They don’t come back.

So I’m just like, okay, I can appreciate that kids need breaks. But what if we—this is what I tell people—if a kid is on your list, you need to start with them, you need to end with them, and you need to know where they’re at in the middle. You need to know where they’re going, why they’re going, and when they’re coming back—whether that’s for five minutes, two days, or a year.

Because I feel like there’s this whole, “This kid doesn’t fit, we’re going to let them go,” and then the conversation is over. I can totally appreciate that kids are going to have an off day. I totally get that. So what I think is, I can understand there might be multiple spaces for kids to be successful. The problem is that when being enrolled in a classroom with your grade-like peers is not even plan B, it’s plan Zed—because we believe this readiness model.

I’m not naive to think that nobody needs time to do something that explicitly meets the needs of a certain area—whether that’s crisis, regulation. I hate saying reading, because I think it could be met in other ways, but I get it. It happens. That’s not the problem. The problem is that people are just like, “They’re not ready, so they can’t be there.” If they are there and they leave—nothing. There’s no question around why they’re leaving. So then they never go back, or that place where they go becomes the place they go to all the time now.

I think about this like a family. Your classroom with your peers is your family. Sometimes we go here, sometimes we go there, sometimes we’re in groups, sometimes we’re over here. But we start together, we end together—every lesson, every day, every week, every year—because that’s where you belong. Where kids’ home base is is where we’re communicating they belong. Are we increasing the places where kids feel like they belong, or are we decreasing the places where kids feel like they belong? Is their home base with their cohort? Period.

And if they’re having a hard time with that cohort, we need to support the cohort, not the individual. I know people want a black-and-white answer, but I don’t have one.

Tim Villegas:
I’m okay with that.

Shelley Moore:
Because it might be different. We have to be responsive. Ugh.

Tim Villegas:
Let’s talk about—do you want to talk about bowling and baked potatoes? Or are you done with that?

Shelley Moore:
You know, we can talk about—let’s talk about baked potatoes. Okay? Because I think that’s a big part of the “how” that people have a question about.

Tim Villegas:
Okay. Let’s talk about baked potatoes. So Shelley, tell me about baked potatoes.

Shelley Moore:
Really quickly. How I was taught to teach was this: I was trained secondary. So my general education class that I taught was Math 8. This is how I was taught to teach: you get your curriculum, you make your plan, and then the kids show up and you teach them. But the assumption is that those kids are ready for that plan. But we know not everyone is where they should be. Some kids are beyond where they could be. So then we’re like, “Oh man, now I have to adapt and modify for all these kids.”

As our classrooms get more diverse, there’s this misunderstanding of workload—that every kid who doesn’t fit needs an individual plan. Every time someone makes a new plan, the workload of a teacher increases exponentially.

Shelley Moore:
So, we make this grade eight math plan assuming it’s for the majority of kids, but in actuality, it’s probably for less than half. Then the big question is, how do we do this in a way that’s manageable? When we look at a grade-level plan, the assumption becomes, “If they’re at a grade two level, we need to make a grade two plan, a grade three plan,” and I have to reteach K to seven. That’s too much work.

The baked potato is about strategic planning. Rather than reteaching K to seven, I’m going to make grade eight math accessible and challenging in one plan. What that looks like is moving away from where kids should be to where kids are and where they could be.

Instead of looking at the average or where kids should be, you look at the range of where they are. You’re going to capture the average within that range. The assumption you’re making is that you have a range, instead of assuming everyone is where they should be. Because you’re designing for a range, you’re creating a scaffold so more kids can actually move and get to grade level, rather than relying on a deficit-based retrofit practice of taking things away.

The metaphor I use to explain this is a baked potato. If we were to plan grade eight not considering who’s there, it’s like saying every single one of my students is going to eat a fully loaded baked potato. I can be really passionate about this. The students come in, I give them their potato, and then you realize that half your class isn’t eating it because they don’t eat meat. Another group of kids isn’t eating it because they can’t have dairy.

So then we have to get EAs and support staff to come in and pick off the bacon bits and try to get the melted butter off this hot potato—which is impossible. In the meantime, people are waiting for these retrofit supports. And in order to realize that the kids need that support, they have to show that they can’t eat. What would kids rather do than show they can’t do something? Have challenging behavior. So the potatoes are being thrown around.

The first thing to understand with the baked potato is that there’s a better way to do it. When you zoom out and say, “This is the concept,” you realize there’s an infinite amount of combinations of baked potatoes you can design for—without designing individual baked potatoes.

You start not with what kids can’t do, but with what everybody can eat in the baked potato. The potato! It’s the biggest, most important concept. If that’s all kids eat, they’re going to be okay. They’re getting enough food to move forward. It’s the most important information. That’s going to be enough for some kids. It’s minimal, but it’s enough.

The problem is if we assume that kids already have that A or B, we only serve the potato. So now, everyone gets the potato. And now we show everyone the possible combinations of toppings. I’m going to teach everyone about bacon bits, sour cream, butter, chili—all these options, which represent levels of complexity.

Your potato, or your concept, is not simple. It’s big. Like, “What is change?” “Who am I?” Then your toppings are adding on complexity from the same goal. So it’s not differentiation, because you’re not choosing, “I’m only eating scallions.” Everyone starts with the potato. Some kids might have the potato and butter. Some kids might have the potato, butter, and sour cream. Kids will vary in complexity, but everyone will have enough. Everyone has the essential understanding. They have the big idea—enough to carry them forward.

When I’m working through planning, let’s not plan for individual potatoes. Let’s look at your math lesson—what’s the most important information? It’s still grade level, but it’s essential and it’s so important.

They’re going to be like, “Okay, how do we add on complexity from there?” But here’s the part that’s important. I saw some ability grouping starting to happen—like the potatoes are over here and the cheese are over there. No, no, no, no, no. Everyone gets the potato. But everyone also has to learn about all the toppings.

Even if a kid doesn’t eat meat, they still need to learn about bacon bits. And the joke is, they’re going to learn that bacon bits have no meat in them. They still need to learn about what’s possible. That’s the equity piece. That’s the high expectations piece.

Then the agency piece is: you decide what goes on your potato. As an educator, my job is to show you the options—not make those decisions for you. A big part of this inclusive conversation is that we’re in charge of the plan, but it’s also about starting to hand over control for kids to be in charge of their complexity and the goals they’re meeting.

Tim Villegas:
Well, we’re almost out of time. Let me sign off. Oh, before I sign off, can you share with everyone where they can find you and all that stuff?

Shelley Moore:
Yeah. I’m very easy to find. I am on all social media. You can find me on Twitter https://twitter.com/tweetsomemoore, on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/fivemooreminutes/. https://fivemooreminutes.com also has links to all the videos, all of the resources. You can search “fivemooreminutes” in the YouTube channel to see the videos. I think between fivemooreminutes and tweetsomemoore, you’re going to find me. Very easy to find. Or just type in “Shelley Moore Bowling.” It will come up.

Tim Villegas:
Yep, yep. Send it to all your friends and buy your book One Without the Other, which is fantastic.

Shelley Moore:
One Without the Other. And the next one is coming up in the spring called All for One.

Tim Villegas:
Perfect. Okay. Shelley Moore, thank you so much for being on the podcast with us today.

Shelley Moore:
Thanks for having me.

Tim Villegas:
If you would like to hear the entire one-hour unedited recording of our conversation with Shelley Moore, it’s easy to do. Become a Patreon subscriber. Here’s what you missed: we talked about why disabled lives matter, what the real barriers to inclusion are, the difference between scaffolding and differentiation, baby Moore, where she really records those awesome videos, the top three most influential people in her life, and what her special interest is. Spoiler: it is not indie music.

Just go to https://www.patreon.com/thinkinclusivepodcast and select the one, five, or ten-dollar-per-month tier. You’ll have access to Shelley’s interview along with ten hours of unfiltered interviews from past guests.

Subscribe to the Think Inclusive Podcast via Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher, or on the Anchor app. And while you’re there, give us a review so more people can find us. In fact, it’s Thanksgiving—tell your family about us and let them know they can learn more about inclusive education by listening to the Think Inclusive Podcast.

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This podcast is a production of MCIE, where we envision a society where neighborhood schools welcome all learners and create the foundation for inclusive communities. Learn more at http://www.mcie.org.

Next month, we will be producing a very special “best of” podcast. I’ve always wanted to do one of these, so make sure you look out in your podcast feed for that one.

Thanks for your time and attention. Until next time.