Empowering Non-Speaking Students: Tools and Mindsets for Inclusive Schools ~ 1312

Lisa Mihalich Quinn
What if is a much better mindset approach than that closed sort of “we’ve always done it this way.” Because when you ask “what if,” the whole world can open up.

I know a lot of people look at us and think we’re like witchcraft practitioners, but I’m going to contend that the things we do are grounded in understanding apraxia—that our students’ minds and bodies probably aren’t connected well with each other.

I hid the elevator button. I was like, “I can’t today. I cannot do this.” I should not have done it. And yet there we were.

Tim Villegas
I feel like we’ve all been there.

Lisa Mihalich Quinn
Two minutes later: “I want stairs computer. I want stairs computer.” And I thought, “God, he is so smart.” Then I said, “Okay, all right. We’ve got to learn to spell. We’ve got to learn more than this.”

Tim Villegas
Hi friends. Welcome back to Think Inclusive, real conversations about building schools where every learner belongs. I’m your host, Tim Villegas.

Today’s episode is about opening up possibilities for communication for non-speaking students and what can happen when we truly presume competence. Our guest is Lisa Mihalich Quinn, founder of Reach Every Voice and co-founder of Adaptiverse, an AI-powered lesson adaptation platform.

Lisa has spent her career building solutions that unlock grade-level access for non-speaking autistic learners and training educators to presume competence and embrace inclusion. We talk about why understanding apraxia and co-regulation is essential for supporting autistic learners, how presuming competence can transform lives, and what it takes to move beyond “this is how we’ve always done it” to “what if we tried?”

Lisa shares her journey from public school teacher to innovator and tells the story of a breakthrough moment with a student whose world opened up once he had the right tools and expectations.

Before we meet our guest, I want to tell you about our sponsor. This episode is brought to you by IXL—an all-in-one platform for K–12 that helps boost student achievement, empowers teachers, and tracks progress in one place. As students practice, IXL adapts to their individual needs so that every learner gets just-right support and challenge. Check it out at IXL.com/inclusive.

All right, after a quick break, it’s time to Think Inclusive with Lisa Mihalich Quinn. Catch you on the other side.

Tim Villegas
Lisa Mihalich Quinn, welcome to the Think Inclusive podcast. I said that right, right?

Lisa Mihalich Quinn
You did, you did really well. Thanks for checking.

Tim Villegas
Sometimes you just never know. Lisa and I have known each other for a while. And although you were on our panel, which was officially an episode, I have not interviewed you one-on-one. So this is a treat for me.

Lisa Mihalich Quinn
I’m glad to be here. Thank you for having me.

Tim Villegas
Lisa, Reach Every Voice—let’s talk about your journey.

Lisa Mihalich Quinn
Let’s do it. Where do we start? I tell everybody that I am a public educator—that’s who I am. I was a teacher for a very long time in Maryland public schools, almost 15 years.

We share that in common, right? We came from classrooms in places where we weren’t always including kids. I think I had a lot of luck in that I ended up in a classroom or in a placement in a school system at the beginning where I was actually including people. That wasn’t where I saw myself coming out of grad school. I really saw myself in a self-contained, segregated setting because that’s what I had seen modeled basically everywhere. That was the model that sticks around here.

But I did get really lucky in one internship and I saw what it looked like to see kids included. When we were thinking about this interview, I was thinking back to how did I even get here? How did I get to be this teacher? My mom’s a teacher. I feel like people who have teachers in their family—it kind of runs, right? My mom was like, “Don’t do it. Don’t do this.”

Tim Villegas
I know, I know. I’m telling my kids that.

Lisa Mihalich Quinn
Right? I will tell my kids that too. Don’t do it. But I don’t know, just from a really young age, I can remember being in second grade. It was in 1990. It was the year of Desert Storm. I was in central Pennsylvania. And the things I remember from second grade are every morning standing there and singing “I’m Proud to Be an American” while it played over the loudspeaker.

I remember that our school must have been part of some kind of pilot because there were students with really significant disabilities who showed up in our building. Nobody said anything about it. It wasn’t like, “They’re part of our community.” It was “those kids in that room over there.” They were downstairs, off in a separate wing, but they would be on the playground with us. And I was so intrigued. I was like, “Who are these people? Where did they come from? Why are they here? Hi, hello.”

I can remember seeing the things that a teacher would try and explain to our kids: “These are kids who have different ways of communicating. They may not be able to say the same things that you want to say.” And as a kid, I was so intrigued. Why is she pulling me off these monkey bars? Why is she doing that? And I just wanted to understand more.

I was pulled in and probably came to this through the same lens that a lot of people do—the idea of wanting to be a helper. I had a second-grade teacher who one day during indoor recess, I went down to volunteer to help out in that classroom. And I came back upstairs and she said, “Where were you?” In front of the entire second grade lined up in the hallway, she said, “Were you down with those—” and she dropped the R-word.

That to me makes me think about how we need to be cautious about what we say to kids when they’re so little because they hold onto it. I’m here decades later holding onto it, but it sparked that feeling of injustice.

I had other career paths. I went to GW for politics and English. I started an English PhD program. I worked at the Pentagon and none of it stuck. That wasn’t it for me.

When I started teaching, I knew that was it. And when I got into the school system, a lot of it was so awesome—being able to connect with my kids, being able to support them. I was in an assistive technology program, supporting students with AAC devices in inclusive settings. And they closed it. I was there for six years and then they closed my part of the program.

When that happened, a lot of things went up in the air and I moved to different schools, which I’m very grateful for. I’m grateful for the experience of seeing different things and different buildings because a lot of teachers get stuck in one place, one experience. That’s how we develop the mindset of “this is the way we do things.”

Traveling to different schools gave me a lot of different experiences, introduced me to a lot of different teachers and students. As I did that, I took a role supporting a pilot program for kids who were using letterboards, keyboards, spelling, typing to communicate. I learned so much. What I learned was that my autistic students that I had had over the years—we knew really nothing about them. Everything I learned in grad school was basically wrong. I instantly regretted all the ABA I’d ever done.

I did a lot of learning on the job. We were given some training as we went into it, but it was a lot of hands-on learning.

Tim Villegas
Yeah.

Lisa Mihalich Quinn
As I was working with these students, one of the things that happened was they were so smart. They were communicating. They were taking grade-level classes, fully immersed in their middle school classes, but they were told essentially, “You don’t qualify for ESY because you’re on grade level.” We know that’s not true. That’s not how it works. There’s a whole process you go through to determine how you qualify for ESY.

If you have communication deficits—critical life skill communication—you’re going to qualify. But nobody wanted to fight our district on communication. They were all like, “That’s cool. Here’s what we really want. We want a program that lets us practice our communication skills, learn about the things we want to learn about, play games that aren’t like Chutes and Ladders and Candy Land with our friends, and build these friendships.”

I said, “Cool. I can do that. I can make that happen.” And that’s how Reach Every Voice started. That was a long way to get here.

We started as a six-week summer program. That was 10 years ago. We just keep changing. People ask us what we do and it’s hard to describe in a single sentence or elevator pitch because we’re always evolving in response to the needs of our community.

We started as enrichment programs—summer, weekend. Then we found that some of our students, our core group, their needs were being met in their school system. But there were so many others whose needs weren’t being met. So we started branching out and saying, “Okay, we can support you outside of school. We can support you in individual sessions. We can support you in the community.”

We’ve grown and evolved and now we’re supporting probably 50-some people in person—individual and group sessions—and we have a whole bunch of online services that we offer.

Tim Villegas
And when did it start? When was that you started the enrichment or the program?

Lisa Mihalich Quinn
The lead-up was like 2015. 2016 was our first summer.

Tim Villegas
Wow. So you’re coming up on 10 years.

Lisa Mihalich Quinn
Yeah, this is our 10th summer. It’s pretty incredible.

Tim Villegas
Wow. I expect this to continue, so just buckle up.

Lisa Mihalich Quinn
I’m on for the ride. It’s all good.

Tim Villegas
Thank you for sharing that. I think it’s important to hear people’s stories and how we got to the place where we are now. Your experience working in schools and appreciating all the different ways learners are supported—and you being able to see that—I think that was huge for me as well.

I was in two or three classroom settings over the course of my career. Then the last three years I was a program specialist, so I was at different schools and could see lots of different ways learners were being supported—some inclusive, some very much not. That gave me a lot of perspective. It sounds like that gave you a lot of perspective as well.

Lisa Mihalich Quinn
Yeah. I think that’s the biggest thing holding people back from being able to include students well—the idea that it must be done a certain way. “This is how we do things. This is how it’s always been done.” When you don’t have the flexibility and creativity to think outside the box, nothing’s going to change. We’ll keep doing things the way we’ve been doing them, and we know that doesn’t work for a lot of our students with more complex needs.

But when you find people who have that creativity and willingness to take a risk or a chance and say, “What if? What if we try this? What if we try that?”—that’s when the magic happens.

Tim Villegas
And you took a risk with creating Reach Every Voice.

Lisa Mihalich Quinn
That was so scary. There’s so much stability in a school system job. It feels safe—knowing you have a pension, knowing you have all those things in place. It’s hard to leave. I understand why people stay even if they’re burned out or struggling and don’t agree with the system. I get it.

It’s super terrifying to own a business and be out here every day, especially because things change in our climate and world. It’s terrifying. And I’m so glad I did it. I wish I could put myself out of business—or maybe have an entirely different model. I wish I didn’t have to provide these levels of individualized supports, teaching people how to communicate, providing literacy instruction to kids, because they should be getting that in school.

I wish we could be doing the work of supporting schools to do this in public school settings. No parent should have to pay me to do that. They should be able to get this in their schools. That would be a dream—and then I wouldn’t have to take on all the terror of owning businesses.

Tim Villegas
Let’s unpack that for a little bit. What I’m hearing you say is that learners who type, spell, however they communicate—they are not being educated in their school the way they can be, and they are being educated at Reach Every Voice. Is that what I’m hearing?

Lisa Mihalich Quinn
For the large part, that’s true.

Tim Villegas
Right. So then who is paying? The parents and families are paying out of pocket to basically have their students learn, right?

Lisa Mihalich Quinn
Mm-hmm. You can call us tutors, I guess. You can compare it to a tutoring model. Whenever kids aren’t getting what they need in school, you pay a tutor. We’re all certified teachers. That’s one way to look at it.

Tim Villegas
What do you think is the big difference? If a student isn’t getting something at their school, yet you are able to provide it, what is the biggest difference?

Lisa Mihalich Quinn
I don’t know if it’s a matter of “can’t.” I think it’s a matter of “won’t” or “don’t believe in it.” Don’t believe in the possibility, the potential.

A lot of the students who come to us—going back to what I said about having to unlearn everything I learned about autism—I think a lot of schools are steeped in understanding autism as an intellectual and behavioral disorder. They look at students through the lens of “this child is severely intellectually disabled” and “this child has behaviors that need to be modified.”

So a lot of classrooms have self-contained, segregated autism programs where students are doing some version of ABA all day long. Our kids are participating in discrete trial things all day long. The exposure they get to grade-level curriculum is minimal. They’re asked to prove understanding before they’re allowed access to something else.

We don’t do that. We’re not going to make you prove you can read or sit still before we read to you at grade level or talk to you as if you are the age you are. From the second you walk through our door, if you’re 15, we talk to you like you’re 15. If you’re four, we talk to you like you’re four. If you’re 64—some of our oldest clients are in their 60s—we talk to you like you’re 64.

We treat you with respect and presume you’re competent and capable of learning. We also understand you probably have big gaps in your knowledge because you haven’t been given access to information for a long time.

I know a lot of people look at us and think we’re like witchcraft practitioners, but what we do is understand apraxia—that our students’ minds and bodies probably aren’t connected well. A lot of their movements are impulsive and not within their control. If I ask a student to pick up the keys off my desk and they come back with crayons, I’m not going to assume they don’t know what keys or crayons are. I’m going to assume they knew what the desk was, but there was a problem of execution in that action. It’s not a problem of cognition; it’s a problem of execution in the moment.

We work on coaching their bodies and motor systems to do what they need to do—most specifically in regards to literacy, which a lot of our students aren’t taught because they’re presumed incapable. They’re given symbols, maybe PECS, maybe a Big Mac button to hit, but it’s only programmed with one phrase we put on there for them.

Lisa Mihalich Quinn
We work on coaching their bodies and motor systems to do what they need to do—most specifically in regards to literacy, which a lot of our students aren’t taught because they’re presumed incapable. They’re given symbols, maybe PECS, maybe a Big Mac button to hit, but it’s only programmed with one phrase we put on there for them.

Tim Villegas
Big Mac, yes. Step communicator.

Lisa Mihalich Quinn
Step-by-step, if you’re lucky, you get a couple of things you can cycle through, but it’s only what I put on there for you. And listen, I did that. I taught Ten Apples Up on Top with counting on a step-by-step. I’ve done that 100%. But when you know better, you have to do better.

So we’re teaching our kids literacy skills. We’re taking into account the knowledge of apraxia, the knowledge of literacy skills, plus the idea that with behavior, our kids aren’t doing this stuff on purpose. They’re not coming in here trying to be bad.

The other day I was sitting in a room with one of my older students and a little five-year-old went through the room. The room has two doors and he came in and did a couple laps. Nobody was phased. Nobody’s yelling. We’re just like, “Hey, how’s it going?”

The only comment was, “My gosh, how amazing to have access to these things as a five-year-old.” That was the comment from my older learner. He said, “I wish when I had been that young, someone had brought me and known that I could do this.”

So we’re understanding this idea of co-regulation. We put it all together and we’re teaching literacy skills and movement.

Tim Villegas
I think apraxia and co-regulation are two things that are huge knowledge gaps for special education teachers right now. It’s like a chasm. If we spent as much time on those as we do on autism characteristics and behaviorist principles—even if we just balanced it out a little more—it would be a game changer for special educators.

Those are the things I learned later in my career that were so helpful. For anyone listening, Lisa and I were both teachers in classrooms for autistic learners specifically.

I remember early on just giving any sort of verbal instruction—was it called a mand?

Lisa Mihalich Quinn
A mand.

Tim Villegas
Kind of like a verbal instruction, right? And you could see the learner wanted to do it. You could see it. I saw it. But they couldn’t—or their body couldn’t. I knew they knew the right answer, but they couldn’t tell me the right answer. Sometimes they would point or touch the wrong answer, and I’d think, “I know you know this.”

Lisa Mihalich Quinn
That’s so frustrating. What you see is so convincing, but it’s like this weird cognitive dissonance. You know your kids are so smart, but they’re doing things that make you think, “What’s happening here?”

It’s even worse when they have a little bit of speech. It makes it almost worse because their speech can be so convincing. We have some people here who speak, and that speech—

I had someone a couple months ago in a session with me just stuck, saying “Panera Bread, Panera Bread, Panera Bread.” One would think, “He wants to go to Panera Bread.” But he spelled out, “I cannot go to Panera Bread today. Please take me somewhere with greasy food.”

His support person said, “Where do you want to go today?” He said, “I don’t know, can we go to Five Guys?” She said, “Yeah, totally, no problem.” Meanwhile, his whole body is getting red and he’s just saying “Panera Bread, Panera Bread.”

I thought, “My God, what’s going to happen? They’re going to walk into Panera Bread or Five Guys and everyone will look at this person screaming ‘Panera Bread’ and think, ‘Why won’t they just take him to Panera Bread?’”

Later I asked, “How did it go? I was so worried.” They said, “It was fine, no problem. We went there, two seconds of dysregulation at the door, then he got what he really wanted.”

Meanwhile, we would just be thinking, “Just take him to Panera Bread.” That’s so tricky because the whole world relies on listening to speech.

Tim Villegas
Yeah, it’s so tricky. Which is why what you’re doing—and other organizations—giving access to communication for non-speakers and unreliable speakers is so powerful. Someone might say something, but you interpret it as “They want Panera Bread,” when they definitely do not. They wanted something else, but they weren’t able to access that communication.

That’s powerful. I hope people listen and think, “Tell me more about this. How do we give access?”

Tim Villegas
After the break, Lisa shares how her team is training educators and families across the country. We dive into the real-world impact of giving non-speaking students access to robust communication tools. Plus, you’ll hear a powerful story about a breakthrough moment that changed everything for one learner.

This show is produced by the Maryland Coalition for Inclusive Education (MCIE). MCIE partners with educators and school systems to promote authentic inclusion, foster change, and support the implementation of inclusive practices. Whether it’s district-wide transformation, customized learner planning, or professional learning and coaching, MCIE walks alongside educators every step of the way.

And here’s the best part: our work begins with a conversation. So if you’re ready to create schools where every learner belongs, visit mcie.org to get in touch and start that conversation today.

Tim Villegas
So maybe we should start talking about the services you provide because you have learners come to you, but you also train educators. Tell us more about that.

Lisa Mihalich Quinn
Yeah. One of the first things I did in terms of training was during the pandemic when every parent had to become the default educator. Parents were like, “Our kids are home. What do we do now?”

So I created a course called Accessible Academics. It’s very low production value, but I think arguably very high content value. It’s me with a document camera modeling how I make grade-level content accessible to somebody who can maybe just make choices.

That course has been taken by over 300 parents and educators. It’s a self-paced course now. It was live originally because we were all home during the pandemic and had nothing better to do, but now it’s all self-paced.

I think it’s so simple and fundamental—just little things where you think, “Now I’ve seen it. I can do this. I can go and do this little thing in my classroom or with my kid at home.”

So that’s one thing we do. We also work with some of our local families or families further away. They have us consult on IEPs or work with their teams, but that’s not a big thing. It’s not sustainable to work one-on-one with every team in the nation who might have this problem.

One of my big dreams was to develop a training program that could really support this. I have two really good friends—one is a researcher at Cal Lutheran University and co-founder of the Autism and Communication Center, and she’s the mom of a non-speaker. Her name is Edlyn Peña. My other friend is Julie Sando, director at Autistically Inclined.

We all had the same goal: to create a training program that primarily focuses on how to support educators—or homeschool educators, unfortunately, because that’s common in this population—and how to support these learners in a school setting.

What are all the things that go into it? Because you were saying earlier, apraxia and co-regulation are huge gaps. How do we bridge that? A lot of times when folks train people on communication tools, they train just on the tool—the platform, the device—but they don’t take into account all the other support needs. All the things that go into regulating someone who needs to use the device, adapting the content that needs to go along with it.

So we created a course called Communication for Education that does all of that. It’s the foundational groundwork to become a communication support partner in a school.

We rolled it out in 2022 with a pilot group. We got grant funding from Ability Central in California and the Autism Communication Center. We collected data from participants in the early year to see their growth, and we had statistically significant growth in knowledge and practice areas.

The coolest thing for me was that we got a couple of grants to run it in schools. We ran it in a preschool in Massachusetts, a low-income elementary school in Colorado, and a transition center in Brooklyn—three totally different schools.

It was incredible to watch these multidisciplinary teams over the span of the program go from doubting their kids’ capabilities to saying, “We taught Shakespeare this week and it was amazing.” They came in saying, “We did Hamlet with our kids and we were talking about it.” That’s incredible.

They found ways to incorporate choice, pointing to answers, and literacy skills in what they were doing. That’s an incredible transformation. Even though some of those were inclusive settings and some very much weren’t, the change in attitudes was huge.

A school psychologist said, “I didn’t even know how I was going to use this course,” and by the end said, “I’m pulling kids in and they’re using their talkers with me. I understand how to scaffold communication now so I can better have conversations.”

That’s the kind of response we want to see. That’s my excitement—how we can get teacher educators and future educators to change their mindset about what’s possible. This isn’t shocking or outside the ordinary. It’s putting best practices for teaching and applying them to people who might not be speaking.

Tim Villegas
If you go on Amazon or other booksellers, you can get Breaking Barriers for Non-Speaking Autistic Students: A Toolkit to Enhance Communication and Learning Environments, which came out this year.

I previewed this, and people can use the book or the toolkit on its own, but you also have a course that runs concurrently with it. Is that how it works?

Lisa Mihalich Quinn
Yeah. These are probably a hundred-and-some-page book, front and back, and it’s all the handouts that go along with the course. We decided to make all of the takeaways available.

One of the most impactful things from the course is hearing from non-speaking autistic people who get to tell us about their experiences. We’ve captured a lot of that in the book.

We have key takeaways about concepts like apraxia, adapting academics, regulation and dysregulation, and strategies for those things. It’s stuff you could hand off to a teacher or a team and say, “This is a great place to start.”

Then it connects with our course. It goes alongside the course that we teach.

Tim Villegas
And we will put all of that in the show notes as well as your website. I’m wondering if we could tell another story—maybe a moment where you witnessed a breakthrough in communication. I think people would love to hear your perspective on a learner who made that jump from not being able to communicate to being able to communicate.

Lisa Mihalich Quinn
Maybe I’ll tell you two because one’s super short. One was one of my fourth graders when I was still teaching in public schools. He had a Dynavox or Springboard—some device he was using—and he loved the elevator. This was his special interest, his obsession. It was a little dangerous at times, but when he got to his device every day, he would just tell me, “I want the elevator. I want the elevator.”

In one of my not-best moments, I hid the elevator button. I thought, “I can’t today. I cannot do this.” I should not have done it, but there we were.

Tim Villegas
I feel like we’ve all been there.

Lisa Mihalich Quinn
Two minutes later: “I want stairs computer. I want stairs computer.” And I thought, “God, he is so smart.” Then I said, “Okay, all right. We’ve got to learn to spell. We’ve got to learn more than this.”

Within two or three weeks, this kid was poking through stencils. He switched to a Bluetooth keyboard. It wasn’t just me. That’s one of the big hangups people have when they see kids spelling or typing on letterboards and keyboards—they think, “Well, he can only do it with her. It’s not real.”

We don’t do that here. You’re going to learn with your parents. You’re going to learn with multiple people. This kid was doing it with his aides, with his speech pathologists.

We had a meeting. This kid was on an alternate curriculum track. We had an IEP meeting where we moved him from a non-diploma-bound track back to diploma-bound. I’ve never done that in my entire life. It was always the other direction, and it made me so sad. But this was incredible. He had gotten this ability to communicate.

Of course, people were walking around thinking, “Is it really him?” This child spoke Korean at home. He was standing with me, and I had an intern who spoke Korean. The intern said something to him in Korean. I was holding his board as he responded, and he spelled out the word “always.”

I asked, “What did you say to him?” The intern said, “I asked if he understood me when I talked to him.” He spelled out “always.” So unless I subconsciously learned Korean, this was genuinely him answering. That’s the magic we’re looking for. This kid is so smart, and he didn’t have a way to tell us.

Tim Villegas
Wow. That was your short story?

Lisa Mihalich Quinn
That was a long short story.

Tim Villegas
Now we have time. This is a podcast. Podcasts are for stories.

Lisa Mihalich Quinn
The other story I was going to tell you—people who follow us on social media are familiar with Nick. Nick is one of our young adults and does a lot of our social media. He presented at the TASH conference last year. Someone asked him to reflect on his journey learning to communicate.

I was the one who taught Nick with the letterboard. He wrote about this lady chasing him around his living room with a board and how he was confused at first. He said, “She was nice. I was intrigued by what she was doing, but I couldn’t get my body to do what I wanted.”

He wasn’t interested in anything I was bringing up, but he had no way to tell me. I would ask, “Do you want to do something else?” and he said his body would stupidly point to the last thing I said. So I was teaching him things he had no interest in because his body just pointed automatically.

Then one day it clicked. We were talking about Schoolhouse Rock because I knew it was one of the shows he watched on his loops. I said, “Let’s learn about the history of it—why it came about, who was involved.” That day we had a breakthrough. He started spelling all these other things.

Nick is such a cool example of what communication has done for his life. He’s been able to direct what his days look like. He has an internship. He comes here for a co-op. Last year his big goal was to go to a conference and present—and he did. He co-wrote our conference presentation with me.

This year he decided he wants to organize a local event from the ground up. Great. He’s taking control of his life and determining everything about his day-to-day life.

Tim Villegas
That’s amazing. Thank you for sharing that.

Tim Villegas
I think people who listen and are not familiar with spelling might wonder: How do learners know how to spell?

So many times a learner will be in a segregated classroom where they are not taught literacy, not taught to read, not explicitly taught these things. But when they’re given access to spelling or typing, the rate of learning seems exponential.

Help us understand—maybe they already know how to spell some words? How does that happen?

Lisa Mihalich Quinn
One thing I know is that my learners don’t read the way I read. Their brains don’t work the same way. I’m making an assumption that they haven’t acquired that knowledge in the traditional way I did.

I didn’t know that until I took a MAP assessment with one of my students. Are you familiar with MAP Growth, MAP R, MAP M? It’s a reading test on a computer. I wasn’t allowed to read it to my students. There’s a chunk of text on screen, and they answer multiple choice.

I took it with one student who uses a letterboard. The text would come up on the screen, they’d tell me their letter, I’d enter it, and we’d go to the next question.

This student typically had no interest in tests or scores—they don’t mean anything to him. But he flew through this test. I couldn’t have followed along. I couldn’t have read everything on the screen because he was giving me answers so fast.

We got to the end and his score was above grade level. Could it be luck? Maybe. But I doubt it. I asked, “Explain to me what just happened, because my brain doesn’t work like that.”

He told me his brain takes a picture of the information and then it floats into his head like a file folder. I said, “Awesome. My brain doesn’t do that.” That was eye-opening.

So when people come to me, my guess is they’ve probably been absorbing environmental print and making sense of it for a long time. I notice a lot of my kids who watch YouTube videos turn captions on. I don’t know if that’s so they can read along, but I think they’re absorbing information everywhere.

I also assume I might need to teach them things. My little guys—we teach them phonetics. We teach phonetically as well as motor skills so they understand the sounds letters make. If they don’t know how to spell a word, they have a repair strategy.

The only thing I can say is they’re absorbing information everywhere around them. My students have told me, “When you can’t speak, you have a lot of time to listen, to look, to observe, to put things into place around you.”

And just sitting here, there’s so much print behind me on all the books.

Tim Villegas
Yeah. If people aren’t talking to you or providing print resources, I guess they have this opportunity for self-direction. They can learn whatever they want—maybe on YouTube or by being exposed to print we don’t even know about.

It feels like autistic learners definitely learn differently than neurotypical learners. The typical ways of gaining knowledge—especially in print and literacy—won’t necessarily be the same.

But what you said about teaching reading and the science of reading—I think that’s still really important.

Lisa Mihalich Quinn
Did you see the article that came out this week? I haven’t read the whole thing yet, just the abstract. Researchers in Canada studied young autistic learners and how they interacted with letters versus neurotypical learners.

They focused on behaviors—things autistic learners did when they were young, like preschoolers. They tended to have a favorite letter, be more focused on letters, line them up, make patterns, form them into word chunks.

This was very different from how typical brains interacted with letters at the same age. They might do it on screens, with blocks, with magnets, but the study showed these learners had a strong love of letters and numbers at a very young age. It had meaning and connection for them when neurotypical students weren’t showing that connection.

Tim Villegas
You’re right. That reminds me of a student I had early in my career. His decoding skills were phenomenal—he could read a passage on grade level, no problem. But I assumed his deficit was reading comprehension.

I’m rethinking this whole thing. What if he understood perfectly and apraxia and co-regulation were the barriers to him letting us know what he actually knew? Wow. Just wow.

Lisa Mihalich Quinn
I know, right? All the kids pop up in your mind and you think, “Man, what if I had known?”

Tim Villegas
My gosh. Okay, let me look—I’ve been way off on the questions now. We just went on a wild ride. I’ll ask one more question and then we’ll wrap up.

Maybe your vision or what you hope will happen in the next five to ten years in public schools. And we’re going to be positive and hopeful. We’re going to speak this into existence—how people like your organization and others who want to give access to students can collaborate with public schools. How do you see that working in a positive and helpful way?

Lisa Mihalich Quinn
Let’s speak it into existence. I think it’s going to be a couple of things.

We’re going to see people who believe in inclusion getting into more senior leadership roles. That’s where change will happen—the people with the mindset of possibility, the “what if” mindset.

Once they’re in those places, that’s key to getting students access to their preferred communication, which is actually protected by the ADA, although many schools fight that.

Getting knowledge about apraxia and regulation to be more mainstream and changing more minds is crucial. There are a lot of people doing that work. I tend to get into a bubble on social media following people who are already in the know.

The work you’re doing with the podcast, the work others are doing to make this knowledge more widespread—that’s huge. I’d love to see teacher training programs include this knowledge before educators leave school.

Tim Villegas
Yes. We’re hopeful that continues to happen and educators gain this knowledge so they come in presuming competence and seeing this as an option to explore.

Lisa Mihalich Quinn
Yeah. And thinking about how far we’ve come—not just specific to kids using letterboards—the democratization of AAC should be huge for so many kids. And yet it’s not.

When I started teaching, I had a kid who needed a touchscreen. It took a whole team to come out and hang a touchscreen on one monitor. It was a separate thing you put on top. It was 15 pounds. We don’t need that anymore.

Now there are things embedded into our technology that support needs. We need an understanding of UDL—how we make learning accessible for all learners from a young age.

Maybe in preschool we give every kid a letterboard. Every kid learns letters and letter recognition. Let’s not single out the ones who can’t speak. Let’s hand every kid a laminated piece of paper with the alphabet and let everyone point to a letter.

Tim Villegas
I like it. Anything you want to leave educators with?

Lisa Mihalich Quinn
Instead of saying, “This is how we do things,” switch it to, “What if we tried?” What if is a much better mindset than “We’ve always done it this way.” When you ask “What if,” the whole world can open up.

Tim Villegas
We’ve talked about how presuming competence and understanding apraxia can open up new possibilities for non-speaking students and heard Lisa’s insights on transforming both classroom practice and educator mindsets. But before we wrap up, it’s time for one of our favorite traditions—the mystery question.

Awesome. Are you ready for a mystery question?

Lisa Mihalich Quinn
I am never ready for a mystery question, so go ahead and we’ll see what happens.

Tim Villegas
Okay, these are written by my 12-year-old. She needs to write more because I’ve only got two left. So I’m going to make you pick: yellow or blue. I know that’s not technically blue—it’s probably another kind of blue—but I’m not good at colors.

Lisa Mihalich Quinn
I’m going to go with the yellow one then, because it’s very clearly yellow.

Tim Villegas
Okay, here we go. If you got a tattoo—

Lisa Mihalich Quinn
Oh boy. Oh no. What would it be?

Tim Villegas
You may already have one. I also do not. So if you got a tattoo, what would it be?

Lisa Mihalich Quinn
I don’t, so… oh boy. I’m kind of a chicken. I don’t know that I would want that pain. If I got a tattoo…

Tim Villegas
Okay, so I’m going to show you a drawing. There’s a story. I’ve never said this publicly. A long time ago, I commissioned this to be a tattoo for myself.

It’s a cartoon skull with four marigolds around it—kind of a Day of the Dead type of skull. For reasons I’m still not going to say publicly, I decided not to get the tattoo and probably never will. But if I were to get one, that would probably be it.

Lisa Mihalich Quinn
That’s fair. I’ve never thought about getting a tattoo. It’s never been something that sparked interest for me. I know so many people who have because it means something to them. I don’t even know what I would do. It might be something that means something to me for my kids or my family.

Tim Villegas
My wife has tattoos. My oldest daughter just got her second tattoo and she’s still 18. We’re definitely not against tattoos. I’m probably in a different place now than when I made that decision, but I don’t think there’s something I’d want tattooed on my body at this point.

Lisa Mihalich Quinn
Forever, yeah. The other day we were at a daycare picnic. I was never allowed to even get temporary tattoos when I was a kid. I think they’re fun. My son said, “Can I go get a tattoo, Mommy?” I said, “Yeah, go ahead.” He came back with a giant dragon across his forehead and something else on his cheek.

I thought, “I’m taking Post Malone to Disney tomorrow.” We went on our Disney World trip with these huge tattoos on his face. So I’ll let him get my tattoo for me. He’ll take care of it.

Tim Villegas
There you go. All right. Thank you so much for sharing and playing along with the mystery question. Lisa Mihalich Quinn, thank you so much for being on the Think Inclusive podcast.

Lisa Mihalich Quinn
Thanks so much for having me.

Tim Villegas
That was Lisa Mihalich Quinn. I keep thinking about the students I taught—the ones who I knew had the answers but just couldn’t show me in the way they were expected to. Honestly, I keep wondering: What if I knew then what I know now?

How much more could we have done if we understood apraxia and co-regulation and truly presumed competence from the start? If you’re an educator working with students with autism, I can’t stress this enough: Make it a priority to learn about apraxia and co-regulation.

We need more balance in how we prepare and support our teachers. It’s not just about behavior or compliance—it’s about opening doors to communication and possibility.

Share this episode with a colleague who’s building inclusive schools. Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Follow Think Inclusive wherever you get your podcasts.

Shout out to the school teams at St. Michael’s Elementary in Talbot County and Deal Island Elementary in Somerset County. Thank you for graciously letting me record interviews and observe some of the activities MCIE is doing to build a shared understanding of inclusive education.

If you have something to share, email me at tvillegas@mcie.org. I read every single message.

Think Inclusive is brought to you by me, Tim Villegas. I write, edit, mix, master—I wear all the podcast hats. This show is a proud production of the Maryland Coalition for Inclusive Education, with scheduling and extra production help from Jill Wagoner.

Our original music is by Miles Kredich with extra vibes from Melod.ie. Big thanks to our sponsor, IXL. Visit IXL.com/inclusive.

Fun fact: Did you know that Testudo, the bronze terrapin statue at the University of Maryland, is famous for bringing good luck to anyone who rubs its nose? When I was on campus interviewing students and peer mentors from the TERPS Exceed program—a program for students with intellectual disabilities who go to college just like everyone else—I made sure to give Testudo’s nose a good rub for luck.

Do you have any special traditions for good luck? I’d love to know about it. Email me at tvillegas@mcie.org.

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