Real Jobs, Real Risk: Magen Rooney-Kron on Transition and Employment ~ 1403

Magen Rooney-Kron: You have to learn those skills. So as valuable as those early career experiences are, a lot of my work focuses on more intensive ones, such as internships and paid employment, where students are consistently at the work site. They’re held to the same expectations you would have at a competitive integrated employment job.

And you really have that time and support to learn those skills. And the research consistently shows that paid employment is the biggest one, right? Because that’s what we want them to be in, so it just makes sense, right? So whenever we shift it and don’t make it the real, authentic thing, I think we lose a little bit.

And within all of this, we are gonna provide the support and services students need. We’re not just gonna say, “Hey, have fun.” But dignity of risk really acknowledges that learning is really messy.

And we’re not going to be successful all of the time, and sometimes we can learn through failure. I’ve screwed up at work many times, and I’ve always learned something.

Tim Villegas: Hey, 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 a box that magically resets. You might have seen one. It’s a work task in a high school classroom where a student sorts things from left to right, checks a box, and then the whole thing goes back into the bin so it can be done again tomorrow.

My guest is Magen Rooney-Kron. Magen is an assistant professor of inclusive education at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, where she also directs the Master of Special Education program. She serves on the board of directors of TASH. Her research looks at how teachers can plan community-based work experiences that prepare students with intellectual disability for competitive integrated employment.

She started out co-teaching biology, chemistry, and math in Chicago Public Schools. She asked a simple question about her students with intellectual disabilities: where do they go after high school? The answers she got were, “I don’t know,” and, “They go home.” She has been working on transition ever since. We talk about why so few people with intellectual disabilities have real jobs, why paid work beats job shadowing, and why a student who doesn’t want to work might just not want to bag groceries.

We also get into dignity of risk and why sometimes the most inclusive thing a job coach can do is let a student mess up. And here’s one line I want you to listen for. Teachers told Magen that the work site was the first time their students were included and held to high expectations. Not the classroom, the job site.

That is a belonging question, and it’s one that we’re gonna keep coming back to throughout this entire season.

Before we meet our guest, I want to tell you about our sponsor. This episode is brought to you by IXL. IXL is 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, and each student gets a personalized learning plan to close gaps.

Check it out at ixl.com/inclusive. Again, that’s ixl.com/inclusive.

All right, after a quick break, it’s time to Think Inclusive with Magen Rooney-Kron. Catch you on the other side.

Magen Rooney-Kron, welcome to the Think Inclusive podcast.

Magen Rooney-Kron: Hi, Tim. It’s so great to be here. I really appreciate your invitation.

Tim Villegas: Yeah, absolutely. And this is really well timed for our conversation. We just published another episode of our Think College series, and this last one that we did was about employment.

They’re all about employment really, but it is fresh in my mind. Sometimes that doesn’t always line up when I have people on, so I’m really excited. We don’t have enough information about this kind of field, in my opinion.

Magen Rooney-Kron: Yeah, I love Think College. I actually work really closely with our inclusive postsecondary education program. Transition to work and college is my jam. It was exciting to see those episodes earlier.

Tim Villegas: Awesome. Okay, correct me if I get any of this wrong, but you taught high school in Chicago Public Schools, right? So you co-taught biology, chemistry, and math, and I know you’ve told this story before, but you were asking about what happens with your students with more significant support needs after graduation. What did they tell you? Whoever you were talking to.

Magen Rooney-Kron: Yeah, so a little context. I was a co-teacher, and I received an alternative certification, and my program didn’t talk anything about transition. So some district reps came in and talked about transition, and I started asking, “Where do my students with intellectual disabilities go after high school?”

And the answers I received were, “I don’t know,” or, “They go home.” And I didn’t understand that, because there was just such cognitive dissonance of, what do you mean we spend 18 to 21 years educating students and they go home? That’s not the point of education. And so I kept asking questions, and I said, “Okay, how are we preparing them for post-school life?”

And they said, “Oh, there’s an occ prep class.” And so I went in, and kids were putting spoons in bags. And again, my mind was blown. I was like, “That’s not a viable way to prepare students with disabilities for work.” And it just felt really unjust to me. I grew up with my mom as a special education teacher, so from a very early age I saw her always advocating and fighting for inclusion and for students to have the same opportunities I had.

So when I realized my students weren’t having the same opportunities I had to work or go to college, I kinda just became obsessed with transition. Luckily, the next year I started my master’s in multiple disabilities at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and I’ve just been obsessed since, reading the work of Paul Wehman and Tim Riesen and all these incredible researchers who believe people with disabilities can work and have developed really great programming. That’s what I’ve been doing for the last 10 years.

Tim Villegas: Why do you think the percentage of people with intellectual disabilities who actually work, real employment, real jobs, not sheltered workshops or anything like that, why do you think that percentage is so low?

Magen Rooney-Kron: Oh, there are so many reasons. I think our systems are very challenging to navigate. For students who are going to require support after high school, there is adult services through vocational rehabilitation. But a challenge with vocational rehabilitation is that it’s eligibility, not entitlement.

Whereas a student with intellectual disability is entitled to special education services, they might graduate high school, require employment support, but be deemed ineligible for services by vocational rehabilitation. Some states have Medicaid waivers to support that population, but again, navigating and accessing Medicaid waivers is very confusing and very challenging.

So there’s just this bureaucratic red tape mess of we’re not providing people support as they transition to post-school life. But I think what also happens is there’s just low expectations, and there’s not an expectation that people with intellectual disabilities can work. And I think part of that comes from a lack of creativity about what work can be.

Work doesn’t have to be a 35-hour workweek where you have a really intense job. It could be five hours a week for a student with really intensive medical needs. It could be self-employment, where a family supports an individual to engage in something they love. So I think low expectations coupled with this limited definition of what work can be limits opportunities.

And then when we don’t have those opportunities, I think for educators, we don’t understand what we’re preparing for, right? If we’re not thinking, “I’m preparing my students to have competitive integrated employment,” that’s gonna inform what we do in the classroom.

There’s so many. I could go on for hours on this. And then we also have segregated school systems. My good friend Julia Snyder, love her to death, she always said, “Segregated students become segregated adults.” And when we think about work, if you are a kid without a disability and you never see people with disabilities in your classrooms, you’re not gonna know how to work with them when you’re older, right?

Or it’s gonna be foreign. So I think our segregated school system contributes to that too. But those are the big hitters. I could probably go on for a long time.

Tim Villegas: Yeah. I’d love to linger on the idea of segregated schools and classrooms for a minute, because I have this core memory of going into high school classrooms that are either transition focused or maybe transition adjacent, and you’d have these workshop-style setups where you have all these work boxes and you’re moving things left to right and there’s little check boxes, visual help and stuff like that. But after it was all done, you just put it in a box and then it magically resets. So.

Magen Rooney-Kron: Which, how annoying would that be? If you worked all day, like what if I wrote a paper all day and then the next day it was just blank?

Tim Villegas: Exactly. That’s no fun. So where is it that we as a field are still doing this and people think that they’re really helping? It’s not that educators think they’re not helping, or they’re trying to be whatever. They really think this is the way to do it. I don’t know if there’s a question in there, but I guess I’ll just throw it back to you.

Magen Rooney-Kron: Yeah. Like what you said, I always try to remind myself, everybody’s doing the best they can with the knowledge they have and in the context they’re in. And I think part of the issue is, one, we’re not training educators on transition.

Most programs have maybe one hour or one class, which is great. It’s helpful, but it’s not enough. Career development looks very different than education. And then I also think we’re not giving these teachers enough resources. To do a community-based work program, you need administrative buy-in, you need employer partnerships, you need time for job development, you need job coaches and transportation.

And if teachers don’t have those resources, or don’t know how to advocate for those resources, they’re stuck with, “What do I do in the classroom?” The task boxes are easy and available, and so they do them with the best intentions, but they don’t go anywhere.

Tim Villegas: Exactly.

Magen Rooney-Kron: I want to acknowledge there are always those barriers, so I would encourage those folks who have task boxes to think, “What are more authentic work experiences in the school?” Because we have to acknowledge that some of these schools are in really rural locations, and they just have a lot of barriers.

But are there school-based experiences where the student can work at the school clothing store? Or when there’s a football game, can they work the concession stands? Can they work in the library? Is there a school-based enterprise you can start? How can we give students authentic work experiences? Because a task box is not gonna do it.

Tim Villegas: Yeah. And I don’t know if we could spend 30 seconds on coffee shops, but it’s kinda played out, don’t you think? Anyway, I’ve talked about this before, so people listening are like, “Yeah, Tim, we know your thoughts about coffee shops and high schools and stuff like that.”

I think everyone’s doing the best that they can, right? So I am not criticizing the effort, you know what I mean? But there are more creative ways to bring employment and job work skills to high school students with disabilities than this one thing.

Magen Rooney-Kron: 100%. And I agree. I want to acknowledge that people are doing the best that they have, but sometimes when that option exists, it’s a little bit easier, and it limits us from being super creative. Sometimes I struggle with, “I understand that this is easier for you,” but if you do that, you have less capacity to think about these more innovative ways to think about employment.

Tim Villegas: Yeah.

Magen Rooney-Kron: So I hear you on that. I focus a lot of my work on the community-based ones, because for the school-based ones, there’s not a lot of research saying they do much.

Tim Villegas: Let’s focus a little bit more on your research and what kinds of work experiences actually make a difference. I’m wondering if you could unpack that for us. I’m just gonna throw out some terms and you can help us define them: job shadowing, internships, work study, and paid employment. What have you learned about which of those actually make a difference for students?

Magen Rooney-Kron: Yeah, that’s such a great question, because I think sometimes we get stuck on the continuum. There’s job shadowing, where students go and follow an employee for a day and learn about a job, and that’s great for career awareness. Career awareness doesn’t get you a job, right? Just knowing I wanna be a teacher does not make me a teacher.

You have to learn those skills. So as valuable as those early career experiences are, a lot of my work focuses on more intensive ones, such as internships and paid employment, where students are consistently at the work site. They’re held to the same expectations you would have at a competitive integrated employment job.

And you really have that time and support to learn those skills. And the research consistently shows that paid employment is the biggest one, right? Because that’s what we want them to be in, so it just makes sense, right? So whenever we shift it and don’t make it the real, authentic thing, I think we lose a little bit.

But the more we can plan community-based work experiences to mirror the demands of what a student would have to do in the workplace, the better prepared they’re going to be.

Tim Villegas: So the paid work, did you notice any difference between, say, a full-pay internship and… I don’t really wanna go down the road of subminimum wage or anything. But where does all of that line up?

Magen Rooney-Kron: How does pay play into it?

Tim Villegas: Yeah.

Magen Rooney-Kron: So the pay part comes into, do you work for free or do you get paid, right?

Tim Villegas: I do get paid, yes.

Magen Rooney-Kron: Yeah, and so do I, right? We get exploited a little probably in our field, but we get paid for our jobs. And so we go to work to get paid. The thing about work experiences too is it’s not just developing skills, it’s helping students understand what work is and conceptualize what it means. When we go to work, there’s lots of benefits to work. There’s health benefits, there’s social benefits, but none of us would go to work if we didn’t get paid, right?

Tim Villegas: Yeah.

Magen Rooney-Kron: So for students to go to work experiences where they’re not getting paid, we often see resistance or challenging behaviors, because they’re like, “Why am I here?” Especially when the work isn’t aligned with their interests. I frequently get, “Hey, I have this student at a work site, and they just don’t wanna work. What do I do with them?” And my first question always is, “What’s the job?” It’s usually a grocery store. And I say, “Okay, what does the student like?” And they say, “Oh, Spider-Man and movies and theater.” And I say, “Okay, can we think about working at a theater maybe?” Somewhere aligned with those interests.

I got a little off on a tangent there. But paid employment is a predictor, I think, because, one, it reflects the demands of what students are gonna have to do in the workplace, but also, students are more motivated when they’re gonna get paid, because no one wants to work for free.

Tim Villegas: Yeah, exactly. I wanna follow up about interests, because I really like where you’re going with that. For everyone else, it’s “find a job that you love, find your dream job, if you work a job with your interest you’ll never work a day in your life,” blah, blah, blah, and all that stuff, right? But for whatever reason, for these kids who are in these programs, it’s like, no, you have to work at the grocery store, or you have to work at whatever job, that they don’t find interesting.

Magen Rooney-Kron: Yeah. Okay, so what’s something you really don’t like doing?

Tim Villegas: I’m just thinking about this, which is actually doing the landscaping in my house, which I have to do this weekend, and I do not enjoy it.

Magen Rooney-Kron: And what if I said, “Hey, Tim, you’re gonna go plant flowers for three hours on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday”?

Tim Villegas: Yeah.

Magen Rooney-Kron: You would have challenging behavior. You wouldn’t wanna learn. And then I think that reinforces these low expectations people have for work. “Oh, they don’t wanna work.” And it’s like, no, they don’t want to do that. I cannot believe that people don’t want to work, because I just don’t subscribe to that belief. I think if you find something you care about, you’re interested in doing it, right? We just have to find things people are interested in.

And a lot of that comes back to the dignity of risk. “Oh, my student wants to work in a theater. Oh, I’m worried it’ll be too loud for them. It’s really fast-paced, and what if they don’t do well?” And it’s like, okay, but if we’ve done the career exploration and we know that this could be a good job fit, yeah, they might fail, but let’s at least try, and then that student can learn.

Either they can show us they can work in a fast-paced environment, the loud doesn’t bother them because they put headphones in and listen to music, or we figure out how to accommodate them. Or the student gets there and goes, “This is awful,” and they learn, “Ah, I don’t wanna go into the theater,” and then we can try something else.

But we have to respect what they’re interested in and get really creative. If a student’s interested in Spider-Man, okay, are there comic stores? Are there bookstores? Are there movie theaters? How can they engage with Spider-Man in some way, shape, or form so that they’re excited about work?

Tim Villegas: Oh yeah, exactly. Our family is really into trading card games, like Magic: The Gathering and Pokémon and all that stuff. And so anytime we go to any store like that, it’s full of stuff and people who are really interested and wanting to talk about Spider-Man. And that’s not weird at all in that context.

But yeah, I think the parallels between how you set up employment for someone who’s in transition or post-school and even for students in school, in K-12 settings, it’s so similar. And the thing that I wanted to touch on in our conversation is, you found that when students’ teachers expected them to have a paid summer job, that had a positive impact on whether they actually got a job.

Magen Rooney-Kron: Yeah. So expectations are… tons of other literature has shown the importance of expectations. What was really interesting in some of the work that I’ve done is that teachers frequently talked about how when students came to their community-based work site, it was the first time they were included and held to high expectations, which I was like, “Oh my God.”

Tim Villegas: Wow.

Magen Rooney-Kron: Yeah. I was like, “That is alarming, but okay.” It was the first time they were held to those expectations. And the interesting thing was that they said when they had good employer partners, those employers had higher expectations than the students’ teachers at their schools. They really contrasted that.

In a work environment, students were held to higher expectations because the employers didn’t know a ton about the student’s disability. They didn’t care about that, they just wanted to make them a successful employee. They wanted to support them, and they recognized they had support needs, but they were like, “Hey, you’re here to do this. You’re here to learn this. We’re gonna do it.”

And some teachers really talked about how that directly contrasted with a more special education approach in schools, where students were held to really low expectations and given a lot of leeway when they made mistakes, and protected. It was that dignity of risk. They were protected from anything bad happening because, “Oh, we don’t want them to feel bad. We don’t want them to fail.” Whereas in the job, it was like, “Hey, buddy, you did that wrong. Fix it. I’m gonna expect you to fix it.” And then the student actually learned.

And the expectations for work… when the teachers expected students to work, they got more integrated jobs, whereas some teachers who had lower expectations, it was more volunteer work, and it was like, “Work sucks, but we have to get through it,” and, “We’re doing it because our program has to do it.”

I can talk till I’m blue in my face on how to do this well. I can give you all the resources and all the tools, but unless you believe your students can work, your approach is just not gonna get there. In my first year of my doc program, Adelle Renzaglia said, and it has always stuck with me, “When we went to a work site, we always said, ‘How can we make this work?’”

And she worked with students with really extensive support needs. It was never if, it was never “can we,” it was “how do we make it work?” And when you expect people to work, you figure out, “Okay, I know this kid can work. What accommodations do they need? What supports do they need?” We are going to do it. And so I think that is what helps students prepare and meet those expectations of competitive integrated employment.

Tim Villegas: After the break, if what adults expect predicts who gets a job, how do you change what adults expect?

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Magen Rooney-Kron: Sorry, I get excited about it.

Tim Villegas: No. I’m just trying to figure out where I wanna take this. If I’m hearing you correctly, it’s not just anecdotal that if adults expect students to work and have a job, they do. There’s a research base and there’s evidence behind it. It’s actually proven. Is that what I’m hearing?

Magen Rooney-Kron: I would say there is research evidence, yeah. Erik Carter, who was on your podcast a couple weeks ago, has done some work where teachers who believed their students could work, their students were more likely to have a summer job.

Tim Villegas: Yeah.

Magen Rooney-Kron: Carly Gilson has done some work about parent expectations, and found that when parents expect students to work, they’re more likely to. So there is definitely some correlational research that expectations impact outcomes.

Tim Villegas: So if beliefs are maybe not the most impactful thing, but definitely a factor in whether a student achieves employment, how do we help shift beliefs?

Magen Rooney-Kron: I know. This is what I’ve been thinking about a lot.

Tim Villegas: I come to you with the hard and good questions.

Magen Rooney-Kron: I know.

Tim Villegas: We can fix it right here. Right here, right now, we’ll fix it.

Magen Rooney-Kron: Yeah, I have my magic wand. It’s ready to go. Okay, so how do we fix expectations? I think it starts, honestly, at birth. It starts early, especially for transition. I always say high school is very segregated in special education, and I always try to encourage elementary and middle schools: you guys need to be so included and have such high expectations that high school is forced to blow up their system, because high school is so lecture-based.

It just doesn’t really work well for inclusion. I was like, “We need to just shift the paradigm,” but that is going off on a tangent. Back to expectations. I think the expectation of inclusion, by having students always included, raises expectations, because in that classroom you see the students without disabilities, and you expect them to accomplish the same things, and then you figure out those supports.

And I think over time, those expectations compound. I expect my students to be included in kindergarten. I expect them included in first grade. I expect them to play sports in middle school. All of those things compound. And then when we are at that transition age, I worked with a lot of parents, and when I said, “Okay, what’s your kid doing for work after high school?” they said, “What do you mean? My kid can work?” And I said, “Yeah, why not?” And they said, “No one’s ever talked to me about that.”

So my approach was, I’m just gonna show you the data. I’m just gonna consistently show you that this student can do it. I would consistently provide opportunities for students to be in the community and learn skills and do things that their parents might not have expected them to do, and then they would be like, “Oh, I didn’t realize they could do that.” So I think it’s giving opportunities, but there also has to be that person in the beginning who has that high expectation, right? I don’t think I’m answering this very well.

Tim Villegas: No, you’re doing great. And this is not just for students with, quote unquote, “mild disabilities” or learning disabilities. This is for everyone, including learners with more extensive support needs. Can you unpack that a little bit and maybe explain to our listeners what that might look like?

Magen Rooney-Kron: For high expectations for…?

Tim Villegas: Yeah, or maybe what even employment for people with extensive support needs would look like.

Magen Rooney-Kron: Yeah. So for students with more extensive support needs, they might not work a 40-hour week. They might work fewer hours. When students with extensive support needs graduate high school, they can receive vocational rehabilitation services, and they can receive customized employment, which is a model that really focuses on how to meet the employer’s needs, but also the individual’s needs.

It’s very strength-based: what is Magen really good at? What does the employer need? And then it’s very customized. So understanding that’s an option, that this student could work in a very customized way, and there are supports, can help increase expectations. Okay, there is an option after graduation.

There’s also self-employment, which can be challenging because you need finances and people to support you. But for people to have their own businesses at home where they have family and friends who support them, those are other options too for students with more extensive support needs.

Tim Villegas: Yeah. What I’m hearing is that’s part of the creative solutions that have come up in the field, in how people are figuring this out, and there’s no shame in that. How many people do we know who own their own businesses and hire their children? A lot. That’s not out of the ordinary.

But maybe, I don’t know if I’m using the right word, there’s a devaluing of that. I don’t know where it’s coming from, but it’s possible that some may see that as undervalued or devalued employment because it’s, “Oh, I’m hiring my child for our family business.”

Magen Rooney-Kron: Which, if the kid wants to do it, that’s fine. And I also think we have to challenge our capitalistic tendencies of, we have to work hard, we have to work fast, and that’s what’s most important. Because it’s not always what’s most important, right? And I think it’s about people with disabilities recognizing they have a lot to contribute to our workforce and our workplaces, and figuring out how to… we’ve built an employment system that’s not inclusive.

Tim Villegas: So you’ve talked a lot about dignity of risk, and you even co-authored a piece called “Messy Inclusion.” I like that phrase, messy inclusion. I’d like for you to unpack that for us. What does that mean in your context?

Magen Rooney-Kron: Yeah. So first, huge shout-out to Dr. Jennifer Bumbal and Dr. Chris Worth, who taught me this concept and helped me understand dignity of risk. But for those who might be new to the term, in the ’70s, Robert Perske was observing people with disabilities in the community, and he realized they weren’t having a ton of opportunities to take risks.

So he coined this term, dignity of risk, and the principle is basically that people with disabilities need to be able to take risks to reach their full potential. But we also have to recognize they might fail, and that’s okay, and that’s a learning experience. Within work experience, this kinda happens before a student even gets to the work site, when we’re picking work sites, right?

We might be really scared about what if they’re gonna fail at this work experience, or what if they’re not gonna like it? And if we’ve done high-quality career development and career exploration, and we know, okay, we’ve done our work, we’ve done the best we can, there’s always gonna be a risk that someone’s gonna fail, right?

And I think sometimes we bubble wrap it so much for students with disabilities that we don’t give them those opportunities to fail. And once students are at the job site, what it looks like for dignity of risk is, students often start these experiences with very low self-efficacy related to work. They’re not really confident completing work tasks. They’re really unsure. But with time, their confidence increases because they have these opportunities for dignity of risk.

Some of those opportunities are working alongside peers without disabilities, where they see, “Oh, hey, Mark just totally dropped a whole bucket of soap, and he didn’t get fired. He cleaned it up. I helped him clean it up, and it’s fine.” Oh, if I try something and I fail, it’s okay.

Tim Villegas: Yeah.

Magen Rooney-Kron: And within all of this, we are gonna provide the support and services students need. We’re not just gonna say, “Hey, have fun.” But dignity of risk really acknowledges that learning is really messy, and we’re not going to be successful all of the time, and sometimes we can learn through failure. I’ve screwed up at work many times, and I’ve always learned something.

And then the other component where dignity of risk comes into these work experiences is authentic consequences. Sometimes when a student messes up or doesn’t do something well, we don’t want them to feel bad, and so we just say, “Oh, don’t worry. I’ll fix it.” This happens a lot with job coaches, where you’re like, “Oh, it’ll look bad on me if they do a bad job, so I’ll fix all these clothes over there,” or, “I’ll clean this up so that no one knows they made a mistake.”

But then how is the student gonna learn, right? Then they don’t understand that was the expectation. That is the level of work I’m required to do. So it’s holding students to those natural consequences. And sometimes that means students get fired, right? If they steal from a business.

Tim Villegas: Yeah.

Magen Rooney-Kron: They need to learn. You can’t do that, right?

Tim Villegas: Totally.

Magen Rooney-Kron: It’s hard when teachers have spent so much time building these connections and establishing the work site. We can’t just blow up our whole operation, but students need to understand those natural consequences, because otherwise they’re not gonna learn. Teachers frequently talk about how helpful it is when their employer says, “Hey, you screwed this up,” or, “Hey, that’s not how we do it. Here’s how we do it.” And in every situation, students met or exceeded expectations. So it’s just getting really comfortable with failure as a learning opportunity.

Tim Villegas: Yeah. It sounds a lot like parenting. I’m just thinking about our kids. I’ve got three, 20, 16, and 13. It’s not fun to see them fail. It is not fun. And to your point about the job coach, if they do something, then it’s a reflection on me, right? My parenting, my coaching, all that stuff. And so I’m sure it is tempting to try to clean up the mess, right? Behind your child or your student or whoever you’re supporting.

Magen Rooney-Kron: Yeah.

Tim Villegas: But I think that’s a good lesson for all of us.

Magen Rooney-Kron: I have a four-year-old, and since he was two years old, he’s been my Velcro baby. He always wanted to be by me. So he always was around when I cooked, and he always loved cooking. And so I got him the plastic knives. Sometimes I’d give him the old carrot that I can’t use, and he would just practice cutting. When I had a low heat thing, he would mix stuff, and my aunt was always horrified, “Oh my gosh, I can’t believe you’re letting him do that.”

I’m like, “But he loves to cook.” He’s four years old, and he can make his own scrambled eggs.

Tim Villegas: Hey, that’s pretty good.

Magen Rooney-Kron: I just have to turn on the oven and get everything out for him, and he can do everything. And there have been times where he’s touched the pan, and I’m like, “Ah.” And I’m like, “Yeah, don’t do that, buddy.” Was it hot enough for him to really hurt himself? No, right? And that’s what we also have to think about. We’re not just gonna throw students out there to the wolves and say, “Fend for yourself,” or, “You could get really hurt.” But with appropriate supports, you know, failure is okay.

Tim Villegas: Exactly. I’m wondering if we can, I wanna end on two things. I would love to know why this work is important to you personally. That’s number one. And number two, if you knew you had a room full of K-12 teachers, and maybe just focus on high school transition, but the audience is K-12, what would you tell them about competitive integrated employment? So those are the two questions we can wrap up on.

Magen Rooney-Kron: Okay. So why is it meaningful to me? I think I mentioned earlier, my mom was a special education teacher, and I’d always been really involved with people with disabilities, and in college I was a direct support professional, and then I was very confused in college doing psychology, and I just didn’t know what I wanted to do.

And I graduated, and my mom had passed away right when I graduated, and I thought, “Oh, I’ll do this teaching certificate. I’ll just teach for a year. I don’t know what I’m doing.” And then I just loved it and found the transition work. I think it’s meaningful for me because people with disabilities deserve the same opportunities I have, and there’s just something in me that says this is not right.

There’s this injustice that we treat people with disabilities differently, and we don’t give them the same opportunity. And I think also just by spending time with people with disabilities, I am always a better and happier person. And I think everyone would benefit from spending more time with them. If people with disabilities were more integrated, we would all be so much happier.

Tim Villegas: Yeah. Well.

Magen Rooney-Kron: And I don’t mean that in the feel-good way. But if society was more integrated and had people with disabilities in it, we would just have more diversity of understanding and diversity of perspectives, and everything would be better for everybody. I went on a tangent there too. But it’s personal for me because there’s so many people with disabilities I love and care about, and I don’t understand why they don’t have the same opportunities I do. So I try to advocate for that.

Tim Villegas: Awesome. Thanks for sharing that. And then if you were talking to a room full of K-12 educators, what would you tell them?

Magen Rooney-Kron: Okay, I think I would tell teachers to build teams, because this is not something you can do by yourself. Find an administrator who’s gonna be your champion. Find someone at the district who’s gonna be a champion.

Look at your related service providers. How can an SLP help you? How can an OT help you? Look for the paraprofessionals who are really super excited about their jobs, because doing all of this requires a lot of hard work and a lot of attention and a lot of intentionality, and you can’t do it alone, or you shouldn’t have to do it alone.

So find your team, find your champions. If you don’t have them at your school, look across your district, look at national organizations, but find people who are gonna help you problem solve, get really creative, and challenge you and challenge those biases when a student says, “Hey, they wanna do this,” and you’re like, “I don’t know if they can.”

Find those people who are gonna hold you accountable and help you process all of that. I have those friends all the time who help me process my biases and help me grow. Right now I’m really trying to hire our college students with disabilities to be research assistants, and I’m learning a lot about my own biases, like having them do certain tasks and training, and I have a lot of friends I call and say, “Help me work through this. How can I do this in an equitable and inclusive way?” So create your team. Find your people.

Tim Villegas: Awesome. Thank you so much, Magen. Really appreciate your time. Is there a place where people can find more about you and your work?

Magen Rooney-Kron: Yeah. I work for the University of Missouri-St. Louis, so I can share my email address.

Tim Villegas: Sure. If people wanna reach out, they can email you to learn more.

Magen Rooney-Kron: Totally. And I’ll also put in a plug. I’m at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, and I’m our graduate program director. We just revised our Master of Special Education. We have an emphasis in transition studies, and a graduate certificate in transition. It’s all online, so if you wanna learn more about how to do this, I would encourage you to look into that.

Tim Villegas: Awesome. And thank you for everything you do for the field and for everyone at Missouri-St. Louis. Really appreciate your time.

Magen Rooney-Kron: Thank you.

Tim Villegas: Are you ready for a game?

Magen Rooney-Kron: Sure, yeah, let’s do it.

Tim Villegas: Okay. Have you ever done any role-playing game before?

Magen Rooney-Kron: I feel like probably.

Tim Villegas: Probably. Everyone’s kinda done a little bit. I am actually very new to it. This comes from my desire to, whenever I wanna learn something, make a situation where I have to do it. It’s kinda like the podcasting thing. This was years ago, but I really wanted to have a podcast, and I had no idea what I was doing. So I just started one, and then I learned. That’s where I am with RPG stuff.

Magen Rooney-Kron: Exposure therapy.

Tim Villegas: Yeah. This role-playing game is called Awake Among the Stars.

Magen Rooney-Kron: Okay.

Tim Villegas: And there’s no wrong way to do this. If we go down a really weird tangent rabbit hole, it’s totally fine. So why don’t you grab two dice?

Magen Rooney-Kron: Okay. Got ’em.

Tim Villegas: Okay. And I’ll read the narration to start, and I just need you to close your eyes for a second.

Magen Rooney-Kron: Okay.

Tim Villegas: I’m gonna count down and then you’ll open them. So three, two, one, open your eyes. You wake up gasping, cold, floating in a dim metal room. Your head is pounding and your memory is syrup. It’s classic hibernation sickness. A soft chime pings in the room. In a calm voice, your ship’s computer, Cora, says, “Good morning. You have been asleep for a very long time. We are in orbit above an uncharted planet. Also, minor note, our teleporter is running on reserve power, so please explore responsibly.”

Through a porthole on the side of the ship, you see a world you have never seen before, and it turns slowly beneath you. So first things first, let’s find out who you are. Roll one of your dice.

Magen Rooney-Kron: One.

Tim Villegas: You are Captain Dash. Captain Dash is a washed-up legendary pilot who’s gruff but has a heart of gold, and your motivation is you’ve got one big last discovery you’re trying to be remembered for. Does that feel right? Can you maybe, in your character’s voice, say good morning to the computer?

Magen Rooney-Kron: I’m gruff, right? So, good morning.

Tim Villegas: Good morning. Very good. All right, Captain Dash, it’s time to roll for your planet to see where you are going to explore. Roll one more of the six-sided dice.

Magen Rooney-Kron: One again.

Tim Villegas: One again. All right. You are going to a planet that is a jungle. It’s the jungle world. It’s very much like Earth in that the gravity is like Earth, so when we’re teleporting you down to this jungle planet, you are gonna be walking around just fine. Instead of dense forest, it’s dense jungle. Everywhere is jungle. Every sound that you make, it’s just all insulated. It’s really thick, at least where you’re gonna be teleporting to.

So Cora locks down the coordinates, designation The Jungle World. Teleporting now. The light swallows you, and now you are standing on the surface of the Jungle World. All right, your mission is simple. You’ve gotta learn about the world, and you have a backpack that has a scanner. The teleporter’s at reserve power, so you don’t have a lot of time. What do you wanna do? You can explore, you can wait, or you can teleport back to the ship. What would you like to do?

Magen Rooney-Kron: Oh, I’m exploring. I didn’t come all this way to get back on the ship.

Tim Villegas: That’s right. Okay. Normally what I would have you do is put the cards down, but I want you to pick a suit: diamonds, clubs, hearts, or spades. Just go ahead and pick one of them.

Magen Rooney-Kron: We’ll do hearts.

Tim Villegas: Hearts. Okay, and then take two of your dice and roll them, and then give me the total.

Magen Rooney-Kron: 10.

Tim Villegas: 10. All right, so you are teleported to the jungle planet. You have your backpack. And as you emerge from this jungle world, you see a small opening. It’s really thick, but as you’re walking forward, you see a very steep cliff. It’s still tons of jungle and tons of foliage, but as you get closer to the cliff, you realize that a staircase is carved in the cliff. It’s pretty steep. But as you go down, you can look, and at the bottom of the staircase there’s a ledge, and there’s a door, and the door is open. So what do you do?

Magen Rooney-Kron: I don’t like heights. But I would very carefully go down those stairs and open the door.

Tim Villegas: Okay, so you walk down the stairs. You’re up against the side of the cliff, because I don’t like heights either. Cora, the narrator, doesn’t like cliffs either. But you’re up against that cliff, and you’re shimmying your way all the way down to the ledge, not really wanting to look down to the edge. And you walk through the door, and it’s pitch black. Do you have anything that possibly could light up your way? Why don’t you check in your backpack and see if you have anything?

Magen Rooney-Kron: Oh, do I get to make something up in my backpack?

Tim Villegas: Just look in your backpack, see what’s there.

Magen Rooney-Kron: Oh, okay, great. There is a giant flashlight.

Tim Villegas: Amazing.

Magen Rooney-Kron: A good flashlight, yeah.

Tim Villegas: Very heavy. Cora thought of everything, right? Prepared you.

Magen Rooney-Kron: Thanks, Cora.

Tim Villegas: Thanks, Cora. Okay, so you have a giant flashlight. What do you do with the flashlight?

Magen Rooney-Kron: I turn it on.

Tim Villegas: And then?

Magen Rooney-Kron: And I think first I’d wanna see the depth of the room. And I think I’d be listening to see if there was anything there with me.

Tim Villegas: Okay, so you are using the flashlight, and you are looking around, and it’s a large, kind of cavernous room.

Magen Rooney-Kron: Oh, no.

Tim Villegas: And it’s really dark, so you keep moving inside the room, and you’re not really sure where the walls are. You just know that it’s not super tall, but it’s just enough for you to fit in. And as you go, you hear something. What do you hear?

Magen Rooney-Kron: The first thing that’s coming to mind is kids playing.

Tim Villegas: Interesting. Okay, so you keep going with the flashlight. You hear the distant sound of kids playing. And all of a sudden you see another door in the back of this chamber, right? You can see light coming through the edges of the door, so you can just kinda see the outline of it, and behind the door you hear the kids playing. So what do you do?

Magen Rooney-Kron: Oh, I get my butt to that door. Very slowly, because it’s dark and I’m scared I’m gonna fall, but I’d scoot a lot and slide, just in case there was a dip somewhere. But I would go to the door and probably open it very slowly.

Tim Villegas: Is the door open or is it locked?

Magen Rooney-Kron: Oh, it’s open? I’m hoping it’s open.

Tim Villegas: No, that’s okay. You reach for the handle, and it turns, and you hear a little click, and you open the door. And all of a sudden you hear a crackle in your headset, and it’s Cora saying, “We’re running really low on power, Captain Dash. We’ve got about five more minutes.” So what do you wanna do? Do you wanna keep going or do you wanna go back to the ship? It’s up to you.

Magen Rooney-Kron: I wanna keep going.

Tim Villegas: Okay, keep going. You’ve got five more minutes. You open the door and you walk over the threshold into this really bright room, and what do you see?

Magen Rooney-Kron: Kids playing. Can you tell I have two small children?

Tim Villegas: What are the kids playing? You see the kids playing off in the distance. What are they playing on?

Magen Rooney-Kron: They’re playing, like, with characters or some imaginative play, but they’re just laughing a lot and being really goofy and enjoying each other.

Tim Villegas: And one of the kids turns to you and notices you and waves you over, saying, “Come on and come play with us.” So what do you do?

Magen Rooney-Kron: I would say, “Okay, I’m coming.” And I’d probably be a little cautious, because in my head this is slightly a horror movie. Is this really a child? Are they gonna eat me? But I would go over and probably say hi and ask what they’re doing, and hopefully they speak English, since we’re on another planet.

Tim Villegas: You hear your earpiece crackle again, and Cora says, “It’s time to bring you home, Captain Dash. The window closes in 10 seconds. 10, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one.” The light swallows you again, and you are back on board, in one piece, happy as a clam that you made it through the adventure. And Cora says, “Every time you explore a planet and it doesn’t have a name, you get to name the planet.” So what is the name of the planet that you have just explored?

Magen Rooney-Kron: Oh, that’s a great question. What would I name the planet that I explored?

Tim Villegas: There’s no wrong answer.

Magen Rooney-Kron: I know. I’m just not creative. My first instinct is to call it Tedasaurus, because my son’s name is Teddy. So we’ll call it Tedasaurus.

Tim Villegas: I love it. Captain Dash, you just explored Tedasaurus. What is the one thing you will remember about Tedasaurus?

Magen Rooney-Kron: The joy.

Tim Villegas: The joy that you experienced when you got to see the kids playing, right?

Magen Rooney-Kron: Yep.

Tim Villegas: I love it. I’d beg to differ about the creativity, by the way. That was great. Every time I do this, it’s so fun, so thank you. Cora says, “Designation has been logged. Tedasaurus is now an official planet. And it’s time for you, Captain Dash, to go back to sleep and set course for the next unfamiliar star. Thanks for playing.”

Magen Rooney-Kron: Thank you. I couldn’t tell if I was in a horror movie or not, but it was fun. Thanks.

Tim Villegas: It really just depends. So far there’s been no horror elements to this game, but I guess it depends on the guest. If they wanna take it there, we’ll figure it out.

Magen Rooney-Kron: That’s true. My husband loves horror movies, and I used to watch one a year with him, and now it’s zero a year. I just can’t do it.

Tim Villegas: I do enjoy the horror genre, so I get that. Magen Rooney-Kron, thank you so much for being on the Think Inclusive podcast. I really appreciate it.

Magen Rooney-Kron: Thank you so much for having me.

Tim Villegas: That was Magen Rooney-Kron. Here is what I’m taking with me. Magen said career awareness doesn’t get you a job. Knowing you want to be a teacher does not make you a teacher. So a field trip to watch someone work is a start, but it is not the thing. The thing is a real job in the community with a paycheck.

And then there’s what one of her mentors used to ask at every work site. Not, “Can this student work here?” but, “How can we make this work?” It was never if, it was how. One practical step for educators: look at one work experience your students have right now and ask three questions. Is it paid? Is it in the community next to people without disabilities? And is it tied to something the student actually cares about? If the answer to any of those is no, I would reconsider what that work experience looks like for that student.

If you wanna go deeper on transition, Magen’s Master of Special Education program at the University of Missouri-St. Louis is fully online and has an emphasis in transition studies, plus a graduate certificate in transition. That link is in the show notes. Share this episode with a colleague who’s building inclusive schools. Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and follow Think Inclusive wherever you get your podcasts.

If you have something to share, please email me at tvillegas@mcie.org. Now, let’s roll the credits. Think Inclusive is brought to you by me, Tim Villegas. This show is a proud production of the Maryland Coalition for Inclusive Education, with writing help from Claude, editing by Ray from Internet, and scheduling and extra production help from Jill Wagoner.

Our original music is by Miles Kredich, with extra vibes from Melod.ie. Awake Among the Stars is adapted from Alone Among the Stars by Takuma Okada. You can find the whole original role-playing game at the link in our show notes. Big thanks to our sponsors, IXL and Inclusive Schooling. Visit ixl.com/inclusive and inclusiveschooling.com/mcie-behavior.

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