Episode 31: Creating a Shared Understanding
Hello, everyone! Welcome to another episode of the Teaching and Raising Problem Solvers podcast.
I want to thank you so much for your support in January. The January series definitely took on a new feel as I had way shorter episodes but was regularly posting, and you seemed to really enjoy the podcast. So I’m really excited to continue this trajectory of shorter podcasts with a really central framework and then carry it out throughout the month.
But as we step into February, I’m continuing with the regulation focus (obviously, as always, that’s my core passion area.) But today I wanted to share something that I’ve been doing more and more in my sessions with students. Just as I evolve and work on social communication work with my neurodiverse and not-diagnosed clients alike, and that is understanding how people have different brains.
At the first sound of hearing that, you probably thought, “Well, of course!” But when we think about, sometimes for certain kids, and even for us, understanding that what we know, what we have a centralized focus on, what we’re interested in, what we really enjoy – not everybody has that same level of understanding, awareness, intention, desire around those topics.
Oftentimes when we’re experiencing communication breakdowns, it is a result of those differences, and a lack of communicating around those differences. So, for example, I was working with a student earlier this week and this student is just so incredibly creative. They have fantastic ideas; they create projects all the time, they create games all the time, so I kind of joined them in their game creation. And I was like, “Hey, can you teach me how to play?” Because I find that when I have students explain things to me, walk things through, it allows me to see how flexible they can be in their communication if I’m not understanding. And also, how much can they vary their communication for a listener who may not have the same awareness or insight into highly preferred topics. (Disclaimer: I always recommend that kids and young adults and adults alike are able to connect with others who share their same hyperfocus interests because there is something absolutely beautiful about a group or two people who have a shared hyperfocus area or monotropic focus area engaging together, because they share the same deep level of understanding and they can get so much deeper than you often can with somebody who may not have that same level.
So just a quick note to those of you working with students – have them teach you, or talk you through, how to do something. And if you’re a parent, the same thing can apply, the same concept. Because it gets kids learning about various ways that they can explain things. And I highly encourage – if you don’t understand something, let your child know that. Let your child know what you’re getting and what you’re not getting so that they’re building that practice of how to repair, or deliver information in more than one way. And that ability to be a communicator who can resay or retype or reshare something on a speech generating device in a different way is so incredibly important. Think about how many times in your day you have a message and you’re talking to somebody and you say, “Let me see if I can explain it in a different way.” We do that quite often as communicators. So think about that as a parent, and as a caregiver as well, and as a professional – the importance of having kids explain the how of things, or the procedure.
But anyways, the student was explaining how to play the game t0 me, and I was walking through the game. We had lots of really great points where there was a clear communication breakdown. So, for example, I was moving my piece along in the game and I got to what was a door in the game, and a door immediately opened, so I just moved the piece in an open way, and this student said, “No! That’s not how you’re supposed to do it. You’re supposed to do it this way.” And then he showed me their way, and I said, “Oh! Can you show me where that’s written down?” And they were like, “Well it’s not written down.” I said, “Oh, well how would my brain know? I don’t think I’ve learned this before.” And it gave us this really amazing chance to talk about externalizing some of the things that may not be shared, and/or creating this shared set of expectations, or what I’ll sometimes call with students “house rules” around things, so that both brains are clear in understanding what the rules are, what things mean, what the expectations are. And we do this sometimes naturally in conversations, but where we don’t do it already is where we often see communication breakdowns happening.
For example, let’s say you meet up with a friend, and you don’t set an end time but you really have an appointment to get to. So as time gets tighter and tighter, you’re feeling more stressed, and you’re feeling like, “I’ve gotta go.” But that expectation, that shared understanding of the situation, hasn’t been laid. Versus if you say, “Ah, I’d love to meet up for coffee. I have to leave by 12:30 because I have an appointment at 12:45. Does this still work for you? Again, communication around that shared experience is so important.
Anyways, back to the game… There were several instances in that game where I would think that something meant something else, and what it did was it gave us this really beautiful chance to talk about how brains are different, and how we default back to doing what we know when we don’t have further information. So it’s also that ability and that awareness that people may not know something because they haven’t been exposed to or experienced it yet.
My most favorite part about this whole scenario is we were drawing – I just draw these rogue brains, hand-drawn – I’ve gotten very good at drawing the side profile of the brain. But in the brain this student put a bunch of people. He said, “I feel like people are really important to you. You seem to really like people.” And I was like, “You know, I really do care about the people in my life, so I think that’s a really cool observation that you made.” But I just said, “Do you see in our brains that we think about, and we focus on different things. And that means when we come together, having a shared level of understanding is so important. That seemed to really click for this student, and it seems to click with a lot of students. Some students get it in that one-time exposure, and some benefit from multiple times of exposure. But be thinking about that and teaching that skill of are you able to communicate the shared understandings around a task? And also how to navigate any communication breakdowns that might happen. So for example, saying “If I don’t understand, then how are we going to approach that scenario?” That can be really, really helpful. And I think for us as adults it’s really helpful, too, in our communication with other adults. So different brains, different interests, different communication styles – how do we create a shared understanding when we come together?
All right, everybody. I hope you have a fantastic rest of your day, and I will talk to you soon.